In his experience, writers belonged to one of two classes: the unspeakably rapacious or the unspeakably ill-mannered.
The first group consisted of the public’s favourites and, though corrupted by their popularity, there was no doubting they had arrived. Ever in need of more attention, they imitated the ways of big business, rejoiced in gala dinners, hosted evening parties, spoke of copyrights, sales figures and box office receipts, and generally proclaimed their prosperity.
The second group was made up of the dregs of society, the flotsam and jetsam of the capital’s bars and cheap watering-holes. There they vaunted their inferior wares, full of self-loathing as they did so, gave free range to their particular form of genius and vented their spleen, while all the time lolling around on benches, pouring beer down their gullets.
No intermediate state existed between the promiscuity of the overcrowded cafes and that of the drawing-room, both offering boundless opportunity for gossip and back-stabbing. Places where one could meet and chat intimately, exchange ideas with a few like-minded artists, untroubled by the presence of women, had almost ceased to exist.
In short, no aristocracy of the soul existed in the world of letters; no view was ever expressed which might provoke consternation; no sudden, breathtaking flight of fancy was ever allowed. The conversations which occurred were the same ones every night whether they occurred in the rue du Sentier or the rue Cujas.
Most of the figures who were involved in Dada proved to be opportunists who for all their anti-art fervor never had any intention of abandoning art and went back to it the minute they could profitably resume their careers. The exception was Hugo Ball, who after the war resigned from the avant-garde, retired to a small Swiss village with Emily Hennings, reconverted to Catholicism and spent the last years of his short life “writing about early Christian saints, Byzantine spirituality, and theology.”
Consciousness of a real and meaningful world is intimately connected with the discovery of the sacred. Through experience of the sacred, the human mind has perceived the difference between what reveals itself as being real, powerful, rich, and meaningful and what lacks these qualities, that is, the chaotic and dangerous flux of things, their fortuitous and senseless appearances and disappearances. . . . In short, the ” sacred” is an element in the structure of consciousness and not a stage in the history of consciousness. On the most archaic levels of culture, living, considered as being human, is in itself a religious act, for food-getting, sexual life, and work have a sacramental value. In other words, to be—or, rather, to become—a man signifies being “religious.”
—Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas
Art has always served power but in the premodern period, power, though associated with wealth, was not its product. Modern power, however, is wholly the power of capital. And the power of capital, unlike the power of nobility or the power of the sacred, is a power that art is hard-pressed to exalt.
Thus, the real story of modern art, once one gets past the self-heroicizing bluster of the avant-garde, is the story of the difficulties that had to be surmounted before art could be sufficiently debased to serve capital.
For art to serve capital, it had to develop the means to make grossness glamorous.
What is grossness? It is the transactional liquidation of all discrimination. This is the enormity that modernity introduced into the aesthetic field, this radical relativization imported into art from the logic of a capitalism that does not recognize any value other than the monetary. Once this idea prevails, the banality of contingency invades both life and art. Grossness is the excrementalizing effect of contingency, the homogenization into waste production of all production since under this regime where all value is determined by price and nothing is of intrinsic value, all meaning is fugitive and provisional and every object and idea disposable.
In this context, the artistic “subversion” of established aesthetic norms and standards is actually a coping mechanism because it is an effort to will the inevitable, to give to what has already happened and is irreversible the appearance of a deliberate “progressive” ground-breaking innovation.
Modern (and postmodern) blasphemous artistic gestures merely perform as willful activism a dismantling of categories that have already been fatally destabilized, already invaded and devoured by the dissolving power of capital, which as Marx had wryly observed in his early writings makes possible “the fraternisation of impossibilities.”
Art in the service of capital is art in the service of shit or what Clement Greenberg politely called kitsch.
The avant-garde rationalized this submission of art to the excrementalizing exigencies of capital by giving it the cover of a programmatic unification of art and “life.”
But what precisely did this unification of art and life entail?
In 1969, on the occasion of the seminal exhibition Live In Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, Scott Burton blurted out the implications: “Art has been veritably invaded by life,” he declared, “if life means flux, change, chance, time, unpredictability.” Left unsaid was that life comes to mean flux, change, chance, time, and unpredictability only when it has been thoroughly profaned and reduced to mere existence, that is to say when life has become senseless.
