In the second chapter of E. M. Forster’s novel A Room with a View (1908), the upper-middle-class heroine Lucy Honeychurch wanders into a famous church in Florence without her guidebook:
How could she find her way about in Santa Croce? Her first morning was ruined, and she might never be in Florence again. A few minutes ago she had been all high spirits, talking as a woman of culture, and half persuading herself that she was full of originality. Now she entered the church depressed and humiliated, not even able to remember whether it was built by the Franciscans or the Dominicans. Of course, it must be a wonderful building. But how like a barn! And how very cold! Of course, it contained frescoes by Giotto, in the presence of whose tactile values she was capable of feeling what was proper. But who was to tell her which they were? She walked about disdainfully, unwilling to be enthusiastic over monuments of uncertain authorship or date. There was no one even to tell her which, of all the sepulchral slabs that paved the nave and transepts, was the one that was really beautiful, the one that had been most praised by Mr. Ruskin.
Lucy Honeychurch, if we are to trust the modern novelist’s free indirect discourse, which opens a window directly onto her thoughts, is a well-read tourist, for the phrase “tactile values” had only been introduced to writing on early Italian art by Bernard Berenson in 1897. It is less surprising that she frets about John Ruskin, whose Mornings in Florence (1875–1877) had supplemented many a Baedeker and Murray. In that book, in his description of the Bardi Chapel in S. Croce, Ruskin had taken the figure of St. Louis, brazenly invented by the restorer Gaetano Bianchi in 1852, to be a masterpiece by Giotto. In Forster’s novel Lucy visits the Peru-zzi Chapel right next door. Ruskin goes on and on for pages about the St. Louis, the subject Giotto was most likely to take up with the maximum of “care and delight.” He concedes that “your Murray’s guide” tells you the figure may have been restored, but he is undaunted: this is “Giotto in his consummate strength, and nothing lost, in form, of the complete design.” Raimond van Marle as late as 1924 attributed the St. Louis to Giotto: “His round face is not very beautiful but full of individuality.” The extent of Bianchi’s interventions was not revealed until 1937.
Historical scholarship sets traps for itself. To avoid the traps is not necessarily to arrive at art. Scholarship filtered into the guidebooks and guided the tourist’s encounters with the paintings.
Henry Adams, the reluctant tourist of 1860, pondering the forty-foot dynamos in the Great Exposition of 1900 in Paris, sensed with alarm their “moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross.” He saw “only an absolute fiat in electricity as in faith.” Physics was occupied with a “supersensual world” of “chance collisions”—physics was “stark mad in metaphysics.” The pragmatic and human-scaled thinking that had sustained the fond narratives of nineteenth-century historians seemed feckless, disoriented.
In 1904 the philosopher Henri Bergson wrote a memoir of his teacher Félix Ravaisson (1813–1900). Ravaisson had written a thesis on Aristotle’s Metaphysics; in Germany he sought out Schelling. Later he developed a new pedagogy of drawing. He studied archeology and ancient Greek sculpture. Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s writings, Ravaisson believed that art gave access to a real realm of permanent forms hidden behind visible reality. Through Ravaisson, Bergson glimpses a counterfactual world, another modernity in which art history plays a different role, a picture of a different configuration of art, research, and thought. There is limited compatibility between Ravaisson’s and Bergson’s metaphysics and professionalized, matter-of-fact scholarship. Art for the metaphysician either belongs to the deceptive screen, and so can be set aside; or is the portal to the unseen. Only one who already has an idea of what lies behind can even recognize the portal.
The convulsive reaction to the earthbound quality of nineteenth-century thought took many forms. Aby Warburg (1866–1929), whom we glimpsed in Florence among August Schmarsow’s pupils, was the eldest son of a Hamburg banking family. He defied his parents by pursuing art-historical studies, enrolling at the universities of Bonn, Munich, and Strasbourg, where he wrote a dissertation on Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera and Birth of Venus. In 1895 Warburg undertook a journey to the American Southwest in search of the secrets of ritual and gesture. He saw this as time travel, historical distance mapped onto space. The origins of art in traumatic experience became Warburg’s great topic. Later he would write of “the experience of religious ritual as the primal mint for the expressive systems of tragic passions.” In 1898 Warburg settled in Florence, where he pursued his studies of fifteenth-century Florentine art. Here he saw Adolf von Hildebrand, but also Bernard Berenson, whom he did not like. To Berenson he preferred Herbert Horne, an English scholar, like himself walking a non-academic path, who was preparing a magisterial monograph on Botticelli. Horne’s study, published in 1908, is built on archival documents, reproduced in the book as an appendix. He provides much political, social, and literary context and only very few but precise comments on the pictures, evocative assessments of quality and originality. Warburg, too, immersed himself in archives and books, but his relation to art, unlike Horne’s, was not sensuous. Warburg did not collect art and took little interest in the art of his own time. Schmarsow’s thinking on art as an encounter between bodies in space may have convinced him that the nineteenth century had overrated the visual character of art.
