Perceptions

Leopold Zinnögger
Hazelnuts
1851
watercolor on paper
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Franz Théobald Horny
Pumpkins, Pomegranates, Fig, Peach
before 1824
watercolor and gouache on paper
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Georg Flegel
Tulips
ca. 1630
watercolor and gouache on paper
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Anton Tomschik
Studies of Apricots
1857
gouache on paper
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

August Rokert
Ornithogalum umbellatum
ca. 1840
watercolor on paper
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Katharina, Baroness von Röthlein
Botanical Study
1819
watercolor on paper
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Anonymous Dutch Artist
Assorted Shells
17th century
watercolor on paper
Kupferstichkabinett,
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

Bernd and Hilla Becher
Cooling Towers
1963-72
gelatin silver prints
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

Jacques de Gheyn II
Flies
ca. 1600
drawing
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Christo
56 Barrels
1977
acrylic paint on paper
(design sketch for installation)
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

Jan Beutener
Interior
1972
oil on canvas
Dordrechts Museum, Netherlands

Anonymous Printmaker
Pressmark of Bartholomäus Westheimer (Basel)
ca. 1540
woodcut
(serpent and arrow)
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Anonymous Printmaker
Pressmark of Aldus Manutius (Venice)
ca. 1500
woodcut and letterpress
(dolphin and anchor)
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Wenceslaus Hollar
Muffs
ca. 1645-46
etching
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Laura Gilpin
Nesting Tables made by Frank Gilpin
ca. 1930
platinum print
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Barnett Newman
Tertia
1964
oil on canvas
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

In Ovid, Pygmalion is a sculptor who wants to fashion a woman after his own heart and falls in love with the statue he makes.  He prays to Venus for a bride modeled after that image, and the goddess turns the cold marble into a living body.  It is a myth that has naturally captivated the imagination of artists, the solemn and somewhat maudlin dreams of Burne-Jones no less than the irreverent mockery of Daumier.  Without the underlying promise of this myth, the secret hopes and fears that accompany the act of creation, there might be no art as we know it.  One of the most original young painters in England, Lucien [sic] Freud, wrote very recently: "A moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of art.  The promise of it is felt in the act of creation, but disappears towards the completion of the work.  For it is then that the painter realizes that it is only a picture he is painting.  Until then he had almost dared to hope that the picture might spring to life."

"Only a picture," says Lucien [sic] Freud.  It is a motif we find in the whole history of Western art: Vasari tells of Donatello at work on his Zuccone, looking at it suddenly and threatening the stone with a dreadful curse, "Speak, speak – favella, favella, che ti venga il cacasangue!"  And the greatest wizard of them all, Leonardo da Vinci, extolled the power of the artist to create.  In that hymn of praise to painting, the Paragone, he calls the painter "the Lord of all manner of people and of all things."  "If the painter wishes to see beauties to fall in love with, it is in his power to bring them forth, and if he wants to see monstrous things that frighten or are foolish or laughable or indeed to be pitied, he is their Lord and God."  

– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960).

Intentions

Anton Groner
Bookbinding Design
ca. 1890
watercolor on paper
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Franz von Seitz
Bookbinding Design
1867
watercolor and gouache on paper
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Karl Friedrich Schinkel
Decorative Scheme for Dining Hall
ca. 1827-28
watercolor and gouache on paper
(this sheet was destroyed during World War II)
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Valentin Lefebvre
Design for Tomb of Ruler
ca. 1677
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

Domenico Santi
Design for Cartouche Frame
ca. 1660
etching
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Hans Thoma
Putti with Armillary Sphere
(design for mosaic)
1883
watercolor on paper
(this sheet was destroyed during World War II)
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Julius Victor Berger
Sketch for Art Nouveau Poster
ca. 1890
watercolor on paper
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Anonymous French Artist
Ornamental Design
for the Grande Galerie at the Louvre
ca. 1660-70
watercolor and gouache on vellum
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Anonymous German Artist
Warrior supporting (blank) Coat-of-Arms
ca. 1520-30
drawing, with added watercolor
Kupferstichkabinett,
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

René-Marie Castaing
Joan of Arc with her Voices
ca. 1930
oil on canvas
(modello for stained glass)
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Pau

René-Marie Castaing
Joan of Arc at the Stake
ca. 1930
oil on canvas
(modello for stained glass)
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Pau

René Boyvin after Léonard Thiry
Design for a Mask
ca. 1550-60
engraving
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

