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Liberal Arts

The term applied to those arts that were traditionally considered primarily as exercises of the mind rather than of practical skill and craftsmanship. The concept of a distinction between ‘liberal’ and ‘vulgar’ arts goes back to Classical antiquity, and survived in one form or another up to the Renaissance, forming the basis of secular learning in the Middle Ages. The name quadrivium was given to the subjects that studied physical reality (arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music — that is the mathematical theory of music) and trivium to the arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Collectively these were known as the seven liberal arts, and were subservient to philosophy, the supreme art. In these, as in all classifications which preceded the concept of the fine arts, the word ‘art’ carries a very different signification from that which it bears in aesthetic discourse today, and one closer to the meaning which survives in academic terminology such as ‘arts degree’. In the early Renaissance the lowly position accorded to the visual arts in this intellectual framework was increasingly contested, providing a theoretical basis for the social struggle which took place to raise them from the status of manual skill to the dignity of a liberal exercise of the spirit. The most formidable champion of the visual arts was Leonardo, who more than anyone else was responsible for creating the idea of the painter as a creative thinker. Vasari records that when Leonardo was painting his Last Supper the prior of the community was puzzled by the way in which ‘he sometimes spent half a day at a time contemplating what he had done so far; if he had had his way, Leonardo would have toiled like one of the labourers hoeing in the garden and never put down his brush for a moment’. When the prior complained to the Duke of Milan, Leonardo explained ‘that men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work the least, for they are thinking out inventions and forming in their minds the perfect ideas that they subsequently express and reproduce with their hands’. By about 1500 painting and sculpture were generally accepted as liberal arts by Italian humanists (significantly so in Baldassare Castiglione’s influential Book of the Courtier of 1528, which was translated into English in 1561). However, as Anthony Blunt points out (Artistic Theory in Italy 1450−1600), ‘As soon as the visual arts became generally accepted as liberal, the protagonists began to quarrel among themselves about which of them was the noblest and most liberal.’ The acceptance came later in other parts of Europe.

The original seven liberal arts (sometimes paired with the seven principal virtues — faith, hope, charity, etc.) are often represented in painting and sculpture, personified as women holding various attributes

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and being followed by famous masters of the arts concerned (e.g. Cicero with Rhetoric). The system was formulated by the 5th-century scholar Martianus Capella in his treatise The Marriage of Philology and Mercury. For the Baroque age the types of the liberal arts were codified by Cesare Ripa in his handbook of iconography.

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The Renaissance

The term meaning ‘rebirth’ applied to an intellectual and artistic movement that began in Italy in the 14th century, culminated there in the 16th, and influenced other parts of Europe in a great variety of ways. The metaphor of a ‘rebirth’ goes back to the 15th century, when it was used to describe the revival of Classical learning. It was also applied to a revival of the arts, and it was in the famous Lives of Vasari (1550) that the idea of such a revival was systematically developed. Vasari saw the history of art in Italy from Giotto to Michelangelo as a continuous progress, which he compared to the process of organic growth, and his view dominated the conception of art history up to recent times. The extension of the meaning of the term from a movement in art and letters to a period of time began in the 18th century, and was given final currency when Jules Michelet (1798−1874) called a section of his history of France La Renaissance (1855). Ruskin had used the expression ‘The Renaissance period’ in his Stones of Venice in 1851. A few years later, in 1860, Jakob Burckhardt published Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy), an extremely influential book that popularized the rather romantic notion of the period as a great blossoming of the human spirit — ‘the discovery of the world and of man’.

This wide definition of the term made it particularly difficult to indicate the limits of the period. If the ‘discovery of the world’ were taken to mean progress towards ‘naturalism’ in art, such tendencies might be detected in the I3th century French art usually described as Gothic. If the ‘discovery of man’ were taken as the touchstone, such thoroughly medieval figures as St Francis of Assisi might be hailed as the harbingers of the new age. These and similar inconsistencies in delimiting the period under discussion have led to much discussion of the whole concept by 20th century historians.

In the visual arts, the term is generally taken to imply a deliberate imitation of Classical patterns or a conscious return to Classical standards of value. It is in architecture that the imitation of Classical models is most easily discerned, for the vocabulary of Roman architecture is quite distinct from that of the Gothic style, and Brunelleschi was without doubt the first architect to revive the antique manner. (In

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describing architecture the term ‘Renaissance’ has sometimes been used to cover all post-medieval building that uses a Classical idiom; thus Sir Reginald Blomfield’s History of Renaissance Architecture in England 1500−1800, published in 1897, embraces a period that would now generally be subdivided into other categories such as Baroque and Neoclassicism.) In painting and sculpture, it is harder to define the Renaissance in terms of imitation of ancient models.

