A History of Art History

1600–1650

It was inevitable that a northern European artist would imitate Vasari. But it took half a century. Karel van Mander (1548–1606) was born in Flanders to a noble family and migrated to the northern Netherlands during the Spanish war. Between 1573 and 1577 he travelled in Italy, where he learned firsthand what Italians thought about northern European painters who, provincial or stubborn, failed to adapt their locally acquired styles to the canons of beauty established in Florence and Rome. The historian Lodovico Guicciardini, in his Description of the Low Countries (1567), had praised the Antwerp painter Frans Floris but only because he had brought back from Italy—after a visit in the 1540s—“the correct way of rendering muscles and foreshortenings naturally and marvelously.” No one described northern art in positive terms. Mostly, northern art figured as something like the “idea of the great alternative to the proper” that Henry James’s Maisie slowly came to know (chap. 6).

Back in Haarlem, van Mander fell in with the painter Cornelis Cornelisz., the painter and printmaker Hendrick Goltzius, and the poet and scholar Dirck Coornhert. They styled their gatherings an “academy,” one of the many informal artists’ collectives to model themselves on the Florentine academy. Like Vasari, van Mander was a good but not a great painter. He was not erudite but acquired enough learning to write a comprehensive handbook on art, addressed, like Vasari’s book, to other artists and to well-informed laymen.

Van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck, the “book of painters,” was published in Haarlem in 1604. It comprises six texts: a didactic poem in ottava rima, expounding the theory of painting; the “Lives of the Ancient Painters and Sculptors” (like Ghiberti’s, cribbed from Pliny), the “Lives of the Italian Artists” (cribbed from Vasari), the “Lives of the Northern Painters” (the part that interests modern scholars; already the 1764 edition of van Mander is reduced to this section alone); a commentary on Ovid; and a lexicon of emblems.

Here emerges for the first time a coherent national or regional art history that is not Italian. The northern difference is incompletely theorized by van Mander, however, and his account is often bent by the magnetic pull of the classical style.

Van Mander’s history of northern art begins with a drama that even Vasari could not match: Jan van Eyck appears on the scene, and without predecessors: for “it is to be assumed that there were few painters or good examples of painting known in those early days in that uncultured, isolated backwater.” “Nowhere in High or Low Germany do I find earlier painters known or named.” Because he knows no names, van Mander omits the entire history of art in northern Europe before van Eyck: no illuminated manuscripts, no painted or carved altarpieces, no sculpture at all, no Gothic churches. Suddenly there is the Ghent altarpiece, “excellent and admirable, considering its time.” For van Mander, the “modern times” in painting began in the thirteenth century, with Cimabue; the fifteenth century is still the “old time” of the modern era. He ranks van Eyck’s invention of oil painting alongside two other modern achievements of the northern Europeans that would have astonished the ancients: the invention of gunpowder by the Danish monk Berthold Schwartz and the invention of the printing press by Laurens Coster, in van Mander’s own Haarlem. Local patriotism was one of the motors of van Mander’s project. His history runs through some dozens of artists, culminating in his friend Hendrick Goltzius, who figures as an ambiguous counterpart to Michelangelo, and finally in his own autobiography.

Unlike Vasari, van Mander could draw on no local tradition of historiography. To assemble his biographies he relied in part on the information about northern artists that Vasari himself had already collected, for example from Guicciardini. He used manuscript notes made by the historian Marcus van Vaernewyck. Few other northerners had made any effort to collect material. Van Mander’s own teacher, Lucas de Heere, had commenced a history of art in rhymed verse, but by van Mander’s time it had already been lost. Van Mander adopted some of Vasari’s methods. He interviewed, for example, the Haarlem painter Albert Simonsz. who had been a pupil of Jan Mostaert sixty years earlier, in the 1540s. Albert reported that Mostaert was around seventy years old at that time, that is, born in the 1470s, and had never met either Geertgen tot Sint Jans or Albert Ouwater. Van Mander reasoned that Ouwater must have been dead by the late fifteenth century and was more likely a contemporary of Jan van Eyck, indeed could be considered the northern Netherlandish or Dutch counterpart to the great Fleming. Elsewhere he complained that the artists he interrogated were not especially cooperative. Van Mander learned little about fifteenth-century art, and he made plenty of mistakes. Repeating Vasari’s confusion, he splits one of the major Flemish painters into two people, Rogier of Bruges (presumably Hans Memling) and Rogier van der Weyden, who died however in 1529 (some sixty-five years after the real Rogier). He described Albrecht Dürer’s Four Witches, in fact Dürer’s first dated engraving, as a copy after Israhel van Meckenem.

Lacking sources on German artists, van Mander drew inferences from engravings. He says that we may guess on the basis of their prints what the paintings of Martin Schongauer, Israhel van Meckenem, Lucas Cranach, and Sebald Beham were like. Van Mander, like other northern commentators on art, was more aware than Italians were of the crucial role played by engravings in the creation of modern art. Prints were a network, a library, a laboratory. Van Mander put forth the engraver Goltzius not only as a peer of Michelangelo but also as a successor to Michelangelo’s near-contemporary Dürer.