Herbert Horne was one of the real-life people after whom Marcel Proust drew his character Charles Swann, a Parisian gentleman who filled his leisure hours writing a monograph on the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Vermeer. Others who inhabit the character of Swann are the mondain Charles Haas, habitué of the studio of Edgar Degas; Théophile Thoré-Bürger; and Charles Ephrussi, a banker, editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts and author of a major study of Albrecht Dürer’s drawings. In the first volume of his In Search of Lost Time, which he began to compose in 1909, Proust compares Charles Swann’s obsessive attempts to reconstruct the mysterious social life of his lover Odette to the passion of the aesthete ransacking the Florentine archives in hopes of penetrating the soul of the Primavera, the central allegorical figure of Botticelli’s painting. With Aby Warburg it was just the opposite. He was not interested either in the soul of the Primavera or in the soul of the artist who imagined her. Instead he was interested in the patrons and scholars who conceived and paid for the picture. He was struck by the power of the figures in the Prima vera with their swirling draperies and tangled tresses—Venus, Spring, Flora, the Graces—to emerge from the past and seize the present. Artist, patron, and modern beholder alike, in Warburg’s account, are at best only coping with the living force of such images.
In 1902 Warburg moved back to Hamburg. He published an essay, entitled “The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie,” about the frescoes in the Sassetti Chapel in Santa Trinita in Florence, painted in the early 1480s by Domenico Ghirlandaio, the teacher of Michelangelo. Warburg focused on a represention of a historical event, the Confirmation of the Franciscan Order by Pope Honorius III in 1223. Ghirlandaio introduced into the scene lifelike portraits of the patron Francesco Sassetti, a banker, together with his family and his own patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Magnificent, as well as Lorenzo’s sons together with their tutor, the poet and scholar Angelo Poliziano, whose works were the basis for the Primavera. These latter personages, vivid and alert, climb a flight of stairs and emerge upon the ceremony that took place a quarter of a millenium earlier. Through archival study Warburg identified and so revived these people.
Warburg saw that the Italian painters’ new ability to render exact likenesses in oil paint, which they had learned from Netherlandish painters, had changed the rules of the game of fifteenth-century art, just as photography had changed the rules of the game of nineteenth-century art. The portraits of the Sassetti and the Medici are direct, unmediated links to the lived experience of fifteenth-century Florentines. By insisting upon the portraits’ domination of the work of art containing them, Warburg dismissed the idea that the calling of art was to improve upon reality. The raw portrait did not want redeeming by the surrounding subject matter, which for Warburg was empty, because already historical in Sassetti’s time. From Warburg’s point of view, Fiedler and Hildebrand, for all their updated terminology, had only been extending the theoretical project of the Renaissance itself, namely idealism, which had supported the invidious comparisons between Italian and Netherlandish art. Warburg does not recognize a distinction between matter and spirit. In general he was uninterested in philosophy, and at university he studied psychology and medicine. For this reason, perhaps, he was not captivated by the tension between freedom and rule; and in the rivalries between the real and the fictive, or the body and the mind, he tended to side with the former terms.
Warburg shared with Jacob Burckhardt and Hippolyte Taine, and by now many others—Robert Browning, George Eliot, John Addington Symonds—a predilection for the Quattrocento. The obsession of the bourgeois northern European with Florence was easily satirized, as for example by Thomas Mann in his short story “Gladius Dei” (1902). Undeterred, Warburg described the poetry and painting of the Quattrocento as an “art of life” (Lebenskunst), an “occasional art” with “the power to draw nourishment from its roots, which rest in the soil of everyday life.” Like Burckhardt, Warburg was partial to the mentalities of the merchant and the potentate, but he was also interested in the emergence of the laboring classes into representability in French tapestries and in popular printed broadsheets, coarse woodcuts that until now had played no role in histories of art. These were the very years when the Milanese scholar Achille Bertarelli began to assemble his vast collection of popular prints, now in the Castello Sforzesco in Milan.
Warburg was impressed by the fervid embrace of religious superstition and astrological determinism not only by the people but also by the elite. Warburg interprets the painted portraits in the Sassetti Chapel as transpositions into two dimensions of an archaic devotional practice, a survival of ancient pagan customs: the placing of wax effigies in sacred spaces to guarantee the connection between the votary in this world and the other world. A wax effigy of Lorenzo de’ Medici, for example, outfitted with real clothes and hair, was mounted in the nearby church of Santissima Annunziata only a few years before Ghirlandaio undertook his painting:
Only a comparison with this ceremonial, legitimate, and long-enduring barbaric custom of displaying the wax figure in the church itself, in fancy dress, defiant and mouldering, allows the portrait-like quality of the historical figures in the fresco in the church to appear in a truer and more favorable light: in comparison to the fetishistic magic of the wax images this attempt to approach the divinity through merely painted images was relatively discreet.
The art of portraiture is sustained not only by sublunary pragmatism and the desire to memorialize but also by a dread of the unknown and a desire to tame hidden forces.
