New history of western art

Where, until relatively recently, these aspects of art history were viewed as stable factors, it is now increasingly likely to be stressed that this is not correct at all. An artist's thinking evolves, and it is safe to assume that even Rembrandt and Poussin had days when they achieved very little. People are fallible, after all. Furthermore, a work of art is a record of its history: paint discolours, restoration alters the physical condition. It was discovered only recently, for example, that the Ghent Altarpiece, one of the most innovative paintings in Western art, had as much as 50-70% of its surface overpainted in the sixteenth century. For hundreds of years, countless thousands of people had been admiring the handiwork of a sixteenth-century master with a little Van Eyck thrown in for good measure. The perception of an image is not a stable factor either: everyone brings their personal baggage with them and looks at things with their own specific pattern of expectations. The period eye', as the renowned art historian Michael Baxandall called it, simply cannot be reconstructed in its entirety. In response, a third viewpoint was added to the traditional pairing of iconography and iconology, namely that of semiotics. Through cross-fertilisation with linguistics and the social sciences, which had analysed communication models for much longer, the understanding has grown that meaning is not only provided by the sender (the artist) of a message (the artwork), but that the recipient (the viewer of the artwork) adds meaning too. The brain invariably makes associations and these are similar for everyone but also distinctly individual. When two Europeans see an image of Christ, a non-believer will respond to it emotionally and cognitively in a very different way to a devout Catholic. A strict Protestant with an aversion to idolatry' will view it in another way again.

The challenge when seeking a good understanding of style and iconography (or of form and content) is to grasp the interaction between the two and its constant instability. Why do we see what we see and why do we interpret it the way we do? The way people respond to an image is highly sensitive to shifts and sudden ruptures in context. A photograph of the twin towers of the World Trade Center had an entirely different significance for New Yorkers (and not only them) the day before 11 September 2001 (9/11) than it did the day after. Art historians have not always taken account of this phenomenon.

New history of western art Page 362

Conversations with Cezanne 

"This man thought only of painting, loved only painting" Monet, a worldlier type, said of Cézanne long after his revered Impressionist confrere was gone. It was, in fact, a common observation, one shared in 1907 from less temporal but more personal distance by Charles Morice, the critic who asked the survey question, "What do you make of Cézanne?" Morice set the significance of the recently deceased artist into the context of modernity: "We hardly dare say that Cézanne lived; he painted...[His is] painting estranged from the course of life, painting with the [sole] aim of painting... [His art constitutes) a tacit protest, a reaction... He put everything in question." How does painting—of a nude, a tree, a mere apple-"put everything in question"?

Richard Shiff, April 2000

Conversations with Cezanne 

Intro page 33

In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust

At the time, given that I had no idea then of the influence that family would have on my life, this mention should have passed me illy by. But it gave me a sharp stab of pain, the pain felt by a self that had long since mostly ceased to exist but which could still mourn the absence of Gilberte. For a conversation about the family of the "chief undersecretary at the Postmaster General's," which Gilberte and her father had once had in my presence, had gone completely from my mind. Memories of love are, in fact, no exception to the general laws of remember-ing, which are themselves subject to the more general laws of habit. Habit weakens all things; but the things that are best at reminding us of a person are those which, because they were insignificant, we have for-gotten, and which have therefore lost none of their power. Which is why the greater part of our memory exists outside us, in a dampish breeze, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn's first fires, things through which we can retrieve any part of us that the reasoning mind, having no use for it, disdained, the last vestige of the past, the best of it, the part which, after all our tears seem to have dried, can make us weep again. Outside us? Inside us, more like, but stored away from our mind's eye, in that abeyance of memory which may last for-ever. It is only because we have forgotten that we can now and then return to the person we once were, envisage things as that person did, be hurt again, because we are not ourselves anymore, but someone else, who once loved something that we no longer care about. The broad daylight of habitual memory gradually fades our images of the past, wears them away until nothing is left of them and the past becomes irrecoverable. Or, rather, it would be irrecoverable, were it not that a few words (such as "chief undersecretary at the Postmaster General's") had been carefully put away and forgotten, much as a copy of a book is deposited in the Bibliothèque Nationale against the day when it may become unobtainable.

