Creativity does not exist in a vacuum. It is predicated on everything that has come before it. For more than 200 years, Renaissance artists created their work, perhaps in an altered modality, but with the methods which had become the contextual coda of all that came before. So too, the artists of the modern era: nearly four centuries later, artists looked at the fin de siecle and the coming twentieth century, and turned what they knew — a thousand years of accumulated knowledge — to foment change in the world they saw.
While separated by 400 years of changing culture, 400 years of modifications in technique, and 400 years of worldly-wise, the artists of these two periods, the Mannerists and the turn-of-the-century Modern artists, shared something powerful and something real: by looking forward and looking back, they elicited fundamental change, which radiated from the point where they stood outward, to encompass their art, their contemporaries and their culture.
In the Mannerist movement, this stylistic change is embodied in the sociopolitical response to the rigidity of the Renaissance period which had come before it. The change is made manifest in its relationship to the reworking of factors of space and form, predicting by some 400 years those modern methods mandated by work in diverse mediums including movements in fine art and schools of thought and creativity in other fields as varied as philosophy, literature and film making.
Arnold Hauser, in his compleat study The Social History of Art addresses this idea:
… there is no relationship capable of logical formulation between the size and the thematic importance of the [Mannerist] figures…The final effect is of real figures moving in an unreal, arbitrarily constructed space, the combination of real details in an imaginary framework…[which is] reminiscent of associations in…[modern] painting, in Franz Kafka’s dream world, in the montage technique of Joyce’s novels and the autocratic treatment of space in film.1
Every painting, every sculpture, from the Renaissance until now bears the indelible imprint of it’s historo-cultural roots — in the work completed, a generation (or more) earlier, by the men who would hand down to an artist offspring the knowledge of their craft.
Many artists have come to depend heavily on previously stated ideology and themes in their art. Either to state those concepts in a new way, such as Jasper Johns’ use of numbers, flags and other modern icons, or because the artist lacks original thought, and so returns to till the same lifeless artistic ground of countless would-be artists before him.
Even the artists who were slow to admit any connection to their artistic progenitors have methodology firmly rooted in the work and traditions of an earlier generation of artists, and an earlier body of work.
In regard to the artists of the High Middle Ages and the classic age which came before, in his full-force Humanist manifesto The Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects,2 Giorgio Vasari argues that the artists of the day — his contemporaries — had no such connection to earlier artists and earlier work. Vasari would have us believe “that simple children, rudely reared in the woods, have begun to practise the arts of design with no other model than those beautiful pictures and sculptures furnished by nature, and no other teaching than their own genius.”
Vasari takes this Humanist ideology a further leap by suggesting that before his nature-boy artist can shake the moss out of his ears, he has elevated himself to the status of the Deity:
I do not believe I wandered far from the true solution when I suggested that the origin of these arts was nature herself–the first image or model, the most beautiful fabric in the world– and the master was that divine light infused into us by special grace, which has made us not only superior to all other animals, but has exalted us, if it may be permitted so to speak, to the similitude of God Himself.3
Yet even an artistic genius of the stature of Michelangelo Bounarotti closely studied the work of Florentine artists Masaccio and Giotto, and owes much of the strength of his sculpture to the anatomical studies of Bolognese artist Jacobi della Quercia, whom he had admired.
Contradicting his own statements in The Lives of the Most Eminent…, Vasari recognized the connection between art and architecture being created in his day and that which had come before:
I do not intend to deny that there must have been one who made the first commencement, for I know perfectly well that the first principle must have proceeded from some given time, and from some one person; neither will I deny the possibility that one may have assisted another.4
Vasari hammers the final coffin nail in place, sealing inside the corpse of his Rational-age Humanist concepts, when he adds:
…I know that our art is altogether imitation, of nature principally, but also, for him who cannot soar so high, of the works of such as he esteems better masters that himself…5
Leon Battista Alberti, in his work The Architecture of Leon Battista Alberti supports the thesis of what we may call this ‘progenerative connectivity’ when he states, “Our ancestors have left us many and various arts tending to the pleasure and conveniency of life, acquired with the greatest industry and diligence….”6
Thus, even the arts-related “Rationalism” of that age was a label, affixed post-facto to the dialectic of an artist at work in his world.
A case in point is Albrecht Durer’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.7 It is a painterly reportage of life within the confines of the artists frame of reference, and is a further extension of the subjectiveness of art, vis a vis it’s contextual basis.
In the case of Horsemen, it is Durer’s vision of and predilection with death, and death’s relationship to God and nature which is embodied in the work. It is the stylus in Durer’s hand that formed the image of Saint John’s visions, and provided the illiterate masses with this terrible vision of the Lord’s retributive might. Particularly throughout this period in history, and perhaps throughout any other, one cannot underestimate the impact of religion (moreover, mans relationship to God) nor the impact of the media. Perhaps this yin/yang of religion and reportage is the greatest synergy.