The German geographer Matthias Quad von Kinckelbach in his treatise Teutscher Nation Herligkeit (The Glory of the German Nation) (1609) composed an initial, concise history of printmaking. Quad also names the famous German and Netherlandish painters, describes several works, and recounts some anecdotes, including one about Dürer recorded nowhere else. He introduces an interesting opposition between artists oriented directly to life (the painters of Dürer’s generation) and artists who work with their minds (Dürer’s followers). Quad counts Virgil Solis as an artist of Geist or mind, and Jost Amman as an artist who recovers the immediacy to life. With Tobias Stimmer, whose reflections on the cathedral at Strasbourg we encountered, it is yet more Geist.

Van Mander tries to see the old painters as denizens of their own times, singling out in their antiquated art what is worthy of praise or even emulation. He says that Dirk Bouts lived “a good many years before the birth of Albrecht Dürer and [his works] are nonetheless very different from the hard or angular modern manner which looks so unattractive (de harde oft cantighe onwelstandighe moderne maniere).” The capacity to break down a style and abstract from it what is valuable will be the key to the ironic art history of the future. In his didactic poem van Mander says, “We see how our forebears, when they wanted to paint a devout history, placed the main figures clearly in the foreground, so that beholders can easily figure out the story; this is useful and we should imitate it.” This is not a relativizing apology for the deficiencies of the old painters but an ironic overturning of the modern norm: van Mander is saying that the old compositions really were better, simpler, more effective. Vasari never said anything like this, though Michelangelo might well have, if we can trust the opinions relayed by the Portuguese artist Francisco de Holanda in his treatise Da pintura antigua (1548).

By giving Netherlandish painters a past, van Mander gave them a choice, and so shaped the history of art-making itself. His history allowed Netherlandish painters to decide whether to perpetuate the local tradition, as did Pieter Bruegel, the great Flemish painter who had died in 1569 when van Mander was twenty-one years old and whose legacy, in the custody of his sons and grandsons, cast a long shadow; or abandon it and join the Italian flow, as did most of Bruegel’s contemporaries. Some later Dutch artists, like Rembrandt, engaged with Italian art while maintaining a native center of gravity. The artist who most subtly folded awareness of the history of painting into the basically realist modern Dutch mode was Jan Vermeer, whose attentive depictions of women and men in bourgeois interiors were guided by careful study of van Eyck and of the sixteenth-century Netherlandish painter known as the Master of the Female Half-Lengths.

Van Mander, who drew up the first chronological list of Dürer’s paintings, contributed to the intensification of interest in this first German artist of European reputation. A topos of the sixteenth-century art-historical literature was to wonder how great an artist Dürer would have become if he had been exposed to Italian art and antiquities. Lambert Lombard posed the question in a letter to Vasari in 1565; the apology is repeated by Francisco de Holanda and Nicholas Hilliard. We can speak of a Dürer “Renaissance” only when we encounter Dürer without apologies: when Quad von Kinckelbach, for example, writes that “Dürer’s manuscripts and paintings, his smallest pieces of paper are worshipped like relics nowadays; they are held up like jewels, yea, you have to pay just to look at them.” Elector Maximilian I bought paintings. Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, brought Dürer’s 1498 self-portrait and his portrait of his father to Charles I, gifts from the city of Nuremberg. Arundel himself bought paintings and had them engraved by Wenzel Hollar. Hollar also published two etchings after drawings he believed to be by Martin Schongauer, both dated 1646 and inscribed “Martin Schön inv.”: a woman with wreath of oak leaves, a subject known only through copies after Schongauer in Munich and Karlsruhe; and a woman with turban, probably unrelated to Schongauer. Dürer was mentioned by Francis Bacon, John Donne, John Dee, Richard Haydocke, and Henry Peacham, as well as Nicholas Hilliard. “Dürer revived” was the subtitle of the Book of Drawing, Limning, Washing and Colouring published anonymously in London in 1660. Meanwhile, ten editions of Dürer’s writings were published in Germany between 1592 and 1622.

Lucas Cranach, or his son, was once commissioned to copy an altarpiece by Hieronymus Bosch. Now Cranach, too, was copied, or closely imitated: a Venus and Cupid on a black ground in Munich, long attributed to the artist’s son, was recently redescribed as a pastiche by the early seventeenth-century Bayreuth court painter Heinrich Bollandt.

Karel van Mander was contributing to a wider European correction of Vasari’s Tuscan bias. Among Vasari’s imitators and critics across the peninsula, one must mention the Sienese physician and amateur of art Giulio Mancini; the Roman painter Giovanni Baglione, who in his Lives of Painters, Sculptors, Architects and Engravers, active from 1572–1642 (1642) picked up where Vasari had left off; and the Venetian painter Carlo Ridolfi, author of Le maraviglie dell’arte, ovvero, Le vite degli illustri pittori veneti and dello stato (1648). None of them, however, challenged either Vasari’s basic premise that art rose to its highest level in the first decades of the sixteenth century or his confidence that once reoriented by academic study, art would maintain and even, paradoxically, improve upon its new perfection.