Page 222, Book 2 of In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust, Translation by James Grieve

A NEW HISTORY OF WESTERN ART

The marriage of art and ideology became a recurring phenomenon in the course of the twentieth century. Few of the many successive and overlapping 'isms' were entirely free of political, ideological or philosophical underpinnings. The democratisation of art and visual language enabled artists to develop revolutionary or reactionary reflexes, become politically or religiously engaged or, at the very least, pick a side in national and international conflicts. There are countless examples of politically engaged works of art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They seldom attained the status of Manet's Execution of Emperor Maximilian or Picasso's Guernica, but the reciprocal influence between art and politics and/or religion remains a constant factor to this day. Ai Wei and Banksy [4.105] are the most recent examples of artists who systematically address political issues, but countless others have gone before them in recent decades.

If we view the political and religious component of art from a long historical perspective- as we have sought to do in this chapter - it is notable that today's artists rarely allow themselvesto be used by the political powers-that-be. On the contrary, they almost systematically embody public opposition, the gnawing conscience of the nation, especially in the Western democracies. More than that, the work of artists who dance to the tune of autocratic regimes is simply not perceived as art in democratic countries. This creates fascinating paradoxes, such as the majestic, classicising statues of exotic dictators that are reviled as kitsch in Europe, even though similar statues from antiquity were seen as authoritative there until well into the twentieth century. Sculpted tributes, like the statues dedicated to the guardians of the demos in Athens twenty-five centuries ago, are still carved from blocks of marble, only now the busts are those of presidents and prime ministers. You will not find them in surveys of important artworks, except perhaps as negative examples. This conundrum illustrates how we citizens of the twenty-first century struggle with our own visual past and how certain genres and types of art have been contaminated by twenty-five centuries of political history. Above all, however, it shows how art has been transformed from a weapon of the powerful into one that is now also wielded by the people.

Chapter 4 ART, POWER, AND FAITH

A NEW HISTORY OF WESTERN ART - Pg 346-348

NEW HISTORY OF WESTERN ART

Science and technology laid claim to the image as a mechanism for visual registration, with the result that it was scientists at this juncture in history who oversaw the birth of new imaging techniques. Where Jan van Eyck (if Vasari is to be believed) had experimented with alchemy and distillation' to improve the binding and drying of oil paint, the key inventions in the nineteenth century were mechanical and chemical applications developed in the laboratory. Visual images were still the indispensable key to intellectual development they had been in the mind of Leonardo, but now it was no longer necessarily the artist who would shape those images. The academic artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been swayed by the ancient idea of ut pictura poesis, becoming caught up in the notion that visual art is fundamentally linguistic and narrative in character and hence, like language, can and must be encoded in clear grammar. Painting (and to a lesser extent sculpture), which still held out the promise in the Renaissance of becoming a vital link in the epistemological chain, was now reduced to the same status as literature - not even poetry - with the emphasis on the narrative component. History painting, in other words.

It ought not to be a surprise, therefore, that it was poets and novelists such as Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) and Émile Zola (1840-1902) who became fervent champions of the visual arts from the mid-nineteenth century, as we saw in a previous chapter. They stressed the role of imagination and emotion in the artistic interpretation of the world - something that was too important for mechanical photography, which was still in its infancy at the time. In a famous passage from 'Le moment artistique' (L'Événement, 1866), Zola argued, in what would become an important dictum for the twentieth century, that what art can add to reality is humanity.

PHOTOGRAPHY: THE ULTIMATE MARRIAGE OF ART AND SCIENCE

Chapter 3 ART(S) AND SCIENCE 253 

Conversations with Cezanne

Here is the way Cézanne's palette was prepared when I met him in Aix:

Yellows

Brilliant yellow

Viridian (Veronese green)

Naples yellow

Greens

Emerald green

Yellows

Chrome yellow

Green earth

Yellow ochre

Raw sienna

Vermillion

Blues

Indian red (red earth)

Cobalt blue

Ultramarine blue

Prussian blue

Peach black

Burnt sienna

Reds

Madder lake

Carmine lake

Burnt crimson lake

EMILE BERNARD

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Documents of Twentieth-Century Art

Conversations with Cézanne

Michael Scott Doran, Julie Lawrence Cochran (Translator), Richard Shiff (Introduction)

Conversations with Cezanne

He claims that this method of working, which is his alone, is the only correct one, the only one leading to a serious result. He mercilessly condemns all preference for simplification which does not pass through submission to nature by means of a meditative and progressive analysis. If a painter is easily satisfied, it is because, according to Paul Cézanne, his vision is mediocre, his temperament practically worthless.

