The lm8ge in Form

Selected Writings of

Adrian Stokes
Edited by Richard Wollheim
The Image in Form
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The Image in Form

Selected Writings of
Adrian Stokes

Edited and with an introduction

by Richard Wollheim

Icon Editions
Harper & Row, Publishers
New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London
THE IMAGE IN FORM. Copyright© 1972 by Adrian Stokes.
Introduction© 1972 by Richard Wollheim. All rights reserved. Printed in the
United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced
in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of
brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information
address Harper & RowJ' Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y.
10022. Cloth edition published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry &
Whiteside Limited, Toronto.

FIRST U. 5. EDITION

STANDARD BOOK NUMBER: 06-438540-X (cloth), 06-430028-5 (paper)

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 72-84750

Contents

List of Illustrations 7
Sources 8
Introduction by Richard Wollheim 9

The Na ture of Art, I: 'The Quattro Cento'

r. 'The Quattro Cento' 35
2. The Love of Stone 36
3. tv1ass and Mass-Effect 38
4. The Emblematic 42

The Nature of Art, II: Carving and Painting

5. Carving and Modelling 47
6. Stone-and-Water 48
7. Colour and 'Otherness' 50
8. Colour as Medium 52
9. Identity-in-Difference 55

The Nature of Art, Ill: Art and Psychoanalysis

ro. Art and the Sense of Rebirth 67
r 1. The Luxury and Necessity of Painting 78
r2. The Two Approaches 98
r3. The Invitation in Art ror
r4. Art and the Body r 16
1 5. From 'The Image in Form' 1 23

Artists and Works of Art

r6. Ghiberti and 'Finish' r3r
r7. Donatello r34
r8. Piero della Francesca r38
19. Verrocchio and Piero della Francesca in the National
Gallery l4I
20. The Reliefs in the Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini 147
2I. Giorgione and the Tempesta 184
22. Michelangelo 193
23. Turner 21 l
24. Cezanne 236
25. Cezanne's Les Bai9neuses, and Two Other Pictures in the
National Gallery 245
26. Monet 250

Places
27. Venice 263
28. Genoa 281
29. Ports 284

Au tobio9raphical
30. Childhood 289
3I. Cornwall and the Sense of Home 3 ll
32. Living in Ticino, 1947-50 314
List of Illustrations (/ollowing page 160)

l. Luciano Laurana, Courtyard of the Ducal Palace, Urbino

(photo Felicitas Vogler)
2. Donatello, Cantoria, Museo dell'Opere del Duomo,
Florence, detail (photo Mansell Collection)
3. Piero della Francesca; The Annunciation, San Francesco,
Arezzo, detail (photo Mansell Collection)
4. Piero della Francesca, The Flagellation, Gallery, Urbino,
detail (photo Istituto Centrale del Restauro, Archivio
Fotografico, Rome)
5. Verrocchio, Madonna and Child with Angels, National
Gallery, London (photo National Gallery)
6. Piero della Francesca, Baptism, National Gallery, London
(photo National Gallery)
7. Donatello, Dead Christ with Angels, Victoria and Albert
Museum, London (photo Victoria and Albert Museum)
8. Agostino di Duccio, Madonna and Child with A ngels,
Victoria and Albert Museum, London (photo Victoria and
Albert Museum)
9. Agostino di Duccio, Influxion Caused by the Moon, Tempio
Malatestiano, Rimini (photo Mansell Collection)
lO. Giorgione, Tempesta , Accademia, Venice (photo
Anderson)
l l. Giorgione, Tempesta , detail (photo Anderson)
12. Michelangelo, Rondanini Pie ta, Museo d' Arte Antica,
Castella Sforza, Milan
1 3. Michelangelo, Slave or Captive, Accademia,
Florence (photo Alinari)
1 4. Michelangelo, Crucifixion (drawing), Ashmolean Museum,
Oxford (photo Ashmolean Museum)
15. Cezanne, Les Baigneuses, National Gallery, London (photo
National Gallery)
16. Rembrandt, Belshazzar's Feast, National Gallery, London
(photo National Gallery)
Sources

The excerpts in this volume have been taken from :

The Q uattro Cen to, Faber & Faber, 1932
Stones of Rimini, Faber & Faber, 1934
Colour and Form , Faber & Faber, 1937: revised edition, 1950
Venice: An Aspect of Art, Faber & Faber, 1945
Inside O u t, Faber & Faber, 1947
Art and Science, Faber & Faber, 1949
Sm ooth and Rough, Faber & Faber, 195 1
Michelangelo, Tavistock Press, 1955
l\1onet, Faber & Faber, in the 'Faber Gallery' series, 1958
Three Essays on the Pain ting of Our Tim e, Tavistock, 1961
Painting and the Inner World, Tavistock, 1963
The Invitation in Art, Tavistock, 1965
Reflections on the Nude, Tavistock, 1967
The essay 'Living in Ticino, 1947-50' was first printed in Art and
Literature, March 1964

Stones of Rimini and The Quattro Cen to have been published

recently in the United States by Schocken Press, and The Invita­
tion in Art by the Chilmark Press.

Certain minor alterations have been made in the text specially

for this collection by the author. Thanks are due to the Tavi­
stock Press for their kind permission to reprint; also to the Chil­
mark Press.
Introduction

Adrian Stokes was born in 1902 . He was brought up in a London

that has now largely vanished, and he has lived, for years at a
time in Italy, in Cornwall, on the North Downs, and, since
1956, in Hampstead in an eighteenth-century house, where he
paints and writes. His life and his work have always been inti­
mately entwined, and he has cultivated privacy in both . He has
been unconcerned with reputation, and the sources of his in·
spiration have lain in the progress of his own ideas and in the
physical environment. In 1925 he first came to live in Venice, and
he has described to me how he immediately fell under the
influence of the city and its lagoons and of d'Annunzio's
passionate novel 11 Fuoco, in which the poet not only recounts
his affair with the Duse but also makes many references to the
Renaissance and to Pisanello. The months that ensued, absorbed
in a city and its architecture, in buildings and the life they
house, in painters of the past, in what another man had made of
these things and how he had invested them with feeling, above
all in his own shy intense reactions, epitomize, if in a
heightened form, the interplay of reflection, art, and place so
characteristic of Stokes's work.
This volume deals only with Stokes's critical writing and with
what is necessary for the understanding of that. Though the
body of this writing, which now amounts to some eighteen
volumes, is not familiar to a wide circle of readers, its influence,
direct and indirect, has been considerable. There are certain
painters, sculptors, poets, philosophers, critics and historians of
art who are profoundly indebted to him. And, increasingly,
some of the earlier volumes, with their thick paper and their
velvety old-£ashioned p hotographs, have become eagerly sought
after.

Of those aspects of his childhood which concern us in that they

10 Introduction

have contributed directly to his work, Stokes has given us a

description, included in this 'Volume, i n which h e retains
throughout the child's perspective. In the fantasies of the young
boy, exercised dai ly in a London park under a succession of
governesses, we discover much that is later to assert itself
either in the motivation or as the content of his writing - two
things never far apart in the work of an original artist. Fear,
concern, the sense of loss, a feeling for order, the desire to re­
store and to put everything right - first experienced most
poignantly in relation to the objects and events of the childhood
round, to the drained bed of the Serpentine, the rough boys who
infested the Park, the Magazine by the lakeside in which
dangerous explosives were stored, the red-coated soldiers, the
big horse-chestnuts in candle, and the myth of the Park returned
to an eighteenth-century grandeur - to whi ch must be added a
powerful capacity to find in the outer world intimations of the
inner : these things later manifest themselves as the motive force
behind Stokes's work, but they are also what he is eventually to
write of, more eloquently, more directly than any other writer I
know of, as the perennial subject-matter of art. In the auto­
biographi cal pages, mostly to be found in Inside O u t and Smooth
and Rough, we find representations, unexcelled in our litera­
ture, of the artist and the aesthete in the making. We see the
child hungry for experience, and hungry also for the under­
standing of experience. These passages recall the best of
Praeterita, and they are the equal of Pater's strange confessional
fragment, 'The Child in the House' . But, if in sensibility Stokes
has much in common with Ruskin or Pater, i n intellectual cul­
ture or the degree of self-consciousness there is the difference of
a century.
The love of art was of slow formation in Stokes's life, and in
its development the first visit to Italy, where he arrived on New
Year's Eve 192 1 -2, was a crucial event. From then onwards,
the craving for sensuous experience, which had so stirred the
young boy on his daily walks, gradually turned towards paint­
ing, sculpture, above all architecture : for with Stokes the ex­
perience of art has always proved most profound, most
satisfying, when art finds expression in a corporeal form or in a
 Introduction II

form sufficiently approximate to the body for us to m ake the

assimilation. Hence, it was only a natural step when, under
the influence of the great Diaghilev seasons, Stokes extended the
range of his aesthetic interest to take in the dance, and he l ater
came to write some of the best accounts of traditional ballet
in the l anguage. More generally, the connection between art
and the body, the corporeal nature of art as we might think of
it, has always figured centrally in the subject-matter of Stokes's
criticism, though, as this criticism evolves, the connection re­
ceives at different times a different elaboration and a different
explanation .
But to talk o f the evolution o f Stokes's criticism inevitably
brings us to the second m aj or theme of his writing. For at much
the s ame time as the love of art asserted itself, he began to sense
the fascination of psychoanalysis. It was early in the 1920s
that Stokes read The Interpretation of Dreams and The
Psychopath ology of Everyday Life. From the very beginning he
experienced the attraction of the new ideas, and they slowly
began to exert their influence over his thinking. The crucial
event in this process was still several years off, as we shall see,
and even then it was some time before the two themes of art
and psychoanalysis were explicitly brought together in the criti­
cal writings. Nevertheless, if Stokes' s early work can be read
much as though it belonged to the tradition of nineteenth-cen­
tury aestheticism, it is to be observed that, throughout, there is
a place reserved for psychoanalytic theory, at w hich it can be
introduced when the moment is right. For from the beginning
the notion finds acceptance that art is a form of externalization,
of m aking concrete the inner world, and the evolution of
Stokes' s criticism c an l argely be accounted for by the increas­
ingly richer view that is taken of the inner world and of how
and by what means it works its way out.

Stokes's first book, The Quattro Cento, appeared in 1932, though

an article on Rimini and the Tempio Malatestiano, which was to
be the subject of his second book, h ad already been published in
T. S. Eliot's Criterion some two years earlier. In point of fact,
The Quattro C en to and its successor Stones of Rimini, the
12 Introduction
repositories of much intense observation and reflection, re­
present the work of several ye'ars. Throughout the l92os Stokes
revisited Italy on a number of occasions, sometimes making his
home there, sometimes travelling extensively. Often he was by
himself, and in some of his most memorable descriptions we
seem to discern the reverie of the young man, as he stands
alone, absorbed in the temple fac;ade, or wandering through
the courtyard of a Renaissance palace, or the crowded piazza of
a small country town. At other times he was in company - for
instance, with the Sitwells, met by chance in Italy, who were
(he has said) 'the first to open my eyes', though their aesthetic
interests and his were and remained very different. A closer
affinity of taste was established with Ezra Pound, whom Stokes
first met as a tennis partner in Rapallo in the autumn of 1926:
for the two men soon discovered that they shared not only a
common admiration for the Tempio Malatestiano and the s culp­
ture that adorned it, which Pound had already written about in
the Cantos, but also a community, or perhaps a complemen­
tarity, of response.*

*Of recent years the literary relations between Stokes and Ezra
Pound have been the subject of speculation by a number of literary
critics. In Donald Davie, The Poet as Sculptor (London, 1964), much
is made of the connection, and Stones of Rimini is talked of as a
commentary on, or an elaboration of, Cantos 17 and 20. The truth
would seem to be that Stokes and Pound became independently
interested in Rimini, and that it was this common interest that they
discovered at a chance meeting. There seems little reason to think of
Pound as· an influence on Stokes's visual aesthetic; though Stokes
profited greatly from his encouragement. Pound was the first to read
in the late 1 920s the article, which was subsequently to appear in the
Criterion, about Agostino and 'stone-and-water'. In a projected
volume Stokes intended to explore the purely historical background
of the Tempio, and there he would have made explicit reference to
the Malatesta Cantos. The volume, however, was never written,
partly because, as we shall see, Stokes's visits to Italy were, at this
period, abbreviated, and partly because, as he worked on the tes­
timony, his view of Sigismondo's personality became more uncertain
and, in particular, his disagreement with Pound's estimate became
more marked. And, meanwhile, Colour and Form crystallized. Pound
 Introduction 13
From the beginning, indeed from the opening words - the first
chapter is entitled 'Jesi', and it starts : 'No sign of Frederick
Hohenstaufen in the railway station at least' - The Quattro
Cento exhibits an idiosyncrasy of manner, later to become char­
acteristic, that sets it apart from normal critical or art-historical
writing. There is an obliquity of approach, long elaborate de­
scriptions suddenly shot through with darting phrases, or an
accumulation of detail, closer perhaps to lore than to learning:
there is an independence, bordering on eccentricity, of judge­
ment, and a heady freshness of observation : and there is the
constant proximity of humour and depth.
In conception The Quattro Cen to is, it is true, the most con­
ventional of Stokes's books. For it has been endowed with an
elaborate architectonic which, if it might have done something
to illuminate the place of the book in some rather larger literary
scheme which was ultimately abandoned, tends to obscure the
thesis that it presents. The architectonic of the book is strictly
geographical, divided according to the city-states of Renaissance
Italy, with the central section devoted to Florence and Verona.
The thesis, however, cuts across geographical distinctions and
will even divide some part of the work of a given artist from the
rest. For the central aim of the book is to identify and to define a
mode of art, which, though it produced some of its finest mani­
festations in Italy in the fifteenth century, cannot be equated in
any straightforward way with Quattrocento art nor even with
any specific school or tradition within Quattrocento art. For
this mode of art Stokes devised the label, 'Quattro Cento', from
which in turn the book derives its title.

Quattro Cento art is identified through a number of charac­

teristics varying greatly in generality and in concreteness. In
The Quattro Cento they are allowed to emerge in course of
description, and, in consequence, though I have tried to do jus­
tice to them in the excerpts I have chosen, I cannot be certain I
have succeeded. Associated with the various characteristics are
was perhaps disappointed by the non-appearance of the second
volume on Rimini, and the relations between the two men
loosened.
14 Introduction

certain distinctive merits or virtues, but Stokes is careful not to

claim for Quattro Cento art supremacy, even within the art of
the Renaissance. It is one mode amongst others - though for
him at least invested with an inexhaustible poignancy and
beauty.
The first characteristic is a passionate attachment to the
medium, to stone : 'the love of stone' . But what Stokes means
here - and the point is important to emphasize and it is one to
which he constantly reverts, elaborating and elucidating it each
time he does so - is the love of stone as a m edium: the stone,
that is, is treasured for its potentialities, for what can be coaxed
out of it. And if, elsewhere, apropos of Agostino di Duccio or
Michelangelo, Stokes talks, seemingly, of the unqualified love of
the stone, the love of the block or the slab, this, it must be
understood, is a derivative love. That in the first place the stone
is loved as a medium is brought out, indirectly, by a kind of
compliance that Stokes presupposes between artist and stone.
On the artist's side, there is the o utward thrust of fantasy, the
projection of this on to stone, a nd parallel to this, there is (as an
observed effect, I take it) the way in which the stone, in the
hands of such an artist, pushes itself forward on to the surface.
The stone blooms, there is 'encrustation', or 'exuberance ' . The
art of the Quattro Cento is, in one favoured phrase, the art of
'stone-blossom' . And if we are uncertain what are the visual con­
ditions on which these descriptions rest, or in what precisely
the effect consists, it is best to turn to the various detailed ac­
counts that Stokes provides of what are for him clear examples
of the Quattro Cento : the courtyard at Urbino by Luciano Laur­
ana, or certain works of Verrocchio. In such passages, where we
can set the description against the object, the terms begin to
explain themselves .
The second characteristic is m ass, where this is contrasted,
variously, with massiveness, typical of Roman architecture and
the B aroque, and with a rhythmic or linear treatment of space,
such as we find in the work of Brunelleschi. The third charac­
teristic is immediacy. And it is by design that I group these two
characteristics together, because the former is best understood
through the latter. For 'mass-effect' can be thought of as that
 Introduction 15

awareness of space which arises (or can arise) instantaneously,

or from 'the quickness of the perceiving eye'. It does not require
a process of synthesis, taking place over time, in which suc­
cessive impressions are first accumulated and then pieced
together, but it is an immediate response to the tension, or inner
ferment, expressed on the surface of the wall. Conversely, the
kind of architectural space that engenders this kind of aware­
ness is not cumulative, nor does it appear to be built up out of
discrete spatial units. (Stokes, it is true, introduces the notion of
mass-effect rather differently, though, I think, nothing I have
said is inconsistent with his intentions. For the definition of
mass-effect he invoked the theory, still current at the time, ac­
cording to which our awareness of space is ultimately derived
from the sense of touch and there is no more than an analogue
to this awareness in the visual field. This theory, which was first
systematically laid out by Berkeley, died hard in aesthetics :
witness the vogue enjoyed, around the turn of the century and
then later, by Berenson's notion of 'tactile values' as a vital com­
ponent of the Florentine achievement. It was then in keeping
with this tradition that Stokes defined mass-effect as that aware­
ness of space which is peculiarly connected with the sense of
sight and hence is to be contrasted with the 'normal' awareness
of space . However, nothing that Stokes says commits the notion
of mass-effect to the Berkeleyan theory irrevocably, and, indeed,
freed from its theoretical trappings, the idea of a treatment of
spa ce distinctive in its appeal to the eye or to visual cues can
only gain in plausibility or clarity.)
The fourth characteristic is the most difficult to pin down.
Quattro Cento art is, we are told, 'emblematic', it has 'the power
of emblem' . The concept of the emblematic, which disappears
from Stokes's later \Vritings, though not without a trace, falls
into two parts, which are evidently if elusively related. The first
is that the signs or symbols recurrent in the art render up their
meaning readily : they are transparent to the eye, or at least
translucent, and are what a whole school of aesthetic phil­
osophers have called 'iconic'. The second is that the process of
making the signs or symbols becomes itself symbolic or mean­
ingful - perhaps, indeed, it is the only source of meaning in the
16 Introduction

arts, and the signs or symbols in which it issues acquire their

meaning derivatively from it .. And, if this initially seems ob­
scure, we might consider for a moment human expression, or
the expression that finds an outlet through the body. For there
too it is the very m aking of the expression, or the gesture, that is
in the first instance meaningful, so that the expression itself
gains its meaning from the way in which it is made. If this
parallel is valid, then it would s uggest that at a ny rate part of
what is intended by talking of Quattro Cento art as e mblematic
is (once again) a claim about the relation in which the artist
s tands to the medium. He is related to the stone with much
the same intim acy as he is to his own body.
To these, the chief characteristics of the Quattro Cento as a
mode of art, Stokes next adds perspective, which he regards as
an 'indispensable' constituent. And i f this strikes us as incon­
gruous, falling clearly on the side of the content, or how the
subject-matter is represented, while the other characteristics are
uncompro misingly formal, this only brings up in a clear, be­
cause in a concrete, form a general difficulty that underlies the
whole characterization of the Quattro Cento : and that is the
difficulty of seeing where the unity of the Quattro Cento lies, or
how, for instance, the various characteristics are supposed to fit
together. The Quattro Cento contains m any fine insights and
many beautiful discriminations, yet there is a real problem in
knowing in what sense it deals with a single mode of art. For the
resolution of this we have to turn to Stokes's next two books on
the visual arts, which can conveniently be grouped together:
Stones of Rimini ( 1 934), and Colour and Form ( 1 9 3 7) . In the
interval Stokes had clarified and i ntegrated his aesthetic c at­
egories i n a way that was to be of the gre atest importance for
his later writing. Let us look at thi s .

In The Quattro Cento there i s at various points an uncertainty

that arises. An observation has been made about this or that
work of art, and then the doubt may be experienced how the
observation is to be understood or interpreted. Does the obser­
vation, we find ourselves asking ourselves, belong to the side of
the artist and does it accordingly refer to a way i n which he has
 Introduction 17

worked ? O r does the observation relate t o the spectator, a nd i s

its a i m to pick out what h e can or perhaps should discern? I t
was i n the course o f removing this uncertainty that Stokes was
ultimately able to resolve the more general difficulty that, as we
have just seen, attached to the notion of the Quattro Cento as a
unitary mode of art.
The first step was to adopt a consistent point of view. In
Stones of Rimini the standpoint of the a rtist, rather than of the
spectator, is consistently m aintained. And this is a chieved
through the device of firs t putting i n the forefront of attention a

single artistic a chievement, the reliefs i n the Tempio Mala­

testiano, * and then considering - empathically, we might say
- how it could have come to be executed. In Colour and Form,
once again, a consistency of standpoint is retained, though now
it is the more shadowy or generalized figure of 'the painter' who
is the protagonist and through whose eyes we are led to recon­
sider many of the central issues of art and several of the greatest
works of art.
In pointing out that the clarification of Stokes's earliest aesthe­
tic is effe cted through the adoption of a single standpoint, I am
not claiming that any viable aesthetic must be written
exclusively from the point of view of the artist: alternatively,
exclusively from the point of view of the spectator. On the con­
trary, I would think that any aesthetic written in this one-sided
way would be seriously misleading. My point is only that what
has first to be done is to collect together those observations
which belong to one side or the other and allocate them cor­
rectly. For it is only when each standpoint has been fully articu­
lated th at the two can be collated : though it is only when they
have been collated that an adequate aesthetic is likely to emerge .
However, it is not merely a shift of standpoint, or rather a
shift towards consistency of s ta ndpoint, that o ccurs between
The Quattro Cento and its successors ; there is also an important
* Throughout Stones of Rimini the master of the Tempio reliefs is
unequivocally identified with Agostino de Duccio. This is now a
matter of dispute: see, for example, John Pope-Hennessy, Italian
Renaissance Sculpture (London, 1958); Charles Seymour, Jr, Sculp­
ture in Italy, 1400-1500 (London, 1966).
18 Introduction

conceptual innovation, and one permits the other. I n the first

book, in the course of trying to. identify Quattro Cento art and
to distinguish it from other contemporary trends, Stokes had
written:
The distinction I am making is laborious. I might have simplified it
into a distinction between carving and modelling, between the use of
stone and of bronze, were it not for the fact that the bronze can well
convey an emotion primarily imputed to the stone, while, on the
other hand, stone can be carved, as it was by Lombard sculptors, to
perpetuate a conception not only founded upon the model but in­
spired by modelling technique. (The Quattro Cen to, p. 28)

In this passage the concepts of carving and modelling are, of

course, being used literally - in such a way, that is, that they are
tied unequivocally to specific techniques or physical processes .
And as such the concepts are, he finds, restrictive, or positively
misleading. However, once the aestheti c theory comes to be
restated from the standpoint of the a rtist, it seems plausible to
reconsider using these concepts and possible to consider using
them in an extended or metaphorical sense. Carving and mod­
elling are now thought of as the two most general attitudes that
the artist might adopt to his medium - attitudes derived
from, but not confined to, the techniques or processes after
whi ch they are named. So adjusted, the two concepts move i nto
the centre of Stokes's aesthetic. More specifically, the notion of
the Quattro Cento gives way to that of carving : the Quattro
Cento artist is recognized as par excellence the carver.
The dichotomy of carving and modelling has a longish history
not only in artistic p ractice but also in aesthetic theory . How­
ever, i n deciding to employ the terminology that he had re­
jected i n The Quattro Cento, Stokes vvould seem to h ave been
influenced less by i ntellectual precedent tha n by the painters
and sculptors whom he was seeing in England at this time: not­
ably Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. For i n the work of
these artists and their associates the sense of direct engagement
with the material was a highly self-conscious element, and in
this respect they thought of themselves as in deliberate reaction
against both the academic and the ' fine art' or Rodinesque tra­
ditions, in which the maki ng of models which were then sent to
 Introduction 19

Italy to be cast by fine craftsmen still played a significant role.

Writing around this period, Henry Moore, who was much in­
volved with this new aesthetic, referred to Donatello the mod­
eller as 'the beginning of the end'.*
It would, however, be wrong to think of the prominence now
afforded to the notions of carving and modelling as simply a
conceptual innovation : or - perhaps a better way of putting the
matter - it would be wrong to think of the conceptual inno­
vation involved as simply a change of vocabulary. On the con­
trary: the introduction of concepts that applied, in the first
pl ace, to actual techniques, and then, by extension, to general­
ized ways in which the artist might regard his relation to the
medium, coupled, as we have seen, with the adoption of the
artist's viewpoint as that from which aesthetic description or
analysis is formulated, allowed Stokes to present a clearer and
more far-reaching view of the kind of art with which he was
still centrally concerned. I shall, by and large, leave Stokes to
speak for himself on this point. For, by including most of the
central section of Stones of Rimini, with its description of
the Tempio reliefs, I have, I hope, allowed the reader to see for
himself how much the aesthetic gained in lucidity, in depth, and
in subtlety through the changes that had occurred since The
Quattro Cento. There are, however, one or two observations
worth making.
In the first place, it is to be observed how the characteristic
that Stokes had spoken of in The Quattro Cento as 'the love of
stone' is clarified within the new conceptual context, and how,
in particular, the point to which I drew attention - that it is
love of stone as a medium that Stokes is talking about -
comes out very sharply. The point is now made by resolving
this characteristic into two components. There is, on the one
hand, the artist's resolve to project his fantasies and emotions on
to the stone, while yet preserving the integrity of the stone. Ac­
cordingly, the surface of the stone acquires differentiation, and
yet the various layers or facets into which it is resolved con­
trive to be related without abrupt transitions or emphasis . And

* Quoted in John Russell, Henry Moore (London, 1 968), p. 19.

20 Introduction

it is at this stage that the significance of perspective, which had

proved a recalcitrant or heterogeneous element in the ori g} nal
stylistic characterization of the Quattro Cento, is integrated
into the new account; for the value of perspective is that it
a llows the externalization of the artist's fantasy (or what in the
broadest sense might be called 'representation') in a way that
does not involve any undue or assertive attack upon the stone
of the kind we get with other more frankly 'illusionistic' devices
for securing depth, such as undercutting or high relief. The
stone remains inviolate. Or, more accurately, it has a chance of
remaining inviolate: for Stokes distinguishes between the use of
perspective within the carving tradition - the 'love of per­
spective', as he calls it, in writing of Piero, the artist in whom it
is exemplified supremely - and the mere exploitation of per­
spective in chillier ways, which he regards as a characteristic
abuse in fifteenth-century Florentine painting. And, on the
other hand, there is the artist's attention to the stone itself, to
the varied intimations and suggestions it exhales, to what we
might think of, or what at any rate the true carver might think
of, as the fantasies that in some metaphorical sense it contains.
There are many factors - its geological history, its cultural as­
sociations, the particular way it responds to manipulation, as
well as its appearance to the eye - which determine the precise
contribution that a type of stone makes to the art of those who
love it. In many passages, limpid, persuasive, moving also below
the level of consciousness, Stokes suggests the most intimate
connections between marble, low relief, and fantasies of water.
However, for Stokes the favoured way of bringing out this con­
nection has always been by invocation of what he sees as its
most powerful exemplification : 'the largest, the oldest, the most
varied aesthetic object that has survived today', Venice, 'the
city of Venice among intrusive waters'. It is for this reason, and
not for the mere enrichment of the text, that the description of
Venice is such a constant point of return in Stokes's writing.
Again, it is to be observed how the adoption of the new con­
cepts helped to free Stokes's aesthetic theory from any residual
chronological reference. For it was hard not to associate the
Quattro Cento with the Q uattrocento. But under the heading of
 Introduction 21

'the carving tradition' Stokes felt himself able to talk in one

breath of the great sculptors and architects of ancient Athens,
Alberti, Piero della Francesca, Giorgione and the Venetians,
Michelangelo, Vermeer, and Cezanne and his true descendants.
And if this list of names suggests a much wider frame of aesthe­
tic reference than anything we had so far been prepared for, we
have at this stage to conjoin Stones of Rimini with Colour
and Form. For in this later book Stokes explicitly set himself to
establish correspondences within the domain of painting for the
various characteristics and virtues by reference to which he had
identified the carving tradition in sculpture and architecture.
Colour takes the place of stone as the loved medium, and the
love of colour is then said to find expression in a number of
characteristic ways . Stokes enumerates : the depiction of objects
as self-lit; the exploitation of near-complementaries, and of the
phenomenon of simultaneous contrast; the application of any
particular colour to the surface in such a way as to reveal its
constituents. And for one pervasive colour-effect typical of the
carving painter, Stokes borrowed a term from a philosopher
whose influence he had felt as an undergraduate and to whom
he owed (he told me once) one of the few intellectual debts he
had contracted at Oxford: the philosopher is F. H. Bradley, and
the phrase is 'identity-in-difference'.
That colour - or perhaps more precisely colour-form - should
be the major concern, or the prime love, of the carving tradition
in painting is based upon the consideration, for which Stokes
thought that there was adequate scientific support, that our
awareness of something being external to us, or of 'out­
wardness', is most powerfully given to us not simply by vision
but by chromatic vision. It is in virtue of colour - 'surface'
colour, that is - that we have the sense of otherness, which in
turn is vital to such notions as projection and externalization.
Once the centrality of colour is given, then the ways in which
the love of colour expresses itself follow very closely the pat­
tern that Stokes had laid down for the love of stone. There is, on
the one hand, the projection of the painter's inner states on to
the colour surface, while yet retaining the integrity of that sur­
face. And, on the other hand, there is the painter's attention to
22 Introduction

the potential life, or the 'vitality', of the canvas as the bearer of

colour.
So far I have spoken of the concept of carving, how it takes
over from that of the Quattro Cento, and how this allowed the
tradition picked out by this latter notion to be c larified and
generalized - its aims to be more sharply formulated, and its
presence in history more widely recognized. But no less import­
ant, though less evidently so for the reader of Stones of
Rimini, is the introduction of the contrasted or antithetic con­
cept of modelling. In The Quattro Cen to we read of values alter­
nate to those of the preferred tradition : there are references to
massiveness, plasticity, the scenic, the pictorial, emphasis,
'finish' - sometimes involving the subtlest uses of these terms.
(As, for instance, in the description of Ghiberti included in this
volume.) Nevertheless, the nature of these values is not always
defined: and apart from the seemingly accidental fact that they,
or groups of them, happen to have been brought together within
the great historical styles, it is left unspecified whether they
have any principle of unity. With the introduction of the
concept of modelling this changes . Subsumed under a single
concept, which in tum associates them with a specific attitude
or relation of artist to medium, these various values no longer
seem to be merely deviant, but interlock to form a counter­
tradition. And if the immediate sequel to the conceptual inno­
vation effected in Stones of Rimini happens to be that the
carving tradition is upgraded and is now given - as it was not in
The Quattro Cento - supreme status, in the long run this is not
how things are to remain. The characteristics of modelling -
once it is recognized that they too constitute a tradition - are to
be reconsidered, and in Stokes's later writing they are acknow­
ledged not simply as something of which art will never be free,
nor as something which forms an inevitable substrate of carv­
ing, but as possessing their own significance and value, as 'a vital
and irreplaceable constituent' of art itself. But to understand
this reassessment and to see how it comes about, we must take a
broader view.

I have talked of the two large themes that go to the making of

 Introduction 23

Stokes's c riticism - a rt and psychoanalysis - and I have a lready

said that, if the second of these themes remains latent through­
out the earlier writings, there is, as it were, a place reserved
for it, whi ch it c an, when the moment is ready, come forward
and occupy. I n this connection I referred to the i dea, present
from the beginning, of art as a form of externalization or pro­
jection . I n a moment we shall see that there is more to it than
this : that there are other ways i n which the later criticism is
a nticipated i n the earlier . Meanwhile we might discern, even i n
the earliest writings, but markedly i n Stones o f Rimini, both
a reference to and a reliance upon such connections or associ­
ations i n the mind as psychoanalysis would assume to be not
merely present but operative . Assumptions are made about the
mind of the artist and about the mind of the reader, how one is
to be described and the other addressed, of a kind that would
seem natural to anyone exposed to Freudian theory. But for the
explicit appearance of psychoanalysis we have to wait.
The significant date in all this is, we might i magine, the be­
ginning of Stokes's analysis with Melanie Klein, which itself ran
on through the 1 930s; and it is this that I h ave referred to as the
crucial event in the process in which the psychoanalytic colour­
ing to Stokes's criticis m becomes more saturated. In point of
fact, the immediate consequence of the analysis was the inter­
ruption of those leisurely, protracted visits to Italy upon whi ch
the first books depended. Life, we must assume, changed. And it
should be observed that the earliest attempts to draw upon the
findi ngs of psychoanalysis or to bring these findings into con­
nection with the experience of art occur in the a uto­
biographical volumes, where they are carried out on a purely
subjective or personal level: as though Stokes felt, in keeping
with the tenor of psychoanalysis, that it Was only when he h ad
worked out these links or connections for himself, that it was
only when he had tested them against his own experience and
found them compelling, that he was prepared to generalize
them, or assert them as part of a c ritical the�ory. I t is the greater
pity that the very complexity, that the intricate workmanship of
Inside O u t ( 194 7 ) and Smooth and Rou9h ( 1 95 1 ), make them com­
paratively unsuitable for excerption. I h ave included what I can.
24 Introduction

