Painting and social history
Basil Taylor
Goya: The Third of May 1808 Hugh Thomas (Allen Lane £1,95) David: Brutus Robert L. Herbert (Allen Lane £2.25) Van Dyck: Charles I on Horseback Roy Strong (Allen Lane £1.95) Turner: Rain, Steam and Speed John Gage (Allen Lane £1.95)
Piero della Francesca: The Flagellation Madeleine A. Lavin (Allen Lane E1.95) We are told that more scientific research has been carried out in the last twenty years than in all the previous ages. The same can be said of art history, due not to any sensational advance in underStanding or in the appetite for knowledge, but to a growth in academic manpower — and some apt innovations in the technology of research. Because art history, as an American scholar William Ivins has said, is the study of art in its absence, the knowledge which these small studies deploy, like the progress of the subject in general, has been largely a yield of the camera. More recently it has been assisted by new retrieval systems, simple and sophisticated, which include the jet aircraft and the photocopier. The books themselves are a product not merely of improved techniques in printed reproduction, but of a late recognition, which might one day influence the language of art historical communication, that it is possible to organise words and pictorial images in an expressive partnership — provided the words are exact and eloquent. I can think of no better place for the general reader, whatever his experience of painting, to discover what art history is about than this generally rewarding, if most uneven, series.
The idea of books devoted each to a single work was sown, I suggest, in the vestibule of the National Gallery in 1944, when a 'Picture of the Month' was brought from store. The ideal was projected further soon afterwards in a soft-back series called Gallery Books and, in publishing and film, radio and television, the concept has been in flight ever since. The concept rests upon two assumptions: that, contrary to the opinion of a lady who wrote defiantly to the Times last year saying that pictures need no explanation, our feeling for them can be fortified by knowledge; and that pictures and sculptures are evasive entities, slipping too easily from the grasp of perception and apprehension. Looking is difficult and there, indeed, is the hub of the art historical problem. Scholarship in the humanities is rooted in the verbal text where meaning resides. Academic accomplishment has been measured by the scholar's power to establish an authentic text, to refine and interpret it, to catch its historical resonance and to establish the place of a particular body of vocables, verbal images and ideas within the context of language, literature and thought. The disciplines of scholarship have been tested through the translation of word into word. In the visual arts, as in music, the ' text ' is something else; the basic apprehension of it, by comparison with the study of a writing, is never less than an exercise of logistics; its subsequent comprehension demands a talent for visual discrimination, as well as a sense of art ' which will distinguish the art-historian from the historian of another no less respectable kind, wearing a skin permanently rented from the Courtauld or the Fogg.
These books severely test their authors' 'sense of art '. The presence of the work is inescapable and the reader is entitled to ask how expressively it has been realised, recreated—not only so as to amplify the experience provided by the plates, which in these volumes reach an acceptable standard., but so as to implant the identity of the painting within the text in order that it may inhabit and activate the historical context. As the editors of this
project properly insist, art history is an eclectic pursuit, and the ultimate act of historical recreation must be a process of synthesis. The choice of Professor Hugh Thomas to write about so powerful a product of the painter's art and imagination as Goya's 'Execution of the Third of ' May 1808' was, on the evidence of his essay, unduly risky. He is an eminent historian of modern Europe, a specialist in Spanish affairs, and as such certainly has the competence to connect the iconography of the picture with events of the Peninsular war. He does this efficiently in terms of the .uniforms, architecture and so on, and has the technical experience intelligently to use the existing Goya literature to give weight to his own studies and observations. But the work is only palely present, and the extraordinary artist who created it is left loitering in the margins of history,
Professor Herbert's subject comes out of the same revolutionary era, is difficult and austere and is most excellently handled. David's ' Brutus ' was started in 1788. Its subject was Lucius Junus Brutus, the nephew of Tarquin the Proud, last King of Rome. Having defeated his uncle and established the first Roman Republic, he executed his two sons when they became involved in a counter-conspiracy against the state. In the early years of the Revolution, and most effectively in 1793-4, Brutus was the most inspirational patron of the new spirit, the embodiment of a stern, duteous and, when necessary, ruthless realpolitik and ideological constancy. It was under the auspices of Brutus that David presented to his colleagues an ideal of the painter as a man guided by the torch of reason, seeking an art which would be as impressive as natural reality. Those qualities of pictorial invention and psychological insight which give this sombre work its philosophical weight and moral eloquence are recreated and analysed by Professor Herbert with an excellent sensitivity and precision, so that David's place within the revolutionary ambience, and his contribution to its imagery, is most thoroughly exposed.
Dr Roy Strong's loosely composed essay on Van Dyck's equestrian portait of Charles I in the National Gallery is a disappointment. Like Professor Thomas, if for different reasons, he fails to bring the picture into the heart of the matter. He is always responsive, as his direction of the National Portrait Gallery proves, to the spirit of an age, and he has gathered some suggestive material about the intellectual and artistic diversions of the Stuart Court and aristocracy and on the theory and imagery of kingship. There is much, too, about the subsequent tradition of the ' melancholy king ' to which the Van Dyck portraits became attached: but neither the pictorial nor the physiognomical evidence which lies within these pictures, nor indeed the development of Charles's personality and the oppressive influences which bore upon it, are examined, with respect to what are certainly the most vibrantly expressive images of an English king. This equestrian portrait and its companions were commissioned by one of the most perceptive and acquisitive connoisseurs in the history. of European taste, a patron devoted to Titian especially and Lo Venetian painting in general, and furnished by a distinguished artist who shared his patron's tastes. There can have been few encounters between sitter and portraitist, vulnerable master and magisterial servant in which the protagonists shared so responsively a feeling for the sensuous and evocative qualities of painting. That central relationship is absent from the book.
A problem of method which this publishing concept imposes upon writers is to move, within such a small compass, illuminatingly from the particular to the general. Dr Gage, in his treatment of Turner's 'Rain, Steam and Speed ', leaves a number of lines unsecured. He establishes the context of the early railway period and the artist's involvement with it quite clearly, but, in presenting the picture as the culmination of Turner's indebtedness to Rembrandt, he hils to reach deeply enough into the artistic implications of that relationship. At the beginning of his second section he plants the following suggestion ". . in his ensleavour to redeem his subject from any suggestion of ambiguity, Turner drew on a tyoe of symbolic imagery that is essentially Baroque.". Even if ' Baroque ' were not by now as blunted a terminology as ' Romantic ', this is an idea which demands a full explication and does not receive it. It is not surprising, then, that the most expressive and intellectually gripping of these essays is the one in which evidence and interpretation are most n-ecisely organised and displayed. Mrs Lavin's study of the Piero della Francesca Flagel'ation ' at Urbino, as befits this exquisite masterpiece, is a model of lucid and precise exposition as well as being an e-cciting exercise of scholarship. Informed with the intellectual rigour of Scholastic exegesis, it deserves to be placed with the classic read ings of fifteenth and sixteenth century works by Erwin Panofsky and Edgar Wind.
What is the significance of this mysterious meeting of two worlds, within so elegant and poetic a perspective? Who are the actors in this silent drama? Mrs Lavin's solution, wholly convincing and commandingly argued, is that this is an allegorised portrait of two bereaved men Ludovico Gonzaga and Ottaviano Ubaldini. The youth who stands between them symbolises the young men whom they have lost, son and foster son, while the representation of the flagEllated Christ, with the symbols associated with it, sheds the light of divine consolation upon them. I hope that Mrs Lavin's essay will be an example to subsequent contributors to this promising series.
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