ART CRITICISM. - One engages in art c. [criticism] whenever one defines, characterizes, or evaluates a work as a work of art. It is clear, once the intrinsic identity of the phenomenon of art in all its manifestations has been admitted (v. ARTE), that the c. whose object is, for example, painting will be substantially the same as that whose object is poetry. Nevertheless, generally by the expression art c. is meant the c. of the figurative arts, that is, painting, sculpture, architecture, and the minor arts analogous to them; and this distinction, when its empirical value is recognized, is justified by certain extrinsic factors such as, for example, the particular technical preparation required of the art critic. Consequently, even historically, art c. presents its own homogeneous line of development distinct from that of the other criticisms, which justifies a separate treatment.
I. ORIGIN
Art criticism is an essentially modern discipline; certainly interest in art and in artists has never been lacking, but in the past it generally took concrete form in descriptions, practical teachings on artistic technique, theoretical dissertations and biographies of artists. Often in this copious artistic literature one finds acute and highly valid critical propositions, but art criticism as an explicit and systematic science in its own right arose, one may say, in the eighteenth century, in connection with the rise of aesthetics as an autonomous science, that is, when the need was felt to bring the practice of concrete judging into line with abstract speculation. Thus there arose, as for the other historical disciplines, the methodology of art criticism.
II. ART CRITICISM AND AESTHETICS
The judgment on art, like any judgment that claims to escape the arbitrary and the occasional, presents itself as an enunciation of truth, and for that very reason tends toward universality. This implies a theoretical foundation, that is, an aesthetic concept, which in turn is of universal value, and therefore at least an embryonic philosophical system. But the interest of the critic does not naturally coincide with that of the philosopher; because, while the latter investigates what art is, the former must apprehend and judge works of art; for which reason necessarily the history of criticism and the history of aesthetics also do not coincide, even though they have a common foundation and at times mutual and fruitful relations.
III. MEANS AND END OF ART CRITICISM
The critic needs first of all knowledge of the work; to attain it, all information concerning the work of art will be useful to him: dates, biographical elements, concomitant facts; and the analytical study of the work. Equally useful to the critic will be knowledge of the taste that the artist finds as a given, both in the environment surrounding him and in himself, in his own preferences, and from which he cannot prescind even if at the moment of creation he will forge it into a new synthesis.
But this preparatory study, important though it is, must not be confused, as has sometimes been done, with art criticism; since the true knowledge of the work of art is precisely the apprehension of the manner in which the artist has expressed himself, of his style, into which his entire logical and affective world, his human content, has been poured. The end of art criticism is to study not the artist as a man, his sentiments, his passions (historical personality), but only the form that he has impressed upon these (artistic personality); nor must the critic judge art according to the perfection of technique, or resemblance to nature; nor yet according to a predefined canon of beauty or a determined style declared perfect (v. ARTE).
The knowledge of art is a historical knowledge, but every history that studies art as a pure symbol or manifestation of something else, or as determinately dependent on political and social, or economic and technical conditions, disregards the autonomy of art. And, on the other hand, every treatment that claims to prescind from the artist, and to study forms in themselves, as pure visual elements or as classifiable elements ("styles"), will produce a history of abstract schemata, torn from spiritual reality and therefore false and incomprehensible, and within which works of art can never be fitted, because they are infinitely varied and not comparable among themselves.
Certainly, in order to arrive at the full historical knowledge of the work of art, the critic may also make use of schemata, whether of content-based qualification or of formalistic characterization; provided he keeps in mind that they must serve him as an approach to the work of art, but must subsequently be overcome, as far as possible (that is, as far as language allows us, language which necessarily proceeds by generalizations and approximations), in order to arrive at the well-individuated determination of each single work.
IV. AESTHETIC JUDGMENT AS SYNTHESIS
Historical knowledge provides us with all the elements for aesthetic judgment, but it is not yet this judgment; for it, as has been said, the concept of art is required; without it one can indeed say what, for example, a painter's manner of painting is, and its characteristics, without however being able to say whether his works are works of art or not. In practice the two procedures are not rigidly distinguished, and it is difficult to establish to what point the critic qualifies the work of art historically and where instead he qualifies it as such.
