Monument of Criticism […]

The discovery for which Wölfflin is celebrated, the discovery that visual art can fruitfully be discussed in strictly visual terms, has provided the chief excitements of twentieth-century art criticism. But those who come to Classic Art with this in mind may read a part of it almost with disappointment. The book represents an early stage in the development of Wölfflin’s ideas: his standpoint is already clear but the view is still coloured by the nineteenth century. Often the first words in praise of a picture, and the last as well, are concerned with its narrative content. This is reasonable enough, but here one is reminded forcibly of how far understanding of pictorial content had narrowed since the sixteenth century. The symbolic richness of illustration and the philosophic and poetic overtones which accompany it are almost entirely excluded from his view: essentially he conceives the content of Renaissance art as similar in kind to that of the academic history painting of the nineteenth century. Its form is more fully expounded; in this respect his responsiveness has never been bettered. But in the total view of artistic character that emerges there may be detected a limitation which amounts almost to shallowness: there is sometimes a suggestion that the virtue of a painter consists simply of a combination of structural deftness with the kind of tact required of a stage manager.

When the High Renaissance is under examination the idea of artistic progress is hard to resist. Wölfflin delighted in demonstrating the beauty of Renaissance art to students, and often his comparisons with the Quattrocento frame themselves, involuntarily as one feels, in terms of praise and censure. Even when the judgements of value are not, to our taste, unlucky (as they are in a comparison of St Jeromes

by Titian and Basaiti),

the character of a picture often seems not to be felt, so much as inferred from a general intellectual view. It may be possible to discover a ‘lucidity of geometry’ in the foreground of Raphael’s Transfiguration, but it is not a discovery that illuminates the convulsive power of the picture. When Wölfflin traces an impersonal perfection in the painting of Fra Bartolommeo we are in another age: for us it is the sense of personal uneasiness, the self-betrayal, in fact the imperfections, which give meaning to the painter’s works.

Wölfflin’s criticism has been, and remains, full of significance, and it would be ungrateful to fuss about details. In Classic Art, and in particular in its final section, we watch the unfolding of his majestic power of comprehending the formal character of a whole period in a single, coherent conception. It is an imaginative effort which remains without parallel in criticism: as an example of critical discipline the book has a lasting importance. If Wölfflin’s great generalisation no longer commands unquestioning agreement, it is because he has himself given us the equipment with which to disagree. Before him it was hardly possible to discuss style in objective terms, but now this very achievement is seen to carry its own danger and difficulty. We can hardly believe in any analysis which does not understand style as a function of the mental life of an individual. Wölfflin was debarred from this, which the train of his thought, time and again, demanded, by the lack in his time of a conception of mental life to correspond with the profound coherence and the intensity of personal purpose, which is felt in a work of art.