Ancient viewing and modern art history - article ; n°1 ; vol.13, pg 417-437

Jas Elsner

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Mètis. Anthropologie des mondes grecs anciens - Année 1998 - Volume 13 - Numéro 1 - Pages 417-437
Ancient Viewing and Modem Art History (pp. 4 17-437)
Le présent article examine s'il existe, chez les écrivains grecs du monde romain, une connaissance historique de l'art qui s'intéresse à la définition du style artistique. Il porte en particulier sur Pausanias, pour les notions de «mains» individuelles et pour quelques cas d'identifications d'artistes; et sur Lucien, pour les idées de styles ethnique et/ou régional. Ces deux théories du style sont très répandues dans l'histoire moderne de l'art, et le présent article tente de comparer la pratique moderne avec ces antécédents greco-romains.
21 pages
Source : Persée ; Ministère de la jeunesse, de l’éducation nationale et de la recherche, Direction de l’enseignement supérieur, Sous-direction des bibliothèques et de la documentation.

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• Publié par: DIALOGUES_D-HISTOIRE_ANCIENNE
• Publié le: 01 janvier 1998
• Nombre de lectures: 16
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

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Jas Elsner
Ancient viewing and modern art history
In: Mètis. Anthropologie des mondes grecs anciens. Volume 13, 1998. pp. 417-437.
Résumé
Ancient Viewing and Modem Art History (pp. 4 17-437)
Le présent article examine s'il existe, chez les écrivains grecs du monde romain, une connaissance historique de l'art qui
s'intéresse à la définition du style artistique. Il porte en particulier sur Pausanias, pour les notions de «mains» individuelles et
pour quelques cas d'identifications d'artistes; et sur Lucien, pour les idées de styles ethnique et/ou régional. Ces deux théories du
style sont très répandues dans l'histoire moderne de l'art, et le présent article tente de comparer la pratique moderne avec ces
antécédents greco-romains.
Citer ce document / Cite this document :
Elsner Jas. Ancient viewing and modern art history. In: Mètis. Anthropologie des mondes grecs anciens. Volume 13, 1998. pp.
417-437.
doi : 10.3406/metis.1998.1091
http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/metis_1105-2201_1998_num_13_1_1091ANCIENT VlEWING AND MODERN ART HlSTORY
Let me begin with a famous beginning. That classic manual of formalist art-
historical analysis, The Principles of Art History- subtitled The Problem of
the Development of Style in Later Art - published in 1915 by the great Swiss
art historian, Heinrich Wôlfflin (1864-1945), opens like this':
«Ludwig Richter [the Dresden painter and iliustrator who lived from 1803
to 1884], relates in his réminiscences how once, when he was in Tivoli as a
young man, he and three friends set out to paint part of the landscape, ail
four firmly resolved not to deviate from nature by one hair's-breadth; and
although the subject was the same, and each quite creditably produced what
his eyes had seen, the resuit was four totally différent pictures, as différent
from each other as the personalities of the four painters».
Richter and Wôlfflin would certainly agrée with the greatest of ail
connoisseurs of antique art, Sir John Beazley, the master-scholar of Attic
vases, when he wrote2
«I was brought up to think of 'style' as a sacred thing, as the man himself».
This notion - that individual artists, or the period in which they worked, or
the particular place and context of that work, can somehow be inferred from
looking with acute détail at the spécifie stylistic features of a painting or a
1. H. Wôlfflin, Principles of Style Art History: The Problem of the Development of
Style in Later Art, New York, 1950 (originally published in German in 1915 as
Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren
Kunst), p. 1, translatée! by M. D. Hottinger. On Wôlfflin, see for example, E. H.
Gombrich, «Critical Priorities in Wôlfflin», in Norm and Form, London, 1966, pp. 89-98;
M. Podro, The Critical Historians ofArt, New Haven, 1982, pp. 98-151; J. Hart, R. Recht,
M. Warnke, Relire Wôlfflin, Paris, 1993.
2. J.D. Beazley, Attic Black-Figure Vases, Oxford, 1956, p. x, with the discussion of R.
Neer, «Beazley and the Language of Connoisseurship», Hephaistos, 15, 1997, pp. 7-30,
esp. pp. 23-4. 418 JASELSNER
sculpture - is the foundation of style art history. However, turning to avant-
garde images produced at the very time when Wolfflin was composing his
Principles of Art History, one wonders how easy it really is (even for a very
well-trained eye) to tell the Cubist Picasso from the Cubist Braque, even
when they were not sharing similar subject-matter, like Richter and his
friends at Tivoli. Had Wolfflin looked with any care at the art of his time
rather than back towards the great tradition flowing up to and through
Ludwig Richter, perhaps he would not hâve written his masterpiece.
Given the dominance of style art history over the various methods and
approaches to art-historical study in the first three quarters of this century,