This power with which the painter (and his patron) holds sway over the common man was described with knowing clarity in the writings of Leonardo DaVinci:
…If the poet gratifies the sense by means of the ear, the painter does so by the eye–the worthier sense; but I will say no more of this but that, if a good painter represents the fury of a battle, and if a poet describes one, and they are both together put before the public, you will see where most of the spectators will stop, to which they will pay most attention, on which they will bestow the most praise…Write up the name of God in some spot and set up His image opposite and you will see which will be most reverenced…8
While man may have hoped for a clean break from his dependence on what we have come here to term progenerative connectivity, even the most jaded of these old “new-agers” admit their reliance on the past. Whether it is their connectedness to the creations of the masters who had come before, the master’s techniques, or their dependence on the Master of all Masters God Himself, as He imbued the artists with their gifts or created the scenery from which they drew their inspiration, it is clear that new fruit is plucked from the old tree, and it would seem the older the tree, the greater the harvest.
Throughout the history of art there lies the essence of this thematic dialectic.
Other factors contributed and contribute to the art which reaches the viewer/consumer: market demand. The great unwashed of the fifteenth century had no direct control over the art that was created, just as today there is no direct connection between the artist and the general public. For 500 years, artists, at least those artists who eat, have worked under a system of patronage. Either funded by the Church or heads of state, or the modern incarnations of those institutions, the museums and galleries, and the private collections [such as those held by banks and other corporate sponsors].
During that period from the Proto-renaissance to Mannerism, nearly all artists were allowed the freedom to paint as they chose, but subject matter was dictated to many artists of the day by the patrons who supported them. The result of this relationship is apparent in many works, perhaps most prominently in the portraiture of the period: Baldisairi Castiglionni by Raphael Sanzio, and Van Eyck’s Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife, to name but two.
The patron was the product of his aristocratic system: a construct of greed, racism, classism, power and position. These aristocrats were unwashed, boorish, incestuous, rampant and consumptive. The royalty, the religiosos and the other heads of state of the day, the flim flam men of their age, swindled the masses into a prerequisite religious dogma, wringing taxes from the poor and hungry to build their gold-and-masterpiece monuments9. And, while one cannot excuse autocracy with art, the autocracies very raison d’etre allowed them the luxuries which, nearly 500 years later, we harken to with pseudo-sentimental gape-mouthed awe — in what Robert Hughes, in his book Shock of the New describes as a “quasi-religious happening for the aesthetically dim-witted masses10.”
While subject matter was a dictate, at least to those who could afford by this symbiosis to eat and live their lives in relative comfort, thanks to the likes of a Borgia or a Medici or a Pope Julius, the end product of that patronage, the work itself, bears the indelible imprint of its historo-cultural roots.
The very things that separate an artistic period from its predecessor are the things that unite it with the art of another age. As the Mannerists turned away from the rational and harmonious of the Renaissance, so to did the fin-de-siecle artists of the 19th/20th Century bridle against the status quo of their era.
The art itself gives credence to this argument, as we shall see.
The uniformity of scene, the topographical coherence of the composition, the consistent logic of the spatial structure were, for the Renaissance artists, amongst the most important preconditions of the artistic effect of a picture. The whole system of perspective drawing, all the rules of proportion and tectonics were merely means serving the ultimate end of spatial logic and unity.
Arnold Hauser, in his four-volume work The Social History of Art, isolates the significance of the Mannerist movement as a turning away from these compositional strictures:
Mannerism begins by breaking up the Renaissance structure of space and the scene to be represented into … externally separate [and] inwardly differently organized parts.
Nothing characterizes the disturbance of the classical harmony better than the disintegration of that unity of space which was the most pregnant expression of the Renaissance conception of art.11
The Mannerist style arose out of the intellectual crisis of the opening decades of the century and was the expression of the battle between the spiritual and the sensual. Mannerism was the artistic style of an aristocratic, cultured class. That it was the court style of the 16th Century is a reflection of the cultured class of the age and it had no equal until what Hauser refers to as “the mature Baroque”12 superceded it, by ingratiating itself into the milieu during the manifestation of the Counter-Reformation, and the resurrection of Catholicism as the religion of the masses, which used the Baroque as a tool for it’s ecclesiastical propagandizing.
Just as Durer and DaVinci and DellaQuercia painted images of power and majesty which changed the world in which they lived, modern artists picked up brush and knife and stylus to communicate their message: a demand for change.
“How,” asks Robert Hughes in his highly acclaimed documentary Shock of the New, “by shoving sticky stuff like paint around on the surface of a canvas, could you produce a convincing record of process and transformation?”13
In the 19th Century the first artists to sketch an answer to that question were the Cubists and the Futurists, yet nearly four centuries earlier the Mannerists, in their deconstruction of styles and ideas of the High Renaissance, demonstrated that they too had begun to form an answer to the same question.
