Grigg 1984_Relativism and Pictorial Realism

Relativism and Pictorial RealismAuthor(s): Robert GriggSource: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Summer, 1984), pp. 397-408Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/430213 .Accessed: 15/09/2013 15:02

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ROBERT GRIGG

Relativism And Pictorial Realism

I.

CHARACTERIZING a work of art as "deca- dent" seems to be about as harsh ajudgment as one could imagine. During this century, historians and critics of art have delighted in overturning such judgments. They have sponsored a series of daring reappraisals. Perhaps nowhere have these reappraisals been more striking than in the case of late- Roman, Byzantine, and medieval art.1

Nearly all of these reappraisals have been connected with the issue of realism or naturalism in art.2 Many of the works of art falling into the categories "late Roman" and "Byzantine" are schematic, with figures that are misproportioned and unreal. Elements of setting are frequently sparse or omitted altogether, sometimes being replaced by a gold background. Prior to this century, it was assumed that the artists responsible for such works were simply unskilled, that they were aiming at realism (as ancient Greek and Roman artists understood it) but simply could not achieve it. The practice of realism, it was said, had decayed along with the other institutions of antiquity.3

Historians and critics of art have tried to defend late-Roman, Byzantine, and medieval art against the charge of deca- dence. Their defenses have varied, sometimes strikingly. Some of the early ones were based on philosophical and psychological beliefs that most readers today

ROBERT GRIGG is an associate professor of Art History at the University of California at Davis.

would find outmoded and fantastic.4 Per- haps the most popular defense today is that the abstraction and unnatural qualities, which used to be explained as due simply to a lack of skill,5 were actually intended by artists as positive features. Late-Roman, Byzantine and medieval artists, it is frequently said, rejected the standards of Greek and Roman art. Most would agree that the motives for this rejection were in part formal or aesthetic. Many are also wedded to the idea that this supposed rejection must reflect the deepest or most essential preoccupations of the age or culture within which it occurred.6 But, when it comes to specif- ics, there are differing opinions about the nature and purpose of this alleged rejection, as well as the degree of aware- ness on the part of the artists and their audiences.

To some extent of course the varied suggestions concerning the purpose of the supposed rejection depend upon the historical background of the art being explained. When this claim is made of the late-Roman art produced under the Te- tarchs (Diocletian and his co-rulers), ca. 300 A.D., the unnatural and "anti-classical" features are read, according to one recent scholar, as a repudiation of the pro-Hellenic biases of the senatorial aristocracy. Diocle- tian and his colleagues are claimed to have seen in this style a reflection of the simpler and sturdier virtues of the early Rom- mans.7 Others have seen it as an expression of an overall "spiritualization" of art.8

When this claim is made of the art produced under the Byzantines, the unnatural

? 1984 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism


398 features are read as an expression of Chris- tian asceticism and transcendentalism.9 The abstraction of Byzantine art "was encouraged by the desire to achieve a higher degree of spirituality than could be at- tained by naturalistic expression."'0 "The advances of asceticism could not fail to foster a style distinguished by its other- worldly character-the expression, in visi- ble form, of the monastic principle of 'renunciation of life'."" Again, there are many explanations that resemble these. A complete review of each variant is out of the question here. I am concerned with them only to the extent that they posit an imagined rebellion against the standards of ancient art.

II.

These reappraisals have met with wide- spread success. Today we welcome the view that other peoples may not have val- ued naturalism or realism in art.'2 We tend to feel that the art of other peoples, periods, or cultures should be judged by its success in expressing their central or distinctive preoccupations. The experi- ence of modern art seems to have proved that the proper expression of these preoccupations sometimes required the rejection of realism or naturalism.13 Not surpris- ingly, the growing acceptance of abstract and nonobjective art has encouraged the acceptance of late-Roman, Byzantine, and medieval art. But this acceptance has been premised in part upon an argument from an analogy with modern art. And as we shall see in a moment, as soon as we begin to press this analogy, it starts to break down.

Perhaps an even more fundamental reason for the success of these reappraisals is the pervasive relativism of modern thought. Their defenders can imagine themselves to be identifying with an enlightened form of historical or cultural relativism. After all, they are, it seems, simply insisting that art must be judged only in relationship to the standards or values of its producers. This position has received support, if only indirectly, from the growing numbers of relativists among anthropologists, sociologists, and histor-

GRIGG

ians earlier in this century.14 The propo- sition that these reappraisals rest on an enlightened form of relativism, however, involves an important irony that has ap- parently gone unnoticed.

In order to appreciate the irony, it will be necessary to distinguish two different forms of relativism that relate to realism or naturalism in art. I shall begin by out- lining in brief a form of relativism that might have been embraced by historians and critics. This form of relativism, which some anthropologists and philosophers share, is based on the belief that periods and cultures systematically differ in their perception of realism.'5 Images that we perceive as flat and unnaturally propor- tioned may well have been perceived as "real" and "truthful" by the intended audience. In short, an entirely different position could have been taken, namely, that what appears realistic or lifelike varies with different peoples, periods, cultures, and perhaps even with different levels of education within a culture. This position, had it been taken by historians and critics of art, would have qualified them as relativists. But it is not the position they took.

Instead, they attributed to artists of other cultures reasons for rejecting realism. This attribution, however, is not as simple as it once appeared to be, for, in making it, they presupposed that the features we perceive as unnatural and abstract were perceived in the same way when the works of art were created. In other words, in order to identify instances of the intentional rejection of realism, they assumed that the perception of realism in other periods and cultures coin- cided with our own perception. It was this tactic that allowed them to search for reasons artists may have had for making figures that appear flat and unnatural. The reasons, of course, were often suggested by the modern movements. In many cases, they involve reference to some as- pect of the ideology of the age or culture within which the work of art was produced, something comparable to the desire of the Futurists to give expession to the speed and energy of the mechanized


Relativism and Pictorial Realism world. In other cases, historians and critics describe works of art employing termi- nology borrowed from the ideological un- derpinning of some of the modern schools of painting. For example, the fragmentary statue of the Tetrachs at San Marco is often described in terms suggesting that the artist was a proto-Cubist.16

What is ironic about the position some historians and critics of art have taken is that the appearance of cultural relativism at one point in their explanations, namely, the difference in value placed on realism in art, is purchased at the cost of denying relativism at another point, namely, the perception of pictorial realism. Wherever they want to claim that realism was rejected, they do so by presuming that other peoples, periods, and cultures recognized the same criteria for realistic representation that we recognize today. They begin by noting that the images look abstract and unnatural. They then look for reasons artists may have had for making them so. They completely ignore the issue of whether what appears unnatural to us looked unnatural to the artist and his audience.

