A Degree in a Book: Art History: Everything You Need to Know to Master the Subject - in One Book!

By John Finlay

Spanning from the classical sculpture of Ancient Rome to contemporary performance art, this vibrantly illustrated guide provides a rich overview of art history, covering many topics explored in a history of art degree. Learn to distinguish Impressionism from Post-Impressionism, analyze a painting's brush strokes and discover the influences of Pablo Picasso.

Written by expert art historian John Finlay, A Degree in a Book: Art History is presented in an attractive landscape format in full-color, featuring iconic works of art through the ages. With timelines, feature spreads and information boxes, readers will quickly get to grips with the fundamentals of art and its fascinating evolution across history.

ABOUT THE SERIES: Get the knowledge of a degree for the price of a book in Arcturus Publishing's A Degree in a Book series. Featuring handy timelines, information boxes, feature spreads and margin annotations, these illustrated books are perfect for anyone wishing to master seemingly complex subject with ease and enjoyment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
• Release date: Jan 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9781398807266

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

WHAT IS ART HISTORY AND WHAT DO ART HISTORIANS DO?

Art historians study the visual artefacts, objects and structures that humans have created. They do so to enrich our understanding of both the past and the artwork itself. History and art at first seem odd bedfellows: history an intangible record of the past, the artwork an object that can be touched and visually understood. Yet, while we can appreciate artworks, we do need to know the circumstances in which they were created. Art historians seek to ascertain the contexts for artworks. For example, scholars try to gain a full understanding of the historical circumstances that led to the commissioning of a religious altarpiece in early Renaissance Italy, or attempt to unravel the mountain symbolism of the Visvanatha Temple at Khajuraho in India (c. 1000 CE). Art historians study subjects from Palaeolithic art to the French Revolution, and interpret Maori cloaks (Whatu Kākahu) or conceptual art pieces. This is an academic discipline, and scholars must always back up their theories with research evidence.

The best art historians tackle artworks from various perspectives, and theirs is often an interdisciplinary enquiry. Working together, historians might require the expertise of a Netherlandish scholar to uncover the secrets of a fifteenth-century triptych, or adopt linguistic theory to describe the arcane language of a Cubist still life sculpture. Others might make use of specialist X-radiographic technology to scrutinize the earlier states of a painting, or perhaps use chemical analysis to determine its composite makeup. Art historians use sophisticated carbon dating techniques to investigate the murals in Stone Age caves. On the walls of the caves at Chauvet in France exist the world’s oldest paintings, datable to around 30,000– 28,000 BCE. Recently, the sculptural design that Alberto Giacometti put on his father’s tombstone – a relief carving of a bird, a chalice, a sun and star – was deciphered by an Egyptologist from the Brooklyn Museum, who compared it to the hieroglyphic for ‘all people worship the sun’. New scientific technologies regularly unmask fakes or confirm expensive acquisitions, while archival material consistently establishes new facts, dates and contexts for artworks.

Art historians habitually use abstract theories, linguistic structures, iconology and iconography to interpret art works (see Chapter 3). Scholars also adopt feminist, anthropological and ethnographical perspectives to deconstruct stereotypes and re-evaluate marginalized or neglected artistic figures, groups and cultures. However, art historians can never be entirely unbiased about the subjects they study. Art historians always bring with them norms, presumptions and biases distinctive to their own art and culture. Although scholars attempt to reconstruct balanced narratives of past events, or present unprejudiced facts on the subjects of class, sex, race and ethnicity, art historical studies are habitually threatened by artistic, cultural and gender short sightedness. We will see how scholars such as Elizabeth Ellet, Whitney Chadwick, Griselda Pollock, Linda Nochlin, Susan Suleiman and many other feminist art historians have consistently challenged the male status quo. In assessing gender bias in art history, moreover, feminist scholars use ways of ‘seeing’ the often unrecognized role of great women artists in the history of art. New global art histories have similarly set the record straight regarding European attitudes towards diverse world cultures, challenging non-Western histories of the ‘Other’ by dismantling historically skewed, restricted and far away understandings of complex thought processes, cultures and artworks (see Chapter 9). As with all branches of learning, art historians nonetheless try to reach a consensus regarding the subjects they study.

Visvanatha Temple, Khajuraho, India. Completed between 990CE and 1002CE and now a UNESCO World Heritage site, the temple is dedicated to Shiva and embellished with numerous symbolic sculptures and engravings.

Today, we think of art as something we experience in a gallery, exhibition or museum space. We probably classify art as drawing, painting, photography, sculpture and architecture. However, art historians study numerous other art objects. These might include ancient ceramics, tapestries, carpets, jewellery, mosaics, illuminated manuscripts, religious relics, tribal masks, ceremonial cloaks shrouds and caftans, ornate treasure chests, sarcophagi and drinking vessels – to name but a few. Art can alternatively involve a multi-sensory experience. In the great Byzantine Hagia Sophia (built in Constantinople, now Istanbul, Turkey, 532–537 CE), the faithful employed all their senses to bring themselves closer to God and the afterlife.

