Page, Canvas, Wall: Visualising the History of Art
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Issue No. 4/2020 Page, Canvas, Wall: Visualising the History of Art Michaela Giebelhausen, PhD, Course Leader, BA Culture, Criticism and Curation, Central St Martins, University of the Arts, London Also published in Susanna Pettersson (ed.), Inspiration – Iconic Works. Ateneum Publications Vol. 132. Helsinki: Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum, 2020, 31–45 In 1909, the Italian poet and founder of the Futurist movement, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti famously declared, ‘[w]e will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind’.1 He compared museums to cemeteries, ‘[i]dentical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies unknown to one another… where one lies forever beside hated or unknown beings’. This comparison of the museum with the cemetery has often been cited as an indication of the Futurists’ radical rejection of traditional institutions. It certainly made these institutions look dead. With habitual hyperbole Marinetti claimed: ‘We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!… Why should we look back […]? Time and Space died yesterday.’ The brutal breathlessness of Futurist thinking rejected all notions of a history of art. This essay considers how the history of art, embodied in art-historical canons, schools, periods, and aesthetic standards, has been conceptualised through writing, the organisation of collections, and the decoration of new museum buildings. It examines some of the moments in which the page, the canvas and the wall offer seminal and selective visualisations of the history of art and deploy notions of time and space that are complex and contradictory, and far from dead. Writing the history of art The history of art began as a history of artists. In 1550 Giorgio Vasari, painter, architect and writer, published his influential Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (Le Vite de’ più eccelenti pittori, scultori, e architettori), which is widely regarded as an important foundational text of art history. Vasari presented the life stories of 250 Italian artists, dating from the late 13th to the late 16th centuries, from Cimabue to Bronzino. His account was biographical and at times anecdotal. He retold the stories of these artists’ lives in roughly chronological order and as a narrative of progress and periods, in which pupils learnt from their masters, and superseded them. In Vasari’s account the tide of knowledge swelled with each generation before it culminated in the work of Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo, which was produced in the twin centres of Florence and Rome during the first half 1 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. ‘Manifesto of Futurism’, in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds.), Art in Theory: 1900–1990. Oxford UK and Cambridge US: Blackwell Publishers, 1992, 145–47. 2 Page, Canvas, Wall: Visualising the History of Art // Michaela Giebelhausen --- FNG Research Issue No. 4/2020. Publisher: Finnish National Gallery, Kaivokatu 2, FI-00100 Helsinki, FINLAND. © All rights reserved by the author and the publisher. Originally published in https://research.fng.fi of the 16th century. This particular point of artistic achievement later historians of art would call the High Renaissance and it remained a benchmark in the teaching of art academies into the second half of the 19th century. In 1568, the second edition of the popular Lives provided illustrations of all of the artists but no illustrations of their works. Wherever possible, these were based on known portraits or self-portraits. Vasari’s written word was thus amplified by the image. The illustrated edition of Vasari’s Lives also continued the tradition of presenting a series of famous men, in existence since Roman times and revived during the Renaissance. Vasari’s Lives not only created a blueprint for the writing of art history it also spawned similar publications using this kind of biographical approach to the artists of different countries, extending the reach well beyond Italy. Karel van Mander’s Schilderboeck (‘The Book of Painters’, 1604) edited and updated Vasari’s Italian canon and added a large section on German and Netherlandish artists. Joachim von Sandrart reworked van Mander’s text in a German publication entitled Teutsche Academie (1675–79), as well as adding original biographies of German-born artists. These and similar publications remained the touchstone of a history of art that centred on the lives of artists. During the 18th century, the history of art entered a new phase. The emphasis on a retelling of the lives of artists shifted to a broader narrative that presented the conditions of artistic production. Luigi Lanzi and Johann Joachim Winckelmann, both art historians and archaeologists, shifted attention from the artist to the work of art. In his book, The History of Italian Art (Storia pittorica della Italia) first published in 1792, Lanzi endeavoured to write the history of Italian art itself rather than of its artists. Lanzi