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Table of Contents

Robert Brennan, C. Oliver O’Donnell, Marco M. Mascolo Introduction

Inventions of Academic Languages Robert Williams Terms of Art

Massimiliano Rossi Norma e parodia. Lessico, codici e categorie del discorso sull’arte degli Umidi alla Crusca 51 Jacqueline Lichtenstein The Conferences of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture: A New Discourse on the Arts 67 Olivier Bonfait La lingua francese e il ‘lessico artistico’, 1660-1700

In the Shadow of the Academy Alessandra Russo Multilingual Dialogues between Artifacts and Words in Early Modern Times 107 Francesca Terrenato In the Manner of Vasari: Italian Loanwords and Calques in Karel Van Mander’s Schilder-boeck (1603-4) 123 Stephen Bann Historical Genre: Negotiating a Hybrid Concept in and Outside of Nineteenth-century France 141

Michael Fried Absorption/Absorbement and Other Problems

161

Translating and Untranslating Art Writing Andreas Beyer Art Historical Untranslatables

175

Elisabeth Décultot Winckelmanns Sprachen: Kunsttheorie als Übersetzung

183

Émilie Passignat Nello specchio della traduzione: l’ecfrasi longhiana alla prova della lingua francese 205 Marco M. Mascolo Roberto Longhi e la sua ricezione, tra ekphrasis e connoisseurship 227 Art History and the Anthropology of Language John Leavitt Language Ideologies and the Inventions of Art History

249

Horst Bredekamp A Neglected Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft

265

C. Oliver O’Donnell Meyer Schapiro and Claude Lévi-Strauss: Structuralist Arguments among Abstract Paintings 277 Whitney Davis «Reading-In»: Franz Boas and the Languages of the Anthropology of Art 291 Plates Biographical Notes Index of Names Photographic Credits

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Robert Williams

sculpture has eight points of view while a painting has only one. Borghini’s response? Dice che la scultura è maggiore sette volte. Cagna! Cellini’s added insistence that a sculptor, in order to excel, must possess buona cognizione di tutte le nobilissime arti – that in order to represent a brave soldier, for instance, he must himself be brave, in order to represent an orator, he must himself be eloquent and possess la buona scienza delle lettere, and so forth – must have struck Borghini as exactly the kind of presumption that Socrates had deplored in Athenian craftsmen: he calls it il vizio comune di tutte l’arti. Borghini also criticizes the claim of Vitruvius that the architect must understand all the sciences, though it should be noted that he finds equal fault with Baldassare Castiglione for claiming that the courtier must possess all virtues. Two of the drawings that Cellini made of his design for the seal of the Accademia del Disegno sometime between 1563 and 1569 – the very years in which he must have written the Trattato dell’orificeria – feature, together with a personification of Nature, a ‘hieroglyphic’ alphabet consisting of the images of tools used by practitioners of the arts of design (pl. 1, and fig. 1). In the short essay that Cellini wrote out – in slightly different versions – on the two sheets, he elucidates the meaning of the allegorical figure: explaining why it has trumpets instead of arms, for instance, he says that artists express themselves through the work of their arms: la tromba della nostra fama viene da le braccia. The sheet you see here in ‘Plate 1’ is now in the British Museum; the one in Figure 1, which was evidently made first, was in the collection of Piero Calamandrei, but its present location is uncertain. On the verso of the London sheet, Cellini explains his hieroglyphic alphabet as follows: To these things I will add that [because] the Egyptians made an alphabet of characters and letters in their way, the Greeks another, different [one], the Hebrews another different yet again, as [was] that of the Latins, and thus each nation, different in its own way from all the others, [I considered that] it would be creative and praiseworthy (capricciosa e lodevole) if we also had one different from the others, so I have made the one seen under our emblem, [made up] of all the tools that we use in practicing those most noble and useful arts.

The version of this passage on the sheet that belonged to Calamandrei contains a small but significant difference. Among the peoples who have created their own alphabets – the Egyptians, Greeks, Jews, and Latins – Cellini also mentions i Toschani, but they do not reappear on the London sheet. By Toschani he would seem to have meant the Etruscans, and one may wonder whether, at the time of the first draft, he may perhaps – perhaps – have clung to the opinion of the Aramei, that the Etruscan alphabet, with its superficial resemblances to Hebrew, confirmed the origins of the modern Tuscans as descendents of the lost tribe. At some point between the first and second version of the essay, however, he would seem to have rejected it, a concession – perhaps – to the balance of informed opinion, and perhaps specifically to Borghini, luogotenente of the Academy.