René Boyvin after Léonard Thiry
Design for a Mask
ca. 1550-60
engraving
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Francesco Ponte
Costume Design for Hasse's opera Solimano
ca. 1753
watercolor on paper
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Anton Groner
Ornamental Frieze Design
ca. 1890
watercolor on paper
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Johann Hermann
Design for Printed Textile (Silk Scarf)
1865
watercolor and gouache on paper
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

The very point of Richter's story, after all, is that style rules even where the artist wishes to reproduce nature faithfully, and trying to analyze these limits to objectivity may help us get nearer to the riddle of style.  One of these limits we know from the last chapter; it is indicated in Richter's story by the contrast between coarse brush and fine pencil.  The artist, clearly, can render only what his tool and his medium are capable of rendering.  His technique restricts his freedom of choice.  The features and relationships the pencil picks out will differ from those the brush can indicate.  Sitting in front of his motif, pencil in hand, the artist will, therefore, look out for those aspects which can be rendered in lines – as we say in a pardonable abbreviation, he will tend to see his motif in terms of lines, while, brush in hand, her sees it in terms of masses.

The question of why style should impose similar limitations is less easily answered, least of all when we do not know whether the artist's intentions were the same as those of Richter and his friends.

Historians of art have explored the regions where Cézanne and van Gogh set up their easels and have photographed their motifs.  Such comparisons will always retain their fascination since they almost allow us to look over the artist's shoulder – and who does not wish he had this privilege?  But however instructive such confrontations may be when handled with care, we must clearly beware of the fallacy of "stylization."  Should we believe the photograph represents the "objective truth" while the painting records the artist's subjective vision – the way he transformed "what he saw"?  Can we compare "the image on the retina" with the "image in the mind"?  Such speculations easily lead into a morass of unprovables.  Take the image on the artist's retina.  It sounds scientific enough, but actually there never was one such image which we could single out for comparison with either photograph or painting.  What there was was an endless succession of innumerable images as the painter scanned the landscape in front of him, and these images sent a complex pattern of impulses through the optic nerves to his brain.  Even the artist knew nothing of these events, and we know even less.  How far the picture that formed in his mind corresponded to or deviated from the photograph it is even less profitable to ask.  What we do know is that these artists went out into nature to look for material for a picture and their artistic wisdom led them to organize the elements of the landscape into works of art of marvelous complexity that bear as much relationship to a surveyor's record as a poem bears to a police report.

– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960).

Intentions

Wiener Porzellanmanufaktur
Design for Tea Bowl and Saucer
ca. 1815
watercolor and gouache on paper
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Matteo Florimi
Lace Patterns
1593
woodcut (book illustration)
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Melchior Michael Steidl
Design for Two-Part Mirror-Frame
ca. 1700
drawing, with added watercolor
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Jacopo Ligozzi
Study for Epitaph Frame
ca. 1578
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Daniel Marot the Elder
Garden Plan for Huis ten Bosch
1732
drawing, with added watercolor
Paleis Huis ten Bosch, The Hague

Pietro Novelli (il Monrealese)
Design for Archway
before 1647
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Antonio Joli
Masque Design for Barque, with Crowning of Saxony
1740
watercolor on paper
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

Johann Paul Schor
Design Elements for State Coach
before 1674
drawing
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

workshop of Francesco Salviati
Design for Candlestick with Animal Elements
ca. 1550
drawing
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi
Design for Candelabrum
ca. 1650
drawing
Morgan Library, New York

Gianlorenzo Bernini
Sketches for Tabernacle for St Peter's Basilica, Rome
before 1680
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Peter Flötner
Design for Cradle
before 1546
woodcut
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Erasmus Horninck
Pattern Sheet for Hat-Pins and Badges
ca. 1575
etching
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Anton Hanak
Study for Monument to Beethoven
ca. 1928-33
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Aristide Maillol
Study for Monument to Cézanne
1914
lithograph
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Christo
56 Barrels
1977
acrylic paint over photograph mounted on paper
(design sketch for installation)
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

In his charming autobiography, the German illustrator Ludwig Richter relates how he and his friends, all young art students in Rome in the 1820s, visited the famous beauty spot of Tivoli and sat down to draw.  They looked with surprise, but hardly with approval, at a group of French artists who approached the place with enormous baggage, carrying large quantities of paint which they applied to the canvas with big, coarse brushes.  The Germans, perhaps roused by this self-confident artiness, were determined on the opposite approach.  They selected the hardest, best-pointed pencils, which could render the motif firmly and minutely to its finest detail, and each bent down over his small piece of paper, trying to transcribe what he saw with the utmost fidelity.  "We fell in love with every blade of grass, every tiny twig, and refused to let anything escape us.  Every one tried to render the motif as objectively as possible."  