So the invasion of art by life comes to mean from the late ’60s onward the transformation of art into a mirror of all the self-perpetuating afflictions of a senseless life: the manic novelty seeking, the compulsive posturing, the pity partying, the attitudinizing, the politicization of trivialities, the simultaneous solicitation of outrage and affirmation, the obsessive preoccupation with identity and its precious signifiers.
The shitshow that is late capitalism is no longer hidden from view. Art doesn’t attempt to offer a refuge from it. It ironicizes it and puts it behind an almost imperceptible transparent wall. Everything becomes a readymade and to that extent, everything becomes a work of art toward which we assume, as Duchamp did, a studied or affected indifference. This is how art serves power today, not by aggrandizing it but by putting a stupid smirk on our faces.
Lisp Press, which I founded in 2011 to publish my own artist books will, over the course of the summer, transition to publisher of Decadent and Symbolist literature and criticism. I will announce titles as they become available. The first scheduled is Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams.
The Dadaist breakdown of the distinction between “art” and “nonart,” and the subsequent mutation of Dada into Pop did not “democratize” art. It magnified the power of the institutional gatekeepers. When someone duct-tapes a banana to a wall and calls it art, validation depends on the assent of these high-placed arbiters. Such gestures have always been expressly designed to offend common sensibility. Antiart manufactures uncommon art. The purpose of uncommon art is to make its consumers feel uncommon. It is no coincidence that Warhol’s arrival coincided with the arrival of the hipster and what Miles Davis called the birth of the cool.
The myth of an anti-bourgeois avant-garde hides the collusion of the avant-garde with its bourgeois patrons to create a new class of luxury goods with no intrinsic value other than their snob appeal. The very notion of an avant-garde was always misleading. The avant-garde did not lead, it followed. It supplied what the bourgeoisie, a new upstart class, needed to mark its cultural ascent.
When the bourgeoisie was revolutionary and heroic, avant-garde art was revolutionary and heroic. When the bourgeoisie degenerated and spawned feckless ninnies, the avant-garde degenerated with it. We call this postmodernism.
Anyone whose overriding craving is for power cannot enjoy art because art is humbling not empowering. The experience of art is similar to the experience of the sacred: it demolishes the ego, it kicks your legs from under you. Like religion, which art faithfully served from the moment of their entwined origin, art is a means of transport.
There is no question that in order for canons to be renewed they must at various intervals be upended. But that upending must be at the hands of newer, more vigorous artists whose destructive gestures release a living tradition from the dead encrustations strangling it. Academic canon-busting is something else altogether because it issues from a neurotic hatred of what the bureaucratic intellect cannot apprehend or circumscribe.
Art survives now by disguising itself as something too dumb to be taken seriously.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563
The story of the Tower of Babel should be understood as a story about the foolishness of attempting to achieve metaphysical elevation by physical means.
Transhumanism is another Tower of Babel. Technology cannot grant transcendence.
Becoming superhuman, becoming shaman, is a process of subtraction not addition. It is an ordeal. To become spirit, the prospective shaman must first experience death. Only then can he visit the heavens and the underworld. Cyborgs cannot do this.
Martin Schongauer, The Temptation of Saint Anthony c. 1470–1475
As I start my severely restricted internet diet, some thoughts.
Media is fundamentally evil. The “news,” whatever the source, trains you to be passive. What others are doing/deciding takes precedence. You are just a spectator.
The world seen through media is an inversion of your existence. You should be absorbed in the the things that you can and should manage. You should be attentive to and deriving satisfaction from mindfully doing everyday things like making a meal, taking a walk, or playing with the dog. Or just breathing. These are the important things. But instead, you are caught up and vicariously living off the drama purveyed by media, which solicits your opinion about everything.
Of course, you do this because you want to escape from the mundane. But there is a feedback loop here, as in all addictive behavior. You want to escape the mundane because your exposure to media has desacralized and diminished the mundane. You have been seduced by the idea that the big reality is over there, in the virtual space of online chatter. Your own immediate sensations and surroundings have been emptied of significance. The immediate has become unreal. You recoil from it. You treat it with contempt. The immediate is an encumbrance you must shed so you can focus on the real issues of the day, which are whatever it is that agitates the social media mobs. Social media immerses you in the imaginary. You regress into the hysteria of identification. (All talk about what you identify as is just that, hysteria. In a sane society, you are what you do, i.e. what makes you useful to others, not what you hallucinate.)