Like the Mannerists, whose work predated his by five centuries, the preeminent Futurist artist, Umberto Boccioni’s artistic revelations were predicated on a changing age.
Boccioni shared with the viewer his interest in, and joy of, the burgeoning industrial revolution in his home country of Spain. “I am nauseated by old walls and old palaces,” he wrote. “I want the new, the expressive, the formidable.” This was his stated task, and he took himself at his own word — most notably in his powerful work The City Rises (1910-1911)14 which was both expressive and formidable, yet it was a composition reflecting more than a nodding acquaintance with the stylistic and dynamic devices of an old master of the Mannerist period: Tintoretto. Eloquently evidenced is the similarity of these styles when one compares The City Rises with Tintoretto’s The Miracle of the Slave 15. The parts of these pictures create a powerful tension, yet one of balance.
Like Tintoretto’s (an artist whom Louise Gardner refers to as the outstanding Venetian representative of Mannerism16), Boccioni’s compositions consist of “contrary and opposing motions…the dynamism [of which] is greatly accelerated.”17 This dynamism is born out of a sense of change and tension, wherein artists of both ages were compelled to give expression to their own inner tension — a tension born of the age itself.
Tintoretto claimed himself as a student of one of the most important painters of the Mannerist period, Tiziano Vecelli (Titian)18. Titian was perhaps the most sought after artist in all of Europe. His early curriculum vitae included his appointment as painter to the Republic of Venice in 1516, painter for the Duke of Urbino, and later, painter to the Court of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and Charles’ son Philip II of Spain. Titian set the tone for all painting to follow, being the first to eschew wood panels for the new framed canvas. Moreover though, Titian’s work is significant in terms of the energy of his compositions. Louise Gardner in Art Through The Ages gives an analysis of Titian’s methodology:
[Rather than composing] a horizontal and symmetrical arrangement…. [Titian] places the figures on a … diagonal, in occult balance…. Attention is directed by perspective lines, by the inclination of figures, and by the direction lines of gaze and gesture. This kind of composition is more dynamic than what we have … seen in the High Renaissance. The forces … promise a new kind of pictorial design, one built upon movement rather than rest.19
As with Tintoretto, we are able to draw poignant comparisons to Titian with a contemporary artist who put brush to canvas in an era of turmoil and change. In this case, the turmoil was manifest by the First World War, and the artist, Expressionist Max Beckman.
With Titian, we see an artist caught up in the politicizing and propagandizing of the Counter-Reformation, this manifesting a change, in his later periods, toward an increased theme of religious piety, which represented a significant contrast from his earlier works which were heavily weighted toward the naturalistic and pagan.
Beckman’s expression of his personal turmoil was born out of his experiences as an Army medic in the trenches of Flanders prior to 1915, an experience which left him in a state of traumatic shock.
While there are certainly differences in style, we can see the tortured expression of the inner man in both Beckman’s and Titian’s choice of subject matter. Titian’s Christ Crowned With Thorns [c.1573]20 depicts Christ, flogged and beaten, tormented by the soldiers of Pontius Pilate, shown twisting a crown of thorns around his head. While in Beckman’s The Night [1918]21, we see two foreground figures being tortured and hung in a visual allegory for the rise of the Left in Europe.
The paintings share a stacked verticality, but one which relies on strong diagonals and elongations of form. The muted light sources, as well as a sense of connectivity between foreground and background gives the compositions an almost claustrophobic quality which Robert Hughes terms “crowded” and “impacted.”22
The powerful interplay between the characters of Titian’s painting, the subject matter, and the directness of his technique — broad strokes of paint forcefully applied — are shared in the technique of Beckman’s painting. These artists share something else, as well: an expression of their age. Yet that expression has a tantalizing commonality that reaches back through the ages. In what might have been a post facto campaign slogan for the propagandizing of religious forces on both sides of the 15th centuries’ Reformation/Counter-Reformation ‘battle lines’, Beckman wrote in 1920, “We have to lay our hearts and nerves bare to the deceived cries of people who have been lied to…” Beckman here might have been speaking of the posing, pandering and bald-faced promotionalism of the religiosos of Titian’s day. And, Beckman added (in what might have been a posthumous message to the artists of the Mannerist era),”…the sole justification for our existence as artists, superfluous and egotistical though we are, is to confront people with the image of their destiny.”
And what is that destiny? In speaking of the Mannerist position on this question, Hauser states that “[it] is the first [style] … which regards the relationship between tradition and innovation as a problem to be solved by rational means. Tradition here is nothing but a bulwark against the all too violently approaching storms of the unfamiliar…[Mannerism's] subjective overstraining of its forms is the expression of the fear that form might fail in the struggle with life….”23
Just as in any culture, and in any period of history, whether in the Italy of Titian or of Bocionni, we live in a world of our making. The nature of our created environment is a defense against the unknown.