Leonardo da Vinci put forth a similar idea in his treatise on painting when he said, "The painter who has no doubts will profit little from his studies. When a work of art surpasses the judgment of the creator, he who works advances little; but when his judgment rules his works, those works become more and more perfect if inconsistency does not interfere." The artist will arrive at self-knowledge and the perfection of his art not through patience, therefore, but through love that gives insight and the desire to analyze in greater depth and to improve. He must extract from Nature an image which will be, properly speaking, his own; and only through analysis, if he has the strength to press it to the end, will he make himself known ultimately, unambiguously, abstractly.

page 37 -

Documents of Twentieth-Century Art

Conversations with Cézanne

Michael Scott Doran, Julie Lawrence Cochran (Translator), Richard Shiff (Introduction)

Conversations with Cezanne

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Denis (like many others) observed that artists of his own age were being dehumanized by the leveling effects of modern urban life mechanization, commodification, standardization, social regulation-all leading to impoverishment of both intellectual and spiritual experience. He argued that the remedy could be found in an "abstract ideal, the expression of inner [mental] life or a simple decoration for the pleasure of the eyes." Under the circumstances, the representational arts would strive to mask out dull environmental realities, "evolving toward abstraction." However much this kind of "abstraction" might appeal to the intellect and imagination (subjective "inner life"), it would retain a distinct material component, located in a purified form and a straightforward procedure (the objective "beauty" of "a simple decoration"). Cézanne was exemplary because his marks appeared independent of any strict mimetic function and were also very physical, therefore representing a material (not conceptual) abstraction of the painting process. This was an aestheticized, humanized materialism, intense in both sensation and spirit; it seemed fit to counter the anesthetizing materialism of modern bourgeois existence.

page 31 -

Documents of Twentieth-Century Art

Conversations with Cézanne

Michael Scott Doran, Julie Lawrence Cochran (Translator), Richard Shiff (Introduction)

Conversations with Cezanne

When Lecomte evaluated Cézanne so intelligently in 1899, "abstraction" had not yet settled into its twentieth-century, formalist definition. Nor had images called "abstract" abandoned representational reference, as they would begin to do not long after Cézanne's passing. The meaning of

"abstraction," circa 1900, was fluid and confused, an amalgam of contested notions. Regardless of anything Cézanne said, it was his technique that caused many of his witnesses to link the autonomy of his form and the purity of its beauty to a process of abstraction. This turn in interpretation entailed a certain irony: "form" and "beauty" were conceptual entities suited to endless verbal philosophizing, precisely what Cézanne disliked in Bernard among others. To reconcile abstraction, itself an "abstract" notion with the very physical nature of Cézanne's painting, most of those familiar with him claimed that his abstraction developed from the senses, not the intellect—more intuitive harmony than science of color, more spontaneous rhythm than planned geometry. This variant of "abstraction" broke from the term's nineteenth-century connotation of intellectual excess (we still say that certain arguments are "too abstract," or that a mentally distracted person has an "abstract" look). Lecomte's perception that Cézanne's style satisfied antithetical demands coming from impressionist naturalism and symbolist idealism was ingenious and should have been adequate to the situation; but other commentators began to acknowledge somewhat different alignments, cognizant of competing notions of "abstraction." For Denis, the conflict between Monet's impressionism and Gauguin's symbolism amounted to a dispute between sensualist lovers of nature and rationalist devotees of abstract form. Reacting to attitudes that troubled him in others, Denis complicated matters by switching sides in the ongoing debate. First he praised, then he denigrated abstraction, lamenting Cézanne's inadvertent role in furthering it.