For Warburg, mastery of nature, in life or in paint, was only ever a fantasy. The true source of creativity is the loss of self, in fear and ecstasy. Warburg was prompted by the evolutionary theorist Tito Vignoli, who argued that primitive man reacted to a dimly comprehended environment with the “phobic reflex of cause projection,” a defensive warding off of malevolent forces. Warburg believed that the traumatic experiences of archaic man were imprinted in pictorial symbols, concretizations of “emotionally heightened gestures” (pathetisch gesteigerte Mimik) provoked by loss of composure in self-defense, confusion, ecstasy, inspiration, or anger. The gestures are transferred to the agitation of limbs, drapery, tangled tresses of hair, even foliage, as the projection of emotional states. He called these gestures and displays Pathosformel, or “pathos-formulas.” The most striking examples are the nymphs of the agitated gait and fluttering drapery that reappear in the paintings of Ghirlandaio and Botticelli. These hieroglyphs of strong emotions are passed down from picture to picture through history. The pictures within which the hieroglyphs appeared were only accidental way stations, stopping places. As direct registrations of the past, they dominate any context they appear in. Gestures are not culturally coded, or only minimally so, and beholders do not need keys to read them. Warburg was a close reader of Charles Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), which weighed the innate and learned components of facial expressions and gestures. The pathos-formulas are dense focal points of nonconventional, nonarbitrary signification, like the realistic portraits embedded in the historical frescoes. The pathos-formula has the power to persist through all the corruptions of contingent history, including the history of art. The pathos-formula arrives from antiquity, but not the antiquity that so preoccupied Warburg’s century.
The notion that we are governed by images from a primordial past is a cheerless one, not so far removed from the mentality of the Ferrarese prince who had planetary gods painted on the walls of the ceremonial hall of his palace, including avatars of Indian demons, the subject of Warburg’s article “Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara” (1912). Warburg’s sympathy for the superstitious could not be more remote from the liberal rationalism of Fiedler, Hildebrand, and Riegl.
Warburg, like Fiedler or Wilde, was not satisfied to let art stand alongside life either as an ornament or as a reflecting mirror, the subordinate functions to which modern life had seemed to relegate art. Each of these thinkers instead wanted to let art and life flow into one another. But Warburg’s model is the reverse of Fiedler’s and Wilde’s. They see life as already shaped by the mind. Warburg, by contrast, sees the work of art as already paralyzed by the force of real life, which arrives unbidden in the form of the agitated gesture. The work of art is saturated by life before the mind can even begin to contemplate it. The pathos-formulas were potent long before they ever appeared in paintings. Warburg believes that the mimic gestures or fluttering drapery represented in the paintings would have the same effect on beholders if they were perceived in real life.
Since he was not interested in a stable encounter between beholder and artwork, Warburg did not accord the art of painting any privilege. He had no concept of the work of art as a synoptic unit. He took no interest in describing the relationships between figure and ground or framing devices that might structure painted forms as a composition. For Warburg, the human figure and its immediate accessories—drapery, hair—are the alpha and the omega of the artwork. In his dissertation on Botticelli, Warburg traced the drapery effects in theatrical pageants and in poetry, as much as in the paintings. He adopted the point of view of anthropology, at that time a new discipline or not yet a discipline: namely, that art is continuous with other forms of symbolic behavior.
Warburg downplayed the input of the painter: “If one assumes that the dramas of the time placed those figures physically before the eyes of the artist, as elements of a truly animated life, then the process of artistic shaping seems obvious.” Warburg was uninterested in master-pupil genealogies and in attributions. His art history speaks neither to the academic artist, nor to the anti-academic artist, nor to the aesthete who hopes to commune with the artist. But this does not mean he discounted the past—quite the opposite, for images travelled through artists. Collective memory for Warburg was not a hermeneutic process of choosing to remember only what “interests” or engages us, a process invoked by the nineteenth-century historians Johann Gustav Droysen and Wilhelm Dilthey. History is not a conversation with the past. Instead, in Warburg, memory is carried forward to us, objectively, by the sequence of pathos-formulas. We do not choose our past, it chooses us.
This was not an entirely direful story. The pathos-formulas register danger but they also ward it off, apotropaically. Art creates the psychic distance that gives mankind a chance in its struggles with hostile nature or with the gods.
The historical relativist is the one who adopts an eagle’s-eye view on the past, lofty enough not to need to prefer one epoch to another. Warburg was no such relativist. For him the European Renaissance, Burckhardt’s Renaissance, the fifteenth century, held the keys to the present. He was fully absorbed by the epic of Europe. The “Orient” figured for Warburg only as a mystifying threat to Mediterranean reason, a passive source of fascination, coded as female. The non-Western here is the image of a hidden weakness within the West. America, meanwhile, sheltered the remnants of the archaic societies it destroyed and at the same time promised a telecommunicational future of “instantaneous electric connection” where “mythical and symbolic thinking,” which once formed “spiritual bonds between humanity and the surrounding world, shaping distance into the space required for devotion and reflection,” would no longer be needed.
