Alhonse Legros, Landscape (engraving) (1885)
I am in my Pittsburgh study looking at an inexpensive print by Alphonse Legros (1837-1911), the French born artist who lived and worked in London. I see a peasant working to clear the fields in the countryside. A wide road runs across the image to the bottom left hand corner. And a storm is about to break out behind the houses. The stability of these buildings contrasts with the movement implied by the descending lines of rain at the upper right hand edge. A lot is happening here. In Walter Pater’s famous manifesto “The School of Giorgione,” (1877) this image is a most fully described example. ( You couldn’t use Legro’s academic paintings as examples. But this print works perfectly.) Everything about Pater is mysterious! Why did he discuss this print by a minor contemporary, who had no visible connection to Giorgione, rather than some work by that artist? I have no answer to that question, but this Legros is an effective example for his theory. Pater’s basic argument is that in Giorgionesque art there is “a certain interpenetration of the matter or subject of a work of art with the form of it.” He is interested in the relationship between form and what art depicts. Hence his famous phrase that all art approximates to the condition of music, which has a perfect form-content unity; you cannot describe its form without also revealing its content. This Legros image of a storm uses an appropriately stormy engraving technique.
In a long letter to Titian in 1544, which deserves extensive quotation the art writer Pietro Aretino describe the scene viewed from his palace on the Grand Canal. After looking at the busy life on the waters, he turns his eyes towards the sky.
See first the buildings which appeared to be artificial though made of real stone. And then look at the air itself, which I perceived to be pure and lively in some places, and in others turbid and dull. Also consider my wonder at the clouds made up of condensed moisture; in the principal vista they were partly near the roofs of the buildings, and partly on the horizon, while to the right all was in a confused shading of grayish black.
This description anticipates John Ruskin’s renowned accounts of the variety of clouds in Modern Painters (1843-60). These two very different lovers of Venice both look attentively, also, at the natural world. No wonder, for once you see that city as a work of art, it’s natural to look also at the sky aesthetically.
I was awestruck by the variety of colors they displayed: the nearest glowed with the flames of the sun’s fire’ the farthest were blushing with the brightness of partially burnt vermillion. Oh, how beautiful were the strokes with which Nature’s brushes pushed the air back at this point, separating it from the palaces in the way that Titian does when painting his landscapes!
Aretino’s account, which is modeled on description of Titian’s painted clouds, is remarkably detailed.
In some places the colors were green-blue, and in others they appeared blue-green, finely mixed by the whims of Nature, who is the teacher of teachers. With light and shades, she gave deep perspective and high relief to what she wished to bring forward and set back, and so I, knowing how your brush breathes with her spirit, cried out three or four times: ‘Oh, Titian, where are you?’
He only regrets, Aretino concludes, that this natural picture “did not last longer,” as would its painted replica. Goethe, it’s worth noting, developed exactly this same way of thinking when he visited: “As I glided over the lagoons . . . I felt I was looking at the latest and best painting of the Venetian school.” It was natural to compare pictures to this picturesque city.
You see a painting and then find something similar-looking in the world. This idea that the visual experience of figurative art can be translated onto everyday perceptual experience has long been influential. To cite just one very well known example, it’s the source of Marcel Proust’s comparisons of old master portraits to living people. For Aretino the city of Venice and clouds looks like an artwork— like Titian’s painting of the city. Schooled by that experience, Aretino admires the real scene as if it were the artwork which it inspired. Sometimes accounts of aesthetic experience are focused entirely on nature, as in Buskin’s accounts of skies and water. Here, however, both nature and the city are imagined translated into Titian’s style. There is, also, a long tradition of reading images of clouds. Long before Titian, Philostratus (170-240), played that game. When that happens, so E. H. Gombrich says, “the artist gives the beholder increasingly ‘more to do’, he draws him into the magical circle of creation and allows him to experience something of the thrill of ‘making’ which had once been the privilege of the artist.”
The philosophical implications of such comparisons are worth noting. Hegel, focused on Dutch art, the tradition he compares to that of Venetian painting, writes:
What should enchant us is not the subject of the painting and its lifelikeness, but the pure appearance which is wholly without the sort of interest that the subject has.
It is a triumph of art over the transitory, a triumph in which the substantial is as if it were cheated of its power over the contingent and the fleeing.
In other words, apart from the things depicted, the means of the portrayal also becomes an end in itself. . . .
(And elsewhere he does briefly describe Titian’s portraits, which were perhaps one source of this analysis.) Here then we are dealing with aesthetic feeling, fascination with appearances apart from concern or even awareness of what they are appearances of. Aesthetic experience means viewing and interpreting what is seen as if it were a work of art. So, to see the buildings of Venice and the clouds and waters, which after all are not artworks as if they were artworks is to respond to them aesthetically.
It’s been observed that Pater’s essay leads, explicitly, towards abstraction in employing what the art historian Joseph Masheck has dubbed ‘the carpet paradigm’. When Pater says,
a great picture has no more definite message for us than an accidental play of sunlight and shadow for a few moments on the wall or floor,
then he anticipates the development of abstract painting. And what now interests me is the adumbration of this basic idea by Aretino, when he responds to the natural world aesthetically, as if it were a painting by Titian. Once you adopt an aesthetic way of looking, you are prepared to imagine abstraction. That’s one reason why Aretino’s letter now seems uncannily suggestive.
Notes:
Pietro Aretino, Letters, Trans. G. Bull (1957).
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey, Trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Meyer (1968)
E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1960).
G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, Trans. T. M. Knox (1975).
Walter Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” The Renaissance. Studies in Art and Poetry.
Joseph Masheck, The Carpet Paradigm. Integral Flatness from Decorative to Fine Art (2010).