For Stokes psychoanalysis has much of the imaginative rich­

ness and vitality of art itself:He has experienced its charms, and
he is deeply immersed in its literature . However, that part of
psychoanalytic theory which he has taken up a nd deployed i n
his criti cism a nd which i s therefore relevant to its under­
standing is restricted, and it falls within the extension effected
to Freud's theory by Mrs Klein. More specifically, we can iden­
tify it with her account of the two 'positions' which she pos­
tu lated i n trying to characterize the early h istory of the
individual.
The starting point for Mrs Klein's work was Freud's account
of infantile development. For Freud i nfantile development
could be reckoned in terms of comparatively distinct ph ases, or,
as he was later to call them, 'organizations' . Each phase is domi­
nated by a particular part of the body, which currently enjoys
primacy in the sexual constitution of the i nfant, and from
which the phase takes its name. By primacy Freud meant rnore
than that for the i nfant, during any given p ha se, the dominant
part of the body is the i nfant's sexual organ, a nd pleasure de­
rived from that part of the body is the infant's sexu al activity .
He also meant something to the effect that the whole, or a great
deal, of the infant's emotions a nd relations to obj ects outside
itself are coloured by thoughts of, or feelings a bout, that part of
the body. The parts of the body that enjoy or can enj oy pri­
macy are the mouth, the a nus, the penis or its counterpart, the
clitoris, and, more generally, the genitals. Primacy passes from
one part of the body to another, in accorda nce with a sequence
that is by and large biologically determined, though it can be
upset or modified by environmental circumstances or the
infant's perception of them. I n normal circumstances, the
i nfant passes from the oral, through the a nal, and the phallic, to
the genital phase, and this cycle is completed within the first
five or six years of life .
Ea ch o f these phases marks, in the first i nstan ce, a stage in the
infant's sexual development. Or, to put it the other way round,
the i nfant's development i s initially calculated i n terms of sex­
uality and its transformations . Freud, however, never thought
of this as the whole story, and he was keen that it should not be
 Introduction 25

thought of as such. For him any totally adequate account of

infantile development should correlate the sequence of
libidinally distinguished phases with phases in the emergence of
the ego . I nstinct and that which controls, moderates, or deflects
instinct evolve concurrently and not without interaction. In
Freud's thought, an overall or integrated account of infantile
development, in which the course of the two evolutionary cur­
rents would be traced, remained something of a n ideal; though,
for a number of specific infantile situations, such as those from
which paranoia or melancholia derive, he provided vignettes,
worked to some considerable degree of detail, of the total
psychological structure and condition.
It was to fill out Freud's account of infantile development
that Mrs Klein postulated her two positions which the infant is
s aid to adopt. The very term 'position ' discloses this, for by
'position' Mrs Klein meant something considerably more com­
plex than a stage in libidinal or sexual development. She ex­
pressly meant it to include, for instance, the mechanisms of
defence to which the infant, while it adopts a particular pos­
ition, characteristically resorts in dealing with anything painful
in the outer or the inner world. Mrs Klein called her two pos­
itions the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive pos­
ition . These names, however, are not to be taken as indicating
that the positions are in themselves psychotic . On the contrary,
they are part of normal development, though they are related
.(like the phases of sexual development that Freud identified) in
several significant ways to the disturbances of adult life.
There are, it might be s aid, three distinct ways in which Mrs
Klein's a ccount supplements what Freud found to say a bout
infantile development. I n the first place, it is to be noted of both
positions that they are initially adopted by the infant a t an
earlier period than any in which Freud took a close interest: in
and j ust after the oral phase. In this way, Mrs Klein's account
contributes to the prehistory of that part of the infantile develop­
ment which Freud laid bare. Secondly, though we can date the
first appearance of the two positions, or their original adoption
by the infant, they are not confined to this or to any other of
the phases identified in Freud's chronology of the libido. Indeed,
26 Introduction
the temporal relations between the two positions themselves are
not secure, for the movement b ackwards and forwards between
them is superimposed on all i nfantile development. The tran­
sition from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive pos­
ition and the overcoming of the l atter - crucial moments,
a ccording to this a ccount - are never achieved completely,
beyond all danger of regression. In this way, Mrs I<lein's ac­
count furnishes a counterpoint to Freud's a ccount. Thirdly, the
tvvo positions are identified primarily by reference to the ego
and its structure, and only secondarily by reference to the
libido . Indeed, in so far as reference is made to the libido in
defi ni ng the two positions, it is i mpure or oblique, in so far as
what is referrred to is the libido as channelled or directed by the
ego : in other words, to the kinds of relation that the ego estab­
lishes with objects or elements i n the external world. In the
paranoid-schizoid position, the ego l acks integration, the objects
to which it is related, both outer and inner, are part-obje cts, and
the characteristic defences to which it resorts are splitting and
denial. In the depressive position, the ego h as achieved a measure
of integration, even if this is not securely established : the objects
to which it is related are conceived of in their i ntegrity, which
means, significantly, as both good and bad; and instead of the
unrelenting attempts to distort the world, typical of the earlier
position, it allows itself to experience guilt, regret, and longing.
Against this background it is now possible to formulate the
basic project of Stokes's later writings : Michelangelo ( 1 955),
Greek Culture and the Ego (1 958), Three Essays on the Painting
of Our Tiine ( 1 96 1 ), Painting and the Inner World (1 963), The
In vitation in Art ( 1 965), a nd Reflections on the Nude (1 967).
Very roughly - and for anything even approximating to the
subtlety and ingenuity of Stokes's c riticism there is no a lterna­
tive to a return to the writings themselves - what Stokes has
endeavoured to do is to associate the two modes of a rt that he
had i dentified, the carving and modelling traditions, with the
two positions that Mrs Klein has postulated. Of course, the as­
sociations are both multiple and complex, and in many cases
they a re mediated by a number of i ntervening factors or run
through chains . The overall point to be made is that in each
 Introduction 27

case, the mode or tradition of art is held to reflect or to celebrate

the kind of relation to the outer world that is typical of the
corresponding position.
The connection between the carving tradition and the de­
pressive position is the more readi ly grasped. The carver, we are
to imagine, in respecting the integrity and the separateness of
the stone, celebrates at once the whole object w ith which he
characteristically enters into relation and also the i ntegrated ego
that he projects . In a single sentence i n Greek Culture and the
E90, Stokes brings the two aspects together : 'The work of art is
esteemed for its otherness, as a self-sufficient object, no less than
as an ego-figure.' (Greek Culture, p . 50.) In talking of self­
sufficiency, of aesthetic detachment, of the rejection of taste
and smell as constituents of the work of art, Stokes is drawi ng
together characteristics that h ave often been insisted on i n the
drier or more academi c forms of aesthetics as essential to or a s
definitive o f art itself; he then connects these c haracteristics
w ith others, more immedi ately linked to observation, which he
had described and analysed i n his earlier writings : and he is then
able to offer this new amalga m as equivalent, for him, to one,
but only one, of the great traditions i n art.
For perh aps the most i ntriguing element in Stokes's l ater writ­
ing is what he m akes of the modelling tradition. What up till
then had been comparatively neglected, at times indeed de­
spised, i s systematically reconstructed, a nd then i n its recon­
structed form is brought i nto association with the earlier of the
two positions. What underlies this i s the realization that, in the
l ast an alysis, the 'modelled' work of art can be thought of as
the mirror-im age of the 'carved' work of art. Examine the
characteristics of each, and we see that they are those of the
other in reverse. So, in the 'carved' work of art there is a lack of
any sharp i nternal differentiation : the i ndividual forms are un­
emphatic, and the transitions between them are gradu a l : there
is, to borrow the phrase i n which Stokes described Piero's fig­
ures, a certain 'brotherliness' i n the composition. And the reward
for this is that the work of art as a whole·asserts its distinctness
or otherness from the spectator. By contrast, i n the 'modelled'
work of art, there are sharp transitions and considerable
28 Introduction

internal differentiation : the forms are distinct and individuated,

they billow out from, or burrow their way into, the back­
ground, and in the overall composition, either the p arts remain
quite separate and their effect is cumulative, or else they are
somewhat intemperately or a rbitrarily brought together by
means of some overriding device. And the price that is paid for
this is that the work of art as a whole tends to merge with or
envelop the spectator. Just as a lack of sharp internal dis­
tinctions produces separateness from the spectator, or self­
sufficiency, so an insistence upon internal distinctions produces
a loss of separateness, or a dependence upon the spectator. In
this loss of separateness, which is also c alled the 'incantatory'
element in art or art's 'invitation', we can see how the tradition
to which this effect typically belongs enables its objects to
epitomize both the part-objects of early relations and the still
inchoate ego which enters into such relations. With the
expressive value of the once depreciated modelling tradition
securely established, it is no surprise that the tradition should
be recognized as a rightful partner in the development of art .
Earlier reservations fall away. 'For many years now, ' Stokes
wrote in 1 96 1 , in an essay not included i n this volume, 'I h ave
no longer regarded an enveloping relationship to be foreign to
the intention of art; on the contrary I have thought of it as a
fundamental attribute when associated with the opposite re­
lationship to an independent object.' (Three Essays on the Pain t­
ing of Our Time, p. 28)
It would be vain, in this introduction, to take further the
summary of Stokes's views as these are to be found i n the later
books . All I s hould like to do is to point out o ne feature, already
present in the earlier criticism and to which I have made im­
plicit reference, upon which so much of these developments
depends.
In discussing the transition from The Quattro Cen to to
Stones of Rim ini I said something about the way in which per­
spective, which seemed a discrepant element in the earlier
volume, falls into place in the later book. The discrepancy arose,
I suggested, because the mentio n of perspective seemed to intro­
duce a characteristic that belonged to content amongst so many
 Introduction 29

characteristics that were purely formal, and the discrepancy was

resolved by a shift to a unitary, and hence an internal, point of
view. In this resolution we may now see the presage of much
that is to come. For if we consider the bulk of criticism that ha�
been written under the influence of psychoanalysis, we can see
that it deliberately models itself upon those parts of psycho­
analysis which are concerned with the discovery of a hidden or
latent content inside a public or manifest content : and the parts
of psychoanalysis I have in mind are, of course, the analysis of
symptoms, the theory of parapraxes (errors, etc.), and, su­
premely, the interpretation of dreams. And in pursuing this par­
ticular course, psychoanalytically oriented criticism has
only been following the lead (or so it has assured itself) set by
Freud in his famous essays on Leonardo and the Michelangelo
Moses. By now the methodological inadequacies of this kind of
approach have been fully exposed. Most substantially, the point
has been made that art criticism framed in this way is likely to
leave out of account the 'art' aspect of the work of art. From
the beginning Stokes's criticism, even as it began to feel the
influence of psychoanalysis, has struggled to avoid these
dangers, and to do full justice to that aspect of art for which we
esteem it. In part, this has involved bringing certain formal
aspects of the work of art under interpretation. But in part, and
more significantly, it has meant dismantling somewhat the rigid
distinction between form and content on which much tra­
ditional art criticism and art theory has indolently rested. It is
the first steps in this process that we observe in Stones of
Rimini, in the discussion of perspective, or in much of what is
written in the early books about art and the body; and it moves
forward at such a pace that, by the time we reach the later
writings, it becomes for the reader the most natural thing in the
world - in the world of art, at any rate - to assimilate a shape to
a feeling, or to equ ate the use of a specific material with a fan­
tasy. In these works we catch the unmistakable voice of psycho­
analytic culture.

If this last observation does not already take us there, it is time

to turn to another aspect of Stokes's writing : the style. I have
30 Introduction

referred, explicitly and i mpli citly, to a number of transform­

ations that take place in the criticism over the years . As a con­
comitant, or perhaps a consequence, of these transformations,
there goes a no less remarkable transformation of style.
Affected somewhat by Ruskin, Stokes' s early style was
formed upon that of Pater, a writer whose influence, once ex­
perienced, is never totally s haken off. Stokes read Pater when he
first began to visit Italy, and he was, he has told me, 'bowled
over' . Stokes's prose exhibits a number of characteristics that
we find i n Pater : m any of the s ame phrases, the s ame use of
inversion, and some of the same cadences . Above all, Stokes
derived from Pater a certain pre cision i n the use of language
which no one earlier had attempted in the s ame fashion. For the
precision I have in mind does not consist in the exact setting
down of observable features : it is a precision not of description,
but rather of presentation, as though the critic's task was to
offer up, along with the object, those associations and sen­
timents whic h determine its place in our understanding or ap­
preciation. To many of Pater's characteristics - Stokes has not
the sureness of ear of Pater, and he is happily free of h is whim­
sicality - Stokes adds things of his own : a certai n strength, and a
wry oblique humour which is certainly not to be found in the
older writer.
But with the increasing influence of psychoanalysis upon the
content of the c riticism, the style is modified. The old sensibility
to associations is retained, but something has to be done to a c­
commodate the intellectually more complex framework within
whi ch the consideration of individual works of art or individual
artists comes to be set. The style becomes more aphoristic . And
the ultimate critical task is now felt to h ave been incompletely
realized unless all the related thoughts, all the relevant sen­
timents, h ave been gathered in - as they might be in a psycho­
analytic i nterpretation. One result can be, perhaps, a certain
lack of focus, and sometimes it is not easy for the reader to
determine which is the central i dea, and which are the reserv­
ations or the qualifying thoughts . But then this too can be a
form of precision : the finding of a precise equivalent to the
ambiguities, to the fluctuations of feeling and perception, which
 Introduction 31

are inherent in art. Delic ately, a bstrusely, m agically I would

say, the struggles of the artist for unity, for some kind of unity,
his triumphs and reverses, are recreated for us by someone who
knows . 'Poeta che mi 9uidi' : I can think of no better words, the
words of Dante about Virgil, to describe Stokes as a critic of the
arts .

Some seven or eight years ago in contributing a Pref ace to The

Invitation in Art I argued that it was wrong to think of Stokes as
narrowly an aesthete, to the exclusion of being a social critic .
Indeed, I argued that there is a natural connection between
these two roles, and that it is the cases in which they do not
coincide, in which the aesthete is indifferent to the conditions
of his society, that require explanation . I shall not repeat what I
said then, but I should like, in conclusion, to add an observation.
I n the intervening years, much h as been written about the
gap between art and life, and how it might be bridged. Most of
what has been written has been absurd. And in part the fault
lies in a confusion or uncertainty in the minds of those who
have pontificated. For they h ave failed to distinguish between a
conceptual issue and a purely practical issue . That is to say,
they h ave identified the gap sometimes with the essential
difference between art and "\Vh at is not art, and sometimes with
the m any different devices, generally oppressively or enviously
conceived, by w hi ch art h as been segregated from those for
whom it was made and turned into a preserve of the rich and
the arrogant. In decrying the l atter, they have fallen into deny­
ing the former, and a ccordingly they h ave railed against both
indiscriminately. In objecting to the ways in whic h art has been
exploited and degraded, they h ave come to assert that there is
no such thing as art, that there is only life . To read Stokes's
writings on these issues is to be recalled to a fresh sense of their
significance and their urgency. For his work has been a sus­
tained attempt to defend, to j ustify, i f need be to sharpen, the
conceptual distinction, and also to narrow, perhaps to close, the
cultural divide.

Richard Wollheim
The Nature of Art
I: The Qyattro Cento '
'
I

' The Quattro Cento '

So this is the building one has come to see, this square brick
edifice that is in bloom . For the decrepit brick has given birth to
straight stone window-frames beaded as with the pips of young
fruit. \Vood l itters the broken-down courtyard Within. The
stone arches are filled up. How stone h ates wood, even this
afflicted stone remembers that. Afflicted? No. The miracle
begins to c atch the heart, the miracle of Aaron's blossoming
rod. That was a Quattro Cento effect, j ust as Moses' miracle of
the splashing water from the mountain side is Baroque . But
Aaron's rod is the greater wonder.
And now the East and North recede. Here is the southern
effect s cattering time and memories . For it is immediate, with­
out rhythm, like the open face of the rose .
I write of the South in contrast to North and East thus
brought together; not the South of the eruptive noon-day which
has relation to North and East, but the South in which life is
outward, spread in space .
This southern stone is neither barren nor vol canic, but the
repository for humanistic fantasies, particularly those sym­
bolizing southern compulsion to throw life outward, to obj e c­
tify . I n the great period of the fifteenth century, Renaissance
sculptors m ade stone to bloom .
Such effect in relation to stone, and other effects that will
gradually reveal themselves, are referred to in this book by the
sym.bol 'Quattro Cento', a ctually as one word the Italian chron­
ologic al expression for fifteenth century. I will not use it a t all in
this its proper sense. The spe cial content with which I am con­
cerned, though neglected by writers o n the period, permeates
the spirit and the art of the fifteenth century. But I c all 'Quattro
Cento' o nly the direct and manifest expression of this con­
tent.
And I hope in the end that my use of the term will become an
36 The Nature of Art, I: 'Th e Q uattro Cen to'

idea inevitably associ ated with the naming of those h undred

years . · ,

I write of stone . Few Northerners and few Orientals love

stone : to the maj ority it is a symbol of barrenness. London
streets would be unbearable except for movement a nd noise and
night. Is it not horrid, so much stone sta nding there i n the two
minutes' silence; and can you think of the endless pavements
without the feet upon them? Yet stone i nspired the develop­
ment of the visu a l arts, that is the southern arts, so far as 'visual'
refers to arts concerned with spati al, rather than with rhythmic
or temporal, v a lues. I want to show the highest effect of mass as
unrelated to suggestions of rhythm or movement, as a supreme
achievement, the only mirror of human aim . I exhibi t stones
the opposite of barren.

[from The Qua ttro Cen to, 1932, pp . 7-8]

The Love of Stone

The forms of life that are concreted into limestone, though ap­
pa rent enough in many structures and in fossils, were never
un derstood as su ch. Yet by some part of the mind their history
was apprehended, and thus served to in spire humanistic art. A
deeper love of stone than any that obtained in other periods,
alone will explain those basic aspects of the Renaissance that
are here termed Quattro Cento . And what is true of the Qu attro
Cento is true in some degree of Mediterranean art as a whole . I
do riot mean to suggest, however, that these obscure feelings
would have m a de themselves felt so strongly except th at some
limestones not only have direct aestheti c appeal but also prac­
tical advantages for bui lding and sculptural purposes . As is
usual in what concerns the imagination, different fantasies, con­
nected with the same obj ect, go h and in h and, enhance one
another' s power. Any great love has m any roots, many per­
ceptions.
 The Love of Stone 37

So let us consider the genesis of limestone . Lime, in the first

place, is set free by the decomposition of igneous rocks which
make up ninety-five per cent of the earth's crust. They contain
on an average, it is reckoned, about five per cent of lime. This
lime is c arried i n solution by rivers to the sea . Except under
special circumstances it is not then deposited, since the amount
of carbon dioxide i n sea-water keeps the calcium carbonate i n
solution : it is, however, extracted from the water b y a nimals
and plants . * The deposits of their remains are cemented into
limestone . Limestone is petrified organism. We may see hun­
dreds of shell fossils on the surfaces of some blocks . Nor are the
animal fossils rare . The skeletons of coral are common, so too of
the crinoid, a kin d of star-fish . These fossils were, and are, en­
countered continually in the quarries; and however falsely an­
cient philosophy and s cience may have explained them, art,
which employs i n a more direct way deep unconscious 'know­
ledge', magni fied the truth. Shells were a Quattro Cento symbol .
They have a long h istory i n classical architecture and s culpture.
But it was the Quattro Cento carvers who in their exuberance
contrived for them the import of momentous emblems. M arine
decor ation of every kind is abundant in Quattro Cento art : dol­
phins, sea-monsters, as well as the fruits of the earth and the
children of men, encrust the stone or grow there. The meta­
morphosed structure of marble encouraged an extreme a nthro­
pomorphi c interpretation of its original life . Needless to s ay,
though marine symbols attai ned a heightened signi ficance in the
hum anism expressed by Quattro Cento art, they are common to
Roman and Greek art and to Mediterranean art as a whole . So
we m ust contemplate the entire Mediterranean basin i n order to
i nterpret the Quattro Cento achievement.
The sea and the limestone dominate those lands . The supply
of fresh water springs from that stone. On our return from a
visit to the South, we remember the limestone well-heads and
the limestone fountains .
We begin readily to conceive the bond of classical building
and limestone. No other architectural forms remind one so
* There are fresh-water limestones of organic origin. But they are
not common.
38 The Nature of Art, I: ' The Quattro Cento'
much of the horizontal bedding of stones. The jutting cornice,
the architrave mouldings, the· plinths and blocks, h ave a definite
relation to the joints of stones as seen i n quarry or cliff; and
p articularly to limestone, medium between the o rganic and the
i norganic Worlds.
A Greek temple is an i deal quarry reconstructed on the hill.
The Tempio Malatestiano at Rimini is a n i deal quarry whose
original organic substances were renewed by the hand of the
carver to express the abundant seas collected into solid stone.

[from Stones of Rimini, 1934, pp. 4 1-3]

3
Mass and Mass-Effect

And now I can explain fully what I mean by mass. A n effec t of

mass is one connected with solidity or density of three-di­
mensional objects . It is, therefore, i n part an appeal to the sense
of touch though the object be a building and not a piece of sculp­
ture. But solids afford an effect of mass only when they also
allow the immediate, the i nstantaneous synthesis that the eye
alone of the senses can perform . An undecorated wall, perhaps
better than a decorated one, m ay give a strong impression of
mass, but only when there are variations in its surfa ce, mostly
of colour or tone, which the eye with one fl ash discovers co­
herent, so that perceptions of succession belonging to any esti­
mate of length or height or density, retire i n favour of a feeling
that here you witness a concatenation, a simultaneity, that the
object is exposed to you, all of it · all at once. And j ust because
stone is solid and fixed and yet has the power in a high degree to
reflect light, to a ccept tone, thus making a purely visual syn­
thesis possible, it is the i deal vehicle of m ass-effect and therefore
the revealer of the spatial dimension, and so the basic i nspirer of
the visual arts. And as far as it is possible I would isolate and
stress this far more pregnant quality of mass, its appe a l to the
quickness of the eye, its power to captivate i n one second or
 Mass and Mass-Effect 39

less. Exploring sense of touch, I admit, introduces a succession,

and therefore entails some element of time though it be turned
into an instantaneous impression by the quickness of the per­
ceiving eye. But from the point of view of the eye alone, there is
no impression of quickness or even of simultaneity, in the
objects perceived. Mass reveals an entirety, reveals space, just as
music dramatizes succession or time with rhythm. And while
admitting that when the eye perceives, other senses are always
incited in that very act (for instance, I have inferred an oral
appeal in Verona marble), and further, while admitting that
visual art is bound to reflect responses of these other senses - for
without them things perceived would not be objects I consider
-

that the basic appeal of the art of colour, p ainting, and of archi­
tecture, should be to the eye alone, just as music to the ear.
And what are the values of this rare thing, purely visual art?
They are the values of space in the abstract. Just as music can
interpret any content in terms of rhythm, so painting can in­
terpret any content in terms of position, of objects related by
space. And when the temporal factor, when succession and
rhythmic or linear treatment in a visual art are the foremost
concern, then it is visual art only in the wider sense that it is
perceived with the eyes. * For immediacy is betrayed, the i m­
mediate synthesis that the eye alone can perform and, indeed,
does perform on material that incites the other senses, should
that m aterial be still conceived as primarily visual, that is to
say, a matter of space, the immediate dimension, of light and
colour without all the temporal, rhythmic afterthought that the
atmosphere of North and East bestow. What I call purely visual
matter is dissociated from noise as well as from silence, from
past, present and future. Things stand expressed, exposed, un­
altered in the light, in space. Things stand. Some call so immedi­
ate an effect dramatic or sudden, for there are no words without
temporal association; and in any case, few minds seem to be
* In any case out of all the visual arts, only from painting and
from architecture are purely spatial values to be expected; though
one does meet them to some extent in other arts, in the sculpture of
Francesco Laurana for instance, where they are translated into a
plastic whose point is the isolation or self-sufficiency of each shape.
40 The Nature of Art, I: ' The Q uattro Cento'
able to disentangle space from time. This feat belongs almost
entirely to the Quattro Cento . Neither Luciano 's courtyard
[Pla te 1 ] nor Piero's painting are in any sense dramati c . The
fina lity revealed is too great in Piero's pictures for any such
word, the fina lity revealed even when, like Uccello, he rep­
resents a battle in progress. The disposition of shapes by means
of colour and perspective affords a sense of completeness, so
that not only is the purely visual aspect of things stressed, but it
is enforced to such a degree that happenings, ferment psycho­
logical and physical, are subsumed under formulae of absolute
exposure, in terms, that is, of unalterable positions i n space .
Thus, the highest achievements of visual art not only absorb,
but transform, time into terms of space .
It is obvious both why the effect arouses emotion and why
that emotion became so conscious as to be proj ected into the art
of the even-lighted South . Objects perceived simply as related in
space encourage the ambition of every man for complete self­
expression, for an existence completely externalized. Our love
of spa ce is our love of expression. When we complain of lack of
light in England, beside the need for the sun's rays we express a
lack of spatial effect. Our spaces drift musical, composite. Even
the brightest day has abundant 'atmosphere-effects' . We console
ourselves for the lapse of the immedia cy image as for our own
resulting lack of entire expression, with the various rhythm of
music, literature and, alas, of the bastard products of the visual
arts; since sense of space is well nigh lost, and small the art in
which time is turned to space.
Mass, then, is a purely spatial synthesis apparent in a solid
and between solids . Now synthesis is only of what is separate, in
this case separate because differently disposed in space. Degree
of mass-effect in its highest form depends upon the degree of
non-temporal synthesis apparent, and the degree of synthesis in
turn depends on the natu re of the sepa rateness that is syn­
thetized. These separate entities, if their spatial position is to be
made emphatic , will otherwise conform to a pattern . Thus the
zones of similar columns, etc . - even in architecture avowedly
contrapuntal in effect. What I have called scenic or musi cal
mass in connection with buildings, is one in which separateness
 Mass and Mass-Effect 41

i n space is overborne by so great a stress upon continuity or

rhythm, one far more involved than what sense of touch
demands, that little non-temporal synthesis is employed, and
little effect of space made material or solid, ensues . Instead, the
building gains a rhythm, and what is actually an immovable
object in space expresses movement or succession .
But inasmuch as we still feel the building is solid, there ensues
a partial mass-effect. The m assive effect, so wrongly identified
with mass-effect, is but an enlargement of this rudimentary
form and lacks the idealism of purely spatial conception; since
the effect, in so far as it is 'piled up', is largely dependent on
musical architectonic . A Greek temple, on the other hand, is
certainly a mass without any unnecessary temporal import
(except what writers have persistently thrust on to it, en­
couraged by the ravages of Time) . Classic columns, though en­
gaged, are easily seen separate as well as synthetized. But this is
not mass in so supreme a form as Luciano's courtyard. It is not
enough to banish the time element. A certain stiltedness, a cer­
tain gap results. It needs a far greater understanding of the
purely spatial to a chieve a non-temporal synthesis where arches
roll in succession . In Luciano's courtyard there is apparent not
so much the detachment of spatial values, but a supreme trans­
lation of the successive into spatial effects . This causes it to be
an expression undivorced from the processes of living . It is the
greatest triumph of the spirit of man, a greater achievement
than Piero's painting because such an effect is realized less
hardly within the two dimensions of a picture. To turn subject
into object palpable as death the perfect obj ect, to turn time
into space without era dicating tirne as does the incident of
death, to show living under the form of the complete, the mani­
fested, was the highest exploit; since it was the final expression
of the universal aim, strongest in that time, to show, to objec­
tify; in other words, it alone entirely reflects the process of
living carried to conclusion, of object charged with subject. It is
an expression as vital as the dance to which it is the opposite,
the complement and the end. All the rest of art lies between.

[from The Quattro Cento, 1 9 3 2, pp . 1 56-60]

4-
The Emblematic

(i)
Stone is solid, extensive and compact, yet reflects light pre­
eminently. The process of living is an externalization, a turning
outward into definite form of inner ferment. Hence the mirror
living which art is, hence the significance of art, and especially
as the crown to other and preliminary arts, of the truly visual
arts in which time is transposed into the forms of space as some­
thing instant and revealed. Hence a positive significance to man
(as opposed to use) of stone, and of stone-building.
Succeeding to the centuries of spiritual torture and enhance­
ment, Renaissance men discovered the concrete world to be
satisfying. It is no longer a desire but a compulsion for them to
throw life outwards, to make expression definite on the stone. I
call Quattro Cento the art of the fifteenth century which ex­
presses this compulsion without restraint. The highest achieve­
ment in architecture was a mass-effect in which every temporal
or flux element was transformed into a spatial steadiness. Mean­
while in sculpture, all the fantasies of dynamic emergence, of
birth and growth and physical grace had been projected within
the stone. The stone is carved to flower, to bear infants, to give
the fruit of land and sea. These emerge as a revelation or are
encrusted there.
At no other time have the materials that artists use been so
significant in themselves. The materials were the actual objects
of inspiration, the stocks for the deeper fantasies. Quattro Cento
art is the one which displays this special attitude to n1aterial, but
particularly and primarily to stone. Owing to the love of objects
in that time, art could express life and individual aim without
difficulty. In the following notes I argue that so direct an em­
blematic art could develop only in a southern climate, in that
part of the South where light induces even a Northerner to con­
template things in their positional or spatial aspect, as objects
revealed, as symbols of objective realization. The aim of this
 The Emblematic 43
volume is to isolate that emblematic art both from the art of
other periods and also from the contemporary and more famous
Renaissance art, generally F1orentine, in which ambitions
foreign to my subject appear uppermost.
Quattro Cento art is the nucleus of the Renaissance. One can
well imagine that at some time or another Italy was bound to
achieve a period of art which expresses fully the most positive
fantasies connected with stone. That the Renaissance occurred
when it did is due to many causes, on the aesthetic side chiefly, I
think, to a unique concurrence of developed art-forms amassed
through centuries from almost world-wide sources, giving the
technique and the wealth of themes that could stimulate for
their treatment a general humanistic infusion, and for their
finality, a concretion into mass-effect. I shall indicate some of
these art-forms gathered from the past. The Renaissance was an
intensification of all forms.

Art is the symbol of all expression, of the turning of subject into

object. The powers of artistic creation gained the deepest rever..
ence of Quattro Cento heroes, not as a symbol of culture so
much as a symbol of life. This is true of no other period. At that
time the aims of life (not cultured life only) and of art were
almost identified. All art has close relation to the life it mirrors,
but at no other time could the emblematic significance of art be
so personal, so individual, so particular. For the act of artistic
creation was itself the specific symbol of release that men were
feeling or desiring. Quattro Cento art, so to speak, is art twice
over.
By 1500 art was no longer so emblematic, emblem of indi­
vidual vitality. Architecture was aesthetically more corn..
prehensive, better defined, but articulate of less emotion. In this
power of emblem, implicit in all art, the Quattro Cento exceeded
other styles : or, to put it another way, the Quattro Cento
themes and technique were perfectly adj usted for express..
iveness.
Now if one needed to find another word for 'art' it would be
'emblem'. Preoccupation with aesthetic values * tends to blind
• By 'aesthetic' values I mean those values in relation to a work of
44 The Nature of A rt, I: 'The Quattro Cento'

one to this fact. Perhaps it is as well, since our own art lacks
emblematic tension . This is no fault of a rtists . They are bound
to reflect our l ack of corporate emotion by lifting the structure
of their art to a feasible distance. On the other hand I do not
claim for the maj ority of Qu attro Cento works the highest
aesthetic value, nor even always the highest aesthetic value
among works of their own age . I have dragged from obscurity
several works confined there by critics. A Quattro Cento m aster­
piece, h owever, eludes the traps of aesthetic appraisal. These
traps cannot govern e mblematic momentum. Today we cry out
for emblem. The aesthetic sense cries out for emblem, an aspect
of art that is a proper subject for literature .

[from The Q uattro Cento, 1932, pp. 1 5-1 7]

(ii)
In the case of Semitic and, indeed, of most art, creation and re­
creation of conventionalized but living symbol, is the creation
of a rt. This is s afegu arded art, a s afe and confined projection of
symbol. Whereas for Quattro Cento art the process is reversed.
The creative a ct itself, the turning of the subject into concrete
and particular and individual form, is the symbol, one that is
universal and that c annot confine and direct artists except those
inspired to the pitch of so universal a range, except those for
whose period art itself is the living emblem.

[from The Q ua ttro Ce.n to, 1 93 2, p . 4 5]

art which can be discussed at any rate for a time - without refer­
-

ring to the connections of art and its period .

The Nature ef Art
II: Carving and Painting
5
Carving and Moqelling

An augmentation upon the surf ace. A rose facing outward from

the stem. A face, the outward part, the augmentation of all that
is within the head. A true painting is of such kind : an aug­
mentation upon the surf ace of wall or canvas.
Then comes the day of early spring. The air of that day is
liberal, a liberality that has been veiled, obscured, overpressed
and finally forgotten in the winter. We had forgotten that the
skies may open : the tent of winter is asunder; the clouds sail.
On this day as you approach Hyde Park the great elm trees
stand up black. It is as if the sooty tunnel of winter has passed
them through : they stand in the stronger light a vibrant mem­
orial of the dim months.
Thus is time recorded by space : an augmentation upon the
surface. The visual world is an accumulation of time appre­
hended instantaneously.
In visual art we are aware of forms as charged with a tension
to be thus manifest. They are the simple showing products of
complication; they are faces : they disclose, they spread: they
are unfolded like the open face of the rose: a folded cycle is
unfurled as a shape. Nothing else in life, it seems to me, is as
final, as concrete-seeming, as this kind of manifestation con­
veyed by certain farms, the one miraculous sensation of full­
ness: and it is a source of surprise that such mode in form
perception has not been isolated and enlarged upon. Its real­
ization, however, must to some extent exist in every work of
visual art.
Carving creates a face for the stone, as agricultu_re for the
earth, as man for woman. Modelling is more purely plastic cre­
ation : it makes things, it does not disclose, as a face, the
significance of what already exists. The painter of a modelling
proclivity manifestly recharges a landscape with shape, with
patent flourish. The painter of a carving proclivity is manifestly
48 The Nature of Art, II: Carving and Painting

at pains to show that the forms there have each a face which he
discloses . The first painter may very well seize upon light effects
and other transitory phenomena to make a forcible pattern. He
rejoices in the image of his immediate mood. There is, therefore,
a greater temporal suggestion in his work, that will be absent
from the work of one who rejoices in the conception of dis­
closure.
Where lies the perennial strength of this fantasy? It is, of
course, all the figures of the inner life, of the unconscious, that
are shown as a fixture, as one harmonious family, steadfast,
completed as an open rose, open, revealed. The modeller, on the
other hand, imbues spatial objects with the animus and cal­
culation of inner life. He projects the lively feeling, though not
as a disclosed state. He accumulates force and directions : he
does not reveal an accumulation, an augmentation upon the
surface, a mere outwardness. Stone is the symbol of the out­
wardness, of the hoarded store of meaning that comes to the
surface. Much fierceness stands collected, just as the storm­
drops are calm together but undiminished in the pool. The deep
life does not course in the men and women of Piero's frescoes.
Their deep life stands revealed as if they were pools, millions of
drops run together in a still shape.
[from Colour and Form, 1950 edition, pp. 30-3 1]

Stone-and-Water
Refracted light through clear water throws marble into 'vaves,
tempers it with many dimensional depths. Hence the poignancy
of submerged temples, or of an Aphrodite's marble arm dragged
over the clear and elongating pebbles by the nets of Cnidian
fishermen.
We approach one aspect of Quattro Cento sculpture . For the
Agostino reliefs in the Tempio [Plate 9] have the appearance of
marble limbs seen in water. From the jointure of so many sur-
 Stone-and-Wa ter 49

faces as are carved in these reliefs, from the exaggerated per­

spective by which they are contrived, from the fact that though
bas reliefs they suggest forms in the round, we are reminded of
those strange elongations of roundness, those pregnant mount­
ings up and fallings away of flatness, those transient fore­
shortenings that we may see in stones sunk in clear waters, in
the marble floors themselves of baths; we experience again the
potential and actual shapes of the stone in water, changing its
form, glimmering like an apparition with each ripple or vari­
ation of light. But whereas we pick the stone out of the tide or
tread the bath floor to discover its real shape, Agostino's forms
never cease to be potential as well as actual. Yet this suggested
potentiality causes no hiatus in the impression they afford.
These shapes are definite enough, unequivocal : only they have
as well the quality of apparition which, so far from mitigating
the singleness of their impact on the eye, makes them the more
insistent and even unforgettable. They glow, luminous in the
rather dim light of the Tempio. Their vitality abounds. The life,
the glow of marble has not elsewhere been dramatized thus.
For, by this peculiar mode of bas relief in which forms in the
round are boldly flattened out, the pregnant functions imputed
to stone in its relation with water are celebrated with all the
accumulated force of Mediterranean art. These reliefs are the
apotheosis, not only of Sigismondo who built the Tempio, a nd
of Isotta his mistress, but of marble and limestone and all the
civilizations dependent upon their cult.
Pregnant shapes of such a kind are possible only in relief carv­
ing. We begin to understand how, at its first elaboration, per­
spective science was the inspiration, the true and deep
inspiration, and not merely the means, of Renaissance art; why
it was the early Renaissance carvers, rather than the painters,
who discovered and elaborated this science. We begin to under­
stand how it is that what I have called Quattro Cento sculpture,
with its stone-blossom and incrustation, with its love of stone,
of movement, liquid and torrential movement within the stone
(needing perspective to measure distance), with its equal love to
carve shells and growth and steady flower, should be considere d
the core and centre of the Renaissance. The Renaissance is a
50 The Nature of Art, II: Carving and Pain ting

gigantic yet concentrated reassertion of Mediterranean values.

The diverse cultures of all the centuries since classical times
were commandeered for this expression, and thus reinforced
the imitation of classical modes, themselves of several periods.
Thousands of years of art were employed in this furore. But
again, the core, the central fury, was the love of concrete
objects. Each diverse Mediterranean feeling for stone found a
new vehemence. And of those feelings of which I write
throughout these volumes, I consider the most fundamental one
to be connected with the interaction of stone and water. In a
sense, the fecund stone-blossom is already connected with
some association of moisture in the stone .
. [from Stones of Rimini, 1 934, pp . 97-9]

Colour and ' Otherness '

Let us examine conditions of colour in which 'otherness'- and

spatiality are stressed, and conditions too by which it is less·
ened; for it is obvious that inasmuch as colour suggests the qual·
ity of what is other or purely spatial, artists whose principal
aim is plasticity, involving an emphatic movement or rhythm
or stress or mass with its counterbalance, will make their point
partly by forcing their colour to surrender its dominant quality
of resistant otherness and in some cases to approximate slightly
to film colour. 'The intensity of illumination within a given
space can be so reduced that it becomes impossible, even with a
completely adapted eye, to recognize either the structure or the
orientation of the surfaces of objects. What can still be dis·
tinguished are merely the outlines of objects and those of their
surfaces which stand out as distinct from each other on the
basis of brightness differences. The grey colours perceived under
these conditions resemble film colours.' How well we know in
painting this use of colour as pre-eminently a brightness
difference : nor is it confined by any means to dark pictures . On
 Colour and ·'O therness' 51

the contrary, some of the brightest modem pictures as well as

the nudes and M adonnas of the fifteenth-century Florentine
s chool are characterized by this plastic or tactile use of
colour. * In spite of their great superficial difference, in com­
parison 'vith a Piero della Francesca or a Bruegel, these Flor­
entine pictures are to be classed with the murky canvases of the
Baroque style.
This leads us to consider the relationship between colour and
illumination : for we shall find that the major stressing in a pic­
ture of complicated or of fleeting illuminations is often realized
in the interest of plastic delights and at the cost of the resistant
otherness of colour, of objects. When distinctness of an object's
normal texture and gradation is reduced by the peculiarity of its
illuminant, the impression comes to resemble that of a filmy
colour. P aradoxically enough, when the approach is not carried
too far, it also stimulates the tactile sense, since we are led to
grope for the object that is exaggerated at one point, fading at
another. This aspect of form and its aesthetic value is well
understood. Pigment is more often put to such use in our art
than to any other. But colour, gradation, texture are best seen in
what is called normal illumination, that of a grey sky, a nor­
_m ality itself softened and dramatized, as we shall later observe,
by the quiet evening light.
The tendency of true colourists is to discount the sep­
arateness of illumination, to identify it with the colour of
objects so that these objects appear to be self-lit in virtue of
their colour, as if breathing. Whatever be the specific illumi­
nation represented, light in the form of living colour also seems
pre-eminently to come from behind, from the back, from the
c anvas. I do not, of course, infer a forthright luminous ap­
pearance - that would be to return to a suggestion of specific
i llumination - but objects which in virtue of their surface sen­
sitiveness, show a face. In Titians and other pictures of the Ven­
etian school it is as if the range of illumination were borrowed
for the independent otherness of colour, even though it be
* cf., for instance, those blue-robed Madonnas in w hich the
strength or saturation of this blue is altogether out of scale with the
other colours in the pictures.
52 The Nature of Art, II: Carviny and Pain tiny

colour reflected from one object on to another, characteristic of

a rich Mediterranean light·, , that is largely exploited for this

end.
[from Colour and Form , 1 9 50 edition, pp. 22-4 ]

Colour as Medium

(i)
Now, in the colour-form painting I have in mind, even primary
hues, used pure, are compelled to reveal something of their con­
stituent colours at the evocative call of other colours in a pic­
ture. It is possible, so to say, to force pure orange to reveal that
it contains an element of leaf-green. Like calls to most unex­
pected like, finds blood relationship implicit in difference. Cer­
tainly, in no sense would one see the leaf-green in the orange:
nothing so direct; yet the collateral relationship can be ex­
ploited by the eye as I suggested in the case of oranges upon
their trees in a southern landscape. Nor does this mean that the
orange appears any the less orange. As usual, a source of affinity
at one and the same time stresses the brilliance of difference. It
is, in fact, merely an extension of the brilliance obtained by the
use of adjacent hues . Everyone perceives the closeness of orange
to red, but used together these colours stress as well each other's
difference .
In all painting we may find a certain exercise for the eye in
analysis and synthesis. Noting the two or three dominant
colours in a picture we feel, as is generally the case, that they
have been 'shut-down' by admixture and thereby constitute the
grey or neutralized zones. Reviewed from the opposite angle
these neutral areas are like chrysalises from which colours
emerge. They gleam together as grey in perfect identity. Broken
colour, brush strokes of purple and yellow, elsewhere in a pic­
ture fused as a brown, promote the same image of perfect
identity and of factors that make it, of a result that is no less
 Colour as Medium 53

individual than each of them separately. The brown is then

either the parent of the purple and the yellow, or it is their
child, the third individual that contains them both.
But if these elements already exist, Why do I complain? Be­
c ause they are rarely used imaginatively. Their use has not
given rise to a mythology of form. The matter is seen as one of
h armony, of taste : and colour harmony is regarded as a mode of
m aking plastic invention pleasant, harmonious, in tune. While
other painters provide a little tune (probably in watercolour)
and leave it at that. Any book devoted to colour harmony in art
will offer elaborate instructions how to attain this harmony.
Practise with one hue, with white, black and the hue's neutrals :
practise with the hue and its two near complementaries or with
triads. There must be a key to the picture, a chromatic key, and
the thorough student will arrange his p alette in accordance
with this key. Weakest of all is the advice to pass a common
tone over the whole of your completed picture, thus bringing it
together. Or merely to varnish it. Such painstaking methods
were far more sedulously practised in the days of the old
masters, and with far greater efficiency, than they are now. All
such practices are symptoms of attenuated carving feeling : they
are, so to say, the backwash of Venetian p ainting especially, of a
painting which, whatever its faults, did attach a real im ­
aginative value to jewel-like colour and inner warmth. But i n
view o f what they are taught about colour in such a tasteful
way, tasteful colour whi ch is at the same time put to the ped­
estrian use of facilitating representation, it is no wonder that
students break off to experiment with some purely plastic ap­
proach, with harsh and opaque colour.
[from Colour and Form, 1950 edition, pp. 96-8]

(ii)
Let us now look at the matter the other way round : mutual
enhancement must always be viewed from both sides. As well
as a material that is worked or carved, I see in some pictures
working and developments that in their sum give back to their
material its pristine unsullied state. A picture should be like an
54 The Nature of Art, IJ.: Carving and Painting
open concertina capable of being packed in harmoniously. Far
the most striking colour · in the Concert Champetre of the
Louvre is a segment of crimson hat belonging to the central
seated musician. I have always felt that the colour and form of
the rest of the picture could be folded up in that hat.
A well-coloured picture is like a spread fan, a spread pea­
cock's tail. To what is it that colours return, how do they lend
themselves to being packed? Lights of all hue in equal pro­
portions make white light. Colour is the division of white. I
would define the European painter as an artist who, as it were,
carves the white canvas, divides that white (Chinese painters
have never had the heart, it seems, truly to divide their white),
opens it to show the strength of colour that may evolve from it.
The painter, on the analogy of the earth and its vegetation, by
ploughing, as it were, a white surface, creates his own organic
world, his own evening panorama. (Specularly reflected white
light is at its minimum in the evening, the time at which colour
is best seen.) A division of the white flame of life in terms of
graduated colour, a division so complete as to rival in com­
pleteness white, the very absence of colour : under this image I
conceive the painting of Cezanne.
And I think that apart from s cientific assurance on the point,
we sometimes have the perception that, ideally speaking, all
colours together make white . It is not, to be sure, our usual way
of looking at white, even in art. But occasionally white assumes
this character. I have in mind the lighthouse at Godrevy point
on the north coast of Cornwall. The lighthouse cylinder stands
among a group of white-washed buildings with black barrel
roofs seemingly all of one piece. These white buildings are
founded in grey rock. On some days the circumventing sea has
blue, yellow, green, maroon and even orange colours crested
with evanescent foam as epitome. From the point in a tearing
wind we look down at the island growing into firm white
buildings with black roofs : the central cylinder of white out­
lined against the grey sky is a monument to every form and
colour in sea, sky and rock.
There is a remark attributed to Titian, to the effect that the
true colourist will feel the preciousness . of unmixed white . Cer-
 ldentity-in-Difference 55

tainly few modern paintings allow one to feel it. But there are
other aspects of white, as I have said. Nevertheless, the domi­
nation of white as we sometimes see it in contemporary paint­
ings very often means little more than a refusal to give battle in
the pictorial lists. The unsullied canvas is beautiful, it is vulgar
to attempt to rival it except in terms of a major transformation.
From the carving point of view, paint as a substance is a
meaningless plastic mud. It must therefore be divided in terms
of colour, identified with the white unsullied canvas in virtue of
drastic chromatic division. The use of this plastic mud as pro­
viding in itself sensations of plasticity, a role to which oil paint
easily lends itself, also has its place. Everyone learns to appreci­
ate that : connoisseurship today in pictures is largely confined to
admiring this cookery in paint, to the conning of delightful bits.
The more important carving values are less widely appreciated,
those matters which are more purely the concern of the eye. In
my view no serious painter will ever give a thought to the
lusciousness or otherwise of any particular 'passage' of a paint­
ing, in and for itself.

