Artistic Personality Research Articles

Horder at Aarhus

One-man shows of Romanesque sculptors are sufficiently uncommon to merit notice in any event. When, as in the present case, the artist is one of exceptional merit, with so distinct an artistic personality that his individuality is clearly discernible amid the work of his contemporaries; when the entire school of which he was a part is largely unknown to art historians outside his own country; and when the exhibition summarizes the results of some two generations’ research within that country—then it seems particularly desirable to bring it to the attention of a wider audience than that reached by the exhibit itself, or even the handsome accompanying publication by H. K. Hein, Horder en romansk Stenmester (Aarhus, 1966).

The Roman Legacy in Sansovino's Venetian Buildings

JACOPO SANSOVINO was forty-one years old when he arrived in Venice in 1527. His great Venetian buildings, the Library of San Marco (fig. 1) and the Palazzo Cornaro (fig. 2), stem from the thirties and forties. It has often been observed that the monumentality and grandeur of Sansovino's Venetian style have no antecedents in Venetian architecture, but little has been done to investigate the sources of the artist's style. Yet fifty-year-old architects of the sixteenth century were usually mature and welldefined artistic personalities.1 This paper, then, has a twofold purpose. It will try to characterize Sansovino's ambience during his early years in Florence and Rome, emphasizing the structures with which Sansovino is known or can be surmised to have

Music

The first volume of Helmut Osthoff's work on Josquin Desprez (ca. 1440–1521) dealing with the Netherlandish master's biography and his Mass compositions marks an epoch in Josquin research. It is the first monograph devoted to the greatest musical figure of the Renaissance.Josquin's genius was mighty enough to encompass both old and new worlds of music, the old world of masterly contrapuntal construction and of mathematical symbolism of Netherlandish vintage, and the new world of euphonious harmony and of musical expression of Italian and of humanistic origin. As an artistic personality Josquin is a novelty in the world of music: he is the first composer in Western history of whom we can form some picture of personality and of whom we have a goodly number of anecdotes, all of which show him to be endowed with a penetrating sense of his artistic mission and a vast, almost condescending, yet at times melancholy, sense of humor toward the great patrons who commanded his services.

Aristotle on Art and Nature by M. J. Charlesworth

BOOK REVIEWS 37'i One other difficulty about the book as a whole might be noted. Despit~ the announced aims for the book, there is no discernible underlying acknowledgment of them manifested. The book appears to be more a collection of wholly independent essays gathered together under a nominal heading. One would suppose that the editor's essays, opening and closing the book, would compare, contrast and relate the essays in some relation to the announced aims. Although there are some passages in Ruth Nanda Anshen's essays which suggest this approach, the fact of the matter is that her essays are actually two quite independent contributions to the problem of language, for the most part unrelated to the other essays except in a manner so general as not to be significant or revealing. Despite some reservations of this kind, the book still achieves a· considerable degree of success in showing " what language is, its variability in time and space, its permanence, and its relation to the thought and history of man." Uni·versity of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana. JoHN A. OEsTERLE .Aristotle on .Art and Nature. By M. J. CHARLESWORTH. Auckland University College. Pp. 40. In a short paper published at Auckland University College as part of the Philosophy Series M. J. Charlesworth adds a clear, rational voice to the many voices now attempting clarifications in the field of an Aristotelian or Thomistic Esthetic. His purpose is " to attempt to reconstruct a part of the general theory of art presupposed to Aristotle's Poetics." He indicates the possible sources of such a reconstruction in the other works of the Aristotelian corpus, especially in the Phy~ics and Metaphysics, the Politics, the De .Anima, etc. Using these sources, he sets up an argumentation that begins with the notion of art as a kind of knowledge, or, rather, the virtue that perfects a certain kind of knowledge, the knowledge of how-to-make. Art is a making or the virtue of making: this is his starting-point. He then discusses the metaphysics of making, " the bestowing of a new accidental and non-natural form on some matter which already exists in its own right informed with its natural form." Thisexcellent chapter gives Mr. Charlesworth an opportunity to reprobate several misconceptions deriving from the Romantic school of esthetics: the idea that the work of art is primarily " the expression of the artist's personality "; the notion that the work of art necessarily expresses the "essence of things" or some "ideal type"; the idea that the artist is by definition the sensitive man who " suffers " experiences. He is "primarily a maker," Mr. Charlesworth insists, "all alse is secondary." 378 BOOK REVIEWS Yet this insight, so useful in resisting a Romantic esthetics, so helpful in the work of connecting a general theory of art with the Poetics, is made to dominate the author's treatise in a way that ultimately weakens it. In Chapters IV and V Mr. Charlesworth takes up the matter of Imitation in Art and particularly in the Fine Arts, at the same time calling our attention to the fact that the theory of Imitation is " the heart and soul of Aristotle's philosophy of art." Appealing to his original insight on art-as-making, he maintains that the famous dictum " art imitates nature " should be read in this fashion: " the operation of art imitates the operation of nature." In other words, art imitates nature not in the sense of copying or representing the appearance of natural forms but in the sense of bringing-something-tobe after the manner of nature, i.e., causing matter to assume some form or, more specifically in the case of the Fine Arts, judging that certain natural things or natural occurrences are " matter potential to a certain artistic form." He insists that the theory of Imitation should be purified of its preoccupation with the object, the artifact as representation. " It is not a question of the work of art imitating natural things but of the artist, in his causative power of making, imitating nature in its causative power of bringing things into existence." Yet it is precisely here that a general theory of art...

