A History of Art History

1650–1700

A century after Vasari’s first edition: the moment for a new draft of the history of art. The modern exponents of the perfect manner, the masters of the early sixteenth century, remained fixed, like the constellations in the sky: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael, but also Andrea del Sarto, Correggio, Pontormo, Bronzino, Parmigianino, and Titian. No academicians had any interest in displacing these paragons. But how did all the artists since measure up? What is the shape of a normative history?

A new entity challenged the Italian monopoly on judgment: the French Academy, an art school established by the crown in 1648. A group of artists led by Charles Le Brun approached the king and asked for protection from the restrictions of the guilds. The crown obliged, several years of rivalry with the guilds ensued, and by 1656 the Royal Academy was installed in rooms at the Louvre. Basic training, the mastery of tools, materials, and techniques, still took place in workshops, by the inveterate system of apprenticeship. At the Academy the pupil learned geometry, perspective, and anatomy; heard public discourses analyzing single exemplary paintings; and competed for prizes. To unify taste, the Academy exposed its pupils to only three sample sets of beautiful form: nude male bodies, posed; ancient statuary, mostly mediated by plaster casts, engravings, and drawings; and masterpieces of modern painting and sculpture, many known only through engravings, and no more than a century and a half old. The Academy discouraged idiomatic expression and recognized no national or local art histories, instead framing art as a universal project.

A century and a half after its establishment, because of its association with the aspirations of the monarchy, the French Academy became the symbolic target of all modern artists’ rebellion against authority. Without the French Academy, there would have been no anti-academic momentum and a less disruptive, more piecemeal launch of modernism in art.

The Italian authorities by no means ceded their prerogatives. The most influential shaper of modern discriminations was the Roman academician Gian Pietro Bellori (1613–1696), a sometime painter, secretary of the Accademia di San Luca, antiquarian, and biographer of the recent artists. In Bellori’s picture of modern art history, painting declined after Michelangelo and had to be revived in the seventeenth century. His Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1672), protective of the legacy of antiquity and Raphael, instead of adding to the mountain of data, reduced the canon of modern artists to twelve: Annibale and Agostino Carracci, Domenico Fontana, Federico Barocci, Caravaggio, Pieter Paul Rubens, Antony van Dyck, François Duquesnoy, Domenichino, Giovanni Lanfranco, Alessandro Algardi, and Nicolas Poussin, all dead by that time.

Bellori’s idealism is simplistic: he says that nature as we find it is imperfect and must be emended by the upward-oriented mind of the artist. The artist should be guided by the best models of antiquity, though not too closely. Bellori’s doctrine of nature purified by mind is formulated against two negative examples developed throughout the sixteenth century: the mode of formal dissonance that we now call Mannerism and the realism associated with northern European and some northern Italian painting. Bellori counsels against both errors. His normative, nonevolutionary model of art is imposed upon a real history. Bellori counsels a forgetting: he is anti-art historical. Bellori does not perceive the rhythm of history that Wölfflin would two centuries later, the movement of the classic to the Baroque, from harmony to dissonance. He sees instead a recovery of harmony.

Academic norms shaped the so-called secondhand art market, the buying and selling of artworks beyond their initial commission. The basic reflex had always been to buy the latest thing. Interest in older painters was still new and not widespread. In the sixteenth century only in Florence with its intense focus on local history was there any market at all for dead painters. The market for works by all but a few fifteenth-century artists was soft. The value of a painting by Botticelli was about 10 percent of the value of a Raphael; Perugino, however, fetched 30 percent of the price of his famous pupil (Rubens owned a painting by Perugino). As time went on the supply of pictures by approved modern painters increased, whereas the tally of approved dead painters, although also increasing, was increasing more slowly. By the late seventeenth century, however, the highest prices for dead painters were higher than the highest prices for living painters, at least in Italy. In France and the Netherlands, where taste was less sophisticated, the highest prices were still fetched by works bought directly from the artist.

Art-historical knowledge was transferred from expert to amateur then as it is now, by tours and guidebooks. The wealthy came to Italy to learn and to buy. The concierge of the Palazzo Barberini, weary of repeating his explanation of the iconography of the ceiling frescoes by Pietro da Cortona, published a pamphlet in 1640. One Pietro Rossini set up shop in Rome as a professional cicerone or tour guide for noblemen, especially Germans and Austrians. In 1693 he published his descriptions of the collections and interior decoration of the great palaces. There was much debate about how much value to place on fine copies of celebrated paintings. There were plenty of forgeries on the market, and well-intentioned copies that became forgeries when dealers offered them as originals. Many travelers hesitated to plunge into this overheated market, preferring instead to buy landscapes or scenes of everyday life by living, nonfamous painters. The painters of such paintings had little chance of being written into the annals of art history, or so it seemed then. If more European gentlemen had been themselves painters, as was the case in China, they would not have been so diffident.