[from Colour and Form, 1 950 edition, pp. 62-3]

9
Identity-in-Difference

(i)
Identity-in-difference is often realized by the few masters of
today through a kind of addition and subtraction that the eye
performs upon the colours used in the picture. I shall return
again to this propensity of the eye, for it is most important to
my argument. The invitation to addition and subtraction of
colour - I have remarked it already in Wallis's picture and
before that - is a very ancient practice in painting, but it is
sometimes employed today in a manner unembarrassed by the
demands of exact or even partial representation. I shall refer
cursorily to a semi-representational Picasso recently exhibited at
56 The Nature of Art, II: Carving and Painting

the Rosenberg galleries. The picture is called Woman with a

Mandoline. On looking at this picture one will perceive immedi­
ately that there exists some integrating relation, more intense
than the one usually described under the words 'design' or 'com­
position', between the figure and the chair on which she sits .
This relationship depends upon a little addition sum that the eye
unconsciously performs (and the eye delights in this exercise). If
the area of colour of the figure's deep red dress is added to the
area of pinkish colour of her flesh, the resultant colour would
equal in tone the light-blue armchair on which she sits. Further,
take this red and blue, their respective areas and shapes, and we
shall find that the purple-brown part of her head-dress gives
some sort of equivalent, both in form and in colour. Or again
the black and purple-brown head-dress is a concentration or
addition of the background colours that are divided into three
zones. The point is not that an analysis on these lines should be
literally true of the painting, but that this mode of interchange,
fructification, metamorphosis, in terms of hue or tone or inten­
sity, or by two of them, or by all three, should be suggested; not
that a colour scheme should be thought out by the artist on
these lines but that a conception of form, in turn based upon
the family character of colour, should lead him instinctively to
create a design thus integrated. In terms of two forms 'going
into' a third, of one texture as the sum of another of larger area
and so on, there is perhaps expressed the wished-for stabilizing,
not so much of our personalities as of its qualification by those
miscellaneous mixed-up archetypal figures within us, absorbed
in childhood, that are by no means at peace among them­
selves.
The colour-vision cause of this predilection for discovering
two or more forms to 'go into' another is obvious if we consider
after-images. 'Wherever areas of neutrals occur near areas of
colour, the hue of the after-image of the colour overlays and
tinges the neutral. In combinations of complementary colours
the after-images are themselves complementary. Consequently,
they intensify some areas and soften others.' * Thus a neutral
* Walter Sargent, The Enjoyment and Use of Colour (Scribner,
1923).
 ldentity-in-Difference 57

area tends to be seen as a sum of chromatic areas which, in fact,

it is. That perception is also applied to the neutralized and near­
complementary hues by which opposition is reduced: these
colours are more likely to figure in a carving work of art.
Let me dogmatically state that if when looking at a picture
the eye is directed by the 'strong' use of tone and colour oppo­
sition to move continually from shape to shape, any one of
these shapes, however bound together with the rest from the
point of view of line and balance and mass, does not possess
such spati al poignancy as when the eye rests on any shape in a
picture and sees it as a self-sufficient shape in uncompeting re­
lation to shapes throughout that picture. The eye construes this
last apprehension in the proverbial flash of the eye and at a
remarkable distance, even when the light is poor. Except in the
case of huge pictures seen at near range the eye can embrace
the whole, even when it is focused on one form in that picture.
Closeness of organization, therefore, by means of colour need
not progress from one form to its adjacent forms but may be
effected by forms that are scattered.
Some pictures - most pictures - partly rebut this natural
synthesis in the eye : one part of the picture is subsidiary to
another, shows off another, by unmixed contrast rather than by
a no less great difference in identity. Such forms do not grow
but stand off in strong relief.
An uncompeting relationship between two shapes is one in
which neither shape is subservient, in which each enhances the
other to a more or less equal extent. Thus, from the angle of
colour whence this conception of form is derived, although one
colour 'shows off' the rest, it should be itself thereby 'shown
off' : between colours, activity and passivity should be equally
divided; and similarly between forms . It follows that in such
presentation we feel that even the mass or the form of a picture
as a whole is not so much a unit standing over against us, in­
ducing the bipolarity of tactile sensation, as a more independent
self-orientated and productive mechanism equally active in all
its parts, with a small wheel (one part), as it were, com­
municating power to a conglomeration of much larger ma­
chinery and thereby contriving for itself a place in the unity of
58 The Nature of Art, II: Carving and Painting

insistence by which colour is best seen; but only because also,

unlike the part of a machine, it receives power from those very
brother parts to which it communicates power. A better
analogy, therefore, is the one of the human body. Thus, there is
a movement between colours, a simple progression in the case
of adjacent hues, one more complicated in the case of an area,
for instance, into which other areas 'add up' or from which
they emerge possessing further relationships between them­
selves . But the movement has nothing except its own organic
momentum, and, unlike plastic rhythm, it is not, at each change
of tempo or direction, dependent as well upon a new polar re­
lation to our own bodies.
As a rule, of course, a compromise exists between the carv­
ing and modelling mode, even in bad pictures . But often it is
evident that a painter has done all he can with dazzling changes
of tone to prevent us grasping all the forms at once. This he does
in the interests of stress and strain and harsh rhythms (or even
of mass) that show their strength by mounting and passing the
peaks of opposition on which the eye bumps . He thinks he is
interested in the purest spatial form. To my mind he is interested
in form and ;movement that is temporal and incompletely trans­
muted to visual terms . But I have already admitted the value of
plastic approach in the material it brings to carving approach.
My bias is certainly in favour of the latter, whose products seem
to me the crown of visual art. I would not deprecate the plastic
approach, were the other a quarter as well understood.
I must insist, therefore, that well-related shape, as defined
above, is a more definite shape . The better a picture is sustained
equally throughout, the more significant the shape of each part
of it. This is not quite the same as to assert that a picture should
look the same all over, a dictum commonly accepted today.
Every good modern picture has an 'all-ovemess'; that is to say,
the rhythm as above is carried consistently through every
part : the brio of brush-work, for instance, will be transparently
consistent, a sop thrown to carving values which reflects the
influence of Cezanne no more than of the Impressionists .
Cezanne himself admired the 'all-overness' of Impressionist pic­
tures, but it could not content him. He started life with an
 Identity-in-Difference 59

almost Baroque love of a continuous, dramatic, calligraphic

modelling. This remains the position of most young artists
today and there th€y persist. Cezanne, however, harnessed this
flourish at the behests of the equal organic radiance of the Pro­
ven�al landscape . That performance was his agony. He pushed,
as D . H. Lawrence has said, the apple away from him into a
world more objective. His chromatic sense triumphed over his
love of tonal or calligraphic exuberance. But their strength, of
course, he did not forgo : it was harnessed, became sometimes
the slave of gradual forms. His masterpieces possess a vociferous
even tenor. By hook or by crook he got his innate, almost Greco­
like, flourish into the four-squareness of space. In conjunction
with extreme rotundity he insisted upon a certain flatness as of
a wall carved by the air, sensitive always to the growth of the
perpendicular from the horizontal .
According t o Gasquet h e once said: 'The whole of painting i s
there - to yield to the atmosphere o r to resist it? To yield is to
deny local colour, to resist is to give them their force and var­
iety' as seen in an evening light. 'Titian and the Venetians
worked by "localities" and that is what true colourists do.' In
other words, is one to model with temporary light-effects or is
one to see in local colour the breathing, living life of a form, the
light as if from inside it?
We all arrive at this discovery towards the end of the day
when in the evening the things around, at which we have
glanced, finally arrest us by standing minutely described. Things
now have their own light : they seem less lit from the sky. They
do not stand out in a sea of shapes : all shapes stand together,
separate and in communion. The character of each texture
appears encouraged by the equality of revelation that an even­
ing sky allows. The eye comprehends, does not follow. Each
thing is rooted : gradation is infinite.

[from Colour and Form, 1950 edition, pp. 49-54]

(ii)
And so I Juve reserved for this place, the high point from which
we make descent, an image that seems to me more nearly all­
embracing of chromatic identity-in-difference.
6o The Nature of Art, II: Carving and Painting

It reduces itself to this, the positive or aesthetic, rather than

the negative, relationship · of contrasting colours : when both
colours are present, different green areas can be tantamount to
one red area or vice versa; so much of graduated yellows can be
tan tamount to a blue shape or vice versa.
Along a leafy road during a dull hour of May I once saw a
small red letter-box fixed to a telegraph pole. I felt that this
strong box rounded at the top was the focus for the tall and
swaying circumambient green of varying tone, intensity and
hue. I felt that the plain red letter-box and manifold foliage
belonged to an identical process displayed as a tense simul­
taneity in space; that they were identical, though of differing
substance, shape and area; that the extended young green en­
joyed a constant reciprocity with this squared patch of satu­
rated red as being both the earth which fed the green thus
spread, and as being the birthplace to which it might return. Of
course, this green and red were by no means complementary
colours . Such affirmative relationship could not be envisaged i n
the case of a green and red that were hue complements, o r in
which the average green tones and their saturation were far
different from that of the red. A greater contrast existed be­
tween texture and substance . Compared with rapturous foliage
the recipient face of the letter-box was plain and strong. Never­
theless, it was the sedulous relationship of near-complemen­
taries that induced my perception of the letter-box in
reciprocity with foliage; and it was in virtue of this perception
that the green forms appeared continuous. At the same time the
red held no predominance, no emphasis, though it were trustee
for every inch of the green. The proof is that we can reverse the
matter, visualize it the other way round. My experience was
unique at that time . How long had I waited to see our glaring
pillar-boxes given by the light and season a structural relation­
ship in the English countryside! For years they had stood out in
my eyes, glaring irrelevantly. On this overcast May day, how­
ever, the young leaf-greens of intense luminosity and of the
right area and disposition had entered into companionship with
the red; and with each other, like soldiers who make a solid pile
of their (red) hats to prove their amity, the distinctiveness of
 Identity-in-Difference 61

each a s brother. And in my opinion every picture that really

'works' possesses in infinite reduplication this kind of relation­
ship.. this kind of m o vem ent.
No doubt the above experience will be considered by many as
the most subjective of my fantasies and, indeed, as the final
'give away' . For answer I refer the reader to Bruegel's To wer of
Babel at Vienna . In the lower middle foreground of this picture,
Bruegel has depicted an uphill road on which a line of carts are
transporting bricks. There is a green bank in the foreground of
this section, and the whitish road is bounded by whitish rocks
from which trees and bushes grow, and by huts roofed with
greenish beams. As well as the roof, the perpendicular planes of
the nearest hut are also greenish. In short, green appears at
every angle in the landscape, upright, slanting, climbing and
falling. At the top of the hill there is a high pink wall that
arches over the road. I think every spectator will agree, once it
is pointed out to him, that the up-standing, 'face-on' pink wall
sta blilizes all the shapes and shades of lifting green (for green
upon the ground especially, always seems to shift and move),
and their verging in manifold details, from whiteness through
orange and brown to red, throughout this landscape. Such a
perception is intensified and, indeed, insisted upon, by the pink­
ish loads in the carts that toil up to the arch over the road. The
pink arch is the goa l ; to the eyes of the waggoners it represents
the sum and total of this yellow-green, blue-green hill. For our
eyes the very shape of the wall, as well as its hue, grows from
the green. Or conversely, this arching wall distinguishes for us
each cognate green substance and form. And again, the pink is
not sudden or isolated. The horses and the carters' clothes, the
colours of them who make this j ourney, seem to reproduce a
mixture of the green with the pink. The rest of the section
prepares us for the wall, for this pink form of green, yes, pink
form of green. A pink-brown lunch basket lies upon the fore­
ground green bank, near to a yellow cleft : there is some neutral­
izing warmth in all the bluish greens.
Bruegel's preoccupation with such relationships and of those
fantasies of which it is the vehicle appears proved by the fact
that in some of his pictures one may detect a small and isolated
62 The Nature of Art, II: Carving and Painting

area of colour, crimson, for instance, amid tree roots, that

serves no representational purpose whatsoever, but which is es­
sential to the mosaic of the· whole. This is indeed remarkable in
a painter whose technique is by no means impressionist, whose
strict mosaic organization is to be contrasted with the charac­
teristic impressionist organization by which a picture, while
based throughout upon a chromatic balance, sometimes ignores
the attainment of the above equivalence and reciprocity be·
tween contrasting or balancing colours .
In continuing the analysis we might dispense with the greens
for a time and consider how the disposition of the yellowish­
White planes of the road and the rocks at the feet of which the
trees grow so aptly, are also summed and augmented by the
pink wall. In fact the analysis might be continued indefinitely.
B ut I have said enough to indicate that Bruegel constructed his
landscapes, at any rate, in accordance with a sensibility that
perhaps causes the letter-box incident to appear less peculiar.
And should this be accepted, it is not very difficult to observe
thereafter that Bruegel's form and composition, as well as his
characteristic subject-matter, and his impersonal mode of pre­
senting it, are intimately associated with this way, tantamount
in his case, as in the case of Piero della Francesca, to a phil­
osophy of viewing surf aces in the external world.
Of which more anon. I want now to contrast such com­
plicated interaction between green and red which has been little
described in terms of balance, with its corresponding superficial
plastic use wherein this power is solely one of balance . We all
know the brown-green landscapes of the late eighteenth and
nineteenth century English school with a spot of red, possibly
an irrelevant figure in a red coat, which balances the green,
saves it, as it were, at the last moment from slipping into an
irrevocable monotony. This use of red appears also in pictures
which are not predominantly green, whose composition would
otherwise be dull or out of hand. The former use of red may
seem closer to the situation of the letter-box and the foliage
than does Bruegel's pink wall. The resemblance, however, is
purely superficial. The gist of the letter-box experience cannot
be carried over into painting, except by the many-sided rela-
 Identity-in-Difference 63

tionships of composition in communion with its subject-matter;

except by art, as with all other experience. The man in a red
coat never saved any picture from inanity. He appears also in
better pictures, in Bonington's, for instance, but while his role
is a good deal less inane, it is still a role, rather than the very
stuff and substance of the picture's thought. Such colour
infusions must be analysed diversely, and even at their worst
they may be the outcome either of the most superficial plastic
conception, or of a worn-out carving tradition that the painter
has attempted to vivify with a sudden plastic inconsequence; or
of any degree or mixture between these two extremes.

[from Colour and Form, 1 950 edition, pp. 1 08-1 2]

The Nature ef Art
Ill: Art and Psychoanalysis
10

Art and the Sense of Rebirth

A loggia of fine proportion may enchant us, particularly when

built aloft, when light strikes up from the floor to reveal over
every inch the recesses of coffered ceiling or of vault. The qual­
ity of s anctum, of privacy, joins the thunderous day. A loggia
eases the bitterness of birth : it secures the interior to the exter­
ior: affirms that in adopting a wider existence, we activate the
pristine peace . . .
Architecture, it has often been s aid, is the Mother of the
Arts.

In front of a fine building it would no doubt seem irrelevant to

think as follows : we were first one with our mothers; then,
during early infancy we found repeatedly (and feared the loss of,
mourned) our guardians as whole people whose composite sep­
arateness in large measure defined the unity of our own . . . . But
classical architecture, we shall see, essays the reconstruction of
this ou tside character, this ego-defining obj ect : thus there has
often existed a rather self-conscious convention of providing
inside doors with pediments, of decorating interiors with all the
forms originating from protection against the weather.

In Italy I have been much alive to what I eat. I cannot judge

how the enjoyment of food has stimulated architectural interest
but I feel certain that pleasure in building broadens appetite,
whether it be for the cylinders of m accheroni and spaghetti, the
pilasters of ta91iatelli, the lucent golden drums of 9nocchi alla
rom ana or for fruit and cheese like strong-lipped apertures upon
the smooth wall of wine. We partake of an inexhaustible feed­
ing mother (a fine building announces), though we have bitten,
torn, dirtied and pinched her, though we thought to have lost
her utterly, to h ave destroyed her utterly in fantasy and act. We
are grateful to stone buildings for their stubborn material,
68 The Nature of Art, III: A. rt and Psychoanalysis

hacked and hewed but put together carefully, restored in better

shape than those pieces 'that the infant imagined he had
chewed or scattered, for which he searched. Much crude rock
stands rearranged; now in the form of apertures, of suffusion at
the sides of apertures, the bites, the tears, the pinches are mir­
aculously identified with the recipient passages of the body,
with sense organs, with features; as well as with the good
mother which we would eat more mercifully for preservation
and safety within, and for our own.
A roof overhead is almost as necessary as was the mother
herself. Ubiquitous for town and village, buildings seem vast in
relation to ourselves : their lower forms are actual to the touch
as well as to the eye. A house is a womb substitute in whose
passages we move with freedom . Hardly less obviously the ex­
terior comes to symbolize the post-natal world, the mother's
divorced original aspects or parts smoothed into the momentous
whole. We shall see that in line with the stress of classical build­
ers upon exterior architecture, by their exalting with such ab­
andon the strong ego-standpoint that may devolve from a
constant admission of this whole other person wherein con­
trasting aspects are brought under one head, the ancients for­
went the power to develop machines.
Art wins for connective activity a grain of the finality of
death . The urgent outwardness, straining to substantiate an
image of an independent whole, bears witness to the infantile,
newly-won, single object whose loss w as so feared, whose being,
however, imbues the forms of classical architecture. But this
does not suggest that an identical basis should be attributed to
the graphic arts, even in Europe where they have often evolved
under evident architectural inspiration. Besides a repaired
mother without, graphic art as a rule insists upon the spell of
inner (often persecutory) figures that stalk the mind.
Fine building exemplifies the reparative function of art : wide
feelings, we have noted earlier, that centre on landscape, on
mother earth, are particularized in houses. Primitive dwellings
are caves carved by the elements. Whereas ploughing roughens
and freshens the progenitor earth, raking smooths it for the seed
that will produce our food. Also in architecture there are indis-
 Art and the Sense of Rebirth 69

pensable themes of smooth and rough. Both by agriculture and

architecture, and very often in the graphic arts through the
example of building, a sensitiveness to surface has been em·
played, the lover's or the infant's precognition, evoking from
stone or from canvas a unity of forms which are felt to be pre­
existent; giving rise to a carving attitude that contrasts with the
proj ection of forms by means of the mere clay, itself of little
moment, or if it is equated with the products of the body, non­
pre-existent independently. I have written at length elsewhere
of these contrasted yet always interwoven trends of the graphic
arts. My greater interest has been for works conceived primarily
from the carving side, since I value the meaning conveyed by
the accentuated otherness, by the self-subsistence, as it were, of
forms, rather than by those juxtapositions through which we
are made vividly conscious of tensions of the mind. I have more
concern with restoration, reparation, than with the versatile
interior giants that seem to infect the artist's material with
shadowy or stark power. * If every work of visual art com­
pounds the two trends, until our own day at any rate, there
could be no doubt as to which of the two was the more evident,
and the more at home, in architecture.
It is a common experience to observe through the expressive
features of foliage a house as the structure of their person.
Round tower, high roof and dome, the Hindu temple and the
similar roofs of Chambord, the acrid, bellying chateaux of
France where so often a maze of shapes, or else giant forms, a
vaunted mass, are emphasized - such typical architectural sallies
have their context, no less than the classical building, from con­
tour and from climate. But in section, in detail, however for­
cible the effect of mass, whatever the stimulus of the plastic

* In the depressive position, 'As an alternative method (to re­

paration), very likely a simultaneo us one, of dealing with these anx­
ieties, the ego resorts strongly to the manic defence . . . . I t seems
probable that depressive (as opposed to persecutory) anxiety, guilt
and the reparative tendency are only experienced when feelings of
love for the obj ect predominate over destructive impulses.' (Melanie
Klein, 'A Contribution to the Theory of Anxiet y and Guilt', Inter­
national journal of Psycho-Analysis, Vol. XXIX, 1948 . )
70 The Nature of Art, III: Art and Psychoanalysis
nerve, they resolve themselves, more especially for their inhabi­
tants, into surf aces that are pierced by apertures with entry to a
womblike cave. The finer the architecture, the better this figure
is re-erected, re-enacted, complaisant in climate and landscape.
Soaring Gothic cathedrals may grossly spiritualize an image of
the body : yet exuberance from stone in organic patterns pro­
jects these fantasies anew, fantasies of a kind that are in­
separable, to some s mall degree, from any building with
apertures or a change of surface. Pinnacles, shafts and phallic
towers do not contradict the trend since, whatever their abrupt­
ness, they will be referring also to the incorporation once attri­
buted to the mother. Architectural forms are a language
confined to the j oining of a few ideographs of immense
ramification.
Colours, textures, smooth and rough planes, apertures, sym­
bolize reciprocity, a thriving in a thorough partnership. The
landscape's centre is fashioned by plain houses in a cobbled
street, by the dichotomy of wall-face and opening. Dichotomy
is the unavoidable means to architectural effect. It has, of
course, many embodiments, a sense of growth and a sense of
thrust, for instance, heaviness and lightness, sheerness and re­
cession or projection, rectangularity a nd rotundity, lit surfaces
and shadowed surfaces, a thematic contrast between two prin­
cipal textures, that i s to say, between smooth and rough . I take
this last to symbolize all, because it best marks the 'bite� of archi­
tectural pleasure upon the memory : the dichotomy that per­
meates our final impression. Such effects as volume and scale,
each providing a separate sensation, are finally themselves the
qualities of that smooth-rough disposal which we observe
plainly in the simple Mediterranean house; best known,
perhaps, in process of being built, before glass has tamed yawn­
ing apertures of velvet-smooth bla ckness which confer an
ordered sense of voluminous depth, smoother than the plastered
walls whose bottom courses are sometimes left bare, displaying
the close pa eking of stones that were blasted from the rock
upon the site. The roof tiles bring another quality of illuminated
roughness : light and dark, differing planes, assert their
difference in a marked equality beneath the sky, like an object
 Art and the Sense of Rebirth 71

of varied texture that is grasped and completely encompassed

by the h and. . . . In employing smooth and rough as generic
terms of architectural dichotomy, I am better able to preserve
both the oral and the tactile notions that underlie the visual . *
There is a hunger of the eyes, and doubtless there h as been
some permeation of the visual sense, as of touch, by the once all­
embracing oral impulse. Architecturally, we experience the
beloved as the provident mother. The building which provokes

* Since writing the above, two recent quotations from letters by

Ruskin, the great Victorian depressive genius, have opportunely
come to hand : 'I should like to eat up this Veron a touch by touch',
and 'I should like to draw all St Mark's, stone by stone, to eat it all
up into my mind, touch by tou ch'.
The most vivid plain Mediterranean houses are the Ligurian.
Usually tall, Genoese p ainted tenements having coloured demar­
cations, p articularly at the edges, intensify the perpendicular thrust.
Old tenements and villas, far more than the modern flats with lolling
balconies, bite upon and hold the _air. Walls and windows lack
projection or moulding but painted shutters stand out with strong
contrasting colour (not always the same colour throughout a b uild­
ing). With a certain fierceness the apertures are further isolated by a
chromatic band at the edges, very often a tawny band to green shut­
ters on a full red wall. There may b e many other chromatic demar­
cations - old villas possess architectural effect almost entirely in this
way - with the use, of course, of horizontal lines. The development
of this smooth painted architecture which, in terms also of figures, of
illusory moulding, of fake shutter, is c arried further and with more
appropriateness than in any other region, has grown from the light
and dark marble transverse strips of the local Romanesque. In es­
sen ce it is a bold upright adaptation of the stripes, with a certain
roughness imputed to the smooth yet fierce perpendicular lines, a
roughness that is made a ctual at the summit by bright pink tiles
which these tenements c arry well in a brilliant air. From some dis­
t ance the panoramic effect of any Ligurian town, so light however
dirty, springing though tightly pressed to sea or mountain, is the
most forceful known to me.
Between Genoa and Camogli the fierce townships clamber below
to great distances along the Tyrrhenian bay. Did Claude, coming on
this route to Rome, look repeatedly back, drawing strength from a
panorama that affords the emotion more insistent than his art?
72 The Nature of A rt, III: A rt and Psychoanalysis

by its beauty a positive response resuscitates a n early hunger or

greed i n the disposition of morsels that are smooth with m orsels
that are rough, or of wall-space with the apertures; an i m­
pression, I have s aid, composed as well from other architectural
sensations . To repeat: it is as if those apertures had been torn i n
that body b y our revengeful teeth so that w e experience a s a
beautiful form, and indeed a s indispensable shelter a lso, the out­
come of sadistic attacks, fierce yet smoothed, healed into a
source of health whic h we would take inside us and preserve
there unharmed for the source of our goodness : as if also - the
apposition though contradictory should c a use no surprise - as if
the s mooth body of the wall-£ ace, or the smooth vac ancy within
the apertures, were the shining breast, while the mouldings, the
projections, the rusticati ons, the tiles, were the head, the feed­
ing nipple of that breast. Such i s the return of the mourned
mother in all her calm and beauty and m agnificence. She was
mou rn ed owi ng to the strength of greed, owing to the
Wealth of attacks that h a ve been m ade on her attributes when­
ever there h a s been frustration. Greed i s excited once more but
achieves a guiltless catharsis on this sublimated level . And so,
we welcome the appearance or reappearance of the whole
object which by contradistinction has helped to u ni fy the ego;
the joining, under one head, of love and of apparent neglect
which thereby may become less fantasti c ; the entire object, self­
subsistent in opposing attributes.
Such victory (in the depressive position) needs consta nt re­
newal. During the earlier period, the i nfant is unable to bring
together as successfully the loved and hated attributes, his
moments of love and aggression, incorporated figures of loved
and hated attributes . * Experience in art and beauty strengthens
the ego, if only because balance, pattern, harmony, welcome a
composite whole. Beauty acknowledges a binding theme (which
art seeks out in any collocation), an identity compacted from
* ' However even at thi s stage such splitting processes are n ever
fully effective. For from the beginning of life, the ego tends towards
integrating itself and towards synthesizing the different aspects of
the obj ect (this tendency can be regarded a s an expression of the life­
instinct).' (Klein, op. cit.)
 Art and the Sense of Rebirth 73

elements, perhaps contrasting, that swell the wholeness of the

whole. Beauty is a sense of wholeness. From the opposing ele­
ments that can fuse in the sublime, we may sense at peace the
impulse of life and the impulse to death or inertia, so well
symbolized by the inanimate nature of the material through
which the artist conveys his fantasies and achieves on occasion
for outward-thrusting Eros the perfection of arrest. By means of
aesthetic pleasure we appropriate the material world without
disturbing it.
Architecture draws upon the origin of all sense of wholeness;
builds upon the deepest foundation. It is unnecessary for this
context to discuss the aesthetic awareness of form, of pro­
portion, space, mass, with their many practical references and
physiological stimuli. I need only to remark tha t since the inevi­
table abstraction, the plain geometry of building, the simple
volumes and lines, the prime shapes, are potentially so
charged with feeling, this the public and unavoidable art of
huts, houses, palaces, provides perennial examples fo:r the ab­
stract propensities in other arts : that architectural form lies at
the centre of developed art though this be specifically and con­
tinuously apparent to us in the main Mediterranean culture
only. Since the beloved was so calmly, so perfectly figured forth
by the Greek architectural orders, much of our graphic art,
paradoxical though it seems, took courage to serve naturalistic
ideals.
This expressiveness and overt domination by architecture in
European art must be related to a variety of European materials,
particularly to limestones and to the Roman pozzolana; further,
to temperate climate and the clear Mediterranean lig� t. Even
more than the Egyptians, the Greeks, especially the Athenians
commanding the unrivalled Pentelic marble, insisted upon the
smoothest of walls for their principal architectural style. Fine
masonry of close joints was often plastered in order that it
should thereby be the more smooth, the more radiant. An ex­
treme care for simple surface, and so, for the smallest change of
plane, and so, for apertures, was never lost, it seems, if we con­
sider the continuity of Mediterranean houses . The monolithic
look of their walls, doubtless borrowed, here as in other parts of
74 The Nature of Art, III: Art and Psychoanalysis

the world, from mud construction, denies many-headed chaos

to the primeval cave . Simiiarly, every type of masonry and of
brick may sharpen our sensitiveness to surface, to what is rough
and to what is conceived to be less rough if only because it
conveys an impression of vivid control.

These reveries are not untoward on the part of one who has been
some years in Venice, often alone, with no other aim than to
seek nutriment from building. The marriage of cylinder with
square abides. Dressed stone is undressed stone that bathes. The
dome feeds the sky. Istrian slabs to apertures on rough, aged,
brick assume the strength of lips . In front of a Venetian palace
the pliant waters crowd.
It seems to me that there is less call here than elsewhere
for social intercourse and that those who come to Venice, as
many do, for j ust that purpose, accepting courtesies and affronts
upon the piazza, are uneconomic.
Like mothers of men, the buildings are good listeners. Long
sounds, distinct or seemingly in bundles, appease the orifices of
p alaces that lean back gradually from canal or pavement. Of all
antics upon lagoon and fondamenta, those of the children serve
their beauty best. Nowhere do children appear more active than
in an architectural mise-en-scene, the original pitch for most
ball-games . Thus m any sounds and movements come together
like a peacock cry to penetrate, to fertilize, the fretted palaces
conniving with longing in ourselves : a melancholy, pinched cry,
perhaps, since the Venice of today is rich beauty that gradually
narrows and disintegrates.
We are increasingly mindful of a wall-face divided by fea­
tures when we h ave first been swayed by an accent, by a notable
volume. In Venice we are subject to two obvious accents,
the great dome of the Salute and the impetuous height of San
Marco's campanile. These and similar sensations attach
themselves to images that are more catholic - they clutch the
mind less suddenly, less like a lost heartbeat - as we remark
stone-framed apertures flowering upon stucco or upon bare
brick, accumulating companionship in the very terms of their
contrast. A candid quality descends on to each simple aperture,
 Art and the Sense of Rebirth 75

on to bracket, to bridge banister, to margin and stanchion, to

the very j oining of the paving stones . Yes, windows receive
gratefully the cries that lengthen over water, that caress the
flowering limbs of walls.
A long sound with its echo brings consummation to the stone.
On the other hand, when one sits in the stem of a vaporetto on
the Grand Canal, overpowered by the noise of the screw the
scene passes by almost as stiffly as pasteboard . . . . The well­
deserved affliction of Oxford Street becomes imaginable.
Footfalls remark the tomb. Architecture reigns also in utter
silence. The Redentore interior by Palladio, supreme archi­
tectural attainment, magnifies the poignancy of cut-into sur­
faces. Engaged columns, apertures in those significant walls, the
run of the drum, the cupola, the semi-circle of disengaged
columns at the end of the nave, the heavy creamy lines above
the knotted capitals, the comers with both rectangular and cyl­
indrical engaged shafts, all these and any other volumes or any
section or detail even within the chapels, can be read in terms of
the smoothness of shafts and the rough sprouting heads of
capitals; in terms of the smooth tribune archivolt and the
deeply cut archivolt behind, over the altar; or even more
simply, in terms of the smooth square teeth of the cornice with
dark rough gaps. Of course, such interplay of infinite
ramification depends upon a thousand adjustments without
which the members would signify aimlessness. There are no
invariable ratios for this excellence though Palladio employed
them with the utmost rigour; and though undoubtedly they
helped him to transmit his high emotion for the vivification of
wall-space. He was able to achieve a sublime effect at the Re­
dentore with undistorted classical forms and cheap m aterial,
foremost because wall-space had been charged during the e arly
Renaissance with a unique intensity, celebrating the return of
the lost object from the long medieval night.
When the orders are used, mouldings of base, capital and en­
tablature - themselves divided by unwrinkled spaces - as well as
proj ections interspersed with open planes such as the wall itself
or the undersides of arches, and any form that discloses rapid
change of light and shade, suggest roughness; whereas the
76 The Na tu re of Art, III: Art and Psychoanalysis

unfluted shaft is smooth . If the shaft is fluted, more smoothness

flows into the entablature :. a different 'key' of smooth and
rough is then employed. Even balustrades and tile roofs are not
always unequivocal roughnesses. Owing to shadow, shallow
stairs are often roughnesses with a smooth intent, as they lead
up to stylobate or massive rectangular plinth. Function in this
respect varies according to the nature of the larger areas of the
whole design. An engaged shaft may appear more smooth or less
smooth than the wall with which it is engaged: also, the charac­
ter of this nexus is modified by the other spaces and volumes:
colours complicate and emphasize.
Frequently - one might say, as a rule - architecture of pre­
tension falls short of the simplest Mediterranean house or fac­
tory by sacrificing too much wall-space to serve the Would-be
features. True architects are less subject to this outcome even
sometimes when, according to the mathematics of area, they
would seem to have invited it; for somehow they preserve alive
the smooth limbs of the wall. Features take up almost all the
outside surface of Palladio's Loggia del Capitanio at Vicenza;
yet, if we ignore the terra-cotta decoration on the walls, few
buildings surpass it in communication of space and volume by
way of the smooth-and-rough. Similarly, at nearby Verona,
though more challenging, Sanmichele's massive gateway, Porta
del Palio, on the town side, forces the eye by the carefully cal­
culated wealth of rustication to discover, to enlarge, the smooth
giant key-stones that he so much loved and the unmarked
frieze . His smooth and rough are transposed in virtue of an awe­
inspiring mass : they still presume, however, the ancient, rip�
pling body, though it be the mould of a hairy centaur with
glabrous face. A predilection on the part of this great military
engineer for tremendous wall-surfaces, inherited from Cyc­
lopean and Etruscan builders, has rarely been combined as suc­
cessfully with an undisputed coherence of the orders. It should
be apparent that rustication or any violent stress will be likely
to h ave a confusing or impotent look unless deep-laid fantasy
finds employment the re. Palladio - it is worth noting - again at
Vicenza, in the palazzo Thiene, achieved a result not dissimilar
from Sanmichele's .
 Art and the Sense of Rebirth 77

Sometimes a roof or a small dome decides the key of what is

smooth. Few buildings, other than Alberti's and Laurana's,
better illustrate my theme than Bramante's Tempietto at San
Pietro in Montorio, Rome, one of the finest pieces of classical
architecture.
It will be noticed that these few examples are drawn from the
Italian Renaissance. I would add to them the Villa di Papa
Giulio, Peruzzi's Farnesina and palazzo Massimi alle Colonne, all
at Rome, Peruzzi's and San Gallo's San Biagio at Montepulciano.
The small list does not include an example of those slightly
earlier masterpieces concerning which I have written much
elsewhere, buildings that with unmatched conviction and di­
rectness celebrate the first triumphant return of the lost object,
an event which will appear from its nature unquestionable and
final; Alberti's fac;ade, for instance, of San Sebastiano at
Mantua with its fertile surface : it requires no titillation. Actu­
ated by the few features that it bears, the wall proffers a steady
insistence like an open flower. Such is the architectural context
for Piero della Francesca, for one of the prized tendencies in
European painting. Brotherly forms, the family of things were
at first disposed by other arts near the architectural mother who
is sometimes shown with naturalistic babies on Quattro Cento
building. The putti, once plucked from the womb by our jealous
attacks, have now returned to her. We see them welling out of
the matrix of Quattro Cento marbles.
The triumph of return cannot always be so poignantly cele­
brated. Recession, however, is by degrees . In a more mag­
niloquent, more uncertain age, though the Baroque searches for
plasticity and movement by means of a broken and omnipotent
line, the agitation still exists within the wall, a violence of lively
stones whose apertures often suggest clamorous or excited or
twisted lips : whereas Alberti's Sant'Andrea at Mantua most
clearly embodies a matron-ideal, capacious, sober, firm; yet no
less magnificent.
Art cannot lie . It is obvious that even the most tried classical
forms and spaces will not be joined together successfully with­
out some imaginative conviction to reimbue those elements .
There£ore it is strange how rarely classical building - the Bar-
78 The Nature of Art, III: Art and Psychoanalysis

oque apart - has been viewed from the side of vivid and per­
sonal emotion to which, no less than the romantic, it is subject.
One may well wonder whether the more direct imputation by
classical forms of the mother's body from without, provides the
reason; the reason why, in fact, they are quickly clothed with
the impersonalization of the academic. It may be that a kind of
cultural censor has intervened, one which will militate against
such speculations themselves even apart from the matter of
their proof.

