On Depiction E-Book

Avigdor Arikha

• Herausgeber: ERIS
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 392

Beschreibung

Avigdor Arikha was one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. He was born in Romania to German-speaking Romanian Jewish parents and spent most of his life in Paris. A talented child, he started drawing early on. During the Second World War, he was deported to a concentration camp in the Ukraine, where he drew the horrors he witnessed. These drawings saved his life. During the 1950s, he established himself in Paris and was enjoying a successful career as an abstract painter. In 1965, a Caravaggio exhibition prompted him to convert to drawing from life. He stopped using colour until 1973, when he started again to paint. He worked with a religious, almost war-like, intensity until his death. Arikha was also an erudite and passionate scholar, endowed with a deep understanding of the history of art and its techniques, well-versed in world history and fascinated by science. He wrote many essays and curated important exhibitions of masters such as Poussin, Velázquez and Ingres. In this collection of essays that he wrote between 1965 and 1994, Arikha expounds on art and artists (Mantegna, Velázquez, Poussin, David, Ingres, Degas, Matisse, and more), technique, seeing, and the state of culture in his day, which, one could argue, is no more hopeful today—almost thirty years later—than it was then. "Throughout his whole development I have never ceased to admire the acuteness of his vision and his faultless insight into the art of the past." —Samuel Beckett

Leseprobe

ERIS

An imprint of Urtext

Unit 6 53 Beacon Road

London SE13 6ED, UK

This updated paperback edition

published by Eris 2019

First English-language edition published in Great Britain

in 1995 by Bellew Publishing Company Ltd

Originally published in French in a

slightly different version as Peinture et Regard,

Éditions Hermann, Paris 1991

© Estate of Avigdor Arikha 2019

Introduction © Michael Peppiatt

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

Printed and bound in Great Britain

The right of Avigdor Arikha to be identified

as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance

with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

ISBN-13: 978-1-912475-17-9

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any

means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,

without prior permission in writing from Urtext Ltd.

Opener page: Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Artist and Connoisseur, c.1565

For Anne

CONTENTS

To Start Again from the Beginning: Michael Peppiatt

Prologue

Notes for a Lecture

Note on Mantegna’s Crucifixion

On Peter Paul Rubens

Velázquez, Pintor Real

On Nicolas Poussin’s Rape of the Sabines and Later Work

On Drawing from Observation

On Red Chalk

On Prints

On David’s Brutus

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

On Two Pastels by Degas

Cézanne: From Tremor to Chequerboard

Bonnard

Matisse’s Jazz and the Beatus Apocalypse of Saint-Sever

Soutine

On Abstraction in Painting

Alberto Giacometti: A Creed of Failure

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Looking at Painting

An Offshore Glance at Painting in Britain

On Light

From Prayer to Painting

Notes

Illustration Credits

About the Authors

To Start Again from the Beginning

Michael Peppiatt

To be simple in life is difficult enough. To be simple in art, without in any sense being naive, requires unusual courage allied to a fine awareness of the ever-present, never resolved complexities of expression. Only children or undeveloped adults are naturally simple. Mature artists may achieve simplicity by an unconditional attempt to give their experience its most direct, essential form. But the attempt involves an important risk: by cutting through preamble or sophisticated disguise, it quickly indicates how much or how little the artist has in him to convey.

This is the revealing and uncomfortable position, it seems to me, that Avigdor Arikha sought. Endowed with an enviable natural facility, he spent much of his artistic career abandoning what he could have easily achieved. The Israeli artist-cum-philosopher-cum-curator could have used his encyclopaedic erudition and gift for synthesis to elaborate the content of his art. Instead, he progressively narrowed it and, by doing so, created some of the sparest figurative canvases in existence. Given the ability to undertake the most ambitious themes, how does one decide to make pictures containing a solitary broom, a section of anatomy, or a piece of bread?

Part of the answer may lie in the artist’s background, marked as it was by extremity and conflict. Born in 1929 in German-speaking Bukovina, Arikha was imprisoned from the age of twelve onwards in a series of Nazi deportation camps. The precociously accomplished sketches he did of the desolate life around him were discovered and—by a miraculous twist of fate—they secured his release via the Red Cross in 1944. Arrangements were made to send him immediately to Israel where he lived in a kibbutz. In late adolescence, he fought and was severely wounded in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. By that time, Arikha had already spent two years at art school in Jerusalem, where the official style was so heavily dominated by Cézanne that the artist ruefully admitted it took him twenty-five years to get it out of his system. From 1949 to 1951 he followed the traditional course at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and although he returned regularly to Israel (of which he said: ‘Every stone in that country speaks to me’), Paris remained his home from 1953 until his death in 2010.

Arikha continued for a while as a figurative painter, moving towards a freer, more personal handling of form than the one prescribed by his art school. As a parallel outlet for his teeming mental energy, he studied philosophy under Jean Wahl at the Sorbonne. The Paris of the mid-1950s reverberated with new styles and attitudes, of which abstraction was by far the most alluring; next to it, figurative art looked compromised and constricting. By 1957, Arikha had embarked on wholly abstract compositions: anguished shoots of colour half-swallowed by a black background, like great fires climbing into the night.