In reality the critical synthesis is not reached through a rigorous process of cause and effect. The critic may say, for example, that the painting is beautiful because the colors are vibrant and the lines harmonious, but the same characteristics may belong to a painting that he judges ugly. Every qualification will allow him to draw ever closer to the work of art, to investigate it more deeply; nevertheless the critical synthesis will always represent a discontinuity in this process, that is, a new act that has something original and alogical about it, insofar as it expresses the personality of the critic. For this reason it is rightly said that for the critic it is not enough to know history and philosophy, but what is needed is precisely a special sensibility and aesthetic taste. Excess in the trust in or the use of such particular sensibility can cause the critic to superimpose his own interpretation on the artist's work, creating in a certain way another work of art. Not always, however, does this reliving of the artist's emotion in other forms harm the correct interpretation of the work; on the contrary, it can be a didactic means, a profitable aid for kindling the sensibility of others and bringing it into contact with the work of art. Because of this diversity between art and criticism, the objection sometimes raised against the critic's work also falls away — namely, that only the artist can judge of art because he actualizes it and therefore «understands it»; since even the artist, at the moment when he judges his own work or another's, ceases to be an artist and becomes a critic.
It is indeed improbable that an artist, in the act of judging, manages to divest himself entirely of his own creative disposition and his own taste.
V. HISTORY OF ART AND HISTORY OF TASTE
A pure history of art as such, that is, only of what criticism recognizes as achieved art, is not possible; in this way one would arrive at a history of art that would touch only the peaks, that is, very few works by very few artists, indeed at times only a few fragments of them, discarding or ignoring the rest. On the other hand, one cannot ignore everything that tends toward art even if it does not fully attain it, constituting nonetheless an expression of formal taste and which can legitimately be taken as a connection between the various moments of pure creation and which permits precisely an understanding of these historically. It should be noted, indeed, that current studies have made legitimate, alongside the history of art, the history of taste, which ultimately belongs within the history of culture or of civilization.
VI. HISTORY OF ART CRITICISM
In judgments on individual works of art, the prevailing taste of the time in which the judgment was pronounced is reflected together with the personality of the critic. Consequently, tracing the history of those judgments, seeking to resolve their contradictions or to grasp what remains constant in them through the evolution of thought, presents an undoubted interest both historical and theoretical, with a view to a more accurate determination of the coefficients and methods of art criticism.
One cannot speak of a true and proper art criticism in the ancient world. Judgment on art is never expressed in isolation; rather, the documents of criticism are mingled with moral and other kinds of judgments. There is reason to hold, however, that judgment on art resolved itself into a didacticism tending to establish canons of beauty founded either on numerical and therefore abstract laws (the Canon of Polyclitus) or on the works of artists taken as models (Xenocrates of Sicyon, 4th-3rd century B.C.).
In the Roman milieu, interest in art was lively among the "connoisseurs," who harked back to the principles of traditional aesthetics but often judged with great refinement of taste; Cicero and Quintilian are very well known; the height of perfection was for them Phidias, no longer the artists of the 4th century. An encyclopedia of the artistic knowledge of the time are books XXXIV-VI of Pliny's Naturalis historia (1st century A.D.). Also widespread among the Romans was treatise-writing, directed above all at the art in which they excelled, architecture; the treatise of Vitruvius (1st century B.C.) is very famous, and it undoubtedly harks back to older models; in it, technical precepts are mingled with general ideas on the essence of architecture and on its origin, and with laws on the form and proportions of the orders and of buildings. Critical propositions on art are furthermore found scattered both in periegetic literature (the "guide" of Pausanias, 2nd century A.D., is very well known) and in literary descriptions of works of art in poets and men of letters in general (e.g., in Statius and Lucian), and in observations of thinkers (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, Seneca, Dio Chrysostom, Philostratus, Pseudo-Longinus).