Reality was not disparaged by antiquarianism, or the study of the material remains of antiquity. Antiquarianism, unlike painting, was often pursued by gentlemen or clerics. Local antiquarians made neat and careful drawings after reliquaries or chalices found in church treasuries. The antiquarians were also prone to error, however, for the mosaic of knowledge was still too incomplete and access to books, or already-acquired knowledge, still too inconsistent. The notes of the architect Inigo Jones, for example, were edited and published posthumously as The Most Notable Antiquity of Great Britain, vulgarly called Stone-Heng on Salisbury Plain (1655). Here Jones made the mistake of trying to fit the monument into a philologically based history of art, the version of ancient art extracted from texts, the very one that Vasari and everyone else was so dependent on and that was only now slowly being adjusted on the basis of archeological findings. Jones construed Stonehenge as a kind of British Doric, an archaic building mode installed by the Romans, so misdating the monument by three thousand years. The research method of John Aubrey was unsystematic in the extreme, dependent on hearsay and the judgment of others. In his manuscript Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme (c. 1688–1691), for example, in the section on stained-glass windows, Aubrey writes: “Sir William Dugdale told me, he finds that the art of painting in Glasse, came first into England in King John’s time.” The Swedish antiquarian Olof Rudbeck, meanwhile, entered into the question of the antiquity of Gamla Uppsala, the site of the cult practices described by Adam von Bremen in the eleventh century. A German scholar had recently contested the traditional identification of Gamla Uppsala with Adam’s pagan temple. Rudbeck made his contributions to that debate but then launched his own campaign to prove, in his four-volume treatise Atlantica sive Manheim (1679–1702), that Uppsala was the legendary city of Atlantis mentioned by Plato.

Lacking any method, the antiquarians’ approach was opposed to both the idealists and to the empiricists. Guided by curiosity and passion, the antiquarians compiled, labeled, described, compared. For Bacon, the scholar’s sensibility could only interfere with the accumulation of knowledge: “Our method of discovery in the sciences is designed not to leave much to the sharpness and strength of the individual talent; it more or less equalizes talents and intellects.” For their blunders, however, the antiquarian scholars should not be dismissed but cherished. The lesson of antiquarianism is, contra Bacon, that imaginative musing and brooding were not incompatible with scholarship. The practice of scholarship—the gathering and sifting of data or facts, the submission of the material to the structures of language, the craft of publication—is private, introverted, pleasurable. The antiquarians often seem to lack a sense for beauty, and yet in their obsessiveness and fantastical imagination they duplicate aspects of the artist’s creativity. Thus was the incompleteness of the academic understanding of art made good in the private sphere.

The curiosi of the mid- and later seventeenth century were eccentric also in the geographical sense, setting their sights on the remotest targets. The collection of Egyptian artifacts, scientific instruments, and ethnographic material of Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), polymathic compiler and exegete, filled a 300-foot-long hall in the Collegio Romano. Among the thirty-five volumes of Kircher’s writings, it was the studies of the ancient Egyptian language and religion that had the most lasting value. But Kircher himself took no interest in art. The antiquarian Filippo Buonarroti, however, the great-grandnephew of Michelangelo, in his publication Osservazioni istoriche sopra alcuni medagli antichi (1698), devised an ingenious apology for the supposedly coarse sculptures of the Egyptians: he says they must have been imitating, out of piety, the even greater coarseness of their revered predecessors.

A theater of antiquarian knowledge was the Kunstkammer, or artcabinet, the antiquarian’s storage and display device, a spatial assemblage of the products of nature and art. Kaleidoscopes of familiar and unfamiliar forms, the Kunstkammer or Wunderkammer (cabinet or chamber of marvels) were counteracademies, where the gentleman-scholar reasserted himself against the professional artists and judges. The Kunst- und Wunderkammer contained gems, coins, clocks, astronomical instruments, bronze statuettes, bits of coral or amber, animal specimens, dried flora, fossils, skeletons, paintings of freaks; scientific instruments, mechanical devices, automata; objets d’art, works of artifice: goldsmith’s art, clocks; works of glass, miniature carvings; paintings, prints, drawings; furniture; relics and prodigies; mummified crocodiles and stuffed birds, dried scorpions and fish; turtle shells; fossils; arrowheads; dried ears of maize, coconuts, and jewelry from the New World. Some collections filled only a shelf or two, others filled rooms. The largest became famous through published inventories and engraved illustrations: the collections of the Danish physician Ole Wurm, for example, or the Milanese Manfredo Settala. None of these collections has survived intact, although the collection of Emperor Rudolf II now at Schloss Ambras near Innsbruck comes close.