That Arikha became abstract is far less surprising than the fact that, having developed his style and his reputation considerably over the eight years that followed, he found it imperative to change once again. Characteristically for this impassioned student of art—already as learned as many a professional art historian—the volte-face was triggered by an encounter with Caravaggio’s dramatically realistic compositions in a large show at the Louvre in 1965, after which he exclaimed: ‘We have to start again from the beginning . . .’

The return to ‘life’ proved more exacting than the lyrical conversion to abstract art. If he was to ‘start again from the beginning’, Arikha felt he would have to accept certain self-imposed limitations. He decided he was ‘not yet ready for colour’ and restricted himself to black and white. The desire for predetermined limits was also manifest in Arikha’s choice of subject and format. Both were strikingly modest, announcing that the artist’s renewed raid on the real was to be made in small, hesitant steps.

Clearly pronounced, too, was the absence of any hierarchy among his subjects. A pair of collapsing trousers received the same scrupulous notation as a self-portrait. Essentially there was only one subject. Each drawing recorded its own difficult birthing (Arikha’s face would be plagued by nervous tics as he squinted and squinted again, groaning frequently in protest against the difficulties he was encountering), as though squeezed through the artist’s conviction that only by deliberate restriction could valid, new, figurative images be made. The images emerged crisscrossed with doubt, as if in perpetual questioning of their real existence in the bright, blank air of the paper. The fundamental difference between one Arikha drawing and the next lay in the intensity achieved, and so an empty armchair or socks lying strangled on the floor proved as poignant as a portrait.

However humble in pretension and scale, each drawing constituted a work in itself: not a sketch or a study, but a complete statement—in fine yet sumptuously gradated black ink—about a passing moment of precise visual content. The desire for factual precision that Arikha felt at the end of his abstract period meant that thenceforth the artist would never draw or paint without continuous reference to a model (whether inanimate, a member of his family, a friend or a professional). ‘Everything I do is from life’, he liked to emphasize:

That’s the whole basis of my work. I wouldn’t allow myself to do a dot that wasn’t from life. In fact, I consider drawing from memory or imagination a lie—an impossibility. To believe you can record a living instant with the memory of this instant is to me an aberration.

The attitudes and practices that Arikha had developed throughout his chosen ‘exile’ into black and white naturally carried over into oil painting, which he resumed in 1973. A similar range of subjects also prevailed: still lifes (of what was nearest to hand), the immediate landscape (the studio, or what could be seen from the window), and portraits (of friends, the artist himself, his wife Anne, or their children) formed the main reach of his themes. Nothing was imagined, nothing recalled: only what the artist could maintain under his rapid, pale blue eye throughout execution qualified.

Arikha liked to work in short, furious bursts, alternating his activity as a painter with another as art historian and guest curator. Although the impression of balance and completeness seems to belie it, the paintings were usually executed in a single session, without any preliminary study, and then never reworked—if he couldn’t bring something off successfully in a single sitting, he would scrap the result and wait for another occasion. Arikha believed that the only chance he had of capturing the ever-elusive spark of life was by trying to seize it in one go (which, of course, could have lasted five or more hours). This strictly observed convention, and Arikha’s insistence on having his subject always before him, puts one in mind of the unities of time and space in classical drama: it is as if the artist had taken a look round the unstructured proliferation of contemporary art and decided that to have a game worth playing he would have to invent (or re-establish) some rules.

Arikha’s theory and technique of painting were deeply anchored in tradition. His parallel career as art historian allowed him not only to compare attitude and method with all the major periods of Western art, but also made him aware to the point of anguish of everything that had already been achieved in painting. ‘There’s an element of entropy in culture that gradually reduces what’s credible in art,’ he would say,

And when what’s credible shrinks, what’s expressible shrinks too. But since the need to express stays constant, we continue to try . . . It’s impossible, of course, to capture the totality of an image. But if you feel intensely about what you have in front of you and attempt to follow what you see truly, you may produce a suspended trace of life, a series of seismic marks of your feeling.

When he expounded his theories (which were as complex as his art is apparently simple), Arikha could not stand still. In the studio near Montparnasse, which he drew and painted with such fidelity, the artist would step back to deliver a well-prepared definition, then dart forward to peer and squint at a recent oil on the easel, then hurry off to the adjoining study to check a reference from the rows of highly specialized tomes or pads with unflagging enthusiasm, then up to the split-level platform which he used for storage in search this time of a portfolio of drawings. In all the provocative intelligence and undoubtedly contagious excitement that emanated from this wirily energetic man, one sensed a compulsion to persuade, convince, even convert.

Painting had to be learned. Now it’s been unlearned . . . though I get the impression that the new generation is interested in learning again. Art is not simply a question of feeling, obviously. Take colour: colour is also a question of intelligence. You have to think how you are going to achieve the right pitch, the precise tone. A picture, after all, has to be both a painting and the truth, without falling into the trap of illusionism . . . I myself want to reunite with tradition but not, naturally, without taking modernism into account. I could not paint the way I do—with these planes . . .

