Foundations of art criticism in antiquity and the Middle Ages
Since antiquity, philosophers have been theorizing about art, as well as criticizing it. Plato, for example, regarded art as an inferior form of knowledge, indeed, no more than an illusion of knowledge. In the Republic he describes the painter as a “creator of appearances,” stating that “what he creates is untrue,” a “semblance of existence” rather than a “real existence.” A painting is at best “an indistinct expression of truth.” Plato distinguishes between the image of something, or the thing itself, and the true idea of the thing, which exists in the mind of God, as it were. According to this understanding, the painter deals with the image rather than the thing, let alone the idea of the thing. Thus, art is deception: “A painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter…though he knows nothing of their arts; and, if he is a good artist, he may deceive children or simple persons, when he shows them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and they will fancy that they are looking at a real carpenter.” Plato writes that works of art are “but imitations thrice removed from the truth, and could easily be made without any knowledge of the truth, because they are appearances only and not realities.” Imitation—image-making—should not be “the ruling principle of [anyone’s] life, as if he had nothing higher in him.” One might call this metaphysical criticism: art is at best a way of simplifying and communicating complex ideas—philosophical truths—to the ignorant, according to Plato, although from the point of view of absolute truth, the artist is also profoundly ignorant.
Aristotle took a somewhat different approach to his theory of art, although he also regarded art as a form of imitation. In his Poetics, perhaps the most influential work on art ever written, he makes it clear that art is a moral issue, since it deals with human character. “The objects of imitation…represent men either as better than in real life, or as worse, or as they are.” He argues that imitation is a human instinct, and as such, works of imitative art, in whatever medium, move human beings deeply. Such works of art are evocative and cathartic; the viewer identifies and empathizes with the human beings and human situations depicted, feeling what they felt, and learning from their experience, which is an essentialized imitation of what all might experience. Thus, the viewer pities those who suffer in tragedy—the highest form of art, since the tragic hero is a higher type of human being—while being terrorized by their suffering and the situations which cause it, for they are potentially the viewer’s own, in spirit if not in actuality. For Aristotle, art is a lesson in life and, as such, is of great social and broadly human value. He was the first psychologically minded critic, and his idea of the inseparability of art and morality—of art in the service of moral teaching—remained influential into the modern period.
The ancient philosopher Plotinus saw art as more mystical than mundane. He was the founder of Roman Neoplatonism, and his thinking about art reflects that of Plato, with important, influential differences: Plotinus introduced the idea that art can be beautiful and that its worldly beauty is a reflection of a higher, spiritual beauty. According to Plotinus’s Enneads, by intellectually contemplating beautiful art, we can gain insight into and even commune—mystically merge—with that higher beauty. Plotinus connects art directly with the higher realm of ideas from which Plato excluded it and characterizes that realm as spiritual as well as intellectual—that is, he emphasizes the spiritual aspiration involved in intellectual analysis and intuition. It is a view that was present, though latent, in Plato. For Plotinus, art was an enigmatic embodiment of pure spirit, which is why artistic beauty has something sacred and abstract about it.
In a sense, all subsequent art criticism is an elaboration of these three philosophers’ ideas, sometimes in combination: art can be seen as imitation, as psychological and moral, and as spiritual. Yet, while these thinkers established important, lasting ideas about the philosophy of art, they were not true art critics. Art criticism is necessarily less general than philosophical theorizing about art, however informed by theoretical generalizations it may be. In his seminal book History of Art Criticism (1936), Lionello Venturi asks: “What is criticism if not a relationship between a principle of judgment and the intuition of a work of art or of an artistic personality?” The principle of judgment can be informed by general ideas about art, but the intuition of a work of art or an artistic personality necessarily involves getting down to particulars. Thus, for Venturi, the Greek Xenocrates of Sicyon (3rd century bce) was the first art critic, for he “tried to fix a relationship between his own artistic principles, as categories of artistic judgment, and some concrete artistic personalities.” In other words, Xenocrates—a sculptor of the school of Lysippus—had a philosophy of art, which he brought to bear on the work of particular artists, evaluating them and finding the truth in their art by its measure.
Xenocrates’ approach continued into Roman times. The writers Lucian and Kallistratos declared: “A work of art requires an intelligent spectator who must go beyond the pleasure of the eyes to express a judgment and to argue the reasons for what he sees.” Again: “A connoisseur is one of those men who, with a delicate artistic sense, know how to discover in works of art the various qualities they contain, and mix reasoning with such an appreciation.” Thus, the ancient viewpoint regards the critic as a connoisseur—a person who knows and values art, which requires reason as well as sensibility. Indeed, according to the philosopher Quintilian, the true connoisseur—the really expert judge of art—is able, in Venturi’s words, to “understand the reason of art, while the unlearned feel only the voluptuousness.”