Once your contact with the immediate is broken, your craving for the mediated intensifies exponentially. People talk about porn addiction. But addiction to porn is merely the most garish form of addiction to media. Porn is the ultimate form of hysterical sexuality, where imaginary relations have completely displaced actual social intercourse. But the idolatry of the imaginary (and the corresponding devalorization of the immediate) is the essence of media spectacle in general. Mass media is mass onanism. Everybody on social media is jerking off.
Media critique, an obsessive academic practice, does not address this problem. It amplifies it, adding chatter to chatter.
To regain any kind of autonomy and respect for your own authentic way of being in the world, a radical disengagement from media is necessary. You have to impose a strict purge. Meditation helps. It makes you aware of how much foam there is in your head, how much of what you think of as self is a tissue of knee-jerk responses to media provocations. Taking a “position” on every media-fabricated event is how you condemn yourself to a lifetime of impotence.
I’m not interested in the manic pursuit of (pseudo)novel form. For me it is enough that something—even something that started as an infatuation—turns into a trend to become gross and despicable. The mania for novelty subsumes great deal of what passes for contemporary art into an abject sub-genre of crass consumerism pandering to the vapid appetites of hedge fund managers.
Beauty is not the same thing as eye candy.
For the relatively brief period when abstraction cast a spell, it was because it expressed a desire for transcendence. A desacralized abstraction is of no interest to me. For eye candy, you’re better off going to the mall.
I’m interested in poetic form, form anchored in a symbolic universe. Ideally, it should be form that in some way, perhaps in a very subtle way, engages with traditional forms.
I am drawn to repetition, but repetition can mean different things in different contexts. In Warhol it means banality. The repetition that interests me is the repetition found in rhythm, song, and prayer.
I discovered poetry through the Surrealist poets and their idea of the marvelous. Nowadays I’m more at home reading Cavafy. In any case, the thing that I discovered in poetry is the magic of words. We use words all the time. They are a debased currency. But in poetry (and song) words become mystical incantations. They produce vibrations that transport the soul to heaven.
Duccio di Buoninsegnia, The Temptation of Christ on the Mountain, 1308-11
[René] Guenon notes that philosophy is the love of wisdom. As such it is “a preliminary and preparatory stage, a step as it were in the direction of wisdom.” It is not wisdom itself. “The perversion that ensued consisted in taking this transitional stage for an end in itself and in seeking to substitute ‘philosophy’ for wisdom, a process which implied forgetting or ignoring the true nature of the latter.”
Guenon’s objection is not to philosophy per se, but to a philosophy denuded of esoteric content. At the heart of Plato’s philosophy is the Form of the Good – God, the Source. The Form of the Good is clearly the object of mystical revelation and it gives all reality a divine quality. Thus, reality is being generated by God and it shares in God’s divine nature. Wisdom must be grounded in reality. Rational philosophical reflection must be centered around the real. If the divine is absented from philosophical speculation, then a vacuum is created. This vacuum can only be filled with malignant creations of the human imagination. They will be malignant because false and misleading – “a pretended wisdom that [is] purely human and therefore entirely of the rational order.” Reality is “true, traditional, supra-rational.”
Another and popular alternative is to take a fragment of the true Good and to represent it as the whole. A single virtue, like compassion, agape, becomes an evil monstrosity by shoving out of view all other excellences. Compassion is acceptance, but true love includes Eros, the push to develop, to gain wisdom, to seek salvation. For that, effort is required. If agape is lacking eros, compassion is lost because truly caring for someone and wishing that person the best means to care about his development. In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis reserves the word “ideology” for the practice of taking a fragment of the Tao and enlarging it in this way, to the exclusion of all other considerations. Hence, communism is an ideology but the Christian religion is not. Liberal opponents of this view tend to try to apply the label “ideology” to religion but in doing this, they miss the point. They want to claim that religion is an ideology like any other. The advantage of the fragment-enlarging technique for the ideologue is that he appears to have a hold of the truth. However, a partial truth becomes a big lie in this context.
Plato, on the other hand, is no ideologue. He examines the role of different aspects of the Good in different dialogs. His devotion is to The Form of the Good and this Form is supra-rational and not something that can be fully explicated rationally. It is not the product of mind and rationality. In fact, it produces the lower levels of mind, soul and body. . . .
