The light of reason?
Peter Conrad
The Heritage of ApeIles E. H. Gombrich (Phaidon £9.95)
Art history is a creation of German culture. Philosophically, it derives from Hegel's notion of a cultural spirit which radiates into and aligns all the moral, aesthetic and political activities of a society. Practically, it dramatises the unworldliness of German imagination and its habit of metaphysical digression, treating artistic innovations as ironic images of the march of mind, from Burkhardt's proclamation of the Renaissance as a dual discovery of man and the world to Gombrich's study of stylistic development as a process of biological and scientific evolution in which, making and matching, artists learn aptitudes which enable them to triumph over the physical world while seeming merely to reproduce it.
In this century, art history has had grand political and scientific purposes. Art historians were the partisans who secretly maintained the continuity of culture Hitler disrupted—Saxl's heritage of images, Curtius's catacomb of topoi, Wind's pagan mysteries moralised by the Renaissance, all assert that a humanist tradition connects ancient and modern, classical and Christian art, and recognise that in ages of oppression art survives by going underground, trusting to riddles, icons and allegories, as the political freedom-fighter trusts to secret codes. These scholars find in art consolatory evidence that European culture is permanent, and that it is rational: they optimistically expound what Panofsky calls 'meaning in the visual arts', translating painting from the fickle world of sense-impressions to the lucid kingdom of ideas.
Gombrich's scholarship is not political in this sense, but scientific. Art for him is an earnest not of resistance but of recovery. Instead of encoding a humane wisdom governments have violated, it evokes the effort of reconstruction, and proceeds according to the logic of scientific discovery. Gombrich's art history is supported by the theory of scientific induction proposed by his friend Karl Popper. In Popper's view, scientific invention is an activity of imagination. Rather than cumbrously accumulating data from which a theory is cautiously extracted, the scientist like the artist advances in bold speculative conjectures. He controls his inspired guesses by self-critically trying to refute them. If the theory withstands the bombardment of fact, it must, however improbable, be passed as truth.
As Popper shifts scientific theory from observation of physical effects to the danger ous guesswork which divines their causes, so Gombrich has shifted aesthetic theory from realistic representation to the fabrication of illusion. Instead of imitating nature, the artist makes a formulaic model and only later matches it with the physical world.
First stated in Art and Illusion, this argument has since been elaborated in three studies of the Renaissance: Norm and Form, in which style is made a reflex of critical convention not personal choice; Symbolic Images, dealing with the science and theology of the icon; and now The Heritage of Apelles, which grounds artistic vision in optics. Apelles was the classical master of mimetic beguilement, the illusionist who painted grapes so realistically that birds pecked at them. Gombrich in the present book considers the reappearance in the Renaissance of the Apellian art of counterfeiting nature. Specifically, he discusses the optical ambiguities of light, and artistic devices which catch its absorption by or reflection from different surfaces. The inquiry fits into the German philosophical tradition which amplifies and ennobles art history: from Goethe's study of the untrustworthiness of colour to Wagner's revulsion from daylight in Tristan und lsolde, romantic metaphysicians are preoccupied by the trickery and meretriciousness of light. The artist owes his perception of the world to light, but worries that that world may be a fiction fostered by light.
Appropriately, Gombrich makes this bemusement with light an attribute of the northern artist. Southern Renaissance art, he says, presents form modelled in space, northern Renaissance art, form disclosed by light. The southern mastery of perspective is balanced by the northern mastery, above all in van Eyck, of lustre and texture, which are phantoms of light. This is why romanticism, a phenomenon of the north, undertakes in painting a study of light at once scientific and mystical. From Turner's apocalyptic illustrations of Goethe's colour theory to Monet's dazzling dissolution of the world's solidity, light presses romantic art towards abstraction. For the Renaissance painter, light invents the material world ; for the romantic painter, light decomposes that same world. Art's subject is now light itself, not the objects it plays upon: abstract painting records what Goethe calls the actions and sufferings of light.
The painter is not merely endowed with sharp eyesight. His art is formed by thought as well as perception; he is not an observer but a schematic maker of new ways of observing. The same applies to Gombrich's criticism, which is a product of intellection not (as is the local manner) of salivation. He is theoretical without being dogmatic because theory, as Popper conceives it, is speculative not canonical. He shares this orientation of intelligence with his subjects:
Gombrich studies this innovatory working of theory in Leonardo, whose grotesque
heads are experiments in facial morphologY
and linear deformation, mnemonic exercises not sketches of actual simian creatures, and whose diagrams of water are an abstract 'visualisation of forces, not a record of individual observations'. In one of his most startling interpretative feats, Gombrich links these studies of water with 'The Last Supper', in which he also finds a theorern about the laws of force and fluid mechanics: as Leonardo's waves are criss-crossed by variegated currents, so The Last Supper traces the impact of a word on a groan recoiling and returning'.
Gombrich finds in the most bravely unlikely places evidence for his rule that theorY generates practice. It is even true, as he suggests in a study of the relation between, the grammatical pedantry of Niccolo Niccoli and the architectural reforms clf Brunelleschi, that the most donnishlY crabbed of theories, fastidiously restoring vestigial diphthongs to orthography, maY anticipate the most radical of artistic inn' vations: Gombrich discerns in Niccolo s revival of letters a scholarly superiori.? which, he suggests, recurs in BrunelleschiS purification of the vocabulary of arch'" tecture. The metaphysical art history Hegel or Burkhardt, in which culture' changes are superintended by the angelic world-spirit, is ironically belittled by Goal' brich, for whom the unfolding destiny dart depends rather on technical proficiency than spiritual revelation: the Renaissance 'hal its origin not so much in the discovery man as in the rediscovery of diphthongs' Brunelleschi's perfection of perspective ought not to be credited to a human assuror tion of god-like power, but compared WO the invention of spectacles a century before —and 'nobody has as yet claimed that t° look at the world through lenses to correct one's bad eyesight is due to a new Weltalls. chaining.' But despite these disavowals, Gombrich' theory is that of a latter-day Hegel, whose world-spirit is now experimental not Pres,' criptive, a machine not a god. Artistic progress is the result of trial and error in the laboratory, not prayerful accommodation with the Zeitgeist. The Renaissance, Golly brich argues, sets itself a number of Pr°' blems—the nude and mastery of perspectly.et were those mentioned by Durer—which,I proceeds to solve with self-conscious genuity; and, because Popper insists th3d for every problem solved, a new one colt' be created', the application of perspectivet impaired the compositional pattern of 31,, and therefore created a new area of difficult' and a further challenge to technical research,: The process can never end. As if in recant, tion of this, Gombrich's book conclude' with a question—and a self-mocking one' worthy of this critic who is a Hegel c.011 verted from intellectual authoritariaolstli to the liberal methods of the open societY'
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