Warburg refused an academic appointment and instead built his library, installing it in a townhouse in Hamburg and later transforming it into a research center.
Less unnerved by the past’s hold on the present, it would seem, was Warburg’s older contemporary Alois Riegl, who in 1901 published Die spätrömische Kunst-Industrie, nach den Funden in Österreich-Ungarn (The Late Roman Art Industry Based on the Finds in Austria-Hungary). This was the first installment of a research report commissioned by the Austrian state responding to recent archeological discoveries in the eastern parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the lands corresponding to the ancient Roman provinces of Pannonia, Dacia, and Illyria. Riegl was supposed to report on excavated metalwork and jewelry. The first 250 pages of the book, before he arrives at the jewelry, are dedicated to the architecture, sculpture, wall paintings, and mosaics of the Roman empire. All of the book’s twenty-three full-page plates are dedicated to material from the last chapter: buckles, clasps, pendants, and brooches dating from the third to the sixth centuries. The chapter classes the objects not chronologically but by formal modes: perforated or open-work, chip-carving, garnet-settings, enamel, and so forth.
Ornamental and applied arts had been much in view since the mid-nineteenth century. The “art industry” (Kunstindustrie) of the title was not a coinage of Riegl’s but a term generally in use. Gottfried Semper in his treatise Style had used it to refer to jewelry, weapons, weaving, pottery, and household utensils, whether handmade or industrially produced. Riegl’s aim in planting the term in his title was to disorient: there was no surer way to demystify the prestigious art of antiquity than to label it the product of industry.
No one had written an art history that so tightly braided all the arts together into a single narrative. Riegl refused to depreciate the graceless forms of the late imperial and Byzantine period. His account of the mosaics of Ravenna was a final overcoming of Vasari (even if Vasari had praised the worksmanship of the mosaics in his introduction). Riegl’s Viennese contemporary, the painter Gustav Klimt, went to see them in 1903. The late imperial buildings are not treated as a decline from the still-Greek earlier imperial structures. But most significant was his account of the reliefs on the Arch of Constantine in Rome (AD 315). These were the very works that the painter Raphael had chosen, in the letter of c. 1519 attributed to him and (usually) Baldassare Castiglione, and addressed to Pope Leo X, to make a point about the decline of ancient style. Raphael differentiated, on the basis of style, between two sets of reliefs on the arch, one group dating from the Trajanic period (spoils, in effect) and the other from Constantine’s time. Raphael was introducing difference into the image of ancient art, asserting that one period was capable of great art while another no longer is. Riegl notes the same difference, but then points out that each period had its own aims. To judge the Constantinian reliefs on the arch for their non-ideal bodies is to impose criteria from another time and place and to misunderstand the aims of that period. Here Riegl was following his colleague Franz Wickhoff, who in 1895 had published a monograph on the the fourth-century miniatures in the Austrian National Library known as the Vienna Genesis. Wick-hoff detected in the manuscript’s loose, disintegrating treatment of form the origins of modern coloristic, impressionistic painting, from Diego Velázquez to the Impressionists themselves.
Wickhoff and Riegl’s redemption of the early Christian works overturned the standard narrative of European culture set in place by Petrarch, in which the arts declined together with the empire into ruin and confusion. Even in the flush of Romantic enthusiasm for Gothic architecture, and later for Gothic sculptural form, no one had eyes for the art of the earliest Middle Ages or of late antiquity. Jacob Burckhardt, who in his account of the Italian Renaissance downplayed the classical revival, maintained conventional disparaging views about late antique art in his book The Age of Constantine the Great (1853).
Riegl deduced from morphology, or the itineraries of form, an impulse or drive to satisfying form, which he called the Kunstwollen or “art-will.” It suits him not to locate that drive too literally in the psyche of an artist or craftsman. Nor does he anthropomorphize artifacts by endowing them with will. Instead, Kunstwollen is a property of forms that permits the historian to attribute meaning to relations among forms.
Riegl’s basic axiom is that each epoch, each society, each artist seeks satisfaction in form:
All human will is directed toward a satisfactory shaping of man’s relationship to the world, in the most comprehensive sense of this word, within and beyond the individual. The plastic will-to-form (Kunstwollen) regulates man’s relationship to the sensorily perceptible appearance of things. Art expresses the way man wants to see things shaped or colored, just as the poetic Kunstwollen expresses the way man wants to imagine them. Man is not only a passive, sensorily recipient being, but also a desiring, active being who wishes to interpret the world in such a way (varying from one people, region, or epoch to another) that it most clearly and obligingly meets his desires.
In proposing that the mind shapes reality in its own image, Riegl echoes Fiedler. But Riegl’s historical “man” is more acquisitive and self-serving than Fiedler’s aesthete. The Kunstwollen recreates the world as the world it wants.
Riegl’s analytical tools respect no distinction between a brooch and a painting. Each work is a closed system operating with limited variables. Manipulations of the variables generate an infinite range of responses in beholders. From the traces left by the Kunstwollen in form the historian reads worldviews and sensibilities.