     Why all this happened is crucial to the historical fortune of Cézanne's art. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Denis (like many others) observed that artists of his own age were being dehumanized by the leveling effects of modern urban life-mechanization, commodification, standardization, social regulation—all leading to impoverishment of both intellectual and spiritual experience. He argued that the remedy could be found in an "abstract ideal, the expression of inner [mental] life or a simple decoration for the pleasure of the eyes.", Under the circumstances, the representational arts would strive to mask out dull environmental realities, "evolving toward abstraction." However much this kind of "abstraction" might appeal to the intellect and imagination (subjective "inner life"), it would retain a distinct material component, located in a purified form and a straightforward procedure (the objective "beauty" of "a simple decoration"). Cézanne was exemplary because his marks appeared independent of any strict mimetic function and were also very physical, therefore representing a material (not conceptual) abstraction of the painting process. This was an aestheticized, humanized materialism, intense in both sensation and spirit; it seemed fit to counter the anesthetizing materialism of modern bourgeois existence.

page 30 -

Documents of Twentieth-Century Art

Conversations with Cézanne

Michael Scott Doran, Julie Lawrence Cochran (Translator), Richard Shiff (Introduction)

Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology

Krishnamurti's major theological contention could be summarized by his statement "Truth is a pathless land," the belief that the angelic, or the divine, or the transcendent, or the absolute must forever be inaccessible to logical language, that no route can bring the initiate to that kingdom, and so the only means of approaching it is poetic rather than rational. At a 1929 address in the Netherlands, Krishnamurti proclaimed, "Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized ... A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect to be imposed on others... Truth cannot be brought down, rather the individual must make the effort to ascend to it." Just as quantum mechanics posits that all sorts of truths about the universe —say, the exact location or velocity of an individual particle —must remain ambiguous and are only decided upon by the arbitrary intercession of the observer, Krishnamurti describes something similar about the divine. Despite his training in Theosophy, such beliefs are perfectly consistent with many interpretations of Eastern religions, but they're also congruent with the idealist mystical belief that the universe only exists if it's being observed, and that God and his retinue are always doing the observing. Both Krishnamurti and Bohm were radical monists, believing in one substance, but rather than matter that substance was mind. The conclusions of quantum mechanics-demonstrated by mathematics and proven by experimentation-were disturbing to physicists who had been trained in the static model of Newtonian science; that some results seem to require consciousness appeared anathema to them. Yet the numbers were what the numbers were, the observations and experiments revealed what they had. On some level, there was a wisdom to assuming that the counterintuitive logic of quantum theory implied that consciousness permeated existence, as that would be the only way to make any sense of such strange results. As Bohm would audaciously declare in an essay published in 1987 in the collection Quantum Implications: Essays in Honor of David Bohm, "Even the electron is informed with a certain level of mind."

Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology

Ed Simon

Page 340

Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology

Cornelius Agrippa in The Occult Philosophy, one of the most influential theurgic texts of the Renaissance, states the Neoplatonist ethos succinctly when he writes that the "world is an elemental, celestial and intellectual triad where every lower thing is ruled by something higher and receives that mighty influence whereby-through angels, heavens, stars, elements. animals, plants, metals and stones —the archetypal and supreme Craftsman transfers his omnipotent powers into us, having made and created all of them to serve us."

Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology

Ed Simon - pg 118

Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology

Helpful to remember, lest one confuse contextual representation with reality when parsing the intricacies of the incorporeal and ineffable. Angels don't have blond hair because angels don't have hair; angels don't have blue eyes because they don't have eyes (or they have dozens of them). There is nothing wrong, of course, with imagining angels in the form of humans, only with mistaking a small segment of examples for the universal standard. Which is what's so fascinating about the earliest representations of such beings, which flout the conventions of the angelic as they've been transmitted in Western culture, or for that matter the response from those who suffered under colonialism and imagined angels as appearing like themselves. In the contact zones of early modern colonialism, beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing until the modern era, and with a particular zenith during the so-called Age of Reason, people developed syncretic religious traditions between Christianity and their own indigenous faiths, in which divine intermediaries often played an integral role. From Africa to Latin America, India to North America, artists often depicted angels in the visual idiom of their own cultures.

Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology

Ed Simon - pg 215

How to Be Truly Free: Lessons From a Philosopher President

NYTIMES, Aug. 23, 2024

Humans can create infinite needs. The market dominates us, and it robs us of our lives. Humanity needs to work less, have more free time and be more grounded. Why so much garbage? Why do you have to change your car? Change the refrigerator? There is only one life and it ends. You have to give meaning to it. Fight for happiness, not just for wealth.

Q: Do you believe that humanity can change? 