Both the Academy and its opposite, the antiquarian Kunst- und Wunderkammer, supported an idea of art located outside of history. The criteria of selection of the Wunderkammer were rarity, unfamiliarity, divergence from pattern and from local custom; fine workmanship; brilliant color. The Kunst- und Wunderkammer staged the uncheckable flow of imagination, nature’s and mankind’s. Works of art and marvels of nature, old objects and recent, were housed under the same ceiling. All objects in the collection possessed qualities of ingenuity, beauty, or mystery. No one was collecting old farm tools, no one salvaged old religious paintings just because they were old. Some collectors had a physicalist bias, others were drawn to magic, that is, the possibility of connecting to the invisible forces behind experienced reality through the manipulation of objects and formulas or divination of forms. But most Kunst kammer were guided by no concept at all. The Kunstkammer is in the present tense. In these rooms one could not perceive the arc of history, as one did in the mythic accounts of Vasari and Bellori.

A neutral machine, unprejudiced and lacking a theory of itself, the Kunstkammer was a portal for the extra-European, one of the few in this period of European self-absorption. The academic art system was obviously not receptive to unfamiliar forms. Information and artifacts were arriving every month from distant coasts, but few beyond Athanasius Kircher knew how to read them. The Kunstkammer ingested these objects greedily.

In the 1640s the Dutch ousted the Portuguese from the west coast of Africa and set up a trade. The Dutch merchants were often frustrated by the local people’s unwillingness to do business, even to agree on what was valuable. The people seemed to have little regard for gold, the Dutch complained, but were instead attached to worthless trinkets, which they wore about their bodies. Many travelers’ accounts reported that Africans touched and spoke to such objects. Europeans could or would not understand these practices. Some spoke of the African objects as “toys” and as “idols.” But neither term fit. Unlike an idol, the African objects did not represent anything. The concept of the idol, derived from Biblical and Greek religious discourses, involved a spectatorial distance that was adaptable to modern concepts of art. Here there was no such distance. Out of the interaction between Europeans and Africans, a completely new term emerged, the “fetish,” a word derived from a Portuguese word, feticao or feitiço, itself derived from the Latin factitius, meaning “manufactured.” With this word the Europeans tried to capture the somatic, familiar relation between person and artifact that they found in Africa. Whether the concept of the fetish as it emerges in these writings described real practices of the people living on that coast cannot be known. The term was prompted by an interaction between peoples and has no significance outside the discourses that managed that interaction. The term can be directed back upon the ones who introduced it and so may also help us interpret the relationship of the European collectors to their objects. The travelers were trying to describe something that seemed alien but was in fact near. European travelers were able to write of the votive uses of objects in Africa because they knew the collections of votive objects at European shrines. Pilgrims to tomb shrines, grateful for or hopeful of cures and rescues, brought offerings, small objects of value, statuettes, small paintings on panel (the Mexican ex votos interpreted by Anita Brenner in the twentieth century are the descendants of such objects). The offerings accumulated, producing crowded displays attesting to the power of the saint and prompting further gifts. The European votive shrines were vernacular and democratic versions of the Wunderkammer, with the difference that the meaning of the displayed objects was personal, in fact biographical. Like the African artifacts described as fetishes, the Christian votive offerings were linked to specific incidents, perhaps an illness, an accident, or predicament. Both kinds of object were expected to operate practically within local, personalized contexts. There will never be a history of votive objects or a history of fetishes, for too little data survives to permit generalization about their forms and meanings across such spans of time and space. And yet because it originates in experience, each fetish and each ex voto is more securely anchored in historical time than any work of art. The artwork is distinguished from other artifacts by the multiplicity of its origin points both within and beyond historical time.