Theorizing about art continued during the Middle Ages under a Christian banner. Although there was a certain awareness of the material character of contemporary art, philosophers made no serious effort to synthesize the material with the theoretical, nor did they illustrate their theories by discussing particular artists. In general, thinkers from the Middle Ages were concerned with art’s symbolic meaning, evident in moral and religious iconography. Also, like Plato, they distinguished between the judgment of the senses and the judgment of reason, the latter being superior because it is based on laws of beauty given by God. St. Augustine used his Christian faith as a theoretical tool. In De natura boni, among other writings, he elaborates the ideas of Plotinus, emphasizing the transcendence or sublimity of absolute beauty, of which the beauty of the work of art is a reflection (albeit a pale one). He discusses the formal character of pictures, often in terms that indicate his religious concerns: thus, black is ugly, but if used the right way it is beautiful, just as the universe is beautiful, even though it contains sinners, who are ugly. In Summa theologiae (c. 1265/66–73), St. Thomas Aquinas, also using Christianity as his theoretical model, distinguishes between the higher senses—sight and hearing—which are a means to organized knowledge, and the lower senses—touch, smell, and taste—which are not. But St. Thomas moves beyond the usual tenets of Christian theory when he suggests that beauty is admirable because it stimulates theoretical thinking and pleasurable because it satisfies desire—a very modern idea.
Renaissance art criticism
Despite such theorizing, no definite critical tradition emerged until the Renaissance, when art criticism came into its own—that is, when detailed analysis and deliberate evaluation of artists began. The first important evaluation of this kind was Cronica (1308–64; “Chronicles”) compiled by brothers Giovanni, Matteo, and Filippo Villani. In Filippo Villani’s portion (1364) of the family’s ongoing work, he celebrates his native city, Florence, as the climax of civilization. Villani discusses the lives of famous men, including some artists. His writing set an important precedent: the idea that painting is among the liberal arts and not the applied arts—an idea already present in Pliny the Elder (23–79 ce) and one that had great influence on the humanist conception of Italian Renaissance art. Villani went even further, elevating painters over other practitioners of the liberal arts, which set the stage for more analytic, in-depth considerations of art.
Indeed, treatises on art flourished in the 15th and 16th centuries. Lorenzo Ghiberti’s I Commentarii (c. 1447; “Commentaries”) includes a discussion of artists’ lives (painters and two sculptors, himself included), and also traces the trajectory of artistic progress, which for Ghiberti begins with the proto-Renaissance artist Giotto, who returned to ancient models of art. Ghiberti also summarizes the ideas of various ancient writers on art. Other important art treatises were written by Cennino Cennini (in 1437), Leon Battista Alberti (in 1435), Leonardo da Vinci (throughout his notebooks), and Albrecht Dürer (in 1528; heavily influenced by Italian ideas). In his treatise, Alberti was the first critic to recognize that a renaissance of art had occurred in Florence and the first to state the humanistic principles and artistic ideals that motivated it—namely, perspectival space and the perfect rendering of the plasticity of human form.
Yet Giorgio Vasari’s Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani… (1550, 2nd ed., 1568; “The Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors…”) is the seminal work of the period. It was not until Vasari that a full-fledged developmental history of art and artists appeared; The Lives is what might be called a critical history of Italian Renaissance art, for Vasari not only documents Renaissance art’s development but also establishes criteria of artistic value and a hierarchy of artists on its basis. For Vasari, himself an architect and painter, his native Tuscany was the epicenter of the Italian Renaissance. He carefully differentiates between artistic styles, developing a theory of artistic progress (the imperfect 14th century, the improved 15th century, and the perfect 16th century—that is, the bronze, silver, and golden ages of art). He collected more data (and hearsay) about artists’ lives than anyone had ever done before and established the lives of artists as an autonomous genre. In The Lives, Vasari elevates Michelangelo—the only living artist he mentions—as the grand climax of the Italian Renaissance. He presents Michelangelo as the embodiment of his vision of the unique artistic personality or rare genius; this effort to empirically ground the artist’s superiority to other mortals is perhaps Vasari’s greatest achievement. His views have become gospel in the popular and critical understanding of the period, indicating the enduring influence of art criticism on the reading of history.
Art criticism in the 17th century: Programmatic theory
Theoretical criticism—criticism that attempts to establish an artistic program on a rational basis and that also regards art as the exemplification and embodiment of ideas (and as such theoretical)—came into its own in the 17th century with André Félibien’s 10-volume Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes (1666–88; “Conversations on the Most Excellent Painters, Ancient and Modern”). Like Vasari, Félibien presents what he regards as the proper principles of art, as well as an account of the lives of the artists. But where, for Vasari, Michelangelo was the consummate artist, for Félibien, Nicolas Poussin was the master to emulate. Félibien’s book in fact draws directly on Poussin’s ideas: Poussin advocated, in his own words, the “grand manner” of classicism, whose “first requirement…is that the subject and the narrative be grandiose, such as battles, heroic actions, and religious themes.” Poussin ruled out “base subjects”—genre (scenes of daily life), for example—along with “base” details, believing that a painting as a whole should have a distinctive style or manner and be tasteful. In practice this meant that a painting should show “a certain restraint and moderation.” For Poussin this restraint was most evident in “the Dorian mode,” or the measure of ancient art, which was “stable, grave, and severe.” Poussin in fact developed his theory from his studies of ancient sculpture and the paintings of artists Domenichino and Raphael.