It could change. But the market is very strong. It has generated a subliminal culture that dominates our instinct. It's subjective.  It's unconscious. It has made us voracious buyers. We live to buy. We work to buy. And we live to pay. Credit is a religion. So we're kind of screwed up. 

Q: It seems you don't have much hope. 

Biologically, I do have hope, because I believe in man. But when I think about it, I'm pessimistic.

Q: Yet your speeches often have a positive message.

Because life is beautiful. With all its ups and downs, I love life. And I'm losing it because it's my time to leave. What meaning can we give to life? Man, compared to other animals, has the ability to find a purpose. Or not. If you don't find it, the market will have you paying bills the rest of your life. If you find it, you will have something to live for. Those who investigate, those who play music, those who love sports, anything. Something that fills your life. 

…

I have one thing. The magic of the word. The book is the greatest invention of man. It's a shame that people read so little. They don't have time. Nowadays people do much of their reading on phones. Four years ago, I threw mine away. It made me crazy. All day talking nonsense. We must learn to speak with the person inside us. It was him who saved my life. Since I was alone for many years, that has stayed with me. When I'm in the field working with the tractor, sometimes I stop to see how a little bird constructs its nest. He was born with the program. He's already an architect. Nobody taught him. Do you know the hornero bird? They are perfect bricklayers. I admire nature. I almost have a sort of pantheism. You have to have the eyes to see it. The ants are one of the true communists out there. They are much older than us and they will outlive us. All colony beings are very strong.

….

Life is a chain and it is still full of mysteries.

What a complicated animal man is. He's both smart and stupid.

Conversations with Cezanne

CÉZANNE SPEAKS…


(I publish [...] these notes collected by Cézanne's son without adding one line of my own, not wanting to alter in any way the thoughts, reflec-tions, and opinions of the artist ...)


I Critics' opinions about art are formulated more on literary principles than on aesthetic ones.

Il The artist must avoid literature in art.

Ill Art is the manifestation of an exquisite sensitivity.

Iv Sensitivity defines the individual. At its highest level, it identifies an artist.

v Great sensitivity is the most powerful characteristic of any beautiful artistic creation.

vi The most seductive element in art is the artist's own personality. 

vIl The artist gives form to his sensibility, to his own, innate individuality.

vIll The nobility of an artist's creation reveals his soul.

Ix The artist materializes and individualizes.

x The artist knows the joy of being able to communicate to others his excitement about nature, that masterpiece whose mysteries he believes he has deciphered.

xI Genius is the ability to renew one's emotion by daily contact with nature.

xII For the artist seeing is creating; creating is composing.

XIII Because the artist does not note down his emotions as the bird sings his song: he composes.

xIv The universality of the immediate impact of a work of art does not indicate its importance.


xv Art is a religion. Its goal is the elevation of thought. xVI He who does not hunger for the absolute (perfection) is content with placid mediocrity.

XVIl An intellect's excellence can be judged by the originality of its creations.

XVIII A mind that can organize powerfully is the most precious collaborator with sensibility in the realization of a work of art.

XIX Art is the adaptation of things to our needs and tastes. xx The technique of any art consists of a language and a logic.s xx1 Style is perfect when it is commensurate with the character and grandeur of the subject it interprets.

xXII Style does not result from the slavish imitation of the old masters; it develops from the artist's personal manner of feeling and expression.

XXIII The manner in which a work of art is rendered allows us to judge the distinction of the artist's mind and insight.

xxIv The quest for novelty and originality is an artificial need which can never disguise banality and the absence of artistic tempera-ment.

xxv Line and modeling do not exist. Drawing is the relationship of contrasts or, simply, the rapport of two tones, white and black. xxvi Light and shadow result from the rapport between colors.

These two most important phenomena differ not by their general intensity but by their individual resonance.

xxVII The form and contour of objects are created by oppositions and contrasts which result from their particular hues.