It may well be that the reason they fail to recognize this issue is that they have operated under a set of assumptions about pictorial representation that most philosophers and psychologists would con- sider overly simplified. Whatever the explanation for the popularity of the type of relativism that I have outlined above, its effects have been unfortunate. His- torians and critics of art have ignored evidence that supports the alternative form of relativism that I have sketched above, i.e., relativism in respect to the perception of realism (and, by implication, the absence of realism) in images. Yet the evidence for this type of relativism is incontrovertible.

Travelers and anthropologists have often reported with surprise that peoples from other cultures do not feel at ease with the images we regard as natural and realistic. We have assumed that the "technological superiority" of our images would be widely acknowledged. Yet to peoples from other cultures our images

399 appear unnatural and distorted. Their complaints tend to fall into some fairly predictable patterns. Foreshortened views appear to distort the objects represented in them and in some cases such views suggest that parts of the object are miss- ing. Their own images, which strike us as willfully conventional and stylized, seem realistic and lifelike to them. Today these reports concerning primitive tribesmen are commonplace. No one challenges them. Similar reports made by Chinese and Jap- anese informants in this and the last century have also gone unchallenged. The evidence in fact is overwhelming that in- dividuals immersed in these cultures do not agree with us about what counts as a realistic or truthful image.'7

III.

The evidence is not limited to the reports of anthropologists and travelers. Some of it is historical. For almost a thousand years, various representatives of Byzantine culture have avowed that their own art is lifelike. This surprises us today, for we perceive Byzantine art to be "abstract" and "unnatural." Still, the written testimony of the Byzantines time and again expresses the belief that their own art was "realistic" and highly lifelike. One can do no better that to quote the authoritative summation of Cyril Mango concerning Byzantine attitudes towards their own art:

... the aesthetic values of Byzantine art ... it is claimed, were influenced by philosophical, particularly neo-Platonic doctrines. Whatever value there may be in such theories, it is only fair to say that they receive little support from the texts . . . The prevailing view of Byzantine authors is that their art was highly true to nature. A perusal of the texts collected here will confirm this statement. The work of painters is constantly praised for being lifelike: images are all but devoid of breath, they are suffused with natural color, they are on the point of opening their lips in speech. ... We might think, ... that Byzantine authors would have made some distinction between their own art and that of the Greco-Roman period which they had before them. Yet this is not the case. Except for the difference in subject-matter . . ., their aesthetic appreciation of both kinds of art is identical.'l


400

It is true that some historians and critics of art disallow Byzantine testimony as the expression of a genuine appreciation of Byzantine art. They have found it impossible to imagine how the Byzantines could have regarded their own art as realistic and lifelike, when it seems so ter- ribly abstract. That being the case, they are tempted to dismiss the Byzantine statements as mere cliches, empty phrases that were spoken simply because of the prestige of the ancient genre of the ekphrasis, the set-piece description of a work of art.'9 To them the descriptions of the Byzantine authors are nothing more than the fossilized repetition of ancient literary descriptions of works of art.2' "Many of the poems and epigrams referring to works of art may be dismissed as cliches by which the scholar displayed his learning."'' By regarding Byzantine descriptions and evaluations of works of art as based merely on an authoritative literary formula, advocates of this rebuttal are evidently claiming that there was a radical divorce between what people said and what they really thought, a divorce that was systematic and co-terminus with late- antique and Byzantine culture.

At this point it becomes clear, I submit, that the analogy with modern art has been a disaster for scholarship. What is amaz- ing is that the glaring flaws in the analogy have so seldom been seen. But as soon as we begin to examine the analogy with modern art, they become apparent. First, the modern rejection of "academic" or "photographic" realism can be dated. We can answer questions like who? when? where? But those who believe that the standards of realism and beauty of ancient Greek and Roman art were rejected seem unable to come to an agreement about even these basic questions.

No one of course would expect to be able to answer these questions with preci- sion. Still, it is disconcerting that there is not one named artist who can be identi- fied with this supposedly courageous rejection of ancient Greek and Roman realism. In view of the fact that ancient writers had no difficulty naming the names of Greek artists thought responsible for

GRIGG

the development of naturalism and clas- sicism,22 it is reasonable to expect that someone would want to give or take credit for it-if it were regarded as an accomplishment.

It is also puzzling that historians have been unable to come to an agreement in assigning responsibility to some specific generation of artists. Instead, many different generations of artists are given credit for it. The varied claims made about this supposed rejection have it occurring any- time from the late third century on into the seventh century.23 There are even some students of Roman art who have it occurring as early as the second century.24 There also appears to be little agreement about the nature of the puta- tive change. Some represent it as a revolutionary change; some represent it as a recurring phenomenon, as if it were due entirely to alternating shifts in taste; others represent the change as so gradual that they are utterly noncommittal about when it occurred or even about whether it can be termed a rejection.25 Views about where these alleged changes first occurred are equally diverse.26 Whatever the basis for these diverse claims, the point here is that if we are dealing with changes so un- systematic, so widely spread, so unclear in their geographical and chronological extent and their progression, that fact may preclude offering a certain kind of explanation for them, namely, one couched in intentional language.

The failure to pin this thesis down to a specific historical context in respect to agent, time, and place makes it difficult to put it to a decisive test, one on which it would stand or fall. That may serve to protect it, but only in the sense that it al- lows those who want to hold it as an article of faith to do so. Indeed, it appears to be defended as such by many of those who embrace it. It functions as a badge of modernism, which wins audience sympathy both for the author and his subject.