I have mentioned more than once 'the smooth limbs of the

walls' . There is danger that an extravagant and pseudo-dramatic
gloss be pinned like a pasquinade on to the perfect in­
tellectuality, on to the sheer walls, of masterpieces : whereas,
contrariwise, outwardness, extension, sublimation, transform­
ation, fixture, like the oral impulse in early infancy upon the
wider visual scene, are of the essence of hum an need. Art
epitomizes such activity, drawing strength from the earliest
accomplishments in the sphere of synthesis.

[from Sn1ooth and Rough, r95r, pp . 55-68]

II

The Luxury and Necessity o f Painting

Not even those who detest art will be averse to the presence of
picture galleries near luxurious shops . For a moment luxury
may satisfy greed and provide the riches that separate us from
loneliness . We sniff a bountiful air at shop windows, con­
templating possessions not yet allotted, and sometimes unen­
viousl y any magnificence, the width of a street or the span of a

doorway. Entertainment seeks to bring in train such bounty,

experiences that are of the nature of meals : though they but
symbolize suppers, surfeit supervenes. It comes about, then,
that when we are at table we may hope to incorporate far more
than our food; as we watch others they appear to reabsorb what
 The Luxury and Necessity of Painting 79

we imagine to be predominant experiences. I have had this

fantasy when watching directors of galleries that exhibit paint­
ings, at a restaurant. It seemed that theirs was very fine nourish­
ment, with associations that differed greatly from a stuffing or
emparcelling : indeed, so enduring and so various is the luxur­
ious stain upon directors of good paintings that their actual
nourishment appears to lend them the overtones of lasting re­
assurance that may visit others only occasionally, should the satis­
f action of various appetites co alesce in the pleasure of the table.
Of course good paintings are extremely valuable, a richness
that lends itself to these imaginative richnesses . The gallery
director has them on his walls . He may suffer from various
difficulties in connection with food : nevertheless, a modicum of
the fantasy of the luxuriousness of his eating will, I am sure,
occasionally at least, be his as well.
To his sanctum I attribute some Italian Baroque paintings,
small, boldly painted with the raw touches that will eventually
prove to have heralded the modern pictorial era . The canvases
were studies and sketches for large paintings, or for their details.
In one a mushroom cloud of angels grows, as it were from the
compost of an ecstatic saint who grovels upward from below:
the picture vibrates with rays of a sudden flowering, but lines in
one corner indicate a h ard architecture, the pillars and the
underside of a cornice whose grooved, stepped mass embraces
the shrinking or resurgence of figures as does a basin that both
holds and spills the fountain's play. The union is ennobling, an
interchange or commerce we would have in ourselves between
passions and the stone, since the architecture symbolizes our
rational disposition unberated by death and decay, embodies a

Parnassus-like bent whereby proportion and space envelop our

emotions, dispersing litter on a desk and the rhythmless rush
of noises from the street that link us to a chaos, otherwise ines­
capable, throughout the length and breadth of London ever ig­
noble where this painting is noble . l-Iow few are the colonnades,
those tunnels with pierced sides, how small the perpetuity of
silent flank and orifice, how little by which to recognize our
own ideal states . . . . As well as of the rational disposition, a

good building is the monument to physique.

 80 The Nature of Art, III: Art and Psychoa nalysis

But it is unlikely that this director has much interest in archi­

tecture : it is not necessary today for devotee s of painting : they
do not acknowl edge building to be the root of any grandeur and
the presiding genius of graphic art. The lapse is due to failure,
and to a resurgence that is taut, of architec ture in our time;
even more because , in view of this failure from the middle of
the last century, painting , while avoiding as a rule an obvious
architectu ral balance , has itself been inspired to fill the void, to
provide the more intimat e architec tural pleasures, striving to
envelop and to feed us without ceremony by means of clamant
textures, to enwrap us with a surface , to drive us by shock into a
place of safety, to declaim from a wall the need for tactile pass­
ages and transiti ons that were once available in lovely streets.
The primac y of archite cture, Mother of the Arts, is not first as
the school of proportion and design but as the universal witness
to the luxuries of art, to the aesthetic translation of mental
process, as well as the scenes of living, into the terms of an
absorbable substance, or of our envelopment by an object. But
simultaneously there exists an emphasis upon the separateness
of the artifact, upon the cake that survives our eating of it.
Thus, in the name of object self-sufficiency and corporeal whole­
ness, art may bestow another luxury in the enshrinement of
even the greatest misery, a luxury gained from the putting
together of fragments of experience that have been dispers e d, so
that even pain coheres, owns features : a service is done thereby,
a good restored. Graphic boldness and idiosyncrasy satisfy more
people today than fine building surrounded by ill-advised curves
and strong material and dreary roofs and the blatant, negative
pretension of all urban scenes. Surely there has never been so
sterling and durable a debasement, n1ultiplied in instances by
the million, of members and materials that were once well used.
It will be some time before late Victorian and Edwardian
miasmas will have yielded their present air of univers�lity.
Envelopment by building, by street, is almost unknown to
Englishmen as a reassurance, but is universal in experiences of
confusion or of the drugs that alleviate, such as the droplet _
comfort in a cottage roof, in a quaint lamp-post or a causeway
too windswept for advertisements. Even so, our director has
 The Luxury and Necessity of Painting Sr

enjoyed visits to Rome; his pleasure i n his Baroque paintings

reminds him of cobbled roads and their smooth houses with
apertures that are tall : and he has read in Wittkower of a con­
scious Baroque aim to envelop the spectator. 'With Caravaggio
the great gesture had another distinct meaning; it w·as a psycho­
logical device, not unknown in the history of art, to draw the
beholder into the orbit of the picture . . . Bernini's St Theresa,
shown in rapture, seems to be suspended in mid-air, and this can
only appear as reality by virtue of the implied visionary state of
mind of the beholder . . . . Miracles, wondrous events, supra­
natural phenomena are given an air of verisimilitude.' * The
power of this art to envelop us suggests confidence in the fan-
tasy that an interchange infuses the complexity of relationship
between substances themselves, between objects, between
different arts though employed to represent a single vivid hap­
pening. Architecture, sculpture, painting merge in the represen­
tation of St Theresa's ecstasy, just as river-god, shell, dolphin are
as one with the water of the Barberini fountain.
Architecture is limited to forms without events; in many
styles or periods an architectural exemplar has provided the
model for translating graphic subjects into the terms of a con­
catenation built upon a ground bass . There are Italian master­
pieces, for instance the operas of Vincenzo Bellini, whose
continuous simplicity remains poignant, whose lyricism
remains unmatched in a firmness far from romantic, suggesting
sunlit or shaded loggias and above them, upon the wall, smooth
apertures that give light, and above again the j utting features of
a cornice-head.
The churches of Rome reign easily over the noisiest traffic in
the world; even in this wretched sanctum in the West End of
London, the Baroque paintings lend a Theatine quiet un­
separated from the life of the town, as if a burst pipe that floods
a building's face in patches might yet convey the image of a
spring. We hang our paintings to convert not only our houses
but our neighbourhoods and our neighbours .
Little understood by our director, the Baroque paintings are a
side-line relegated to this narrow room. Modern paintings are
* R. Wit tkower, Art and Architecture in Italy, r 600-r750 (London,
19 58).
82 The Nature of Art, III: Art and Psychoanalysis

his livelihood and his life� Let us go into the galleries. There he
is, in the hour before the midday meal, doubtless still stimu­
lated by pictures whose appeal fails only at the tap of another
example. They titillate the appetite to absorb all things : who
can say where limitation lies since these artists' aims have been
to show the unknown as uniform in strong impact with the
known? We have here the manner of endless bodily function as
well as of hardly touched states of mind, more muscular, more
independent than the resonance of images in a dream yet, when
viewed in terms of the intellect's categories, vague and bound­
less as are the spongy i mages of sleep so often tied to an incon­
sequen t context, equalled occasionally by the name the modern
artist puts upon his painting in the catalogue.
'I no longer invite the spectator to walk into my canvases,'
writes the American Action painter, Grace Hartigan, * 'I want a
surf ace that resists, like a wall, not opens like a gate. ' The wall,
Leonardo' s homogeneous wall with adventitious marks which,
he said, encourage fantasy to reinforce their suggestion, has
been an especial spur from the time of the Impressionists, from
the time of the new negative significance of buildings in our
epoch for which the picture plane, the picture surface, has
become an affirmative substitute; so much is this so that much
modern painting ceases to have parts or pieces, in the sense of
parts that when abstracted from the whole would remain
objects of beauty as of value . What price a section of an Action
painting (of one section rather than another), or even of a Cubist
painting or a Mondrian? The modern stress upon unity and
purity, upon strict aesthetic relevance, connotes a stress upon
homogeneity : in some styles ·the picture plane in fact resembles
a blank wall to which is entrusted the coalescence of dissonan­
ces or blows directed at the spectator. Even when this is not so,
we are likely to discover the kindred notion of something un­
limited. Unspoken experiences, bodily and mental, have always
been incorporated into art through the appeal of formal rela­
tionships : but when, as now, they are offered without the
accompaniment of any other symbolic content - or if there is
* Catalogue of The New American Painting, an Arts Council exhi­
bition, Tate Gallery, 1959.
 The Luxury and Necessity of Painting 83

another programme, when it is distorted or simplified even to a

greater extent than in a style that has been strictly conventional­
ized - they readily suggest the unlimited, a concept always
present to the mind in terms of a boundless, traumatic bad or a
boundless, bountiful good, by which we suffer envelopment or
from which we would perpetually feed.
Now, the simplest relationships, the most sporadic marks,
have deep meaning: we have been shown it beyond all question.
We have today an art without manners, without veneer,
arresting, knock-you-down yet unbraced and unlimited, it
appears, in scope : that is one reason why it must continually
change so much : what is novel affords a sense of boundless pos­
sibility with which we may exchange ourselves in lieu of
achievement. Modern art tends thus to be romantic, somewhat
at the expense of the other fundamental draw of the work of
art, as a self-sufficient entity, though this character too has
been isolated and worked upon. The palpable textures of
modern painting express the division and disintegration of cul­
ture as well as the ambivalent artist's restitution, often carried
no further than an assembly of scaffolding. We are then left
with an unceremonious image that seems to symbolize the
process of art itself, of the hidden content, always immanent,
whereby mere space and shape touch in us sensations of pain,
struggle, anxiety, or joy that we have already begun to translate
into tactile and even visual sens ations, since a parallel amalgam
is ceaselessly registered in some part of the mind. Appreciation
is a mode of recognition : we recognize but we cannot name, we
cannot recall by an effort of the will: the contents that reach us
in the terms of aesthetic form h ave the 'feel' of a dream that is
otherwise forgotten . This 'feel' too may be lost until it is re­
called by an action in the street, by some concatenation of
movement or of substances : in j ust this way much modern art
offers us the 'feel' of our own structure, sometimes overriding
the communication of particular feelings . Painting usually pre­
sents as well a specific subj ect-matter equivalent to the manifest
content of a dream, in terms of an image of the "\vaking world.
The p ainter has been happiest when surrounded by an actual
architecture which provided an assumption (a living style) that
84 The Nature of Art, III: Art and Psych oanalysis

made it unnecessary to reconstruct ab initio for every work the

rudiments of the body and .of the psyche. Titian was adorning,
not creating, the stone Venice, and Rembrandt the new Amster­
dam. Architecture in the West has been the prime embodiment
not only of art but of culture. There are left, of course, many
beautifu l places, many ordinary houses that are satisfying, par­
ticularly in the South; but it is not our ruling culture that
creates them. Marinetti considered all the beauty of Italy an
obstacle to his harsh idealization of the machine by which alone
he felt enveloped in the unlimited way he demanded.
We will agree that the work of art is a construction. Inas­
mucli as man both physically and psychologica lly is a structure
carefully amassed, a coalescence and a pattern, a balance i m­
posed upon opposite drives, building is likely to be not only the
most common but the most general symbol of our living and
breathing: the house besides, is the home and the symbol of
the Mother: it is our upright bodies built cell by cell : a ledge is
the foot, the knee and the brow. Whi le we project our own
being on to a ll things, the works of man, particularly houses or
any of the shelters he inhabits, reflect ourselves more directly
than will inorganic material that has not been cultivated thus.
Of course buildings and the engineering involved, roads, bridges,
and the rest, are so common as to be a part of a ceaseless environ­
ment. The ordered stone or brick encloses and defines : whether
we will it or not, the eye explores these surfa ces as if compelled
to consult an oracle, the oracle of spatial relationships and of
the texture that they serve. Hurt, hindered, and inspired by wall
and ledge, the graphic artist has bestowed upon flat surfaces an
expressiveness of space, volume, and texture equivalent to the
impact, at the very least, of fantasies, events, moods . Archi­
tecture has provided the original terms of this 'language' that
can rarely be put into words, though words may someti mes be
found for the simple employment of the 'language' by building
when taken in conjunction with the natural scene. For instance,
in the fascination of gazing along a dark passage into the outside
light that invades an entrance, in a subject not uncommon for
seventeenth-century Dutch painters, we may become aware
that we contemplate under an image of dark, calm enclosure
 The Luxury and Necessity of Painting 85

and of seeping light, the traumatic struggles that accompany

our entry and our exit, in birth and death. To look along the
walls of a cave into the blinding entry would be to experience a
more dramatic symbol except for the consideration that a thou­
sand threads of conscious life bring now to the passage and to
the house, to the constricted brick or stone, an appropriate as­
sociation. Seeing that the projection of fantasy on to all the
phenomena of Nature is ceaseless, I would not deny that the
'language' of form must have a far wider origin; but I would
claim that the example of building, not least in view of a con­
text in the natural scene, has greatly served the precision of that
'language' ; nor is it irrelevant that the graphic arts have been
expended in many cultures on the adornment of building; nor
that in pictorial art there has often figured the architectural or­
ganization. In almost all periods and styles buildings have been
represented in painting : this is due not only to their common­
ness or to relevance for many scenes : a study of the employ­
ment of the architectural background in Renaissance art and i n
the theatre, shows without question that they are treated as the
emblems both of ordered beauty and of a psychological tenor,
in general as the presiding example of the conversion of fantasy
into substance and for bestowing upon fantasy an autonomous
and enduring body.
I shall now leave the terms of architecture and of luxury and
our gallery director who loves luxury, achieves it from painting
while more or less blind to building. I take leave of him because
of the great distance between gallery and studio, between art as
luxury and art as necessity, though the former meaning is de­
pendent upon, and founded upon, the latter.
The calm, the architecture, the luxury of pictures, what are
they to the artist? Everything, I dare to say, though the making
of art is a compulsive fruit of conflict, grief, and loss, of a
sadness or a lack too old and bitter, too keen though hidden, to
carry for long any romantic overtone. These feelings, the spring
of art whatever an artist's overt temperament may be, cor­
respond with our own feelings of loss and confusion : none of us
h as escaped them; hence the reassurance and luxury, since a
synthesis and restitution will have been forged in the studio.
86 The Na ture of Art, III: Art and Psychoanalysis

I do not want to hint that the artist should paint with tears
rolling down cheeks, misting vision, but that he projects with
astuteness upon the canvas an inner need in terms of the outside
objects he has chosen, so that both he and they renew life; that
is, so as to figure forth a pattern wherein confusion, though it be
rehearsed there, may not rule; and greed and sadistic control of
the object, though they too may figure, are not unchallenged.
We have no difficulty in speaking of the painter as the artist
par excellence, of painting as the representative of art in gen­
eral. I think that this is because of the instrument, the brush,
tipped with the creative m aterial, and because the canvas is
worked at arm's length, with the result that the very act of
painting as well as the preoccupation with the representation of
space, symbolize not only the restitutive process but a settled
distance of the ego from its objects. The distance from us of our
world varies continuously : the artist brings all into view, into
focus, at arm's length as it were. Throughout consciousness one
thing stands for another: we traffic all the time with symbols, in
thought as well as in emotion; for, behind any feeling, behind
the 'feel' of any argument even, there lurks another that is older
and, as we proceed back, that is nearer to the source of its power
over us. More than the rest of us, the artist is aware that what
we see symbolizes the history as well as the aspiration of the
mind : his task is to discover for them a felicitous embodiment
in the outside world so that they be recognized as any object of
perception is known, and better kno\vn the better the character
of the object or scene represented has been seized in paint.
I am not necessarily referring to an artist's manifest aim but
to the springs of his compulsion; nor do I refer in this context to
anything tha.t throws light on the immense variety of art, on the
need for change. One of our most comprehensive symbolic
objects - the artist is very aware of it - is the culture in which
we live. In one aspect, culture and society are foods just as art
itself is a food, an absorbable structure that nourishes our own.
The artist absorbs his 'times', 'what is in the air' . On the other
h and culture is recognized as an entity in the terms of the art it
inspires; differences of culture are often measured succinctly in
terms of art : and art itself, as a history of development and as a
 The Luxury and Necessity of Painting 87

model of achievement, is another comprehensive object that the

artist will tend to incorporate . Symbolic activities, art in chief,
have their richest material in what is already richly and widely
symbolic : the outermost ripple on the pond after the stone was
cast is the one that most vividly reveals the power of the throw­
ing and of the thing thrown. It seems that contemporary atti­
tudes and achievements, whether or not we are sympathetic to
them, provide indispensable terms for creativeness. It is well
known that old works of art vary to some extent in their power
of evocation, in accordance with their apparent comment upon
a present cultural endeavour : and that the 'climate' of feeling is
an inescapable framework for aesthetic emotion.
Our relationships to all objects seem to me to be describable
in the terms of two extreme forms, the one a very strong
i dentification with the object, whether proj ective or intro­
jective, whereby a b arrier between self and not-self is undone,
the other a commerce with a self-sufficient and independent
object at arm's length . In all times except the earliest weeks of
life, both of these relationships, in vastly differing amalgams,
are in play together, as is shown not only by psychoanalysis but
by art, since the work of art is par excellence a self-sufficient
object as well as a configuration that we absorb or to which we
lend ourselves as manipulators . (The first generic difference be­
tween styles lies in the varying combinations by which these
two extremes are conveyed to us.) Here is to be observed a
fundamental connection of art with the culture from which it
arises; for, art helps us both to identify ourselves with some
aspect of our culture, to incorporate cultural activities or to
reject them, and at the same time to contemplate them as if
they were fixed and hardy objects . From the angle of con­
templation culture is art - hence, once more, the necessity of
having art - since culture is most easily seen as an obj ect for
contemplation in aesthetic terms. Moreover, a cultural re­
conciliation of what is various, and even opposite, is perceived,
when reflected in art, as a symbol for the integration that we
have carried out upon contrary urges, opposite feelings, once
widely separated, about one and the same person. In p ainting
his picture the artist perfarms an act of integration upon the
88 The Nature of Art, III: Art 9nd Psychoanalysis

outside world that has reference, then, as well as to the inde­

pendence of objects, first to the re-creation and to some reso­
lution of his own inner processes, next in regard to the
organization of the ego in a genera lized sense, and finally in
regard to a cultural significance. The result is an interplay be­
tween these modes of organization to the end of making one of
them more poignant since it possesses the services of the others.
Romantic art underlines an aspect of the artist's personality,
Hellenic art the generous ideal of ego-integration, a severely
conventionalized art, such as the Byzantine in a characteristic
phase, the cultural hierarchy. Throughout the history of art,
emphasis has more commonly lain here : art has been em­
ployed to mark ritual and religion, cultural pride, s ocial dis­
tinction and consequence. Moreover in ceramics, in all of what
are called the applied arts, only a cultural identity, by and large,
is likely to survive : indeed, the potter's compulsions, as reflected
by his work, will rarely have been apparent beyond his immedi­
ate companions, beyond the workshop : we remain very much
aware, however, that the Korean dish or Sung bowl was an
outcome not only of a tradition to which numerous artists had
contributed but of an individual who must have again, in his
turn, been subject to the aesthetic compulsion to reflect an ideal
of ego structure. The same is often true in the sphere of build­
ing. We have arrived at a further reason why the painter may
represent all artists : his work usually a llows us to discern other
syntheses (beyond those of a style and of a culture) that under­
lie the practice of every kind of art. But whereas architecture
does not possess the many facets of painting, it shows us the
surfaces that matter most, the 'language' : it surrounds us so
widely that the art of painting cannot be viewed apart from
architectural alternatives, volume and void, light and dark, re­
cession and protrusion, the rough and the smooth. That is not at
all to say we would have no sculpture or painting without an
example of building, but only that in such case, painting and
sculpture would themselves have to find a partial substitute for
this absence, just as they tend to do now.
To speak of art is sometimes to estrange ourselves from the
artist. He seems today often to be concerned merely with the
 The Luxury and Necessity of Pain ting 89

expression of sensations, maybe sensations to touch and tear

and mould materi a l . Nevertheless, whatever he may profess, no
artist, old nor modern, with the possible exception of a few
child-like or na'if painters, achieved his aim without having
been fired by a lready existing works of art, especia lly by the
work of contemporaries . The itch to create in _the aesthetic
sense is perhaps a thing apart; but it follows that the artist i s
himself no mean connoisseur of creativeness : he understands
art; he could not be much of an artist if he did not, since he is
extremely sensitive to what lies together, especia lly to what is
intentionally symbolic. There is no hard-and-fast division be­
tween the appreciator and the creator of art. Indeed, wha tever
his conscious i nterest or know ledge, I h ave no doubt tha t the
artist is p'otentially the most highly-trained appreciator, often
confined i n range of interest by the preoccup ation of his own
c_rea tive field. This is but to emphasize again in a different
manner that art is a cultural activity though the fount be
hidden and untutored. Were it otherwise, art would not mirror
the whole m an, the whole of his cap acity . The fire of Van Gogh
woul d h ave been of small consequence had it not consumed
Vincent, the copier of drawings in the Illustra ted London Ne ws,
the admirer of Millet, and the near-contemporary of the Im­
pressionists. Some artists today ape an effect that is untutored,
but in so far as their work is notable, it will be obvious that they
are, as artists, the product of modern museums . Nor do they
work now in more isolation than heretofore . On the contrary,
the movement, the fraternity, seems more essenti a l : few
modern p ai ntings make their utmost point without re­
inforcement from others .
I sent our gallery director packing, yet h e now reappears in
the train of a rtists : we are not i nterested i n his business a cumen
but in his nose. He and h is smart gallery a re symbols of the
cultural releva nce of h ard agonies in the studio. Picasso is re­
ported to h ave said that as a child he could draw like Raphael
but that l a ter, as an adult, it h a d taken him a l ong time to learn
to draw like a child. It seems tha t the character of our culture
has i nspired an element of regression : it inspired Picasso's early
appreciation of the val ues of Negro sculpture, a very import ant
90 The Nature of Art. III: Art and Psychoanalysis

part of his creativeness. We taste a new humility and a new

arrogance, a sophistication· and a barbarity in all the people and
all the things surrounding us : and I do not use the word 'taste'
altogether metaphorically since I would stress the oral com­
ponent in our attitudes to parts of our environment: as pre­
sented by art, I have said, it does not overwhelm us since, as
well as in the terms of envelopment and incorporation, we are
shown an aspect of our environment and 'mental climate' by
the p ainter as an enclosed object, at arm's length, reflecting
what I have called two basic relationships to objects. They are
usually experienced together; in art alone their collusion seems
perfected to the extent that we appear to have the cake and to
eat it without a greedy tearing, the object to incorporate and the
object set out and self-contained. Surely the status of this cake is
the one of the 'good' internal object, the 'good' breast which, as
Melanie Klein has repeatedly said, formed and forms the ego's
nucleus, the prototype not only for all our 'good' objects but, in
the unenvious, unspoiling relationship with it, for happiness.
But it is always a prime error to search only for derivations
that are positive, affirmative. I have not pointed to the fact that
part of the aesthetic compulsion will have a negative basis in
the component of aggression and, perhaps, of organ deficiency
as well as in the threat, perhaps always present, of incipient
confusion. We know of several great painters who have had
ceaseless trouble with their eyes, imaginary or real. When the
trouble has been imaginary we must impute to them an uncon­
sious sense of guilt, unusually strong, in connection with the
greedy, prehensile, and controlling act of vision as it has ap­
peared to the fantasy in early years. To observe is partly to
control, to be omnipotent : whereas the exercise of the cruel
power continues in the making of art, it is used also to recon­
struct what thereby is dismembered : in reflecting such com­
bined yet antithetical drives, a work of art symbolizes the
broader integrating processes. The aesthetic a ccount of in­
tegration is an end-in-itself, unlike the stock syntheses that con­
struct a character type, professional, class, or national, often
valued beyond all other ego projections by unaesthetic persons.
Genius displays a new mending of i mpulse, of feeling, with such
 The Luxury and Necessity of Painting 91

conviction that there issues from i t a novel treatment of sub­

j ect-matter as of form. Cezanne applied a steel-bright knife to
pattern and to distance : he introduced love and respect into an
extraordinary attack upon his apples and upon the landscapes
of his home. His paintings are unified by a play of glinting cuts
that both bisect and glorify the contour. It is above all com­
posers who demonstrate easily the varieties, and even the con­
trariety, implicit in a theme. What twists of combined feelings
Mozart contrived within the clear cascade of a chamber work.
Many artists of an opposite temperament to Cezanne's will
have availed themselves of his discoveries. Considered psycho­
logically the development of art is no less complicated than the
view from any other approach. But I want to stress a factor that
has usually been simple, the compulsion to 'get things right'·
issuing in part from the fear of deformity and of aggressiveness.
In the case of naturalistic painting the first test of what 'looks
wrong' has been very simple. In drawing a jug how shameful it
is that a side should become swollen or should be impoverished,
how poignant and sacrilegious the lopsidedness . Many present­
day artists defy this fear and scan the lopsidedness of our en­
vironment: modem art tends to conventionalize ugliness and
distortion in the search for comprehensive balances : the vibrant
power wanes to correct each enormity without devitalization,
since art must reflect as well as affirm : idealism in art has been
the face put upon some degree of truth, upon some need of
balance amid discord : also the unabashed shape of the deformed
jug may have this timeless quality. In the past, undeformed
shapes have sometimes been balanced in a picture asymmetri­
cally : today we often see deformed shapes balanced squarely.
I have already introduced a negative approach in attributing
the development of modern painting partly to the nineteenth­
century vulgarization of architecture. Ugliness has strengthened
not only confusion but a desire for collapse : in art we will here
discern an amalgamation of negative and positive components.
A collapsed room displays many more facets than a room
intact: after a bombing in the last war, we were able to look at
elongated, piled-up displays of what had been exterior, mingled
with what had been interior, materializations of the serene
92 The Nature of Art, III: Art and Psychoanalysis

Analytic Cubism that Picasso and Braque invented before the

first war; and usually, as in' some of these pa i ntings, we s aw the
poignant key provided by some untouched, undamaged object
that had miraculously escaped. The thread of life persists, in the
case of early Cubist pai ntings a glass, a pipe, a newspaper, a
guitar whose humming now spreads beyond once-sounding
walls that h ave become c lean a nd tactile remains. In such
strange s urroundings, not altogether unlike the i ntact yet empty
buildings invented by Chiri co , the brusque a ccoutrements of
comfort for pavement life, the one of the cafe, extend a great
sense of c alm : a simple shape and a simple need emerge from
the shattering noise a nd changing facets of the street. L ater
work by Picasso is more disturbing, since he h as broken off and
re-combined parts of the body, often adding more than one
view of these part-obj ects . Disruption of flesh a nd bone extends
to the vitals, but the furor of his genius is such that the sum of
misplaced sections does not suggest the parts of a machine : on
the contrary, i n the translated bodies, a s i n the rent room, of
Guernic a , there exist both horror a nd pathos a s well as aesthetic
calm : the i nterior of the body is not represented as a ruined
closet but as p art of an extelior decor. Similarly, the New York
M anager of Picasso's ballet, Parade, wore his ribs outside h is
costum e and outside the child's skyscraper a ttached to his head.
In the period known as Synthetic Cubism, Picasso and Bra que
had j oined into whole objects upon tilted table-tops, the p iled-up
abstract bric-a-brac a ccumulated i n Analytic Cubism, to a n en­
folded effect a s fresh as fruit. Strong, j agged p attern, a wrought­
i ron j oi nture, the curve of a rib blunt or a cute, typify endur­
ing characteristics in the manifold variations of Picasso's a rt, a
giant i n our times .
The distinctiveness of what we c all modern art does not lie i n
the degree o f conventionalization o r o f distortion or i n a total
neglect of appeara nces but i n the treating by means of such
methods of all experiences as if they were rudimentary; i mp act
takes p recedence of the values revealed by the last ripple on the
pond. Things are already in bits a nd must themselves be broken
up i nto absorbable p arts . The emp hasis upon strong i mpact is a n
emphasis not only upon the proj ection o f proprioceptive o r
 Th e Luxury and Necessity of Painting 93

i nteroceptive sensations and i mages associ ated with a mere p a rt

of the body, but consequently upon the merging or i ncor­
porating fun ction that belongs pre-eminently to our relation­
ship with any p art-obj ect, i n the first place the breast of
infanthood : we ca nnot attribute originally to the infant an
awareness of whole or sep arate objects either visually or im­
aginatively, only of highly-coloured attribl.J.tes or parts that in
their supreme goodness o r badness are assimilated with himself.
In modern a rt, then, the wealth of adult experiences is often
endowed with this primitive cast that is n ormally retained at
such strength in adult life for some states only, such as sleep . I
a m here referring to a treatment i n the work of art, not entirely
to the effect of the work itself, which by definition brings to us
a lso the sense of a who le and self-sufficient obj ect. On the other
hand, a unifying simpl i fication of shape (and often a shape's
mere exaggeration) to some degree figures in all plastic art : it
facilitates the clutching i n1pa ct, the easy identi fication, charac­
ter] stic of relationship with a part-obj ect, whereby the world is
homogeneous . As well as to observe, Form induces us to par­
take.
We are n ot likely to u se the word 'im aginative ' i n con­
nection with modern art . This seems strange if we recall the
extraordinary inventions of Picasso, for i nstance, syntheses of
many experiences, m a ny feelings ; reflections, very often as
well, of n umerous cultural nuances past and present. Are n ot
his phantasmagorias imaginative by definition? Yet I think that
even here we are loath to use the word, though we do so at once
i n regard to works of the early periods and to his classical remi­
niscences particularly in the early 1 9 20s, to the horses and gia nt
Women by the sea and to echoes of pagan myth i n represen­
tationa l drawings, to such a series as the one of the artist with
the model. Why do we call these works imaginative whereas we
make no immediate call for this word in contemplating the far
greater fertility of his m ore recondite works? I believe the
answer to be that they are more recondite in a limited sense
only, since they a re by no means of a hidden or etiolated
manner. While it remains difficult to define the imaginative con­
tent, we are strongly aware of a constraint upon us to regard
94 The Nature of Art, III: Art and Psychoanalysis

their richness as a stripping,. a baring, as a defiance even of the

symbolization or image-building attributed to the processes of
imagination. Indeed, the word 'imaginative' is no longer in con­
stant employment even beyond the range of professional art.
Do we any more say that children are imaginative; or children's
drawings? We have come to realize that all expressions are
symbols of a further meaning. I have asked the question
whether a typical child's drawing should be considered im­
aginative. The answer surely is No : a child's drawing finds the
equivalent, without much ado, to a hidden tension in himself :
hence the lesson learnt by modern art from child's art. The
attempt in modern art to break down the accepted image in
favour of primitive entities that it symbolizes, results in the
formation of images without resonance from which we with­
hold the adj ective 'imaginative'. In pursuing his spadework on
what seems virgin ground, the artist of today sometimes man­
ipulates appearances out of all recognition or refuses al­
together to have truck with appearances other than the one of
his own painting to which, as by Mondrian, the laws of the
cosmos are instantly related: the World comes back with a rush
in catalogue explanations, whereas what we value in Mondrian
are the sensations of architecture of w hich we are always in
need.
Though the greater part of the art of the world demonstrates
varying compromises between two treatments of symbols - we
can call them here the classical and modern - I do not think
that the rawness of impact rescued by recent generations from
primitive art and so prized in our own art today - remember, it
means a raw impact of formal relationships no less than of
other symbols - is likely to cease in attraction, especially since
the art of the world has been assembled in photograph and in
museum. But there is this point : the slower art, slower, though
as strong, in formal impact, is obsessed with the variety and
smooth interpenetration of things that in their sum symbolize
an integration and independence of the self and of our objects,
maybe at some expense of a blatant (though not an eventual)
enveloping power to which I have referred. I submit, therefore,
there has not been in the West an art reflective of the entire
 The Luxury and Necessity of Pain tin9 95

man as successful as the classical Greek and the Renaissance art

at its greatest, which strove to endow symbolic objects with the
full value of their own appearance s .
All great art commands a strong impact, and all great art
records as well the last ripple on the pond. Which aspect will be
more needed in the future; will the modern concentration upon
impact diminish? I have attempted to isolate the deeper necess­
ity of these emphases : there is obviously unforgettable virtue in
both.