Fitzgerald as Icarus

THE RELATION between the artist's personality and his work, while obviously intimate, can never be made wholly explicit. Creativity is too elusive, too fundamentally mysterious, to afford a point-by-point correspondence between the man and the art. Yet the artist's role has shifted historically on the question of the individual's degree of identification with his books or paintings or music. From the anonymous art of the Middle Ages, dedicated to the glory of God, one may trace a movement toward ever greater concern with the artist as a person, toward a highly individualized art dedicated to the glory of self. In some instances this tendency has resulted in a relative disregard of the work, its overshadowing by the symbolic importance of the artist's person. Rimbaud, for example, has perhaps been more influential as the prototype of a role-the alienated, rebellious writer at odds with society-than as a poet to be read for his poetry. As Trilling notes in the passage above, F. Scott Fitzgerald may stand as an exemplar of self-exploitation in the novel. His life and

De italiska folkens förhållande till den grekiska konsten

Summary Every scholar who—however slightly—has come to touch upon problems of Roman art is well aware that the most crucial of them all is the intricate question of the extent of the Greek influence that is undeniably present in all products of Roman art. It is one of those problems which are easy to state but extremely hard to solve. Horace's famous words about Greece that captured her ferocious captor and introduced the arts in Latium1 like most famous quotations from world literature are more striking than realistic. We may admit that they are mainly true for his own sphere of art, i.e. literature, but the decorative and figurative arts in Italy and Rome had a far more remote history which decided the course of development of what is commonly called Roman art. The First Contact. Towards the end of the Mycenean age Sicily and South Italy seem to have entertained close commercial relations with Mycenean Greece. With trade went art. Mycenean vases were imported and imitated, as is shown by the finds made ...

Some Protocorinthian Vase-Painters

Johansen in Vases Sicyoniens and Payne in Necrocorinthia and Protokorinthische Vasenmalerei isolated a number of artistic personalities, but this was, or seemed at that stage, incidental to their main object, the ordering of Protocorinthian and ‘Corinthian’ pottery by phases of chronological development. Payne left further work on painters in manuscript notes, and we and others have done something in the same line, but so far there has been no attempt to see the whole development of the style in terms of artistic personalities influencing one another (which after all it was), as has been done by Beazley for Attic red-figure and blackfigure, and by J. M. Cook for Protoattic. If such a view can be achieved it modifies the necessarily rather schematic (even Procrustean) division into chronological phases, and gives a more organic view of the development. For the ‘Corinthian’ period it is a somewhat dispiriting task, though even there we believe that it would be worth doing, if only to help our understanding of the interrelation of Corinthian and Attic. In this article, however, we are concerned only with Protocorinthian, whose general level is very high, and the principal artists of superlative quality; the isolation of painters here needs no apology.Earlier work on these lines was impeded by the fact that the miniature side of Protocorinthian has been so much better preserved and published than the parallel and contemporary ‘big style’. The balance has recently been partly righted by Kraiker's publication of material from Aigina; and the other most important body of Protocorinthian pottery—the votive deposit from the Temple of Hera Limenia at Perachora—has already been prepared for publication by Dunbabin. We have made full use of the Perachora material in this article, and the substantiation of some of our conclusions will have to await the appearance of Perachora II. There is a third, unpublished, collection of Protocorinthian ‘big style’ vases in Berlin, from Aigina.

PAINTINGS FROM VENICE FOR SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND: SOME RECORDS OF A FORGOTTEN TRANSACTION

The historian of painting who is concerned with any larger problem than defining the limits of a particular artistic personality must take account of the history of collecting. To-day one country is made familiar with the art of another by international exhibitions, and a diffusion of styles between one nation and another can be accounted for in that way. But until the 1820'S, when Constable and Lawrence exhibited in the Paris Salon with such remarkable effect, it was through the works imported by the private patron that the artist who could not afford to travel became familiar with foreign work, and it was only about the same date. (the 1820'S) that the creation of a National Gallery in London and the beginning of Old Master exhibitions made any other channel of knowledge possible. Before the emergence of the professional ‘art historian,’ when the field was held by the curioso, collecting was considered as interesting a branch of study as art itself. In France, during the nineteenth century, a fairly rich literature on collecting appeared, of which the monuments were perhaps Charles Blanc's Le Trésor de la Curiosité (1857) and a number of works by Edmond Bonaffé, culminating in his Dictionnaire des Amateurs français au XVIIe siècle (1884). But for England there has been nothing of the kind and we are still very sparsely informed about the collecting of Italian pictures in England during the seventeenth century. Yet our principal native painter, William Dobson, who is not known to have been abroad, is so deeply tinctured with the style of the Venetian school that some explanation is clearly needed. And an explanation has been ready to hand. Francis Cleyn, who was in charge of the Mortlake tapestry works, and Van Dyck had both studied in Venice and some particulars at least of the great collections of Charles I, the Earl of Arundel and the Duke of Buckingham, are familiar to all. It has been endlessly repeated that these three men, in their emulation of the foreign habit of collecting, were altogether exceptional for the first half of the century. The Commonwealth, we are told, dispersed all the treasures of the collection of Charles I and thus our great national heritage of Italian painting of the Renaissance evaporated—except of course for the Raphael and Mantegna cartoons and what little could be reassembled after the Restoration. But this is not the whole story. Remarkably little investigation has been made of early inventories and the Historical Manuscripts Commission, in their exclusive zeal for political documents, paid at first little attention to such inventories if they happened to come under their notice.