Vasari saw the beginnings of Renaissance sculpture in Nicola Pisano because he had borrowed motifs from Classical sarcophagi. But we know that Gothic sculptors also borrowed motifs from Classical statuary, and we now see that there is in fact so much in common between the art of the Pisani and that of their northern contemporaries that we classify their style as proto-Renaissance rather than Renaissance proper. Moreover, Italian sculpture of the 14th century remains Gothic. It is only in the early 15th century that we can see a reflection of Renaissance taste in sculpture. Donatello was not content with the copying of individual Classical motifs but aimed at a revival of the spirit of Classical sculpture whose glory had been extolled by the ancient authors. His David (Bargello, Florence) was the first life-size nude statue since Classical antiquity, just as his Gattamelala (Padua) was a deliberate revival of the Classical equestrian monument.

The problem of defining what constitutes Renaissance painting, in similar terms, is considerably more complex, since there were virtually no ancient models surviving in painting as there were in sculpture and architecture. The works of such famous masters as Apelles and Zeuxis were known only through literary records, but Pliny’s descriptions of them influenced the painters as well as patrons and critics. From Classical authors the Renaissance public learned to expect of painting a high degree of fidelity to nature and a search for the perfect form. Giotto, who made great advances in naturalism, is sometimes put at the head of the Renaissance tradition, but it is more consistent to give this position to Masaccio, who brought a new scientific rigour to the problems of representation. Masaccio, like his friends Brunelleschi and Donatello, was a Florentine, and it is thus reasonable to see Florence as the cradle of the Renaissance, and the period around 1425 when they were producing some of their most innovative works as a major turning point in European art.

The term ‘High Renaissance’ is applied to the brief period (c.1500−c.1520) in which later centuries saw the fulfilment of all the ideals that painters had pursued since Giotto; Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael are the dominant figures of the age. Vasari points out that the perfect mastery of means achieved in this period led to an ease of manner and a graceful harmony that stand in marked contrast to the strained efforts of preceding generations. The harsh sculptural outline

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gave way to the mellow modelling (sfumato) of Leonardo, the rigid symmetry of Perugino to the balanced variety of Raphael’s pyramidal compositions.

The term ‘Northern Renaissance’ is applied to the transmission of Italian imagery and ideals to the rest of Europe, but here again exact demarcation is far from easy. North of the Alps painting developed independently of the Italian Renaissance movement throughout the 15th century. There were indeed Italian influences, such as that of Mantegna on the Austrian Michael Pacher, but they were exceptions. The acceptance of Renaissance ideals as such was due to the conscious effort of a handful of men, above all to Dürer, who saw it as his mission to transplant the arts ‘reborn’ in Italy on to German soil. He visited Italy twice with the aim of acquiring the ‘secrets’ of the Italian masters, that is the mathematical principles of perspective and proportion; and he struggled all his life both in his theoretical writings and in his art to fathom the mystery of Classical beauty.

The Netherlands with their strong Gothic tradition were slow to accept the Renaissance and at first they assimilated it only through the medium of Dürer’s prints. Lucas van Leyden best represents this phase. In the work of Quentin Massys we find the direct influence of Leonardo’s art both in his types and in his treatment. But only when the Flemings travelled to Italy did they experience the full impact of the Renaissance: Gossaert tried somewhat ostentatiously to emulate Classical statuary and the more sensitive Jan van Scorel absorbed something of southern poise and serenity.

The later imitators of Italian painting, such as Heemskerck and the Floris brothers, belong to Mannerism rather than the Renaissance. The same is true of painting in France. There was a strong influx of Renaissance influence in France around 1500, following the Italian campaigns of Louis XII (1462−1515) and Francis I (1494−1547), but Primaticcio and Rosso, who were called to Fontainebleau by Francis I, represent the Mannerist phase no less than does Cellini, and the School of Fontainebleau cannot therefore be said to represent pure Renaissance ideals, nor can the courtly portrait style of the Clouet family.

These distinctions reflect once more the elusiveness of the term ‘Renaissance’, particularly in its application to the north. While in the field of literature and thought we are used to speaking of the Renaissance in Elizabethan England, few historians of art would now consider such painters as Hilliard or Eworth as representatives of Renaissance style. Like their French contemporaries, they embody rigid courtly ideals far removed from the wide sympathies and spirit of intellectual adventure from which the Renaissance had originally sprung in Florence.