He once said, pointing to a still life in which a knife, some cheese, and bread appeared pressed almost vertically to the picture surface, continuing,

. . . if Mondrian hadn’t come before. Just as Mondrian could not have painted the way he did without Vermeer. By the way, have you noticed how Mondrian helps one to see Vermeer?

Arikha’s personal experience of changing radically from one style to another, together with his historical connoisseurship, gave him a special awareness of the dilemma of contemporary art. The fundamental question (largely shelved during the abstract period) about what else was left for painting to say, and about what areas had still been left to explore, Arikha answered in much the same way that his friend Samuel Beckett answered it for literature: the task is to reduce, to limit oneself to the barest elements of the knowable, record them with humbled passion, and from there—maybe—move out with a renewed eye towards a wider vision of the universe.

PROLOGUE

Painters are meant to paint, not to write. And yet almost all did—on technique or theory, via diaries or letters. Although it is not by words that a pictorial difficulty can be overcome. Nor can words supplant or even explain the visual sensing of line, form and colour in interaction. Is this attraction to writing due to the fact that painting is mute, often mis-seen, in need of words to shield it? I haven’t been able to resist the temptation, going even against my grain as a painter, often studying and writing on artists for whom I had more esteem than with whom I had an affinity, and nothing on Piero or Vermeer, Chardin or the early Menzel. Engulfed in the study of the Classical Ideal, I soon realized that the need for moderation and proportion, on one hand, and the romantic call of vertigo, on the other, are two facets of one and the same drive; that idealism is deeply rooted in the Western world’s subliminal notion of art, and some of its components were, and still are, responsible for totalitarianism—not only political, but aesthetic as well. In the end, everything hinges on a hair.

The history of art is a history of exceptions, and cannot be reduced to a history of tendencies, of schools, of ‘isms’, or explained by social causes. Such an approach stems from mis-seeing and this is the menace to art today.

Paris, January 1990

A.A.

Notes for a Lecture1

Each generation of young artists seems to stand in front of a closed gate—everything seems already to have been said. Moreover, each new generation of artists seems to have its peephole and its dustbin. The latter defines the former: what’s elected for admiration is seen by what’s thrown away. The totality of art is never perceptible without partiality. The sequences up for admiration are often alien to subjective taste, but attractive as being exotic or new. Vacillating and uncertain subjective taste then gives way to acquired taste, which emanates from the collective style, a sort of aggregate, expressing the urge for the new. This urge for the new seems to be prompted by its inherent endemic erosion. It tends to set in as soon as a mystery is clarified and loses its charm, having become self-evident. Banal. This is the way the most subjective expressions fuse with reality. And that’s how reality is unknowingly, but not simultaneously, perceived through art.

There seems to be a parallel between solving a scientific problem and an artistic one: in both cases the creative moment is the initial state, that of solving a problem, but not the repeated demonstration of its solution. Whence the short periods of ‘singing’ or intense creativity, and the reason for decay in style, and rupture in collective styles.

The span of collective styles, within which individuals expressed themselves throughout the ages, varied between thousands of years, in the Palaeolithic era, and two decades, as in the case of the Amarna period in Akhenaton’s Egypt. The variation is irregular. For example, the Greek classical period lasted about seventy-five years, but the Byzantine style lasted a millennium. The interesting fact, however, is that the periods oriented towards observation and work from life were brief, whereas the dominance of ornament, mannerism or codified styles were lengthy. High Renaissance lasted two decades, just as Impressionism did, but Mannerism went on for about six decades. It would be too flat to state that the modernist creed, which lasted a century, is over. Is it over? Can we say that its terminal phase is over? We can’t really know that, since the modernist creed is increasingly marked by a stylistic pluralism, which has no precedent in the history of art, regardless of its affinity with turbulent periods of migration, invasion and change. In fact, we live in just such a period. But instead of being invaded by ‘barbarians’ we are invaded by information, by the media. What the ‘barbarians’ did in antiquity in disrupting the Hellenistic order, the media do in our time to all orders. Indeed, the increase of pluralism seems to be due to the increasing rupture. It is due to the fact that no trend other than change remains credible.

Is it possible to paint a picture without aiming for permanence, and let the terror of being obsolete take over and let change wipe out permanence? But an inspired square will remain preferable to any uninspired portrait or figure.

However, rift in style—or shift towards something else—was there from the start. A striking example is the sudden appearance of hand imprints on the walls in the Pech-Merle and Gargas caves (Aurignaco–Perigordian period, c.25,000 bc), which, although prompted by magic or religion, seems to have been the earliest group phenomenon of individual expression, of leaving one’s mark. (It looks very much like certain exhibitions today . . .) It was a ritual but at the same time the earliest example of fashion. Fashion is indeed an epidemic phenomenon which is followed unquestionably, as if it were a religion. It is a shortcut by which personal taste or judgment is eluded, or abdicated, and replaced by participation in a collective expression, still perceived as a ritual.