The Personality of Artists

The Personality of Artists

How to Read a Picture

How to read a picture!” That seems very pretentious. As a matter of fact there are many ways to read a picture or any work of art. History has repeatedly produced brilliant scholars, earnest students, poet-essayists and artists who have given us both factual and imaginative readings of the works of the past great and small. There is some fact and fiction in them all.A picture may be read for itself alone as clearly as a printed page. Of course, there are other considerations besides the appearance of the picture as a world by itself, that add interest to the art lover's experience. Knowledge of history, for example, a familiarity with the artist's personality, life and habits, are all very important. But we can agree that there are a few simple approaches which may help the art appreciator to form an independent judgment about the visual Tightness and appeal of a picture regardless of these other facts.

ANTON BRUCKNER AND THE PROCESS OF MUSICAL CREATION

T HE SCIENCE of musical xsthetics has hitherto devoted but little attention to the question of the origin of the musical artwork. One could almost say that the concern of this science is always with the finished work-that the investigation of the mysterious process of the creation of that work is avoided. It is no wonder, then, that the understanding of a musical art-work is much more difficult to obtain than that of a work of literature. The definitive edition of a poet's work generally contains in the last volumes an assembly of the fragments, drafts, and sketches, relating to the various completed works. But in the editions of the complete works of the great composers it is only rarely that one finds such glimpses into the workshop of the musician. And yet such additions to the collections of the finished works are altogether necessary to the understanding of the artist's personality. For this reason it is cause for congratulation that in the new edition of the Complete Works of Anton Bruckner ' the sketches and drafts of the symphonies have been included in great number, so that one can follow the development of the various musical ideas and the growth of the musical architecture.

Some Younger Artists of Colorado

The development and growth of art centers in the Rocky Mountain region is relatively new in comparison to many other sections of the United States. Work of the younger artists is just now beginning to command attention outside the narrow limits of the community. The standards set and the growth of fuller art consciousness have depended largely upon the personalities of a few older artists and the influence of rapidly growing institutions, such as the galleries, museums and art school in this section.Except for the older established artists, all of the individuals mentioned here are under thirty-five years of age. Less than half of them have received European training or even the experience of any extensive study in the eastern part of the United States. The important influences among the older artists are such personalities as John Edward Thompson, painter, who came to Colorado in 1915 directly from Europe, and Arnold Ronnebeck, sculptor, one time adviser at the Denver Art Museum. Albert Byron Olson and E...

The Early Works of Paolo Uccello

Apart from some slight suggestions, mainly put forward by Roberto Longhi, critical literature on Paolo Uccello has limited itself in these last years to dealing with a few new and by no means always convincing attributions, without any effort to make clear the part played by this great master in the early Florentine Renaissance as a whole. We are still without an adequate analysis of his art as deducible from his few authenticated works, which should furnish the basis for all further knowledge of his artistic personality—a personality which, in our belief, has, as a result of erroneous attributions, been wrongly conceived during the last generation of art criticism. That most important and most difficult problem of his artistic derivation and of his earliest productions remains to be solved.1

Bronzino X-Rayed

One of the reasons for using the X ray in the study of paintings is that an artist's first thoughts are often more exciting and informative than his second thoughts. Penetrating the paints, plaster and wood, X rays throw shadows of these materials upon a photographic film and record the artist's brush strokes from first to last. The strokes which mark his first idea, and those which change that idea into something else, appear in the X-ray film superimposed. One has only to separate in one's mind those strokes which form the surface picture from those which are hidden beneath the surface, in order to determine what changes the artist has made in the picture during the process of painting it. In some cases, as Veronese's Mars and l enus in the Metropolitan Museum, one is tempted to revise one's estimate of the artist's personality, after studying the alterations and the development of his design. An intimate view of the artist is revealed in the record of his revisions and corrections. So it is with the alterations found in the X ray of Bronzino's Portrait of a Youth, which came recently to the Metropolitan Museum with the Havemeyer collection. The surface of the picture, with shining, firmly modelled flesh, rigid architectural background and heavy ornamentation, presents the artist as a cold, courtly person, who liked the static effect of vertical lines and never allowed his sitters to take poses of action—unless putting one finger between the pages of a book can be called action.