Fabritius, Goldfinch: a Little Piece of Nothing and the Triumph of Art

Fabritius, Goldfinch: “a little piece of nothing” and the Triumph of Art

Robert Baldwin Associate Professor of Art History Connecticut College [email protected]

This essay was written in March 1025 and revised for writing in September 2015. It has been posted on my web site (below) under the page “Essays by Period”. www.socialhistoryofart.com

Fabritius, Goldfinch: “a little piece of nothing” and the Triumph of Art

Fabritius’s Goldfinch (1654) may be the only painting of a single bird in Renaissance and Baroque art. The rarity of the subject and the lack of any setting or context make it difficult to interpret. Three, unconvincing allegorical explanations have been advanced. One sees the Goldfinch as a conventional reference to Christ’s Passion, based on its frequent appearance in Italian late Medieval and Renaissance art. (According to legend, the head feathers of the European goldfinch were stained red when it tried to remove thorns from Christ’s crown.) Since Fabritius avoided any religious symbolism such as cross-shaped forms or a “divine” light streaming down from above, this Christian reading seems unlikely. Two somewhat less farfetched, allegorical readings were proposed in 1968-69. One connected the chained goldfinch to the Platonic tradition of the caged bird as the soul imprisoned in the body until death. Known in Dutch Baroque emblems, this reading was at least familiar to artists and viewers. Yet nothing in Fabritius’ painting referenced death. The bird was not perched on the skull seen in thousands of Dutch vanitas still lifes and genre scenes. i The other explanation relates the painting to Dutch images of the caged bird as a symbol of female chastity and the “happy” confinement of marriage. Conversely, the empty cage allegorized the loss of chastity. Although more widely known in Dutch Baroque art than the bird as captive soul, this reading suffers the same problem when applied to the Goldfinch. The lack of any nuptial context renders it unlikely. ii Instead of trying to explain every motif in Dutch Baroque art by allegorizing it, we might do better to recognize what was revolutionary to Dutch art: a new focus on ordinary life. Even if Dutch life was frequently allegorized with moral and social issues, every detail need not carry special significance. In this case, I follow the lead of Fabritius scholar, Christopher Brown, who dismissed all symbolic readings of the Goldfinch. As Freud might have observed, sometimes a goldfinch is only a goldfinch. Putting aside overly allegorical readings, two concrete, visually-based approaches help us understand the painting historically even if neither offers any earthshaking insights. The simplest view sees the painting as a record of an ordinary feature of Dutch everyday life – the keeping of pet goldfinches. Pet birds were known since the Middle Ages and appeared in portraits of children and in many Dutch genre scenes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Like the occasional Dutch Baroque portraits of dogs (Potter), genre scenes of sleeping mutts (Dou), dogs licking the faces of owners (Honthorst), and naughty children feeding pet birds to cats (van der Neer, van der Werff), Fabritius’s 2

Goldfinch is probably another painting of a mundane subject with no special meaning beyond an emerging, sentimental, middle class attachment to pets. The other, more visually grounded interpretation focuses on the painting’s conspicuous artistry - in particular, four typical features of Baroque aestheticism - and on the larger relation of aesthetics to reality in later seventeenth-century, Dutch art.

Baroque Trompe l’oeil Illusionism Grounded in Early Renaissance naturalism and perspective, illusionism took on a more self- conscious display in the sixteenth and especially seventeenth century when ceiling frescoes dissolved into heavenly visions, figures leapt out from canvases and niches, and painted curtains half covered real paintings. As many observers have noted, Dutch art was full of such illusionism; indeed, it was central to still life as a category. It also appealed to Fabritius who built a perspective box (now lost) and who played with perspective in his View of Delft. Although the Goldfinch can be classified as a trompe l’oeil painting, its visual trickery does not rise above the level of conventional illusionism. The View of Delft is far more interesting with its curved perspective, double vanishing points, sharply foreshortened violin, and signature overshadowed by a courtly lute.

