Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Cavendish Album, British Museum - 18th-century Drawings

attributed to Alessandro Gherardini
Putti
before 1723
drawing from the Cavendish Album
British Museum

attributed to Luigi Garzi
Kneeling putto lifting cloth
before 1721
drawing from the Cavendish Album
British Museum

Giuseppe Passeri
Studies of infants
before 1714
drawing from the Cavendish Album
British Museum

ON THE DIALECTIC OF TACT

"The precondition of tact is convention no longer intact yet still present.  Now fallen into irreparable ruin, it lives on only in the parody of forms, an arbitrarily devised or recollected etiquette for the ignorant, of the kind preached by unsolicited advisers in newspapers, while the basis of agreement that carried those conventions in their human hour has given way to the blind conformity of car-owners and radio-listeners.  . . .  Other than convention, there is nothing by which tact could be measured.  Convention represented, in however etiolated a form, the universal which made up the very substance of the individual claim.  Tact is the discrimination of differences.  It consists in conscious deviations.  Yet when, emancipated, it confronts the individual as an absolute, without anything universal from which to be differentiated, it fails to engage the individual and finally wrongs him.  The question as to someone's health, no longer required and expected by upbringing, becomes inquisitive or injurious; silence on sensitive subjects becomes empty indifference, as soon as there is no rule to indicate what is and what is not to be discussed. Thus individuals begin, not without reason, to react antagonistically to tact: a certain kind of politeness, for example, gives them less the feeling of being addressed as human beings than an inkling of their inhuman conditions, and the polite run the risk of seeming impolite by continuing to exercise politeness, as a superseded privilege.  In the end, emancipated, purely individual tact becomes mere lying." 

  from Minima Moralia (1951) by Theodor Adorno, translated by E.F.N. Jephcott (1974)

Adorno's example of the "tactful silence" should resonate with all viewers of what is now called "heritage drama."  In Jane Austen, active silence is the norm, a silence aware of itself and perceptible to its audience as a unique and valuable form of speech.  Two centuries later, in Ann Beatty or Raymond Carver, silence can only be empty.  

Francesco Fernandi
Head of a boy looking upward
before 1720
drawing on blue paper from the Cavendish Album
British Museum

Anonymous artist working in Naples
Head of a man in a turban
18th century
drawing from the Cavendish Album
British Museum

Giuseppe Passeri
Portrait of a Prelate
ca. 1700
drawing on blue paper from the Cavendish Album
British Museum

Carlo Maratti
Head of a woman in profile looking upward
before 1713
drawing on blue paper from the Cavendish Album
British Museum

Carlo Maratti
Study for statue of St John the Evangelist carved by Rusconi
 for niche designed by Borromini at St John Lateran, Rome
ca.1703
drawing from the Cavendish Album
British Museum

William Comyn (active in Venice)
Portrait of a man in the guise of a philosopher
before 1720
drawing from the Cavendish Album
British Museum

William Comyn (active in Venice)
Two young women hunting with a dog
before 1720
drawing from the Cavendish Album
British Museum

Pietro de' Pietri
Adoration of Magi
before 1716
drawing from the Cavendish Album
British Museum

Giuseppe Passeri
Holy Family and Saints
before 1714
drawing from the Cavendish Album
British Museum

Giuseppe Passeri
Birth of the Virgin
ca. 1707
drawing from the Cavendish Album
British Museum

attributed to Henry Trench
Venus and Cupid
ca. 1700
drawing on blue paper from the Cavendish Album
British Museum