Hand imprints, c.25,000 bc (Pech-Merle, France)

Taste, subjective taste, and the right to have it, was recognized late. It is, no doubt, in so far as it is tolerated, a phenomenon of high civilization. And yet, even though timeless in principle, subjective taste is apparently always in peril, whereas imposed or acquired taste is not. Not all civilizations tolerated its bloom.

Emanating from without, collective style reverberates like a tune to a dance. Fashion evolves by excluding those who are inattentive to it and including those who consent to it. But it wears away as soon as it is imposed. In a way, fashion’s antinomy is permanence, which is the artist’s highest ambition. It is qualitative permanence that enables a work of art to reverberate through time. Not its momentary spark. However, the increase of mediation contributes to enhance the spark and obscure the permanent qualities.

We are now in the midst of a period without precedent in history: difference, which is the root of identity, seems to be in peril. Although all is open, and maybe because it is so, all seems closed. Furthermore, and because of this peril, qualitative differences seem to dim, and with them the difference—between viewing pictures under natural or artificial light, between an original and its reproduction, between painting and poster, genuine and fake, art and rubbish—seems to vanish. All appears to be equal under the power of the media. One would think that things couldn’t have been clearer, and yet, they are not. There was probably never a confusion of such magnitude as now, in regard to the nature of art, and consequently of its purpose. Indeed, it can be said that the preceding confusions were mostly between content and form. Not between art and artifice. The difference was rather clear, despite several exceptions. It was always clear that art was produced by those ‘gifted’ by nature; in fact, we now assume, by those suffering from a slight genetic distortion. It was clear that art can only be produced by this special breed, just as honey can only be produced by bees. One cannot become a bee. But we now witness an increase in the amount of people who believe that everybody can be an artist. Whence the inflation of things which are not art and yet are accepted as art. The fact that they don’t have the quality of art is turned into an advantage, as a mark of ‘avant-garde’. These things serve as an example to other people without talent, who, in their turn, serve as an example to the next wave. Some of them are recognized, temporarily, as ‘avant-garde’ by ‘other criteria’ theorists, who are as doctrinaire as the compilers of the treatise governing icon painting, The Painter’s Manual of Mount Athos, but inversely: they are about how not to paint …

The purpose of art for the Ancients, and even those nearer to us, was clear: beauty. Beauty was recognized as being the vehicle by which faith and myth were conveyed. Beauty was their essence. Sublimity its attribute. Immediacy was the dimension by which it was apprehended. Beauty is an experience by which the senses and the mind are satisfied, but not only; it is a disquieting, unnameable experience. Since the beginning of historical time, it was clear that the visual arts were mute, but that this deficiency was an advantage: it communicated the unspeakable, the unnameable. Contrary to the written word, drawing, painting and sculpture are immediate. What they communicate is not information, but sensation. Feeling. Emotion. Content is transformed through form and transmitted by way of its frequency and intensity. Not only by its content, which is the domain of the image. The image is a reminder, a signifier to be decoded. Not a picture. Indeed, a painting will move or not, according to how it is painted and not by what it represents. It can of course be seen as an image—for example, we can view the Meninas as an image, a document only, extracting from it social and other information, and not be moved by it at all. Iconology did serious damage to the perception of art. But there is an old confusion between art and aesthetics. In fact, Plato had a mediate conception, hindering the immediate feeling for art. His taste in art must have been rather poor, in spite of his deep insight into the creative process. His belief in the supremacy of idea and the inferiority of mimesis gave birth to idealism in art, to the ideal form, which still prevails. But outside the Western world, art was the mass media by which mankind communicated with the sacred, or invoked the unknown, the remote or the desired, by visual means. With line, shape and colour, one can hold a moment of life, and preserve its echo as illusion. Art is illusion, certainly. But this illusion is indispensable for the transmission of feeling from one individual to the other, and through death, to other lives. Its experience is subjective and not collective. It is in fact, when truly felt, the passive equivalent of the creative act.

