Ah the memories of Art History, when the young green me was immersed
in the study of beauty: magnificent paintings and objects, the lives of the
artists of the past, the beautiful macros that show the painting techniques and
the chisel of master sculptors. I loved the descriptions of how colors were
gathered, shipped around the world in long journeys on caravels or caravans,
then mixed with alchemical competence and applied layer by layer with
techniques learned in a lifetime of dedication to the craft.
Then, to counterbalance the beauty of these studies, the insubstantial
analyses on style: sometimes they were fascinating (moreover if well written),
other times contorted and labyrinthine, but in general they left me with the unpleasant
feeling that I had not learned much.
Jennifer T. Roberts paper[1]
offered me both feelings. In the first half the transoceanic travel of the
painting helps in showing a vision of a very large world now disappeared: the
vast distances, the painting’s movement from hand to hand to its destination,
the long delay between the making of the art piece and its exhibition. The
analysis of how Copley carefully planned the theme of the painting is also
interesting. Then the bitter taste of the pains of the undergraduate studies:
the drapery and the perspective linking Copley to Empiricism, despite five
hundred years of drapery painting and perspective studies that predated Copley.
Walter Benjamin’s paper[2]
excels in showing the limits of my understanding. I could say that it is the
language barrier, but I am perfectly aware that my mind is the problem. Between
some very satisfactory (for my ego) errors and sparse concepts that I
understood and appreciated, a dense fog obscured my general understanding of
the meaning of the paper. Not language barrier, it was a meteorological issue.
Then the dense mist lifted; there was light again when
Michael Yonan[3]
and Charles F. Montgomery[4]
blew off the haze. Yonan’s call for an Art History focused more on the
materiality of the analyzed objects let me cheer in a very un-academic way.
Montgomery’s practical guide to the evaluation of an object had the taste of a
behind-the-scenes trip in the mind of one who has reached excellence: with
clarity and nonchalance he leads through the multiple steps with the ease of a
seasoned guide of a hidden wing of a magnificent museum.
The readings of this week confirmed what I miss and what I
don’t of Art History: there is a limit to what we can deduct from an object,
and the evidence that we have draws this border. Any analysis that is based on weak
or no evidence is, in my personal view, just an opinion. The papers helped me
in better defining the line; a lesson that I hope to use well in dealing with
my beautiful object. That old magazine deserves some respect.
[1] Jennifer L. Roberts,
“Copley’s Cargo,” in Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early
America (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2014).
[2] Walter Benjamin, “The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Hannah Arendt, ed.,
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).
[3] Michael Yonan, “Toward a
Fusion of Art History and Material Culture Studies,” West 86 th 18 (2011): 232-48.
[4] Charles F. Montgomery,
"The Connoisseurship of Artifacts," in Thomas J. Schlereth, ed.,
Material Culture Studies in America (London: Altamira Press, 1999).
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