The Baroque Figuring Turning to Look Out The figure turning out to see and respond to the real spectator was ubiquitous in Baroque art. Examples include self-portraits by Van Dyck and Rembrandt, Rembrandt’s etched Diana (1631) and painted Suzannah (1636) and Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring. The turning figure brought art to new life with a theatrical drama while creating a momentary dialogue between the viewer and the image, between reality and art. It also cleverly reversed the viewer’s experience of art by making the real spectator into the object of the painted figure’s gaze.

Baroque Asymmetry From the Middle Ages through the Early Renaissance (1400-1500), symmetry expressed beauty, sanctity, reason, and universal order. After 1500, most High Renaissance painters modified the rigid symmetry of the Early Renaissance without abandoning a larger balance. It was Baroque artists who first explored a bold and expressive asymmetry, most notably Fabritius’ teacher, Rembrandt, as seen in his early Supper at Emmaus (Louvre) and Blinding of Samson. The Goldfinch is another example of Baroque asymmetry, though not particularly noteworthy.

Baroque Painterly Brushwork and Colorism Seen at a distance, Fabritius’s Goldfinch works as another Baroque, trompe l’oeil painting. Seen up close, verisimilitude yields to the painterly abstraction and textured brushwork seen elsewhere in Baroque art. Fabritius learned painterly handling from his teacher, Rembrandt, but it was also striking in Hals, Vermeer, Van Dyck, and Velasquez. (As an example of virtuoso brushwork, the Goldfinch is less exciting than Fabritius’ Rotterdam Self-Portrait or the works of Vermeer.)

Ars longa, vita brevis est: Fabritius’ Goldfinch as the Triumph of Art over Nature The juxtaposition of high artistry and lowly subject matter in the Goldfinch also suggests the growing aesthetic self-consciousness of later, seventeenth-century Dutch painting. After all, little finches come and go by the millions, unnoticed, unnamed, and unremembered. This little bird is frail, delicate and 3 short-lived yet saved from the ravages of time and made precious by the artist. Prominently signed and dated directly below the bird, the painting quietly asserts its own, higher accomplishment as art over nature, as human civilization over irrational animal, as individual accomplishment over nameless beast. Even as Fabritius’s art elevates this insignificant creature beyond death and Vanitas, his painting also gives it a certain poignancy as it gazes out alertly, making us the object of its own, visual scrutiny. Chained to its perch, the bird turns to engage the viewer as if to remind us of our own earthbound limitations, frailty, and impermanence, and our own hope for transcendence.

The Later Impact of Dutch Baroque Art: from Realism to “Art for Art’s Sake” Thanks to the example of Dutch Baroque art, ordinary subjects spread widely through eighteenth and nineteenth-century European scenes of everyday life, landscape, pastoral and child portraits, and still- life (especially game pieces). With its focus on modern existence, the mid-nineteenth-century Realist movement drew deeply on seventeenth-century Dutch art. Despite this later impact, Europe completely forgot about Fabritius and Vermeer until the 1860s when they were rediscovered by the French Realist critic, Thoré-Burger. On the one hand, he admired their mundane, “insignificant” subjects. Receiving the Goldfinch as a gift from a collector, he praised it as “a little piece of nothing” (un petit piece de rien). Yet Thoré-Burger also extolled the subtle artistry of both painters. In the optics of the late nineteenth- century aesthetic of “art for art’s sake,” these painters emerged to a new prominence after 1870. And the greatest of them – Vermeer – became the poster child for a modern aestheticism where artistic subtlety and expression gradually triumphed over everything else. Ultimately derived from High Renaissance and Baroque court art but separated from class by seventeenth-century Dutch artists, and even more, by the Romantics, this aestheticism lived on as a core element in twentieth-century modernism. i Could the goldfinch’s food box and shadow symbolize the tomb and the shadow of death? Yes, but only in a world of interpretation where the need to discover high meaning trumps plausibility and common sense. ii It seems bending over backwards tro interpret the gold-colored chain attached to the goldfinch as a conventional symbol of love and marriage seen in Dutch emblems and in Rembrandt’s Jewish Bride and Family Group.