The best collection of paintings in Europe was assembled by Charles I of England, who as a young man had seen the collections of Charles V and Philip II in Spain. He made purchases, he received gifts, and the posthumous inventory of 1651 listed 1,570 pictures. The highest valued was the Holy Family by Raphael, known as “La Perla,” at £ 2000, or more than 5 percent of the total value of the collection; a painting now usually attributed to his pupil Giulio Romano (this work, it seems, was mentioned by Antonio Maria Mazzoleni in his letter to the councilors of Salò, with its original cost, 1200 scudi, as a benchmark against which to measure the appropriate price of his own work). Charles I owned many modern works, for example Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin, now in the Louvre, and many early Netherlandish paintings, among them Jan van Eyck’s triptych dated 1437, now in Dresden, and the panels by Geertgen tot Sint Jans now in Vienna. He had pictures by Dürer, as we know, Hans Holbein the Younger, Jan Gossart, Lucas Cranach, and Pieter Bruegel. He owned the Wilton Diptych, a French or English masterpiece of around 1400. The northern paintings were exempted, as it were, from the requirements of admission to the academic canon. And yet there was still no theoretical justification of northern art: taste runs out ahead of language. Charles owned nothing by any Italian artist older than Andrea Mantegna, whose series of Triumphs of Caesar on canvas were the second most highly valued work in the collection, at £ 1000.

Again, concern with content raises the question of the past. The iconographers, testing the typologies that had long governed the adornment of the churches, looked through historical variation of form. For this class of writers, artistic beauty did not so much matter. The English antiquarian and curiosus Thomas Browne in his Pseudodoxia epidemica (meaning vulgar errors) (1646) corrected conventional iconographies. After establishing on the basis of scripture that Christ was recumbent at the Last Supper, for example, Browne says of Mary Magdalene:

That she stood at Christs feet behinde him weeping, and began to wash his feet with teares, and did wipe them with the haires of her head; which actions, if our Saviour sate, she could not performe standing, and had rather stood behinde his back, then at his feet; and therefore it is not allowable, what is observable in many pieces, and even of Raphaell Urbin, wherein Mary Magdalen is pictured before our Saviour, washing his feet on her knees, which will not consist with the strict description and letter of the Text.

Unlike Thomas Browne, Cardinal Federico Borromeo (1564–1631), archbishop of Milan and prolific defender of orthodoxy, knew fine art. He collected paintings, and he sponsored the restoration of Leonardo da Vinci’s mural painting of the Last Supper in S. Maria delle Grazie.

Borromeo was interested in older Christian art but mainly for doctrinal reasons. He monitored the continuity of Christian art. He also corrected profane tendencies in modern art: in his treatise De pictura sacra (1624) he dispraised “images of sphinxes, a crowd of satyrs, men shaped like trees, and other vanities of the pagans” in churches. He was impatient of iconographical errors, not granting Michelangelo license, for example, to include Charon’s boat in the Last Judgment. Borromeo hesitates to subscribe to the legends of wondrous portraits of Christ made “not by human hands” but by divine agency. He notes as iconographic touchstones, however, a marble sarcophagus excavated in the Vatican depicting Christ as a shepherd “holding a staff with one hand and stroking a lamb with the other” and a painting in the catacombs of St. Zephyrinus (now St. Domitilla) in which “the Savior is shown as Orpheus and can be seen standing among beasts.” He reviews an array of early Christian images in order to determine whether Christ was crucified with three or four nails. He included in his treatise an engraving of the mosaic portraits of St. Peter, Pope Leo III, and Charlemagne, based on a drawing by Alfonso Chacón, from the wall of the Triclinium of Leo III, the apse of the eighth-century banquet hall in the old Lateran, or papal, Palace.

Borromeo judged the older Christian paintings deficient in style. In his own museum, the Ambrosiana, which he described in his treatise Museum (1625), Borromeo housed no works by any artist prior to Titian and the Milanese Bernardino Luini. He did make appreciative comments about the curious art of his friend Jan Bruegel the Elder. Borromeo’s concerns often exceeded what orthodoxy demanded. He felt that even the pagan artists could not be forgiven their errors: Hercules must not be depicted killing the lion by ripping its muzzle open but rather, for example, as history attests, by inserting his hands into the jaws.