The Renaissance artists found order and life in an imitation of nature. The Mannerists broke down that nature in a spirit of, as Hauser relates, “exaggerated intellectualism, consciously and deliberately deforming reality with a tinge of the bizarre and abstruse…”24. And a future generation of artists responded similarly in the face of their own psychic deconstruction.
“Like … the High Renaissance,” wrote Robert Hughes, “the modern movement lived and died. It produced its masterpieces, some of which survive, but it’s doctrines no longer have the power to inspire visions of a new world.”25
Our artistic destiny may be merely a single stage in an endless cycle of renewal, or it may be another step down the long spiral of entropy with a capital ‘E’.
And all the while the artworld plays a waiting game. They wait for that creative call to arms, which will signal at least to the historians, the end of one period and the beginning of another. The artworld bides it’s time, and fills it’s day with any sort of meaningless frippery which the market might bear, from found concrete slabs to titanium energizer bunnies. Despite this demonstration, they still hope for a model of renewal, rather than one of entropy.
But if a new era should arrive it will arise, as have previous eras, out of revolution, not out of the recondite posturing which we are heir to today.
Just as the artists of the Renaissance found comfort in their wrestling of nature into a sense of order, so too it seems that an historian’s mind calls for the ordering of life into simple categories. Perhaps it is easier to look at art in neat categories: ProtoRenaissance, High Renaissance, Classical Age, Baroque, Rococo, ad nauseum. But, just as Albrecht’s work with a stylus reduced black and white to endless shades of gray tones, so too is life a complex gathering of the grays.
But through this gray mist, what becomes clear is that which the Mannerists and their modernist counterparts found as they rebelled against that order instigated by their predecessors: an even more profound artistic poignancy is manifest in a little chaos.
Robert Venturi, one of the fathers of post-Modern architecture, in his book Complexities and Contradictions in Architecture quotes Empson, who “sees ambiguity as ‘collecting precisely at the point of greatest poetic effectiveness…,” while admitting that there are good and bad ambiguities: “Ambiguity…may be used to convict a poet of holding muddled opinions rather than to praise the complexity of the order of his mind or vice versa.”26
Perhaps Robert Hughes, Time Magazine Art Editor and “Shock of the New” author said it best in his recent Time essay “The Fraying of America”: The need for absolute[s] … runs deep in us, but it drags history into propaganda.27
Footnotes
1. The Social History of Art, Arnold Hauser; copyright 1951; Vintage Books
2. Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, translated by Mrs. Jonathan Foster; 1890, George Bell’s Sons, London; Excerpted in The Renaissance Reader, James Bruce Ross, editor; copyright 1953, Viking Penguin
3. ibid.
4. ibid.
5. ibid
6. The Architecture of Leon Batista Alberti, translated by James Leoni; 1755, London; Excerpted in The Renaissance Reader, James Bruce Ross, editor; copyright 1953, Viking Penguin
7. Illustration taken from Art Through The Ages, Seventh Editon, Helen Gardner; copyright 1980 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
8. Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Gottingen; Philosophy History Class, 1952; Excerpted in The Renaissance Reader, James Bruce Ross, editor; copyright 1953, Viking Penguin
9. Germanic Art & Architecture - Conspicuous Consumption, Erick Anderson; copywright 1981;
10. The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes; copyright 1980; Alfred A Knopf
11. The Social History of Art, Arnold Hauser; copyright 1951; Vintage Books
12. ibid.
13. The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes; copyright 1980; Alfred A Knopf
14. Illustration: courtesy Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes; copyright 1980; Alfred A Knopf publisher
15. Illustration: courtesy Galleria dell’ Accademia, Venice; Art Through The Ages, 7th edition, Louise Gardner; copyright 1980; Harcourt Brace Javonivich
16. Art Through The Ages, 7th edition, Louise Gardner; copyright 1980; Harcourt Brace Javonivich
17. ibid.
18. ibid.
19. ibid.
20. Illustration: courtesy Alte Pinakothek, Munich; Art Through The Ages, 7th edition, Louise Gardner; copyright 1980; Harcourt Brace Javonivich
21. Illustration: courtesy Kunstsammlung Nordhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf copyright SPADEM; The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes; copyright 1980; Alfred A Knopf
22. The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes; copyright 1980; Alfred A Knopf
23. The Social History of Art, Arnold Hauser; copyright 1951; Vintage Books
24. The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes; copyright 1980; Alfred A Knopf
25. ibid.
26. Complexities and Contradictions in Art & Architecture, Robert Venturi; copyright 1965, the author
27. The Fraying of America, Robert Hughes; February 3, 1992, Time Magazine
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