It was irrelevant for tens of thousands of years to get the likeness, the exact likeness, of someone’s face. Prehistoric art was about the typical. Man, woman, animal. Not this man, this woman or this animal. But only about a man, a woman, an animal. The typical dominated art for tens of thousands of years during which nobody’s face was drawn. There was no other style but the collective. The evolution of the prehistoric hunter-gatherer tribes into more complex communities, such as city-states and finally empires, bestowed upon the collective style a stately aura. The typical became sacerdotal and imperial. Its tyranny was absolute. Can one imagine the fate of an Assyrian or Egyptian sculptor who, except for the twenty-two years of the reign of Akhenaton, would have ‘expressed’ himself in a personal style? No such trace exists. Can we imagine someone in Byzantium trying to follow his fancy or paint from life? No such trace exists. It is interesting to note that the transition from the imposed collective style to the highly individual one was not possible without the passage from the closed to the open society. Tyrannies don’t tolerate freedom of expression, and they impose the collective style by which they exercise their power—tribal, religious or imperial—until this very day. Social realism in Soviet Russia was the last example. The generalized image accommodates with tyranny. On the other hand, the transition from the generalized to the particular, from the cult of the typical to the one of the exceptional is an epiphenomenon of the passage to individual freedom, and to a higher degree of civilization. It took one million years for evolution to produce such exceptions as Dürer, Beethoven or Shakespeare. It took as much to let a sole person experience the emotional impact of a Beethoven quartet, or a Velázquez portrait. But what is that impact made of? Is it beauty and if so, what is beauty? A constant fluctuation renewed from life to life. For Kant, beauty is a form of finality of an object as long as it’s perceived without the representation of that finality (‘Schönheit ist Form der Zweckmässigkeit eines Gegenstandes, sofern sie, ohne Vortstellung eines Zwecks, an ihm wahrgenommen wird’).2 In other words, beauty is a finality without an aim. And yet it became normative, ideal beauty opposing measure to nature, because it was thought to be made of regularity. ‘Beauty is when all parts concord simultaneously in achieving proportion and discourse, in such a manner that nothing can be added or taken away, but for the worse,’ said Leon Battista Alberti.3 Four hundred years later, Owen Jones wrote that,

true beauty results from that repose which the mind feels when the eye, the intellect, and the affections, are satisfied from the absence of any want.4

And further: ‘Beauty of form is produced by lines growing out one from the other in gradual undulations: there are no excrescences; nothing could be removed and leave the design equally good or better.’5 It is in fact a variant of Alberti’s definition. Although it is possible that Owen Jones, whose concern was ornament, may have been aware of Alberti’s definition, which was about architecture, his formulation is more about the perceiver than about the perceived. But he couldn’t have known the sculptor Orfeo Boselli’s then still unpublished manuscript, written c.1657 (first published fragments, 1939):6

The grand manner, accordingly, and the exquisite taste appear in making the work with sweetness and tenderness, which consists in knowing how to hide the bones, nerves, veins and muscles, in keeping one’s eye to the whole and not to the parts—something so difficult that only to the ancients was conceded the great marvel of seeing a figure consummately beautiful, with everything and with nothing being there . . . This tenderness of manner was not only practised in the Apollos, Antinouses, Bacchuses, Faunes and youth and natural statuary, but also in the great river gods and even in stupendous colossi. The more they remove the grander the style becomes . . .7

Disegno, Proportion, Attitude within Leggiadria (grace, charm). The quest of the whole rather than the parts. Weglassen in German, ‘leaving out’ was the painter’s key to it. Beauty was believed to be the goal of all the arts. However, the concept of beauty evolved from ideal to real, before ultimately vanishing altogether. But did it really vanish? The philosophical concept of Beauty differs from the artistic one because of the concreteness of the latter.

Drawing or painting is a way of investigating and seizing visual data by pictorial means. The inquiry by pictorial or graphic means—how this hill, this apple or your face are constituted—results in a sequence of marks, forming a structure, holding ultimately this hill, apple or face by pictorial or graphic means. This depiction is a process by which visual sensations transformed by velocity, touch, rhythm and pictorial means constitute an echo of what was seen and felt. It is a process equivalent to freezing or to petrification. But also to ontogeny. The condition of its success is that it be generated from within. Dot after dot. Not skilfully, nor from without, following a concept, but from within a deep state of concentration and oblivion of all other visual precedents. The memory and skill by which we are able to draw a hill, a tree or a face, is in fact a disturbing factor. It leads away from the particular to the general, from truth to fiction. Skill is negative talent, but was not really recognized as such until this century (just like viruses), being confused with talent. For example, Bouguereau developed his skills to the detriment of his talent. But old Titian avoided skill instinctively and Cézanne seems to have had no skill at all. It is his weakness which makes for his greatness: unable to emulate the masters he admired, he painted as he could, remaining in torment.

Following the Platonic concept of Ideal Beauty, and the belief in the imperfection of nature, artists during the later part of the sixteenth century avoided strictly following visible reality dot by dot. They aimed for ideal generalization, by moving away from this hill, apple or face to a hill, apple or face. Thus giving up, as was said above, truth for fiction. Besides, drawing from visible reality dot by dot was also increasingly considered as pedantic and inelegant. This is how academicism came about.

Five centuries later this belief seems still to be deeply rooted.

Andrea Mantegna, The Crucifixion, c.1457

Note on Mantegna’s crucifixion1

and the origin of its circular plan

Degas believed that one has ‘to copy and recopy the masters and it is only after having proved oneself a good copier that one can justifiably be permitted to paint a radish from nature’.2 In his unfinished copy3 of Mantegna’s Crucifixion,4 Degas left out the key of this painting, namely the red standard bearing the inscription SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus).5 It is not even indicated. And yet, this red spot triggers the entire composition.