Plato never doubts The Form of the Good, but he sometimes wonders about his ability to write sensibly and well about it. He is aware of the limitations of discourse and never considers it a substitute for mystical experience. Hence, he narrates a story, a “myth,” like the Timaeus, and in contexts like that he sometimes writes “something like this must be true.” Plato also appears to worry in the Meno that virtue may be unteachable and not fully definable. The character of Socrates suggests that it is better to try to do so, than to give up. In being self-aware about the distance between exoteric and the esoteric, Plato’s philosophy has the quality of a parable in the manner of Jesus, Christ’s way of communicating with the uninitiated.
Thus, the core of Plato’s philosophy is a religious experience. He worries that in writing about it he may misrepresent it and makes the reader aware of his misgivings and the approximate and provisional nature of all attempts to describe and explicate this religious core. This means all Plato’s writings, like all good philosophy, are theology. Platonic exoteric philosophy forever circles round the supra-rational. The Phaedrus and the Symposium have a quality of glorifying the divine and are also inspirational.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is a useful starting point for all attempts to understand Platonic philosophy. Everything Plato writes presupposes such a vision of reality. Plato has a place for rationality, but he at no point tries to deduce morality from merely rational considerations. The love of goodness and justness that is visible in the character of Socrates in The Gorgias is of a piece with Plato’s raptures expressed in describing the experience of the Form of the Good in Book VII of The Republic. The moral faith and beauty of Socrates in this dialog is inspiring, in stark contrast with the evil and self-serving nature of Gorgias, Polus and Callicles; with each interlocutor becoming progressively more brazenly horrible. In dialogs like this one, Socrates becomes a vehicle for the Form of the Good and the divine light shines through him, making him the most admirable of men for Plato.
Real philosophy is the explication of the supra-rational. What is the goal of life, having been projected into a physical universe by an ineffable Source? Socrates the man wanted to forget about the origins of the universe and focus on ethics. However, Plato saw that ethics without an appreciation of the divine origins of life is meaningless and a hopeless task. God is the alpha and the omega; the origin and destination. Rationalism, on the other hand, loses its way.
When what were formerly existentially significant modes of being in the world are reduced to “lifestyles,” then a postmodern diversity does indeed become possible. For then everything can coexist with everything without generating conflict or tension in the same way that the corpses of men who were enemies in life can happily coexist in a cemetery.
Rauschenberg’s Combines embody this enervated diversity of used-up dead things. If we could all play dead, we would be able to get along as fabulously as the stuffed goat and the tire.
What Nietzsche called the death of God resembles what Mircea Eliade described as the recession of a once actively present god into a distant and indifferent one, a deus otiosus. In polytheistic cultures, the typical remedy for this development was to supplement the Great Father with lower and, therefore, more supplicable specialized deities and demiurges. Monotheistic Europeans did not have this option, so those who craved numinous contact, not least artists, responded either by seeking out and reclaiming the residues of earlier forms of Christian piety or by appropriating what they thought were the more magically potent gods of the recently colonized “primitives.” Gauguin did both, first by going to a corner of Brittany still steeped in medieval belief and color and then on to a Tahiti haunted by pre-Christian deities and spirits.
The current overly moralistic, priggish assessment of primitivism cannot erase the fact that it gave access to what was probably the last store of vitality in a moribund European civilization poisoned and degraded by the very modernity it had brought into being. It restored to European art a visionary capability that yielded fresh visions of heaven and hell, which are the two sides of ecstasy. And in so doing, it briefly gave back to art its highest purpose, which has always been and always will be to give symbolic form to what cannot be adequately encompassed by physical form.
George Grosz, The Funeral (Dedicated to Oskar Panizza), 1917-18
Andy Warhol, Orange Car Crash (5 Deaths 11 Times in Orange) (Orange Disaster), 1963
It is as a further result of his ability to travel in the supernatural worlds and to see the superhuman beings (gods, demons, spirits of the dead, etc.) that the shaman has been able to contribute decisively to the knowledge of death. In all probability many features of “funerary geography,” as well as some themes of the mythology of death, are the result of the ecstatic experiences of shamans. The lands that the shaman sees and the personages that he meets during his ecstatic journeys in the beyond are minutely described by the shaman himself, during or after his trance. The unknown and terrifying world of death assumes form, is organized in accordance with particular patterns; finally it displays a structure and, in course of time, becomes familiar and acceptable. In turn, the supernatural inhabitants of the world of death become visible; they show a form, display a personality, even a biography. Little by little the world of the dead becomes knowable, and death itself is evaluated primarily as a rite of passage to a spiritual mode of being. In the last analysis, the accounts of the shamans’ ecstatic journeys contribute to “spiritualizing” the world of the dead, at the same time that they enrich it with wondrous forms and figures.