The second way in which the analogy breaks down lies in the reception of this supposed rejection. It is an understate- ment to say that the experiments of modern artists were not always welcomed.27


Relativism and Pictorial Realism Modern art and its advocates have been subjected to scathing abuse by conser- vative elements in society. Yet modern western European societies, even a century ago, appear liberal in comparison with late Roman and Byzantine societies, where entrenched and unquestioned alle- giance to tradition was the rule.28 Where then are the outcries against innovation and novelty that any intentional rejection of the standards of ancient Greek and Roman art would have occasioned from conservatives? The sources fail to betray the slightest hint of a controversy about style in art. Ernst Kitzinger points out, "no ancient source alludes to the truly cataclysmic change which took place in Roman art in the third century.'29 This silence is all the more significant since there is ample evidence that Christians could get extremely contentious about certain aspects of religious art.30

It is true that there have been attempts to represent Plotinus and neo-Platonic philosophers as advocates of the abstraction of late-Roman art.31 But those who have backed these attempts have never been able to answer even the most basic questions they raise. Did neo-Platonic philosophers regard the abstraction of late-antique art as an exemplification of their aesthetic doctrines? Plotinus could hardly have done so, since he cites Phi- dias approvingly.32 Porphyry tells us that he shunned portraiture altogether, without the question of style ever entering into discussion.33 Did artists know of these aesthetic doctrines? Here again there is not much hope of an affirmative answer, judging from our knowledge of the social position of the artist in Roman society.34

In a sense, however, the silence may have been broken. We have perhaps failed to see it because we tend to regard this change merely as a change in style, a switch from one aesthetic to another. This disposes us to disallow certain evidence as relevant. But there is no guarantee that the Romans would have approached alternative standards of art and truth with such congenial tolerance. In the fourth century the emperors published several related laws that reflect concern over a

401 serious shortage of skilled labor in many different professions, including the various arts. It is at the very least an ad- missible thesis that what modern scholarship sees as a change in style was correctly perceived by the later Romans as the result of a shortage of skilled labor, a development that they tried to stem by means of economic incentives.35

A third way in which the analogy breaks down concerns the relationship between the language of art criticism and art, which returns us to the topic of the statements of Byzantine writers about their own art. The dismissal of their testimony has never been supported by a sus- tained argument. It rests solely on an appeal to the dependence of Byzantine descriptions and evaluations of art upon ancient models. But the argument is hardly compelling. It does not necessarily follow that we can dismiss what the Byzantines wrote about art as uninformative about their real thoughts simply because what they wrote was influenced by topoi in ancient literature. There is, after all, the obvious possibility that the descriptions found in ancient literature were chosen as models because they were assumed to be appropriate either to the works of art at hand or to the aims it was assumed artists were pursuing.

Nor is it true that the written evidence alleging realism in Byzantine art comes exclusively from Byzantine intellectuals and elites, classes supposedly most sus- ceptible to rhetorical exaggeration. Some popular legends about the lives of the saints have important implications for the Byzantine perception of their own art. Nilus of Sinai, for example, tells us a story about how Saint Plato of Ancyra was recognized when he made a miraculous appearance to a young man in dis- tress; the young man recognized him because he had seen the saint's portrait.36 The Byzantines believed their portraits to be accurate. They had an explanation why they were. The saints sometimes made miraculous appearances to artists, enabling them to render exact likenesses. The life of St. Theodora of Thessalonika contains a typical story which takes for


402 granted the realism of Byzantine images. The story concerns a certain painter named John. Even though he had never seen the saint, he was able to paint her portrait. She had miraculously appeared to him in a dream. Those who had known the saint vouched for the accuracy of the portrait.37 The implications of such stories are clear enough. But even more important was the existence of a kind of image that by its very nature rendered all consideration of style and abstraction ir- relevant: this class comprises images that were-according to legend-miraculously created without the intervention of human hands, the so-called acheiropoietai.38

Like many problems, the problem of explaining the abstraction of Byzantine art has been exaggerated. Some historians, thinking that they have an explanation conveniently at hand for the abstraction and unnatural qualities of Byzantine art, are tempted to overemphasize the presence of these qualities (and correspon- dingly to underestimate the presence of the very same qualities in ancient Greek and Roman art, most especially in the provinces).39 Since they have a stake in seeing late-Roman and Byzantine art as a rejection of ancient art, they succumb to the temptation of contrasting ancient and Byzantine art, as if there were a clear development, just the kind one would expect to find if there were a rejection. In their histories, they tend to choose works that support the contrast.

This has made it hard for them to inte- grate into their discussions of the development of medieval style many works of art that provide fairly clear evidence of a continuing admiration for ancient Greek and Roman art.41 To explain the existence of those works of art, they appeal to the idea of a momentary revival (sometimes termed "'renaissance"). How it was possible for anyone to assert the supposedly rejected values of Greek and Roman art in the highest levels of Byzantine society is left unexplained. Still others reason that both styles coexisted, sometimes in the same work of art, and that both styles were used for different expressive purposes .41

GRIGG IV.

It is really not necessary to suppose that the Byzantines rejected the values of ancient art. There are other ways of explaining how Byzantine art came to differ from ancient art. I am not suggesting that the explanation is simple. I do not believe that it is. Nor can I provide it here without writing a history of Byzantine art. But to win the necessary freedom to do so we must at least recognize that admiration of ancient art is one thing, knowledge of it quite another.

Much as Byzantine intellectuals might profess admiration for ancient art, it is doubtful that they had much understand- ing of what it looked like. They could read about ancient art and its much vaunted realism. They "knew" of some of the more famous accomplishments of ancient Greek painters and sculptors by name. But, apart from some scattered examples and the dwindling collection of ancient statuary in Constantinople, they had little first-hand acquaintance with ancient Greek and Roman art, most especially painting, which would have had the greatest relevance to them.42 The one crucial gap in most discussions of Byzantine aesthetics is the nature and extent of Byz- antine information about ancient art.

It is a mistake to assume that the realism of ancient art was widely accessible to the Byzantines as a standard against which they could measure their own art. The information technology available to the ancient and medieval world did not allow the inexpensive collection and dissemination of such information. A bias against what Wil- liam Ivins once called "visual communication" was built into it.43 What people said or thought about art could be commu- nicated by means of writing. But communi- cating the appearance of works of art was another matter.

