Starting to rethink

In a 1906 edition of "Punch" there's a cartoon of an old man with an injured foot sitting in a chair.  He explains to the vicar's wife how he passes the time: "Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits."  Thinking is like that.  If you set out to have a "thinking" session the chances are you won't come up with anything,  Of course, if you're trying to solve a particular problem you may well be able to concentrate and find a particular, peculiar solution.  But to think - in the abstract, unfettered - you'll probably end up wondering whether you should have that coffee yet, or where that list of things to do (that you wrote yesterday) has got to.

So most times when I set out to think about what Art is (and isn't) I either end up with a couple of trite truisms before drifting off to think about something else, or I find myself thinking how much I despise Tracey Emin, or Nick Serota, or . . . . insert your own pet hate; you know what I'm getting at.

Recently I've tried to change tack and go back to basics; to work forwards from a basic, incontravertible position.  What was Art for in the millenia before Fox-Talbot, the Daguereotype, and photography generally?  What did the artists think they were doing?  What did the patrons think they were paying for?  And what do we think those Artists achieved?  On the surface these are easy questions to answer.  But when you try to put together what they felt then, and what we feel now, you run up against a problem.  To illustrate what I mean, consider a piece of devotional Art.  This is Fra Angelico's "Annunciation" from around 1440:

What's happening here?  Well, the Angel of the Lord has appeared to tell the virgin Mary that she's going to bear a baby who is the son of God.  Mary is struck dumb, apparently, as who wouldn't be?  Apart from everything else, the Angel is in awe of her, and is bending the knee . . . to a humble carpenter's wife!  Amazing.  The poor people who saw this painting would never have seen anything so lifelike.   

These days we are struck by the painter's astounding competence and ability given the context of the times.  The painting doesn't carry the spiritual, emotional weight it did five and a half centuies ago.  We admire the technical skill of the Artist; his contemporaries wouldn't think like that.  They were having the story of the Annunciation made flesh in their own village church - or as near as could be.  Think high definition 3D for us.  Or hyper-reality.  That's what they saw.  And it confirmed what they were told every Sunday and feast day of their lives.

I remember going round a gallery of religious images from the 12th Century through to the beginnings of the Renaissance, in Sienna a few years ago (the Pinacoteca Nazionale).  After the first two rooms it left me cold.  Wall after wall of religious pictures.  Nativity after nativity, miracle after miracle, saint after saint.  Boring.  It was utter overkill.  But, of course, this was a collection from the whole of Tuscany and beyond - from little churches in tiny communities.  Each church might have had just one or two images.  The people who worshipped in each church might be familiar with three or four other churches in similar communities - and that would be the limit of their experience of Art, and of the accurate representation of life - of simulacra.

Here's a lesser known painting from Sienna:

 

This is The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine and St John the Baptist by Michelino da Besozza in about 1420, now in the Sienna Gallery I visited.  We cannot understand this image now unless we see it as an elaborate allegory.  We cannot understand the idea of a spiritual union between a humble but saintly virginal woman, and characters who had been dead for over a millenium, or who were local dignitaries who paid for the image.  But to humble "parishioners" who saw this every week in their church - and who saw no other accurate images - it was a deep reality; in some ways a deeper reality than that of their own daily existence, since it spoke of their own imminent eternity, which was going to be so much better than their earthly life.

It's taken me more than twenty years to understand the significance of those rooms and rooms of devotional Art I saw in Sienna.  The paintings still do not really move me as objects in themselves.  But their significance to the men and women who saw them when the paint was fresh - well, if I can respond to any work of Art in such a sincere way, I would count it a good day.  No, a great day. 

So now I need to think about how a more secular, less naive society looked at its Art.  I'm going to move forward 300 years and think about the 18th Century.

 

(Originally published 20/09/2010)