Sometimes art historians know very little about the origins or raison d’être of artworks (see Chapter 2). It is not known, for instance, if the mammoth ivory figure from the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in Germany (c. 32,000–28,000 BCE, Ulmer Museum) is a ‘lion-man’ or ‘lioness-woman’. The statuette can dependably be termed ‘art’, but offers strong evidence that it had a more utilitarian, social or arcane religious function for Stone Age peoples. More crucially, it is one of the first indisputable instances of art conjured in the imagination of the anonymous human who created it. For lack of any written account by Stone Age peoples – there are none, obviously – art historians can only surmise the rationale behind the Hohlenstein-Stadel statuette, conjecturing as to what the artist had in mind. This is the paradoxical vexation and sheer delight of art history: studying a period so far away in time that we have to work incredibly hard to make sense of what remains. As we’ll see in Chapter 2, virtually every new Palaeolithic discovery causes art historians to reconsider what had hitherto been substantiated.

The interior of Hagia Sophia, Istanbul. This former cathedral and mosque, which is now a museum, holds examples of many different religious styles from across the ages.

This book provides those interested in art history with a selection of the core topics taken on a BA degree course. The art historical discipline is highly varied, and it does not seek to cover in any depth architecture, or postmodern subjects such as pop art, world art histories or a particular specialism such as photography or sculpture. Each chapter gives prominence to a particular genre, including portraiture, still life, religious subjects, landscape, genre and history painting. These are the kinds of images and subjects that students will repeatedly encounter on any art history course, and the reason for their prominence throughout this book. The key ideas, images, histories, artists, writers and thinkers introduced here will point the way to a more rounded and complete study of the discipline of art history.

As the reader will see, art history is a highly challenging interdisciplinary field. It is also a lifelong interest and is highly fulfilling and beguiling.

Chapter One: 'Ways of Seeing': Introduction to the Visual Analysis of the Arts

ENGAGING WITH ART

The visual analysis of the arts involves a considered type of looking. It is an essential tool of the art historian: a way of looking through and thinking about art. The visual analysis of the arts is a subjective, interpretive discipline; so, observing art for oneself is just as valid as the reflections of others. Great works of art change over time, through historical study, new interpretations and probing analysis by scientists, archaeologists and conservators. This occurs largely in tandem with the adept visual analysis used by art historians.

Whereas art is essentially scrutinized from the perspective of history, the visual analysis of the arts puts the emphasis on looking. Here is John Berger describing Paul Cézanne’s watercolour of Trees by the Water (1900–04): ‘In his later works [Cézanne] … left a large area of the canvas or paper blank. This device served several purposes, but the most important is seldom mentioned: the blank white spaces give the eye a chance to add imaginatively to the variations already recorded; they are like a silence demanded so that you can hear the echoes.’¹

Trees by the Water (1900–04) by Paul Cézanne. In addition to the use of white space, the limited tonal palette adds to the atmosphere of the work.

The act of seeing

This skill can completely change the way in which we think about an artwork. And it is crucial to developing our art historical skills. Visual theorists have shown that looking at art is based not merely on visual pleasure, but is also influenced by our own assumptions, preconceptions and the judgements that encompass the act of seeing. It’s fundamentally about finding new ways of reading the complex languages of art. These skills appear to be ever more vital in the digital era, where images are so readily accessible in mass-produced formats. Photography seems to be a base currency for all art historians, for this is how most works of art are known and compared. But can the objects of art really be known in this way? Is photography a substitute for a real physical encounter with a work of art?

Before discussing the topic of reproducibility, it is important to make a few straightforward points about our engagement with artworks. Our experiences shape the act of looking, so we all account for art in our own way. But this does not necessarily mean that our interpretations of art are always uniformly convincing. They are not. If we have strong visual analyses underpinning our thought process, however, our arguments will be additionally cogent and more thought-provoking. The better your methodology, the more you will reveal about the artworks you are studying. Every art historian adopts certain approaches or methods, and these completely affect the way we look at art and what we find. So let’s turn our attention to the act of looking by using a few methodological examples, trying to put these in context to determine how they fit into the ongoing historical discourse.

The philosopher, critic and essayist Walter Benjamin, who argued that a work of art loses impact when it is seen as a reproduction instead of in its original state.

VISUAL POLITICS

The inherent problem with photography in relation to art is its inherent reproducibility. It’s a subject that the German philosopher and art critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) tackled in his seminal essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. The impact of Benjamin’s theory is such that some art historians have seen fit to adapt it to their own work. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger argued that there is something larger at stake when we think about artworks in relation to mechanical reproduction. Berger, like Benjamin, saw the reproduction of art as a deeply political issue, its undiminished authority validating many other types of cultural and political authority. ‘The bogus religiosity which now surrounds original works of art, and which is ultimately dependent upon their market value has become the substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible. Its function is nostalgic […]. If the image is no longer unique and exclusive, the art object, the thing, must be made mysteriously so.’² The point is, ‘ways of seeing’ are never, politically speaking, innocent or neutral when it comes to looking.