Terms of Art

Fig. 1. Benvenuto Cellini, Project for a seal of the Accademia del Disegno. Location uncertain, formerly: Florence, Archivio Calamandrei, from: Pope-Hennessy, John, Cellini, London 1985, Pl. 144.

Robert Williams

with which it includes extensive treatment of the subordinate arts of masonry, roofing, carpentry, cabinetry (he distinguishes between charpenterie and menuiserie) locksmithy, paving, and glazing. In the section on sculpture he includes goldsmithy, ‘turning’ or lathe-work, and gem-cutting, as well as engraving. The section on painting includes the media we would expect to find, but also an extensive discussion of glass painting, stucco-work, and marquetry. The purely theoretical sections of the text are succinct and rather formulaic; much more attention is devoted to the practical challenges of building and to the processes and tools involved, and the same is true of the other arts discussed. The book is dedicated to Jule-Armand Colbert, the twelve-year old son of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s superintendent of public works and minister of finances. Félibien’s purpose, he says at the beginning, is to enable those who are not artists themselves to understand the arts and to converse about them in a more informed way, especially to be able to communicate more clearly and effectively with artists. The second half of the book is a dictionary (dictionnaire) of terms, which can be consulted on its own but which is intended as a glossary to the treatise: any words that the reader may not understand can be looked up immediately. The volume also contains 65 engraved plates illustrating groups of tools to which discussions in the treatise and the definitions frequently refer, since, as Félibien says, it is difficult to describe such objects with sufficient precision using words alone (fig. 2). Some, such as this plate illustrating engraver’s tools, takes the form of a workshop view, thus emphasizing the working process: no engraver is shown but the viewer is invited to imagine himself or herself in the chair. Some of the terms recorded by Félibien are very colloquial, and give a sense of the liveliness of craftsmen’s speech, especially when it involves the names of animals. The French chevalet, like the Italian cavaletto, recorded by Baldinucci (but which does not appear in the Crusca with this specific meaning) is the word for a painter’s easel. Félibien notes that the word «dog» (chien) serves to mean sergent – in Italian, grappa, an iron or copper tie securing two blocks of masonry (in English, a ‘cramp’) – but he also uses the words crampon and lien de fer to denote the same thing. A «bird» (oiseau) is a wooden board with handles on which laborers (goujats) carry fresh mortar to masons: Félibien himself prefers the term épervier. A grue is a ‘crane’ in both senses, a «monkey» (singe) a kind of winch, an «ox-tongue» (langue-de-boeuf ) a type of mason’s trowel or spade (figs. 3-4). Where Baldinucci lists seven types of martelli, and distinguishes between martello and martellina, as well as between a martello and a mazza (in English, a ‘sledgehammer’), Félibien discusses at least 18 different kinds of marteaux, also differentiating between marteau and martelline, as well as between marteau and masse. Baldinucci distinguishes two types of maglio (‘mallet’) and between martello, mazzapicchio, and mazzuolo; Félibien also between marteaux and various kinds of maillets. The same exhaustive approach is found in Félibien’s treatment of other common tools: he

Terms of Art

Fig. 2 André Félibien, Des principes de l’architecture, sculpture, et peinture, Paris 1676, p. 389.

Jacqueline Lichtenstein

Fig. 3. Diagrams from Roger de Piles, Cours de peinture par principes, 1708, page 382.

The Conferences of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture

Fig. 4. Peter Paul Rubens, Deposition from the Cross, 1612-14. Antwerp, Cathedral of Our Lady.

Ce génie heureux a bien senti que la couleur relèverait infiniment son ouvrage ... il s’est servi du coloris pour mettre le vrai dans ses carnations et dans ses draperies.9 As this happy genius was very sensible, that colouring would be of infinite advantage to set off his work…he has accordingly coloured it, and by this means made both the carnations and draperis appear with greater truth.10

Actually, in most treatises of the 18th century, the word «coloring» can be considered an equivalent of the French coloris and has more or less the same meaning, as in Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty. «When I come to treat of coloring», he writes in Chapter 12... ...I shall particularly shew in what manner the gradating of prime tints serve to the making a beautiful complexion; in this place we shall only observe how nature hath by these gradating shades ornamented the surfaces of animals; fish generally have this kind of shade from their backs downward; birds have their feathers enriched with it; and many flowers, particularly the rose, shew it by the gradually-increasing colours of their leaves.11

9. De Piles, Cours de peinture cit., p. 229. 10. De Piles, The principles of painting cit., pp. 284-285. 11. William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, written with a view of fixing the fluctuating ideas of taste, London 1753, p. 96.