We seldom appreciate the extent to which the rise of systematic art history depended on the technology of printmak- ing, photography, and printing, "Histor- ians of art and writers on aesthetic theory have ignored the fact that most of their thought has been based on exactly repeata-


Relativism and Pictorial Realism ble pictorial statements about works of art rather than upon first-hand acquaintance with them."44 First-hand acquaintance with a work of art is no longer an indispensable condition for knowledge of the appearance of the work of art in question. And this makes it fatally easy to assume a background knowledge about ancient art that we today possess, but which Byzantine intellectuals had no way of accumulating. Without documented collections of ancient art, especially paintings, accessible for con- stant reference, it would have been hard for them to perceive the gradual drift from ancient art. Even those who could see that such a drift had occurred would have found it difficult and perhaps impossible to com- municate their perception to others for whom such access was denied.

The Byzantines may, in some sense, have been mistaken in regarding their art as lifelike and natural, but the point at issue of course is their perception. The perception of realism in art, as Gombrich and others have pointed out, is largely a func- tion of expectation and that is based upon the "state of the art," namely, what one is currently familiar with.45 The limited information available to the Byzantines about the naturalism of ancient art is, in my opinion, one of the most important factors helping to explain the apparent discrepancy between Byzantine art and what the Byzantines said about their art (best in the sense that it requires fewest unsupported assumptions).

The alleged revivals, if that is what they are, could then be explained as the result of perceptions, never widely shared and difficult to sustain, that Byzantine and ancient art had drifted apart. In short, it is not necessary to assert that there were marked and radical shifts in value. All we need imagine is a loss of information about the appearance of ancient art, occa- sionally relieved by rediscoveries. Doubt- less the causes of this loss of information were varied; among them may have been the economic, political and military diffi- culties experienced in the Roman world in the third and early fourth century. It has been suggested, perhaps correctly, that these encouraged the dissolution of

403 Roman workshops, reducing the number of skilled workers (relative to demand) who could train others in their traditional practice.46

At present it appears doubtful then that Byzantine intellectuals recognized a clear break with the past in the way that Renais- sance humanists had.

A violent jolt was needed to produce a different attitude towards pagan antiquity; to make it appear as a distinct epoch, one whose greatness shone even through its ruins. This interposition of "distance" or of a "projection plane," as Panofsky calls it, is indeed what separates the Renaissance in its attitude towards antiquity from the Middle Ages. In Byzantium such an interposition was never achieved, although there are some signs that it could have been.47

Not recognizing a break with the past, the Byzantines saw no reason not use the "cliches" they found in ancient descriptions of works of art. They assumed that the cliches were appropriate. In contrast, Renaissance humanists not only recognized the need to collect and edit man- uscripts to retrieve ancient literature, they also were some of the earliest and most avid collectors of ancient art.48 There were earlier collectors, like Henry of Blois and Frederick II, the Stupor Mundi.49 But the humanists were the first systematic collectors. Their collecting was competitive and created a rage for antiquities.

This may explain how the Byzantines were unable to perceive the drift of Byz- antine art from the art of antiquity; but in our effort to understand how the Byz- antines could have perceived their images as real and lifelike, we also have to talk about psychological receptiveness. The Byzantines viewed their religious images, most especially portraits ('icons'") with a sympathy that we find hard to rival today. Their attitude was not quite the dis- engaged aesthetic attitude that we tend to value today. The Byzantines addressed their images in prayers, treating them as if they were sentient. They clothed them, they decked them with costly jewelry, they censed them, they illuminated them with candles and lamps, and they carried them in processions." Those parts of the


404 person that were most important in communication, especially the eyes, were the focus of attention in the images. The abstraction of the setting reflects the fact that for this narrowly conceived purpose elements of setting were not only unnec- essary, they might actually prove to be a distraction. Icons may seem abstract to us, but they gave a human face to the in- scrutable and transcendent will of God. Far from creating images that were unnatural and untruthful, the Byzantines in- sisted that their portraits of the saints were "exact likenesses,'' produced either during the lifetime of the saint or later by an artist to whom a vision or dream was granted, providing him with the occasion for producing an authentic image.

V.

I have argued then that it is a mistake to compare late-Roman and Byzantine artists to the pioneers of modernism. Unlike the critics who defended the modern movements by advancing new standards of art, late-Roman and Byzantine writers contin- ued to praise works of art in terms formu- lated by ancient Greek and Roman critics. Some historians and critics today have implied-little of an explicit nature has ever been written-that there must have been a nearly total divorce between the language of art criticism and the thoughts of artists and their patrons. That position, because it dismisses out-of-hand an enor- mous amount of Byzantine testimony, seems to imply that the intentions of the artists are directly and independently accessible in the work of art. The intention of the artist can indeed be inferred from the work of art, but only under certain conditions.51 The dismissal of Byzantine testimony about their perception of their own art can hardly be taken seriously. As I have argued here, one of the underlying reasons for this dismissal is a commitment frequently made to a certain form of relativism, but it is a "safe," narrowly conceived relativism. It essentially asks us to believe that people once thought as critics and aesthetes frequently do today. The evidence and arguments presented here

GRIGG

not only are inconsistent with that propo- sition, they support an alternative form of relativism, namely, relativism in respect to the perception of realism in art.

' These reappraisals are discussed by O. Brendel, Prolegomena to a Book on Roman Art (1953) (New Haven and London, 1979), pp. 25-37; E.H. Gom- brich, Art and Illusion, 2nd ed. (Princeton Univer- sity Press, 1961), pp. 15-43; R. Goldwater, Primitiv- ism in Modern Art (1938) (New York, 1967), pp. 15-43. The reappraisal of Byzantine art is discussed by K. Weitzmann, "Introduction," in Age of Spiri- tuality: A Symposium [hereafter Symposilum], K. Weitzmann, ed. (New York, 1980), pp. 1-5. The taste for reappraisal in art criticism was of course well established before the 20th century: see F. Has- kell, Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion, and Collecting in England and France (Cornell University Press, 1976).