XXVIII Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and color cannot be separated, since all things in nature are colored.

xxIx As we paint, we gradually draw. Accuracy of tone gives an object both its light and shading. The better the color harmonies, the clearer the drawing becomes.

xxx Contrasts and relations of tones are the secret of drawing and shading?

xxxI Nature exists in three dimensions. There is a distance-a plane- between the painter and his model; it is atmosphere. All bodies seen in space are convex.®

XXXlI Atmosphere forms an enduring foundation. Oppositions of colors divide all the phenomena of light into separate elements upon the screen that is atmosphere. This atmosphere, then, envelops the painting, contributing to its synthesis and general harmony.

xxxIII We can say, therefore, that to paint is to create contrasts. xxxIv There is neither light painting nor dark painting, but simply relationships of tones. If they are placed well, by themselves they will establish harmony. The more numerous and varied they are, the greater is their effect and the more pleasing they will be to the eye?

xxxv Like all the arts, painting has its own techniques, but beauty of tone and harmonious combinations of sensations depend entirely on the artist's discernment.

xxxvi The artist cannot perceive all these relationships directly;

he must feel them.

xxXVII To sense correctly and represent that sensation fully is the foundation of style.

xXXVIII Painting is the art of combining sensations, in other words, of establishing harmony between colors, contours, and planes.

xxxx This method comes from contact with nature and develops through experience. It consists of searching for the expression of what one feels and of organizing sensations within a personal aesthetic.

xL Schools of art, a priori, do not exist. 10

XLl To paint from nature is to set free the essence of the model.

Painting does not mean slavishly copying an object. The artist must perceive and capture harmonyl from among many relationships. He must transpose them in a scale of his own invention while he develops them according to a new and original logic.

XLII To paint a picture is to compose.

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Documents of Twentieth-Century Art

Conversations with Cézanne

Michael Scott Doran, Julie Lawrence Cochran (Translator), Richard Shiff (Introduction)


ELYSIUM - a visual history of angelology

At issue with Aquinas's systemization isn't that passages such as the one quoted above don't make sense, but rather that they make too much sense. Serpentine though the reasoning may be, Aquinas's logic is unassailable and, based on the axioms he assumes, conceives of an angelology as rigorous as Euclidian geometry. What's unclear is whether any of it corresponds to an actual reality. With the rise of Scholasticism toward the end of the Middle Ages, what we see in evidence isn't an overabundance of faith but rather a crisis of it. What's clear in reading Aquinas-especially once it's remembered that he abandoned his own philosophy after a mystical experience that was supposedly infinite in its beauty-is that the Summa Theologica is a project of trying to convince yourself of something. Neoplatonists had the benefit of admitting that their systems were forever deferred, always falling short of whatever ultimate things flit unseen beyond the veil of human senses. When it comes to approaching angels, science is deficient in a manner that poetry simply isn't. A powerful tool, poetry — as long as it isn't mistaken for the referent-one that dominated until the High Middle Ages, only to return with the Renaissance humanists, occultists, and Neoplatonists. The Areopagite was among the most subtle of thinkers in this regard, in avoiding intellectual idolatry that confuses the painting of a winged being with intangible celestial forces themselves—a feature of the aforementioned apophatic tradition of which he is an exemplar, a wisdom that understands that the spoken god is never the real God. This is the "being beyond being" as he calls it in Divine Names, something that "is cause of all; / but itself: nothing." What Dionysius's angelology offered was a system of symbol, metaphor, simile, and cipher in which to express the experience of the inexpressible, to hear that which is silent, to see that which is invisible. A language to speak of those without tongues, a hand to write among those lacking limbs, a mind to envision for the thought that is greater than all experience. For Dionysius, angels were both agents of inspiration and a metaphor for meaning; returning celestial beings to their most crucial function, his was a theory of the message. - ED SIMON Elysium page 64

ELYSIUM - a visual history of angelology

Again and again, I return to this question of who among us can see the angels, and why they are so often invisible to the preponderance of people in the contemporary world. In past epochs, visionaries and prophets, mystics and poets were privy to the shimmering resplendence of the celestial choir flitting about in the cosmos. I, who have never seen an angel, and can scarcely believe that such a creature is possible, am envious of William Blake with his espying them in the trees at nightfall, every golden wing quivering in the sunset, every halo glowing in the dusk. As with so much of that which ails us—our nihilism and our prejudices, our alienations and our oppressions-I've long favored that myth of disenchantment, that faith that at one point the ladder to heaven was a bit sturdier and one need not have been as remarkable a soul as Blake to hear the flapping of the angels' wings. "There is a widespread sense of loss here," writes the philosopher Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, "if not always of God, then at least of meaning." I'm not sure that an overabundance of meaning was ever the birthright of humanity, but like all creation myths, this parable about disenchantment does what it needs to do in aiding me to make sense of the world. Because an angel is not something to be etherized and anatomized, dissected and categorized; an angel refers to nothing so vulgar as a body that can be examined with scalpel and calipers, but is closer to a fleeting feeling, a figure of speech, a turn of phrase, a sense that there is something greater and truer and more beautiful than you, and that despite it all you are loved and are capable of loving in return. For you see, an angel is merely love that is given a proper name, grace that is imagined with a face. A blessed wisdom that is so close we can sometimes hear it call to us in our names, the reminder of a wholly foreign and holy Other beautiful and irrational goodness. -ED SIMON Elysium page 15