The fetishistic approach to display was not unknown in the sphere of the fine arts. The new genre of the gallery picture presented the private collection of painted masterpieces as if it were a Wunderkammer, all crammed together and creating an effect of abundance and variety. David Teniers II (1610–1690) was court painter to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, Habsburg governor of the south Netherlands. The painting shows Leopold Wilhelm among his paintings in Brussels. The archduke is in the center, wearing the hat. He also owned ethnographic artifacts and natural specimens, but they are excluded from the painting. This collection is the basis for the Italian holdings of the Kunst historisches Museum in Vienna. For his paintings Leopold Wilhelm built a pavilion—described by Teniers as a pinakothek, from the Greek word for picture gallery—in the garden of his palace. He showed the paintings to guests; they looked at drawings, engravings, and books, as do the figures in this painting; he allowed painters to work there; and he gave the gallery pictures by Teniers (fourteen survive, each different) to friends. In 1660 Teniers published the core of his patron’s collection, an album illustrated with engravings after 243 paintings, all Italian, entitled the Theatrum Pictorum (there was also a Dutch version and many further editions). In all the archduke owned 517 Italian and 880 northern pictures.

The organization of the pictures according to size and not date or subject matter symbolizes the collector’s control over the material. The historical range of the paintings depicted here is little over a century, with nothing older than the Giorgione. It is the equivalent of a collector or scholar today who is intensely engaged with modern art but uninterested in any art prior to Cubism—a perfectly common attitude, by the way. Leopold Wilhelm understood that too much history is suffocating. The problem of evolution that had preoccupied Vasari is disguised here: the gallery picture does not reproduce the history of art, though a well-informed person would be able to read it off from the picture. Art, now that it had arrived, was not going anywhere; it was instead only turning endlessly on itself, commenting on itself, just as this painting depicts a painting that depicts a sculpture, Titian’s portrait of Jacopo Strada (1567/68), the architect, numismatist, and collector, the painting in the top row in Teniers’s work, second from the left. A gallery picture can represent this infinite regress better than a written narrative can.

The picture gallery, governed by conventional academic taste, was not an open system like the Kunstkammer. The whole was not greater than the sum of the parts: most paintings depicted by Teniers were worth more than Teniers’s painting itself. Still, the diminishment, the reframing, and the enforced painting-to-painting sociability suggest a certain ironization of academic idealism. Teniers offers no hypothesis of why paintings in this collection were so valuable, or what idea of art might embrace his own art and that of Titian.

For new accounts of the historical life of form, we will have to read the successors to Vasari, the historians who extended his account, dedicated to academic norms, to be sure, but often resentful of Vasari’s biases. Carlo Cesare Malvasia, an aristocratic scholar and amateur painter and poet, published in 1678 the Felsina pittrice, vite de’ pittori bolognesi, a passionately partisan history of the Bolognese school of painting, which had produced the Carracci, Guido Reni, Domenichino, Guercino, and Francesco Albani. (Felsina was the Etruscan name for Bologna.) Malvasia, mentioning several fine Bolognese frescoes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by way of refuting Vasari’s claims of Tuscan preeminence, quotes him word for word: “You see how these works expose the lies of the author who writes that back then, ‘on account of the infinite flood of evils that had undermined and submerged poor Italy, the art of painting, which was not merely lost but had disappeared altogether, was reborn first in Florence rather than elsewhere.’ ” Malvasia’s resentment of Vasari’s chauvinism, he himself notes, was shared by the Sienese Mancini, the Venetian Ridolfi, and the French historian André Félibien. He commends Félibien for writing about a twelfth-century French manuscript with fine drawings. According to Malvasia, Vasari had no excuse, for “Bologna is neither beyond the Alps nor placed in the Indies, and thus he could easily have observed such ancient paintings here, reported on the artists who signed them, and added the date placed beneath, and in conclusion, with due integrity and sincerity, published all this in his history of painting.” This is the origin of critical historiography: the exposure of the biases and omissions of the predecessors; the imputation of unreliability; the mistrust of the authority of the printed page; in short, the origin of the present book.

Malvasia’s sympathy for the early painters, however, Bolognese or not, was limited. “To tell the truth, the figures of these four artists [of the fourteenth century: an artist known by the initials p.f., Guido da Bologna, Ventura da Bologna, and Orso] have always seemed to me so feeble and dull, not to say stupid and flawed, that I can only wonder that our [Bernardino] Baldi [a local historian] exalts them as much as Vasari celebrates his first compatriots.” Malvasia is insisting not on the absolute merit of the early Bolognese but only on parity with the Florentines. None of them measures up to the noble modern standards:

I will always say that what was first heard coming from the hammers and resounding from the anvils of Tubalcaine was still just a noise, not a concert and harmony. Even the peasant (il villano) argues, and you hear him making inductions and enthymemes with the other dolts on the threshing floor. Does this naturalness, however, seem to you worthy of the name of a consistent logic? Come on! Until the arts show some small degree of excellence, one does not consider their beginning, one pays no regard.