The pedantic eye of the antiquarian, when trained on the oldest Italian churches, was able to draw distinctions that were invisible to the ideologists of academic art. A biography of Cardinal Stefaneschi (1642), by the physician Sebastiano Vannini, disputed Vasari’s attribution of the mosaics at S. Maria in Trastevere to Pietro Cavallini, pointing out that some sections were clearly newer and attributing them (wrongly) to Simone Martini. Giulio Mancini in his Considerazioni sulla pittura (1617–1621) apologized for the “imperfection” of the paintings in the catacombs “because their aim was not adornment but devotion and piety.” Although Mancini’s manuscript remained unpublished until the twentieth century, other scholars knew it well. Again and again he warns against judging painting without considering the period. The miniatures and the script of the Vatican Virgil (c. 400) “correspond to their time.” The Roman mosaics of the eighth century are good because they resemble contemporary mosaics in Greece, where the art had been perfected. To see the Byzantine works as the realization of a medium is halfway to seeing them as simply good. Miraculous images, the icons “made without hands,” “have no time.” The thirteenth-century murals at Santi Quattro Coronati, however, are rather good “for those unhappy times.” Mancini locates the primo rinascimento, or the “childhood of painting,” in that thirteenth century, the time of Guido da Siena, an artist unmentioned by Vasari. The researches of Antonio Bosio on the catacombs, meanwhile, including their wall paintings, were published posthumously as Roma sotterranea (1632). But there was little interest on the part of the Christian antiquarians in the evolution of style.

The aristocratic collector and antiquarian Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588–1657), secretary to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, commissioned drawings after antiquities as well as geological, botanical, and zoological specimens. His 200 folio volumes containing c. 4200 antiquarian or architectural drawings, known as the “paper museum,” were later purchased by King George III and are now at the Royal Library at Windsor. This scholarship is both ahistorical, in the sense that it does not pretend to trace the shape of history, and non-normative. Antiquarian history, deferring assessment, is simply inclusive. The deficiency of antiquarian history is also its merit: a lack of concept.

The medium of painting marked constant approaches and retreats from good form. There was more inertia in architecture, fewer challenges to good form. The normativity of Greek and Roman architecture was encoded in modern building practice by the architects and theorists Sebastiano Serlio and Andrea Palladio. Heterodox approval of the non-classical mode was occasionally voiced in the national contexts. The architect Philibert de l’Orme opined in his Premier tome de l’Architecture (1567) that “French” or pointed Gothic vaults were not all that bad. But the illustrated treatises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provided a limited alphabet of acceptable forms. The history of architecture was always present before the eyes because the progression from simple, powerful beginnings to florid maturity was inscribed in the system of the orders. The Doric order was the symbol of primordial, unadorned authority. The system of the orders raises the possibility of its own permanence. Already the letter of Raphael of c. 1519 on the Arch of Constantine had distinguished between the architecture and the sculpture of the late empire. The fourth-century arch itself was still correct, still complying with the best formulas, but the sculpture on its faces had descended into rough ineptitude.

Typology, with its power to repeal the laws of form, was still in force in architecture and in proximity to the Church. Compliance with the type ferries content forward through a variety of forms. The typological content of a building is a link to an origin secured by ground plan and other structural elements. The typological content of an icon is the person portrayed, a reference sustained by a presumed system of reliable copying, more or less mechanical. This limits formal variation registering the personal contribution of the artist, pace Filarete’s observation that personal style is legible even in portraits. Typology is profiled against personal style. The capacity of art to reflect on its own origins and conditions becomes a content of modern art. Art is now broadcasting on several channels at once.

It is sometimes said that all art was once contemporary. That is not true: typological or substitutional art was never contemporary.

The Bolognese painter Domenico Zampieri, known as Domenichino (1581–1641), who emulated Raphael in his pursuit of a timeless style, is a good example of a painter who worked both with and against typology. The best style, Raphael’s style, was not a transparent window onto content. Raphael’s style holds up the gaze with its beauty. Can such a style fulfill the project of a typology? No: exactly this beautiful form had to be dropped because it interfered with primordial Christian content. Because Domenichino was unwilling to do that, he instead corrected for style on the level of depicted style, the style of buildings depicted in his paintings. In his frescoes at the Abbey of Santa Maria at Grottaferrata, in the Alban Hills southeast of Rome, Domenichino narrated the early, legendary history of the monastery. The Greek monk St. Nilus had founded the abbey in 1004. The fresco depicts Nilus’s successor, St. Bartholomew, supervising the construction of the monastery at some point before 1024, when the abbey was dedicated.

The grand marble structures depicted in the background (the abbey, presumably) and on the right (the church?), with their fluted column shafts and flat capitals, elements of the Doric order, do not much resemble eleventh-century buildings. Domenichino’s abbey church recalls instead a pagan temple. He renders the eleventh-century building in classical form because the Doric order installs the archaic automatically. An eighteenth-century source relays a legend according to which St. Bartholomew rescued eight marble columns from the supposed villa of Cicero on the site (this must be the old brick structure that workmen in the left background of the fresco are tearing down). Those columns were in fact incorporated into Bartholomew’s church, although they are no longer visible today. Domenichino’s rendering of the abbey as a classical building asserted that the founders of Grottaferrata were still in contact with the ancient world and its ideals of beauty even if the church they managed to build was not very beautiful, apart from the salvaged columns. Domenichino asserted his freedom to tell the story in the most impressive way, unbound by pedantic cleaving to historical fact. He was aware that the history of art used to be typological. Even today, Dome-nichino is saying, typological substitution is a possible way of thinking about the history of art. He believed the history of art had started over again, recovered its footing on the path to perfection, with the painter and architect Raphael. Domenichino’s aim now is not continuity with the whole past but a certain circling around ideal form.

