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Pater Renaissance

Preface

• Art is not about objective truth, but subjective impressions: TO ME
  • My pleasure, my impression, how my personality changes it
  • Aesthetics must be understood in terms of personal experience
• “Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness” xxix
  • We need concrete terms, ones that will apply to specific examples, not universals: abstractions are of no use for people who feel strongly xxx
• You only need FEELING, not its “exact relation to truth or experience” xxx
• Defining beauty is about understanding first one’s impressions of the object
  • art works “receptacles of so many powers or forces” “producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar or unique kind.” xxx
  • Each has unique characteristics that makes it give unique pleasure
• “Our education becomes complete in proportion as our susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety” xxx
  • You must be able to distinguish art works, understand what makes it give a special impression and how you get it: like a chemist, “with great exactness”
• Critic needs not intellect, but “a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects”
  • “beauty exists in many forms”
  • find an artist’s “unique, incommunicable faculty” xxxi, which the critic must “follow up” in an artist
• Renaissance
  • Not just 15th c but somewhat in middle ages too, also Winckelmann 18th c carries on the spirit
  • “care for the physical beauty, the worship of the body, the breaking down of those limits which the religious system of the middle ages imposed on the heart and the imagination”
• Isolation
  • “The various forms of intellectual activity which together make up the culture of an age, move for the most part from different starting-points and by unconnected roads….each group is solitary” (art, poetry, philosophy, religion are “confined” to its own circle)
  • Great ages: where “men raw nearer together than is their wont” and you get “general culture” and a “unity:” the Renaissance is this unity

Leonardo da Vinci

• La Gioconda
• “Hers is the head upon which all ‘the ends of the world are come.’”
• Beauty “wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions.”
  • she is the outward form of animalism, lust, mysticism, paganism, the Borgias, of all different moments in human history are all there, would have shocked Greek godesses: “the soul with all its maladies”
• “like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave”
  • “the fancy of a perpetual life…is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.” 80
• Surely Wilde couldn’t have written Dorian Gray without this passage

The School of Giorgione

• The individuality of each branch of art
  • He notes his idea goes against popular criticism, which says that all the arts are “translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity in imaginative thought” 83
    • This is wrong: “sensuous element in art, and with it almost everything in art that is essentially artistic, is made a matter of indifference”
• Instead, “the sensuous material of each art brings with it a special phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any other”
  • This is where art criticism should begin: it finds out to what extent “A given work of art fulfills its responsibilities to its special material”
    • a picture needs “pictorial charm” not a poetic sentiment; a poem that uses rhythmic language not just images or description; etc
  • Because each art is associated w/different sense or combination of senses, “its own peculiar and untranslatable sensuous charm, has its own special mode of reaching the imagination”
• Popular mistake is to make everything into poetry, especially pictorial art
  • Painting is “inventive or creative handling of pure line and colour”
  • “in its primary aspect, a great picture has no more definite message for us than an accidental play of sunlight and shadow for a few moments on the wall or floor” 84
• Nevertheless, “it is noticeable that, in its special handling its given material, each art may be observed to pass into the condition of some other art” 85
  • “a partial alienation from its own limitations” by which each art “reciprocally to lend each other new forces”
• “all arts in common aspiring towards the principle of music; music being the typical, or ideally consummate art” 86
  • “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.”
    • Why? Most arts, you can separate form and content, but all arts want to present the content so that they are “nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling, that this form…should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter”
      • in other words, content ruled by form to the extent that you can’t separate them: you must MINIMIZE the distinction between form and content
      • lyric poetry does a great job w/this: it’s best when you are vague about your subject, so the subject arrives at you via form: meaning comes to you but you don’t exactly know how
    • And music
• Concept applies to “all things that partake in any degree of artistic qualities” 88
  • furniture, houses, dress, gestures, speech, socializing, behavior: CHARM
  • The charm “gives them a worth in themselves”
  • “elevates the trivialities of speech, and manner, and dress, into ‘ends in themselves,’ and gives them a mysterious grace and attractiveness in the doing of them.”
• “Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject or material.”
• Physical, sensuous: he repeats these words

