Whose History?
- David
- 7 hours ago
- 4 min read
Good Books
I’m always a little skeptical of so-called Great Books programs that purport to teach a canon of works without the mediation of modern historians and scholarship. Even if you could read Homer in the original Greek, or Alberti in Latin or fifteenth century Tuscan, you wouldn’t know for certain what words like fate or history meant to them. Much of what scholars do is recover the world and words of the past as they were understood then. If you’re not going to interpose modern scholarship between you and Virgil (or Vergil), how can you be sure that you actually understand what Virgil intended?
Historians, inevitably, have a point of view. And it is right to be mildly suspicious of what that point of view is. But there are those scholars who seem (though how can we really know?) to be able to access the past on its own terms, to be able to operate almost like a native in that foreign land where “they do things differently” (vide L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between).
My work and artistic worldview have been shaped by a handful of mid twentieth-century scholars of the Renaissance and Baroque like Rudolf Wittkower, Erwin Panofsky, and Edgar Wind. I’ve read other scholars, many of them their students (James Ackerman, Howard Hibbard, Irving Lavin, and their students), from the later twentieth century. But as this twenty-first century has worn on, I find it harder and harder to read younger contemporary historians. Too many books that don’t deliver on the poetics of their titles, too many books that should have been a long article, too much posturing to distance the authors from their forebears, too much jargon and not enough narrative.
So, I will reread Edgar Wind’s Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance to marvel at his command of ancient sources and his elegant prose; I will go to Wittkower first when I encounter a “new” Baroque artist or architect. But my appetite for history isn’t satisfied by rereading, so I occasionally, with trepidation, buy more books. Better if they’re old books. Last Fall I was in a used bookshop in DuPont Circle (shout out to Second Story Books!) and after almost giving up on finding something (I also shop by book size and weight relative to my suitcase size), I found Ernst Gombrich’s New Light on Old Masters. I knew Gombrich’s name, but had somehow never read anything of his (he’s most famous for two brief accounts of the history of the world and of art). Gombrich had been for many years the director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of its History of the Classical Tradition. The book I had just bought soon made clear that it was near the end of a long line of books he had published on, call it what you like, the Old Master tradition, the Renaissance, the Early Modern period.
I almost immediately set out to buy online as many of his books as I could find, hard cover first editions with dust jackets if possible, and was successful surprisingly easily (and relatively cheaply). Gombrich was a star in his day, but his reputation has waned, in part because he was more of a generalist than a specialist, so his scholarship is not as much a steppingstone for others as was Wittkower’s. But if Wittkower illuminated Alberti, Palladio, Bernini and Borromini (and many others) in substantive ways, he was less of an overt polemicist than Gombrich, and was indeed suspicious of polemical arguments like his student Colin Rowe’s “Mathematics of the Ideal Villa.”
Gombrich, instead, waded judiciously into the culture wars of the post-War era, trying to make sense of that “classical tradition” he was tasked with teaching for a modern world. What appeals to me now about much of his writing (most of the books are collections of essays and lectures) is his gentle, common sense wisdom—on the limits of iconography, on what constituted “progress” in the arts, how artists advanced their craft by incremental steps, and much more. Many of the “modern” issues he confronted—historicism, what are museums for, can we distinguish artistic quality in absolute terms—are still relevant and no less contentious today (and will likely continue to be).
Most Histories may not be Great Books, but they can be really Good Books. The thoughtful artist or architect can’t live without them. So, caveat emptor: be prudent, be just a little suspicious, but if you find a book by E. H. Gombrich, and if it doesn’t cost a fortune, buy it. You will probably find something of real value inside.
But is there anything academic scholarship can give the artist in return? I think and hope there is. It can show, by its example, that boldness alone is not yet exploration unless it is coupled with a critical sense. In clarifying the memory of the past it can pin down and render innocuous those catch-words which buzz around the artist’s ears… The art historian who sees the styles of the past merely as an expression of the age, the race or the class-situation, will torment the living artist with the empty demand that he [or she] should go and do likewise… The more we exorcise those spirits which still haunt the history of art, the more we learn to look at the individual and the particular work of art as the work of skilled hands and great minds in response to concrete demands, the more we shall teach authority that what the artist needs is not more myth or propaganda, but simply more opportunities, opportunities for experiment, for trial and error, which alone can lead to the emergence of those skills which can meet the ever changing challenge of the here and now.
—E. H. Gombrich, “Art and Scholarship,” Inaugural Lecture as Durning Lawrence Professor of the History of Art at University College, London, February 1957
from
Meditations on a Hobby Horse: And Other Essays on the Theory of Art, London: Phaidon Press Ltd., 1963, pp. 118-19