Berger’s main thrust in Ways of Seeing was to prioritize the act of looking. ‘Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak.’ The opening lines to his text illustrate his key concept. ‘The relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled. The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.’ The key to this idea is how looking is always influenced by our learned preconceptions. Berger labels these ‘assumptions’, and here they are:

• Beauty

• Truth

• Genius

• Civilization

• Form

• Status

• Taste

Via photography and Berger’s television, ‘the painting now travels to the spectator, rather than the spectator to the painting … its meaning … diversified.… At the same time it enters a million other houses and, in each of them, is seen a different context.’ Berger talks about the democratizing effect of the camera on the frescos in the Basilica of St Francis of Assisi in Italy: ‘The uniqueness of every painting was once part of the uniqueness of the place where it resided. Sometimes the painting was transportable. But it could never be seen in two places at the same time. When the camera reproduces a painting, it destroys the uniqueness of its image. As a result its meaning changes. Or, more exactly, its meaning multiplies and fragments into many meanings.’³

The Lower Basilica of St Francis of Assisi in Assisi, Italy that features frescoes by Cimabue, Piero Lorenzetti and Cesare Sermei among others.

This seems like a good place to start thinking about the implications of reproduction, especially in relation to specific artworks. Walter Benjamin suggests that within Capitalism lies the seed of the destruction regarding art’s ‘authenticity’. The process of mass production, including images, he argues, causes the demise of the original artwork. In turn, reproduction liberates the art object from its dependence on ritual or religion. Mechanical reproduction (or its contemporary equivalents) therefore is a democratizing process. Regardless, art’s authority, value and ‘the quality of its presence is always depreciated’ by photography and other methods of replication. Its authenticity, or ‘aura’, is interfered with and threatened. While Benjamin argued that mechanical reproductions do not ‘touch’ the work of art, he nonetheless contends that the art of the past no longer endures as it once did. Its ‘authority’ is misplaced and substituted by its other – the mechanically reproduced image.

The Milkmaid (c. 1658) by Johannes Vermeer. For a long time, a yellow-tinged image of the work that was often seen on the Internet was thought to be the original, until a better quality image was released.

So what precisely makes an artwork, according to Benjamin, ‘authentic’? As Benjamin explains, ‘Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.’⁴ The presence of the original, its location, the experience of it spatially and temporally, contributes to an artwork’s authenticity. This is where the ‘aura’ resides and also leads to its decay. Benjamin’s concept is full of complexity and contradiction. Two possible interpretations might be that the aura is able to maintain its distance, despite its proximity: i.e. a sense of itself, its uniqueness and its completeness. To experience an aura is to have a deeply personal and close interaction with the artwork. John Berger describes this effect in visual terms. ‘Original paintings are silent and still in a sense that information never is. Even a reproduction hung on a wall is not comparable in this respect for in the original the silence and stillness permeate the actual material, the paint, in which one follows the traces of the painter’s immediate gestures. This has the effect of closing the distance in time between the painting of the picture and one’s own act of looking at it.’⁵ As Benjamin likewise maintains, mechanical reproduction challenges this authority when ‘The cathedral leaves its locale.’⁶

The Last Supper (c. 1500) by Giovanni Pietro da Birago. This engraving is the earliest known copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s mural and helped to make the work popular.

In its severance from tradition and the ‘cult of beauty’, Benjamin’s optimism concerning the emancipation of art is obvious. The author views it as a catalyst for ‘a tremendous shattering of tradition [and…] the renewal of mankind’. Illogicality and wistfulness inhabit the text. Mechanical reproduction has a ‘destructive, cathartic aspect’: ‘To pry an object from its shell [is] to destroy its aura’ and ‘overcoming the uniqueness of every reality’ are inconsistently iconoclastic and democratizing statements. Benjamin’s text appears purposefully open-ended, the impact of mechanical reproduction leaving us with countless questions in relation to art. For both Berger and Benjamin, it seems, ‘mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual [and…] the total function of art is reversed. Rather than ritual, the artwork begins to be based on another practice – politics.’⁷

FORMALISM: THE STYLES OF ART HISTORY

Style is a vital part of distinguishing artworks. A charge often levelled at formalism and formalist art historians (and its counterpart, connoisseurship) is that it considers artefacts without significant consideration to the cultural environment that engendered them. This once pivotal concept has fallen out of fashion, but the fact remains that comparative methods in art history to explain another culture’s perspectives have continued unabated. Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945), Alois Riegl (1858–1905) and their heirs in America in the twentieth century greatly expanded formalism within the discipline of art history. Few art historians even now succeed in explaining a painting without referring to formalist principles in some such way. Wölfflin’s practice of evaluating ‘forms of representation’ and ‘the Zeitgeist […] spirit-of-the-times-explanation of artistic style’ in his Principles of Art History (1915) is still accepted as a fitting means to carry out art history. It is often explained to students when teaching Wölfflin’s Principles that his dual system of contrasting images side by side on a projection screen has remained largely unchanged in today’s lectures and tutorials.

The Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölflin who taught in Basel, Berlin and Munich, helped to raise the study of art history in Germany to new levels in the early part