In the early Middle Ages, intellectualistic interest in art was very scant; aesthetic and historical constructions were no longer attempted (philosophers speak of the beautiful, not of art), artistic literature consisted of encyclopedias (v. ISIDORE OF SEVILLE) and technical treatises, of inventories (among which the Libri Pontificales are to be included) and of itineraries; alongside which the Mirabilia Urbis Romae should be remembered.
The principal theoretical books are the treatise De coloribus et artibus Romanorum of the so-called Heraclius (of the 10th century, at least in part), the Schedula of Theophilus (12th century), the treatise on optics of Witelo (13th century), the notebook (Livre de portraiture) of Willard de Hamecourt (13th century), and finally the painters' book of Mount Athos, known through a very late redaction, but which contains elements of medieval tradition.
In the fourteenth century, especially in Italy, art acquired a more autonomous value and aroused more complex interests. Already in Dante are found testimonies to the importance of the artist and an embryonic evaluation of Giotto and of his relations with Cimabue. Petrarch establishes a comparison between ancients and moderns in favor of the former, while his taste leads him to appreciate above all Simone Martini; Boccaccio senses the greatness of Giotto and exalts him as the best painter, not inferior to the ancients. His is good painting that only the "learned" and not the "ignorant" understand; which implies that already from this time the work of art is evaluated intellectualistically.
In the same cultural climate, F. Villani, in his Vite di uomini illustri, dedicates a chapter to painters. And an epigone of the recipe books, but already informed by a new spirit, and therefore extremely important, is the Libro dell'arte of Cennino Cennini (end of the 14th century).
In humanism, interest in art manifests itself deliberately in well-defined forms. The historical exigency of knowing the artist is accentuated, since exceptional human qualities are recognized in him. Biographies therefore acquire great development; the first and most notable are those of the II Commentario of Lorenzo Ghiberti (1578-1455). He presents artists as such, that is, by means of true and proper judgments on style; yet the historical connection among the various artists is given by the idea of progress, from the innovative work of Giotto up to himself. Among the other biographies of the time, notable is that of Filippo Brunelleschi, which is held to have been written by Antonio Manetti, of an apologetic character, but dense with acute stylistic and historiographical observations.
The humanistic mentality, however, finds its most genuine expression in the theoretical treatises on art. Among the treatise-writers the richest and most profound is undoubtedly L. B. Alberti (c. 1404-1472), author of a treatise on painting, one on architecture and one on sculpture, where, alongside admiration for antiquity and the repetition of motifs of classical aesthetics, the awareness of the originality of the new art and of the new ideas is evident. While Ghiberti in the third and last commentary had sought to give art a physical (optical) foundation, F. di Giorgio Martini, author of a treatise on architecture, Piero della Francesca and Luca Pacioli, authors of the De prospectiva pingendi and of the De corporibus the one, and of the De divina proportione the other, set their theories on a strictly mathematical plane. Leonardo, in his fragmentary treatise On painting, poses the problems of art in an original manner and dense with suggestions destined for further developments: the scientific value of sensible experience, and therefore the supreme importance of painting, which is mistress of the sensible, and its superiority over the other arts. Equally important are his precepts, no longer technical but formal, on shadows, color, motion, anatomy, expression.
In the treatises of the sixteenth century (Varchi, Borghini, P. Gaurico, P. Pino, F. Doni, L. Dolce, G. Lomazzo), the scientific-mathematical foundation having been abandoned, there prevail rather general considerations on the character of the arts, on their properties (drawing, invention, coloring, etc.), on their utility, on the priority of one over the others, on the value of color or of drawing, on the propriety (decorum) of the subjects represented, on pictorial "genres" (historical, poetic, landscape, portrait, etc.) and their differing dignity. They are, in short, affirmations above all of taste, which claim to be founded on theoretical bases and which hark back to the canons and prejudices of the ancients; which, now, ever more explicitly, are declared infallible and unsurpassable. To such assertions contributed the character of the artistic Academies (v. ACADEMY) that arose and flourished in that century.