Epilogu e
My hope is that far from needing a more abstract treatment,
what I have written above will have stimulated a modicum of
consent to the following very brief summary : it e mbraces simi­
lar propositions I have previously put forward.
There is a sense in which we absorb the obj ect of our atten­
tion : we speak of absorbing or imbibing knowledge while, for
the moment, the rest of the world is excluded. Except for con­
templative acts we do not mentally imbibe a thing as an end in
itself but as part of a wider activity. Though things and their
systems remain outside us, we seem to get to know them by
taking them in; for the most part, however, we do not will them
to flood through every atom of our being in entering the store of
what we call the mind. The work of art, on the other hand,
though by definition a complete and enclosed system, strongly
suggests to us physical and mental states of envelopment and of
being enveloped. These identifications vary from strong man­
ipulation of the obj ect to an absorption of it and a sinking into
it; I h ave used the word 'envelopment' as shorthand. Since art is
useless, it exists solely for the contemplative act in which the
senses are not the mere vehicles; the appeal is first to them . Two
important results follow : as the senses are the feelers by which
we apprehend the otherness of outside things, the otherness or
object-nature of the work of art is stressed in this act of its
contemplation; yet, .as I have said, the ruling attention is also
engaged by the process of its absorptign no less than by the
more obvious projecting therein of our feelings . The great work
of art is surrounded by silence . It remains palpably 'out there',
96 The Nature of Art, III: Art and Psychoanalysis
yet none the less enwraps us; we do not so much absorb as
become ourselves absorbed. .This is the aspect of the relation­
ship, held in common with mystical experience, that I want to
stress, because the no less important and non-mystical attitude
to object-otherness in aesthetic appreciation has been better ad­
mitted. Aesthetic form immediately communicates, as well as a
symbolic image of an integrated ego, the answering image of a
reconstituted and independent 'good' object. This object there­
upon becomes incorporated with a satisfaction that evokes in
turn a more permeating ground for what is felt to be good, and
so a symbol for the 'good' breast. The process entails the feeling
of 'a pulse in common', of a heightened identification between
the appraiser and his object : it is a process that has been accen­
tuated in the so-called conventionalized or conceptual styles of
the graphic arts; without ado they impart a generalized image
imposed upon what is particular, upon what is mere ap­
pearance, transcendent equally of self and of object-nature.
Evoking, through the creation of symbolic inducements, the
manner of primitive attachment to a part-object (e.g. the
breast), art has served ·ritual, religion, and every cultural aim. In
this context, but more particularly outside it, that is to say, in
examples which lack the focus of a narrow cultural ideal, we
find an employment, as I shall show in the following two essays,
for a type of experience that may be called visionary, though
coupled (as assuredly it must be in the creation of art) with an
insistence upon the independence of a limited, self-sufficient
object.
What common analogy can we find for so strong an a bsorp­
tion of ourselves in other things? As a matter of fact such
identification is extremely common : an element of it enters into
all group attitudes, all states of contemplation and physical en­
grossment. The most common is surely the state of sleep
wherein We discern best the 'oceanic feeling' as Freud called it,
a loss of identity that he referred to the infant's satisfaction at
the breast v\rith which he is one, a part-object that does not
suggest the distinctiveness from its perceiver of a whole object.
(There are many methods of confusion with the object, under
the stress of predominantly negative feelings, that result in
 The Luxury and Necessity of Painting 97
serious loss of ego power. The affirmative quality of aesthetic
value I have in mind is bound to be related, largely in a com­
pensatory manner, with these mechanisms of attack and of de­
fence . )
D r Lewin's so-called 'dream screen' is 'distinguished from the
rest of the dream a nd defined as the blank background upon
which the dream picture appears to be p rojected . . . . It h as a
definite meaning in itself' . . . and 'represents the idea of "sleep " ;
i t is the element o f the dream that betokens the fulfilment of the
cardinal wish to sleep, which Freud considered responsible for
all dreaming . Also, it represents the m aternal breast, usually
flattened out, as the infant might perceive it while falling asleep.
I t appears to be the equivalent or the continuation, in sleep, of
the breast h allucinated in certain pre-dormescent states, oc­
casionally observed in a dults . ' * Whether or not the dream
screen is wel l authentic ated, it serves to i llustrate the formal
value to which I would point in aesthetic experience, usually
a ssociated \vith a subj ect-matter (the dream itself) . In such pro­
j ections the good breast is of an illimitable chara cter: art is here
j oi ned by religious a nd philosophical yea rning for the absolute,
so primitive and, some will think, so destructive of good sense in
a pretended context of universal truth . The superb p la ce for it is
i n useless a rt, h arnessed to a n equal emphasis upon object­
otherness . We must realize at the same time that more gen­
erally an oral character i n experience is very common; the
modes of i dentification necessary to culture and to cultural be­
h aviour in p art depend upon it.
Thus, in virtue of its form at least, a rt rehe arses favourable
rel ationships free of excessive persecution, greed, a nd envy. Con­
ventio n, s tylization, the power to generalize, a re among the
means of furthering the enwrapping component in aesthetic
form : where one line does the job of two, in a ny simplification,
we experience the emphasis upon singleness. But at the s ame
time the identical formal qualities, such as pattern, that lend
themselves to an envelopment t heme, a re the means also
for creating the object-otherness, independence, and self-con-

* B. D . Lewin, 'Inferences from the Dream Screen', In ternational

journal of Psycho-A nalysis, 1 948 .
98 The Na tu re of Art, Ill: Art and Psychoanalysis

tainment of the work of art : it 'works' on its own, 'functions' in

the way of an organism : this fantasy accompanies the one of our
being enveloped, but is connected with another that projects the
ego in terms of an integrated figure in which opposite charac­
teristics coalesce. The idea of beauty, I have said elsewhere,
projects the integrated ego in the terms of a corporeal figure.
I add this note in regard to Dr Lewin's description of his
drea m screen as a flattened breast. One thinks at once of
the flattened shapes especially of low relief in much art of the
world, particularly Quattrocento low reliefs, often of the
Mother and Child; and, more generally, one thinks of the pic­
ture plane in painting that is preserved at all costs by modern
art : more generally still, one thinks of the little recessions, lines,
and protuberances of pilasters, for instance, of the markings on
frieze or cornice, by which architecture reconstitutes the body.
I wrote many years ago : 'Architecture is a solid dream for those
who love it. One often wakes from sleeping vvithout any re­
collection of a dream but conscious of having experienced di­
rections and alternatives and the vague character of a weighty
impress in harmony with the non-figurative assertiveness of
building. In architectural experience, however, changing sur­
faces, in-out, smooth-rou gh, light-dark, up-down, all manner of
trustful absorption by space, are activated further than in a
dream; full cognizance of space is sign enough of being wide
awake . The state of sleep has thus been won for actuality.'
And so, too, I make bold to say, in art altogether.

[from Three Essays on the Painting of Our Time, 1 96 1 , pp . l-2 3]

12

The Two Approaches

A good drawing may be lascivious, but the artist will have
noted the cold facts, for instance the position of the navel in
respect to the nose (of course, there is a sense in which this is
not a cold fact), the relationship of key points in regard to verti-
 The Two Approaches 99

cal and horizontal lines . The character of the pose depends

upon a suspicious exactness in such matters, upon a power to
dismiss the model, to see her for some of the purposes of
draughtsmanship as made up of flat p atterns. Thus, an aspect of
the draughtsman's talent, meaningless by itself, is his facility to
see a hand not as a hand but as areas of tone from which he
extracts the pattern, the proportions, as well as the effect of
relief, wider truths of its appearance that serve also i n this kind
of drawing to mirror a n aspect of the inner world. These imper­
sonal-seeming preoccupations, together with the austere or 'geo­
metric' elements of design in general contribute to the resistant
armature of the aesthetic object. During another p art of the act
of drawing - it should of course be exercised at the same time -
when the artist makes marks for the folds of the stomach, say,
he is likely in fantasy to be digging i nto ·it. I find it difficult to see
how these attitudes could more than coexist, i n that they
illumine each other through their coordination, did not one of
them spell out the impervious endurance I have described under
the name of a minimum object.
But not every artist - and no artist all the time - has taken
full advantage of the hardiness latent in design and pattern : not
every artist predominantly grasps or twists his object while
trusting to this safeguard. My oldest contention i n this field is
that differences of approach between carving a nd modelling
characterize p ictorial conceptions as well as conceptions i n all
the other visual arts. The carver, in a manner more nearly con­
crete, is j abbing into a figure's stomach. The compensatory
emotion is his reverence for the stone he consults so long : he
elicits meaning from a substance, p recious for itself, whose sub­
sequent forms made by the chisel were felt to be p re-existent
and potential : similarly in p ainting there is the canvas, the rec­
tangular surface and the whiteness to fructify, a pre-existent
minimum structure that not only will be gradually affirmed
but vastly enriched by the coalescence with other mean­
ings. What a contrast, this side of art, to the summary, o mni­
potent-seeming aspect of creativeness, to the daring, the great
daring and plastic i mp osition that are even more character­
istic and far more easily recognized and applauded, qualities
100 The Na ture of Art, III: Art and Psychoanalysis

that cause us to clutch at them, or that tend to envelop us .

But i t has a lso a lways been my contention tha t some exercise
of both approaches must figure in visual a rt . Nevertheless, the
greatest exponents since the Renaissance of the ra re type of
painting tha t reveres outside objects for themselves, a l most to
the exclusion of projecting on to them more than the cor­
responding self-sufficient inner objects, ha ve had the least, or
else the tardiest, recognition of their suprema cy. Those im­
mense heroes of pa inting, Piero della Fra ncesca, Georges de l a
Tour, Vermeer,* were forgotten and rediscovered only i n the l ast
hundred years a t a time when texture, the heightened express­
ive use of the matiere of painting, a substitu te for pleasures i n
p a s t ages available from buildings, w a s m u c h o n the increa se.
Their rediscovery, then, points to the connection between this
care for materia l and a non-grasping approach in genera l , since
i t i s not a t all the surfa ce or texture of paintings by these Old
Masters tha t most characterizes, i n their case, the 'carving' atti­
tudes to objects .
I end invoking Piero, de la Tour, and Vermeer since it may be
opportune to reassert, in line with much I h ave written before
and with the p aper by D r Sega l, t tha t whatever the proj ection
of narrow compulsions to which I h ave referred, wha tever the
primitive a nd enveloping relationships tha t ensue, the recon­
s ti tu tion or restoration of the outside and independent whole
object (expressive equally of coordina tion in the ego) whether
founded entirely, or less founded, upon wha t I have ca lled mi ni­
mum or generalized or i deal and impersona l conceptions,
remains a paramount fu n ction i n art.

[from Pain ting an d the Inner World, 1 963, pp . 1 4- 1 6]

* See Lawrence Gowing, Vermeer (Lon don , 1 952).

t H. Sega l, 'A Psycho-Analytical Approach to Aesthetics,' in New
Directions in P$ycho-Analysis (London, 1 955).
13

The Invitation in Art

Since the ti me, nearly fifty years ago, that M arcel Duchamp
sent to an exhibition in New York a porcelain urinal (described
as a fountain) with the signature of the n1a nufacturer that he,
Duchamp, had attached in his own writing, we h a ve had a n
excellent occasion with which t o associ ate new reflections upo n
the values of art. We realize that adepts at sca n ning a n object
for the less immediate significance o f its shape, a manner of
looking at things that has been cultivated from looki ng at art,
\vill co ntemplate a multitude of obj ects, and certainly, in a n
august setting, the regular c urves and patterns o f light o n that
porcelain obj ect, with aesthetic prepossessions . With less
thought for the obj ect' s function tha n for its patterns a nd
shape, we project o n to them a significance learned from m a ny
pictures and sculptures . But a re we proj ecti ng separate experi­
ences of art; a re \Ve not proj ecting a n aspect of ourselves that
has alvvays been identified with them ; a nd is not the
identification an i ntegral fa ctor, therefore, of aesthetic ex­
perience and an a i m for art? This has seemed even more likely
si nce psychoa nalysis uncovered a mechanis1n called proj ective
identi fication by wh ich parts of oursel ves or of our i n ner
objects may be attributed even to outside obj ects that, u nlike
artif acts, at first s ight seem i nappropri ate for their reception. It
is possibly i n this n1a nner as well that we might discover our­
selves to be assimi lated i n a n acti ve aesthetic transformation of
the urinal, a n obj ect that does not itself communicate to us with
the eloquence of art. We, the spectators, do all the a rt-work i n
such a case, except for the isolating o f the object by the artist
for our attention.
Structure is ever a concern of a rt and must necessarily be seen
as symbolic of emotional patterns , of the psyche's organizatio n
with which we are totally i nvo l ved. This reference of the outer
to the inner has been much sharpened by psychoanalysis,
which tells, for i nstance, of parts of the self that are with
1 02 The Nature of Art, III: Art and Psychoanalysis

difficulty allied, that tend to be split off, a nd of i nternal figures

or objects tha t the self has . incorporated, with whi ch i t is i n
constant communi cation or forcible ex-communication. Pattern
a nd the making of wholes a re of i mmense psychical significance
i n a precise way, even apart from the drive towards repairi ng
wha t we have damaged or destroyed outside ourselves .
As distinct from projections that ensue upon a ny perceiving,
aesthetic projection, then, contai ns a heightened concern with
structure . The contemplation of many works o f art h as strength­
ened this habit. I think it i s so strong only because i n every i n­
stance of art we receive a persuasive i nvitation, of whi ch I shall
write in a moment, to p articip ate· more closely. I n this situation
we experience fully a correlation between the i nner and the
outer world whi ch is manifestly structured (the artist i nsists).
And so, the learned respo nse to that i nvitatio n is the aesthetic
way of l ooking a t an object. Whereas for this context i t is
simpler to speak of structure, of forma l rel ations, such a presen­
tation is far too n arrow. Communication by means of precise
i mages obtai ns similarly in art a wider reference whenever the
artist h as created for the experience he describes a n i m a gery to
transcend it, to embrace parallel kinds of experience that c a n be
sensed. Poetic a nalogy or image is apt; felici tous overtones co­
exist_: the musical aptness of expression h azards Wider con­
junctions tha n those i m mediately i n mind.
I n visual art, too, we see without difficulty that form and
representation enlarge each other's range of reference. Simi­
larly, the same formal elements are used to construct m ore tha n
o ne system o f rel atio nship within a p ainting i tself, a nd with us
who l ook at it. Whatever the total meani ng, the perenni a l
aspect reveals a heightened close connectio n between sensation
significance, that is to say, impa ct on the perceiving i nstrument
as it organizes the data, and more purely mental content that
we then apprehend in the outside terms of sensatio n
significance.
Referring to the character of perception, I have in m i nd what
might be ca lled the prej u di ces of vision u ncovered by psy cho­
logists . I take these 'prej u di ces' to be an important link between
the outer world and the emphatic projection thereon, in
 The Invita tion in Art 1 03

ordinary and i n aesthetic perception a like, of i nner process ..

The 'forces ' uncovered by the psychology of vision provide the
words, the language of visual art. Whereas wide disagreement
exists among psychologists as to the way that the visua l world
is perceived or constructed, none would deny, I believe, that the
perceiver p a rtici p ates in what might be called the quandary of
units of the visual field, which do not, or do not e asily, achieve
restful status . Thus, there is tension i n any perceived obliquity,
in any dep a rture from a n open framework : there is pull, di­
rection, the sense of weight and m ovement. Even a vertical el­
lipse strives upward in the top half, downward in the lower. A
verti c al l ine seems to be far longer than a hori zontal line of
equal length ; and so on. Such forces, such bents, I repeat, a re the
words, the l anguage, of visual art. Not only a re their i m­
plicati ons of direction, compression, weight, p ull, i nterference,
employed by the p ainter to communicate the sentiment of a
pictori al subject-matter, but they mirror, i n their i nter-working,
the power that one p art of the self, or one i nner object, can
exert over the others . Indeed, I hope it is not a n outrageous
conjecture concerning perception to say that stereotypes for
psychi c a l tensi on m ay be proj ected thereby, and that these pro­
j ections in s ome p art m ay h ave reinforced the perceptual bents
to which I am referring . In any c ase, whether or not i mmured
biologically in perception, i nterna l situ ations remark them­
selves therein. We a re dynamically i mplicated with visual
stress, p articularly with the enveloping use tha t art makes of it.
When the final balancing, the whole that i s m ade up of i nter­
acting p arts, i s suspended for a time by the i rregulari ties of
stresses, these s ame s tresses appear to gain a n overwhelming,
bl u rring, and unitary action inasmuch as the parts of a
composition a re thereby overrun, a nd i nasmuch as the spec­
tator's close p articip ation, as if with p art-obj ects, removes
distance between him a nd this seemi ng p rocess . Much of the
attraction of the sketch lies in this situation, whi ch arises also
whenever we think we find the a rtist a t work, i n his calligraphy
or flourish, his gesture or touch, and, even m ore genera lly, i n
the a ccentu ations of style . I have p articularly i n mind the ex­
treme example of Baroque p ai ntings with a diagonal recession,
1 04 The Nature of Art, III: Art and Psychoanalysis

invaded by a represented illumination, cast diagonally, that cuts

across figures, that binds the composition as a m ovement of
masses, w ithout respect for integrity of parts of the scene, of
distinct figures, voids and substances . A principle, a process at
work, seems to override the parts . It is one aspect of the 'paint­
erly' concept formulated by Wolfflin, in whi ch va lues of what
some psychologists have called 'the visual field' dominate certaj n
values in 'the visual world' of ordinary, everyday, perception.
We very often associate creativeness first of a l l with a n ability
to disregard an order elsewhere obtained, to ignore an itch for
finality in favour of a ha rder-won integration whose i mage may
still suggest a n overpowering process, no less tha n its in­
tegration with other elements .
Hence the invitation i n a rt, the i nvitation to i dentify em­
phatically - a vehemence beyond a n i denti fication with realized
stru cture - that largely lies, we sha ll see more fu lly, in a work's
suggestion of a process i n train, of transcending stress, with
which we may immerse ourselves, though it lies a lso i n that
capa cious yet keen bent for aptness, for the embracing as a
singleness of more than one content, of one mode for 'reading'
the elements of its construction, to which I have a lrea dy refer­
red in regard to form and i mage. Though they always have the
strong quality of coordinated objects on their own, the world's
a rtifacts tend to brj ng right up to the eyes the suggestion of
procedures that reduce the sense of their parti cu larity and
difference; even, in part, the difference between you and them,
though the state with which a work is manifestly concerned be
the coming of the rains, or redemption and damnati on, or the
long dominance of the dea d. Most p a i nting styles are what we
ca ll con ceptu a l : obj ects a re rendered u nder conformity to an
i dea of their genus, to hierarchic c oncepti ons (with a com­
parative neglect of individual a ttributes and changing ap­
pearances) favouring the power to lure us i nto an easy
i denti fication with an expression of attitude or mood. The de­
picting of incident thus receives a somewha t genera lized i m­
print, offers a rel ationship tha t at first glance saps the
symbolism of an existence vivi dly separate from ourselves . As
we merge with such an object, some of the sharpness that is
 The In vitation in Art 1 05

present when differentiation of the inner from the outer world

is more a ccentuated , the sharpness and multiplicity of the intro­
j ectory-proj ectory processes, a re at first minimized. Yet I shall
note, on the other hand, that under the spell of this enveloping
pull, the obj ect's otherness, and its representation of otherness,
a re the more poignantly grasped. But I want also to stress the
opposite point by i ndicating in naturalistic styles, which boast
far greater representation of the particular and of the inciden­
tal, that these works, if they are to be j u dged art, must retain,
and indeed must employ more industriously, procedures to
qualify the intimation of particularity, to counter the strong
impression of events entirely foreign to .oneself by an i m­
p ression of an envelopment that embraces distinctiveness.
I now call the envelopment factor in art - this compelling
invitation to identify - the incantatory process . I h ave often
written of it, principally in terms of part-obj ect relationship,
parti cularly of the prime enveloping relationship to the breast
where the work of art s-tands for the breast. I a dopt the word
'incantatory' to suggest the emphatic, i denti ficatory, pull upon
a depts, so that they are enrolled by the formal procedures, at
any rate, a nd then absorbed to some extent into the subj ect­
m atter on s how, a relationship through whose power each
content in the work of art can be deeply communicated. I sh all
try to indicate further methods and characteristics of visual a rt
whereby the incantatory process comes into being. I believe
that much formal structure has this employment, beside en­
tirely other employment, and that a part of the total content to
be communicated is often centred upon unitary or transcending
rel ationships, though they contrast with the work's coordi­
nation between its differing components, this, another content
no less primary, whereby the i ntegration of the ego's opposing
facets a nd the restored, independent obj ect can be symbolized. I
believe that the incantatory quality results from the equation
enlisted between the process of heightened perception by which
the willing spectator 'rea ds' a work of art - often with a
difficulty of whi ch the artist makes use to rivet attention to his
patterns - and inner as well as physical processes; an equation
constructed or reinforced by a t least an aspect of the formal
1 o6 The Nature of Art, III: Art and Psychoanalysis
treat1nent that encourages the sense of a process i n action.
There is vitality in common that suggests a unitary relation­
ship, as if the artifact were a p art-object.
I shall continue to touch on a few manifest elements in the
case of naturalistic art. For it goes without s aying that dance,
song, rhythm, alliteration, rhyme, lend themselves to, or create,
an incantatory process, a unitary i nvolvement, an elation if you
will. Thus when I wrote of this m atter in 1 95 1 , I did so in terms
of the manic. During the next year, 1 952, there appeared in the
International journal of Psycho-Analysis M arion Milner's p aper,
renamed in the Melanie Klein Symposium of 1 955, 'The Role of
Illusion in Symbol Formation', where, not only i n m.atters of
art, she emphasized a state of oneness as a necessary step in the
apprehension of twoness. Her key-word here is 'ecstasy' rather
than 'part-object' . Her p aper derived p artly from ideas she h ad
already put forward in her book, On Nat Being Able to Paint.
Of the principal aesthetic effects an incantatory element is
easiest grasped. By 'grasp' I refer a lso to being joined, enveloped,
with the aesthetic object. But whereas we easily experience . the
pull of pleasant, poetic, pictorial s ubject-matter - classical
i dylls, fetes champetres, and so on - there is not so much
readiness to appreciate the perennial existence of a wider incan­
tation that permeates pictorial formal language w:P.atever the
subject or type of picture. Similarly a poem, like a picture, prop­
erly appreciated, stands away from us as an object on its own,
but the poetry that h as gripped, the poetry of which it is com­
posed, when read as an unfolding process, combines with cor­
responding p rocesses by which we find ourselves to some extent
carried away, and that our i dentification with them will h ave
been essential to the subsequent contemplation of the work of
art as an i mage not only of an independent and completed
o bj ect but of the ego's integration . Since, as a totality, it is an
identification with the good breast, I have often submitted that
the identification with processes that are thought of as in train
allows a sense of nurture to be enjoyed from works of a rt, even
while we view them predominantly i n the light of their self­
sufficiency as restored, whole objects, a v alue that thereby we
are better prepared to absorb.
 The Invitation in Art 1 07

The first power that the work of art has over us, then, arises
from the successful i nvitation to enj oy relationship with de­
lineated processes tha t enliven our own, to enjoy subsequently,
as a nourishment our own corresponding processes, chiefly, it
appears to me, the rela tionships between the ego and its objects,
though concurrently the unitary power, i nseparable from p a rt­
obj ect relationship, that transcends or denies division and
differences . To take the i nstance once more of this last relation­
ship from painting, light and space-extension can be employed
to override each p arti cularity in favour of a homogeneity
with whi c h we ourselves are enveloped. And so, such effects i n
the picture - their variety i s vast - construct a n enveloping m ise
en scene for those processes i n ourselves that are evoked by the
picture's other connotations .
I t is easily agreed that pictorial composition induces images
of i nner process as we follow delineated rhythms, movements,
directions with their counter-directions, contrasts or affinities of
shape with their attendant voids, as well as the often precarious
bala n cing of masses . Predominant a ccents do not a chieve settle­
ment without the help of other, and perhaps contrary, refer­
ences : hence the immanent vitality, and a variety of possible
approaches i n analysing a composition; hence the ambiguity, i n
the sense o f a n oscillation o f attention, that others h ave noted in
the i nter-weaving of poetic images . It may be thought that this
will h ardly apply to the representation of balance between
s tatic, physical forms as opposed to the representation, in whi ch
n aturalisti c art excels, of movement or of stress and strain. Such
immobility, however, often i nvolves a sense of dragging weight,
of the curving or swelling of a contour with which \Ve deeply
concern ourselves, since we take enormous pleasure, where
good drawing makes it profitable, in feeling our way, in crawl­
i ng, as i t were, over a represented volume articulated to this
end; m any modes of draughtsmanship, or of modelling, may
invite a very primitive, a nd even blind, form of exploration. In
one of their aspects, too, relationships of colour and of texture
elicit from us the s ame sense of process, of development, of a

form growing from a nother or entering and folding up into it.

And, as I have said, we find ourselv.es traversing represented
1 08 The Nature of Art, III: Art and Psychoanalysis
dista nces, perhaps enveloped by a n overpowering diffusion of
light . Finally architecture, possessor of many bodily references,
mirrors a dynami c or evolving process as well as the fact of
construction .
It is necessary to repeat that the u nitary relationship between
ourselves and on-going processes represented by the aesthetic
object contrasts with the integration of its parts, for which we
va lue it as a model of a whole and separate reconstituted object.
In a combi nation that art offers, we find a record of pre­
dominant modes of relationship, to part-obj ects as well as to
whole obj ects .
I want now to remark an aspect of visual a rt con nec ted with
what I have called the quandaries a nd prej udices of visual ex­
perience that provide the possibi lity of a stressed language . One
exploitation of these quandaries lends itself to catharsis of ag­
gression, even of a mutilating urge that, paradoxically, is some­
times more characteristic of naturalistic art than of a ny other.
Extreme foreshortening has been described by Arnheim * as
'contraction, like a charged spring' . He also speaks, not a l­
together without j ustice, of 'the rearrangement of organic parts
through projective overlapping - hands sprouting from behi nd
the head, ears attached to the chin, knees adj oining the chest.
Even the most daring modern artists h ave rarely matched the
paradoxical reshuffling of the human limbs that has been p re­
sented as an accurate i mitation of nature ' , doing violence to
simple patterns of structure, a desired norm - it is sometimes
thought - for vision.

It may be useful to specify for a moment, if only with a h andful

of examples .
I refer very briefly to the place of the u nita ry breast principle
in proto-Renaissance and early Renaisssance naturalis m . John
White has described a 'growing tendency to move from the idea
of things surrounded by space towa rds that of space enclosing
and uniting things' t i n much a rt of fourteenth-century Florence
* R. Arnheim, Art an d Visual Percep tion (London, 1 956) .
t John White , The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Sp ace (London,
1 95 7) .
 The Invitation in Art 1 09

and Siena . The representing of space would much l ater become

wholly an enveloping agent, sometimes an aggressive scoop to
carry us into distan ce, to go far beyond the canvas. But earlier,
in the protoperspective space bedecked or jewelled by Giotto,
Duccio, and the Lorenzetti, there exists no such m a nipulati on
or destruction of the picture surface. Moreover, at the very
same time that geometric perspective was institutionalized as a
cult i n the first half of the :fifteenth century, there c ame about
at the hands of those who worshipped there, p articularly
Piero 's, a supreme use of colour, an echo between forms and
intervals, whereby an e quality for each shape, a lack of em­
phasis throughout the p atterning, preserved an unified com­
plexity o f picture plane : a miraculous solution of conflicting
data, perceptual and physical, and hence of picture-making.
Piero's own books reveal that he estimated perpective not at all
for the new p ower at the artist's command of trompe l'oeil, but
for the extension of harmony and proportion, of the laws of
opti cs, and, indeed, of a mathematically ordained universe to be
learned now fully from the i mage, the painting, no less than
from visual experience of whi c h it served as an image.
Thereafter, overpowering uses for perspective h ave some­
times been developed. Similarly, though little apparent until
much later, from the time of Leonardo there has been some
breaking down of the constancies that characterize the visual
world, by means of the full employment of chiaroscuro, by
means of i nsistence on a full tonal range that disregards the
conventional aspect of an obj ect usually seen to be constant
whatever the illumination, j ust as perspective often utterly
distorts, neglects, a c haracteristic shape of an object on which
conceptual art lingers . Although the psychology of ordinary
vision does not support it, the abstract quality of s uch observa­
tion, analytic and truthful, has ennobled pictorial inci dent.
Indeed, out of the requirement for enveloping values amid the
pursuit of naturalistic detail, European a rtists particularly h ave
uncovered a degree of triteness in the constancies through j ust
observations and through the bold, embracing techniques to
which they could then proceed. If what they have thus isolate d
i n the name of naturalism has tended t o disrupt both the picture
I ro The Nature of Art, III: Art and Psychoanalysis
plane and the enduring character of the represented objects as
suc h, these same events h ave called forth unparalleled efforts
for their restoration in a new, and i ndeed more truthful, situ­
ation of quandary, truthful especially i n regard to the conflicts
of the i nner life . Hence the greatness, o n the whole, of our art
since the Renaissance, as well as the utter degradation to which
it is pro ne.

I h a ve been describing the suggestion of an overpowering

process in the painter's deployment of perceptual truth that h as
been largely ignored in the exercise of p ractical perception . I
use the word 'process' because the overpowering is felt to be
going o n by the spectator. I turn now to the m ajor overall
process, a reparation, i n which both the good breast and the
whole, independent m other m ust figure, a reparation de­
pendent, it seems to me, upon i nitial attack. I believe that i n the
creation of art there exists a preliminary element of acting out
of aggression, an actin g o ut that then accompan ies reparative
transformatio n, by which i nequalities, tension and distortion,
for i nstance, are i ntegrated, are m ade to 'work' . I have long held
the distinction between carving and modelling to be generic in
an application to all the visual a rts . These two activities h ave
many differences from the psychological angle, fi rst, I think, in
t he degree and quality of the attack upon the m aterial. Simi­
larly, this difference of attack is relevant to the old distinction
between the decorative and the fine arts where an increase of
attack calls forth a n increase of creativeness . But i f decoration
titillates, ornaments, the medium, and if larger creativeness may
to some considerable extent oppose its native state, I believe
that every work of art must include both activities .
A p ainter, then, to be so, must be cap able of perpetrating de­
facement; though it be defacement i n order to add, create,
transform, restore, the attack is defacement none the less . The
loading of the surface of the canvas, or the forcing upon this
flat, white surface of an o verpowering suggestion of per­
spective, depth, the t hird dimension, sometimes seems to be an
enterprise not entirely dissimilar to a twisting of someone's
arm. I am inclined to think that, more than anything else, the
 The Invita tion in Art III

defacement involved of the picture plane accounts for the tardy

arrival in pictorial art of an entirely coherent linear per­
spective . From many angles, extreme illusionism is an extreme
form of art, not least in the aggressive and omnipotent attitude
to the materials employed. Many - every month many more -
materials are now consciously respected, set-off, in our art
today; thus made purposive, their n aked character bears
witness to an independence of these obj ects . We often de..
precate an entire disguise of the canvas's flatness; we advocate
'preservation of the picture plane ' . But whereas the p aint, for
instance, stays paint in s uch works, a l arge p art of the i mpact
upon us may p roceed fro m the fact that the canvas is so heavily
loaded and scored. Alw ays the strong impact of which de­
facement, I am convinced, is an attribute. It is 'seconds out of
the ring' for every writer as he opposes his first unblemished
sheet, innocent of his graffiti. I t is even harder to begin to paint.
With the first mark or two, the canvas has become the arena in
which a retaliatory bull has not yet been weakened; no sub­
stantial assault, no victory, has begun. If a p ainter be so blatant,
so hardy, as to fling, almost heedlessly, upon the canvas, a
strong impact, he will at best create an enveloping or tran­
s cendental effect of omnipotence.
Pictures in a gallery, even the pictures in the National Gal­
lery, make an ugly ensemble; as an ensemble the bare walls
would be more pleasing. There is no doubt that the most beauti­
ful ensembles of p aintings are of those that are abstract and
thinly worked, unaggressive in colour. A Ben Nicholson exhi­
bition vivifies the walls on which it is hung. Some kinds of ab­
stract painting, then, emp loy a very subtle attack . But we soon
reach the strange conclusion that if attack be reduced below
a certain minimum, art, creativeness, ceases; equally, if sen­
sibility o ver the fact of a ttack is entirely lulled, denied. The
plainer tricks of perspective drawing can be easily learned and
then i mposed, should the knack be greedily appropriated with­
out a thought for the numbing distortion of the surface thus
worked, and so without aesthetic sensibility. A p ractised artist
will have become habituated, of course, to his bold marks . But
he cannot be a good artist unless at one time he reckoned p ain-
1 12 The Na tu re of Art, III: Art and Psychoanalysis

fully with the conflicting emotions that underlie his transform­

ations of material, the aggression, the power, the control, as well
as the belief in h is own goodness and reparative aim. The ex­
ercise of power alone never makes art : indeed it reconstructs the
insensitive, the manic, and often, strangely, the academic. Art
requires full-dress rehearsal of varied methods that unify
conflicting trends . Such presentation causes composition, the
binding of themati c m aterial, to be widely evocative . This is
more clearly shown in musi c than i n the other arts . Musi­
cologists tend to discover that, whereas construction is easily
analysed from a vari ety of angles, the creative element, that
distinguishes a coherent web from clever dovetailing, in general
eludes analysis . Hence a vague appeal, s ometimes, to 'organic
unity' . I believe that it is possible to be more specific in speaking
of the deep charging of these sense-data with emotive
signi ficance, whereby the deployment of formal attributes
becomes a vivid language, that is to s ay, symbols of obj ects, of
relatio nships to objects and of pro cesses enwrapping objects,
inner as well as outer. The word 'symbol' here does not indicate
parallel structures, but structures wherein the component parts,
though possessing no correspondence with the component parts
of the original objects, are interlocked and interrelated with an
intensity, sharpness, regret, or other feeling-tone that belong at
least to one aspect o f the original object-relationships, especially
to the fact of their coexistence, interpolations, and variety.
Whereas the fi nished work, or the work as a whole, sym­
bolizes integration, once a gain while we contemplate and follow
out the element of atta ck and its recompense, we are in touch
with a process that seems to be happening on our looking, a pro­
�ess to which we are j oined as if to an alternation of part-objects .

A t t h e beginning of this chapter I s a i d that naturalistic art h ad

need, ipso facto, for p articular exertion in initi ating the i ncan­
tatory process, since its apparent aim sharpens the otherness of
a represented incident or scene. In conclusion, and to sum up, I
think I can now better make clear, in one i nstance of a represen­
tational aim on which everyone is agreed, how these two objec­
tives are combined.
 The Invitation in Art I 13

Consider i n painting the third dimension, the suggestion of

depth. No painting of whatever kind, with any merit, is abso­
lutely flat in effect. There will be at least a suggestion of oscil­
lation; something tends to come forward, in a manner that
intrigues the senses, in front of something else, though, in gen­
eral, there be no attempt to disguise the flatness of the picture
plane . The surf ace itself seems to have bulk. Thus, at any rate to
a limited degree, illusionism, a mas tery in isolating general­
izations that convey it, are inseparable from painting and from
the artist's sense of a creative act in his determination to dis­
cover effects for the paint that are revivifying . More clearly
in naturalistic painting, the first test of its merit is the degree to
which we become attached to the turn of the contours, the
degree to which we are corn pelled to feel our way into spaces,
whether populated or whether empty of shapes . This matter is
at the heart of painting on a flat surface, distinguishing its
appreciation from an apprehension of landscape itself which
the eye constructs and contemplates without ado as a three­
dimensional datum .
But there are many more ways of intriguing the spectator of
a p ai nting with space than by a pedestrian representation of
depth. I h ave emphasized the desirability of preserving the pic­
ture plane. Yet I want now to restrict the matter to the tra­
ditional aspect, the aspect dear to art schools at any rate until
very recently, the aspect of which I have been reminded by a
gay bit of painting of a Mediterranean harbour that I saw i n a
cafe. One often sees such decoration, boldly painted, perhaps
without much effort and even without a visit to the south. The
interesting point is that the example I have in mind, and prob­
ably most examples to be found in similar places, have no
aesthetic merit, far less than photographs which, for the most
p art, lack that element of assertive handiwork by which the
artist points to his invitation. What is so wrong with the paint­
ing, what is the most obvious reason for lack of worth? Colour,
design, and application of p aint are not objectionable. But the
aesthete would sacrifice these merits, if such they be, to the
s lightest poignancy in the suggestion of space . Don't mis­
understand me. There is a quay, and a boat with gay sails in the
I 14 The Nature of Art, III: Art and Psychoanalysis

water j ust behind it. You can't mistake the scene. The aesthete
attaches not the slightest merit to that : nothing he values can be
read into the s cene since, for the moment, he p laces no value o n
blue waters, slim boats, and pretty sails in themselves. Before he
can estimate and relate these things, h e wants to be i nduced to
feel his way over the stones of the quay, bit by bit. Again, he is
not interested in the stones of the quay : h e is interested i n the
breadth to the water's edge, and then in the breadth of the
water between quay and boat; he wants to swim, as it were, in
the empty air above them, yet again he won't mind if that
which he contemplates does evocative service for, but hardly
looks like, the width of a quay. There are so many ways, and
always new ways, of commenting upon space, and any one of
them for the moment will suffice. We want to be certain that
the matter has absorbed the artist and to identify with him; we
want to feel volume, density, and the air it displaces, to recog­
nize things perhaps in the manner of the h alf-blind; we demand
to be drawn in among these volumes, almost as if they were
extensions of ourselves, and we do not tire of this process, the
incantatory process at work. It is at work only because the
canvas face is, in fact, flat. At the same time the restored other­
ness of things is asserted by t hese same means of true draughts­
m anship, the means of all good drawings w hether of things or
of the figure; at the heart of aesthetic value. Surface v alue and
depth value go h and in h and. For it is obvious that the
,
representation of space, of depth, reflects a metaphor so un­
avoidable that one suspects it to be the consequence of a very
old piece of concrete thinking concerning 'the layers in depth'
of our m ental life and individuality.
Nevertheless, incantatory rhythm and movement should be
approached as well from an opposite viewpoint that reveals the
vibrancy and volume of objects endowed with t hese qua lities.
The felicity of art lies in its sustaining power, in a markedly
du al content, in multiple forms of expression within one bound­
ary that harmonize. I t demands usually very h ard work on the
p art of a mentality not easily seduced and s atisfied by its own
products. Self-expression and art are not synonymous. Art, we
h ave seen, is mastery within the mode of certain emphases
 The Invitation in Art 1 15

upon reconstruction. Whatever else i t makes known, art trans­

mits an enticing eloquence in regard to the varied attachment to
obj ects, and in regard to the coordin ation of the self.

Since the context has been created, I want to a dd a note con­

cerning an emphasis in our surroundings. I think that normal
e nvironment has always brought h ome to i nhabitants both the
otherness of things and the sense of processes that echo or am­
plify i nner processes as s uch, a nd even dreams as such, though
these meanings may merely alternate. On the other h and, I be­
lieve that everything we feel to be out of h armony with the
body's image a nd with the ways of natural growth or change,
everything we feel today to be h arshly mechanical, mirrors, in a
one-sided manner, a n unsettlement of the i nner life. I n his p aper
on 'The Uncanny' ( 1 9 1 9), Freud constructed an equation be­
tween the psychologically p rimitive and what appears weird,
o utlandish, unheimlich, u nhomely. Similarly, when con­
templated as a series, the mech a nical apparatus that s urrou nds
and supports our modem living, instead of s timulating a pre­
ponderant s ense of otherness as the res ult of a n unp aralleled
organization of o uter substances, tends rather to suggest abrupt
experiences that are both s tranger tha n this and nearer to us,
though without the i nsinuating quality of the incantatory
pro cess in art, a setting for further content. I n the e nvironment
to which I now refer, there is no provision beyond the shock of
it. The beauty in our streets is mostly the one of glitter, of
flashing lights; surprising, momentary signals of a confusing
ramification within, yet we a re arrested by a sense neither of
depth nor of surface . I h ave spoken, i n regard to art, of an
enveloping effect that accomp anies a represented movement. I n
our towns today We are largely s trangers t o s tillness, t o delib­
erateness and silence. From the s treet, even buildings appear to
be but boundaries or targets for the movements of traffic,
whereas, in the days of the horse's clop-clop, o ne moved within
the circulation of a whole mother who still reigned fi tfully. The
same h arsh h allucinatory quality, from the a ngle of utter con­
templation, that is - not everyone is prepared to contemplate it
at all - i nevitably characterizes much modern art of merit.
I 16 The Na ture of Art, III: Art and Psych oanalysis

The words 'humanist' and 'humanism' a re h a rd to define.