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Alessandra Russo

when the pre-Hispanic technique had dramatically and creatively changed under the impact of new artifacts brought from Europe – not only engravings, but canvas paintings as well. It was an artifact that resulted from the reciprocal ‘untranslation’20 of Mesoamerican feather techniques and European canvas paintings. The feather image that would be called a painting (pintura) by Guevara and a canvas (lienzo) in the inventory of his collection was therefore already a piece that physically resulted, in New Spain, from the dialogue with and untranslation of a new linguistic environment and a new imagery. And yet, that ‘feather piece’ came to transcend its specific colonial or Novohispanic context when it was regarded as a painting or a canvas that prompted a major innovation in the history of p/Painting tout court. In this sense, it revealed its potential for universalization when its artistic nature exceeded a specific local history or geography. Anyone – not only experts or painters, as Guevara says, and not only art historians of the colonial period today, one may add – could immediately recognize its laborious inventiveness. While Guevara was writing his treatise in Spain, in New Spain an unprecedented team of multilingual intellectuals, scribes and painters was working with the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún to compile the General History of the Things of New Spain, also known as the Florentine Codex. This monumental alphabetic and visual history of pre-Hispanic and post-conquest Mexico is written in Spanish and Náhuatl and intercalated with hundreds of images.21 A large portion of Book Nine addresses the creation of feather artifacts. The extremely elaborate stages of the artistic process are represented in detail and described in Náhuatl with no simultaneous text in Spanish. One passage addresses how, before proceeding to the gluing of feathers, the artists make a drawing (pl. 5). Feathers are then glued on the drawing cut-outs, starting with the outline: [Niman ic motequi in tlilli in tlilantli] inic motlillotia, motlilancaitotia, in ihuitlacuilolli […] iehoatl in tlilantli muchioa, ihuiio tzanatl, anoço chamolin, chamoloatzalli… in order to mark the feather painting, to delineate it, feathers are glued, pressed on with the bone blade. The black outline is made of grackle feathers, or scarlet ones, the glue-hardened scarlet feathers.22 20. A. Russo, The Untranslatable Image: A Mestizo History of the Arts in New Spain (1500-1600), Austin 2014. 21. On the Florentine Codex, D. Magaloni, The Colors of the New World: Artists, Materials, and the Creation of the Florentine Codex, Los Angeles 2014; see also the collective volume: Colors Between Two Worlds: The Florentine Codex of Bernardino de Sahagún, edited by G. Wolf and J. Connors, in collaboration with L.A. Waldman, Florence 2012. 22. I have modified the translation from Náhuatl into English published in Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, 12 vols, translated by A.J.O. Anderson and C.E. Dibble, Salt Lake City 19501982, Book IX, p. 95. In particular, I use here the present tense, as in the original text, while the translators

Multilingual Dialogues between Artifacts and Words

115

Fig. 5. Detail of Plate 4.

In the image, a feather artist, clearly creating in a post-Conquest setting (note his clothes, the architecture) is gluing the black and scarlet plumes to outline a particularly demanding pattern. Below the picture surface, which is actually depicted as a canvas, another, symbolic, canvas displays the two glyphs of the birds that are mentioned in the text: the black grackle, portrayed in a naturalistic style, and a red scarlet feather, capped by the glyph chantli (house), which phonetically indicates the first letters of the word chamolin (scarlet macaw). If one carefully observes a feather painting, this interesting technical detail is unmistakable: the outline of every form is masterfully ‘drawn’ by gluing down black or scarlet feathers (fig. 5). The Náhuatl word ihuitlacuilolli, which is employed in the Florentine Codex to name the artifacts, deserves equally close inspection. The term does not appear as such in the vocabulary published in Mexico in 1555 by the Franciscan Alonso de Molina, nor had decided to put all the sentences in the past, which contributed to the idea of a ‘lost’ technique. Instead, with the present tense, the Florentine Codex is addressing the contemporary vitality of this art.