The basic trend in Europe from now on is away from typology. The desire for artistic freedom outweighs the desire to profit from typology’s antilinear but continuity-creating chronology. The desire for freedom coincided with the disengagement of art from politics. Architecture was slower than painting to extricate itself from typological systems because the meaning of architectural form was less specific and therefore did not interfere so readily with new functions and belief systems. This is exactly what Domenichino was proposing: a survival or “standing over” of the Doric order into the Christian era was less troublesome than the superstitious loyalty of the Swedes to their idols. (In fact, there is one, but only one, church in Rome that used Doric columns from a pagan temple, the fifth-century basilica San Pietro in Vincoli.) Architectural form was carried over the pagan-Christian threshold. Architecture is where the typological mode persists in modernity.

Even the strict classicist Domenichino knew that painting profited from the participation of ideal form in the non-ideal, so entering into an untimely time that evaded history but fell short of eternity. Christian iconography offered many occasions for the modern painter, inside the frame of his own painting, to multiply time frames. The co-presence within a single painting of saints who lived in different time periods was an obvious example of such routine anachronism. The author of a pamphlet on Giovanni Lanfranco’s densely populated painted cupola in Sant’ Andrea della Valle in Rome (1628), Ferrante Carli, had defended the work’s “anachronism”: for painting “fabricates images” and shares in the “fantasmatic power” (virtù fantastica). Painting enjoys the “privilege,” exceeding the power of nature, of “adding” the past to the present. Anachronism, according to Carli, is a “license to take advantage, without blame, of the diversity of times in a single moment.” Anachronism is the symbol of art’s fictional nature. Yet this licence was not a new invention but one of the legacies of medieval and early Renaissance painting that the art of the rivals Lanfranco and Domenichino drew on, so obvious to any Christian—there were plenty of old paintings in the churches—that it went unacknowledged in writing.

The contest between typology and authorial performance is now the dramatic content of art. Contradictions become the matrix of artistic achievement. Artistic beauty engulfs the beauty of bodies.

Typology is of no use to the connoisseur, for whom the difference between original and copy is everything. Giulio Mancini in the Considerazioni tells us to look for the “boldness” (franchezza) of the master’s touch, especially in passages where the artist is more likely to invent than to copy from other paintings, such as hair or eyes. The connoisseur values traces of the artist’s fantasy and decisiveness more highly than the production of verisimilitude. The Dutch philologist Franciscus Junius (1591–1677) wrote a treatise on ancient painting, De pictura veterum (1637; his own English translation appeared in 1638 as The Painting of the Ancients), in which he asserts that those who study art, “discerning a perfect and natural force of grace in the originalls,” “doe most readily discerne originall pictures from the other that are copied,” suggesting the gratuitousness—with respect to typology—of authorial difference.

The reciprocal, self-perpetuating relationship between the production and the commentary of art is the legacy of this period. This was the system that the Chinese had developed and that Europeans were just now beginning to rival in complexity. It is still the system that prevails today in the West and increasingly worldwide. Closed off, art cultivates its untimely quality, and this explains the paradox that Italy in the seventeenth century is one of the strongest periods of painting and one of the weakest periods of art-historical writing. The historiography of art in the seventeenth century was still basically annalistic, and ideality had replaced workmanship as the criterion of inclusion. The only art history that can flourish within such a system is the fable about form.

The circling around the ideal is sustained by formal citations. Alternative art histories disturb this dream from the outside, threatening the citational closure. Everyone closes ranks around the idea of decorous art, as if in conspiracy against indecorous pasts. One might well wonder whether the memory of profane and non-eternal art disturbed the dreams of eternity. Did those dreams not leave negative impressions? Can one learn to read seventeenth-century art this way? The agreement to equate artistic achievement with technical accomplishment (by now a mere condition or necessary foundation) and approximation to the ideal (which by now overlaps with aristocratic codes sustained by the idea of decorum) casts to the margins all other modes of art. Materialist, non-evaluative antiquarian scholarship flourishes, but few paths lead from antiquarianism to the painting workshops of the day, apart from the odd citation of a weapon or costume. Northern art and Italian art are locked into a binary opposition that suits both parties; both the northern realistic and the Italian idealizing modes are valued. Northern art acquiesces in its second-class status. When a northern artist writes at all in this period, he inevitably succumbs to the authority of the Italian mode, deferentially writing himself out.