Whatever may be meant, I am convinced tha t a desideratum for
the humanist is an environment stimul ating awareness of other­
ness i n harmony with hopes of an integrated obj ect, outer as
wel l as inner. I f the depressive position itself implies humanist
attitudes for the adult who has embraced i t wel l , the para noid­
schi zoid position, to which the enveloping mechanisms and dis­
connecting noises of limitless cities pay court, certainly does
not. In the old days, art was a means of organizing the i n ca n­
tatory element that h a d been felt in the length of land or in the
restless sea . Today art is entirely outmoded in the choice of such
phenomena by the s cintill ating l a ck of limitation of urban
things in general ; though it strai ns a l l the time to keep u p . But,
of course, in art there exist contempla tive purpose, organ­
ization, a degree of wholeness . That is why art is no less a solace
now, and perha ps little less an a chi evement, than i n great ages.

[from The Invitation in Art, 1 965, pp . 1 3-30]

1 4-
Art and the Body

(i)

The basic architecture of the vis u a l arts depends upon the many
a lternations such as repose and movement, density and space,
light and dark, tha t underlie composition, none of whi ch can be
divorced initially from the sense of intera cting textures . Aesthe­
ti c appreciati on h a s an i dentical root : it is best nurtured by
architecture, the i nescapable Mother of the Arts . Indeed, the
ideal way to experience p ainti ng i n Italy is fi rst to examine olive
terraces and their farms, then fine streets of the plain houses,
before entering a gallery. As far as the streets are concerned a
simHar procedure can be recommended for Holland i n prep­
aration for Rembrandt and Vermeer. It is not a coincidence that
what we now call Old Amsterdam was rising above smooth
water in Rembrandt' s day . Much existed on his canv a s, in the
 Art and the Body r r7

character of the s urface, before he started to particularize, to

pai nt.
Now, i f we are to allot pre-eminence i n aesthetic form to an
underlying image of the body, we must distinguish two aspects
of that i mage, or, rather, two i mages which are joined in a work
of art. There is the aspect which leads us to experience from art
a feeling of oneness with the world, perhaps not dissimilar from
the experience of mystics, of i nfants at the breast and of every­
one at the deeper points of sleep . We experience it to some
extent also from p assion, m anic states, intoxication, and
perhaps during a rare m oment in which we have truly accepted
death; above all, from states of physical exaltation and catharsis
whose rhyth1n has once again transcribed the world for our
possession and for its possessiveness of us ; but only in con­
templating works of art, as well as n ature, will all our faculties
have ful l play, will we dis cover this kind of contemplation i n
company with the counterpart that eases the m ani c trend . I
refer to the measured impact o f sense-data that distinguishes the
communi c ating aesthetic experience from the messages of ec­
stati c or dreamy states : I refer to the otherness apprehended i n
the full perceptions by which art is made known . A n element o f
self-s ufficiency wi ll inform our i mpression of the whole \vork of
art as well as of turned phrases and fine pass ages . The poem, the
sum-total, h as the articulation of a physical object, whereas the
incantatory element of poetry ranges beyond, ready to i nter­
penetrate, to hypnotize . Or perhaps precise and vivid images, a n
enclosed world fed by metre, serve a sentiment that is
indefinable, permeating, unspoken. Space i s a homogeneous
medium i nto which we are drawn and freely plunged by m any
representations of visual art ; at the same time it is the mode of
order and distinctiveness for separated objects . Musical en­
se1nbles create p erspectives for the ear : as well as the 'music',
the enchantment, the magic, there i s the exactness of rhythm,
harn1ony, counterpoint, texture, and the enclosed pattern of
symphonic shape, handy as a coin. We are presented with dis­
cipli ne, articulation, separateness, and with a blurring i ncan­
tation th at sucks us i n, at the s ame time, gives us suck,
communicates, however staid the style, a rhythmic flow. The
l 18 Th e Nature of Art, III: Art and Psych oanalysis
strength of these effects will differ widely, but the work of art
must contain some argument for all of them .
There is, then, i n a rt a firm allia nce between generality and
the obdura te otherness of objects, as if a n alliance, in regard to
the body, between the positive rhythmic experiences of the
infa nt at the brea st and the subsequent appreciation of the
w hole mother's sepa rate existence (also internalized), complete
to herself, uninj ured by his aggressive or appropri ating fa ntasies
that had caused her disappearance (though i t was for one
moment) to be mourned as the occasion of i rreparable l oss :
there is the suggestion of oneness, and the insistence on the
rea lity of otherness if only by the self-inclusive obj ect-chara cter
of the a rtifa ct itself.
And so, these good and rea ssuring experiences, the basis of
object-relationship, a re used aesthetically as the c over for all
manner of experience (i.e. they inspire conceptions of sty le
even those predominantly h ieratic or a nti-corporeal and ab­
stra ct; govern the treatment of subject-matter). Thi s is the prac­
ti cal i dealism of a l l a rt which says 'in order to live we must
somehow thrive'. The a rtist is compelled to overcome de­
p ressive fa ntasies by making amend (often, a s i n the Re­
naissance. by presenting with a n air of ease the surprising
and the di fficult), the amend that a rticulates together a n all­
embra cing physical entity \Vith bodi ly separateness, recon­
stru ctions of i nternalized good objects, threatened by the bad.
Content, subject-matter, m ay be u nredeemed; forma l m agic
must rule over the pressures of cultu re. Obviously, art is n ot
planned on tactics of avoidance. The artist has recognized our
common sense of l oss i n a deep l ayer of his mind. Michelangelo,
i t is manifest, forged beau ty out of confli ct (not by denying
conflict) . The disguises of art reveal the artist; they do not
betray him . It can less often be said of the a ctivities of others .

[from Michelangelo, 1 9 55, pp . 65-7]

(ii)
The balanced emotional estimation of the body is an ide a l . One
may doubt whether any h u m a n being has attained entire i n­
tegration of those hidden feelings . It remains the quest, an
 Art and the Body I 19

impetus o f adult search i ncl uding the one of a rt. Indeed the
contribution of art is quickly apparent; for i nstance i n regard to
the huge concern p articularly of the infant a nd the child - a
concern, therefore, that will always considerably persist - about
the inside of the body, though the nearest even to an i ntuitive
formulation at which most people arrive i s i n the context of
hypochondria and psychosomatic illness when these conditions
h ave been recognized for what they are.
Whereas the art of the written word i s with diffic ul ty a nd
indirectness centred on this m atter, portraits and p aintings of
the figure are less h ard to i nterpret. Rembrandt, it seems to me,
painted the female nude as the s agging repository of jewels a nd
dirt, of fabulous babies and m agical f aeces despoiled yet l ater
repaired and restored, a body often flacci d and creased yet sti l l
the desirable source of a s carred bounty : not the bounty o f the
perfected, stable breast housed in the temple of the integra ted
psyche that we possess in the rounded forms of classical art, but
riches and drabness j oined by the infant's i nterfering envy,
sometimes with the c h aracter of an oppressive weight or list­
lessness left by his thefts. There supervenes, none the less, a
noble a cceptance of ambivalence i n which love shines.
Thi s is not necessarily to h int a t Rembrandt's emotional
equipment nor to stigmatize a bias in seventeenth-century
Northern European c ulture . On the contrary the contrasti ng
classical conception is very rare : it i s far more common to dis­
cover in a rt the i mplication with the i ns ide of the body : we
a ccept it that the Athenian a ch ievement is without p arallel a nd
that the emp tiness and fals ity to which the Greek i deal would
often be reduced (though the i nspiration will never disappear)
could c ause i t to be less a c cessible even to some who, like Rem­
brandt, studied and borrowed from classical composition, learn­
ing especially how to a chieve the l ook of i nevitability whereby
to dominate the l arger aspects of design.
Rembrandt constructed a stable format out of contrary
emotions, from a varied h u ma n condition to which he a llowed
by the granular additiveness of his technique, the progression to
a munificence that crowns other i mpressions like a gratitude
that h as final ly overcast an envy. He has s hown in s um, as Ken-
1 20 The Na ture of Art, IIJ.: Art and Psychoanalysis
neth Clark said of his portraiture, 'the raw material of grace' ,
strands of negative feeling, for instance, about the body limited
to the original zones, a process that will have entailed some
with drawal of those parts of the self that h ave been sent into
th e obj ect to plunder or to command; for otherwise the
affirmation th at I am I and they are they, an objective of art,
cannot be clearly stated.
We are intact only in so far as our objects are intact. Art of
whatever kind bears witness to intact objects even when the
subj ect-matter is disintegration. Wh atever the form of tran­
script th e original conservation or restoration is of the mother's
body. And whereas pictorial art employs and s timulates those
infantine fa ntasies - they are many - that utilize the eyes for
omnipotent projections, for omniscience, it enlarges upon the
rea ssuring endurance of objects in the shadow of this attack :
they are enthroned by the artist by means of a pictorial settle­
ment wherein they may surrender themselves only to th at
multi-form compositi on which symbolizes the integrated ele­
ments of the self no less than of the other person .
And yet almost every product of the body as well as disease,
malform ation, malfunction, and the inside itself (apart from an­
cient bone) continues to revolt us since we are implic ated; not so
much because we belong to a similar vulnerable organism but
because atta cking wishes have caused the imperfection of
others to appear revengeful : that imperfection is likely to
reflect also our own, split off in accordance with the necessi ties
of narcissistic estimates . Every virtue resides or is symbolized
in th e flesh together with all humiliation, threat, and squalor. A
moment of active grandeur may come with birth of the baby
from inside ; birth is someti mes a supreme event for the p arents'
reconci li ation of fantasies about the body. Adult sexuality,
adult love, can make every endowment commensurate. On the
other h a nd an access of virtuosity for confusion and splitti ng
m a y ch a ra cterize this sph ere . Success, full sa tisfaction, depends
upon the disposition thereby involved of the early psychic
structures regarding the body. As heretofore, not only do we
proj ect but we i ntroj ect, including our own proj ections with
their obj ects . Others, or parts of others, a re inside us; parts of
 Art and the Body I2I

our bodies sometimes merit a double nomenclature : nor are

these str angers likely to be at peace.
The medical view of the body is the most vivid and careworn
of unemotional systems, a routine insistence tha t the body is a
valuable m achine. Concomitant with the growth and triumph
of science there has occurred in cul tu re a boastful surrender to
the omnipresence of fantasy and finally in our own time a plain
admission of compulsiveness . This, in my view, is the essence
and origin of the Romantic Movement in the shadow of which
we sti l l l ive . The growth of s cience a nd the first rumbling of the
Industrial Revolution kil led the Enlightenment, the Age of
Reason. As we have noted i n the use to which a ctuality i s put
by the art of collage, actuality, and therefore the gaze of science,
isolates a nd elicits fantasy as a stupendous force . A part of the
aesthetic stress upon the actual is stress upon the corporeal con­
tent in fantasy.
We h ave learned that to examine how scored and pitted
smooth ski n looks under the microscope does not help us to
conceive the satin flesh as leather, to l ink conceptions of youth
and age, to j oin our feelings about a ttractiveness and about
repulsiveness in a form of truth or j ust a ccountancy. Yet even
the handshake points to the expectation of a fundamental
warmth, a requirement that never passes though it conflicts
with a variety of contrary feel ings about the person. Many have
tried, therefore, when genital a ttraction is not notably involved,
to value not the body but its animation, the life infusing the
carcass that cannot i n fact be separated from it. The once useful
conception, the 'sou l ' , is entirely outmoded in an age whose
range of a ctualities continues to i ncrease. We cannot dissociate
people from their physical presence and we may sometimes fail
to dissociate the presence that they present to us from the life
of their persons under all circumstances. Narcissisti c esteem,
self-love, a fount of w arm and generous estimates, does not
confine its dealings to the sou l . Love is as comprehensive as
h ate, though even within the narrow gauge that we are set by
our compulsions there is much concerning which our feelings
fluctuate. The intact objects, works of art, are a model for the
direction of those feelings, not so much in reference to people
1 22 Th e Nature of Art, III: Art and Psychoanalysis
specifically loved or h ated but in the m atter of the persons of
our fellow-men more generally. A degree of education is possible
and any profit from it may accrue to the intense relationships
also. It is therefore i mportant to discover in art the recounting
of all aspects that the body h as possessed, the inside (as seen
from without) as well as the outside. (Thus the glimmering or
tufted finery that clothes m any sombre Rembrandt figures can
mirror the character of inner objects for whose state the indi­
vidual is massively responsible.)
It is for such communication, however recondite, that we
scan good portraits . At any rate we learn to see the spirit, the
animation, in terms of art's inoffensive m aterial. That material
stands for the body whether or not it has been used to represent
the body. Art, truly seen, is never ghostly; and art, truly seen,
does not so much educate us about animation, about the mind
or spirit, about the intentions of others good or bad in which we
find a source of persecutory feeling or of trust, as about the
resulting body-person, about the embodiment that is much
more than an embodiment because bodily attributes h ave
always been identified with those intentions . A painting of the
nude, therefore, is but one of the corporeal lessons set by art.
There is a sense in which all art is of the body, particularly so in
the eyes of those who accept that the p ainted surface and other
media of art represent as a general form, which their employ­
ment particul arizes, the actualiti es of the hidden psychic struc­
ture made up of evaluat ions and fantasie s with corpore al
content.

[from Reflections on the Nude, 1 967, pp . 36-40]

15

From ' The Imag e in Form'

Often in a talk about art we get a t least a partial division of

formal attributes from representation . We say the formal re­
lationships organize the representation, the images, on view.
That's the traditional approach. On the other hand, in the
theory of Significant Form, form is isolated from imagery, from
the construction of likeness in visual terms .
I am going to argue that formal relationships themselves
entail a representation or imagery of their own though these
likenesses are not as explicit as the images we obtain from what
we call the subject-matter. When later I shall refer to Cezanne's
Bathers in the National Gallery, I shall suggest that there is far
more imagery in this picture than the imagery of nudes in a
landscape, a more generalized imagery, with references to all
sorts of experiences, which proceeds from the formal treat­
ment. Now I think one can say that that's obvious and indeed
that it is presumed in the work of all the best writers today on
current art; but it doesn't seem to have given rise to a really
wide investigation of what is involved. I am going to make some
suggestions about this.
The phrase 'the i mage in form' cropped up when I was asked
to decide between two constructions at a Soto exhibition. They
a re made of projectin g square plaques against a background of
black and white lines . I said I thought one communicated a

stronger image than the other. It suggested an image for an

amalgam of experiences, even though that impression had not
been achieved by the creation of a correspondence with recog­
nized events as is the case where you have a subject-matter. I
found this abstra ct work to possess an image all the same,
whose character would not be altogether dissimilar in the long
run for those who are able to lend themselves to abstract art.
Formal a rrangements can sometimes transmit a durable
i mage. That is not merely to say th at they are expressive . There
is a sense in which every object of the outside world is express-
1 24 The Nature of Art, Ill: Art and Psychoanalysis
ive since we tend to endow natural things, any piece of the
environment, with our associations to i t, thereby constructing
an identity additional to the one generally recognized. At
heightened moments anything can gain the a ura of a personage .
But in art it should not be we who do all the imaginative work
in this way. The better we understand a rt the less of the content
we impose, the more becomes commu nicated. In adopting a n
aesthetic viewpoint - this, indeed, i s a necessary contribution
on our p art - which we have learned from studying many
works of art, we discover that to a considerable extent our at­
tention is confined to the relationship of forma l attributes and
of their image-creating relevance to the subj ect-matter. The
work of art should be to some extent a stra it-j acket in regard to
the eventual images that it is most likely to induce . Obviously
any mode of feeling can be communicated by a rt, perh aps even
by abstract a rt. Nevertheless the personification of this message
in the terms of aesthetic form constru cts a simulacrum, a pre­
sence that qualifies the image of the pa ramount feeling ex­
pressed. The feeling takes to itself as a crowning attribute more
general images of experience . Form, then, ultimately constructs
an i mage or figure of which, in art, the expression of particular
feeling avails itself. A simple instance lies with Bonnard, with
the shape of hats in his time that approximated to the sh ape of
the head and indeed of the breast. He seems to coordinate ex­
perience l argely through a n u nenvious and loving a ttitude to
this form . He is equa lly i nterested in a conc ave rounded sh ape .
Again, when we kno\v \Ye l l an a rtist and his work we may
sense that among the chara cteristic forms he makes some at
least are tied to an image of his own physique or of a personal
aspect in his physical responses . This also would be a n instance
of form as an agent which, through the mea ns of the artist's
personality as an evident first step in substantiation, a llows him
to construct from psychical and emotional as well as physical
concatenations a thing that we tend to read as we rea d a face. A
face records more experience than its attention at the moment
we look at it.
Perhaps all we demand of a work of art is that it should be as
a face in this sense. But form in the widest sense of all, as the
 From ' The Image in Form ' 1 25

attempted organization tha t rules every experience, must obvi­

ously give rise to a strong and compelling imagery so general­
ized tha t it can hardly be a bsent from a consciousness i n
working order though ordinari ly present in nothing like the
aesthetic strength , since were it otherwise, refreshment and en­
couragement that we gain from art would not be necessary .
Form must possess the chara cter o f a compelling apparition, a nd
it is easy to realize that it is the i con of coordination.
Integration or coordination of what? it will be asked. Some
aspect, I have argued elsewhere, of the integration of experi­
ence, of the self, with which is bound up the integrity of other
people and of other thi ngs as separate, even though the artist
has identi fied an aspect of himself with the object, has
transfixed the object with his own compulsion, though not to
the extent of utterly overpowering its otherness . These per­
ceptions of relationship that are the basis of a minimum s anity
dema nd rein forcement . Outwardness, a physi cal or concrete
adaptation of relationship, spells out enlargement, means cer­
tainty .
It must appear a strange suggestion th at art i s i n any way
bent �pon constructing an image for san ity, however minimal,
in view of the wild unbalanced strains of feeling th at h ave so
often been inseparably employed in making this image. But
surely if a rt allows not only the extremity of expressiveness but
the most conclusive mode, if it constructs of expressiveness an
enduring thing, that mode must incorporate an element to tran­
scend or ennoble a p articular expressiveness of which otherwise
we should soon tire . We a re encouraged to experience a many­
sided apprehension in art. Expressiveness - it may be i nfantile -
becomes valu able in evolving the mature embrace by form .
In the case of abstract art we are sometimes told by the a rtist
- and it is very understandable - th at we entirely mistake his
\V ork i f -vve insist it expresses this or that. It i s itself, the artist
says, it does not stand for, it does not express, anything : it is not
meant to suggest associations. I think he is right in the sense he
means it. He is providing us, however, in his work with an ex­
perience of spati al relationships . Now it is obvious that no ex­
perien ce is entirely isolated, or else it is traumati c . The
1 26 The Nature of Art, III: Art and Psychoanalysis
experience communicated by the abstract artist, on the con­
trary, invites comp arison with other experiences and, to some
extent certainly, will point to common ground with a par­
ticular aspect of vis ual experience in the first place o r of the
relationship between experiences . Abstract a rt would otherwise
be virtually meaningless. Hence we h ave here an amalgam of
meaning conveyed by material that transmits an image not only
optical but for the mind or memory as well; unique for the eye
but generalized for the mind. Here too the form constrains us to
an image, and it is not merely one of our choosing .
Aesthetic experience can be defined as the opposite, indeed
often as a p alliative, of tra umatic experience . But I am not
going to try to probe the conditions of being of which this
aspect of form is the symbol. I have attempted this elsewhere, as
I have s aid. Some of the preliminaries a re straightforward - for
instance, the connection with the body-image. I shall p artly be
confining myself to this aspect.
I have often before referred to the rough-and-smooth values
in building, in architecture, that a re c arried over into the other
visual a rts and, indeed, into the textures, as we h ave to c all
them, of concerted sound. Why otherwise are we forced to
speak of texture to describe appositions of i nstrumental sound?
In truth, we cannot but speak of the surface of a ny work of art,
and equally of shape and volume, of the articulated body, meta­
phors by which we assert the dynamic effect of its i mpression
and the self-completeness. Form al values vivify such images;
the inevitable metaphors derive from inevitable images that a c­
company our apprehension of the formal qualities . I n the
fifteenth-century courtya rd of the palace at Urbino designed by
Luciano L auran a [Plate 1 ] , i n my opinion one of the greatest
m asterpieces of architecture, we surely see the s ame thing, a
justice and fairness in the smoothness of the pilasters on the
brick wall. The strength of this wall is measured by the elo­
quence of its apertures and by the open arcade beneath . Each
plain yet costly member of this building h as the value of a limb :
in the coordination of the contrasting m ateri als there is equal
care for each : together they m ake stillness that, as it were,
breathes .
 From 'The Image in Form' 1 27

One must agree to a generalized and meaningful content in

the relationships of the Soto construction and i n the Laurana
courtyard. But are they characteristic works of art, that is to
say so characteristi c that they can be used to illustrate a content
available in all art? What of the agony, violence, irregularity,
flippancy even, that appear to be inevitable in some art today,
or the restlessness, the explosive disruptiveness that is also
common to much of the art of the past?
I h ave said that the generalized content of form, an element of
coordination as well as of allusiveness, not only does not i nhibit
but m akes an enduring thing or body of any kind of express­
iveness however extreme. When, as h as been common in this
country, we use the term 'expressionist' in a pejorative sense,
we mean that unmistakable expressiveness figures in this or that
work but is by no means richly integrated throughout the
formal relationships on view, and that therefore the effect is
transitory rather than enduring. It encompasses no more than
one or two notes.

[from Reflections on the Nude, 1 96 7, pp. 47-52]

Artists and Works ef Art
16

Ghiberti and ' Finish'

The coldest temperan1ents are the most gracious.

I imagine the common conception, 'finish', derives from an ack­

nowledgement of an attribute of Florentine s c ulpture that dates
from Ghiberti's second doors, an attribute which some would
wish irrelevantly perpetuated. For 'finish' does not popularly
refer to the perfect objectivization of any aesthetic idea, but
rather to the final result of a particular painstaking realistic treat­
ment only. This is as it should be; for the conception 'finish' is
the prime quality, the final aesthetic triumph of that fluent grace
- in wider terms - that fluent realism, which we found to demand
perspective treatment. Otherwise the concept 'finish' would never
have occurred. It is always i rrelevant \vhen applied to other than
a fluent, u nemphasized, realistic treatment. One may find a

fifteenth-century Persian p ainting had not been finished, but not

that i t lacks 'finish' . And because more educated people insist on
introducing the concept where it does not apply, they talk non­
sense about art, and think nonsense. There are other reasons .
But there is plenty of excuse for the muddle i n question. Few
post-Ghiberti artists in Europe - and neither Michelangelo nor
Leonardo is among them - h ave escaped the problem of
'finish' , j ust because 'finish' has been i dentified with the final
state of all realistic treatment. So they envy Ghiberti and his
like for the equally-distributed rhythm of their works, gained
by 'finish' , while they themselves want to express, in addition, a

definite emphasis . Now Ghiberti invented 'finish' in order to

avoid any emphatic treatment.
I would s uggest that this problem which needed always to be
solved afresh with each work, h as been the spur to the greatest
and to the worst art in the his tory of man. Today we tire of i t; i t
i s an obstruction. So back w e should g o t o Ghiberti t o analyse it
and to rid ourselves.
132 Artists and Works of Art
I find myself inferring that these Ghibertian attitudes were
deliberate, whereas actu ally they were l argely unconscious.
Perhaps one can only write in coherent prose of deeper motives
as if they were deliberated. Purely on the surface, though, it is
evident that whereas some Florentine artists arrived in Rome
with enthusiasm for the big and monumenta l, others like Ghi­
berti were drawn there not primarily from a genera l mounting
of the pulse in that generation, but from increased interest, assi­
duity . Their keen intellects were real enough, and their eager
civilization.
That Ghiberti was working twenty-seven years on the
bronzes for his second doors, throws some light on the quality
'finish' . I shall remark l ater on Florentine a ffinities with the kal­
eidoscopic art of the North, which helped Ghiberti to formulate
his ' finish' . Somehow the beasts among the foliage on the bronze
jambs recall the convention of Flemish miniatures . The flowers
themselves are 'posed' (rather than positioned), as if for pho­
tography or for a still-U fe class . They are unexception a l in their
perfection of unassuming naturalism . This l ack of assumption
underlying 'finish' needed years of careful cultivating. Some of
the leaves, besides, were undoubtedly cast from n ature. Yet,
unlike the narrowly intimate art of the North, the whole pul­
sates with rhythm . Every m arking of the veins of leaves, every
carefully articulated tuft of h air in the figures of the ten outside
reliefs, every angle of the statuettes of prophets and sibyls,
convey the rhythm a n d the freedom of the whole . Remember
how engrained was the Florentine aesthetic of the statuesque,
remember the same as threatened by the new Italian ferment of
whi ch, too, the Florentines p artook; remember Brunelleschi 's
invention of speed of line in architecture . Ghiberti invented for
sculpture a similar speed, so as to sublimate to the ends of Flor­
entine aesthetic the deep Ita lian dramatic sense . Movement is
everywhere in these reliefs . Only thus can repose be saved.
Repose must have no beginning and no end because it must
appear in the guise of movement, continuous movement, a flow
without emphasis . Conservation by division of strength . There
must be no central emphasis, but a general rhythm . Therefore
every detail must h ave its perfect rhythm and yet, at the s a me
 Ghiberti and 'Finish' 133

time, be without emphasis. Such unemphasized perfection of

detail is · finish', which could be attained only by fluent realistic
treatment. For a ny other treatment that a rticulates by general­
ization is too direct, too a rresting. For this purpose the 'primi­
tive' realism of the Giottesque would be i nadequate, violent,
clumsy. Perspective is the means of Ghiberti's movement. A
pictori al treatment of l ow relief embodying perspective guaran�
tees the flow, while l aborious naturalism both makes each de­
tail s afe from emphasis (which a n eco nomic, direct articulation
wo uld not do) and keeps each detai l distinct, a miniature of
potential a ctuality. And so this general yet precise flux a chieves
the Florentine clarid measure .
What a great a rtistic a chievement is this, when the tricks of
abstraction used i n every art-period throughout the \Vorld are
s acrificed ! No wonder Ghiberti 's s u c cess has been a stu mbling­
block to m any a normal artist. (If you conten1pl ate art as a
whole, you wi ll see Ghiberti as eccentric.) Donatello, o n the
other hand, endo\ved his reliefs with an inner organization, ap­
p arent i n their first composing. He had no need of perfect
'finish' . So far from avoiding emphasis, Donatello magnified it;
for his planes are never divorced from one a nother, though
interrupting and interrupted.
Ghiberti did not want any such i ntense composition. Writing
in co mmentary of his second doors, he says : ' I have tried in
every \Vay to in1itate n ature exa ctly i n these reliefs . . . the
nearer figures appear larger, the more remote smaller . ' ' I mi­
tation', of course, is never an exa ct term. Cultural values deter­
mine what is considered to be i mitation. B u t the words quoted
bring to my mind these reliefs ( 'the nearer figures appear larger,
the more remote s maller' ) i n which expressiveness is sub­
ordinate to an unastounding beauty, a n d every contour is left
soft a nd rhyth mic . I n these doors, s culpture is certainly betrayed
by pictoria l treatment. Ghiberti describes hi mself as foremost a
p ai nter. But one c annot conclude that when p ainting he con­
ceived in terms of colo ur, of tone . That is not the way to make a
picture look as if it isn ' t there at all, however effectua l i n
relief.
So, 'unastounding beauty' , 'unemphasized rhythm', 'finish'
1 34 Artists and Works . of Art
and 'good taste' which so often, in part, expresses a desire to
have things looking as if they weren't there at all - are in some
ways synonymous . I ntroduced to the North, 'finish' was bound
to lead to trouble . For bad artists have never realized that the
whole point of 'finish' is the equal rhythm it enables . And who
can feel an equal rhythm i n a northern climate? Except it be
bright in the sun, equ al rhythm is monotonous. In our rains the
p orticoes of Greece and Rome loom long-suffering.

[from The Quattro Cen to, 1 9 3 2 , pp. 89, 95-8]

17

Donatello

Now Donatello's works belong largely to the Quattro Cento.

Donatello's supreme coordination of the new sensuousness was

a stone-blossom; but not through the simp ler fantasies of flower
and foliage. He saw the passion ate thronging of youthful bodies .
The press upon the Pontevecchio, fire behin d the eyes pulsating
the blood, up out of the low qu arters the quick children he
imagines to stretch upon their wildest a ctivities . The gross
crowd, sole moisture of these barren streets, human luxuriance
that overruns the receptive valleys - these he disentangles for
singleness of energy and of movement. The slum children
cannot group about him too long. Their energy drives the air to
ventilation. Every child is a newly victorious amorino. There is
tempered steel i n the strain, and n o m ore than any Rom an need
Donatello be fastidious. Nakedness, however slight the form,
a chieves an irresistible tension, an irresistible repose, con­
summate in self-reliance. The fecun d slime from which they
grew, stHl clinging, is dried to brittle stone as the putti flash
their limbs . Swollen with vigour they enhance rhythm beyond
the powers of musi c. Such a stampede, a thunderous lilt, not
heard - as if the ear already deafened, the resourceful eye could
store i n i ts depth with one glance a succession of tune which
 -D onatello 1 35

will astound the ear when inaudibility lifts, which Will over­
whelm the shallow ear again and press down against the sides of
the head - such is the rhythm of the putti as they move in their
compartments on the pulpit at Prato above the long wrought
bronze capital, above the monumental console, such the dance
that can never run down, too strong and too subtle for the
plodding ear, dance sudden and final in the corridor behind the
columns of the encrusted singing gallery at Florence [Plate 2] .
In the symbol of the putto, the new ambitions of the body
found a wide expression. The animal functions of infants are in
themselves symbols to adults of the m ost profound release.
They should have been perm itted us : they are symbols of the
freedom we c annot win . We relish it that children, when un­
questioning in their acts, do not s hock . The putto is a pagan
emblem to those overburdened by sense of guilt, an emblem
that corresponds to so universal a desire for freedom that in­
decency of putti was indecency to no one. An Agostino di
Duccio putto (now hidden, it is true, by a c anopy) at Rimini
urinates above an altar : even the Catholic Church, mounted as
she is on sense of guilt, h as turned a blind ey.e .
Donatello took full advantage of this fact that blithe infants
do not shock. His putti are fierce on their pleasures, intense,
even precise enough, in their sexual romp s . The stone and clay
bear sons by the sculptor, not daughters . Out of the hundreds of
nude forms attributed to D onatello, two only are female, the
bronze figure with cornucopia in the B erlin Museum, and the
Eve at Padua. This fact is very significant. What is true of
Donatello is true of the early Renaissance as a whole. For no
other art, not even the Greek, shows so marked a preference for
the male nude, a figure far less easily composed to beauty than
the female nude. Such unique choice shows a predominance i n
s culptural fantasy of a feeling for spatial values alone, of a feel­
ing for m ass, for m aterial as being the fruitful female b lock that
will give birth to the m ost active shapes full of prolific s ap.
From the stone comes a new, fearless energy. And to push this
fantasy further, since the a rchitect's building is fema le, set
on the earth like Giorgione' s woman by the running stream,
the s culptor's attendant statuary a re her lovers and sons rather
1 36 A r tists and Works of Art
than her <la ugh ters or a mere projection of herself. But only
sculptors with a passion for the m a teri al, stone, w ill keep s o
close to this primary fa ntasy th a t on their low relief they
crea te for the s tone her chi ldren i n the image of male human
infants . And so the marble putti who play a long the marble of
Donatello ' s si nging gallery are the most i ntense manifestation of
stone-blossom : also the most humanisti c . A certai n humanity,
as an expression of hum a n love for the near objective world in
contrast to the distant, yet relentless, spiritua l hierarchy, i s a t­
tributed to material . Once more s to ne is not o nly the medium of
hum anistic fantasy, but is the near obj ect, obj ect pure and
simple, the love for which ori ginates the anti-sense-of-guil t, the
huma nistic, a ttitude . Humanism as an i ntellectual movement is
but a pale offshoot of such emotion.
Now Donatel lo's putto i s certainly derived from the pagan
amorino, a nd the putto's prankish turn was no doubt evolved
from the slightly genre, or n a tura listic, treatment, already evi­
dent a t Florence i n the fou rteen th century, of the Virgin and
chi l d group. Donatello's putti are nearly always winged, p artly
because such cri nkled surfa ces appealed to his love of in­
crustation, still more because wings enormously help sugges­
tion of movement, of dynamic passage a nd of air currents m a d e
to whistle . It is as if a dust arose with the dance along the
si ngi ng gallery ; for the p u tti ' s wings are set off by a ba ckgrou nd
of bl ack and white mosaic flecks . The putto m akes the air move.
I ndeed he is associ ated with all the elements. He bursts stone
like earth , at Rimini he rides the dolphin, his tempestuous
energy kindles a flame that \Vithers tasteful ornamental foliage
poor in sap, a nd heats the luscious growth to a vibrant, tropical
bulbosity . The putto is elemental force under the symbol of the
infa nt's a ni m al nature . He is the emblem of Europe. For i ns tead
of the generati ve principle in terms of dark god and fetish or i n
term s of some e a vernous concept o f fem ale seclusion, instea d of
the I ndi a n y aksi beautiful thou gh she be, or the j erky satyr who
overruns the clear Greek horizon to hairy glades, we of the
West have symboli zed fecundity by the i nfant, by the play of
i nfa nts in whom the primary desires that make the adult world
limitless, subterranean, dark, are seen bright a nd immediate and
 Donatello 1 37

in their least unsettled state . We i n the West believe not only

that the child is father to the man, but that the child's intent
play in modes hateful and loving expresses a more real necessity
than does the grown god's esoteric power to lure and to destroy.
And since the putto is unguarded, without reserve, he sym­
bolizes, as well as the necessity, the ideal of emotional exter­
nalization that I have identified with the Quattro Cento spirit.
He symbolizes the process of living, th at lies between Life and
Death; the translation outwards of the formless flux of passions,
to definite, concentrated, obj ective form . Adult intelligence
brings the artistry to living, but only in the child can you dis­
cover the material that is worked. The Quattro Cento men un­
covered that material in art, a lways first on the field. And now
science as well insists on the sexua l life of the child and learns
from him . And since we know today that the child also is
broken by his impotent p assions, his cry and his gurgle are
likely to remain for us symbols n ot only of Life, but also of
living.
Naturally the Renaissance putto is first of all symbol of j oy
and freedom. Donatello swells his contours . His putto is a
powerful plaything both in muscle a n d in sex. Donatello is safe­
guarded by the 'innocence' which has been so irrationally attri­
buted to the child. The putto is such an infant as every a ctua l
infant would like t o be, a n d s o with his games. H e is a creation
of Donatello's, so special, so imbued with unsuspected meaning,
so emblematic of an age, th at I must insist again that Rococo
infants and such-like are n ot putti at all. In fact a ny work in
which the putto appears is bound to be not only fifteenth-cen­
tury but Quattro Cento. And here I must distinguish the putto
from other and contemporary infants, for i nstance, the dell a
Robbia kind. As one would expect, Florentine artists were shy
of Donatello's putto. Even Desiderio whose work is Quattro
Cento for quite different reasons, generally changed putti into
children and young boys. Rossellino and M aj a no followed him .
They favoured especially the delicately featured young boy in
bust or a s guardian of a tomb. Representations of the more
youthful saints, particularly the San Giovannino or young Bap­
tist and St Sebastian, belong to this vogue. Pollaiuolo the trucu-
1 38 Artists and Works of Art
lent avoided both putto and child, both Donatello's avowal and
its negation. Verrocchio returned to the putto, but not to the
crowd of them. He represents them alone, a little timid, though
still bulbous in form. Otherwise, it is outside Florence that
Donatello' s putto lives, particularly in eastern Italy. Donatello
himself worked for ten years in Padua and planted there the
Quattro Cento emblems . Sculptors imitated the putti in San An­
tonio, but painters, p rincipally Mantegna and, then, Giovanni
Bellini, transformed them back into s weet children.

[from The Quattro Cento, 1932, pp. 1 29-34]

18

Piero della Francesca

When we remember his paintings we first think, perhaps, of

broad calm heads, of an o aken calm, of head-dresses, and blame­
less trees ; of entablature, of foliage, linked as if by h an ds : of
tufted ground a nd feet in profile on a marble floor, of open
surfaces that bloom from open surfaces, spheres that respon d to
cylinders, fibrous hair to non-deciduous trees . No other p ainter,
except Giorgione and Cezanne, transposed as completely his
love of life into the terms of space . Other, and usually pre­
dominant values of visual art, such as rhythm, contrast, stress,
movement, arabes que, are common to all the arts however
differing their sensation in each . The great poet Botticelli, fo r
instan ce, to our exploring tactile sense exposes visions, s ome­
times restless. The transposition lacks the finality, or at any rate
the immediacy_, of space . Compared with Piero, Botticelli is as
sea to land. One might s ay of all, or nearly all, the pictures in
the National Gallery, compared with the Pieros they are as sea
to land.
We are bound to attribute to Piero a deep contentment. The
loggias and h alls are not embellishments of princely life, but
enlargements of an italianate street, innocent of genre . His ar­
ch itectural backgrounds possess great beauty ; but it is less likely
_
 Piero della Francesca 1 39

we shall recall Piero when looking at St Paul's, or even San

Lorenzo, than at the sight of a black-timbered farm building in
the sun, a sublime demonstration of architectural meaning
(since he has caused us to s ee it thus in element), with open
doors a nd windows revealing a greater and more simple dark­
ness . Outside, the sun, inside a generous darkness beyon d the
edges of neutral-toned apertures . The thought occurs of the
square muzzle of a cow.
As well as his sheds, Piero's m agnificent buildings are stalls of
the greatest contentment. Their shelter is dignified, complacent,
like the gesture of the Virgin in the Monterchi fresco, pointing
to her pregnant stomach . There is suffi ciency and amplitude
both within and without the womb. Hills lie with heads, foliage
with thorny hair, massive mouths on calm rounded faces . There
remains always a strong ligament between light and dark, be­
tween what is spread and bark-like folds, between the rounded
and the pointed. Each interval constructs an expressive p attern.
In the s tillness, apprehended at one glance, there is fire. The
men and women of bovine lips a nd bovine eyes are gripped to
their outward showing like trees in broad leaf. Above them
stand the self-confident trees, circular, pyramidal, of thick foli­
age, nut, acorn, chestnut-bearing.