—Mircea Eliade, Shamanism
In Warhol’s Disaster series, we encounter the radical de-spiritualization of death. The flat orange background showing through the transparent photographic reproductions arrests attention on the surface: the painting is formally and connotatively shallow. Repetition transforms the image into visual noise. The combination of black and burnt orange make it one the handsomest Disasters Warhol produced.
Warhol’s work conveys the profanation of the world by reproducing reproduction. This device has long since become a cliché and later appropriations, including Warhol’s own, are sterile iterations of an exhausted trope that stretch ironic depthlessness well-beyond its filmic range (which Duchamp had declared to be “infrathin”). That moment when art could put a frame around the banal came and went very quickly. It didn’t really last beyond the ’60s. What we start seeing emerging in the ’70s is what is in full effect today: the effort to re-moralize art by making it a platform for suburban liberal pieties, which has inexorably reduced contemporary art to the performative dimensions of a Twitter post.
Because we are immersed in the profane and cannot escape it, the only way to gain distance from it is to will it, momentarily indulging the illusion of authoring it.
In primitive man as in all human beings the desire to enter into contact wi!h the sacred is counteracted by the fear of being obliged to renounce the simple human condition and become a more or less pliant instrument for some manifestation of the sacred (gods, spirits, ancestors, etc.).
—Mircea Eliade, Shamanism
This is why every authentic prophet is a reluctant one.
Althusser does not know of this type of “interpellation,” because as a materialist he is preoccupied exclusively with material entities and material effects. The beyond of the material, the metaphysical, is to him foreclosed and his world is circumscribed by authority, ideology, and subjugation.
And yet, in so many instances where authority has been challenged, the conviction and strength that sustained the challenge have come from belief in a higher, unworldly authority. Ordinary mortals become superhuman because they are drawn to something that is immaterial, to something that is not of this world and to which they feel a greater loyalty than to the powers that rule this world. So it is that in answering Jesus’ call, St. Matthew begins a journey to martyrdom (depicted by Caravaggio on the wall of the Contarelli Chapel opposite The Calling),which he incurs because he dares to rebuke a king.
One of the most tenacious of the typically modern prejudices is the one that sets itself up against the impersonal and objective rules of an art, for fear that they should stifle creative genius. In reality no work exists that is traditional, and therefore “bound” by changeless principles, which does not give sensible expression to a certain creative joy of the soul; whereas modem individualism has produced, apart from a few works of genius which are nevertheless spiritually barren, all the ugliness—the endless and despairing ugliness—of the forms which permeate the “ordinary life” of our times.
“Initiation usually comprises a threefold revelation of the sacred, of death, and of sexuality.” (Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane)The initiate emerges from the initiating mysteries as one who knows.
The symbolism of death and (re)birth figures prominently in these mysteries. The initiatory ordeals impress upon initiates the import of coming to age and gaining admission into a society of recognized adults. The painful ordeals make the passage an indelible experience but also convey the existential weight of the secret knowledge that is revealed to the initiate. Knowledge of what is vital is knowledge of pain but also knowledge of the ability to surmount pain and deprivation. Thus the initiate gains both self-confidence and pride in tribal fellowship. The necessary subjugation that forges fully formed subjects is not left to chance.
In a desacralized society, the symbolism of death and birth is unavailable, as is symbolism in general, and rites of passage no longer exist. This leaves each individual to “choose” his or her own identity, now extended to the right of each individual to declare their gender identity. Because these identities are self-conferred with no travail they carry little weight and are as easily cast off as they are put on. Under these circumstances, identity never amounts to anything more than an attitude and one never attains the position of one who knows. One remains a perpetual infant, not to say an embryo, arrested in a lifelong condition of insecure identity, anxiety, and bewilderment. The young are formally enjoined to “grow up” but they are immersed in a disorder that they do not have the means to escape. Their “rights” confine them for a lifetime in a larval stage of boundless but never realized potential.