The most brilliant figure of the artistic culture of the Ming period was Dong Qichang (1555–1636), an official, scholar, calligrapher, painter, collector, and art historian. Dong Qichang shaped all subsequent histories of Chinese art by inventing a pair of opposed schools of painting, the Northern and Southern schools, embodying two approaches to the art. These terms are not geographic but conceptual; they are transferred from Zen Buddhism where there is a similar dichotomy of schools of thought. The Northern school comprises the professional painters who favor a rule-guided approach to representation. The Southern school comprises the so-called literati painters, often retired officials, who occupy their leisure with poetry, calligraphy, and a freer, more imaginative style of painting. Quoting the supposed founder of the Southern school, Wang Wei (eighth century, the same painter praised by Zhang Yanyuan), Dong Qichang says “the clouds, peaks, and cliffs should be formed as by the power of Heaven, then, if the brush-work is free and bold, the picture will be penetrated by the creative power of Nature.”

For Dong Qichang, the true artist is not the professional painter, who must earn his bread with his brush, but the gentleman-scholar, often a retired bureaucrat who now views society from a disinterested, ironic, or spiritual distance. The gentleman’s paintings will never appear rule-bound or labored. There is no equivalent to this in Europe. Leonardo da Vinci and Vasari would have liked to elevate painting to the prestige of poetry, but they did not quite succeed. Gentlemen in Europe at this point do not draw or paint, an old prejudice found in Pliny and not challenged until the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when amateur drawing flourished.

Dong Qichang himself, the modern champion of the Southern school, made many copies of old paintings as well as original compositions, mainly landscapes. He imitated the masters of the Song period (tenth to twelfth centuries) as well as even more prestigious models from the Yuan dynasty (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries), who had themselves been imitating still more ancient painters. Shaded Dwellings Among Streams and Mountains is a hanging scroll, a landscape in ink on paper, imitating a composition by the tenth-century Southern-school master Dong Yuan, himself an imitator of Wang Wei. The humped hillocks at the base, modeled with so-called hemp-fiber strokes, support ramifying trees. The rocks and the trees climb to the sky, engulfing the houses. Dong Qichang’s style in this late phase of his career has been described as abstract, additive, and allusive. The inscription in six columns, in his own hand, reports that the artist saw the painting by Dong Yuan “at the eunuch Zhu’s palace in the Imperial Academy. I made a sketch copy and kept it in my satchel, and have just now completed [the painting]. It shows quite some resemblance.” Shall we call it a copy, a pastiche, an homage? This is the rough equivalent of Domenichino imitating Raphael, who was studying Roman statuary, itself based on Greek models: a cascade of imitable classicisms.

Dong Qichang’s landscapes are unintelligible outside their web of citations and borrowings. “Someone has said that each one must form his own school, but that is not right. Thus for example, the willow trees should be made after Chao-Po-chü, the pine-trees after Ma-Ho-chih and the old trees after Li-Ch’eng.” His own paintings describe mountains with flat, ribbon-like bands, self-evidently conventional. They are only meaningful if you realize that they are pictures of a style, pastiches. They are markers of stylishness as such. The ability to imitate styles is the most refined personal style. Everything is in the difference: “Those who study the old masters and do not introduce some changes are as if closed in by a fence. If one imitates the models too closely one is often still further removed from them.” The comparison with the Mannerism of sixteenth-century Europe, keyed to Raphael and Michelangelo and yet valuing idiosyncrasy, is obvious.

Dong Qichang the theorist is as original, and at the same time as dependent on his predecessors, as Dong Qichang the painter. Throughout the overlapping corpus of Chinese art history and art theory, the exhortation to imitate the old masters is accompanied by a discourse of immediacy: good painting, fresh and spontaneous, grasps the “spirit of things.” The painter who seeks to put “life-breath and movement” in his works must wait for inspiration.

Quoting the sixteenth-century painter Mo Shih-lung, Dong Qichang says, “Painters of the past usually took the old masters as their models, but it is preferable to take Heaven and Earth as teachers. One should observe every morning the changing effects of the clouds, break off the practising after painted mountains and go out for a stroll among real mountains.” But in the end Dong Qichang trusts the old pictures. “If one discusses painting with a view to its faculty to render distance, one must admit that it does not equal real landscape, but if one considers the wonders of brushwork, it becomes evident that real landscapes do not equal paintings.”

Good copying, paradoxically, channels spirit. Dong Qichang, again quoting Mo Shih-lung, writes about the rebirth of the style of the ancient calligrapher Wang Xizhi in the Tang period. The more modern painters altered his manner, and yet the old and the new styles are alike. “These works may be difficult to understand, because close copying is quite easy but to transmit the spirit and meaning is difficult.”

Just as in Europe in this period, the retrospective gaze is not necessarily primitivist. It is true that some Song and Ming artists cultivated rustic or grotesque styles they found among the archaic painters. But others saw in antiquity simplicity, spontaneity, and a generative power unknown to moderns. “Who can abandon the old forms and create new ones quite independently?” It is as if all painters were still alive, an apprentice-master system spread out over centuries. Only an artist can speak this way.