If clothes are sometimes bark, hair is breathing foliage. Man,

measure of the universe, on ceremonial occasions manifests the
world's geometry. Hence the towering volumes at Arezzo of the
hats . But consideration of pure form, in the case of such lyrical
genius a s possessed both Piero and Cezanne, men of roots and
strong sensuous feeling, leads to no short cut, no summary arti­
fact. Their geometry exhibited the condens ation of their far­
reaching love. As is so often the case, Piero's theoretical writings
mislead in the m atter, for he wrote only of v alues responsive to
rule, to scientific rule. These v alues, however, were in divine
conjunction with his sense of the warm th between parent and
offspring, between polychrome p avement and s hod feet th at
create the spaces thereon, between grooved entablature and the
I '

creases in a band that rounds the head, between arm and peeled
tree-trunk, horse and cloud, a small rich p endant and the wide
140 Artists and Works of Art
spreading of lake and low hills, between a circular dark-toned
hat and a porphyry disk, between hat, hand and battlement.
Connection is always architectural in the sense of a division of
an order: the mailed apple of a closed visor and the rounded
face of a trumpeter with his length of thin tube extending from
his lips; the ring of a skull-cap and the spring of an arch; the
darkness of an aperture circled with stone and the dark centres
of eyes flanked with their whites; the consummation expressed
in an Emperor's conical hat s urrounded by heads of coiled, plea­
ted hair against a background of arches and circular disks; the
spiral grooves of ears and the straight grooves of a transparent
covering that falls from the head; the winding river with light
paths and white belts or curving outer hems; extended fingers
and the feathered points of an heraldic eagle; the horses' hooves
of opposing armies like wide-bottomed chessmen on the board;
the acanthi of a Corinthian capital and the features and fingers
of the Virgin, the beads and structure of her vestments [Plate 3] ;
the dark head of a cross- bearer against the sharp walnut-shaped
centre of the grain and the ribbed clouds beyond; in a crowd,
head growing from head, half a mouth against a neck or a white
hem disappearing against the white of an eye; the mounting
risen Christ and a dark knoll in the dawn light; the hill pro­
tuberances beyond Battista Sforza's ivory face and the dia­
phanous hills beyond her husband's warted cheek . . . . The cata­
logue is mechanical, since the connections are not single but
profuse, ramifying in stHlness. Piero's colour exploits the affinity
to which we have referred in terms of shape and tone. All art
exhibits connection, a bringing together. In visual art alone, and
then solely in visual art deeply founded upon this colour-cum­
architectural sense of form, an aesthetic communication may be
explicit and immediate to the point of rebutting afterthought. It
is the realiser of Cezanne. Such demonstration of intellect and
feeling was the crown of the Quattro Cento compulsion to make
manifest. Thereafter the same chromatic sense of form to some
degree persisted in post-Renaiss ance art refurbished, if we con­
sider painting only, by Vermeer, for instance, by Chardin, re­
enacted by Cezanne. Yet there has not been, and still there is
lacking, a generalized apprehension of this side of visual art,
 Verrocchio and Piero della Francesca 141

eminent not only i n painting but a lso in dra w ing, in sculpture

and, more particularly, in architecture whose stea dfast forms
and textures (not colours) h ave so often endowed that sensibility
with archetypes .
Piero revea ls the family of things . His art does not suggest a
leaning from the house of the mind . He shows, on the contrary,
the mind becalmed, exemplified in the guise of the separa teness
of ordered outer things ; he shows man's life as the outward
state to which a l l activity aspires .
The family of things. It is as if the poetry of deep affinities
were identical with those objects and with their formul ae; as if
death's calm separation lent nobility to the pressure of each
heart-beat.
There can be no a rt without something, however minute, of
this quality; because Art, mirror of each aim, conspires to win
for expression the finality of death .

[from Art and Science, 1 949, pp. 3 2-6]

19

V errocchio and Piero della Francesca

in the National Gallery

We start with a most beautiful plastic picture on the right wall,

a !vladonna and Child with Angels by Ver'rocchio [Plate 5] . As
we first look at this remarkable composition our eyes are drawn
into the central red of the Virgin's robe, a surface in a rel ation­
ship of slight asperity with the plainer and more suffused red of
the angel's cloak on the right. This latter red and the more
cherry-coloured sleeves of the angel on the left, still more, the
red curtains on the way to meet at a peak beyond the top of the
picture, pull our eyes from the centre, from the Virgin 's sym­
bolic midriff; meantime our eyes are caught on the major dis­
cordance and stiff rocky modelling of her light-blue cloak. The
bumping to which our eyes are subj ected by this picture, as by
a dazzlement suffered in the apprehension of a multitude of
142 A rtis ts and V\1 arks of A r t
lights, is the means of magnifying and stressing the solidity of
tactile shape. Colour, we see, p lays an important part in this
roug h passage for the eye, the reward for which is the clearer
apprehension (as dazzlement disperses) of a simple shape, an
irresistible momentum since it bursts free from forces that
p artially counteract it: these forces also countera ct each
other. The subsidiary parts, then, of this design are truly sulr
sidiary in a sense unknown to carving design in which each
unit (ideally speaking) is i n some respect a microcosm of the
whole process, if only because of a n equal insistence obtaining
throughout.
The pyramid of strongly modelled, incontrovertible, blue
mounts with such striking or rugged simplicity that we cannot
but help finish off this pyramid by including the neck and head
of the Virgin over the yellowish colour of which the eye bumps
with the momentum it h as already received. There are other
movements in this picture but they are delayed by counter­
stresses and by colour discordance. One's eye becomes a post­
man who must call at every house and Who, upon return,
enjoys the better an uninterrupted cycling down the middle of
an exceedingly b umpy street. Thus this formal pyramid rises
and descends in the midst of the picture like a congealed water­
fall, a rocky precipice frozen with a film of ice.
I shall try to analyse a little more closely how this is effected.
First of a ll the discordance of the Virgin's red and light-blue
garments . Blue is 'naturally' darker than red. But when the eye
is dark-adapted blue tends to lighten, red to darken . * There are
many methods in a picture by which the reversal of the 'natu­
ral' order of these colours, and the implication that s hould go
'vith it, can be compensated. None of them figures here, and one
need only tum to the right and glance at the Madonna of Ber­
tucci the elder, to see to what extent Verrocchio's reds and
blues, though vivid, are harsh and discordant. For it is not as if

* This phenomenon, known as the P urkinj e phenomenon, is an

important qualification of the constan cy of co lour in varying illumi­
nation. If one watches flowers in a fading light the greens and blu es
become perceptibl y lighter in relation to the yellows, oranges and
reds.
 Verro cchio and Piero della Francesca 1 43

the red robe suggested a more absorbent surface as do the cur­

tains behind. This central red is not exchanging places with the
blue as in the Purkinj e phenomenon, though a sense of it, in
caricatured form, remains . For one thing the blue i s too light,
for another, both red and blue are represented a s reflecting
white light with competing i mpermeability. Almost surrounded
by this light blue, the Virgin's calm red centre, an axis for the
blue pyramid above and below, is insulated, cut short from
close intimacy with the other reds . We are finding that a lso this
careful plastic use of colour is serving well the p icture's s ubject­
m atter. But we must not look at all for the kind of accumulative
organization to which we have become accustomed in this
book. This plastic beauty will elude us if we try, for instance, to
conceive the brown hair of the angel on the right as an extrac­
tion from the landscape behind it.
And now walk up to Piero's Baptism [Plate 6] at the end of the
room. You will notice that the roundness and fork of Christ's
beard are echoed beneath by the round of the arms that come
together in his hands which point with triangular apex into the
triangula r space between the forking of the beard. As we shall
see in a moment, the form s in this painting proceed in the
manner of a m osaic or of a closely-knit architecture. Again, the
Virgin who prays in Piero's Nativity, o n the other side of
the door, shows a similar reduplication in her form. The down­
ward sweep of her nearer arm appears at all angles in the folds
of her cloak, and the triangle of her returning hands is isolated
but echoed by the tri angle of red vest above them, and by the
triangular form beneath her chin.
Now return to the Verrocchio. The Virgin's hands and a rms
are posed in a similar attitude of prayer; but each form is discon­
nected. There is little i mpression of arms descending and lifting
at the elbow. The upper arm s are needed as boundaries of the
blue pyra mid, while the forearms, and especially the h ands,
serve an entirely different purpose . For the hands as a discon­
nected form are urgently needed to carry the eye up from the
red to the neck, and therefore to enhance the pyramid of this
whole organization of Which, it is true, they are the s maller
image. The eye fixes on them for this reason and perhaps per-
144 Artists and Work s of Art
ceives that their suspension or poise conflicts with their h arsh
role as a bridge to the kindred colour of the neck, a harsh bridge
from the red over the blue to the yellowed white. Nevertheless
the hands, as well as the similar inclination of the head, are the
means of bestowing a quiet grace, but h ardly a graciousness,
upon these uncompromising forms; a conc aten ation typical of
early Renaiss ance Florentine art that I h ave always found
slightly disturbing. This anile m ask of grace was removed by
Michelangelo to reveal the insatiable features of the Baroque.
But I do not suggest that the grace of the Verro cchio is in any
way repulsive. Such a stricture applies more to the sculpture of
this kind.
And now let us note another of the subsidiary movements in
the picture, movements delayed by obstructive colour; the post­
man's ro und a s I have called it. There is a movement from the
right angel's head, along the baby and up the other angel, one
that encloses the pyramid the better but is itself full of delays .
Thus , the neutralized purple blue, for instance, of the infant' s
drawers pushes to the right with the i nfant's weight : but the
colour is arrested by a clash with the angel's supporting hand
and with his sleeves of a greener blue . This last is the strongest
of these competing colours, and so movement is sustained i n
spite of the obstacle, and one i s made t o feel the baby's weight
and the pressure of the angel's arm . The left angel 's lily helps
the general upward movement j ust as the Virgi n's veil assists
her hands in cementing the obdurate pyramid. A plastic painter
m akes these obstacles in order to overcome them . Thus is the
stress and solidity proven that he communicates .
All the s ame, there is another organization, this time more of
the nature of a progression, constructed from the baby' s dra\vers
as base of a triangle, and from the Virgin's purplish sleeves that
reach to her wrists ; and also from the upper and lower parts of
the i nfa nt's body divided by the dra\vers, taken with the
Virgin's hands as the apex of another tria ngle . Both these organ­
izations that bound the red robe are microcosms of the m aj or
pyramid, and i t is here, in this constructio n of a carving nature ,
that the picture's poigna ncy of feeli ng principally lies ; especially
when considered i n conj u nction with the rocky plastic pyra mi d
 Verrocchio and Piero della Francesca 1 45

of the whole. For the i nfant is thus attached to the Virgin's

h ands that pray so peacefully : these organizations, moreover,
are the bounda ries of that calm centre, thus disclosed, from
which he came : they thus enh a n ce the nobility of this central
shape : and it follows that each of these forms is similarly en­
hanced. The picture as a whole, h owever, is most ta ctile, an
immensely bright and solid apparition that might confront an
eye groping in the approach of night. A 'solid apparition' is a
contradiction in terms ; but perhaps no more so than the one
inherent in this picture's effect.
And now if we glance again to the left of us at the Piero, on the
end wall, we discern immediately a smoothness of colour and
form, an identity as of the white notes of a pianola which are
sounding the most diverse ha rmonies without being pressed
from their line. Let us approach the Nativity.
I do not offer an appreciation or analysis of this picture, des­
iring to point only to those characteristics th at contrast more
obviously with the Verrocchio. Thus we note at once the neu­
tra lized blue of the Virgin's cloak which engages in no sort of
clash with the tria ngle of red at her breast and the squares of red
at her wrists . Her form synthesizes the triangles and rounded
ovals figuring throughout the picture. The triangle of reds prays
steadily as do her pointed hands ; and how calm the ra dia nce of
her neutralized blue robe that is informed with the warm col­
oration of the wood on which it is painted! Owing to the ord­
erly succession of blues from the angels, the Virgin's robe
maintains a closer centrality than th at of the outside, but far
stronger, blue of her cloak. In fa ct, this more saturated blue,
instead of taking precedence in our attention, seems to exert
itself to keep the Virgin nearer to the band of angels and to the
picture's centre . For, while more saturated, it is also a good deal
,darker. At the same time the cloak's yellow lining th at s hows at
the inside edge, ta kes upon itself this gap of tone, thereby en­
ha ncing the lighter, rather than the darker, blue . The cloak of
strong blue descends� in fact, from the Virgin, revealing her. It is
more a trai n, and since the child lies on a part of it in front, it
forms a continuous bond also, uniting the child with his former
house. The warm-coloured lining that appears as well on the
 146 Artists and Works of A.rt
other side of the Virgin is also in contact with the child, and it
passes to the Virgin's golden-brown hair which, in tum, i s in
colour contact with the traditional background forms of this
scene, the cow and the shepherds. Beyond the cow, light-grey
bricks of the manger's open wall, a nd beyond again, the silver­
greys of the landscape and the township, are built with those
shapes and declivities that together with the angels a chieve syn­
thesis in the Virgin's grey-blue robe; in so doing they themselves
discover incontrovertible positions and relationships .
I have taken the Virgin as the focus of this picture i n order to
contrast it the better with the Verrocchio. But I might h ave
started my analysis (which must, u nfortunately, be cast in
terms of a focus) with almost any other of the larger foreground
shapes . For everything is distinct, yet nothing is cut short.
In other words, we are encountering s upreme identity-in­
difference. I avoid the attempt to describe the subtler m odes of
this relationship . Were I to do so I would have to devote a great
deal of space to the function of the greens in this picture and to
such a relationship as the one between the horizontal pla nes of
the baby, the angel's viols and the roof of the m a nger.
Let us note one detail in the colour of the angels . The crimson
triangle of under-robe visible at the neck of the back a ngel on
the right, if taken with the light-blue robe of the contiguous
front angel and its purplish shadows, would roughly equal in
colour the purple-blue robe of the centre angel. Thus, as the
centre of this miraculous group she augments it, though with­
out herself taking any precedence.
I n the group we discover still m ore clearly the m arriage of
rounded ovals with triangular forms . The careful patches of the
ground, the open-leaved plants as well, presage the angels'
straight and beautiful stature.
Joseph is seated on a saddle . Beneath him there is a s imple
instance of the use of answering shapes that I rem arked in t he
Christ of the Baptism and i n the Virgi n ; an orderly i nterlinking,
which is yet by no means stiff, of shape with shape that I h ave
shown to be closely connected with the profounder values of
colour vision. Resti ng on the ground and against the arch of the
saddle, there is a leather bag of similar shape. But whereas the
 The Reliefs in the Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini 147

s addle arch is hollow, the bag is solid. Such contrast through

such identity makes us acutely aware of this hollow a rch, of the
b ag's darker leather s urfaces, and of all the felt with which the
arch is vaulted.
The most obvious movement in the picture is down the angels,
along the floor, through the baby, round the yellow of the
Virgin's clo ak to the other upright tawny surface bounding it,
to the s addle, in fact; and up round its arch where the move­
ment receives an imprint of the viol shape in perpendicular
form. There is then an extension up through Joseph and the
peasant in a red cap (this cap is a compression, as in the case of
Joseph's h at, of the viol shape), up on to the shed top and
to the sky where the deep-blue c loak beneath the infant is
rarefied.

[from Colour and Form, 1 950 edition, pp. 1 24-3 1 ]

20

The Reliefs in the Tempio

Malatestiano , Rimini

The Tempio reliefs which most concern me are arranged as

follows : lying back an inch and a half or so from a frame of
moulding, they constitute, together with this frame, the sur­
f aces on three sides of piers . These piers support arches that
form the entrances to chapels . The reliefs are for the most part
low, yet their forms possess m any values of s culpture in the
round : while the quickened mass of a h u man shape between
wind-strewn films of drapery, the delicious torture of hair and
clothing by an unseen, evocative wind upon the outer and inter­
mediary s urfa ces of a relief, give to its body the effect of
vitality, of that stone-blossom we prize so high . Even carved
landscapes by Agostino are restless, even the countryside is
drunk with this dithyrambic draught that impels to ecstatic
dance as did the breezes in the sibylline c ave, s cattering the mad
leaves of prophecy. In the relief representing the j ourney of San
148 Artists and Works of Art
Sigismondo to the monastery of Augauno, a pillar surmounted
by the statue of an angel appears among the surrounding moun­
tains like a lighthouse encompassed. Still more in the landscape
representing the influxion of the moon [Plate 9], sea and l and
are mingled in supernal agitation upon which a youth rides in a
boat. At the Tempio, the young Agostino evolved his style ;
under the influence of his patron, Sigismondo, who aroused
choriambic visions, he created his masterpieces. The sea is vi­
brant with fish, boughs bend under the weight of birds, the
active airs breed a flock of doves that descend to greet the new­
born Venus from the sea to earth . The land undulates with vege­
table and animal life j ust as the sea with fish. But his pre­
occupation with sea movement - his garments, though
ostensibly disturbed by wind, cling to and disclose naked forms
like seaweed waving on submerged rocks, or they are like water
fa lling clear as the bather rises to leave t he pool - was u n­
doubtedly stimul ated by Venice whither he came after leaving
Florence. Sigismondo made him - to his presentiment of move­
ment added a sense oJ spell . A spell was upon the spirit of Agos­
tino, the spell of Isotta communicated to him by his m aster
upon whom it first lay, a spell which, when enlarged over the
varying subj ects of Agostino's work, brings to mind the
afflicting magnetism of the moon that confounds the height
with the depths, transforming landscape into the basin of a for­
gotten sea .
Thus, though superficially the movement expressed by these
reliefs evokes a sense of air currents, yet, as we shall see later
more clearly, Agostino's root preoccup ation was with water
forms and water movement .
But before I try to put i nto words the crystallization pre­
sented by this carving, of the deeper Mediterranean fantasies in
conn ection with limestone, I mean to prospect the whole field of
sculpture . Agostino a chieved what he did just because he was
essenti ally a carver of limestone, far more essenti ally so than
were the maj ority of his famous contemporaries, and perhaps
more so than any sculptor whose work we have . At the i nstance
of Agostino, then, it will be possible to grasp what is the carving
approach as disti nguished from the modelling approach. To
 The Reliefs in the Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini 1 49

raise this iss ue is by no means to embark upon discursion. My

sole aim still is to interpret the values of Agostino' s sculpture.
And since these are bound up largely with the imperfectly re­
cognized virtues of carving pure and simple, so wide an issue
must now be d iscussed for his good. Otherwise he will be appre­
ciated and condemned in accordance with more or less irrelevant
standards, that is, in accordance with considerations of plasticity
or modelling by which all carving, in whatever material, is today
largely judged.
The predominant virtues, then, of Agostino 's sculpture
demand that a basic distinction be made between what is carv­
ing conception and what is plastic or modelling conception,
even though some traces of both conceptions are to be found in
a ll sculpture whether it be carved or modelled. In view of the
Germans and their horrid noun Plastik, one cannot emphasize
too strongly that sculptural values are not synonymous with
plastic values . The values in sculpture which find but little ex­
pression in modelling are those which have been forgotten. Few
people are deeply sensitive to them . Neither the German nor the
Italian critics are capable of 'seeing' an Agostino relief, beyo nd
its often indifferent modelling. This state of affairs is intensified
by the currency of photographs . Photographs transmit plas tic
values exceedingly well, carving values hardly at all . As plastic
conceptions, the majority of the reliefs are by no means first­
rate .
So we shall now attack the vital though confused aesthetic
distinction between carving and modelling. There must be a
profound aesthetic distinction between them . As everyone
knows, carving is a cutting away, while modelling or moulding
is a building up. Agostino's virtue will shed new light upon the
high imaginative constru ctions which common fantasy has
placed around each of these antithetical processes : (imagination
itself is a p lastic agency, fashioning its products with frag­
ments). Agostino's virtue will illumine afresh the field of visual
art. For the distinction between carving and modelling proves to
be most suggestive in relation to all visual art.

The visu al arts are rooted in handicrafts. Let us keep the ex-
1 50 Artists and Works of Art
p ression 'the fine arts ' . For these a re the useless arts, a develop­
ment of handicraft that is valued, although the p roducts possess
no utilitarian function. They a re the superb developments of
fine objects made for use. And, in turn, the h andicra fts are a
hejghtened manual skill gro\vn from the exercise of manual
labou r as a whole. Every artist has .m ore than a pra cti cal interest
in Jabour. Just as plants, worms and i nsect life tum the soils and
help to disintegrate the rock, just as animals crop the veg­
etation, so the cultivator carves the earth, hoeing and p loughing
the ground, cutting the undergrowth, the trees and the planted
corn . And j ust as the cultivator works the surfaces of the
mother earth so the sculptor rubs his stone to elicit the shapes
whj ch his eye has sovvn in the matrix. The materi al, earth or
stone, exists. Man makes it more significant. To wash, to polish,
to sweep, are similar activities. But to weave or to make a shoe,
indeed the processes of most trades, are pre-eminently manu­
facture, a making, a plastic activity, a mou lding of things .
Plastic shape in the abstract is shape in the abstract, while
carving shape, however abstract, is seen as belonging essentially
to a particul ar substance . It fa obvious th at all carving i s partly
to be judged by its plasticity, that is to say, by the values of its
forms apart from consideration of their m aterial. But that ap­
proach alone to carving is inadequate and in some c ases (Agos­
tino's reJ iefs for example) is altogether beside the point. It is like
judging sculpture by photographs.
Briefly, the difference between carving approach and mod­
elling approach in sculptural art can be i llustrated as f oJ lows.
Whatever its plastic value, a figure carved i n stone is fine carv­
ing when one feels that not the figure, but the stone through the
mediu m of the figure, h as come to life. Plastic conception, on
the other h and, is uppermost when the material with which, or
from which, a figure has been made appears no more th an as so
much suitable stuff for this creation .
In the two activities there J ies a vast difference that sym­
bolizes not only the two main aspects of labour, but even the
respective roles of male and female. Man, in his male aspect, is
the cultivator or carver of woman who, in her female aspect,
moulds her products as does the earth . We see both the ultimate
 The Reliefs in the Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini r5r

distinction and the necessary i nteraction between carving and

moulding i n their widest senses . The stone block is female, the
p l as ti c figures that emerge from it on Agostino's reliefs are her
children, the proof of the c a rver's love for the stone. This com­
munion with a materia l, this mode of eliciting the plastic shape,
are the essence of carving . And the profundity of such com­
munion, rather than of those plastic values that might be
roughly rea lized by a ny m aterial, provides the distinctive source
of i nteres t and pleasure in carved obj ects .
It \Vas not i nappropri ate tha t the tool c arved as an i nstrument
for carving or to cut now a branch, now the skull of a n enemy,
sho uld have h ad so masculine a shape. Knapped flints, rubbed
obsidians and jades, are most s atisfying as carving. The demands
of rea lity a nd of the connections m ade by the fantasy are here
i n simple a ccord . One m ight go further. I t is from such co­
incidence th at a th us reinforced fantasy h as p roceeded to create
visu a l a rt.
This is the point at which to emphasize the pre-eminence of
stone as the materia l to be c arved . I am no t thinking of i ts
durability, nor even o f the shape i t wil l allow . I am thinking of
the equ a l diffusion of ligh t that, comp ared to most obj ects, even
the hardest and darkest stones possess; I am thi nking of hand­
polished marble's glow tha t can only be compared to the l ight
on flesh-and-blood. The sculptor is led to woo the m arble. I nto
the solidity of stone, a solidity yet capable of s uffused light, the
fantasies of bodily vigour, of energy i n every form, can be pro­
jected, set out and made pern1anent. Most oth�r statua ry m at­
erials, bronze a nd terracotta, are far higher mediums of
m a ni festly reflected lights, as if their light were not their own
light. The m aj ority of stones, on the other h and, are faintly or
slightly translucent so that their light seems to be more \Vithin
them . Polishing, when it i s h and-polish and not a chemi c a l
polish, i n nearly every c ase gives life and l ight to the stone
without causing it to be so brilliant as to lose a great p art of i ts
light again i n reflecting it, or to be over-confused, and deadened
by m anifes tly accepting lights reflected on to it. It is the
difference betv.'een light a nd l igh ts . The great virtue of stone
is that unlike other h ard materia ls it seems to have a luminous
152 Artists and Works of Art
Ufe, light or soul. Limestone in p a rticular blends the virtues of
hard and soft m a terials . Whatever virtues I now a ttribute to
stone in general I have already a ttributed in p a rticul a r to lime­
stones a n d marbles.
Owi n g to the equal suffusion of Jjght on stone, its most grad­
ua l sh a pes are una voidable, especia l ly since they a re seen in
a ssociation with stone's solidity : for hardness of materi a l gives
an enormous sense of finality to shape . The obsidian tha t has
been thinned yet rounded to a cylinder a t the sha ft provides one
with a far greater sense of roundness than does a ball of clay.
The roundness of a flint is so compact, so heavy, its rol l so
conti nuous . As for representation of the hum a n form, it will
readily be understood tha t in the c a rving of stone's h a rd lu­
m i nous substan ce, it suffers all the stroking and polishing, a l l
the defi nition tha t our hands and mouths bestow o n those w e
love .
Polishing stone is a lso like slapping the new-born infant to
m a ke i t breathe . For poli shing gives the stone a m ajor light a nd
life . 'To carve' is but a complication of 'to polish', the elicitation
of s6 ll la rger life . Carving is a \Vhittling away. The first jnstinct
in rel ation to a c a rvable m ateria l is to thin it, a nd the first use of
such m a teri a l as tool or weapon required it to be sharp , to be
graduated in thinness. The primary (from the imagina tive p oint
of vie\v) method of carving is to rub with an abra sive . It is
possibl e tha t the forms in stone sculpture which p ossess pre­
emi nently a ca rving, as opposed to a plastic, significance, have
nearly a lways been obtained by rubbing, if only in the fi nal
process . I-Iowever, it is not necessa ry for me to enter into a
discussion of technique. I think one can hold tha t from the
deep, imagina tive a ngle, the point, chisel, dri l l and c l a w a re not
so much indispensable instruments of stone sculpture a s auxili­
a ry weapons th a t prepa re the stone for the use, however per­
functory, of abrasives. The chisel and the rest facilita te stone
sculpture : and, historically speaking, it may be that these instru­
ments were adopted from wood c a rving and gem carving for
this purpose, rather th an invented for use on sculptural stone.
But the only point I wish to make is tha t rubbing belongs in­
tegrally to the process of stone sculpture . Wood, on the other
 The Reliefs in the Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini 1 53

h and, is never carved by rubbi ng. * Herein lies the fundamental

difference between stone and wood s culpture : for it is reflected
in the sh apes proper to e ach , w h a tever be the a ctual instru­
n1ents with which they a re attained. Stone demands to be
thinned, tha t is to say, rubbed. Wood demands to be c ut a nd
even split. Wood is not only not so dense, but possesses less light
seem ingly its own . Typi cally wooden shapes are nearer to typi­
ca l ly model led shapes . Hen ce, wooden shapes need to be more
emphati c . In contrast with the flattening or thinning p roper
to stone, more definitely circu lar shapes are p roper to wood,
condi tioned as YV�en, i n the maj ority of cases, by the rounding tree­
grow th fonnation of its grain. But the light on stone reveals the
slightest undulation of its surfa ce; and since no stone has a gen­
era l circular structure, curves depend entirely on the care with
which the block has been dimini shed. Such forms, though they
may suggest the utmost rou ndness, will tend i n reality to be
more flattened or compressed than in the case of carved wood.
Indeed, as we have said, from this l a ck of exaggerati on, from
this flatteni ng or thinni ng of the sphere, the slightest roundness
obtai ns the maximum life and appe a l . The light on stone is com­
paratively even : no s hape need be s tressed : where complete
round ness is avoi ded, the more i t may be suggested. So the
sh apes p roper to stone are gradual, to which sharpness is given
only by the thinned na ture of the block as a w hole .
Carving i s an articulation of something that a lready exists i n
the block. The carved form should never, i n any profoun d i m­
aginative sen se, be entirely freed from its matrix. I n the case of
rel iefs, the matrix does a ctu a l ly remain : hence the heightened
carving appeal of which thi s techni que is capable. But the ten­
dency to preserve some part of the matrix i s evident i n much
figure carvi ng, and in the case of some arts, has given rise to

* This statement i s tru e on1y in the present context, that i s to say,

in helping to define a trend or pri n ciple. If read literally, it is untrue.
Some very hard wood forms - many insta n ces of Negro wood sculp­
ture spri ng to mind - ·were undoubtedly attained by rubbing. But in
these cases the hard wood was treated almost as stone : the basic
forms are stone-like, though, to their detriment, they lack stone's
even light.
154 Artists and W arks of Art
definite conventions : thus, the undivided knees of Egyptian
granite kings and idols . My example i s a literal one : for even
though no part of the m atrix is p alpable, the conception of it
m ay yet be imputed to some p art of the form. This is the i n­
spiration behind m any of the grea t h ard-stone Egyptian heads .
In conception and execution they are pure c arving; of which
the proof is that nothing, no, nothing, is more meaningless, more
repulsive, than a plaster c ast of one of these heads.
I speak of a ll s tones as if they possessed pre-eminently the
light and the texture which, in a previous chapter, I attributed
to certain limestones . The m ajority of stones have these virtues,
but to a much s maller degree. It follows that Egyptian hard
stones, s uch as granites, diorites and porphyries, a re by no
means the most vivid kinds of stone . They l a ck m arble's even
and palpitating light. Their extreme hardness and h arsh light
entail comparatively rounded s hapes . Softer stones, on the other
h and, tend to be diminished to greater thinness . Their curves, no
less gradual, will be more cap able of a v aried p alpitation in their
defining of forms . Such definition of form by whittling and pol­
ishing m arble, so that in representational art the figures them­
selves tend to be fl attened or compressed, as if they h ad long
been furled amid the i nterior layers of the stone and now were
unburdened on the air, were smoothing the air, s uch thinness of
shape appears to me to be the essential m anner of much stone
carving. This m anner, also, p reserves for us the influence of the
once enclosing m atrix.
Superb instances of such shape i n its most direct form are
provided by the little prehistoric m arble figures that come from
the Cyclades . Many of these figures are so thinned out that they
will not stand up . The heads p articul arly are s quashed back. Yet
what roundness is suggested by the curve of the shoulders, what
fullness by the slight i ndic ation of the breasts ! Curiously
enough, such sensitiveness to the radiance of human form and
to the kindred radiance of marble immediatel y proposes a Greek
ancestry, although these figures antedate Achaian invasions by
m any hundreds of years . One will conclude, however, that this
p articular sensitiveness to luminous gradations of m arble , Greek
or not Greek, is through and through Mediterranean.
 The Reliefs in the Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini 1 55

I will not stop to consider the direct evidence of s uch flat­

tening in Mexican sculpture, for instance, nor attempt to eluci­
date it in all the major sculpture of the world. I shall not
otherwise refer to the almost paper-like thinness of the earliest
Chinese jades, nor explain how that though granites tend for
each section to make for heavily rounded shapes, yet the col­
ossal height of much Egyptian figure-sculpture is itself an
elongation that brings them into line with pyramid and obelisk.
I pass straight on to relief. This, I contend, is a dramatized
form of carving. The shape is on the surface, the matrix behind
it.
It is obvious that in relief carving, especially low relief, flat­
tened or compressed shapes can be shown to the greatest advan­
tage; indeed, the utmost degree of compression can here serve
as the direct and constant aim of the carver, an aim to which all
stones inspire him. Just as an enhanced feeling of the spheri cal
is attained in stone to the glory of stone, by elongating spheres
into ovoids and into other gradually rounded shapes, so three­
dimensional form may become all the more significant from
being represented by the compressed s hapes of low relief. Ad­
visedly I say 'can serve' and 'may become' . For, except Agos­
tino, no s culptor known to me has flattened into low relief
almost entire figures in the round. Agostino's reliefs are the apo­
theosis of carving. His isolation, and the n1oderate approval that
his work h as won, but indicate how undeveloped, general ly, is
the emotion that the very i dea of stone carving should inspire;
or, at any rate, how easily it gives ground to emotions aroused
by considerations of plasticity.
I realize that I owe in the first place to the contemplation of
Agostino's work all that I feel about stone. No other sculptor
can teach so much about carving. His achievement inspires the
search for its origins . As my comment, I have needed to range
the Mediterranean geography and the character of limestone.
For at the time of the Renaissance, above all, it was the in­
heritance of feeling derived from concrete objects that became
intense. Agostino's qualities, of course, were in part shared by
some of his contemporaries, certainly in those of their works
that I have described as Quattro Cento .
1 56 Artists and Works of Art
A more definite search f� r the origin of these qualities than
the one I purs ue, a definite research in the technique of ancient
or medieval reliefs, will explain but little. Assyrian low reliefs,
for instance, show no large degree of flattening. Classical high
relief often has the appearance of free-standing statuary that
has been cut off three-quarter or h alf by the background plane.
This matrix not only does not assist the carving value but
muddles the plastic value. Classical low relief is, essentially, a n
engraving; i n actuality, a raised surface surrounded sometimes
by a grooved outline. This contour is clearer from the distance
than a general incising of the stone would be. I rarely find a
deeper inspiration behind such relief. It is intended that the
figure should look as flat as possible o n the raised surface.
Relief is substituted for engraving merely in the interests of
greater clearness . An Agostino relief is exactly opposite in
conception and technique. It is intended that the figure should
look as round as possible, while the lower the surfaces by which
the effect is achieved, the better. So great is the three-dimen­
sional significance of some of the Tempio reliefs, that one needs
to touch their surf aces to realize fully the degree of their
flatness .
In many periods of art throughout the world, low relief has
too often served merely as a raised incision, a drawing or en­
graving in stone whose sides have been cut away to afford
sharpness and definition. No wonder that our nlore thoughtful
contemporary s culptors have no interest in relief!

