Greek art, between the sixth and fourth century B.C. was, compared with Egypt, in a state of permanent revolution, which carried it within no more than six or seven generations from the archaic style to the trompe l'oeil. Yet, although originality and innovation were valued as never before, it could not avoid developing its own clichés. 'After all,' wrote Gombrich, 'Greek art of the classical period concentrated on the image of man almost to the exclusion of other motifs, and even in the portrayal of man it remained wedded to types. This does not apply only to the idealized type of physique which we all associate with Greek art. Even in the rendering of movement and drapery the repertoire of Greek sculpture and painting has turned out to be strangely limited. There are a restricted number of formulas for the rendering of figures standing, running, fighting, or falling, which Greek artists repeated with relatively slight variations over a long period of time. Perhaps if a census of such motifs were taken, the Greek vocabulary would be found to be not much larger than the Egyptian. [12]
That vocabulary -- and its Euclidean grammar of proportion -- remained as indelibly printed on European art as the categories of Aristotle on European philosophy. The Byzantine painter and mosaic maker had given up the aspiration to copy nature, but he used the approved Greek stock-formulae to represent faces, hands, gestures, and draperies. Warburg [13] has shown that the artists of the Renaissance were prone to fall back on Greek models whenever they wanted to indicate emotion by a gesture or attitude: he called these emotive clichés Pathosformeln.*
'Even Dutch genre paintings that appear to mirror life in all its bustle and variety will turn out to be created from a limited number of types and gestures' -- if for instance, one compares them with newspaper-photographs of crowd scenes. The quotation is again from Professor Gombrich, [14] whose Art and Illusion proved an invaluable source of illustrative examples.
Skilled routine in perceiving as in thinking, has its positive and negative side. Without certain conventional rules of the game, which were acquired by learning but function unawares, we could not make much sense either of nature or of art. 'The art of seeing nature', Constable wrote, 'is a thing almost as much to be acquired as the art of reading Egyptian hieroglyphs.' [15] On the other hand, conventions tend to harden into rigid formulae -- the matrix freezes up, and makes us ignore those aspects of reality which do not fit into the schema. The Greek sculptor is indifferent to individual expression, the Byzantine painter to anatomy, the Chinese to shadows, and so on. But there exist far more striking examples of the single-minded neglect by the eye of anything which the mind does not consider relevant. They are engravings dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, which show that even artists reputed for their meticulousness can be indifferent or blind to features which are considered irrelevant or offensive to the conventional rules of the game. One of them was Merian, an extremely skilful illustrator who obviously tried hard to make a faithful 'copy' -- it looks actually like an architect's drawing -- of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. And what happened? ' . . . As a child of the seventeenth century, his notion of a church is that of a lofty symmetrical building with large, rounded windows, and that is how he designs Notre-Dame. He places the transept in the centre with four large, rounded windows on either side, while the actual view shows seven narrow, pointed Gothic windows to the west and six in the choir.' [16] He could not go against the code which governed his visual perception.
Nor could those medieval artists, who drew lions, elephants, and other exotic animals 'from life', but, incapable of visually digesting the startling appearance, produced monstrosities reminding one of Greek chimeras -- creatures compounded of a lion's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail. The reason is simple. The codification of experience into 'rules of the game' is as indispensable in perceptual skills as in manual or reasoning skills. The learning process starts in the cot and ends only when the artist has learned to forget what he has learned -- but that is only for the chosen few. The medieval artist -- like the contemporary amateur taking a correspondence course in draftsmanship -- did not start by drawing from nature, but by learning, from drawing-books, the tricks and formulae of how to draw heads, hands, and feet, birds, stags, trees, and clouds. There were hundreds of such works published, from Villard de Honecourt's Album of Patterns in the first half of the thirteenth century to date -- including such classics as Dürer's Dresden Sketchbook or Fialetti's The True Method and Order to Draw All Parts and Limbs of the Human Body -- which seems to contain every conceivable shape and misshape of ears, eyes, and noses under the sun. To succeed in drawing an ear with an untutored eye requires genius; even Dürer, so we are told, got the anatomy of the human eye wrong.
To quote Constable again: an artist who is self-taught is taught by a very ignorant person indeed. He must acquire a vocabulary -- not only to express himself, but to read meaning into appearances. The same Villard de Honecourt whose album of patterns contains the most admirably schematized swans, horses, ostriches, and bearded heads drew a lion 'from life', as he assures us -- and produced a chimera. We do not know for how long he had the chance of looking at the lion or how coherent his sketch was. But it is evident that where he had to fill in features from memory, he could only do so by supplanting the forgotten details of the strange creature by parts of more familiar animals. He had certainly not intended to falsify deliberately -- any more than Merian did in his drawings of Notre-Dame. But neither of them could digest the unfamiliar motif because it could not be resolved into familiar schemata, pigeonholed; labelled, and confined to memory -- or jotted down in shorthand, as it were, by means of a ready-made formula. They were in the same position as the subjects in the psychological laboratory who are made to witness an unexpected sequence of events -- and, when asked to relate what happened, give notoriously divergent, unreliable accounts. Their verbal reproduction is jumbled, not because they lack the skill to express themselves, but because they were unable to take in a sequence of events which did not fit their scheme of things.