Such cryptic comments must be read in the context of the canonical Six Principles of painting, formulated in the late fifth century by Xie He, which call for fidelity to nature; spirit and vitality; and the copying of models.

Dong Qichang also wrote art history, assessing priority in the development of techniques. “The painting of cloudy mountains,” he asserts, “did not begin with Mi Fei: such things were done already in the T’ang period by Wang Hsia who used the p’o mo manner.”

Not every critic of the day was in tune with this. Hsie Chao-chih, scholar and official, not a painter but a generalist, in his Five Jars of Potpourri (c. 1607) disparaged modern painters who “amuse themselves with brush and ink” but would do well to study the old masters (though not the Six Principles, none of which “touches upon the secret of painting” and are only good for painting portraits, flowers, and birds). Hsie Chao-chih says, “We often laugh when eunuchs and women ask on seeing a picture, ‘What story is it about?’ ” But they are right to ask, for the old paintings all told stories, whereas “modern painters concentrate on mood and flavour.” “As for pictures of the gods and spirits, Buddhas and hell, hardly one percent of the pictures deal with them.”

These would seem elite concerns, but in China there is also an opening to a wider public. Painting manuals since the Yuan period already included woodcut images. A publication of 1603, Master Gu’s Pictorial Album, reproduced 106 woodcuts of works attributed to notable artists beginning with Gu Kaizhi (fourth century) and stretching to the present, including Dong Qichang. This was the first collection of independent printed reproductions of old art works. The compiler of the album is a certain Gu Bing, otherwise little known. He includes copies of the traditional lives of the painters, still basically encomia. It is not clear that all the reproduced paintings actually existed. Very little pre-Song painting had survived to the Ming period, as Dong Qichang himself conceded. Gu Bing may have invented the pictures, lending them what he saw as appropriate styles.

There is a tension in every advanced painting tradition between the ineffable qualities that cannot be learned (the reproduction of life, the grasp of the spirit of things) and the economical principle of imitation of the best masters, who in principle had already worked out how best to do this. The question is: does imitation of nature by way of someone else’s rendering of it inevitably fall into falsehood? The same question imposes itself in Europe. Such impasses are not resolved, or even thought of as impasses, until a technological breakthrough reorganizes the canon or encourages a bypassing of the old masters altogether: modeling, light, perspective, photography, film. These technologies give art history a convergent shape. Until then, it is back and forth between nature and tradition.

Dong Qichang’s works were soon copied and forged. It has been estimated that only 10 percent of works attributed to him are really his. But in China, where the frontiers between copy, imitation, and forgery were constantly shifting, such ambiguities were not new. Through these replicas Dong Qichang exerted a great influence. Four of six volumes of a calligraphic album published in 1747, San xi tang fa tie, will be devoted to works by the Ming master.

Parallels may be drawn between the scholarly and critical culture around Dong Qichang and conversations and writings in Italy, especially in Rome and in the circle of the Carracci in Bologna. The content of the art of the Carracci is art. How does Europe achieve this, given that many paintings are still destined for altarpieces and so contribute to active liturgical rituals? and that art in Europe—no longer in China at this point, except as a topos in the writings—is still understood by some as a form of knowledge? For form to become content, iconography needs to be neutralized. As in China, landscape is best for this, a field for the imagination created by the evacuation of subject matter. But the landscape tradition starts slowly and late in Europe.

Franciscus Junius’s treatise on ancient painting was not really a history of art, for so little ancient painting had survived, but rather a history of ancient ideas about art, based on texts. As in the Chinese tradition, it is easier to defend archaic simplicity when the old paintings do not actually exist. Franciscus Junius provided much information on ancient image-cults. Junius, a philologist, nevertheless had a clear sense of what art was. He suggests that the most sophisticated art is the art that feigns simplicity, paraphrasing a passage in the preface to Edmund Spenser’s Shephearde’s Calendar (1579) by “E. K.” (who is possibly Spenser himself): “The most curious spectators find themselves singularly delighted with such a disorderly order of a counterfeited rudeness.” This is a pastoral fable of art. “Picture therefore must follow a bold and carelesse way of art, or it must at least make a show of carelesnesse in many things. Philostratus propoundeth unto us a lively example of this same secure and unlaboured Facilitie.” Franciscus Junius trusts the “free spirit of the Artificer” before he trusts the “rules of Art.”

Franciscus Junius associates artificial simplicity with the earlier periods of ancient art, before vice had set in:

These Arts being anciently perfited [perfected] by the study and care of many and most consummable artificers, came so low about the times of August, that they were ready to give their last gasp: for in that very time, the vices prevailing, the Art perished; and when the Artificers, leaving the simplicity of the ancients, begane to spend themselves in garnishing of their works, the art grew stil worse and worse, til it was at last overthrowne by a childishly frivolous affectation of gaynesse.