Winckelmann

• Periodization is difficult b/c it makes you think that the Renaissance is a separate period, when in reality there is “the identity of European culture” “continuous” 145
  • That the Renaissance “was ever taking place”
  • Christian viewpoint: when relics are discovered, “as if an ancient plague-pit had been opened”
• What do we want from the Renaissance?
  • “Breadth, centrality, with blitheness of repose… Can we bring down that ideal into the gaudy, perplexed light of modern life?” 146
• Modernity: “its conflicting claims, its entangled interests, distracted by so many sorrows, with so many preoccupations, so bewildering an experience, the problem of unity with ourselves…is far harder” than for the ancients
  • “not less than ever, the intellect demands completeness, centrality”
  • We must dive into the art and ideals of the past “not so much to reap all that those various forms of genius can give, as to find in them its own strength. The demand of the intellect is to feel itself alive” 147
• Culture
  • See all of the past cultural forms in relation to one another: “that it might measure the relation between itself and theme…lets each fall back into its place, in the supreme, artistic view of life…with a kind of passionate coldness”
  • The artist is a cultural tourist of the past, swinging via his intellect in and our of the old forms of culture in order to feel HIMSELF alive. It’s a strange kind of imperialism.
  • All in service of “personality:” like that of Winckelmann
• Philosophy: it raises the great questions “which help one to detect the passion, and strangeness, and dramatic contrasts of life” rather than any “absolute or transcendental knowledge” 148
  • Again the emphasis on detection is on the consciousness of the beholder, what it creates in the beholder
• The Artist’s Goal
  • “Can the blitheness and universality of the antique ideal be communicated to artistic productions, which shall contain the fulness of the experience of the modern world?” 148
  • How you do that: “varied literary form” will do it, “command that width, variety, delicacy of resources, which will enable it to deal with the conditions of modern life.” 148
  • Must “rearrange the details of modern life, so to reflect it, that it may satisfy the spirit.” by giving “the sense of freedom”
• Modern Mind
  • Its thoughts about itself “is the intricacy, the universality of natural law, even in the moral order. For us, necessity is not, as of old, a sort of mythological personage without us, with whom we can do warfare. It is rather a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks….”
  • Goethe and Hugo: there is a network of “fatal combinations,” but there is “excellent work” done through those webs: “Who, if he saw through all, would fret against the chain of circumstances which endows one at the end with those great experiences?” 149
• Hegelian: development of art corresponds to development of thought, “the growing revelation of the mind to itself” 148
• Poetry: “all literary production which attains the power of giving pleasure by its form, as distinct from its matter”

Conclusion

• Modern Thought
  • “To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes of fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought.” 150
    • “Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them” (that is, natural elements), so that the changes of our body, say circulation of blood, take part of the same elements that rust iron; that your life is but a series of combinations of elements
      • Even the body is changing, not stable: “That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours…a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it.”
  • This “Whirlpool” also in our “inward world of thought and feeling” 151, where movement are not gradual, but “the race of the mid-stream, a drift of momentary acts of sight and passion and thought.”
    • Though sight initially “seems to buy us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality…but when reflexion begins to play upon these objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions”
    • language is what “invests” objects with “solidity”
    • Our impressions: “unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn are are extinguished with our consciousness of them…the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind.” 151
    • the “thick wall of personality” separates your mind from the real world, “no real voice has ever pierced,” “each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner in its own dream of a world”
• What are impressions?
  • They are what “experience” “dwindles down” to
  • “in perpetual flight”
  • “limited by time”
  • “infinitely divisible”
  • “all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it” where the only thing you can say about the “actual” is that it has gone
  • where analysis breaks down, “leaves off” 152
• Phew, this description is itself a breaking down, where once you try to GET AT the actual it disappears, stage by stage
• Experience itself is the end, the point, “not the fruit of experience”
  • You must multiply your experiences, have as many as possible, notice when a form “grows perfect”
  • Your consciousness must follow the energy, finding where the greatest number of forces play, moving quickly from one to another thing:
    • “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life”
• Anti Habit
  • Novalis: Philosophy “startles” ou “to a life of constant and eager observation”
  • “our failure is to form habits…habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike” (this is like Nietzsche and Russian formalists)
• Instead, Discriminate
  • “While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge…any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours….” whether in friend’s face or an artwork
  • “Not to discriminate” is “to sleep before evening.”
  • Experience full of “splendour” and “brevity” so why waste time with theories? There is no time for them
    • he notes Comte and Hegel are guilty of this systematizing: you can’t have “facile orthodoxy”
    • any time a theory asks you to sacrifice your facility to always experience and see things anew, isn’t worth devoting yourself to, “has no real claim on us” 153
• Our one chance: “getting in as many pulsations as possible into the given time…only be sure it is a passion” (that is, “quickened, multiplied consciousness”)
  • “For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.”

Notes

• Quotes Arnold on function of criticism “to see the object as in itself is really is”