[ Arnold Hauser] Social History Of Art Vol II by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: istoria artei, hauser, antropologie, arta, art

RENAISSANCE, MANNERISM, BAROQUE

the artist should add at least a loin-cloth. Carlo Borromeo has all pictures which seem indecent to him removed from the sacred places within his sphere of influence. At the end of a successful life, the sculptor Ammanati disowns the entirely harmless nudes of his youth. Nothing is more typical of the intolerant spirit of this epoch than the treatment suffered by Michelangelo's 'Last Judgement'. In 1559, Paul IV commissions Daniele da Volterra to cover up the naked figures in the fresco which appear to be especially provoking. In 1566, Pius V has further offensive portions of the fresco removed. Finally, Clement VIII desires to have the whole fresco destroyed and is restrained from carrying out his plan only by a petition submitted by the Academy of S. Luca. But even more remarkable than the behaviour of the Popes is the fact that Vasari himself—in the second edition of his Vite— condemns the nakedness of the figures in the 'Last Judgement' as unsuitable by reason of their ecclesiastical destination.

The period of the Council of Trent has been described as the 'birthday of prudery'. 169 It is well known that cultures based on aristocracy or other-worldly values are adverse to the representation of the nude5 but neither the aristocratic society of early classical antiquity nor the Christian society of the Middle Ages was 'prudish'. They avoided the nude, but were not afraid of it. Their attitude to the physical was much too clear-cut for them ever to have wanted both to conceal and to stress the sexual by introducing the 'fig leaf. The ambivalence of erotic feelings does not arise until the onset of mannerism, and it is bound up with the whole dichotomy of this culture in which the greatest polarities are united: the most spontaneous feeling with the most intolerable affectation, the strictest possible belief in authority with the most arbitrary individualism and the most chaste representations with the lewdest forms of art. Prudishness is here not merely the conscious reaction against the provoking lascivious-ness of the art produced independently of the Church, such as is cultivated at most courts, but it is also itself a form of suppressed lasciviousness.

The Council of Trent was antipathetic to every aspect of formalism and sensualism in art. In the true spirit of the Council, Gilio complains that painters are no longer concerned with the

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POLITICAL REALISM

subject-matter but only with the dazzling display of their own artificially developed skill. The same opposition to virtuosity and the same demand for a direct emotional content is expressed in the Council's purgation of church music, particularly in the subordination of musical form to the text and the recognition of Palestrina as the absolute model. But, in spite of its moral rigorism and its anti-formalistic attitude, the Tridentinum was, in contrast to the Reformation, by no means inimical to art. Erasmus's well-known saying— ubicumque regnat lutheranismus, ibi literarum est interims —cannot be applied in any way to the enactments of the Council of Trent. Luther saw

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