Posted on 09/21/2013 10:12:13 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
It was in a 1925 essay entitled “The Best Picture” that Aldous Huxley made the claim that a 1478 fresco painting by Piero della Francesca (1420–92), in the little Italian town of San Sepolcro (Holy Sepulcher) in the upper Tiber valley, was “the greatest picture in the world.” It is true that critics and connoisseurs before Huxley, and many after him, also made very high claims for Piero’s relatively few surviving paintings. Much of his work, sadly, was destroyed shortly after his death, and in the early 1800s vandalistic Napoleonic French troops fired damaging shots at his great fresco series The Legend of the True Cross (1452–66) in the Church of St. Francis during their occupation of the city of Arezzo.
Some 50 years after Piero’s demise, the great biographer of the classic Italian painters, Giorgio Vasari, praised him highly in his Lives of the Artists. Over the last 150 years numerous Anglophone scholars and critics have expressed vast admiration for Piero: John Addington Symonds in the 1880s, Bernard Berenson in 1902, Kenneth Clark in a great monograph in 1951, John Russell, art critic for the London Sunday Times and the New York Times, in the 1960s: “He had the kind of total comprehension which makes us trust in him, unreservedly. . . . He is for us the first and the greatest of classical painters. . . . He has my vote, any time, as the Perpetual President of European painting.”
Berenson wrote that in the presence of “certain Giottos, Masaccios, and Pieros . . . it is not the physical but the ethical, the moral weight that overawes us.” Fifty years earlier, after discussing Piero’s technical excellences, Berenson had written of him: “judged as an illustrator, it may be questioned whether another painter has ever presented a world more complete and convincing, has ever had an ideal more majestic, or ever endowed things with more heroic significance.” When the great art historian, museum administrator, humanist, and television broadcaster Sir Kenneth Clark first saw colored photographs of Piero’s Legend of the True Cross fresco cycle, “I immediately felt a sense of pre-ordained harmony different from anything I had known.” He added that Piero’s Baptism of Christ gave him “more intense aesthetic delight than any other painting in the [British] National Gallery,” of which he was then the director. Clark reports that when he first saw the diptych by Piero of Duke Federico da Montefeltro and his duchess in Urbino, he fell to his knees. Another distinguished art historian, John Pope-Hennessy, later claimed that Piero’s Flagellation of Christ was “the greatest small painting in the world.”
So Aldous Huxley is in good company in his praise. But is Piero’s Resurrection of Christ in little San Sepolcro “the greatest picture in the world”? Huxley’s own argument is initially interesting and powerful but ultimately oblique and incomplete — oddly so, given that he was one of the best-educated, most verbally clever, and most sheerly intelligent of major 20th-century writers. He admits that the contention that Piero’s Resurrection is “the greatest picture in the world” is in one sense obviously “ludicrous” because there are “a great many kinds of merit and an infinite variety of human beings.” But he fends off the common, nihilistic modern argument that art “is all a matter of personal taste,” saying that there is “an absolute standard of artistic merit,” which is “in the last resort a moral one.” He thinks “genuineness” always “triumphs in the long run”; he asserts that Piero della Francesca’s painting is “absolutely great, because the man who painted it was genuinely noble as well as talented.” But Huxley longingly refers to a purified classical humanism as a defensible ideal: “the religion of Plutarch’s Lives” and “the resurrection of the classical ideal, incredibly much grander and more beautiful than the classical reality.” He tells us, counterintuitively and unpersuasively, that Piero’s ostensible subjects, the Christian religion and the Resurrection of Christ, are not really central to his art.
Twenty-six years and much painful history later, in 1951, another self-styled aesthete, Kenneth Clark, is equally sure of the greatness of the painting and the painter, but he manages to go much deeper, perhaps affected by the tragedy and pathos of the previous 40 years of European and world history, including two world wars and millions of unmarked sepulchers: “But before Piero’s risen Christ we are suddenly conscious of values for which no rational statement is adequate; we are struck with a feeling of awe. . . . This country god, who rises in the grey light while human beings are still asleep, has been worshipped ever since man first knew that seed is not dead in the winter earth, but will force its way upwards through an iron crust.”
Clark has realized, and realized that propositional language is not altogether fit to express, certain fundamental truths of the human condition to which artistic, ritual, musical, doctrinal, and symbolic representation give the only real access, and perhaps only in what he calls “moments of vision.”