For Riegl it was the late Roman metalwork and jewelry that made the crucial break with the ancient Mediterranean conception of art that had persisted in stimulating the “tactile” imagination, both in its imperious and auratic figurative art and in its ornamental art, tied through figuration and symbolism to the natural world. The early medieval artifacts abolished any clear distinction between figure and ground through light and dark contrasts shimmering in a shallow plane. This happened especially in the jewelry of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries.
The new opticality implied a new and modern format: the framed tableau. For Riegl, the tableau is received by the beholder as a layer of light and color hovering perpendicularly in the middle distance. This layer, a dematerialized apparition, proposes a virtual reality and invites the beholder to participate in that reality intellectually. In the “colorism” of these artifacts—their fusing of pattern and ground into a single integrated apparition—he sees the template for the purely optical constitution of the modern work of art. This is the template of the modern Western artwork, the one that Warburg rejected: the framed and stable field, cut off from the world, where figure and ground can forever switch places, ground becoming figure, figure becoming ground; a conceptual space where forms and colors enact a miniature drama for the attentive gaze of the individual beholder. The breakdown of the distinction between figure and ground allows the artifact as a whole to cohere and detach itself from the rest of the world, as if the work itself were now a figure set off against the ground of life. The optical objectivism of the metalwork was the key step in the historical establishment of the autonomy of the artwork.
Riegl smooths out the tangles of Roman history. But Riegl’s relativism is limited. He is always on the side of history’s winners—that is, with the barbarians, against Rome. As is so often the case, shapings of history designed to bring out lost sources of vitality call upon fictions of ethnicity or race as their medium. Riegl also believes that each epoch and each artist is contributing to a vaster story that they themselves are unaware of. Riegl’s formal analyses feed into a narrative of Mediterranean and northern European art history stretching from prehistory to the Baroque, with implications for the art of his own time. The shape of this story is more or less Hegelian, though without the prospect of a metaphysical apotheosis. This is a narrative of the increasing authority of cognition, for the mind profits from the dematerialization, which seems to license a disengagement of art from practical functions. It is also teleological, as Riegl says in Late Roman Art Industry: cultures and peoples that are unable to participate in this history are shunted aside:
Byzantine art, which continued to adhere to the ancient notion of the closed individual isolated form as the goal of all plastic arts, thereby excluded itself from that future and so from the second half of the middle ages lost all significance within the progress of the European art development.
No one is free; we are not even free to react to the environment. Only the art historian can see the overall pattern, from his vantage point at the end of history, that is, after the proliferation of historical citations in the nineteenth century had dismembered the history of art.
The art academies had offered a story of art as the conquest, loss, and finally reconquest of nature through the mastery of illusionistic technology, improved by a grasp of ideal beauty. Romanticism replaced this with the story of art as an acquisition and then loss of wisdom, warning us not to mistake naturalism or technical skill for such wisdom. Historicism proposed that each period expresses its view of the world through its own forms; no art form can be preferred for they are all true registrations of the evolving mind. Materialism, finally, a version of historicism, told the story of art as a series of local responses to conditions, materials, tools, and functions. The immediate purpose of Riegl’s teleology was to counter the crass reductionism of the materialist version. He did this by insinuating that there was something animating the history of form, a ghost in the machine, a will to form that overrode pragmatic needs. There is a tension in Riegl’s art history between the anthropomorphic concept of Kunstwollen, which locates the motor of history in the individual, and the teleological shape of history, the inexorable dematerialization and intellectualization of art, a schema inherited from Hegel and never justified philosophically by Riegl.
For Riegl, all art is naturalistic; it is simply that each epoch sees nature differently. What they see is the true object of art. This transforms art history into a history of seeing, and therefore of thinking. Riegl corrects Hildebrand by identifying—implicitly—impressionistic painting, not relief sculpture, as the task of the present. Dispelling any lingering nostalgia associated with the Romantic embrace of medieval art, Riegl reinstated the progressivism of the ancien régime. Riegl also solved a paradox of academic doctrine, wedded to the ideal: its tendency to summon its own subversion by reality, or by lowly life. Now that the story line is the movement from touch-based art to vision-based art, the future is open-ended, for art can always be further intellectualized without worrying about a surfeit of sublimity or transcendence, just as low subject matter does not threaten to drag art back into the weeds of practical life. Riegl’s dematerialization “saves the appearances”: what appeared to some as technical decline in the Middle Ages, and to others as authenticity, was in fact underground work on the overall project. What appeared to be the pomp and decadence of the Baroque was actually the pursuit of formal disintegration. Instead of a conquest of nature tempered by idealism, which periodically fails and has to be restarted—or the opposite, an apprehension of spirit periodically pulled back to earth by mere creaturely life—we are presented with a steady, unidirectional process without real regression, pauses, or catastrophes.