adhered to Vasari’s belief in a developmental history of art, but applied it to recent Italian art and combined it with a broader approach to his subject, drawing on Winckelmann’s ground-breaking explorations of art and antiquity, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture, 1755), and the Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (History of the Art of Antiquity, 1764), in which the work of art, rather than the artist, provided the object of study. Both Lanzi and Winckelmann remained indebted to Vasari’s developmental paradigm while applying it to the artistic production of different historical periods. A visible history of art During the 18th century, approaches to art as a developmental history, which the likes of Vasari, Winckelmann and Lanzi had been promoting, were gradually influencing the display of private and public collections across Europe. Often the redisplay was accompanied by a printed guide or illustrated catalogue. A prime example of this dual strategy of image and text can be found in the Düsseldorf picture gallery that Johann Wilhelm II von der Pfalz, a German prince, built for his famous collection. Completed in 1714, the gallery was sited adjacent to the prince’s residence and was the first European example of an independent art gallery building. As the collection gained increased independence from the palace, there was a shift away from the decorative or political arrangements of its artworks, towards one that was determined by the historical rather than the aesthetic significance of the artworks themselves. From 1763 onwards, the collection was completely rehung according to national schools and the emerging principles of art history. In 1778, the French architect Nicolas de Pigage and the Swiss engraver Christian von Mechel published an impressive catalogue raisonné of the collection. Volume one contained entries giving the standard information we expect to see today: artist’s name, title of work, medium and dimensions. This information was accompanied by a brief description of the work. The second volume contained meticulous engravings by von Mechel, which recorded the gallery’s actual hang, showing each wall and the precise location of each work. 3 Page, Canvas, Wall: Visualising the History of Art // Michaela Giebelhausen --- FNG Research Issue No. 4/2020. Publisher: Finnish National Gallery, Kaivokatu 2, FI-00100 Helsinki, FINLAND. © All rights reserved by the author and the publisher. Originally published in https://research.fng.fi Christian von Mechel, The Electoral Picture Gallery at Düsseldorf: Paintings on One of the Walls in the First Gallery, 1775, engraving, 21.3cm x 25.8cm Wellcome Library, London Photo: Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0 The illustrations and accompanying text thus offered the reader a virtual visit to the gallery.2 In privileging the ensemble over the individual work of art the illustrations draw attention to the gallery walls. Baroque profusion had given way to a less dense hang that recognised the value of individual artworks by allowing space between the works on the walls. The earlier decorative hang, which deliberately combined works from different schools and eras to delight and divert the connoisseurial eye, was rejected in favour of an arrangement that established art-historical connections by bringing the works by artists from the same 2 For a detailed account of the gallery and catalogue, see Thomas Gaehtgens and Louis Marchesano. Display & art history: the Düsseldorf gallery and its catalogue. Los Angeles, Calif.: Getty Research Institute, 2011. 4 Page, Canvas, Wall: Visualising the History of Art // Michaela Giebelhausen --- FNG Research Issue No. 4/2020. Publisher: Finnish National Gallery, Kaivokatu 2, FI-00100 Helsinki, FINLAND. © All rights reserved by the author and the publisher. Originally published in https://research.fng.fi school into close proximity, making it possible to study several works by one artist together. The forms of viewing established at the Düsseldorf picture gallery prioritised the individual artist together with a developmental history of art, and were to become paradigmatic for picture displays. Pigage and von Mechel’s illustrated catalogue, produced in a large print run with the text in French, helped to disseminate knowledge of the gallery’s hang widely across Europe. It also lent permanency to the hang, creating a monument to the collection. Von Mechel’s work in Düsseldorf attracted the attention of the Austrian Emperor Joseph II, who was keen to update the display of his picture gallery at the Belvedere in Vienna. From 1779 to 1781 von Mechel was thus busy reorganising the Imperial picture collections, whose extensive holdings enabled him to realise a hang that was more historically precise than that of other European collections. Von Mechel pitched the Northern against the Southern schools, and established a detailed overview of early German painting, which formed a particularly impressive part of the Imperial collection. In his catalogue of the Imperial collection, von Mechel wrote that he had endeavoured to present a visible history of art.