2 K. Weitzmann, ed., Age of Spirituality. Late An- tique and Early Christian Art, Third to Seventh Cen- tury [hereafter Age] (New York, 1979), p. xxvi.

See especially Alois Riegl, Spatromisc he Kunstin- dustrie nach den Funden in Oesterreich-Ungarn (1901), 2nd ed. (Vienna, 1927), p. 48, who first fo- cused favorable attention on the Constantinian friezes on the Arch of Constantine.

3 This view is not entirely a product of the Renais- sance. During the Middle Ages, there was a series of revivals based on the perception, sometimes exaggerated, that previous centuries were barren of accomplishments in the arts. See Leo of Ostia, elev- enth century, who made exaggerated claims about the decay of art in Italy- Thle Chlronicle of Monte Cassino, III, xviii, pp. 26-32. H. Bloch, trans., in A Documentary History of Art, E.G. Holt, ed. (New York, 1957), I, pp. 9-17. Ghiberti's Second Com- mentary represents the decline of art as occurring with the public acceptance of Christianity under Constantine the Great. The acceptance was supposedly accompanied by an attempt to eradicate idol- atry, which involved the destruction of art and the persecution of artists. See C. Gilbert, ed., Italian Art 1400-1500 (Englewood Cliffs, 1980), p. 77. See also Vasari, Le Vite, R. Bettarini, ed., II, pp. 37 and 97. The most comprehensive treatment of the theories of decline and rebirth is of course E. Panofsky, Renais- scance and Renasences in Western Art (Stockholm. 1960), pp. 25f., 34, for Ghiberti and Vasari.

4 A. Riegl, Stilfragen (Berlin, 1893); idem Spa- tromische Kunstindustrie; F. Wickhoff and W. Ritter von Hartel, Die Wiener Genesis (Vienna, 1895); W. Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy (1908), 3rd ed., M. Bullock, trans. (Cleveland and New York, 1967), and idem, Form in Gotllic (1912), 2nd ed. (New York, 1957). For an evaluation of Riegl's views, see M. Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven, 1982), pp. 71-97 and 234-36 (for bibliography).

5 Goldwater, p. xix: "The most contemptuous criticism of recent painting comes from those who say 'any child of eight could have done that'.'"


Relativism and Pictorial Realism Kenyon Cox, who was outraged by the works of Matisse included in the 1913 Armory exhibition, compared them to the scrawls of a nasty boy (Oliver Larkin, Art and Life in America, 2nd ed. [New York, 1960], p. 363). This challenge, directed at the artist's supposed lack of skill, has typically been countered by showing evidence that the artist had in fact mastered the skills of the academic tradition.

For the unpopularity of explanations appealing to inability or undeveloped skills, see Worringer, Form in Gothic, pp. 8-9.; idem, Abstraction and Empathy, p. 12; and Gombrich, Art and Illusion, pp. 21, 77.

h H. Kahler, The Art of Rome und Her Empire, J. Foster, trans. (New York, 1963), pp. 165 f., 187 f., 191; E. Kitzinger, "On the Interpretation of Stylis- tic Changes in Late Antique Art," in The Art of By- zantium and the Medielval West (Indiana University Press, 1976), 32 ff., regrets that almost all successful efforts to correlate art with its historical and cultural background have been in the domain of iconographi- cal studies. Stylistic analysis, which is used mainly for dating, according to Kitzinger, can be used to probe the mind of the artist and his contemporaries. In saying this, Kitzinger (op. cit., p. 35) works from the postulate that stylistic change is a "pure reflection of the artist's mind."

7 E. Kitzinger, Byzantine Art in the Making (Cam- bridge, 1977), p. 12. Cp. G. Hanfmann, Roman Art (Greenwich, 1964), p. 41.

8 H.P. L'Orange, "Late-Antique and Early Chris- tian Art: Introduction," Encyclopaedia of World Art, IX (1964), col. 62.

9 E. Kitzinger, "Byzantine Art in the Period between Justinian and Iconoclasm," in Berichte zum XI. Internazionalen Byzantinisten-Kongress (Munich, 1958), p. 46; J. Beckwith, Early Christian and Byzantine Art, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth, 1979), p. 221; and G. Ladner, Ad Imaginem Dei: The Im- age of Man in Mediaeval Art (Latrobe, 1965), pp. 20 ff., and 46 ("in the preceding centuries spiritualism had striven to devaluate the body. ... "). 10 Weitzmann, Age, p. xxvi.

11 J.R. Martin, The Heavenly Ladder of John Cli- macus (Princeton University Press, 1954), p. 163. See also E.T. DeWald, Italian Painting, 1200-1600 (New York, 1961), pp. 10-15, and A. Smart, The Dawn of Italian Painting 1250-1400 (Oxford, 1978), pp. 7-9.

12 Gombrich, Art and Illusion, pp. 4 ff., almost apologizes for dealing with representation in art: "never before has there been an age like ours when the visual image was so cheap in every sense of the word" (p. 8).

13 In the work of the Brucke, . . ."there is a deliberate coarsening of technique, . . . Here the desired effect is of something unstudied, less artisti- cally and consequently truer to the inner qualities of the subject. . . . Nolde praised primitive pottery and sculpture because it was executed directly in the ma- terial which it expressed, without the distortion in- troduced by preparatory drawings. . . . The woodcuts of Kirchner and Schmidt-Rottluff are influenced rather from the 'primitive' German woodcuts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as is evident not only in technique but also in the prevalence of reli-

405 gious subjects" (Goldwater, pp. 118-19). A clear analysis of abstraction and distortion in modern art is given by H. Osborne, Abstraction and Artifice in Twentieth-Century Art (Oxford University Press, 1979).

The rationale for the expressive abstraction and distortion of the Expressionists is laid bare in the following statement (1912) by Franz Marc:

Today we search behind the veil of external appearances for the hidden things of nature which seem to us more important than the discoveries of the Impressionists. . . . We seek and we paint this spiritual side of ourselves in nature, and this is not from caprice or the desire to be different but because we see this other side just as before they suddenly saw violet shadows and the at- mosphere before everything else. Art in its pur- est essence is and has always been the most au- dacious departure from nature and the natural. It is the bridge to the world of the spirit. (Quoted in Osborne, p. 60.)