LOOK INSIDE A New History of Western Art

Ekphrasis page 128

One final concept from Greek antiquity that deserves some explanation here, even though it is not directly related to art theory, is ekphrasis (Exparis or descriptio in Latin) meaning an artful description. Ekphrasis was a standard part of the progymnasmata, the exercises given to students of rhetoric. Would-be orators had to describe a sculpture or painting as vividly and accurately as possible, so that the visual narrative they created would allow their audience to form a clear idea of the work. Theorists of rhetoric were quick to appreciate this ability to 'speak to the imagination'. Ekphrasis had a substantial impact on art in the Renaissance as it enabled the artists of the time to work in the opposite direction. Knowledge of antique art was limited in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, not only outside Italy but within the birthplace of Renaissance art itself. Barely any trace had survived of paintings from antiquity; all that remained of Zeuxis and Apelles' masterpieces were the beautiful descriptions of Horace and Pliny, and so their texts, along with those of other authors, began to be used in an attempt to reconstruct antique art. The translation from image to word was thus reversed, as words were turned back into images. The so-called Calumny of Apelles - a description of an allegorical composition by the most famous Greek sculptor - is an example as striking as it is well known. The painting was described by Lucian and was drawn and painted by numerous Renaissance masters, including Botticelli, Mantegna, Raphael and Bruegel.

NEW HISTORY OF WESTERN ART

Mimemata 

Chapter 2 Art as Idea page 122 


Thinking about art has been dominated by the concept of 'mimesis' since antiquity. Freely translated, the ancient Greek term refers to the 'imitation' of nature which human beings sought to recreate in their art until well into the nineteenth century. The degree to which the creator succeeds in this goal has always been one of the most important benchmarks for the quality of the work of art. Successful mimesis resulted in what the Greeks - who did not have a word for visual artworks - called mimemata (singular mimema: the result of imitation). The concept is of the utmost importance to any understanding of Western art history. Mimesis was the focus of Western visual culture from the antique era until the paradigm shift of Impressionism and its offshoots began to undermine the principle from the latter part of the nineteenth century. No artist before then had dared to produce art that did not consider nature its ultimate model. To this day, many people still judge a work's merit in terms of its mimetic qualities. Consequently, the principle of imitation was at the forefront of the artist's possibilities and limitations for centuries. The techniques of oil painting and linear perspective, for instance, did not just develop out of nowhere but were vital steps in the ancient quest for perfection in the emulation of reality that has typified Western art. Even more than that, the notion that art is essentially an imitation of nature actually fed through over time into the visual culture of non-Western religions and cultures. The ancient Greek concept played an active part, for instance, in the visualisation of Buddhism, whose founder was represented symbolically during the religion's first centuries (up to the fourth century BCE). It was only after Alexander the Great's conquests in the Indus Valley that the Buddha began to be depicted as the idealised human figure we know today [2.6]. Mimesis might thus appear simple and self-evident at first sight, yet it is far from being so. Simulating what we see is not a straightforward process. The term itself is not unambiguous either and has undergone various shifts in meaning since ancient times. Over the centuries, mimesis became an umbrella concept taking in ideas such as imitation, representation, similitudo, simulacrum and prototypum. If we delve more deeply into the phenomenon, which is precisely what occurred in antique Greek culture, emulation proves to be highly complex. Artists can, for instance, imitate nature in an idealised way by seeking to perfect it, but they can also strive for a 'photographic' realism [2.7, 2.8] or give free rein to their creativity and imagine things that cannot be imitated, as they do not actually exist. The centaurs on the famous Parthenon frieze [2.9 ] appear lifelike, but these hybrid mythological beings - half human, half horse - are obviously a product of human imagination.