We are not yet ready for a villainous concept of art.

For the painters of the fifteenth century, Lippo di Dalmasio, Marco Zoppo, and others, Malvasia mounts an apology on the grounds of their earnestness and piety. He praises the “most diligent” miniatures of the female religious the Blessed Caterina de’ Vigri, whose depiction of Christ still has the power to heal the sick. But the artists of the fifteenth century were not yet free: “They painted more from necessity than from ambition, for the sake of truth, not for adulation, in the sincere taste of that pure and blessed century, and with the ingeniousness and sometimes excessive affectation of ours.” “One should forgive them for their prudent choice and holy purpose, which today are mistaken for dryness and hardness.” It is precisely bad art that requires historicization; the good art of our own time needs none, it is absolutely and not just relatively good. And yet not quite—for Malvasia’s remark about modern “affectation” will one day become the basis of an apologetic contextualization and historicization of the art of his own time, the late seventeenth century, a period of art little esteemed in our own time.

The most significant extension of Vasari’s Lives was undertaken by Filippo Baldinucci (1625–1697), a Florentine businessman, bookkeeper, and secretary, in his Notizie de’ professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua (three volumes—1681, 1686, 1688—and two posthumous volumes). Baldinucci also found time to publish several pamphlets on art theory. He collected drawings and even drew a little himself. Incensed by Malvasia’s critique of Vasari’s patriotism, Baldinucci defended the styles of the early Florentines, Cimabue and Giotto, so emending Vasari’s insufficiently admiring account. He included more non-Italian artists than any Italian predecessor had. Baldinucci organized his lives by decade, the decade in which the artist first flourished, Italian and northern artists alike—much like the present book. So, for example, Ghiberti and van Eyck both appear in 1400–1410, and Hans Memling and Andrea del Verrocchio in 1450–1460. The decade of 1550–1560 is populated almost exclusively by Netherlandish artists.

Among many other works on a range of topics, the court historian André Félibien (1619–1695) published De l’origine de la peinture (1660) and the Entretiens sur les vies et les ouvrages des plus excellents peintres anciens et modernes (1666–1688), in which he defended the French role in the rebirth of the arts, just as Malvasia had noted. Although on the whole conventional in his tastes, Félibien did draw some fine distinctions among the Italian primitives, remarking about the carved wooden crucifix in San Paolo fuori le mura in Rome, attributed by Vasari to Pietro Cavallini: “The drawing in this work is not very exquisite. There is something rather bold in the disposition of the body: I recall that the head of Christ is turned in a certain proud manner, and the attitude of the whole figure is extraordinary.” This is the crucifix alleged to have spoken to St. Bridget in 1370. Whereas Vasari had made no stylistic comments on the work at all, Félibien discerned in Cimabue, the Florentine predecessor of Giotto, “a perfection somewhat greater than that of those old gothic painters who are noteworthy only by virtue of their antiquity.”

A more likely place than Bologna, Florence, or Paris to find sympathetic attentiveness to the non-ideal was Nuremberg, Albrecht Dürer’s town and the locus of the first German art academy, founded in 1674 or 1675 by Joachim von Sandrart (1606–1688), a German painter who had worked for many years in Italy and the Netherlands. Sandrart absorbed the entire historiographical tradition, from Vasari through van Mander and the later Italians. His monumental publication (in two parts, 1675 and 1679; translated into Latin in 1680–1684) was entitled Teutsche Academie der edlen Bau-, Bild-und Mahlerey-Künste, a printed supplement to or surrogate for an academic course. Between the covers of this book one met with descriptions of famous collections and museums; a treatise on art; a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, following van Mander; and a history of European art, to that point the most comprehensive. Like Baldinucci, he included a history of printmaking. More exceptionally, he added a brief chapter on Chinese art (Sandrart knew Athanasius Kircher). He says that among the barbarians of Asia, the Chinese are the most notable as artists and hold painting in high esteem. But they paint without rules and know nothing of shading, modeling, or perspective and so are at the mercy of their own deceptive eyes. Sandrart reports that he himself owns many samples of Chinese painting and compares them interestingly to the “primitive and inept figures that one finds in the first printed books of two hundred years ago, or in the old tapestries.”