Riegl was a rationalist, and yet his overall narrative is a fantasy. It was just the combination of the fantastical and the objective in Riegl that appealed to twentieth-century readers. Some of his modern commenders, like Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin, shared his confidence in the meaningfulness of historical evolution. Others, like Henri Maldiney or Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, have not shared that belief in evolution but have been able nonetheless to extract from the dematerialization narrative the principle of art’s underivability from non-artistic material. It is as if the dematerialization narrative—haptic to optic, body to mind—were only one possible picture of art’s historical life and could be replaced by any number of others, or even no picture at all, as long as the basic principle of art’s autonomy was safe.
Riegl redeems the museum and at the same time puts it in its place. The academic discipline of art history sets itself up as a superior discourse that justifies, through historicization, the ideal attentiveness that the museum solicits. Academic art historians since Riegl are apt to consider the museum an atavistic institution attached to a primitive conception of art as possession. As if the museum that hoards ancient gold and garnets were no more than a treasury until the art historian succeeds in explaining why jewelry and oil painting belong under the same roof. The art historian crafts a new, conceptual roof and so crowns the museum.
Riegl’s Dutch Group Portrait appeared in 1902 as a long article in a scholarly journal and was reprinted as a book in 1931. Although focused on one of art history’s fortunate epochs, Holland of the seventeenth century, the book dealt neither with the Biblical narratives of Rembrandt van Rijn nor with Jan Vermeer’s domestic meditations but with a kind of applied art: the group portraits that documented bourgeois society. The paintings were unpromising because they seemed to offer nothing beyond simulacra of men seated at tables in dark rooms, involved in no meaningful action. There seems to be no content beyond the objective transcriptions of physiognomies. Riegl’s series of patient analyses of paintings starts in the fifteenth century and culminates in the great works of Frans Hals and Rembrandt. His terms of analysis are subordination—the imposition of an ordering principle from outside upon the gathered company—and coordination—the composition’s internal self-governing through depiction of the sitters’ awareness of the other sitter’s presences, through body language and glances. The historical life of the men, their social existence, is unmentioned in Riegl’s analyses, because it is all already there in the paintings.
These were militia companies, civic brotherhoods of citizens who gathered to eat and drink and celebrate the national liberty that their forefathers had won in the revolt against the Spanish crown. The portraits were hung in the clubhouses of the companies. The visitor to the quarters of the Companies of St. George or St. Adrian in Haarlem in 1627 saw hovering before him a virtual feast, in life-size. The militia companies were now idle, merely festive institutions. The militiamen reveled in the prosperity of their young nation, commerce-oriented, protodemocratic, and Protestant. They cultivated the arts of peace, poetry, and painting. The portrayed individuals, senses heightened, are relaxed but alert to one another, watching, questioning, enjoying one another. Aesthetic experience itself is figured in the pictures, in the many miniature dramas of mutual attentiveness. The realism endows the portrayed individuals with fictional interiority so that they are able to engage in fictional psychic interactions with each other and with the beholder.
Riegl adds a dimension to the doctrine of pure visibility. He acknowledges a content of art superior to all other contents, more meaningful even than perception, to wit, the possibility of communication with the minds of others. When painting can represent attentiveness and sympathy, then the circuit between beholder and painting is closed. The beholder takes over art history. Art history as a discipline now has a social task: to form these beholders—and not only by exposure to paintings but also by historical study.
The militia company interior space was distinguished from the rest of society as an ideal theater of sympathetic and coordinated intersubjectivity. It became one of the indispensable cells of this balanced and harmonious polity. Seventeenth-century Dutch society for Riegl is corporatist, communitarian, and antihierarchical, an ideal liberal society. The corporatist society sampled in the Dutch group portrait is an unfolding of late medieval northern European urban culture, the cradle in some nineteenth-century political mythologies of modern civic liberty and individualism. The fragile canvases and softly molded oil paints that Riegl describes with such deliberation figure a stable, appealing model for European society, which in Riegl’s time was coasting on a long run of peacetime not unlike the Dutch of Hals’s time.
Liberal, bourgeois society had developed an art of sensations, Impressionism, that folded easily into the realist program and yet with every iteration—so aware was it of its own recent history—resembled more an art of sensations of sensations, ever further removed from a natural, external fact. Impressionism was undercoded, a mode of painting that only gently guided perception—perception of what? of anything: city life, vegetation, the body. Thinking with the Impressionists, Riegl was unafraid of realism or naturalism. Like Warburg, Riegl recognized that the development of realistic portraiture in the second quarter of the fifteenth century had irreversibly altered the history of painting, initiated its long slide or progress toward uselessness. The black-and-white reproductions in Riegl’s text, which only augmented an effect of achromatism that the Dutch portraitists themselves strove for—not to mention the drapers and tailors who clothed the Dutch burghers—made the comparison between the historical group portraits and modern photographic portraiture obvious.
In Riegl’s lifetime European painting was ascending to its high point, an accumulation of adjustments and refinements—the last stretch, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, provoked by photography. Painting was the pursuit of a balance between the claims of the world, processed by perception, and the claims of all the previous paintings to have found that balance. Art history was designed for painting; its self-adjustments were always coupled with the development of new languages to describe painterly form, from Vasari on.