Not only the medieval artist used formulae like recipes from a cookery-book. Camper, an eighteenth-century anatomist, wrote a book on The Connection Between the Science of Anatomy and the Arts of Drawing, Painting, Statuary, etc., in which he described the standard procedures of portraiture in his time: 'The portrait painters of the present day generally describe an oval upon their panel before the person to be painted sits to be drawn, make a cross in the oval, which they divide into the length of four noses and the breadth of five eyes; and they paint the face according to these divisions to which it must be accommodated, let the proportions themselves be ever so much at variance.' [17] The oval with its subdivisions represented the matrix with its fixed code; the filling-in of details was a matter of elastic strategy.
Convention and Creation
Regardless of the period at which we look, every work of art betrays the prejudiced eye, governed by selective codes which lend coherence to the artist's vision, and at the same time restrict his freedom. The ensemble of these codes provides the 'rules of the game', the routine aspect of his work; while his 'strategy' must be adapted to the double environment of motif and medium. The greatness of an artist rests in creating a new, personal idiom -- an individual code which deviates from the conventional rules. Once the new idiom -- a new way of bisociating motif and medium -- is established, a whole host of pupils and imitators can operate it with varying degrees of strategic skill.
It does not mean belittling the creative mind to point out that every artist has his cookery recipes for the basic ingredients of the dishes he serves. But we must distinguish between true creativity -- the invention of a new recipe, on the one hand, and the skilled routine of providing variations of it. The whole, vexed question of the artistic value of brilliant forgeries and copies hinges on this distinction (see Chapter XXIV).
But whether the rules of the game were imposed by convention or originally designed by the artist, they have an equal sway over him. Rubens' puttis sometimes look mass-produced, and
even some of the portraits of his children seem to obey the same formula; similar blasphemies could be uttered about Renoir's pneumatic nudes, Henry Moore's convexities and concavities-with-a-hole, or Bernard Buffet's obsessive angularities. One cannot help feeling that artists who spend the rest of their lives exploring the possibilities of a single formula which they discovered in their truly creative period, resemble the 'one-idea-men' in the history of science. The difference is that the concrete language of the painter's brush permits endless variations on a single theme without losing in enchantment -- which the abstract symbol-language of science does not.
The reader may have felt, in following the last few pages, an uneasy suspicion that I was deliberately confusing the tricks and formulae for drawing a pussycat with the artist's vision of the pussycat, and the history of painting with a history of seeing. But in fact the two interact so intimately in the artist's mind (and in the responsive beholder's mind) that they cannot be separated. Take seeing first; already Pliny knew (what Behaviourist psychology managed to forget) that 'the mind is the real instrument of sight and observation' and the eyes merely act 'as a kind of vehicle, receiving and transmitting the visual portion of consciousness'. [18] But the mind is also the real instrument of manual dexterity, in a much deeper sense than we generally realize, including those quirks of manner and style which can be 'left to the muscles' to be taken care of. Renoir, when his fingers became crippled with arthritis, painted with a brush attached to his forearm, yet his style remained unchanged. It would be psychologically just as absurd to assume the reverse -- that a pattern of expression so deeply ingrained should have had no effect on his pattern of perception, as it would be to assume that his perception had no influence on what his hand was doing. The two activities are bisociated; in the terminology of the communication engineer, the medium 'in terms of' which the artist must think, influences by feed-back his pattern of vision.
An obvious example is provided by the way in which the study of anatomy -- even if merely demonstrated by a lay-figure -- transforms the artist's perception of the human body. A less obvious example is the following -- which I again owe to Gombrich. Cozens, the eighteenth-century painter who advocated the ink-blot technique to inspire his pupils to paint 'Rohrschach' landscapes, also drew for their benefit a series of schemata of various types of cloud-formation -- as Guercino had given recipes for drawing various types of ears. Constable studied and faithfully copied these crude schematizations of 'streaky clouds at the top of the sky' or 'bottom of the sky' or clouds 'darker at the top than the bottom'. By learning to distinguish different types of cloud-formation -- acquiring an articulate cloud-vocabulary as it were -- he was able to perceive clouds, and to paint clouds, as nobody had done before, His brush, like the poet's pen, 'turned them into shapes, and gave to airy nothing a local habitation and a name'. The result is that Constable addicts see real clouds in Constable's terms, as Van Gogh addicts see the fields of Provence in Van Gogh's terms -- and in either case much to their benefit. Some French authors -- Lalo, I believe was the first, and among contemporaries, Malraux -- have proposed that our aesthetic appreciation of nature is derived from having seen landscapes in paint. That may be the case with many of us, but it only means -- as suggested already at the begining of this chapter -- that man has always looked at nature through a frame. Through the painter's frame, or the frame of mythology, or the frame of science; through half-closed eyes or eye glued to the lens of the telescope. Constable called landscape painting an inquiry into the laws of nature; and Richardson, discovering that the difficulties of his pupils were caused as much by their unskilled eye as by their unskilled fingers, drew the conclusion:
For it is a certain maxim, no man sees what things are, that knows not what they ought to be. That this maxim is true, will appear by an academy figure drawn by one ignorant in the structure, and knitting of the bones, and anatomy, compared with another who understands these thoroughly . . . both see the same life, but with different eyes. [19]
NOTES
To p. 366. I am speaking of Europe: landscape painting in China has a much older tradition.