Religious man conquers the fear of death and acquires the ability to live fully and authentically by assigning death the symbolic meaning of passage: initiation kills the profane and unformed man, who is then reborn as consecrated man, free from the fear of death and, therefore, enabled to live a noble life. Uninitiated, irreligious man shrinks from death and is, therefore, condemned to live a cowardly, compromised, senseless half-life.
This has bearing on why the West is at war with itself and takes pride in demolishing its own traditions, canons, and monuments. A desacralized and diminished civilization cannot tolerate the memory of its sacred origin. The legacy of the past becomes an embarrassing encumbrance putting to shame the spiritual poverty of the present. But the willful erasure of the past does not prevent it from haunting the present. The sacred persists as a haunting, as the always possible undoing of “progress.”
Master of the Osservanza, Saint Anthony Abbot Tempted by the Devil in the Guise of a Woman, c. 1440
Most of the art-historical literature from the 20th century that addresses Italian Renaissance painting follows a much earlier tradition according little respect to the early schools. Many writers still perpetuate the hierarchical construction of artistic development during the Renaissance that Giorgio Vasari expounded in his Lives of the Artists (1550 and 1568), which was the most influential discussion of the history of Italian Renaissance art. In the three prefaces that frame the chronological sequence of the lives of the great Italian artists, Vasari presented a view of the progressive development of art that appears remarkably biased in hindsight. As Erwin Panofsky explained in an essay of 1930, Vasari reestablished the supremacy of the classical style during the High Renaissance by tracing its emergence from a constructed antithesis: the primitive Gothic past. Vasari outlines a model of artistic progress through quasi-biological cycles of development and renewal. He draws on the idea often expressed by classical historigraphers that the evolution of a state or culture corresponds to the ages of man. There was the cycle of ancient times that reached its peak in the Golden Age of classical Rome, after which art declined and then virtually disappeared during the darkness of the early Middle Ages. But then, as the Renaissance gradually dawned, a second cycle began. According to Vasari, the cycle of the Renaissance developed toward its zenith in three stages or ages, compared metaphorically with infancy and childhood, adolescence, and adulthood or maturity.
The first age, or childhood, began with the appearance in the late 13th century in Tuscany of talented artists including Cimabue and, most significantly, Giotto. Vasari describes these childlike artists as eventually “weaned” and brought up beyond the stage of infancy. Through increased study of nature, the arts then climbed to a second age, or adolescence, in the 15th century, exemplified by Masaccio and Donatello. Finally, by turning not only to nature but also to the ancients, and by striving not just to equal but to surpass them both, the arts arrived at a second Golden Age during the early 16th century in Florence and Rome. Vasari believed that absolute perfection was embodied in the art of the divine Michelangelo, and to a lesser degree in Leonardo and Raphael.
This construction of the development of Italian Renaissance art continues to hold sway. It reached us with the help of Heinrich Wölfflin’s often-reprinted Die Klassische Kunst or Classic Art of 1899 and 1903, in which Vasari’s concept of artistic progress is given fuller stylistic description and also associated with notions of class. For example, Wölfflin conceives of the transition from 15th-century to High Renaissance painting as a movement from “a bourgeois art” to “an aristocratic one.” Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Birth of St. John the Baptist of 1485, in Sta. Maria Novella in Florence, presents fussily detailed settings with many overtly gesturing figures in a manner suited to “middle-class” tastes. By contrast, Andrea del Sarto’s Birth of the Virgin of 1514, in the forecourt of SS. Annunziata in Florence, is noble, elevated, dignified, and “aristocratic”. Like Vasari, Wölfflin glorifies the High Renaissance by denigrating that which came before.
The early Italian artists of the late 13th and 14th centuries were, accordingly, often seen to be lower class. In fact, Vasari’s metaphor of childhood was translated into a conception of these artists as simplistic and, therefore, primitive. As the enduring label i primitivi suggests, they were associated with a complex mixture of other “primitive” artists from as yet infantile or uncivilized, typically non-Western cultures. In turn, the childlike simplicity seen in their art could be interpreted negatively, as reflecting an ignorance of learned conventions and, therefore, as naïve and rude, although in some instances the freedom from learned conventions was viewed more positively as unaffectedly truthful and unconsciously expressive. Several decades before Wölfflin’s discussion of High Renaissance style, Charles Eastlake, then director of the National Gallery of London, explained, in this negatively charged way, the inclusion of some very early Tuscan panels as part of a larger purchase of paintings from the Lombardi-Baldi Collection:
The unsightly specimens of Margaritone and the earliest Tuscan painters were selected solely for their historical importance, and as showing the rude beginnings from which, through nearly two centuries and a half, Italian art slowly advanced to the period of Raphael and his contemporaries.