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Stephen Bann

prime example being Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846), who was obsessed with the notion that history paintings should, before all else, be vast in size.20 On visiting the Louvre in 1814, Hayden was mortified to find that Raphael’s Transfiguration was much smaller than he had imagined! His own efforts were devoted to a huge and technically unstable rendering of The Raising of Lazarus (1821-23, Tate). This was undertaken in the spirit of competing with the large painting on the same subject by Sebastiano del Piombo, then open to viewing in London as part of the Angerstein collection, and later to enter the new National Gallery. Haydon’s interest had been galvanised because the latter was believed to be, in part, the work of Michelangelo. Having no success as a history painter, Haydon fell back on genre scenes of the most popular kind. The last surviving pupil of Reynolds, James Northcote, summed up his situation decisively in one of his voluble interviews dating from the 1820s: [H]istoric painting cannot flourish here as things are at present. Look at Haydon, the historical painter! I have told him that it’s impossible for him to get on in this country, let his merit be what it may. I have always told him this. I tell him he is like an architect, who is qualifying to build cathedrals when no cathedrals are wanted. But [interrupts his interlocutor] Haydon tells me that, in time, he should be able to create a demand for historical pictures! He will find it [replies Northcote] a sad mistake, for in no age or country has historical painting ever been encouraged for its own sake, but always either as a source of power or profit ‒ or as affording gratification to ostentation or self-love.21

I have no proof that Northcote might be alluding to Paul Delaroche when he records in another of these conversations: «A young Frenchman called upon me some little time ago, and expressed to me his admiration for my picture, The Little Princess made a Nun».22 But what can be said with certainty is that Delaroche visited London at least twice in the 1820s, and had proven contacts with 20. There is an interesting parallel here with the case of Antoine Wiertz, one of the first prize-winners sent to study in Rome by the newly created state of Belgium in the 1830s, who conceived his own ‘grand tableau’, The Body of Patroclus Disputed between the Greeks and the Trojans (1835-37, Musee d’art wallon) on such a scale that the merchant who sold him the canvas had no room to make it up! See La correspondance d’Antoine Wiertz, Bruxelles 1953, p. 48. Wiertz exhibited his huge painting (395 x 703 cm) at the Paris Salon of 1839, where it was badly hung and greeted with ridicule. He subsequently persuaded the Belgian state to house the majority of his works in a personal museum, the Musée Wiertz, which still survives in Brussels. 21. Conversations of James Northcote R.A., edited by E. Fletcher, London 1901, p. 70. 22. Ibid., p. 223.

Historical Genre: Negotiating a hybrid concept

153

Fig. 3. Francis Legat, after James Northcote, Scene from Shakespeare, King Richard the Third. Engraving published by Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, London, 1790.

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Michael Fried

called «coups de théâtre», in favor of temporally protracted and emotionally moving groupings of figures, which he called «tableaux», one model for which, it is strongly implied, is Poussin’s Testament of Eudamidas of the mid-1650s.6 What this suggests, of course, is that Diderot was already thinking of painting and drama in the same basic terms, a fact that becomes even more clear in the Salons he went on to write (the first Salon dating from the year after the Discours). In fact, the conception of painting I am starting to sketch has its origins in the years before Diderot turned his attention to drama and painting. Here for example is the Abbé Laugier’s commentary in his Salon of 1753 of a painting by Chardin titled Un Philosophe occupé de sa lecture (fig. 1): Ce caractére est rendu avec beaucoup de vérité. On voit un homme en habit & en bonnet fourré appuyé sur une table, & lisant très-attentivement un gros volume relié en parchemin. Le Peintre lui a donné un air d’esprit, de rêverie & de négligence qui plaît infiniment. C’est un Lecteur vraiment Philosophe qui ne se contente point de lire, qui médite & approfondit, & qui paroît si bien absorbé dans sa méditation qu’il semble qu’on auroit peine à le distraire.7

And here is an excerpt from a Salon two years later, the Abbé de La Porte’s commentary on Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s debut canvas, Un Père de famille qui lit la Bible à ses enfants (fig. 2): Un père de famille lit la Bible à ses enfans; touché de ce qu’il vient d’y voir, il est lui-même pénétré de la morale qu’il leur fait; ses yeux sont presque mouillés de larmes; son épouse assez belle femme & dont la beauté n’est point idéale, mais telle que nous la pouvons rencontrer chez les gens de sa sorte, l’écoute avec cet air de tranquillité que goûte une honnête femme au milieu d’une famille nombreuse qui fait toute son occupation, ses plaisirs, & sa gloire. Sa fille à côté d’elle est stupéfaite & navrée de ce qu’elle entend; le grand frère a une expression aussi singulier que vraie. Le petit bonhomme qui fait un effort pour attraper sur la table un bâton, & qui n’a aucune attention pour des choses qu’il ne peut comprendre, est tout à fait dans la nature; voyez-vous qu’il ne distrait personne, on est trop sérieusement occupé?8