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Text 5

Leonardo da Vinci

(1452−1519)

Florentine artist, scientist and thinker, one of the greatest Renaissance painters and perhaps the most versatile genius who has ever lived. The range of his accomplishments was astonishing, for he was an anatomist, engineer, mathematician, naturalist and philosopher, as well as a painter, sculptor and architect. He trained in Verrocchio’s studio and according to Vasari gave the first great demonstration of his prowess by painting in his master’s Baptism of Christ (c. 1472, Florence, Uffizi) the left-hand angel, which indeed makes the other figures look prosaic. In 1481/2 he went to Milan, leaving unfinished his early masterpiece The Adoration of the Magi (Uffizi), a work of great originality and complexity in its sense of movement and in its variety of gesture and expression. In Milan he worked chiefly at the court of Duke Ludovico Sforza. His two most important artistic undertakings before he left in 1499 were an abortive project for a huge equestrian statue of Ludovico’s father, and his mural painting of The Last Supper (c.1495, S. Maria delle Grazie). This is now a sad ruin because Leonardo’s technical experiments with his medium failed, but it still retains some of the authority which made it the most celebrated painting of its time. Leonardo’s drawings and notes indicate the immense care taken in its design. ‘That figure is most praiseworthy’, he wrote, ‘which, by its action, best expresses the passions of the soul.’ This psychological approach was revolutionary, and the idea of the artist as a creative thinker rather than a skilled artisan stems chiefly from Leonardo. In 1500 he passed through Venice, then looked mainly to Florence until 1506. From this period dates the Mona Lisa (Paris, Louvre), innovatory in the subtlety and naturalness of its pose and expression, and the wall-painting of The Battle of Anghiari in the Palazzo Vecchio. This is destroyed but copies show that its dynamic energy anticipated the Baroque. From 1506 to 1513 Leonardo was based in Milan, although he made two lengthy visits to Florence. In 1513 he went to Rome, and in 1516, at the invitation of Francis I, settled in France, where he died. His later years were taken up increasingly with scientific work (which largely remained hidden in his notebooks). Leonardo’s contemporary reputation was colossal and has never faded. He was a generation older than the other two supreme artists of the High Renaissance, Michelangelo and Raphael, and with his nobly balanced designs and heroic figures can virtually be said to have created the style. Another immensely influential aspect of his work (notably on Giorgione’s style) was his SFUMATO modelling through light and shade which suggested rather than delineated the

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form. No sculptural or architectural works are certainly known to be by Leonardo, but his ideas had wide influence in both fields. Although his paintings are so few, more drawings exist by Leonardo than by any other contemporary Italian artist (mainly at Windsor Castle), and in them is revealed his insatiable quest for knowledge and the range and power of his extraordinary genius.

Text 6

History Painting

In Italian Renaissance art theory and later in the academies of art, the highest and most demanding of the genres or categories of painting. The English and French words ‘history’, ‘histoire’, are misleading: history painting is not necessarily the painting of historic scenes. The term derives from the Italian istoria, ‘story’, ‘narrative’, in contrast to immagine, icon, a single timeless figure. The distinction must have originated in the decoration of churches, which has from earliest times included both iconic figures and narrative scenes. The latter, normally involving several figures in action and emotionally engaged, posed the greater artistic challenge. By 1435, when Alberti, in his treatise On Painting, wrote that ‘istoria is the greatest task of the painter’, he was influenced not only by current Florentine artistic practice, but also by ancient Graeco-Roman literary theory, which differentiates between various kinds of narrative. He identifies istoria with tragedy and epic poetry: the representation of the noble, the exemplary deeds and vicissitudes of personages ‘better than ourselves’ — figures from the Bible and saints, but also pagan divinities and the heroes of ancient myth, and of more recent literary texts and historical events. Allegory, when presented in narrative form, becomes istoria. According to ancient authors, the highest art aims to elevate the mores of the whole community, making istoria particularly suited to the decoration of public spaces: churches, town halls, princely palaces. History painting is thus an art of persuasion and education of the many; to this end it is preferably practised on the scale of life or larger.

The history painter must employ intellect and imagination, thereby raising the artist above the craftsman. Like the poet and the orator, he should affect viewers’ hearts and minds. He must, like the modern film director, cast actors suited to their allotted roles within the story, design for them telling poses, gestures and expressions, select the most appropriate point of view. Perhaps every major development in Italian Renaissance art can be understood as a response to the challenge of history painting. Giotto, in the Arena Chapel, Padua, с. 1304−1313, condensed the narrative to moments of greatest drama, focusing on the key actors, and inventing new scenes of pathos and suspense.