At some level the question of whether Piero’s Resurrection of Christ is the “greatest picture in the world” is of course absurd, because no merely technical analysis invoking pictorial or other specifiable aesthetic values is ever adequate to estimate the ultimate value and success of a work of art. We cannot prescind altogether from the topic, subject, theme, meaning, or recognizable or paraphrasable content of a work of art. However, today, as the critic Morris Dickstein has said, “art since Warhol is whatever you can get away with.” There are no canons but the market, driven by a kind of mindless dynamism and fashion. The more transgressive of traditional standards, sensibilities, and ethics, the better; “neophilia,” profanity, and obscenity reign. So aesthetic claims are inevitably and only claims of subjective pleasure or satisfaction: I like it.
But though Huxley was throughout his life an ambiguous aesthete, a very dark angel, he had some profound intuitions. “Five words sum up every biography,” he wrote: “‘Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor’”; “I see and approve the good, but follow the bad.” He sought in art and spirituality, and alas in more ambiguous ways too, what he called “the lost purpose and the vanished good.”
What the many admirers of the Christian Platonist Piero (and of other great orthodox artists such as Dante, Bach, Shakespeare, and Eliot) may dimly understand, and cling to, is that both religion and idealism — including duty and honor in one’s work and daily life — are kept alive by a faith: a faith that we live in a metaphysical and moral as well as a physical universe, that true value ultimately triumphs over inert or brutal fact, that spirit triumphs over flesh — if not here, then hereafter — and a whole series of similar distinctions and convictions: altruism and love over self-interest and envy; justice over indifference, cruelty, and crime; mind over matter; grace over gravity; cosmos over chaos; purpose over chance and necessity. We are saved from cynicism and despair by such faith, and its greatest symbol is the Resurrection.
Piero’s subject and his exquisite portrayal of it are in fact what make it credible to say that his visionary Resurrection is the greatest of all paintings, because he binds together inextricably the visceral, the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious with the kind of integrity and synthesis of expression that the human person yearns for and so often misses or lacks. The American poet Edwin Markham put the insight poignantly over a hundred years ago:
In spite of the stare of the wise and the world’s derision,
Dare travel the star-blazed road, dare follow the Vision.
It breaks as a hush on the soul in the wonder of youth;
And the lyrical dream of the boy is the kingly truth.
The world is a vapor, and only the Vision is real;
Yea, nothing can hold against Hell but the Wingèd Ideal.
Having served as a lay religious leader and on the town council, Piero della Francesca lost his sight during the last decade of his life in his small home city, San Sepolcro, and he turned to pursuing the beloved mathematical investigations that brought him later eminence, along with his gifted friend and countryman, Fra Luca Pacioli. Though there is a statue of Piero in San Sepolcro, nobody really knows what he looked like after his youth; but a lantern-maker from his town, Marco di Longaro, has been remembered in history because when he was a small child he “used to lead by the hand Master Piero della Francesca, who was blind.”
Late in World War II, in the summer of 1944, on a hill in the upper Tiber valley, a young artillery officer in the vanguard of the British 8th Army was ordered on the radio by his superior behind the lines to shell a small German-occupied Italian town in the valley beneath him to drive the Germans out and safely prepare for the British advance. The town was San Sepolcro, and the young officer had read Huxley’s essay on the great painting. Making ambiguous, evasive excuses on the radio to his superior, he disobediently held off shelling, risking grave consequences for the British forces, including himself, if they had encountered lethal resistance. But the next day the Germans withdrew without a major altercation. A street just outside San Sepolcro is now named for him.
— M. D. Aeschliman is professor of Anglophone culture at the University of Italian Switzerland. He recently edited a new edition of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (Ignatius Press).
What makes it interesting to me is the day before I saw the painting, I stood on the very hill where it took place.
Yes Insp Clusau, as you wish
Yes, he’s dead now. He died from an accidental overdose of alcohol and prescription pain meds.
In the mid 90’s I had the displeasure of briefly speaking to him several times while I worked for a law firm that handled some of his estate planning. I can tell you that from my personal experience, he was not a “nice” man.
While Kincaid had some artistic talent, in reality he wasn’t any more or less talented than a lot of other artists who toil anonymously for greeting card companies and such, more good illustrators than what I would call great artist. In some cases not any better than what you might buy at one of those “starving artists” sales or from a company like this for a heck of a lot less:
http://globalwholesaleart.com/
Kincaid’s real talent IMO was in marketing himself. And what many people do not know was that lot of his later works, the stuff sold in his galleries during the height of his popularity were not even painted by him but by “artists” trained to emulate his style and technique or who splashed a few bits of paint to pop the light on the mass produced prints and thusly justifying charging the gullible thousands of dollars for them.