14 Two of the best known defenses of relativism in history are Charles Beard, "Written History as an Act of Faith" in The Philosophy of History in Our Time, H. Meyerhoff, ed. (New York, 1959), pp. 140 ff., and R. Aron, pp. 152 ff.

15 E. Gombrich seemss to be a relativist in this sense: "The point is precisely that without an articulate formulation of what constitutes lifelikeness there are no easy grounds for a negative judgment. The illusion given by paintings and works sculpture, after all, is always a relative judgment"- -"The Lea- ven of Criticism in Renaissance Art," in The Heri- tage of Apelles (Cornell University Press, 1976), p. 112. The same is true of N. Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, 1976), pp. 34-39. (Also refer to note 17 below.) P. Feyerabend, Against Method (London, 1975), pp. 236 f., likewise seems to favor this position. He points out, however, that ancient Egyptian artists favored the use of stereotypes over close observation, even though we know they were capable of the latter. See note 29 below for a related observation.

'6 See note 7 above and Cornelius Vermeule, "Maximianus Herculeus and the Cubist Style in the Late Roman Empire, 295 to 310," Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 60 (1962), 8 ff.

17 For the reactions of "primitive" informants to images and photographs, see Gombrich, Art and Illu- sion, p. 139. For Chinese and Japanese informants, ibid., pp. 84 ff. and 267. F. Boas, Primitive Art (1927) (New York, 1955), p. 158, on the meaning of realism to north-west coast Indians. Other anthropo- logical discussions of this phenomenon are found in M. Segall, D.T. Campbell, and M. Herskovits, The Influence of Culture on Visual Perception (Indian- apolis, 1966), pp. 32 f. (the perception of photographs), and J.B. Deregowski, "Pictorial Perception and Culture," Scientific American, 228 (1972), re- printed in Image, Object, and Illusion (San Fran- cisco, 1974), pp. 79-85 (with bibliography).


406 'l C. Mango, ed. and trans., The Art of the Byzan-

tine Empire, 312-1453 (Englewood Cliffs, 1972), pp. xiv-xv. See also his "Antique Statuary and the Byzantine Beholder," Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 17 (1963), 65 fif.

19 For the ekphrasis genre, see G. Downey, "Ekphrasis," Reallexikon fur Antike und Christen- tum, 4 (1959), 921 ff.; A. Hohlweg, "Ekphrasis," in Reallexikon zur Byzantinischen Kunst, 2 (1971), cols. 33 ff.; H. Maguire, Art and Eloquence in Byzantium (Princeton, 1981), pp. 22f., and idem, "Classical Tra- dition in the Byzantine Ekphrasis," in Byzantium and the Classical Tradition, Margaret Mullett and Roger Scott, eds. (Birmingham, 1981), pp. 94-102.

2( R. Cormack, "Painting after Iconoclasm," in A. Bryer and J. Herrin, eds., Iconoclasm (Bir- mingham, 1977), p. 157, and Beckwith, p. 345. Mango, "Antique Statuary," 65 ff., himself writes that the statements of Byzantine intellectuals cannot be taken at face value. H. Maguire, "Truth and Convention in Byzantine Descriptions of Works of Art," Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 28 (1974), 113-40, is more concerned with the overall descriptive accuracy of Byzantine descriptions than with the issue of realism. Even so, his article is useful in cautioning against a blanket dismissal of Byzantine descriptions of their own art.

21 Beckwith, p. 345. 22 See J.J.G. Pollitt, The Art of Greece, 1400-31

B.C. (Englewood Cliffs, 1965), and idem, The An- cient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History, and Ter- minology (Yale University Press, 1974).

23 Kitzinger, Byzantine Art in the Making, pp. 9, 12 f., sees the decisive rejection as occurring in the age of the Tetrarchs, a belief commonly shared. Yet he also sees repeated assertions of abstraction later on in Byzantine art, implying that later generations replicated the rejection of the generation of the Te- trarchic period (ibid., pp. 99 ff., especially 103). (E.g., Kitzinger writes of a "major stylistic shift around the year A.D. 550 . . . a bold reassertion of abstract principles of design that had been in vogue around the year A.D.500").

24 G. Rodenwaldt, "The Transition to Late-Clas- sical Art," in Cambridge Ancient History, 12 (Cam- bridge, 1939), p. 554, who sees the crucial changes foreshadowed in the era of Antoninus Pius. Also see Kahler,ArtofRome,pp. 165f., 187f., 191.

25 Although he recognizes a period of preparation in the provinces, the decisive adoption of abstraction, according to Kitzinger in Byzantine Art in the Making, p. 12, was in the age of the Tetrarchs. Ladner, pp. 25 f., especially 69, n. 1, emphasizes the gradual nature of this change (". . . a direct causal nexus between such theological views and the practice of art cannot be established. It is only claimed here that these views and their vicissitudes represent attitudes of mind which . . . nourished the concep- tion of the human image which can be perceived in the works of art themselves").

26 R. Bianchi Bandinelli, Rome: The Late Empire, P. Green, trans. (New York, 1971), pp. 41 ff., sees it as the expression of a native "plebian" taste, a theory held earlier by Rodenwaldt, pp. 546 f. E. Kit- zinger, Early Medieval Art (London, 1940), pp. 11 f.,

GRIGG and Byzantine Art in the Making, pp. 10 f., sees it as originating in provincial Roman art. Others see it as "oriental" (D. Talbot Rice, Byzantine Art, 4th ed. [Harmondsworth, 1968], pp. 50 ff.)