Proper to the moralistic climate of the Catholic Reformation (v.) are certain writings that seek to combat lascivious and unseemly works; such as, for example, the Lettera di contrizione of the elder Ammannati; and the Dialoghi of Father Gilio, who interprets decorum as what is regulated by the Church both as regards iconography (unseemly is held, for example, the representation of the Trinity with three faces) and as regards expression (notable is the consideration, in the full sixteenth century, that the art of the early centuries, though rough, is more devout). Connected to these are the Saggio of Cardinal G. Paleotti on sacred and profane images, and later in the seventeenth century the book De pictura sacra of Cardinal F. Borromeo (which inveighs instead against pictures unseemly for nudity); the treatise on painting and sculpture of Father Ottonelli in collaboration with the painter P. da Cortona (which proposes a subtle casuistry to save in part profane art) and finally even more rigid treatises in Spain and in Germany.
A separate place in sixteenth-century theory is occupied by writings on architecture; the principal ones are the treatises of Serlio, Vignola, Palladio and Scamozzi, in which, following the Vitruvian scheme, they teach above all the proportions of the orders, the forms of the building types and the laws of symmetry, propriety, decorum, etc., with numerous examples from Roman and modern architecture.
Outside Italy, in the north, the only theoretical work, which remained without followers, is that of Dürer (1471-1528), which links up with the Italian tradition, especially the Venetian-Lombard one, and in Portugal the work of Francisco de Holanda, an admirer of Michelangelo and a slavish follower of classical theories.
But from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century the historical interest in the artist is increasingly accentuated. It should be noted that now all previous art, including that of the fifteenth century, appears surpassed and inferior to the present; Michelangelo is generally considered perfection (Doni), but already in Dolce the comparison between him and Raphael begins; the academy of the Carracci then teaches one to take the best from Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Correggio. And it is precisely in historiography that the principal work of the Renaissance on art is found: Vasari's Vite (after those of Billi, Gelli, Giovio, etc.), which deal with painters, sculptors and architects from 1300 up to his own time (1st ed. 1550; 2nd, much ampler but less organic, 1568). Vasari's theoretical principles are those of his time, but accepted uncritically and often contradicted in the face of individual works of art: imitation of nature and of antiquity, expression, invention (especially of "histories"), design. Great importance is given to this last element by Vasari; finally, the classical prejudice of progress in art, which reaches its invariable limit in the "divine" Michelangelo, is rigidly codified by him. This scheme and the aim of praising above all Michelangelo suggest to Vasari the inclusion of anecdotal biographical data. In this way, into art criticism proper there is inscribed the taste for biography, which would flourish especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in step with the growth of philological-erudite interest and of the taste for antiquarian collections.
In the collections of artists by Baglione (the artists working in Rome from Gregory XIII to Urban VIII), by Passeri and by Pascoli, the interest in the artist's historical personality predominates. In Florence, at the end of the seventeenth century, Baldinucci's Notizie dei professori del disegno appeared, a universal and no longer local or Italian history of art, with a more learned and lofty character, and with the evident intention of emending the defects of Vasari (note the substitution of the term "Notizie" for that of "Vite" and the appellation of "professors" given to artists). The biographies of Mancini, who turned lively attention to medieval art, were likewise an erudite work. Among analogous works, the Carta del navegar pitoresco of Boschini offers critical interest; although it presents itself as a simple guide to Venice, it extols Venetian colouristic painting and that of Velasquez and Rubens.
The principal historian and theorist of the seventeenth century is G. Pietro Bellori, archaeologist and scholar, who lived at the centre of the artistic milieu of his whole time (1613-96). In his principal work (Vite dei pittori, scultori, architetti moderni) he maintains that art must conform no longer to nature, which is always imperfect, but to ideal types assumed as a model for each individual art. No longer, therefore, as for Vasari, does the ideal become incarnate in an artist, but it proceeds from a theoretical abstraction; nature must therefore be emended, the ugly and the deformed discarded; among the genres of painting the highest is "history", which shows us man as he ought to be: consequently the ideal is no longer Michelangelo but Raphael, and not only the primitives but the whole Baroque taste is condemned. It is precisely to the seventeenth century that the beginning of the rupture between art criticism and contemporary art, and of the mutual incomprehension, goes back.