Paris 1966, p. 231. 6. See Fried, Absorption and Theatricality cit., pp. 95-96. 7. [Abbé Marc-Antoine] Laugier, Jugement d’un amateur sur l’exposition des tableaux. Lettre à M. le marquis de V., [Vence] 1753, pp. 42-43. 8. [Abbé Joseph] de La Porte, Sentimens sur plusieurs tableaux exposés cette année au grand sallon du Louvre, 1755, p. 15. The passage continues: «Quelle noblesse! & quell sentiment dans cette bonne maman qui, sans sortire de l’attention qu’elle a pour ce qu’elle entend, retient machinalement le petit espiégle qui fait grander le chien: n’entendez-vous comme il l’agace, en lui montrant les cornes. Quel Peintre! Quel Compositeur».

Absorption/Absorbement and Other Problems

165

Fig. 1. Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Un Philosophe occupé de sa lecture, 1734. Paris, Louvre.

For reasons of economy, I’m going to let Laugier’s and de La Porte’s remarks stand for a host of similar descriptions of related paintings by Diderot and other critics of the 1750s and 60s (and after), the crucial points for my purposes being, first, that Laugier

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Whitney Davis

Fig. 1 a, b. Designs on Cheyenne mocassins, from Paul Ehrenreich, Zur Ornamentik der nordamerikanischen Indianer, «Ethnologisches Notizblatt», 2, no. 1, 1899.

c = strings for shell money; b = fish bones; a = frigate bird).6 At the same time as all this research was conducted, however, Boas signalled the deep challenges it posed for the very idea ‒ his underlying idea ‒ of small-c culture. 6. E. Stephan, Südseekunst: Beiträge zur Kunst des Bismarck-Archipels und zur Urgeschichte der Kunst überhaupt, Berlin 1907, p. 86.

Franz Boas and the Languages of the Anthropology of Art

295

Fig.2. Cloud All Alone, a Zuni painted bowl, early twentieth century (fieldwork of Ruth Bunzel), from Franz Boas, Primitive Art, fig. 91.

Let us take the supposed «definite significance» of the designs employed in Marquesan male tatoos as reported by Karl von den Steinen ‒ Boas’s cited example of the initial ethnological discovery of the problem. With respect to one design (fig. 4) ‒ a very small part of the immense tapestry of a full-dress tatoo ‒ one informant called the

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Whitney Davis

Fig. 6a Chilkat Blanket AMNH T25542, from Boas, Notes, fig. 3; Fig. 6b Chilkat Blanket AMNH E/1501, from Boas, Notes, fig. 16a.

George Hunt ‒ English on his paternal side and Kwakiutl on his maternal. From Hunt, Boas collected many artefacts and stories as well as local knowledge and gossip. Boas himself was a whiz at acquiring languages; his fluency in Kwakiutl was eventually sufficient for him to record its sexual and scatological euphemisms and to

Franz Boas and the Languages of the Anthropology of Art

303

Fig. 7a Chilkat Blanket AMNH 16/351, from Boas, Notes, fig. 18a; Fig. 7b Chilkat Blanket AMNH 16/350 (see pl. 14), from Boas, Notes, fig. 22.

prepare its grammar, though he actually spoke with his Kwakiutl friends mostly in English with his strong German accent.19 Moving the names, explanations, and inter19. For critical appraisals of the cultural, political, and gender dynamics in Boas’s collaboration

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Plates

Pl. 9. Pierre-Charles Comte, Gipsies MakingLittle Pigs Dance in Front of the Sick Louis XI, 1869. Private Collection.

Art History before English

Pl. 10. Carlo Braccesco, Annunciazione e Santi, dettaglio: paesaggio. Paris, Louvre. Pl. 11. Hendrik ter Brugghen, Il giovane ricco e il povero Lazzaro. Utrecht, Centraal Museum.

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Plates

Pl. 12. Mark Rothko, Number 10, 1950. New York, Museum of Modern Art.

Art History before English

Pl. 13. Donald Judd, Untitled, 1969. New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

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