27 See J.O. Hand, "Futurism," Art Journal 41 (1981), 337-42, for the reception of Futurism in the United States. See T. Buddensieg, "The Early Years of August Endel: Letters to Kurt Breysig from Munich," Art Journal, 43 (1983), 47 ff. for Kaiser Wilhelm's denunciation of anarchy in art. See Meyer Shapiro, "The Introduction of Modern Art in America: The Armory Show [1952]," in Modern Art, 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected Papers (New York, 1978), pp. 135-78, for the reaction to the Ar- mory Show: "For months the newspapers and magazines were filled with caricatures, lampoons, photographs, articles, and interviews about the radical European art. Art students burned the painter Matisse in effigy, violent episodes occurred in the schools, and in Chicago the Show was investigated by the Vice Commission upon the complaint of an outraged guardian of the morals. So disturbing was the exhibition to the society of artists that had sponsored it that many members repudiated the vanguard and resigned; among them were painters like Sloan and Luks, who the day before had been considered the rebels of American art. Because of the strong feelings aroused within the Association, it broke up soon after, in 1914" (p. 136). As Shapiro explains, what disturbed them was not so much that the painting was nonobjective as that it was premised upon a deliberate rejection of the image (pp. 142 ff.): ". . . the new painters seemed to be coarse ruffians, and their art a reversion to barbarism. These artists were aware of their own savagery and admired the works in the ethnological museums, the most primitive remains of the Middle Ages, folk art and chil- dren's art, all that looked bold and naive"(p. 147). One academic spokesman, Kenyon Cox, claimed that Cezanne was "absolutely without talent" and "could not learn to paint as others did, .. ." (p. 165). Modernism was still under attack in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when it was linked in the minds of late 1940s and early 1950s, when it was linked in the minds of some reactionaries to the Communist threat (p. 176).

28 For the conservatism of late-Roman society, See A.H.M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire 284- 602 (Norman, Oklahoma, 1964), pp. 873-74.

29 Kitzinger, "Stylistic Change," 36. There is at least one instance, namely, the Hellenistic art of Egypt, in which the evidence is clear that ancient artists deliberately chose an unrealistic style over a naturalistic style. Some of the surviving Hellenistic mummy shrouds feature paintings in two strikingly different styles-the naturalistic style that we nor- mally associate with Hellenistic art (which was used for portraits of the deceased) and the hieratic sche- matism of Egyptian art (which was used for images of the Egyptian gods). There is one other context in which there may have been an expression of pref- erence for relatively nonnaturalistic styles-the context of art collectings: "Quintilian tells us of con- noisseurs who preferred the austere art of the 'primitive' Greeks to the more nearly perfect masterpieces


Relativism and Pictorial Realism of later times" (Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p. 144). With the rise of art criticism and collecting in the ancient world, there naturally came into existence an awarness of alternative styles, for which see J. Onians, Art eand Thought in the Hellenistic Age (London, 1979), pp. 53 ff. But that is another issue, which by no means compromises the basic truth that ancient Greek and Roman critics assumed unani- mously that verisimilitude was a value in the pictorial arts.

30 For Iconoclasm, see E.J. Martin, A History of the Iconoclastic Controversy (London, 1930) and the recent studies of S. Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm During the Reign of Leo III (Louvain, 1973) and Byzantine Iconoclasm During the Reign of Constan- tine V (Louvain, 1977).

3' For the alleged influence of Plotinos, see A. Grabar, "Plotin et les origines de lesthetique medie- vale," Cahiers Archeologiques, I (1945), 15-34; Ma- thew, Byzantine Aesthetics, pp. 19 f. For a critique of these theories, see P.A. Michelis, "Comments on Gervase Mathew's 'Byzantine Aesthetics'," British Journal of Aesthetics. 4 (1964), 253-62, and idem "Neo-Platonic Philosophy and Byzantine Art," in Aisthetikos (Detroit, 1977), pp. 152-81.

32 Plotinos, Enneads V, viii, 1; in J.J.G. Pollitt, The Art of Rome c. 753 B.C.-337 A.D. (Englewood Cliffs, 1966), p. 217.

33 Porphyry, Life of Plotinos 1; in Pollitt, Art of Rome, pp. 215-16.

34 J.M.C. Toynbee, Some Notes on Artists in the Roman World (Collection Latomus, VI [Brussels, 1951]), pp. 5, 17-18, and 54 ff. Toynbee contests the view that the Romans were prejudiced against the arts. Even so, as she points out, "the outstanding artistic personalities, . . . were, for the most part, if not always pure Greeks by race, bearers of Greek names, men of non-Roman and non-Italic origin, ..." (ibid, p. 54).

35 See C. Pharr, trans. and ed., The Theodosian Code and Novels and the Sirmondian Constitutions (Princeton, 1952), p. 396. Some of them are re- printed in Mango, ed., Art of the Byzantine Empire, pp. 14-15, 50. For their significance, see A.H.M. Jones, '"The Greeks under the Roman Empire," Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 17 (1963), 15.

36 Mango, Art of the Byzantine Empire, p. 40. 37 Ibid., pp. 210 f., for this and similar stories. 38 E. von Dobschutz, Christusbilder: Untersu-

chungen zur Christliehet Legende (Leipzig, 1899), pp. 61 ff. and 83 ff. A. Grabar, La Sainte Face de Laon, Le Mandylion dans I'art orthodoxe (Prague, 1931), and E. Kitzinger, "The Cult of Images in the Age Before Iconoclasm," in The Art of Byzantium, pp. 121 ff.

39 For provincial Roman art that anticipates some of the features of Byzantine and medieval art, see A. Schober, "Zur Entstehung und Bedeutung der pro- vinzial-romischen Kunst," Jahreshefte des osterrei- chischen archaologischen Instituts in Wien, 28 (1939), 9-52; Kitzinger, Early Medieval Art, pp. 11 f.; and idem, Byzantine Art in the Making, pp. 10- 11. For Roman portraiture that anticipates the cubic simplicity of the style of the San Marco Tetrarchs,

407 see J. Breckenridge, Likeness: A Conceptual History of Ancient Portruiture (Evanston, 1968), figs. 14, 88, 89, 91, 98, 122. The argument is sometimes made that the qualities of Tetrarchic and Constantinian art were anticipated in a native "Italic" tradition or Roman popular art. But the portraits referred to in Breckenridge do not sustain that thesis. Many were not the work of native Italic artists. Many were in fact produced for aristocratic patrons.