alongside its associated techniques of connoisseurship and formai analysis, it
is more than just surprising - perhaps even shocking - to find a virtually
complète rejection of this method in the last two décades of the twentieth
century3. In 1986, the angry young men and women of the field (at least in
its Anglo-American incarnation) could pen this assault on the Wolfflin
tradition4:
«In discrediting the old art history, words like connoisseurship, quality,
style and genius hâve become taboo, utterable by the new art historians only
with scorn or mirth».
Only a décade later, the mockery had been replaced by silence. In a
generally excellent collection of Critical Tenus for Art History (edited by
Rob Nelson and Richard Schiff in 1996) hardly a single one of the traditional
terms of the discipline - neither «style» nor «form», for example, nor even
«the artist» - appears in the index, let alone in the table of contents5. 1 guess
3. Of course, the literature on style is vast. I hâve found the following interrogations
particularly useful: M. Schapiro, «Style» (first published 1953) in Theory and Philosophy
ofArt: Style, Artist, Society, New York, 1994, pp. 51-102; E. H. Gombrich, «Style», in D.
Suis (éd.), Encyclopaedia ofthe Social Sciences, New York, 1968, vol. 15, pp. 352-61; W.
Sauerlânder, «From Stilus to Style: Reflections on the Fate of a Notion», Art History, 6,
1983, pp. 253-70; D. Summers, «"Form", Nineteenth Century Metaphysics, and the
Problem of Art Historical Description», Critical Inquiry, 15, 1989, pp. 372-406; W. Davis,
«Style and History in Art History», in M. Conkey and C. A. Hastorf (eds.), The Uses of
Style in Archaeology, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 18-31; I. Lavin (éd.), E. Panofsky, Three
Essays on Styie, Cambridge, Mass., 1995 (the first two originally written in the 193O's, the
third in 1962); also the collections of essays in B. Lang, (éd.) The Concept of Styie,
Philadelphia, 1979 and C. Van Eck, J. McAlIister and R. Van de Vall (eds.), The Question
of Styie in Philosophy and the Arts, Cambridge, 1995. Brief versions of the Schapiro,
Gombrich and Summers pièces appear in D. Preziosi (éd.), the Art of Art History: A
Critical Anthology, Oxford, 1998, pp. 109-63, with a commentary.
4. A. Rees and F. Borzello (eds.), The New Art History, London, 1986, p. 4.
5. R. S. Nelson and R. Schiff (eds.), Critical Terms for Art History, Chicago, 1996. ANC1ENT VIEWING AND MODERN ART HISTORY 419
that after assaulting his father, Oedipus buried the corpse and forgot ail about
it.
I certainly do not want hère to get involved in a bitter methodological
polemic about how art history should be done. But, at the risk of disinterring
a few corpses, I would like to go back - beyond the soon-to-be virtually
forgotten art history practised by our fathers - to its origins. I look back not
to our fathers, but their fathers' fathers, to an antiquity which is not just
before the practice of scientific art history, as we usually understand it, but
even before the invention of art itself (at least in the influential formulation
recently presented by Hans Belting, with which I disagree!6). In disinterring
the corpses of such second-century A.D. enthusiasts for the Visual arts as the
Greek-speaking travel-writer Pausanias, or the Syrian-born Greek-language
essayist Lucian, and in bringing them a little to life through their writings, I
hope their voices will cause us to reflect a little.
First, the process of forgetting is hardly new. Just as we are now busy
creating a politically correct modem art history by forgetting the Wolfflins
lying in our past, so Winckelmann, Wolfflin et al. were themselves capable
of forgetting a much earlier but no less impressive historical moment of
intense personal and scholarly sensitivity to artistic and cultural styles in the
pre-modern world. Second, «style art history» itself is not just a modem
development from the conjunction of post-Renaissance amateur connois-
seurship with the combination of nineteenth-century positivism and the
discovery of photographie technology. Rather, its essential intellectual
moves - great and deep knowledge of objects, an interest in artists, dates
and provenances, and the acute intuition that allows an art historian to place
two or more objects together in a convincing way, which may never hâve
been seen to go together before - thèse moves far antedate both art and art
history as we know them in the post-Renaissance era. The subject of this
essay is what ancient Greeks and Romans knew about artistic style and
iconography, and how we might learn something from that knowledge.
Our most vivid, detailed and accurate witness for the art and architecture
of Greece in the Roman era - most of it lost now, of course - is the second-
century writer Pausanias. A native Greek-speaker, he was born in Lydia in
Asia Minor, and seems to hâve travelled in remarkably painstaking and
6. H. Belting, Likeness and Présence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art,
Chicago, 1994. My disa