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Around 1427 Masaccio used perspective and foreshortening to remove, optically, the barrier between the painted scenes and the viewer’s own space (Florence, S. Maria del Carmine, Brancacci Chapel), ransacking the then-known repertory of ancient sculptures for expressive poses and gestures. In the next century, Leonardo de Vinci deployed his even greater mastery of perspective, expression, light and shade in the Last Supper (Milan, S. Maria delle Grazie, ex-refectory). It remains the Christian history painting par excellence: a seemingly ‘authentic record’ of a unique event and, simultaneously, a cogent representation of that event’s profound, universal, significance. The eloquence of the nude in Michelangelo’s history paintings surpasses anything in ancient art: who, having once seen it, can forget his scene of God transmitting the spark of life to the recumbent Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel? Raphael consistently transformed static motifs and dry allegory into compelling and poetic history painting (e.g. Entombment of Christ; Vatican, Stanza della Segnatura; Sistine Madonna), mastering an ever-broader range of visual effects. The same can be said of Rubens in the 17th century (e.g. Allegory of War and Peace, Minerva protecting Peace from Mars).

The history of history painting, so deeply identified with western art itself, continued, but by the late 18th century the genre was devalued both through the increasingly vapid prescriptions of the academies and the semantic confusion between istoria and history. If Benjamin West’s Death of General Wolfe, 1771, just about succeeds in elevating, albeit tendentiously, a historical event into a history painting, can the same be said of Copley’s Watson and the Shark, 1778, which records a horrific but ethically insignificant accident? While David’s Oath of the Horatii, 1784, revives the moral grandeur of 17th-century history painting, Delaroche’s finicky costume-piece, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, 1833, seems to belong to an altogether different, more sentimental and less elevated category: tragedy reduced to popular melodrama.

The 19th century saw the lower art forms usurping the status and the special attention reserved for the highest, while melodrama increasingly infected history painting when ambitious 19th-century painters attempted this elevated art form. As some degree of education became more accessible and the art public grew, the canon of subjects fit for history treatment increased too and the great models to which history painters had looked gradually lost their authority. Time-honoured historical events lost their agreed value, as anecdotes such as the one chosen by Yeames for his costume drama And When Did You Last See Your Father? (1878; Liverpool, Walker), large in size, but small in content, came to be preferred. There are many examples of history painting being demeaned by routine production and by the loss of idealism that came with finding subjects in contemporary literature.

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Conversely genre subjects could be given the weight of history painting to assert their moral value. When Millet or Daumier presented labourers as heroic figures in the manner of Michelangelo, or Courbet painted a large group portrait of his fellow citizens gathered for A Burial at Ornans (1850; Paris, Orsay), they were subverting established social values. The academies became more liberal in countenancing genre, landscape and still-life painting even while they insisted on giving pride of place to history painting. The first president of the Royal Academy, Joshua Reynolds, who was eager to make history painting the Academy’s chief business, should have been pleased to see his successor, Leighton, made a peer. Yet Leighton’s work was widely criticized both as an anachronism and for its low intellectual ceiling and poor drawing. Contemporaries, such as the Рге-Raphaelites, had set new standards, charging their work, whether history or genre, with emotion and immediate relevance. Manet had been thought to mock great prototypes when he echoed Raphael and Giorgione in his Déjeuner sur I’Herbe (1853; Paris, Orsay), a modern-dress genre scene; later in the century Jean Beraud painted his Mary Magdalen in the House of the Pharisee

(1891; Paris, pc) as a modern-dress drama with the heroine played by a famous prostitute and only Christ not in evening dress. This seemed as odd then as Stanley Spencer’s later picturing of biblical scenes as part of the life of his native Cookham. Both painters were intent on giving their religious subjects an immediacy that academic routines had diminished.

The 20th century seemed to take little interest in the entire matter of the genres and certainly ceased to give special status to history painting. Nonetheless, the forms of history painting endured as a resource to be drawn on when artists wanted to demonstrate the seriousness of their work, as when Boccioni used a triptych format for his States of Mind genre scenes, and Dix used it to denounce the horrors of war and of post-war urban society. Picasso composed Guernica (1937; Madrid, Reina Sofia) like a triptych, making it an allegory using modern and traditional images and an unrealistic, partly Cubist, partly Expressionist idiom; we remember the bombing of Guernica because of the painting. An alternative was to turn to abstract art to speak of grave matters while avoiding tired academic formulae. This is what Malevich, Kandinsky and Mondrian did, and later Rothko and Newman. Meanwhile the Mexican muralists of the 1920s and after, notably Rivera, used forms and methods derived from pre-Renaissance religious fresco painting to propagate socialist ideas; and the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy, in the 1930s and early 40s, adopted classical formulae in art and architecture to give themselves imperialist airs. Since then the forms and sometimes classical manner and subjects of history painting have been used by Post-Modernist painters to demonstrate the impossibility

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of progress and significance in art and their own ironic detachment from such issues.