Nevertheless, when they then compared the fruits of their efforts in the evening, their transcripts differed to a surprising extent.  The mood, the color, even the outline of the motif had undergone a subtle transformation in each of them.  Richter goes on to describe how these different versions reflected the different dispositions of the four friends, for instance, how the melancholy painter had straightened the exuberant contours and emphasized the blue tinges.  We might say he gives an illustration of the famous definition of Emile Zola, who called a work of art "a corner of nature seen through a temperament."

It is precisely because we are interested in this definition that we must probe it a little further.  The "temperament" or "personality" of the artist, his selective preferences, may be one of the reasons for the transformation which the motif undergoes under the artist's hands, but there must be others – everything, in fact, which we bundle together into the word "style," the style of the period and the style of the artist.  When this transformation is very noticeable we say the motif has been greatly "stylized," and the corollary to this observation is that those who happen to be interested in the motif, for one reason or another, must learn to discount the style.  This is part of that natural adjustment, the change in what I called "mental set," which we all perform quite automatically when looking at old illustrations. 

– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960).

Ornament

Heinrich Aldegrever
Panel with Putto and Mermaid
1528
engraving
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Anonymous German ARtist
Printer's Ornament
18th century
woodcut
(excised from printed book)
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Barthel Beham
Ornamental Panel
ca. 1530
engraving
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Jean Bérain the Elder
Ornamental Design
1703
etching
Herzog August Bibliothek, Wulfenbüttel

Niccolò Billy and Pietro Cerini
Acanthus Ornaments
1725
engraving
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Niccolò Billy and Pietro Cerini
Acanthus Ornaments
1725
engraving
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Niccolò Billy and Pietro Cerini
Acanthus Ornaments
1725
engraving
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Niccolò Billy and Pietro Cerini
Acanthus Ornaments
1725
engraving
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Raphael Custos after Lucas Kilian
Ornamental Panel
1632
engraving
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Angelo Falconetto
Panel with Acanthus Scroll and Satyr Family
before 1567
etching
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Peter Flötner
Panel with Grotesque Ornament after the Antique
before 1546
woodcut
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Agostino Musi (Agostino Veneziano)
Acanthus Ornament
in Basilica San Silvestro, Rome
caa. 1510-20
engraving
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Georg Pencz
Ornamental Panel with Satyress and Satyr
ca. 1535
engraving
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Susanne Maria von Sandrart after Jean Le Pautre
Variations on Architectural Ornaments
1678
etching
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Jörg Seld
Panel with Pomegranates and Acanthus
1514
woodcut
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Antonio Tempesta
Panel with Grotesque Ornament surrounding Apollo
before 1630
etching and engraving
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

But Nicias, seeing the Athenians to be in a kind of tumult against Cleon, for that when he thought it so easy a matter he did not presently put it in practice, and seeing also he had upbraided him, willed him to take what strength he would that they could give him and undertake it.  Cleon, supposing at first that he gave him this leave but in words, was ready to accept it; but when he knew he would give him the authority in good earnest, then he shrunk back and said that not he but Nicias was general, being now indeed afraid and hoping that he durst not have given over the office to him.  But then Nicias again bade him do it and gave over his command to him for so much as concerned Pylus and called the Athenians to witness it.  They (as is the fashion of the multitude), the more Cleon declined the voyage and went back from his word, pressed Nicias so much the more to resign his power to him and cried out upon Cleon to go.  Insomuch as not knowing how to disengage himself of his word, he undertook the voyage, and stood forth saying that he feared not the Lacedaemonians, and that he would not carry any man with him out of the city but only the Lemnians and Imbrians that then were present and those targetiers that were come to them from Aenus and four hundred archers out of other places; and with these, he said, added to the soldiers that were at Pylus already, he would within twenty days either fetch away the Lacedaemonians alive or kill them upon the place.  This vain speech moved amongst the Athenians some laughter, and was heard with great content of the wiser sort.  For of two benefits, the one must needs fall out: either to be rid of Cleon (which was their greatest hope) or, if they were deceived in that, then to get those Lacedaemonians into their hands. 

– from The Peloponnesian War as written by Thucydides (5th century BC) and translated by Thomas Hobbes (1628) and edited by David Grene (1959)