40 E.g., some of the early icons from the monastery of St. Catherine on Mt. Sinai, for which see K. Weitzmann, The Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai: The Icons, I (Princeton University Press, 1976); the pavement mosaics of the Great Pal- ace of the Emperors in Constantinople, for which see P.J. Nordhagen, "The Mosaics of the Great Pal- ace of the Byzantine Emperors," Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 56 (1963), 53-68; as well as the Joshua Roll and the so-called Paris Psalter. E. Kitzinger, "The Hellenistic Heritage in Byzantine Art," Dum- barton Oaks Papers, 17 (1963), 98 ff., acknowledges that the existence of the techniques of Hellenistic il- lusionism in Byzantine art is regarded as problematic by some scholars.

41 David Wright, "Style in the Visual Art as Ma- terial for Social Research," Social Research, 45 (1978), 139, alludes to "the numerous classical revivals which characterize the early Middle Ages." Noting the coexistence of both naturalism and abstraction in Byzantine art, Weitzmann, Age, p. xxvi, claims that artists deliberately used both modes even within a single work for different purposes: "the highly sensitive artist [of the apse mosaic of St. Cath- erine's Monastery at Mt. Sinai] has employed the abstract form for the divinity and more naturalistic forms for the human figures." Interestingly, others have pointed out that the occurrence of the "spiri- tualized'" style is not limited to religious subjects and that many of the more naturalistic and classical works in Byzantine art have religious subjects. In short, the association Weitzmann refers to seems entirely spurious. For this see Dale Kinney, review of E. Kitzinger, Byzantine Art in the Ma-king, in Byzan- tine Studies, 9 (1982), 318-19.

42 There was a large collection of ancient statuary in Constantinople throughout most of the Byzantine period. It was for the most part collected during the fourth and fifth centuries. For this, see Mango, "Antique Statuary," passim, and idem, Byzantium, pp. 273 ff. The relevance of these statues to Byzan- tine art, however, was limited by the comparatively minor role statuary played in Byzantine art as well as by their subjects, which made it difficult to regard them as plausible models. This is important to real- ize, for the disinterest shown by the Byzantines in ancient statues does not mean that they were disin- terested in ancient art, as Mango, Byzantium, p. 274, seems to suggest.

43 William M. Ivins, Jr., Prints and Visual Com- municution (Cambridge, 1953), pp. 2-3. For a more extended discussion of the role of the technology of reproduction in the development of art history, see Estelle Jussim, Visual Communication and the Graph- ic Arts: Photographic Technologies of the Nine- teenthl Century (New York, 1974), pp. 4 f., 7-17, 78-


408

79, 236-78 ("The New Technologies and the History of Art History").

44 Ivins., pp. 2-3. 45 Art and Illusion, pp. 28 ff., especially ch. VII

("Conditions of Illusions"). J. Onians, "Abstraction and Imagination in Late Antiquity," Art History, 3 (1980), 1-24, argues that through the use of imagination and hyperbole late antique rhetoricians often had to make up the distance between the work of art and the standards expected of works of art. They could not afford to insult wealthy and powerful patrons. Some patrons, however, could not participate in the lie, accounting for the "exceptional" revivals of naturalism in the late antique art (p. 20). Onians concludes that the rigorous standards of classical art were relaxed as a result of the relationship between the patron and the rhetorician (p. 23).

46 Jones, Empire pp. 15-16. 47 Mango, "Antique Statuary," 68-69. 48 For Italian humanists as collectors of art, see

Richard Krautheimer, "'Humanists and Artists," in

GRIGG

Richard Krautheimer and Trude Krautheimer-Hess, Lorenzo Ghiberti (Princeton, 1956), pp. 294-305.

49 J.B. Ross, "A Study of Twelfth-Century Inter- est in the Antiquities of Rome," in Medieval and His- toriographical Essays in Honor of J.W. Thompson (Chicago, 1938), 308-09, and E. Kantorowicz, Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1928), pp. 482- 83, and the Erganzungsband (Berlin, 1931), p. 210.

O50 Kitzinger, "Cult of Images," pp. 96 ff.; idem, "A Virgin's Face: Antiquarianism in Twelfth-Cen- tury Art," Art Bulletin, 62 (1980), 11 f., for use in processions. See also P.J. Nordhagen, The Frescoes of John VII (A.D. 705) in S. Maria Antiqua in Rome (Rome, 1968), pp. 75-76, 89 for evidence that certain protraits of saints painted on the walls of Santa Maria Antiqua, Rome, were especially venerated and evidence that jewelry or adornments may have been added to them as votive gifts.

'51 R. Grigg, "The Constantinian Friezes: Inferring Intentions from the Work of Art," The British Jour- nal ofAesthetics, 10 (1970), 3-10.


Article Contentsp. [397]p. 398p. 399p. 400p. 401p. 402p. 403p. 404p. 405p. 406p. 407p. 408

Issue Table of ContentsThe Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Summer, 1984), pp. 371-481Volume Information [pp. 477-481]Front MatterEditorial [pp. 371-373]The Rhetoric of Incommensurability [pp. 375-381]The Tonal and the Foundational: Ansermet on Stravinsky [pp. 383-386]The Poetry of Theory: Reflections on after the New Criticism [pp. 387-396]Relativism and Pictorial Realism [pp. 397-408]Expression of Emotion in (Some of) the Arts [pp. 409-418]Delimitating the Concept of the Grotesque [pp. 419-426]Art, Religion and Musement [pp. 427-437]Afterwords: Criticism and CounterthesesThe Relativity of Refutations [pp. 439-442]Kant and Greenberg's Varieties of Aesthetic Formalism [pp. 442-445]

ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 447-448]Review: untitled [pp. 448-451]Review: untitled [pp. 451-452]Review: untitled [pp. 452-455]Review: untitled [pp. 455-457]Review: untitled [pp. 457-459]Review: untitled [pp. 459-461]Review: untitled [pp. 461-463]Review: untitled [pp. 463-465]Review: untitled [pp. 465-467]Review: untitled [pp. 467-469]

Books Received [pp. 471-472]American Society for Aesthetics News [pp. 473-475]Back Matter

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Grigg 1984_Relativism and Pictorial Realism