To p. 378. Incidentally, there is a bridge waiting to be built between an criticism and the physiology of gesture. To give an example: the neurologist Kurt Goldstein (1947) has made a study of the way in which people point with their arms at an object. If the object is to the front and to the right, the person will point with the extended arm, which will form with the frontal plane of the body an angle of approximately forty-five degrees. If the object is moved further to the right, the person will start turning his trunk to the right, so that the angle between body and arm remains 45 degrees. But if the object is placed straight in front of him, he will turn his body to the left and the angle will still be the same. There are obvious anatomical reasons for this. But if you make your figure point an accusing finger straight ahead. fully facing his adversary, you get a 'pathos-formula'.
XXII
IMAGE AND EMOTION
The trouble with putting into words the aesthetic experience aroused by a picture is, as we saw, that so much is happening at the same time; that only a fraction of it becomes conscious, and an even smaller fraction verbalized. 'The forceps of our minds', to quote H. G. Wells again, 'are clumsy things, and crush the truth a little in the course of taking hold of it.' Wells was talking of the difficulties of putting ideas into words; when it comes to putting aesthetic experiences into words, nothing short of a caesarian will help. The surgical tool that I proposed was 'bisociation'; and the operation consisted in disentangling the various bisociative, or bifocal, processes which combine in the experience. I have mentioned a number of these; I shall have to mention one or two more, and discuss briefly the emotional reactions which they call forth.
Virtues of the Picture Postcard
The essence of the aesthetic experience consists, as I have tried to show, in intellectual illumination -- seeing something familiar in a new, significant light; followed by emotional catharsis -- the rise, expansion, and ebbing away of the self-transcending emotions. But this can happen only if the matrix which provides the 'new light' has a higher emotive potential or 'calory value' (pp. 321-31); in other words, the two matrices must lie on an ascending gradient.
Let us see in what manner the various bisociative patterns mentioned earlier on fulfil this requirement. Take illusion once more, which enters art in a variety of guises and disguises, on its most naive level: the discovery that something can be itself and something else at the same time. A small child, fascinated by dad's amateur efforts as a draftsman, will beg ' make me a donkey', 'make me an elephant', thus unconsciously evoking Pygmalion's power. I shall not hark back to Altamira and the witch-doctor -- merely dot my i's by pointing out that the gradient leads in that direction.
Or take the simplest illusion of space: the delighted shock of looking for the first time through fieldglasses, and seeing the distant church-spire leap to within grasp. Here again unconscious analogies, echoes of sorcery enter into play: the power to be in two places at once; the conquest of space by magic carpet; action-at-a-distance. The reverse experience is the illusion derived from a perspective landscape -- or a Chinese silk painting which, with a few brushstrokes, makes the horizon recede into infinity. To call perspective and trompe l'oeil 'magic' is a cliché, because their genuine magic has succumbed to the law of diminishing returns; but to the unsophisticated eye the hole in the wall through which it looks into a different world has the dream-like quality of Alice stepping through the looking-glass; dream-like, because the creation and annihilation of space is a favoured game of the underground.
I have made a slighting mention of the 'prettification' of nature on picture postcards, which bring the whole scenery within the range of focal vision. But there is a genuine appeal to the emotions in the fact that a landscape painting can be taken in almost at a glance, without the half-conscious, constant scanning which the real scenery requires. To have it all there simultaneously laid out before h
is view, gives the beholder a kind of naïve Olympian feeling, a sense of power entirely harmless, since his only aim is passive contemplation; enhanced by the circumstance -- and here the next bisociation enters into the process -- that he is looking at the scenery not through his own, but through Claude's or Courbet's eyes.
Another facet -- or pair of facets -- of the many-sided experience of looking at a picture is synesthesia (p. 321). Berenson's dictum 'the painter can accomplish his task only by giving tactile values to retinal impressions' does not only mean that the bisociation of vision with touch lends an added dimension to experience and more solidity to illusion. Berenson's emphasis on tactile values also indicates that the sense of touch had a special appeal to him -- as it had to Keats (p. 321). But neither of them was exceptional in this respect; after all, the adjective 'touching' -- that is, emotionally moving -- is derived from touch; and 'touching' in the verbal sense is a primary impulse not only among lovers; the texture of silk or polished stone also provides minor pleasures. The brocade fineries of Van Eyck's figures have a strong tactile appeal; the impact of the gangrened flesh of Christ in Grünewald's Isenheim altar is one of horror redeemed by pity. It is perhaps only matched in power by Flaubert's rendering of the legend of St. Julian sharing his bed with the leper.
The Act of Creation Page 45