But this omission is not surprising. Degas’ interest was indeed elsewhere: not in the conceptual but in the lifelike. The obsession with geometry and perspective prevalent in Mantegna’s century vanished in Degas’ time, and the ardour of the scienza dell’arte was extinguished. On the other hand, painting directly, spontaneously, freely, letting feeling overcome calculation, was still unthinkable in Mantegna’s time. Making a picture without scienza, without the geometrical division, without a perspective construction was ludicrous in Mantegna’s century. It wasn’t yet known that

perspectival construction ignores the crucial circumstance that this retinal image—entirely apart from its subsequent psychological ‘interpretation’, and even apart from the fact that the eyes move—is a projection not on a flat but on a concave surface.6

Andrea Mantegna, The Crucifixion, c.1457 (division and perspective)

Mantegna, however, was obsessed both by antiquity and by perspective, which he believed to be at the root of art. The sharp foreshortening, the di sotto in sù, is his stamp. He certainly used several methods of perspective, maybe without exactly following the Albertian construzione legittima. He may even have used a plane projection in the manner of Piero,7 or abacus books and ‘triangulation techniques of surveying lengths, breadths and height’.8 But where could he have learned all these methods? True, the bifocal system of foreshortening was an old studio practice preceding Brunelleschi and Alberti.9 Squarcione must have had experience with these old studio practices to which the centre-point perspective may have been added, perhaps through his students (although Padua was a cradle for perspective theories before Brunelleschi’s and Alberti’s Florence. It was in 1390 that Biagio Pelacani in Padua wrote his Quaestiones de Perspectiva).

Neglected for centuries, antiquity was now resurrected. Suddenly a rupture and a mutation occurred due to the fact that some enlightened people began not only consulting the ruins, but also scraping and digging the soil. It was not archaeology yet, but an urge for the antique. This urge, shared by most men of letters, was to leave its imprint and dominate Mantegna throughout his life. For Mantegna, ‘. . . the visible remains of antiquity conjured up a grander, more ordered world than the one in which he lived. Only in Alberti’s architecture does one find a similar understanding of the intrinsic character of Roman art.’10 Copying from the antique, from the exempla drawings which Squarcione collected so avidly, the study of theory, and life drawing to a lesser extent, was apparently the curriculum practised in his workshop. Squarcione, who had the habit of legally adopting his most gifted pupils, was also an ardent traveller. It was on one of their trips to Venice that the precocious Andrea gained his freedom from his master and adoptive ‘father’, met Jacopo Bellini and married his daughter, Nicolosia, in 1453. Before that, in 1449, the young Mantegna was invited by Lionello d’Este to paint his portrait (now lost). Did he, on this occasion, see the Rogier van der Weyden? All of this has been told and retold by Vasari and questioned by historians beginning with Kristeller and Knapp.11

Donatello and Uccello’s ‘Giants’ frescoes in the Casa Vitaliani were Mantegna’s lighthouse. Donatello spent ten years in and out of Padua, leaving the city in 1454, leaving ‘his pattern to others’ in Vasari’s words. His reliefs for the high altar of the Santo, based on the central perspective, were a major influence on Mantegna. This influence on Mantegna must have been made explicit by its having been put into practice by Niccolò Pizzolo, who was an assistant to Donatello at the Santo between 1445 and 1448 and again in 1450. In 1448, Pizzolo was commissioned to decorate the chapel Antonio degli Ovetari in the church of the Eremitani in Padua along with Andrea Mantegna, younger by ten years, and in collaboration with Antonio Vivarini and Giovanni d’Alemagna. (The Eremitani was destroyed by an allied bomb in 1944.) It was to become a cycle of frescoes which changed the course of painting in northern Italy. Although the partnership between the two was legally dissolved in September 1449, Pizzolo’s name recurs three times, the last time on 9 June 1452, before his violent death in 1453.12 In that time Mantegna must have learned quite a bit from him. ‘The degree to which Mantegna absorbed the lessons Pizzolo had to offer can be gauged from the fact that the work of the younger artist painted in the Ovetari chapel in 1448 and 1449 was long ascribed to his older partner.’13

On the other hand, the influence of Donatello’s reliefs in the Santo on Mantegna is discernible not only by the low horizon line and sharp foreshortening, but by the sculptural approach itself, to begin with in the St. James cycle of the Ovetari chapel. In the Crucifixion the foreshortening is milder than in the Ovetari cycle, but Christ’s figure is nearly a painted sculpture; the question is whether the horses were also drawn from a sculpture, namely after the equestrian monument of Niccolò d’Este III by Niccolò and Giovanni Baroncelli, as suggested by Castelfranco.14 They could have been partly drawn from life. But Mantegna did not make such distinctions. He probably did not shun the sculpted model, on the contrary, his entire work is sculptural. Rocks were apparently his passion. They are, in a way, the embodiment of his craving for sharp diagonals, cutting lines, and for rhythmic hatching. His engraving style was present in his paintings prior to his engravings: he started engraving with the chisel or the drypoint—probably not before 1466. Even if he engraved only seven plates,15 his engravings reached an unsurpassed peak.