I agree with kabumpo - “Kitsch”. But hey, if you like it, more power to you. Just don't delude yourself that they are great works of art, that their value will increase over time over what you paid for them.
I never meant to imply they were, nor do I own any. OTOH if the subject painting is supposed to be the "greatest", you can have it. ;-)
Thank you - so rare that I find agreement about aesthetic standards on FR.
If you mean do I agree with Aldous Huxley that Piero’s “Legend of the True Cross” is “the greatest picture in the world.”? While I like Piero’s architectural works, Legend of the True Cross is not; at least it isn’t for me, although it might have been for Huxley. There are many paintings that I like more than Piero’s “Legend of the True Cross”. But I can’t and won’t be pinned down on what I think is the one singular absolute “greatest”.
Art in all its various styles and moods is rather subjective and much like music it touches and evokes different emotions in me and what I like best can change based on my mood and emotional state. Can I say that one single piece of music is “the greatest in the world.”? No. I do know what I like. Ralph Von Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis is among my very favorite pieces of music of all time, but then I also very much like and am stirred emotionally by Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Mahler's 9th Symphony. I also like jazz, Thelonious Monk for instance and some hard rock, Rush for example and a lot of other composers, musicians, groups and musical styles, all for very different reasons. But even across many musical styles, there are works that are great or even good and the best have a timelessness to them and then there is pure schlock and what is simply popular at the moment. Many, many years from now people will probably still be listening to Von Williams, Vivaldi, Mahler, Chopin, Beethoven Monk, even Rush; Miley Cyrus? Not so much (at least I certainly hope not).
But I could no more listen to the same piece of music, read the same book, watch the same movie over and over again, day in and day out any more than I would want to gaze upon one single painting for the rest of my life.
I can look at a painting by Hieronymus Bosch or Goya and see and truly appreciate the detail and artistry but find the depictions disturbing or even nightmarish. I can look at a painting by Monet or Renoir and equally appreciate the artistry but the emotion it invokes is quite different. Personally, I am quite fond of the Dutch realists, Rembrandt and Vermeer; their depictions of everyday people engaging in everyday life were for their time quite revolutionary as the subjects of most art prior to that were religious or historic or mythological depictions or commissioned and highly formal and stylized portraits of royalty and the wealthy.
As far as Picasso, while I’m not a big fan of much of his later works, he was a very talented artist as evidenced in his early works which I do like.
http://mesosyn.com/pp-early.html
So what makes great work of art?
IMO, aside being technically good in terms of composition and the skill of the artist, a truly great work of art draws you in. You can’t simply look at it and say “oh, pretty” and walk away; rather you gaze deeply into it and study it, it imprints on you not only its image but an emotion that stays with you long after you’ve seen it.
You might want to be in the painting yourself or it might evoke a place or emotion that you yourself experienced. When you look at Gustave Caillebotte’s Rainy Day for instance, you can almost hear the rain hitting the tops of the umbrellas and smell the rain in the air. You want to know more about the place or people depicted in it – who are they, where are they going, why is the Mona Lisa wearing that slight smile or why does Leonardo’s Ginevra de’ Benci look so sad and wise and world weary well beyond her years and in Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter With Her Maid, who is the lady writing to and why is the maid gazing longingly out the window? Is there someone she wishes to write to or someone she wishes would write to her?
A great work of art might also depict a place or situation or people you would never want to witness in person, but it still stirs you emotionally and draws you in deeper. You feel their joy or their pain; you want to share their joy or intercede to save them from the tragedy being depicted.
A great work of art has a depth of field and a balance and even the littlest of details are interesting and they contribute to the whole of the piece. And while some great artists were prolific and repeated themes and styles, their works, unlike say a Kincaid, are not exact cookie cutters of the very same work over and over again and cannot be easily replicated except for the most talented of forgers or replicators.
When I look at a Kincaid, I think, “oh pretty, yet another cottage with glowing lights” but it does not evoke any true emotion in me, there is no personality or depth of emotion in them, I don’t want to be drawn in and while full of details, the details are flat and repetitive and they do not add or contribute to the work as a whole. When I look at one of Kincaid’s paintings, I think of schlocky sappy Hallmark greeting cards, Disney Princesses, pictures of big sad eyed clowns or those hideous mass produced Franklin Mint collector plates and while “popular”, pretty and overly sentimental as it might be, “art” it isn’t.
As Aristotle said, “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” And as Winston Churchill said, “Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.”
Compare these:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WhAZ7KNaiU
To these:
Excellent video presentation. Is that you?
sadly....no
but my interests lie there.
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