These theories and this taste inform the French artistic milieu, frankly academic (which indeed unified the arts under the category of beauty: beaux-arts), from Poussin to Dufresne, to Le Brun, to Félibien, to De Piles.
The eighteenth century accentuates the aforementioned tendencies, sanctioning the triumph of rationalism and of Neoclassicism. Antiquity is now the indisputable and unsurpassable model, and antiquity itself is no longer Rome but Greece. Especially notable is the rationalistic theory on architecture codified by F. Blondel in polemic with C. Perrault and by De Cordemoy.
In Italy too the tradition of architectural treatise-writing continues. In 1693 a treatise consonant with the times appeared: the Prospettiva dei pittori e degli architetti of the Jesuit A. Pozzo. In the eighteenth century the rationalistic ideas found a brilliant champion in Fr. Lodoli, a Franciscan, the "philosopher architect", who maintains that the "function" of the building must be clearly expressed by the "representation"; he was followed in this by Algarotti.
The greatest codifiers of Neoclassicism are Lessing, Sulzer, Mengs, Winckelmann. Even more important than the concepts that inform it is Winckelmann's work (1717-68) on Greek art, the first history of art as history of forms and no longer as biography of artists; he wishes to look at works in and for themselves; he seeks ideal beauty in them, and on this basis establishes a history with the usual scheme of progress, acme and decadence; often, however, despite this schematism, his observations and his stylistic qualifications are critically valid. Winckelmann's history of art had much influence and many continuators, among them Seroux d'Agincourt, Cicognara, Lanzi, whose Storia pittorica is most important, even if it adheres to a different historical scheme: namely the history of the various artistic schools (Florentine, Venetian, etc.), a scheme already indicated by Bellori and by Domenico, and which enjoyed a very great and long-lasting success.
In England academicism had a more limited importance: its principal representatives are Webb and Reynolds. But against rationalism there asserted itself rather an aesthetics of feeling and imagination and a taste for the fanciful and the picturesque (Gerard, Hogarth, Burke, Price and above all Shaftesbury). There thus also begins the revaluation of Gothic architecture (Batty Langley) and of works of art outside the sphere of classicism (Richardson) and the taste for exotic things (chinoiseries). This, moreover, also happened in France, especially on the part of the critics of the Salons (art exhibitions): first among these Diderot, himself an upholder of the importance of feeling and caprice in art.
Romanticism (v.), in polemic with rationalist classicism, affirms the pre-eminence of fantasy, of feeling, of expressive immediacy and hence of individualism, outside of canons and abstract ideals. The first exponent in the field of figurative art criticism may be considered Wackenröder (1773-98); in his Herzensergiessungen he affirms with ingenuousness, but with an entirely new sensibility, the spontaneity and the arationality of artistic creation, and he admires Dürer and the primitives for this reason; his friend J. L. Tieck and F. Schlegel may be connected with him.
Medieval art becomes, in opposition to classical art judged pagan, the model for certain Romantic artists, who saw in it purity of feeling and divine inspiration; thus were born artistic "schools" that claimed to revive the art of the primitives. This proves how criticism tended by then toward content-based criteria. The schools of the "Nazarenes" and the "Purists" in Italy, of the "Primitives" in France, of the "Pre-Raphaelites" in England (artistically the most important) aroused very numerous controversies; the Nazarenes were defended above all by Schlegel, the Pre-Raphaelites by Ruskin, a notable critic, endowed with great sensitivity also for medieval art. Besides Ruskin, medieval art was studied with love by Rio in his work L'art chrétien.
Not considering here the philosophical systems on art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Vico, Herder, Schelling, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Herbart: v. ESTETICA), one notes the great importance that Romantic art criticism had in France regarding contemporary art. Often it is the artists themselves who polemicize, for example Delacroix against Ingres: but above all important are the critics of the Salons: Thiers, Planche, Thoré, Champfleury, etc., and, more acute than all, Baudelaire, who affirms the absolute freedom of the creative act and the value of form. Impressionism too finds its defenders against the condemnation of the academy: Zola, Duret, Duranty, etc.; and from the pictorial conquests of the new art, Fromentin draws the premises for an acute study on seventeenth-century Flemish painting, thereby reevaluated against the condemnation of classicism.
