I may be groggy and swollen but I'm not totally and newly stupid. So I have to say a little. This very likely silly book about perspective needs a hearing if only to expose its lopsided thesis. There is some truth to the idea that painting and architecture were closely united in the Renaissance but not exclusively so by a long shot. We need to keep in mind that artists during the R were establishing their own identity and choosing challenges, like perspective, to prove their abilities. They were highly competitive as individuals and if we learn nothing else from Vasari (the first art historian) we learn about artists as individuals. There was also the "cult of genius" in the high R which was the apotheosis of the individual artist blessed by special uber-human "divine" gifts. It's wrong to sweep all that aside to isolate institutional architecture as the principal locus of perspectival demonstration. Most serious scholars of R art agree that there were 3 interrelated features that gave rise to R art (and its traits). 1 was the revival of antiquity (sculpture, architecture, literature), 2 was the study of perspective, 3 was the study of human anatomy. Put all those together and you have real-looking figures (where real means Greek/Roman models amplified by anatomic knowledge) in a convincing perspectival "stage" space. The more real the construction of illusionist space became, the more important it was to give up older methods of proportions (that divide a flat plane) and to portray figures in the round, in action, and only an adequate knowledge of human anatomy would enable that. The first handbook of human anatomy for artists was published in Florence in 1475.
Miller keeps coming up with these oddball books without having the foundational literature well in mind. We simply can't overlook the mountains of research that have informed us of R art. Quirky, no, quaint, texts need to be set up alongside the thick literature in a field to expose their bits or crumbs of useful information, if any. This is like that fellow Glenn Beck, who I watched on tv for a few minutes yesterday, admittedly in a blurry medicine fog. He presented to most ridiculous chalk-board talk on 20-21C economics I've ever witnessed by ignoring the major economic impacts, like WWII!, the whole FDR dictates that actually saved the US while being contrary to our republicanism ideals, and other labor, civil rights, and global issues, to say nothing of the effects of energy policy. That Beck fellow is ludicrous, as any freshman economics student, even a C student, would recognize, but what's actually obscene is the moral depravity that puts him on the air simply because of his audience and advertising revenue. Scarcely hidden, his hideous remarks float up a sickening racism and rejection of poor and struggling citizens. In addition to ignorance of basic economics, Beck is ignorant of American History, particularly the early efforts to incorporate the idea of virtue (selfless concern for others) into a burgeoning free-market capitalism -- a paradox, but one that America was able to balance for so long to worldwide admiration. Not any more. Now the self-interest thugs rule and virtue is dead. It's a stretch but a useful one to liken the Glen Beck warped and ignorant view of the world to a marginalized book of yapping over a trivial but wrongly magnified footnote in art history. I totally agree with Cheerskep on this issue. If we read a book, let's make it a worthy one, something basic to the literature in a field. WC ----- Original Message ---- From: Chris Miller <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thu, February 25, 2010 8:03:06 AM Subject: N.K. Smith's "Here I stand" Here's a quote from the beginning of the final chapter: "So what happened to perspective that it should have disappeared from 20th C. Art ? In the foregoing chapters I have tried to elucidate its meaning - to find out what made it compelling as a pictorial device - for artists of the Renaissance. It is not hard to see why those same factors are not operative within the modern artists' frame of reference. The most important factor of all, I believe, has to do with the radical change in the status of membership institutions, which are no longer accorded the kind of Platonic reality they once possessed, a kind and degree of reality that was closely related to that of the buildings that were erected for those same institutions.... Both the public edifices and the pictures that adorned them continuously challenged the member to "take his stand" with reference to a body of narrational and iconic subject matter that served to authenticate the real and enduring being of the institutions and their power to give order and meaning to the life of the community..... Nothing has done more to undercut the claims of any institution to ultimate reality than the burgeoning of radical nominalism that owes much to the triumph of science and the scientific outlook" So it's not surprising that the most radical nominalist on our listserv would conclude "he's no one I want to spend time reading - given how many other worthy books are around." (although, indeed, over the last ten years in this listserv, Cheerskep has yet to identify a single one of those "worthy books") As I noted at the very beginning, Smith is going to make provocative generalizations. Does every 20th C. professor not express "earnest convictions" ? No... of course not ... all of us can provide examples. But when we're looking for "intensely moralistic" earnest convictions regarding their area of expertise, perhaps the scholars whom we have read here recently are more typical (Kivy, Dutton, Berger). (and didn't William recently advise me that art critics should avoid that kind of expression? The "Refine Search" function for the listserv is not working any more, so I can't find the exact quote) Wouldn't a scholar like Ruskin, with his "seven lamps of architecture" be an anomaly in today's academic world? But, regrettfully, Smith only offers that critique of his profession in passing -- his real subject is the meaning of perspective, as elucidated in a selection of paintings from the 15th C. -- beginning, amazingly enough, with the two lost paintings that Brunelleschi is said to have done to demonstrate the science of single-point perspective. And since Michael owns this book, and seems to admire it, I would like to invite him to begin that discussion. ____________________________________________________________ Small Business Tools Find solutions for your business. Click here and get it done now! http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2231/c?cp=rrFVV1qv5twaMmTya3Q5NgAAJz6c l_zTaptgNR5c8Mer1v9kAAYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARMQAAAAA=