If Poussin’s ideas were canonized by Félibien, they became gospel in the French Academy in Rome (founded in 1665) under Charles Le Brun, its director (some would say dictator). Le Brun turned Poussin’s ideas into academic rules that influenced a generation of art students and critics. The Academy taught that classical art, not nature, was the model for artists. This classicism was reduced to tasteful authority and empty rhetoric in the artistic output of the Academy members, however, who often made dogmatic and prescriptive what Poussin had meant to be a rational and disciplined approach.
At the same time, there was a certain rebellion against this rigidity, perhaps in recognition of the fact that the rule of theory inhibited creativity and especially because it had become authoritarian. In Paralelle des anciens et des modernes (1688–97; “Parallels Between the Ancients and the Moderns”), the French critic Charles Perrault argues for the superiority of 16th-century Italian painters over ancient artists and of contemporary (17th-century) painting over 16th-century painting. This idea that there was artistic progress challenged Poussin’s sense of indebtedness to ancient art. Art historian Giovanni Pietro Bellori similarly challenged Le Brun’s elevation of classicism. In Le vite de’ pittori, scultori, et architetti moderni (1672; “The Lives of Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects”), he celebrates the rationality and classicism of Raphael’s art, but he also argues that the irrationality and anti-classicism of turn-of-the-17th-century painter Caravaggio was a valid alternative. Similarly, while he exalts the sobriety of Poussin, Bellori recognizes that 17th-century painter Peter Paul Rubens’s liveliness was its antithesis. In other words, he saw that there were two kinds of art (and artists), not readily reconcilable with one another.
This polarization of artistic theory—the recognition that there are two fundamentally different modes of art, whichever the critic prefers and theoretically justifies—recalls the ancient distinction between an art that is more rational than sensuous and an art that is more pleasing to the senses than to reason. It is in effect a distinction between painting that adheres to the rules of reason—evident in proportion and perspective and reinforced by linear clarity, that is, pure drawing—and painting that indulges in artistic license, which in practice means that it is colorful and painterly and thus erotically stimulating. The latter kind of “irrational” painting is no longer strictly illusionistic but rather on the way to becoming abstract—indeed, abstract expressionist. The debate, which can clearly be understood as moral and psychological as well as aesthetic, appears in Fréart de Cambray’s treatise in 1662 against wanton painting, by which he meant painting that exhibits exciting color but that lacks geometry. In contrast, the Venetian Marco Boschini, in La carta del navegar pitoresco (1660; “Map of the Picturesque Journey”) and Le ricche minere della pittura veneziana (1674; “Rich Mines of Venetian Painting”), celebrates the vitality of 16th-century Venetian painting, especially the work of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. He admires the Venetians’ use of color, which seems to have an uninhibited life of its own, overflowing the linear limits of the object to pervade the entire painting, giving it an all-over sensuality and atmospheric lushness. (In its time, this Venetian work was opposed to the more rigid painting coming out of Florence, an early incarnation of the Poussin/Rubens debate.) In his writings, Boschini regards the 17th-century painters Rubens and Diego Velázquez as important masters because their style derived from the more radical tradition of Venetian painting.
These two approaches inspired the development of two camps in the Academy: the Poussinists and the Rubenists. The debate between the two approaches came to a head when critic Roger de Piles published a series of theoretical pamphlets setting forth an argument for the Rubenists in 1676. De Piles’s writings helped break the hold of the Poussinists in the French Academy by legitimating an alternative to it, giving the Rubenists credibility—especially when he was elected to the Academy in 1699. In his Abrégé de la vie des peintres, avec des reflexions sur leurs ouvrages, et un traité du peintre parfait (1699; “Abridgement of the Lives of Painters…”), de Piles argues that while there is art that seems to break the laws, it establishes a new law if it is the product of genius—in other words, a genius is above rules. He also distinguishes between the mind’s considered taste and the body’s spontaneous taste, the former involving fixed, preconceived ideas about what art should be, and the latter allowing for unexpected intuitions about art. This distinction between procrustean and independent judgment reflects the distinction between an official (academic) Poussinist and an independent (nonacademic) Rubenist. Importantly, this distinction also established the idea that the critic’s feelings, however inexplicable, have as much a place in his judgment as his reason, setting the stage for a new generation of thinkers.