Riegl’s writing raises the question of whether art history as a project can survive the end of painting—or the beginning of painting. The parietal images at the cave of La Mouthe near Les Eyzies, in the Dordogne, were discovered in 1895, beneath layers of paleolithic material that decisively proved the site’s antiquity. Font-de-Gaume and Les Combarelles were discovered in 1901. In 1902 the great antiquity of Altamira itself, which had been discovered in 1879 but doubted, was finally accepted.
But paleolithic painting in the end proved unassimilable to art history. The twenty-three years that it took to establish the authenticity and date of the paintings at Altamira only gave the discipline of art history a kind of reprieve.
Riegl had discussed the origins of art in the opening pages of his book of 1893, Stilfragen, ignoring Altamira. Riegl might well have introduced the paleolithic paintings without upsetting his hypotheses. For the bone carvings and the paintings alike only reinforce his theory that art begins in naturalistic representation of animals, in an apparent attempt to seize directly the principle of life itself, and only later tends toward the representation of plants, toward the establishment of a picture plane, toward ornamentation, toward stylization. Riegl never abandoned this principle: the glint of the brooch, the gleam of the eye of the Dutch burgher. He simply relocates life from animal to artifact to people. Riegl saw that in their vitality the prehistoric images did not support a story of art that begins with technology, function, and ornamentation and only arrives at figuration and imagination much later. For Riegl, the prehistoric images disclosed the “primacy of creative thought.” Altamira and the Aquitaine make it seem as if the subsequent history of art were not so much a learning of plenitude and vitality as an unlearning.
All this was very far from the questions prompted by paintings in Florentine chapels. It is as if art history had undertaken to narrate a history of mural painting stretched too thin.
Wilhelm Worringer (1881–1965) wrote the most successful of all art-historical dissertations, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (1906, published 1908 and still in print today, though translated into English only in 1953). Lacking footnotes, Abstraction and Empathy did not resemble academic scholarship. But it also lacked illustrations. The book was read by scholars and thinkers, including artists, well beyond the field of art history.
The concept of empathy enjoyed great currency in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Empathy was the tendency of the embodied mind to tune itself to the shapes and rhythms of the environment. In the context of aesthetics, empathy was the susceptibility of emotions to the cues of form. Theorists of empathy accepted the Kantian doctrine that the mind makes sense of reality by imposing its own categories on it, but only in part, because empathy theory allowed the body to play a greater role. Use of the word signalled a desire to move away from philosophy and toward psychology, perhaps even to submit aesthetic responses to controlled experimentation. Theories of empathy recovered and updated the aesthetic theory of the eighteenth century with its stress on the senses. Like eighteenth-century aesthetics, empathy theory was non-normative, for each individual will have her or his own empathic relationship to things. The theory of empathy exceeds aesthetics, however, because the mind and body adapt not just to artworks but also to the shapes of things in the world and because a psychology based on empathy need not generate a prescription for art-making. Worringer himself cleaved close to the question of art. He did not trust empathy as a basis for an aesthetics because the history of art, he believed, taught that empathy tended to seek out only satisfying experiences. Empathy, as it was cultivated by art and protected by art-historical scholarship, amounted to a merely comfortable cooperation with the physical world. Worringer, quoting Theodor Lipps, described empathy as “objectified self-delight,” corresponding to naturalism in art. Worringer invoked Riegl constantly and adopted his coinage Kunstwollen. But he tests the implications of Riegl’s premises that the Kunstwollen always seeks satisfaction and that man is pursuing analogies of his own body.
Worringer, like Burckhardt and Warburg, believed that the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie had inherited the participatory relationship to nature achieved by Europeans in the Renaissance. The Renaissance and what Worringer calls its “parallel phenomenon,” antiquity, struck the keynotes for the entire standard narrative of Western art. “Both periods represent the efflorescence of naturalism. But what then is naturalism?” Here Worringer changes the terms of the debate. To define naturalism he will focus not on the product (as did classical art theory) nor on the response (as did the aesthetics of sensibility introduced in the eighteenth century) but rather on the process of creation. This is aesthetics for artists:
The answer is: the approach to the organic and the true to life, but not because the artist wished to represent an object in nature, faithfully and in its corporeality, not because he wished to create the illusion of life itself, but rather because the feeling for the beauty of organic and true-to-life form had been awakened and because the artist wanted to satisfy this feeling, which dominated the absolute artistic volition (Kunstwollen).
Worringer adds that these theses “naturally take no account of content, which is secondary in every artistic representation.” Worringer detects in Renaissance art and all its variants an evasion of the truth in favor of simple satisfaction. Only this ingratiating art, whose culmination is the Naturalism of the nineteenth century, deserves the name “art” and yields to the analyses of aesthetics (Fiedler and Hildebrand would have objected to this argument!): “naturalism alone belongs to the domain of pure art and is therefore accessible to aesthetic evaluation”:
Its psychic precondition … is the process of empathy, whose object nearest to hand is always the familiar and organic; that is, formal processes play out within the artwork which correspond to the natural organic tendencies in human beings and permit him, in his aesthetic perception, to flow without restriction with his inner vital feeling, with his inner need for activity, into the felicitous current of this formal happening.