The end of the nineteenth century saw an extraordinary flowering of historical and philological studies also in the field of art history. Among archaeologists one cites Lanciani and Fürtwängler, among Christian archaeologists De Rossi and Wilpert, among researchers of documents Milanesi; among the authors of broader historical syntheses, first is Cavalcaselle (who may be called the father of modern art history, for the richness and depth of his investigations and the rare acuteness of his attributions), followed by A. Venturi (also deserving in the history of Italian art for his vast work rich in sensitivity and intuition), by Van Marle, by Toesca, etc.
What philology and scientism could not give, that is, the explanation of the phenomenon of art, was often sought either in psychological-literary description (Walter Pater) or in the history of customs and society (Taine, Müntz, Thode, Burckhardt) or in the history of technique and economic conditions (Semper and the historians of architecture Choisy, Viollet-le-Duc).
To content-based approaches, whether philological, literary, or sociological, formalist art criticism reacts, which has its most typical theoretical formulation in the doctrine of "pure visibility" (Fiedler, Hildebrand, van Marees): for it the principle of art is neither beauty nor concept nor feeling, but visibility: hence the history of art will therefore become the history of purely visual elements, such as form, color, space, etc., disregarding the subject represented and the artist's feeling; and forms will be considered as living a life of their own, developing according to their own laws and grouping themselves into styles or formal families (Focillon). With pure visibility are connected other tendencies that might be called formalistic psychology, which interpret forms as symbols of psychological situations and as stimuli to their reproduction in the observer (Berenson speaks of the tactile sense solicited in us by Giotto's art, of the distinction of breathing caused by Perugino's spatiality; according to Geoffrey Scott, for a correct critical appreciation of architecture one must recognize in forms "the image of our functions"); and therefore the development of styles corresponds to philosophical cycles (Dvořák) or more generally historical ones (Wickhoff, Riegl, Wölfflin, belonging to the so-called Viennese school). All the critics just named have brought substantial contributions to individual problems of art history, arriving at them both independently of their own theoretical schemes and also through them but surpassing them (Wölfflin's five famous schemes served, for example, to better characterize the Baroque).
The most modern art criticism owes its theoretical foundations to the aesthetics of B. Croce and to his consequent methodology (v. ESTETICA; FILOSOFIA DELLO SPIRITO). Affirming the autonomy of art, it excludes a history of art as an abstract physical fact or in relation to the pleasure it procures or to the moral precepts by which it is informed or to the conceptual knowledge it provides or even to the beautiful and the natural true; affirming the identity between content and form, it excludes both conceptualist art history (psychological, biographical, literary, sociological) and art history as pure form; asserting the identity of intuition and expression, it denies all value to any history that makes art depend on technical knowledge and that on these establishes a process of progress or decadence; affirming the unity of art, it reduces to simple empirical divisions the distinctions among the various arts as well as the divisions of literary or artistic genres; recognizing finally the spontaneity and originality of artistic creation, it denies that art can be taught and that criticism has a didactic and corrective office. Art criticism coincides with the history of art and consists in affirming that "at a determined moment, there has arisen, inserting itself into the series of events, an a," which is a work of art, or that it is not, and belongs therefore to another moment of the life of the spirit: conceptual knowledge, practical or moral act, and then in characterizing the work with the help of empirical and content-based concepts.
Even when it does not accept all its principles and consequences, modern criticism cannot disregard the work of clarification and systematization of Crocean aesthetics; indeed it owes to it the fact that studies of art history (like those of literary criticism) are conducted in Italy with a rigor and methodological coherence much greater than elsewhere. Among the current critics of this orientation are (without forgetting that each of them has undergone other and various influences besides the Crocean one and above all that of pure visibility) R. Longhi, L. Venturi, M. Marangoni (for medieval and modern art), R. Bianchi Bandinelli (for ancient art).
Bibliography20 works
Adriano Prandi