The only part of Sandrart’s opus still read is the lives of the northern artists. Notable is the sheer quantity of painters he discusses, including minor Netherlandish and German artists of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Although he is supposedly an exponent of the ideal style, Sandrart in fact had no prejudice against painters of landscapes or everyday life. He held his exact contemporary Rembrandt in high regard. He is indispensable for his researches into the early German painters, whose memory, apart from Dürer, and despite Sandrart’s best efforts, was about to be extinguished, for a century or more. But for Sandrart’s report, the mysterious figure of Matthias Grünewald may never have reemerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sandrart reports that Grünewald was still remembered and praised but that there were few documents. He had been shown marvelous chalk drawings by the painter Philipp Uffenbach of Frankfurt, who had received them from his teacher Hans Grimmer, who had studied with Grünewald. Sandrart was overwhelmed by Grünewald’s art but had no language for what he saw.

Sandrart reasoned like an art historian. Intent on establishing the priority of the Germans in printmaking, he adduced the oeuvre of Israhel van Meckenem. Sandrart conceded that none of Israhel’s 136 copper engravings is dated, but he believed that Dürer had copied one, and he noted that two drawings in the early seventeenth-century collection of Johann Aegidius Ayrer in Nuremberg, attributable to Israhel, were dated 1490 and 1498.

The demand for drawings had augmented since Dürer’s time. Sandrart admits that he once offered to pay 200 guilders for a single drawing by Hans Holbein the Younger. He himself sold a Dürer drawing to a Dutch collector for 300 guilders, or about a year’s wages of an unskilled worker. Sandrart purchased the grave monument of Dürer, a metal tablet with an inscription by the artist’s great friend Willibald Pirckheimer, and bequeathed it to the Academy of Nuremberg, adding an inscription.

By now the historians of art anticipate readers who wish to consult compilations and lists, to guide their travels or their collecting or their own researches. Karel van Mander had already undertaken to list all the paintings he knew by Dürer, in chronological order (though he only knew a few dates). Decades later, more systematic, Carlo Cesare Malvasia published a list of the engravings, more than 900, by the artists of the Bolognese school from Marcantonio Raimondi to the Carracci. Because it provided dimensions this may be considered the first catalogue raisonné of a corpus of prints.

By the start of the Qing dynasty in 1644, there was a massive accumulated palimpsest of the written record of Chinese painting, layer upon layer of lists and comments. Even specialists find it challenging, today, among the many compilations of source material and painting manuals—above all the Mustard-Seed Garden Manual of Painting, printed in color in 1679, made famous by many later reprints—to sort out historiographical tradition from innovation. Overburdened by patrimony, some painters developed spontaneous, wilder styles. The painter who also expounded in writing the new subjectivity was Shitao Daoji (1642–1707). Shitao studied the older masters, including Dong Qichang. He wrote an abstruse treatise on art, The Sayings of the Monk of the Bitter Cucumber (or Friar Bitter Melon), published in 1728. This a speculative and cosmic theory of art suffused with Taoist teachings and the I Ching. For our purposes it is remarkable for its extreme confidence in the authority of the individual artist. Shitao recommends abandoning the old masters—and all method. Paintings must instead express the essence of life and the artist’s creative spirit. The painter must be immersed in art and detached from worldly cares. In this way he escapes the refined but suffocating historicism of Dong Qichang. Shitao made many cryptic pronouncements: “The most ancient had no method; their state of natural simplicity had not been shattered.” Their method was the “all-inclusive creative painting,” a mode of art that “lies open to the gods but is hidden to men.” The ideas of the painter who grasps this non-methodical method “will be clear and his brush will be bold, whereas poor pictures reveal a lack of spiritual force in the wrist. The movements of the wrist must be freely revolving, they must transmit the richness of the ink and dominate the open spaces.” The value of study of the past is limited: “When the superior man borrows from the old masters, he does it in order to open a new road.” He who imitates does not know himself. “I am always myself and must naturally be present (in my work).” “When one has mastered the union of brush and ink, one can … open up chaos, transmit everything old and new and form a school of one’s own.” No such unequivocal assertion of artistic independence can be found in a European writer, not this early. The vehemence of Shitao’s expressions is the measure of the psychic obstacles he faced, the ennui of historical consciousness. Shitao, already a modernist, gives a premonition of the countervailing forces that a modern art history will have to contend with. The historiography of art in modernity bends into the tenacious headwinds of modern art itself.