The constitutive element of his painting is the line. He drew in paint—as in the Crucifixion, the surface of which is covered by minute lines depicting every hair, every hoop of the legionaries’ lorica, every wood-vein of the crosses, every fissure in the rocks. This tempera painting is executed with round sable brushes on a panel composed of three spindle-shaped poplar rails placed top-to-tail with a fine silk-strip glued over the joints before the white gesso was applied.16 The geometric division was first incised with a stylus (one diagonal line was spotted under the microscope by this author) before the drawing, traces of which remain visible through the painted surface, particularly in the white robe of the mourner left of the Virgin (our right); Mantegna did not follow the lines of his underdrawing, but painted the robe freely, probably from observation, maybe from a mannequin—the modified folds prove it. The robes of this entire group are painted from observation, whereas the faces are obviously from imagination, and even according to the canon. The expression of grief reaches its peak in the pale face of the Virgin, shadowed with black, contrasting with the sumptuous execution of the robes, their embroidered hems, their folds shaded with black and highlighted with gold.17 The gold is not a pigment, but actually pure gold powder, applied directly and lightly on to the fast-drying medium. In spite of painting minutely layer on layer, it is his medium—which must have been his secret—that permitted Mantegna to keep up this extraordinary transparency and freshness.

Mantegna probably painted the three panels of the San Zeno predella after having finished the upper triptych, and this central panel at the very end, just before his final departure for Mantua in January 1460. Indeed, the central panel is the conclusion of the whole, justifying the whole: the Crucifixion18 carries visually the upper panels by virtue of its central point on top of the cross which constitutes the optical pivot dynamizing the entire composition. Having conceived the entire altar as being lit from the right, Mantegna had a right-side window opened to this effect (but this window was bricked up in the sixteenth century),19 his point of sight originating from the same direction. It is a low-set point of sight stimulating the di sotto in sù foreshortening which is amplified by the tension between the strict symmetry (the cross is in the exact centre) and the invisible diagonal ascending from below. The last two steps of the eighteen carved in the rock, according to legend, were apparently painted in order to correspond to eye-level in the chapel; the field of vision is defined by the fragmented head20 emphasizing the low point of sight.

The reason for the symmetrical division is theological: it segregates right from left, the righteous on the right from the wicked (sinister) on the left, magnifying Christ in the centre: on his right (the viewer’s left), the righteous, and animation of life; on his left (the viewer’s right), the sinister, evil and death. But from the formal point of view, a symmetrically centred composition is doomed to become inert and fall apart, whence the red standard. It is painted at the harmonic horizontal and diagonal intersection. Without this harmonic counterpoint and the slight angle to the right of its pole, the composition would have been inert indeed. However, this point was apparently not preconceived by Mantegna: the standard was painted at a later stage, over the already finished landscape. Although it is the key to the painting, it ostensibly came at the end.

Map of the World, ninth century

Map of Jerusalem, c.1150

At the median intersection, exactly at the apex of the visual pyramid, the Albertian ‘centric’ point, are Christ’s feet. Our gaze, caught between the distance point on the right and the vanishing point on the left, follows the low-levelled foreshortened plateau, being pulled to the left at pavement-level behind the cross, and drawn up on the cross by the terrifying image;21 our eye remains arrested there by the power of the horizontal tension: it is provoked by the contrast between the hard (crosses) and the tender (clouds) acting as inflections, like arpeggios.

From there our gaze is driven to the red standard again, to the onset of a dual chromatic theme, red-yellow, with the red dominant first; from the red standard to the red crest on the yellow (gold) on the black helmet of the centurion, to the red reins of the dappled horse, to the trousers of the second rider, to the red cuirass of the rider on the white horse (a red spot without which the composition would have split), then to the shield and sandals of the soldier downhill, the collar of the one coming up, and finally Mary Magdalene.

Dividing left from right, Mantegna had the red and yellow invert their functions accordingly. On Christ’s right (the viewer’s left), the side of the righteous, yellow encircles and underlines the red (but also the blue, green and black); the yellow (gold) is the colour of the haloes—of light, of life—unfolding behind St. John and the group of the holy women supporting the Virgin. On Christ’s left, the sinister side (the viewer’s right), the red encircles and underlines the yellow, there is no blue, less and less light towards the edge, but death: dead trees and bare earth; of the three horses, two of them, the white and the dappled one, are carrying their riders to the abyss, as if pushed by the red. Concluding it all, the warm colours are intensified by the cold grey of the plateau.

Map of Jerusalem, Florence, c. fifteenth to sixteenth century

This red-yellow division is summarized by the red-yellow circular shield, divided into four yellow and four red sharply foreshortened triangles, on which the three soldiers are casting their lots. The shield, like an engine, but an optical one, activates the pavement’s orthogonals. It spins optically, in contrast with the dominant static verticals, sending off a horizontal quiver through the entire composition.

*    *    *    *    *

What part did the patron Gregorio Correr,22 apostolic protonotary and abbot of San Zeno Maggiore in Verona, play in the iconographical conception of Mantegna’s Altar? Puppi23 found evidence that the abbot wanted it to be ‘heroic’.

