On Art and Connoisseurship (9781447495383) by Friedlander Max J

Author:Friedlander, Max J.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc
Published: 1960-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

19. HUGO VAN DER GOES, ADORATION OF THE MAGI (‘THE MONFORTE ALTARPIECE’)

Berlin, Picture Gallery

I will leave undecided the old question, debated by philosophers concerned with history, as to the greater or smaller effect exercised upon the course of events by heroes who ‘accidentally’ have emerged at a given time and in a given place. In any case, even if I aim at a ‘history of art without names’, I am yet bound to have classified the works of art according to time and place, and as far as possible to have brought them into harmony with biographical tradition, before I attempt to say something about the general development of the will for art. To someone who knows nothing about Correggio’s life, it might happen that he would assign the works of this master to the 17th century, and in no case would he be able to classify them as, in their essence, affording evidence regarding Parma and the time about 1520. When the Monforte altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes arrived at Berlin, a sensitive art historian—to whom ‘history of art without names’ was a desirable goal—terrified me by his remark that the picture obviously was a work of the 16th century, and hence could not possibly be by Hugo van der Goes, who, of course, died in the 15th century.

The boundaries of the style of a given period may only be drawn, it is claimed, after all that was produced had been examined. And when would this be?

To the art historian there is available evidence of a twofold kind. On the one hand we have tradition as contained in writings, posthumous fame, records, inventories, biographies; and on the other, the surviving works. The task consists in building bridges from one bank to the other, in bringing the documents into harmony with the surviving examples. Were all the works by Raphael lost, we would nevertheless, thanks to the utterances of his contemporaries, have an idea of his importance, his influence and even of his manner of art. Since we have a considerable part of his life’s work before our eyes, we enrich and vary that idea as a result of contemplation. It becomes the task of style criticism to ‘attribute’ the works, to classify them according to time and place, and to fit them into the frame of tradition represented by art literature and records.

The community of art scholars consists of two groups—one may even say, two parties. The university chairs are mostly occupied by people who like to call themselves historians, and in the museum offices you meet the ‘experts’. The historians strive generally from the general to the particular, from the abstract to the concrete, from the intellectual to the visible. The experts move in the opposite direction, and both mostly never get farther than half-way—incidentally, without meeting each other.

The ideal set up by the historians is called ‘history of the spirit’. It seems indeed most desirable that all visible results of artistic activity be considered as expressions

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