This art encourages a quasi-pantheistic investment of trust in nature, a pleasure in organic lifelike form, and a confidence in the immanence of meaning in things. Technology is just the extension of empathy. Empathy was Worringer’s code word for the materialism and consumerism of nineteenth-century life.
The paradox is that Worringer sees aesthetics as perfectly matched to Naturalism, and yet he will reject Naturalism. Instead he clears a path to a post-aesthetic art. For the new century Worringer foresaw—but wisely did not attempt to describe—an art of truth. He had pointed out that the theory of empathy cannot explain why some people are drawn to inorganic beauty. He offered an aesthetics founded on a different principle, abstraction. By abstraction Worringer did not mean nonfigurative painting—that had not quite been invented yet—but rather a tendency to flee the terrifying chaos of the natural world and seek refuge in the discipline of style. The art of abstraction is for Worringer a more honest project than Renaissance or naturalist art because it fabricates a stylized alternative to nature instead of vainly attempting to appease nature by mimicking it.
When Worringer states that abstraction is born of a troubled relation to nature, including the fear of space, he is not so far from Warburg. The pathos-formulas are also abstractions, evasions. For Worringer, however, abstraction means not the body in extremis but a turning away from the body entirely. Worringer gives some examples, but the real heart of the book is the chapter on northern European animal ornament. The rhythmic, intertwined bands and lines of early medieval Scandinavian and insular art had been the subject of intense art-historical interest over the previous decade. Riegl had published on the topic. The authors of these forms were Europe’s semi-mythical internal savages, the peoples living in disharmony with nature, clasping to paganism deep into modern times, restlessly seeking an outlet into the absolute. The abstract form, whether crystalline or curved, was detached from accident, temporality, and unclarity. This tendency culminated finally in Gothic. The architecture of the cathedrals, which was liberated from all natural models—it no longer drew its proportions from the human body—was a pure mechanism, like a marionette. Gothic was uncanny. The same struggle to escape expressed itself in the sculptural drapery of the Gothic period. But in the end sculpture turned back to the natural model and so began the episode of falsehood that we call Renaissance.
Modern man, according to Worringer, finds himself again alienated from nature, not by his incapacity but by an excess of capacity, namely by technology. He finds himself in the situation of the primitive. Rationalism has failed; now we again want a stable relationship to things. Abstraction was both the primordial attitude toward nature and the advanced approach that under the conditions of modernity was once again appropriate. Abstraction is both a starting point and a final psychic contrivance.
What kind of art history is this? Worringer handles the past roughly, does not let the past assert itself. This is history written from the point of view of the present.
In Riegl’s model, ancient Mediterranean art sought to isolate objects, to remove them from space. Since the early Middle Ages, European art reinserts those objects into a virtual space, a space shared by (depicted) objects and (depicted) beings. Worringer reverts to the ancient project, isolating objects to bring out their implacable objecthood, reintroducing them to the haptic plane. Worringer will isolate objects from one another to give them their necessity and eternity. Here he speaks the same language that the painter Wassily Kandinsky will. Worringer breaks with Hildebrand and Riegl and their logic of dematerialization, which favors concept over sensation. But if his efforts to escape it are more strenuous, Worringer is still basically defined by the naturalism/idealism binary that had structured all thinking about art in the late nineteenth century.
The avant-gardes of the first two decades of the new century were also shaped by nineteenth-century assumptions, exactly to the degree of vehemence with which they sought to overturn them. This, too, is a “standing over,” a superstition. Art history, the knowledge, the writing, the museums, is inscribed in the avant-garde mentality.
Worringer rewrites but does not overturn the dominant art-historical fable of modernity, the truth of medieval art. In some ways nothing has changed since 1800: the art praised by Vasari and Bellori is still being challenged, as are Winckelmann’s statues. The difference is that the antidote to the false promise of worldly satisfaction is not the sweet sincerity of Dürer’s Madonnas but malign twisting serpents. Wor-ringer rejects pleasure as the basis for the experience of art and instead identifies a higher kind of pleasure, art-pleasure, that involves recognition of pain and loss. This concept was latent in Warburg’s art history, too, and remained latent. Worringer’s teaching casts a shadow over all subsequent art. From this point on affirmation is suspect. The moral of the new fable is no longer the superiority of the rude to the civilized but of the hideous to the beautiful.
Worringer in his sympathy for the barbarians was taking up a theme of Riegl’s. For Riegl, however, barbarianism was ultimately sublimated in liberal democratic society. Out of the chaos of the Middle Ages came new political structures. People organized themselves beyond the reach of central authority, learning the arts of negotiation and democracy. To relativize civilization itself, as Worringer did, was a dangerous game to play.