Regarding the depiction of Jerusalem, it is generally admitted that Mantegna used Flavius. An Italian translation existed from the fourteenth century. From the second half of the second century onwards, Flavius ‘was welcomed as a principal witness from the enemy camp’.24 Flavius, who wrote his history between ad 72 and ad 75, was adopted and adapted by the founding Fathers of the Christian Church—Origen, Eusebius and Chrysostom—who manipulated the text to fit their ‘punitive theology’.25 The question is whether Mantegna followed Flavius’s topography in regard to the circular conception of Jerusalem. He painted from imagination a city in which there are details mentioned by Flavius, such as the column (depicted in both versions of the Agony in the Garden, Tours, and London, National Gallery), but giving the houses an Italian aspect. His circular hill is an allusion to the circular plateau of Golgotha26 which does not derive from Flavius. The question is whether it derives from a visual source rather than from a literary one.

According to Millard Meiss, the concept of the circle in Crucifixions and Lamentations, the circular plateau, is an invention of Jan van Eyck as exemplified in a lost Crucifixion27 once in Padua. He states that, ‘Jan van Eyck’s plateau Crucifixion combined with the departing soldiers was disseminated, chiefly by Mantegna, throughout North Italy.’28 But Mantegna’s circular plan is unlike the one depicted in the extant copy of the lost van Eyck (Anonymous Paduan, Venice, Accademia) and attests to another source. On the other hand, Meiss points out elsewhere29 that ‘the circle of perfection was of course current in late antique and Medieval imagery’. Indeed, the ‘circle of perfection’ was also recognized as Divine and theologically suitable for the representation of the world (as in the ninth-century map at Saint-Gallen), and of Jerusalem in particular.

The earliest map, the mosaic of Madba (sixth century),30 is, however, oval. It is the Crusaders that give it the circular shape. In the new Crusader maps of Jerusalem, topography follows theology, not reality. These maps,31 an offshoot of the Carolingian style, are abstract but also symbolic schemata. They all indicate the two main streets, the cardo and the decumanus maximus, which cross at the exact centre of the Holy City, hence forming a cross.32 This model of the circular map was perpetuated for centuries. There is no difference between Cannon Lambert’s map in the Liber Floridas (c.1260, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Lat. Mss. 8865 fol. 93r) and the earlier map of Saint-Omer (c.1150, Bibliothèque Municipale, Codex Aldomarensi, folio 15b). They all follow the world-map of Ranulf Higden, with Jerusalem at its centre (London, British Museum, Ms. 14c IX), and essentially such maps as the ninth-century Carolingian map of the world with Christ in its centre (Saint-Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. 237, 63). In this map, Christ is rising on the cross above the centre, hence marking the place of the crucifixion as the world’s centre. The cross-centre of Jerusalem sprang from the union of two separate monuments present in the Madba map: the cross on Golgotha in the Templum Sancte Crucis built by St. Helen on the spot of Solomon’s Temple, and the column bearing the emperor’s effigy on its pinnacle. This column (painted by Mantegna, see above) was erected in front of the northern city-gate, baptized St. Étienne by the Crusaders. The Emperor Constantine replaced the effigy on this column with a cross. A legend spread that it marked the centre of the world. The belief that Jerusalem is situated at the midpoint of the world is asserted by Ezekiel who qualifies it as tabur haaretz—the navel of the earth (XXXVIII, 12). This tradition continued in Judaism as well.33 Christianity transformed the prophets’ metaphors, like the one of Jerusalem, into Christian certitudes. Victorinus Pettavionesis (second century) and Sophronius Patriarch of Jerusalem (fourth century) locate Golgotha as medium orbe, beginning a tradition according to which the centre of the world is the Saint Sepulchre.34

Simultaneously the ‘earthly’ Jerusalem is abandoned for a ‘celestial’ one, whence the circle.

Mantegna apparently took into account the circle and the centre in his Crucifixion. His Christ towers in the centre just like in the Saint-Gallen map. His ‘circular plan’ is by far more radical than van Eyck’s (mentioned by Millard Meiss), who may also have had in mind Jerusalem’s cartography.

Mantegna painted a Crucifixion without the sponge-bearer, nor wound, nor angels and chalice, without sun or moon, without Church or Synagogue—but essential, and with an immutable formal invention: an exempla.

1993–4

On Peter Paul Rubens1

Rubens’s immense oeuvre never stopped reverberating; he was one of the greatest draughtsmen of all time and his activities were multiple: he was an antiquarian scholar, connoisseur and collector, courtier and diplomat, besides being a painter; his correspondence with some of the most brilliant and significant personalities of his time (250 letters survive, written in Italian, French, Flemish, Latin and Spanish), his sense of duty, of loyalty and friendship, his elegance, his impact on his own time and on posterity, are of such magnitude that one would need a lifetime to tell his life. From Roger de Piles (the apostle of ‘Rubenism’), Charles Ruelens and Max Rooses to Julius Held and Michael Jaffé, all those who entered the giant’s den were absorbed into its density.