Antique relief sculpture provided many basic lessons for history painting. Free standing sculpture often represented mythical and historical figures but could not readily present stories of any complexity, though Bernini worked marvels in carving succinct religious and secular narratives. Rodin took up the challenge, making multi-figure free-standing sculptures on historical subjects and loading his Gates of Hell with biblical and literary figures and events. Today few subjects remain that can evoke an interested understanding in western society and elevate its mores. An exception might be made for the Nativity of Christ: for good commercial reasons we are kept alert to its meaning. Meanwhile we look to film for our narratives, epic or comic, and have been taught to look at art for style and personality, not subject matter and deeper truths.

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The Hermitage

The largest public museum and art gallery in Russia and one of the most important in the world. It takes its name from a pleasure pavilion adjoining the Winter Palace, built to the order of Catherine the Great in 1764−1767 (the ‘Little Hermitage’) for the display of her treasures. In 1787 it was incorporated in a new building (the Old Hermitage). Catherine was one of the most voracious collectors of all time and at her death in 1796 the imperial collections were estimated to total nearly 4,000 pictures. From 1802 pictures by Russian artists began to be added to the imperial collections. In 1837 the Winter Palace was ravaged by fire and the New Hermitage was built by the Munich architect Leo von Klenze, 1840−1849. It was opened to the public by Nicholas I in 1852. In the following year the Czar sold over 1,200 pictures, but the collection continued to grow, doubling the number of its pictures between 1910 and 1932 despite extensive sales by the Soviets. After the Soviet Revolution the imperial collections came into public ownership.

Western European painting forms only a fraction of the collection, which includes art objects from India, China, ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Pre-Columbian America, Greece, and Rome. Special emphasis is laid upon illustrating the continuity of Russia in history and art, from prehistoric art (consisting chiefly of archaeological material from the Soviet Union) to the present day. The collection of Western painting is rich in virtually every period and school, but perhaps most notably in I7th-century Dutch painting (the largest collection in the world) and in French painting of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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Text 8

The Royal Academy of Arts, London

The national art academy of England, founded in 1768. Its Instrument of Foundation was signed on 10 December 1768 by George III, who had been approached by Benjamin West and the architect William Chambers (1723−1796) to lend royal approval to the scheme. Membership was limited to forty Academicians, who had to be artists by profession, and thirty-six were named in the Instrument of Foundation. Their motive in founding the Academy was to raise the status of their profession by establishing a sound system of training and expert judgement in the arts and to arrange for the free exhibition of works attaining an appropriate standard of excellence. Behind this conception was the desire to foster a national school of art and to encourage appreciation and interest in the public based on recognized canons of good taste. In 1769 a new class of Associates was instituted, from whom the number of Academicians was recruited. At first twenty, the number of Associates was raised to thirty in 1876.

The Royal Academy first functioned in Pall Mall. The Schools and the Exhibition were transferred to Somerset House in 1780, shared with the National Gallery its premises in Trafalgar Square 1837−1868, and moved to the present site of Burlington House in 1869. The first President of the Royal Academy was Sir Joshua Reynolds, who held the office until his death in 1792. His famous Discourses, delivered over a period of twenty years, laid down the basic conception of the Academy as a body of professional men which, ‘besides furnishing able men to direct the student’, was to form ‘a repository for the great examples of the Art’. The latter function was important since until the foundation of the National Gallery in 1824 there was no public collection of masterpieces available to students and schools. Although the most celebrated work owned by the Academy is a marble tondo by Michelangelo of the Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist (the Taddei Tondo, с. 1505), the collections are chiefly important for their representation of work by Academicians, the custom being that each new Academician deposits a work (called a Diploma Work) on admission.

Regarding itself as the main depository оf national tradition in the arts and the safeguard of sound standards of professional competence in execution, the Royal Academy, in common with other official establishments, has been cautious of innovation and slow to lend the seal of its approval to experimental novelty. During the latter decades of the 19th century, the reputation of the Academy sank very low and it began to be regarded as the bulwark of orthodox mediocrity in opposition to creative and progressive art. Other organizations, such as the New English Art Club, and later the London Group, were formed

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