Markmaking

Scientifically Informed Art History

According to the web page of the journal Art History, "Bernini's Light" by Frank Fehrenbach was its most accessed article online in 2005. This is the only easily accessible online work by Fehrenbach (PDF CV), who was hired as Harvard's senior Italian Renaissance scholar last year (Gazette; Crimson). Fehrenbach and Horst Bredekamp are two scientifically oriented German art historians who have been doing well lately; Fehrenbach with his new job, and Bredekamp with a 750,000 Euro prize from the Max Planck society. Genuine scientific literacy seems to be bringing wider rewards than fluency in obscurantistic pseudo-scientific methodologies that may or may not have wide currency in the humanities, not that I can think of any of the latter at the moment.

[Thanks to arthistorynewsletter.com for linking here. Double-checking my work -- d'oh! -- I realize that it's not certain that Fehrenbach's is the most-downloaded piece from the journal last year -- it's merely the first one on the list of several most-downloaded articles -- some of which may even partake of the methodology against which I snark above! -- Bild]

Christianity and capitalism

Rodney Stark in the Chronicle of Higher Education: The common denominator in all these great historical developments was the Christian commitment to reason. That was why the West won.

Alan Wolfe in The New Republic: The Victory of Reason [by Rodney Stark] is the worst book by a social scientist that I have ever read.

Belting: The Genuine Picture

Tonight Hans Belting lectures in the Humboldt Universitaet Audimax. The theme: "Perspectives on the Look: The question of pictures in a new view." It will presumably have something to do with his new book, Das echte bild: Bildfragen als Glaubensfragen. Reviewers discuss.

Hans Belting, The genuine picture: Pictorial questions as questions of belief (Beck Verlag): He shows how much the European history of religion to the present has determined our concepts of, and thoughts about, pictures... He shows how strongly our thinking about pictures is rooted in the old religious debates.

Andreas Tönnesmann, "Hostile Abundance," Süddeutsche Zeitung: With an idea of the picture anchored in anthropology, Belting wants to make art-historical experience newly at the disposal of the cultural practices of the present... Belting presents to today's visually spoiled public a learned, also thoroughly instructive book, that can be understood as a warning of uncontrolled Bildhunger, and at the same time as instruction for a reflective enjoyment of viewing.

Thomas Gross, Rheinischer Merkur: For Belting, Kunstwissenschaft is a Wissenschaft of human beings, and art history is for him fundamentally determined by the interplay between body, picture, and medium. The sweat-towel of St. Veronika and the 'mediality' of gene technology are exemplary opposites.

Perlentaucher review excerpts: Valentin Groebner, NZZ: Pictures only function when their viewers believe in the authenticity of what is displayed. Eckhard Nordhofen, Die Zeit: The central difference between a Bild-Anthropologie and a monotheistic writing culture in which the mistake-ability of picture and reality is held at a distance in non-iconic written characters. Elke Buhr, Frankfurter Rundschau: Pictures by artists are only one contemporary variant on the (larger) production of images in human history; Belting wants to undertake a historically conscious study of pictures in general, also as they relate to economics and power. Michael Diers, Frankfurter Allgemeine: Instead of "What is a picture [Bild]?" Belting asks, "What is a true (echt) picture?"

Flemish Painting: Best for Women and Old People

VITTORIA COLONNA (smiling):

I much wish to know, since we are on the subject, what Flemish painting may be and whom it pleases, for it seems to me more devout than that in the Italian manner.

MICHELANGELO (slowly):

Flemish painting will, generally speaking, Signora, please the devout better than any painting of Italy, which will never cause him to shed a tear, whereas that of Flanders will cause him to shed many; and that not through the vigor and goodness of the painting but owing to the goodness of the devout person. It will appeal to women, especially to the very old and the very young, and also to monks and nuns and to certain noblemen who have no sense of true harmony. In Flanders they paint, with a view to deceiving sensual vision, such things as may cheer you and of which you cannot speak ill, as for example saints and prophets. They paint stuffs and masonry, the green grass of the fields, the shadow of the trees, and rivers and bridges, which they call landscapes, with many figures on this side and many figures on that. And all of this, though it pleases some persons, is done without reason or art, without symmetry or proportion, without skillful selection or boldness and, finally, without substance or vigor. Nevertheless there are countries where they paint worse than Flanders. And I do not speak so ill of Flemish painting because it is all bad but because it attempts to do so many things well (each one of which could suffice for greatness) that it does none well.

Robert Klein and Henri Zerner, eds., Italian Art, 1500–1600: Sources and Documents, (Northwestern UP, 1989), p. 33.

The Creation of the World

The creation of the world, Genesis: long-term artistic inspiration.

a) Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights: 1) Counterfactual scenario, world without original sin.  2) Autonomous artistic imagination, obstinate/self-directed refashioning of the old iconography, suspect to the clerical class. Self-assured observation. License of artistic freedom. Leeway/play-space/running-room (Spielraum) for art.

• Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (GIF file, 1.8M)
• Hans Belting's Hieronymus Bosch, Garten der Lüste reviewed by Gustav Seibt (Süddeutsche) 05.02; Werner Hofmann (FAZ) (05.02) (German links)
• Victor Stoichita reviews Die Erfindung des Gemaldes: Das erste Jahrhundert der niederlandischen Malerei in The Art Bulletin, 12.96
• Hans Belting: Northwestern U., CAA Lifetime Achievement, Chicago School of Media Theory
• Charles Dempsey, Sicut in utrem aquas maris: Jerome Bosch's Prolegomenon to the Garden of Earthly Delights (restricted access, 2004)

b) Barnett Newman's bilateral symmetry: separating darkness from light, earth from water.

• Yve-Alain Bois, 'Here I Am': On Newman's Use of Laterality (08.02)
• Yve-Alain Bois, On Two Paintings by Barnett Newman* (PDF file, spring 04)
• W. Jackson Rushing reviews The Sublime is Now: The Early Work of Barnett Newman, Paintings and Drawings 1944-1949 (spring 95)

The Opacity of Painting

Louis Marin indefatigably sought after caesuras, syncopes and reprises in Early Renaissance painting. The arm holding John the Baptist's head, for instance, "sliced" (so to speak) by the corner of the room on which the fresco was painted. How does the picture structure the story? Not as simple a question as it might seem. He sees, immanent to the pictures, their own theories of representation in action. Christine Tauber: "how precarious and oftentimes aporetic is the transfer between the represented istoria, the event, and the narration of this event."

• Christine Tauber reviews Das Opake der Malerei, FAZ 19.08.05 (German link)
• Louis Marin (diaphanes.de); Louis Marin (UC Irvine)
• Das Opake der Malerei (diaphanes.de)
• Louis Marin, “Narrative Theory and Piero as History Painter,” October 65 (1993): 107–32.

Painter with Glorious Crown of Roentgen Rays

Owing to examination of 37 paintings with X-rays, dendrochronology, and infrared reflectography, Jochen Sander is able to take up the question of Hans Holbein the Younger's "style pluralism" with new authority:

• Bettina Erche reviews Jochen Sander, Hans Holbein: Tafelmaler in Basel 1515-1532 in the FAZ, 08.08.05 (German link)
• Sander and Buck, Hans Holbein: Painter at the Court of Henry VIII (Thames and Hudson)
• Jonathan Jones reviews Holbein exhibition in The Guardian, 16.08.03

New Alberti Joint

Vitruvius wrote in such unlettered fashion, that the Latins held him to be Greek, and the Greeks held him to be Latin. Therefore it fell to Leon Battista Alberti in the 15th century to pull together a new treatise on architecture: De Re Aedificatoria. Now, for the first time since 1553, there is a new translation of Alberti's major joint into French.

• Christine Tauber reviews the Choay and Caye translation in the FAZ, 05.08.05 (German link)
• Valérie Auclair reviews two Alberti translations in Fabula, 10.01.05 (French link)
• Jean Martin's 1553 French version of De Re Aedificatoria, online at Tours U.
• Alberti bibliography by Michel Paoli

And:

• Alina Payne reviews Anthony Grafton's Alberti biography, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance, in The Art Bulletin, 06.03

2008 Presidential Inauguration Proposal

Antwerp 1520

    Dürer witnessed another great public spectacle—the Triumphal Entry of Charles V into Antwerp—but, having purchased the printed program composed by Peter Gillis and Cornelius Grapheus, he felt it unnecessary to describe the thirteen tableaux which lined the parade route. We know from the program itself, however, that the first of these represented the Genius of Antwerp welcoming Charles, together with the Three Graces, hand in hand, with the golden apple, all on a stage held up by two columns, between which were found the allegorical figures of Faith and Love. Then followed other tableaux featuring Jupiter enthroned between Right and Might; the Emperor accepting Piety and rejecting Impiety; the Emperor accompanied by Prudence, Justice, Clemency, Truth, and Munificence; Philologia and Mercury (the god of Commerce) with Barbarism and Ignorance at their feet; the young emperor as Hercules at the Crossroads, embracing a woman dressed as Pallas Athena and rejecting Luxury, Indulgence, and Drunkenness; and a palace, wherein Eudoxia, Victoria, Honor, and Majesty paid tribute to the Emperor while trampling on Infamy. A twelfth tableau represented the Apotheosis of the Emperor, with Death in a pit underneath, and finally, in the thirteenth, the Emperor was shown embracing Europa, while holding out a helping hand to Greece (shown dying), while Asia and Africa knelt to plead for freedom; Peace defeated War, and two generals carried the heads of Mohammed and the Sultan on the tips of their lances. Of this spectacle, which Martin Luther was to denounce as an egregious spectacle of Pride, Dürer commented briefly but warmly on the splendid decorations and the beautiful girls, “the like of which I have never seen.”

--Jane Campbell Hutchison, Albrecht Dürer: A Biography (Princeton UP, 1990), pp. 144-145.