Even the members of mid-19th-century purist movements essentially followed Vasari’s model, though they assessed the simplicity of the early Italian painters quite positively. Tommaso Minardi, the most active Italian advocate of purism, elevated Giotto’s art—believing the Assisi frescoes to be by Giotto—because of the natural simplicity and intensity of expression. He was then compelled to heap even greater praise on the artists of “the period of highest rewards, the period of perfection”.
Painters from various centers in Italy, working in the period ca. 1180–1400 or even later, were known collectively as the “primitives” as late as the 1970s; this fact reveals much about prevailing attitudes toward early Italian art. The label “primitive,” with its dual associations of “rude” and “unconsciously natural,” set the early schools apart as different and less polished than “classic” artists. But the implicit contrast was there: these distinctive, rare, and often exquisitely crafted paintings, instead of being appreciated on their own terms, were devalued through a historical comparison with the muscular superrealism of Michelangelo or the robust idealized figures and soft landscapes of Raphael. Vasari’s notions of High Renaissance classicism, subsequently elaborated upon in the definition of “fine art” within the French academic tradition, formed the enduring touchstone of artistic perfection against which early Italian painting was measured and was consequently found lacking. Indeed, the post-World War II literature continues the currency of expressions such as “the dawn of Italian painting,” thus perpetuating the belief that these works represent the earliest stages in the artistic evolution that produced the high noon of the High Renaissance. Alistair Smart chose that image of the dawn for the title of his early Italian survey, first published in 1978, and elaborated on the analogy in his poetic introduction:
The glow of dawn leads on to the blaze of noon, but its quality is quite distinct. And if the full light of Renaissance painting can be likened to a noonday amenable to the objective scrutiny of the natural world, the rise of the early Italian Schools suggests, rather, a slow dawn whose spreading light, while gradually revealing the forms of things, retains its mystery.
Although Smart celebrates what he sees as the distinctly mysterious or otherworldly quality of early Italian painting, the metaphor of the rising sun betrays his acceptance of Vasari’s paradigm.
Or why it is not because they lack technical facility that the painters of medieval icons appear uninterested in getting perspective “right.” Rather because like all artists whose concern is with “noumenal” (as opposed to phenomenal) space, they want to force a visual rupture with mimetic representation.
Semantically important gestures and objects, as a rule, are presented in close-up shots, a departure from the laws of linear perspective. This may be seen in the Archangel Gabriel’s gesture of blessing in icons of the Annunciation, or images of the scroll St John of Damascus holds in medieval Russian O Tebe raduyetsya [In You Rejoices] icons, with the opening words of the hymn in honour of the Mother of God. This emphasis shows that the text of the song composed by St John of Damascus was at the very heart of the icon’s composition. The same may be said of depictions of the outer clothing (the “mantle”) which the prophet Elijah leaves to his disciple Elisha on icons of the Ognennoye vozneseniye Ilyi Proroka [Fiery Ascent of the Prophet Elijah]. The materiality and the miraculous power of the “mantle” turns it into the central device of the composition, uniting heaven and earth.
The Fiery Ascent of the Prophet Elijah (16th century), State Historical Museum, Moscow
[Pavel] Florenskii also linked the absence of shadows in the artistic space of the icon with the system of reverse perspective: “The absence of a definite focus of light, the contradictory nature of illumination in different places of the icon, the effort to bring forward masses which should have been overshadowed–yet again, this is neither coincidence nor a blunder by a naive craftsman, but artistic calculation, which imparts maximum artistic expressiveness.” Florenskii clearly follows Plato and his symbol of the Cave in the determination of people’s knowledge, since, in his works, light and shade acquire gnoseological meaning in the context of the metaphysics of reverse perspective. Platonic Ideas are “shadows,” “the negative of things,” “intaglio experiences;” a turn towards the light is a transition to a new level of cognition, and symbolizes our drawing closer to the truth. From any viewpoint, therefore, iconic images exclude shadow; when perceiving inscriptions, figures, architecture and landscape depicted on the icon, a turn (which also suggests a mobile gaze) may well convey gnoseological meaning. The icon is a transfigured reality, which knows no shadow.