This is a completely new history of art: decadence sets in already in early imperial times. By an internal logic—not by intervention of barbarians and not by decline in workmanship—art declines into immorality.

The doctrine of an artificial simplicity breaks with the idea that art is a kind of knowledge. The only valuable knowledge is the knowledge required to paint well (perspective, iconography); the rest is an unlearnable flair.

At the very moment when painting in Rome, Bologna, and Venice has found its niche in modern life; when the French were also planning an academy; and when painters are granted knighthoods (Rubens and van Dyck), a blow is struck against the legitimacy of the arts. Empirical science breaks with ancient science and so alters the very understanding of what knowledge is. A new idea of knowledge emerges that will alienate art from knowledge once and for all. Even antiquarianism will no longer count as knowledge, for it is too much driven by random curiosity, an undisciplined quality much valued by Franciscus Junius.

The spokesman for empiricism is Francis Bacon (1561–1626), the statesman and philosopher who urged the readers of his Novum Organon, published in Latin in 1620, to turn away from history, which is variable, and instead focus on nature. This was the second part of Bacon’s unfinished Instauratio Magna (Great Restoration), a sketch of a more thorough “renaissance” or rejuvenation of civilization that is not so tied to the past. “The wisdom of the Greeks,” in Bacon’s view, “was rhetorical and prone to disputation; a genus inimical to the search for truth.” “Anyone who has turned his attention from workshops to libraries and conceived an admiration for the immense variety of books we see around us will surely conceive a stupendous change of mind once he has given the matter and content of the books themselves a careful examination and inspection.” For it is all repetition, thin and impoverished. Bacon’s aim “is to open up a completely different way to the intellect, unknown and untried by the ancients.” Opinions, words, theories, and abstractions are nothing but illusions, idols. We need to start the work of the mind all over again—and this time entrust it to a machine: in other words, to experiment, to a disembodied protocol of observation and recording, for the human sensorium cannot be trusted, nor is imagination the friend of objectivity. For Bacon, observation and experiment were the only ways to elicit knowledge from nature. He called this way the “interpretation of nature.” The opposite approach, a “risky and hasty business,” the forms of reasoning in current use, he derided as “anticipations of nature.”

Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer began their treatise Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) with a long quotation from Bacon. For them, he represented the overconfidence of the Enlightenment project, and the way of error, away from philosophy. But that was exactly Bacon’s point: he believed that philosophy, beginning with the philosophy of the Greeks, had yielded nothing of value. “All the philosophies that men have learned or devised are, in our opinion, so many plays produced and performed which have created false and fictitious worlds”; they are the Idols of the Theater. The mechanical arts, by contrast, founded in nature and experience, “constantly quicken and grow as if filled with spirit … always progressing.” These are the arts Bacon trusts, the ones that solve practical problems.

Do the mechanical arts have a history? In his “Outline of a natural and experimental history,” an essay published in the same volume with the New Organon, Bacon says that “the most useful of the parts of history … is the history of the arts; it shows things in motion, and leads more directly to practice.” He goes on to list 128 possible Histories including “Painting, Sculpture, and the Plastic Arts etc.” “The manipulations of art … reveal the ultimate strivings and struggles of matter. … Therefore we must put aside our arrogance and scorn, and give our full attention to this history, despite the fact that it is a mechanics’ art … illiberal and mean.” The sole purpose of such a history, however, is to reveal more about nature itself, which is eternal and has no history (“truth is not to be sought from the felicity of a particular time,” as he says elsewhere).

For Bacon, such mechanical histories are convergent: at some point people learn how to solve the problems, and then they move onto new problems. The history of art we have been considering up to now, by contrast, is not convergent but emergent. Although Vasari and others wrote as if painting were a technology for capturing nature, the art of painting was in fact continually exceeding nature, generating new and unheard-of forms. Now suddenly there is the possibility that art is not knowledge at all. John Dewey would say it again three centuries later, but the principle is already in Bacon. “A man cannot tell,” he wrote, “whether Apelles or Albert Durer were the more trifler: whereof the one would make a personage by geometrical proportions; the other, by taking the best parts out of divers faces, to make one excellent. … The painter must do it by a kind of felicity … and not by rule.” Moreover there is a danger that “outstanding and admirable works of art, … which seem like the peaks and high points of human endeavour, may stun the intellect, bind it, and cast their own peculiar spell on it so that it becomes incapable of further knowledge.”

Bacon’s lack of respect for the fine arts, for the lessons of the academies, for the passions of the collectors, and for the lucubrations of the theoreticians resonates to this day. The technological mentality cannot grasp what art has to offer other than solace and distraction. Modern art in the West, or art under the conditions of technological modernity in general, accepts Bacon’s partition, agreeing that art opens a view not onto what is, but only at best onto what is not; not yet, perhaps not ever. Modern art history, meanwhile, Baconian at its core, is obliged to carry on delivering knowledge, knowledge about a kind of non-knowledge.