What is the currency, the ultimate goal of the art historian when he looks back at the art of the past? Is it simply to explain art, to engage with beauty, to come to a definition of beauty? I don’t think art history as a discipline has one unifying aim, but rather it is split into the branching aims of its individual and philosophies.
Yet ultimately, what all art historians engage in is a dialogue with the art of the past, starting from their present vantage point. All art historians are ambassadors of the present. None of them can exculpate themselves from the consciousness of the now. Some are more candid than others about their dependency on the present, more admitting of the subjectivity of the period they happen to be writing from.
And why should we hide it? Whilst history is noble enough in and of itself, it has a higher aim: it must contain lessons – never direct nor deliberate – that we can debate and absorb for the sake of contemporary civilisation.
Engaging with art history is to engage in the mind-sets, lessons, passions and philosophies of brother and sister human beings across time. Ultimately, human nature doesn’t change, but its circumstances does, wildly so. An art historian must use the art of a time to strip away the alien accretions of the age to pierce through the universal humanity underneath. We may no longer be as devout as in Michelangelo’s time, but what mother, in any historical epoch, could not relate to the suffering of the Virgin as she holds the body of her dead child in her arms? What of Ukrainians today, can they not relate to the unspeakable horrors described in Picasso’s Guernica just because they are being bombed by Russian planes instead of German ones and themselves exist in a different culture and country than 1930s Spain?
In a sense, the beauty and value of an artwork lies outside its artistic value. One does not have to be a connoisseur of art to admire the suffering of the workers in Repin’s Barge Haulers of the Volga, or envy the revelry of his exuberant dancers in his Evening Party. On a deeper level, when we look at the colossal head of Constantine now in the Capitoline Museum, don’t we all think and reflect on the propagandistic use of art especially in the hands of dictatorial regimes, and how we should keep our eyes open to such manipulative tricks?
Sometimes the messages artworks convey are accidental. When we look at the Parthenon our way of looking today is biased by its over two-thousand-year history; we think of the rape of its frieze by Lord Elgin, its devastation and near destruction at the Siege of the Acropolis, and by the general aura of myth associated with the 5th century BC world it epitomises. Its ruinous state tells us stories its original makers had never intended. And somehow, even despite all its tragedies, it makes it more powerful, poignant, even beautiful. In fact, if we were to see it in its heyday, full of painted friezes and with the giant statue of Athena stood before it, we might think it gaudy and tacky. A similar thing might be happening in our appreciation of Van Gogh. As undeniably great and revolutionary an artist as he was, in the popular mind especially, would he hold such sway on the public imagination without his well-documented mental troubles?
As such, our definition of ‘beauty’ is partly independent of the physical work of art. Which is not to deny physicality as an essential ingredient for beauty. By such standards, most contemporary art, so bogged down by zeitgeist politics as they are, would be judged far more beautiful than, say, the seemingly apolitical, silent, carpet still-lifes of Francesco Noletti. But we all know this isn’t true. Any painting of Noletti is far more beautiful and eloquent than an installation by Tracy Emin. Message and dialogue alone does not make a work of art beautiful. Guernica would have been a far less powerful, grappling work of art if it was merely a blank canvas.
Thus beauty in art is the interplay between the physical and the human; the timeless and the historic. An art historian’s role is to engage all of us, not just his or her fellow academics, in this all-too-human dialogue. After he has done all the hard work in analysing the historical background of a painting and gone into its formalities, he must then turn to the public and say, right, this artwork is saying XYZ about human nature, politics, religion, existence, purpose… what do you think about what it is saying?
ABventure 