I shall return to the question of relief. It is time to say some­

thing about the nature of modelling .
That with which you model in sculpture i s as much a mat­
erial as the stone to be carved. But plastic material has no
'rights' of its own. It is a formless mud used, very likely, to
make a model for bronze or brass. Modelling is a much more
'free' activity than carving . The modelled shape is not un­
covered but created. This gives rise to a freer treatment, free in
the sense that it is a treatment unrestricted by so deep an i m­
aginative communion with the significance of the material
itself. The modeller realizes his design with clay. Unlike the
 The Reliefs in the Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini 1 57

carver, he does not envisage that conception a s enclosed i n his

raw m ateria l .
I f the pri mary carved shape is an obsidi an tool or weapon, the
prim ary moulded shape is a clay recepta cle. The ungla zed bowl
is \Vritten with the potter's fingertips : thu s he expresses the com­
pleteness of its manufacture : while enamelled pattern over
glaze and slip, or on porcela i n , are an el abora tion of his touch,
are the potter's written chara cters . As we sha ll see, the cal­
ligraphic and supremely personal element in graphic art is
always to be associated with modelling conception (particularly
i n the c ase of oil painting), w bile painting, for instance, that
essenti ally illuminates a certain spa ce, the use of pigment that is
more directed by some a rchitectural conception of planes, is
preferably to be classed wi th carving .
One can s ay at once of modelling forms (as opposed to carv­
ing forms) i n the widest sense, th at they are without restraint : I
mean that they can well be the perfect em bodimen t of con­
ception : vvhereas, in the process of carving, conception is all the
tim e adj usted to the life that the sculptor feels beneath his tool .
The mind that i s intent o n plasti city often expresses i n sculp­
ture the sense of rhythm, the mental pulse . Plastic objects,
though they are obj ects, often betray a tempo. Carving con­
ception, on the other hand, c auses its obj ect, the solid bit of
spa ce, to be more spatial sti l l . Temporal signi fi c an ce instead of
being incorporated in spa ce is here turned into spa ce and thus is
shown in iminediate form, depri ved of rhythm.
Modelling conception, untram melled by the restraint tha t
reverence for obj ects as solid space inspires, m a y run to many
kinds of extreme . For instance, on the one h and there are the
simple, 'pure', forms of many fine pieces of pottery, exhibiti ng a
purity of completeness in ma nufacture th at is foreign to the
very substance of s tone : on the other h and there are potentia l
or conglomerate forms that are consciously impressed with the
associative and tra nsi tional qualiti es of the mind's processes .
The ra pid content of Rodin's sculptu re and, indeed, of I m­
pressionist art as a whole, serves as an exa mple.
Chara cteristi c of modelling is an effect of the preconceived.
In any Ting ware bowl, a most compli c a ted thoughtful con-
158 Artists and Works of Art
ception has been realized by a s imple s hape; while the t hr ust of
some all-absorbing rhythm, simple enough i n its fundamental
movement, has been realized in virtuoso or m asterly s tyle by
Bernini, Manet and Rembrandt, in unequivocal or monumental
style by Donatello and Michelangelo . One does not encounter so
prominent a masterliness� so 'wilful' a preconcepti o n in wh at i s
most essentially carving . For carving entails a dependence, i m­
aginative as wel l as a ctual, upon the material tha t is worked.
The stone block attains vivi d life under the h a n d that polishes .
Simi larly, the s hape of the material o n which Piero della Fran­
cesca and even Giorgione painted was of the deepest signi ficance
to them, far more so than i n the case of Rubens, for insta n ce,
or of Greco . These latter, i n their vastly different ways , were
often engaged i n such potent modelling tha t they negatived the
picture plane by their compositions, as did all the B a ro que
painters . Theirs was the supremely person al , the supremely
'aesthetic ' touch ; theirs the calligraphic omnipotence so charac­
teristic, as wel l, of Far Eastern p ictori a l art. The B a ro que cal­
ligraphy was generous, bold, a dul t : while the Chinese
calligraphy, though far more subtle, in painting at least has
always been at root a n art of precocious childhood, that is to
say, cunning and exquisite splodges upon a white surfa ce .
Most developed visual art displays a calligraphic competence.
Ca lligraphy becomes extreme o n ly when a calligraphic
draughtsmanship is that to which each of the vis ual arts ap­
proximates . Such vvas the positi o n in B aroque times . A Baro que
church, a Baroque painting, a Baro que sculpture, each of them
possess the verve of experienced and rapid h a n dwriting. All un­
abashed modelling conception may be put i nto terms of such
draughtsmanship, p articularly since m aterials are so i n ter­
ch angea ble i n modelli ng . All s culptural modellers should pri­
m arily be such draughtsmen. I do not mea n merely that they
should be able to draw, but further, that their modelling should
be but a proj ection of this primary penm a nship . The true
carver's power to draw, on the other h a n d, is a secondary
power : for i t is i nspired by his attitude to stone. He has sought
to i lluminate the stone with fi le or chisel : now h e seeks to i l­
luminate p aper with pencil or brush, so as to articulate its evenly
 The Reliefs in the Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini 1 59

lighted surface. ' Illuminated manuscripts' are a just description

of the painting that springs from this attitude; and to these
illuminations, the painting that was inspired by the character of
stone always bears some reference. There may be a strictly
linear a pproach to contour; but in the developed pictorial art of
this kind, the painter will emulate the tonal values which the
actual carver reveals on the surfaces, more or less equally lit, of
his block. This p ainter's employment of tone i s distinct from all
other employments of colouring: in comparison they are adven­
titious; whereas the former method gives rise to the painting,
whether it be more linear or more 'tonal' i n technique, that is
most deeply founded upon tonal conception . To my mind, such
is the only true pai nting. There are, of course, all degrees of this
profundity. Thus a Piero della Francesca picture cau ses all
nearby pictures to cease as paintings . For, in comparison, they
appear to be n o more than coloured designs, calligraphic brush­
work, tinted drawings .
I shall not risk the further confusion of the reader at this
juncture, by following up so difficult a distinction in the realm
of painting. This subj ect, i n its entirety, belongs to a subsequent
volume. But, so far as it is now necessary to my interpretation
of A gostino' s carving, I believe it will become clearer in due
course.
To turn again to sculpture proper.
I have attempted to isol ate the essential carving from the
essential modelling. We may now form a better idea of their
interdependence. For let me admit at once that in no p a rt of the
world has there existed a s ustained figure-carving in which mod­
elli n g did not influence, and so, extend, the carver's aim; nor
have artists with the strongest plastic preconceptions disliked,
for what were considered monumental works at any rate, the
suggestions of carving that result from the execution of their
designs in wood or stone. There is no doubt that in the majority
of developed periods, sculptors have desired to combine the
plasticity of poise and rhythm w ith those qualities of a spatial
object which, it is felt, can only be translated and enhanced
rather tha n created. Stone exhibits these qualities at their
highest. And so, plastic conceptions have been realized pre-
1 60 Artists and Works of Art
eminently in stone as well ·as in plastic materials : and that
not only because of the greater durability of s tone.
So confused a conceptual admixture, of course, is foreign to
the pure plastic art of Chinese earthenware and porcelain. But in
limestone Europe, the influence of stone on modelling is evident
from the earliest times, particularly in the South. After the initial
rapprochement, so typical of European art, the rel ationship is
sustained with reversed roles. For the quick develop ment of the
more facile process, modelling, then constantly influences the
carver. Indeed, one can make the generalization that the greater
the power of carving to absorb modelling aim, the more incess­
ant will be the infiltration of plastic values into that carving.
Thus, the proof of the importance of stone in European art is
the prevalence of plastic aim in European carving. A period
comes in Europe, however, when an excess of plastic aim in
stone-work overpowers the nexus with carving val ues . As
carved stone the resultant will be empty, though it may still be
lovely as modelling : since a successful plastic idea is little
bound up with any one material; indeed, its entirety may be
suggested by a drawing. But it is probable, since the one defines
the other, that when the values proper to carving are finally
lost, modelling is atrophied sooner or later. There then intervene
those grotesque confusions in aesthetic val ues s uch as we attri­
bute to the Hellenistic age and, s till more, to our own i mmediate
past . At such a time it is essential to start afresh with the
primary values of carving and modelling. This is o ur position
today.

To turn once more to stone relief. Classical relief, I have said,

rarely possesses superb carving value. The flattening of form, so
congenial to the light and density of stone, is rarely marked.
Flattening entails the use of some perspective where a scene is
crowded with figures : and it was the character of classical ar­
chitecture itself which ruled out any such treatment. A Greek
temple, in particular, was so entire an expression of limestone,
that a relief could add nothing structurally; while, executed in
perspective, it would have disturbed the li mestone geometry of
the planes . It was as if architecture almost completely absorbed,
 ··
�
. · ··

.· � .
.··. ...
.··:·· .

1. Luciano Lau rana, Courtyard o f the D ucal Palace, Urbino

(photo Felicitas Vogler)
2. Donatello, Can toria, detail
3. Piero della Francesca, The Annunciation, detail
4. Piero della Francesca, The Flagellation, detail
5. Verroc chio, Madon na a n d Child with Angels
6. Piero della Francesca, Bap tism
7. Donatello, D ead Chris t with Angels
8. A gostino d i Duccio, Mado nna and Child with Angels
9. Agos tino d i Duccio, Inf1uxion Caused b y the Moon
10. Giorgione, Temp es ta
11. Giorgione, Tempes ta, detail
 13. Michelangelo, Slave or
Cap tive

12. Michelangelo, Rondanini

Pie ta
14. Michelangelo, Crucifixion
15. Les Baigneuses
Cezanne,
16. Rembrandt, Belshazzar' s Feas t
 The Reliefs in the Tempio A1alatestiano, Rimini 161

and then restricted, carving aim. I n some other countries, a

more developed relief has still been part of the architecture
without so marked a subservience . The other extreme is at­
tained by some Indian temples i n which structura l conception
might appear to be sacrificed to what is ca lled orna mental carv­
ing : a misnomer ; for the carving has not been conceived as
distinct from the structure . It is the structure .
That will not appeal to modern taste which tends to deny, in
any circumsta nces, a paramount scu lptura l va lue to relief.
One is told that Renaissance relief is merely pictorial, merely
bad painting . I trust the foregoing pages have put the boot upon
the other leg; though I do not wish to suggest that a painting is
inferior because it can be referred to a carving or plastic con­
ception. If it were so, there would be no good pictures at all.
One is also told that a sculptural piece must be satisfactory
from every angle; it must be entire, significant from in front,
behind, on top, beneath and so on; whereas relief, of course, in
worse case th an a picture, can be seen only from the front.
Now the reliefs I a m about to champion are to be seen from the
sides a s well as fro m the front. This h as escaped everybody ' s
notice, a nd it i s the central point of their qu ality . But they
h ave no backs . Behind them, and part of them, are slabs fitted to
columns . Yet is this not to have a back ? For myself, the entire
piece of carving, even a primitive flint, is not the quintessentia l
carving though i t be the primary one . The carved stone t h a t you
take in your h and, that you turn over to examine every love­
liness, h as a created entirety which in the last resort I would
rather associ ate with modelling. For the essence of stone is its
power to symbolize objectivity . It s hould stand, be more or less
immovable : a nd what better occasion for vital objectivity tha n
when carving gives the expression to masonry itself, when relief
shows the surf ace of the stone a live? Not often does it take this
role . Quattro Cento carving, though, is of this kind, of which
Agostino was the greatest master. Let me, then, if I am to con­
vince you, define his mastery in detail, first p ausing to consider
th e low relief that he inherited.
A few pages back I described how all the major values of
stone could be glorified by the flattening and thinning of form i n
1 62 Artists and Works· of Art
very low relief; how stone may thus reveal ro unded forms that
are yet altogether one with the matrix and with the building .
Fla ttened shapes in relief, shapes that give
some suggestion of the
figure in the round, and consequently afford some value to a
side-view, are common eno ugh in Byzantine, Romanesque and
Gothic relief. Except, however, in some Byzantine and late
Gothic pieces, the flattening is not far developed, nor could it be
further developed without proper perspective. But it is a mis­
take to regard perspective science as something altogether un­
equivocal, as clearly demarcating its users from their
predecessors. Wherever o n flat or flattened surfaces there is a
suggestion of the round, there is use of perspective of some sort.
Here again is the connection between the layer-like or flattened
forms natural to stone, and pictorial art in general . For the
widest possible definition of a pi cture m ust be the use of flat
pigment entailing some suggestion of two or more surfaces .
Should pigment be used without any suggestion of a variety of
surfaces, it may achieve pattern, but not painting . Painting re­
alizes on a single plane the tones of marble surfaces . Indeed, the
very same sense of round sh apes that are yet flattened out,
which I find proper to stone relief, is sometimes to be obtained
fro m Byzantine pictorial art; for instance, from the compressed
attitude of the mosaic sitting Virgin of San Apollinare Nuovo
at Ravenna. She is, in part, represented slightly sideways so that
she shall the better appear to sit. As for one of the attendant
Magi, his bending knees (that enable a large p a rt of the h aunch
to appear), his twisting trunk, immediately put one in mind of
the attitudes Agostino used in so many of the Tempio reliefs,
by which he could s uggest figures in the round. Again, the By­
zantine terracotta reliefs in the Baptistery of the Orthodox are
to be connected with Agostino's works .
Thus, when perspective science was discovered -at the begin­
ning of the fifteenth century, it was the answer to an i ntensi fied
acquai ntance with stone. The Mediterranean limestone values
came uppermost; and, of course, in a novel form, in a Gothic
form after a thousand years or so of C h ristiani ty . But as usual
the carvi ng situation was bound up with the plastic. Given a

new attention to stone th at dates from the proto-Renaissance, it

 The Reliefs in the Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini 1 63

was not irregul ar that the enormous strides i n technique and

perspective should have been i mmediately contingent upon a
new aim i n the more facile process, modelling .
Limestone, a s I h ave s aid, m arble i n particular, p ossesses a
soft light. Yet it is solid and durable . Its beauty is this fusion of
the virtues of h ard materials and soft materials. Nay, further,
the purer marble is h ard and brittle, yet owing to its meta­
morphic, h omogeneous structure, is carved by strong tools with
some facility. And i t is probably due also to this character . of
marble, that modelling, the more facile process of homogeneous
soft materials, has made in Mediterranean countries an unpar­
alleled, continuous, i ntrusion into the carving of stone. Some
intrusion of modelling facility heightens the 'human' limestone
character, as we shall see in the work of Agostino, whose art
reveals a con1bi nation of some plastic skil l with a searching
respect and l ove for the stone .
But the maj ority of Florentine Renaissance sculptors had no
such continuous love . Already before the 'stone rush' Florentine
modelling was far developed, and i t was the Florentines who
upon the advent of the 'stone rush' gave the new com mand and
the new conception to the rest of Italy. In my first volume I h ave
described this phase and its connection, so far as architecture
and architectural decoration were concerned, with the dull Flor­
entine sandstone, pietra m orta. *
They loved stone little i n Florence . The more typical Flor­
entines answered to the spiri t of the times, but not speci fically.
Their i nterest i n carving too closely corresponded \Vith their
interest i n the degree of m odelling that stone could absorb . They
made use of the deepened i nterest i n stone a trifle ungenerously.
Theirs was the poise, the equipoise, the cold purity of modelling
conception. When I come to Florence from the Adriatic coast, I
notice this a t once - everyw here this poise of the bronze upon
the pedestal . I h ave a sense of Plastik, I noti ce the prominent yet
noble stoma chs of the statuary, m oulded, it is evident, not by
eating but from outside by the sculptors . I admire the size of
things, I admire greatly the poise of the open loggias and the
great eaves that are l ike wings of wheeling aeroplanes along the
* More usually called pietra serena.
164 Artists and Works of Art
·
streets . How they s a i l and w heel l ike the swal lows who nest i n
them! Stately, n atura l ly stately become the figures in the nar­
rowness below, figures once fitted i n vol uminous robes and locks
upon high heads. As I gaze at the p la nes of the eaves fixed in
complicated rhythm a long the Via dei Bardi, high over the
straight, gloomy \V alls, I remember Verrocchio's bronze St
Thomas with a foot balanced without the niche on Or San M ich­
ele, I feel his calm locks a nd pointed face and the nobleness of his
cloak. The noise of the Vi a dei C a lzaioli, re¥erberating a mong
the close grey stones, prevents this nobleness from gloominess
and pride : and so it must h ave always been in Florence; a lways
the plastic assurance amid turmoil .

Perspective was developed by the Florentines, but w a s never the

basis of their art. The Florentine sculptors and the p ai nters who
derived from them ' used' perspective . They cared little for gra­
dations i n layers or in tone, except so far as they assisted n atu­
ralism . In c arving as in modelling they realized the most
realistic perspective without any intense gradation between a d­
jacent surfaces . The foreground figures of Ghiberti's bro nze
reliefs are real ly free-standing, while the b ackground figures are
no more than outlined. Open the bronze gates or appro a ch them
from the side, and the reliefs will be meaningless, the fore­
ground figures will be horrible and precarious bits of pointed
metal. In this connection I feel in sympathy with the modern
criticism of relief, especial ly relief on doors that presumably
open and shut. But such is not the relief I h a i l as c arving.
Since they aped i n stone the extreme n aturalism of Ghiberti's
modelling, the Florentine cutters developed an unequalled
facileness . Sometimes they anticipated the Baro que translation
into stone of an extreme Baroque modelling, a s when the Rossel­
linos h ung their flying angels on the w alls . These distressing
figures, which claim the poise of the hollow bronze although
they are ostensibly marble relief, preserve their positions by
being corn posed in reality of marble pieces that lie close on the
wall surface and that a re secured by a projection that p asses
within the wall . But there existed relief carving i n F lorence,
exquisite relief carving, even though largely i nspired by Ghi-
 The Reliefs in the Te1npio !vf.alatestiano, Rimini 1 65

berti's plastic elegance. Desiderio would not have thus carved

the swags on the Marsuppini tomb unless he had loved the
marble. Yet, if we comp are him with Agostino, Desiderio is a
modeller, conceives as a modeller. And the same is true of D on­
atello. When Desiderio or Donatello carved a M adonna and
child relief, they composed it boldly, in masses. And so, what­
ever the delicacy of the carving, there is little, or no, vital
connection between one surf a ce a nd the one immediately next
to it. The child, although he is the front surface, will be ex­
tremely flattened, so that i n composition he becomes of a mass,
a plastic m ass, with the mother. There are cases when a

significant relation between one surface and an a dj oining sur­

face is not so much unimportant from the point of vievv of the
general composition, as definitely undesirable . Thus the fl attened
top of a Virgin's head or nimbus is resolved into a rim cut
away from the background. The centrality, the emphasis upon
organized mass, require the rim to be divorced from the ba ck­
ground, so that composition be the more definite, the more pre­
cise. Such a rim, hovvever, is contradictory \vhen seen from the
side. For the cutting away now appears as something so blatant
and emph asized as to become a main feature, a positive deni al
of a nexus with the background, with the matrix. I n brief, there
is little care of stone surfaces as valuable and related in them­
selves.
Lombard cutters are even more a t fault. Very often the whole
heads of their crowded reliefs are cut away to an a lmost spear­
like sharpness, apparent even from the front. It is only fair to
s ay that of the carvers who w orked principally in Floren ce,
Desiderio is to be blamed least in this connection . He is con­
siderably nearer to Agostino th an were the Rossellinos a nd
Maj anos, o r than was Donatello himself. Desiderio worked
marble with a sensi tiveness unrivalled in Florence. But he too
seems a modeller by the side of Agosti no .
Stone gra dations are n1 ultiplied by a n Agostino Madonn a a n d
child relief. Graduated surf a ces a re the logic of its form . E a c h
surf a c e sponsors a fresh djsclosure. What i s in front (the c hi ld) is
less flattened th an what is behind (the Virgin). The effects of
actu al difference in the depth of surfa ces are not diminjshed as
1 66 Artists and Works of Art
by Desiderio or Donatello in favour of a plastic mass, but em­
phasized with perspective . Thus the forms carved on the inner
layers are progressively flattened. The further into the stone the
more p ronounced becomes the flattening of shapes : yet the
inner and background shapes suggest no less contour than
the other shapes; with the res ult that they are luminous even in
the dimmest light, as if their conto urs were i ndeed the face of
the stone-block itself. So great is the contour expressed by these
gradual or flattened interrelated s urfaces that, unlike the reliefs
discussed above, an Agostino relief will bear examination from
the side.
This is the test of relief carving. If every surface is rounded
into the next so that, seen from the side, the values of forms in
the round are still composed there as a face to the stone, then it
is the finest relief carving. The Florentine sculptors, one and all,
had little use for perspective beyond a certain point. Agostino
exalted perspective, so that every g radation of the marble's slow
luminous face was given life by his hands . His low relief and its
background possess a vital and vibrating concomitance .
Such general statements p roduce small conviction . Let us
compare Agostino's Virgin and child relief in the Victoria and
Albert Museum [Plate 8] with the famous Don atello Dead Christ
with Angels [Plate 7] that hangs on the next case, the one nearer
the door. I have little doubt as to which of these two pieces the
reader will prefer in photograph . For the greater the model ling
conception in sculpture, the less are the values lost in photo­
graph . The photograph of the Donatello relief gives you its point
most happily. The design, the o rganization of masses, the
elements of weight and stress and strain a re clearly understood.
The virtues of the Agostino relief, on the other hand, the gradual
rounded cutting, the closely rel ated equal tones and h alf tones,
the luminosity, in part are lost.
But the disparity is not merely a question of photograph . The
s ame j udgement is likely to be made in front of the reliefs them­
selves . For contemporary educated taste is a good deal m ore
academic in temper than one might suppose from all the talk
and would-be 'modernist' profession. Now, academic taste only
feels at home with plastic conception in the widest sense. That
 The Reliefs in the Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini 1 67

is one of the reasons why academic sponsorship of the classic is

so woeful, so doomed. Like the pseudo-modernists, academic
t aste can only fully recognize design a lone, albeit of a different
sort, but equally the plastic sort. Be i t modernist or academic or
whatever else, the simple, swift or 'masterly' oryanization of
m asses is characteristic of modelling, be i t oil p aint that is
slickly splashed about or Le Corbusier's lightning concrete. * Nat­
urally, the Florentines with their power of organization, with
their complete preconception (all the values of a Florentine
relief can be suggested by a sketch), are continually a cclaimed
unrivalled masters among the fifteenth-century s culp tors . At a
moderate estima te only one out of a hundred trained a dmirers
of visual art is as sensitive to the deeper philosophies of spa ce
and tone or carving, as he is to poise and rhythm or to the
plastic side of composition. The majority will fully recognize the
creative verve only when it has fashioned something out of
formlessness. They see the shape and the other attributes of a
primitive flint tool, but they do not see with the same absorbed
a ttention that it is a flint. In a word, the m ajority are not highly
sensitive to stone . They love texture and colour of course. They
know this picture has good colour and that bad colour. But
there it is, just colour or colourfulness : which indeed it is when
employed for plastic conception. To them the concentrated use
of tone necessarily means an impressionist effect. When will
they see that tone is put to more uses in a picture by Piero della
Francesca than in a picture by Renoir; when will a painter
come forward who is incapable of conceiving this horrible i dea,
colour?
I, at any rate, put in a word for carving. And, indeed, there
are signs that the original carving conception is today re­
discovered. Already there are painters who disdain the moulding
properti es of oil paint, who, so to speak, prefer to polish and
s cratch their canvases like the carver his s tone. An a ttitude of

* I am not denying the relevance today of Le Corbusier's building.

I but make the point that his conceptions are purely plastic. At the
end of this chapter I shall point out wha t difference this n ew (and
in evitable) pla sticity of building makes to the carving-modelling situ­
ation.
1 68 Artists and Works of Art
such kind - rather than the often concomitant abstraction in
design - is the basis o f the pai nting we feel to be con­
temporary.

I do not desire to minimize the appeal of the Donatello relief,

though I am not averse from a nticipating its photographic ad­
vantage. Its beauty is monument a l . Nothing that Agostino
carved was monumental . Hence his comparative neglect by the
cri tics. There is nothing monumental a bout the n a ture of
marble . But I will not deny th at the effect of the Donatello
piece, i n common with many o ther p l astical ly conceived pieces,
is enhanced by the fact that it is carved in m arble. And, of
course, i n such carving, some of the Renaissance general love
for stone obtains expression. But this relief in no way qualifies
as one of Donatello's Quattro Cento works ; unlike, in this re­
spect, the reliefs o n the base of the Judith, which, although
bronze, display the tense a nimation and exuberance that was
pri marily imputed by that age to flowering sto ne surface. Or, if
you prefer, such humanistic eruption was imputed to a l l mat­
erials. But I h ave argued sufficien tly tha t stone h as a pre-emi nent
objectivity for which a flowering is most desired . It is the con­
crete thing, the sculptor' s ideal obj ect.
Here is, then, in the Donatello relief, the modeller's organ­
ization of masses rea lized i n m arble. The Christ' s body is every­
thing. Even in photograph you can follow the modelling of his
stomach which is made ' a natomical' i n the mode that is
common to Florentine sculpture of t his period. On the oth er
hand, the further wing of the foreground a ngel on the right i s
no more th a n sketched in. As surfaces, the figures traced i n the
background, the background heads and the nimbi, h a ve no
aesthetic rel ation \vh atsoever with the m asses in front. These
background shapes are relevant o n ly to the composition as a
whole, th at is, as shapes; \Vhich is not e nough rel ationship for
c arving conception . But apart from the b ackground shapes , i n
foreground, too, there is shown s m a l l feeling for changes i n
s urface a s significant i n themselves . T o Donatello, changes of
surface meant little more than light and shade, chiaroscuro, the
instruments of plastic organization . The bottom of the a ngels'
 The Reliefs in the Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini 1 69

robes is gouged and undercut so as to provide a contrast to the

open planes of Christ's nude torso. The layers of the stone are
treated wholesale . Though some of the cutting is beautiful in
itself, the relief betrays a wilful, preconceived, manner of ap­
proach . In brief, the composition is not so much founded upon
the interrelationship of adj oining surfaces, as upon the broader
principles of chiaroscuro. Stress and strain is the point : anat­
omy, the then unrivalled plastic subject, is the point.
There exists a tendency for composition to be thus broadly
organized whenever the sculptor h as m ade a design and delega­
ted to assistants most, if not all, of the heavy slow work of cut­
ting the stone . Here again we see a reason, this time an unattrac­
tive one, for the interpolation in carving of plastic values . The
prevalent monumental aim of European carving has, at times,
entailed the gentleman sculptor of manifold commissions, \vho
draws sometimes, and sometimes models in clay . Several recent
academic sculptors are reputed not to have handled a chisel in
their lives, nor any other carving instrument except at meal
times . Three-feet models of war memorials - a wet day's work -
have been posted to Italy to be executed there in tractable
marbles by s ubservient masons with the mechanical aid of
pointing . No \Vonder, then, that with few exceptions, the hand­
ful of serious sculptors who exist today concentrate upon carv­
ing and perform every s troke of their own work; no wonder
they feel that they rediscover the very art of sculpture.
In the Renaissance, of course, there were hundreds of men
who cut stone superbly. The most intense feeling for stone was
abroad. Nevertheless, plastic conception lent itself to delegation
of work, to its organization on a large scale. We see why Flor­
entine aesthetic was so well developed, why the workshops
were so big and efficient. In plastic art, at any rate, production
breeds production. A plastic conception executed by able as­
sistants does not suffer to anything like the same extent as a
c arving conception. The plastic conception already exists in the
m aster' s drawing. But the values of an Agostino relief, other
than those of its plasticity, were a chieved only in the actual
carving process. Agostino's assistants in the Tempio often let
him down badly; and it was inevitable that they should. One
1 70 Artists and Works of Art
might say that the attainment of a carving conception cannot
be delegated or hurried. But those peoples whose fantasies rely
largely on stone, insist upon a multiplicity of statues . Thus, we
rea lize once more that the very love for stone, for stone sculp­
ture, entails the development of a plastic approach . For only
with the aid of this approa ch can good s culpture become
quickly extensive. And we see that when the tendency h as run its
course, when the original demand for stone is exhausted, a mean­
ingless plasti c sculpture, committed to a c ademi c design, remains.
We need, however, m ake no excuses for the cutting of this
Agostino Madonna and child low relief. It is obviously by his
hand.
The most marked difference between the Agostino and the
Donatello is the farmer's effect of steady disclosure, in direct
contrast with the latter's a lternating light and shade . There is
always the element of disclosure in true c arving . Yet, contrasted
with the Donatello, Agostino 's intensely low relief at first sight
may seem ribbed and fretted, fussy. You miss Donatello's bold
plasticity. But then you c annot realize in photograph the subt­
lety of surfaces that preserve the marble as wholly m arble. You
feel a l a ck of rhythm . But why alvvays seek for rhythm in
visual art, why desire th at rhythm or music and other temporal
abstractions be conveyed by obj ects ; why desire from the con­
crete an effect of a lternation, since the very process of time can
be expressed, without intermittence, as the vital steadiness of a
world of space, as a rhy thm whose p arts are l aid out as some­
thing simultaneous, and which thus ceases to be rhythmical?
Rhythm, surely, is not so proper to visual art as i mmedia cy;
there is, surely, a certain priority of carving over plastic con­
ception. Plasticity or rhythm in architecture and s culpture of
the South has a lways retained some pronounced immediacy of
effect through the dramati c presentation of feeling. In the visual
arts of North and East, on the other h and, rhythm too fre­
quently impairs spati a l signi fic ance : too often those arts i n es­
sence are a visual kind of musi c . And how few appreciators of
visual art understand anything about art, except about music
and literature !
Agostino' s tonalities elude you . You cannot, for example, re-
 The Reliefs in the Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini 171

alize from the photograph the effect of the apparently straight,

if ridged, surface of the Virgin' s undergarment that appears be­
neath her left h and. Carved, not modelled, are the carefully
flattened heads, slow in roundness, yet so great in roundness that
they will 'read' from an angle. Should you go to the Victoria and
Albert, contrast in this respect the two Florentine reliefs, one on
each side of the Agostino . They are absurd when viewed from
an angle, when you see them as you stand in front of the Agos­
tino. The poignancy of his shapes is not so much in themselves,
as in their relations with his other shapes . This relationship is a
much tighter one than in modelling. There is a poignant beauty
in the triangular shape beneath the Virgin's wrist, inside her
cuff. This shape i s nothing in itself: for carving conception
bestows an immense content and power on what, by itself,
would be the most insignificant of forms. Notice the impassable
little space between the Virgin's cheek and the child's head. It
has the meaning, the shapeliness, of the intervals between forms
in Piero's paintings . Such irremediable positions between objects,
shapes that are thus so far determined by their intervals, do not
lend themselves, after a certain point, to the bold organization
of masses th at we admire in the Donatello. And why 'bold' ?
Because such plastic organization runs counter to the purely
sp atial conception of which stone is the symbol .
Yet, I will not deny that Agostino himself is an offspring of
Florentine modelling as I have defined it; that unless he had
learned his trade in the Florentine school, he could never have
developed so facile and flowing a technique, nor attained such
naturalism; that some of the Florentine modelling cliches re­
m ained with him . But I have already admitted a constant inter­
relation between what I h ave called modelling and what I have
called carving. I admire the infusion of such modelling into
such carving so long as it enhances the layer formation of the
stone . Further, I am willing to champion any m arble piece,
however 'modelled' its forms, where there still exists some
wide reverence for stone, some evidence or remembrance of
stone culture such as the Mediterranean limestone culture . I
give the Florentine plastic stone statues and reliefs preference,
as carving, over much Northern cutting that may have a
1 72 Artists and Works of Art
minim um of direct plastic aim but which, none the less,
pulsates with rhythm . Northerners have never loved stone deep
down : and no other material directs the fantasy to pure non-
rhyth mic space .
This conceptio n, non-rhyth mic space, is difficult to define
more closely : so let me again apply its sense to one detail of the
reliefs before us. Whereas in the Donatello relief the angel's
face on the Christ's shoulder is a most definite (and plastic) tran­
sition, on the left of the Agostino relief we see one face, as it
were, causing other faces. The essence of the carving, and of
truly spatial, non-rhythmic approach in general, is the juxta­
position of similar tones, of related contours, of intrinsically
related forms. Every part is on some equality with every other
part, an organization that is foreign to the come-and-go of
rhythm. Work of this intensely spatial kind recalls a panorama
contemplated in an equal light by which objects of different
dimensions and textures, of different beauty and of different
emotional appeal, whatever their distance, are seen with more
or less the same distinctness, so that one senses the uniform
dominion of an uninterrupted space. The intervals between
obj ects have assumed a markedly irreversible aspect : there it all
is, so completely set out in space that one cannot entertain a
single afterthought. In visual art, the idea of for ms however
different, as answering to some cogent, common, continuous,
dominion that enforces the bonds between those forms in spite
of their manifold contrasts, gives rise to the distinctive non­
plastic aim : and this idea was inspired, above all, by the equality
of light on stone, an equality that dramatizes every tonal value.
In Piero della Francesca's painting, by the religious reverence
for spatial intervals, by tonal and perspective organization, all
feeling, all movement, all rhythm, all plasticity itself, was trans­
lated equally into panorama terms. His pictures express the
metaphysics of space or colour or tone . They are free of 'atmos­
phere', psychological or physical, as they are of anything em­
phatic.
See once more how shape causes shape in the Agostino relief.
The Virgin's arm lies tight to her diaphragm. There is the i m­
pression of a surface growing inward. This helps out the slight
 The Reliefs in the Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini 1 73

indication of the breasts . I n the Donatello, an angel's hand is put

flat on the Christ's body. I t directs attention to the torso : it is a
general tactile reminder. One obtai ns from the Donatello none of
the sense of surfa ce making surface to flower. Agostino was the
master of u ndul ation in the stone . His stone becomes a hotbed
of sh ape. See the angel's head at the bottom of the relief, h is hand
c linging to the fra me as if he h ad emerged from the back layers
and had passed through the Virgin to the front, or as if the s tone
were a sea i n w hich he rocked by his hand to and from a
breakwater . Also, notice the poignancy of the child's curving
shoulder j uxtaposed upon the fa ce of an a ngel behind, from
which the shoulder's roundness graduates . Face and shoulder
give each other shape . This is an excellent example of Agos­
tino's use of tone, or, perh aps i n the case of actual untinted
carving, one should j ust call it surface j uxtaposition . * At any
rate, compare this surface transition with the deep shadow
a round the shoulder and arm of the angel on the left of the
Donatello relief. There are no such gross and plastic shadows in
Agostino's carving. His placing of a shoulder agains t a cheek
behind, similar contours without a shadow between, remind
one of Piero della Francesca ' s yet greater j uxtapositions of simi­
lar tones, u naided by the a ctual changes of surface that facili­
tate this fe at in carving. Piero delighted to display his extreme
virtuosity i n the employment of tone by using a practically
identical colour for so mething portrayed far behind, j uxta­
posed to something portrayed well in the foreground. So com­
plete his skill and so essential is it to his con ception of painting,
so completely is that conception realized, that with a fair
amount of intelligence one might look at h is Flagellation at
Urbino [Pl ate 4] every day for a year, without noticing in the
picture a very astounding instance of th at feat.
This is the pai n ting th at presumes light, a more or less equal
light, another word for space as a homogeneous medium, in
which all thi ngs are set out. Piero could turn transition and
movement into the finality of such space . Lights , on the other
* The reader will be able to discover for himself in my photograph
many other instances of such mutually enhancing j uxtaposition. An
obvious example is the hair of the two angels on the right.
1 74 Artists and Works of A rt
hand, li9h tin9 effects, or an emphasis upon c hi aroscuro, these
are to be connected with rhythm or p oise, not prim arily with
stone. Northern European and Northern Asiatic p ainters have
generally conceived light as the agency of a tmospheric effects :
when left to themselves they have been, of all pictorial artists,
the least connected with stone, the furthest committed to mod­
elling conception. Such is the case of many sculptors, too, who
have avoi ded the introduction of specific modelling shape and
idea . This avoidance has availed them little, whatever strength
and superficial purity, whatever profound absence of vulgarity,
their more purita n temper has evolved.
Piero's and Agostino's conception depends upon an almost
hieratic use of perspective. In terms of perspective was the re­
ligion of equal light, of space, of stone, expressed in that time.
Anyone may experience this finality who is familiar with the air
of southern l ands. It is not because of marked difference in tone
or in distinctiveness that you perceive thi s wall to be behind this
wal l . The bricks of the farther house-wall are just as clear, just
the same colour. Each obj ect stands in order, redu ced to a
common rel ationship by a common medium . You are aware of
space : every p rocess seems exposed as obj ects, all of them all at
once in their degrees . More especiall y, j ust as the sun ha s gone
down after a hot day, things stand. A luminous whiteness, as yet
untrammelled by the dizzy approach of night, is common to sea,
to road, to house. Stone gleams, the dust is w hite: what is of dark
hue is dark, what is darker is blacker without mitigation . The
sun has disappeared suddenly leaving the world arranged . After
the long dazzle of the day, your eyes see the worl d exposed by a
neutral medium which is but the fresh, caressing air. The even­
ing stirs : the concrete worl d stands con crete . W hat was the pass­
age of the sun has turned into space and all that is left of passage
are the invisible airs . Otherwise every ph ase, all subj ective con­
ditions, appear to have been transformed into objects a rranged
in neutral unbroken perspective.
It is when thus light or space imposes so uniform a dominion
on obj ects that difference in tones seems uniquely real and poig­
nant. There is nothing atmospheric a bout them . The relation­
ship between objects becomes the essenti al p art of their shape;
 The Reliefs in the Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini 1 75
and this their relationship is of tone and of perspective . Light
marble pre-eminently, in most of its conditions and in most
lights however dim or however violent, enjoys this tonal
condition, since the equal light on stone tends but to mark its
shape .
Once more I a m back to the subject of Agostino. I have pre­
viously mentioned the tonal qualities of his cutting. I must now
s ay more about his uses of perspective . Although much of
Piero's fi nality in spatial exposition may be tra ced in his art,
Agostino was also concerned i n showing movement as a fer­
ment on the surface of the stone. For both purposes he used
exaggerated perspective : s ince both the tonal relationships and
the ferment proper to his stone could be dramatized only by
gradual c urves, that is to s ay, by the flattened or perspective
treatment of form . To describe exhaustively the method of its
employment by Agostino would need a volume to itself, en­
tailing an i ntensive technical study for whi c h I am not
equipped. I can but i ndicate a few general principles, remark a
few details, a few c haracteristics of his carving.
In the first place, to show developed perspective in carving,
it is necessary to carve relief. Having argued a connection
between perspective and s tone, I now bring it forward to
recommend the low relief, or at any rate, Agostino's relief i n
whi ch the perspective cult i s celebrated. Renaissance relief per­
spective i s based on the s a me conical projection as painting per­
spective, with the difference that painting i s projection on one
plane, low relief on at least two planes : thus the latter's per­
spective is complic ated by the thickness of those planes . Also,
since the joining of actual s urf a ces must not be obscured by the
use of perspective; on the contrary, s hould thereby be
magnified, less simplification is desirable than in the case of pic­
ture perspective. High relief does not suffer this complexity to
the s ame degree, yet h as the difficulty i n crowded s cenes of one
figure obscuring a nother, especially as seen from an angle. B ut
those s culptors who loved, rather than employed, perspective, as
far as possible avoided crowd s cenes of the type that can only be
treated in high relief, or in some combination of h igh and low.
Agostino's best work i s of low-relief single figures which mani-
1 76 Artists and Works of Art
fest clearly the fla tteni ng he employs, a nd its i ntegral connec­
tion with the block.
As I h a ve often remarked, for such degree of flattening, per­
spective was essenti a l . It is a lmost as if his figures were con­
ceived in the round a n d \Vere then pressed into low relief, so
great is the roundness that is intimated by his care of stone sur­
fa ces. His perspecti ve tricks dramati ze to the ful l the pro­
pensities of stone : a nd since form in the round is th ere squashed
out, the whole of tha t form is to be gra sped from a ny a ngle . In
sculpture, such immedi a cy can be attained o nly by relief; and
I think no one except Agostino has m a naged it, a n d h e by n o
me a ns invariably. Not more th a n twenty pieces o r so in the
Tempio Malatestiano a re first-ra te, one or two reliefs by his h a nd
at Perugia , a nd the Madonna a n d child reliefs, the one at Flor­
ence, the other at the Victoria a nd Albert . We do not know how
much e lse of the same sort has di sappe a red.
The ovoid is the perspective a ppe ara nce of the sphere. The
ovoi d is the fla ttened sph ere . Hence the ovoid, the thinned
sphere, is the preva iling shape in Agostino's work. As he needs
must work with ovoi ds, he bega n to visu a l ize everything in
terms of that form. Through out his work he has given us this
key. Thus, for instance, when he represented clou ds, they are
cut to oval shapes. Fingers , of course, a n d fish were dear
to him. So too, globul a r h a ir-locks and the elongated contour of
breast or stoma ch, buttock or th igh, bene ath tight strands of
tra nsparent drapery. Such tra nsparency, again, a ffirmed the slight
tra nslucence of the marble . He a lso used drapery to enshroud
the whole figure a nd reduce it to his dominant shape. History
and Rhetoric in the Tempio are oval forms .
Agostino h a d various w a ys of enforcing perspective . Most
forms in his reliefs have a perspective of their own a p a rt from
their contribution to the gener a l perspective . Occasionally this
individual perspective is in opposition to the more genera l one,
but, at the same time, the former thereby makes the l atter poig­
nant . Still, the particul a r, a n d sometimes even contra di ctory,
perspective of details, while it yet must fit i n and help to m ake
the design, a lso puts emph asis upon gradation of surfa ce a nd
neutralizes a simple modelling assessment of genera l m asses.
 The Reliefs in the Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini 177

Thi s perspective treatment is not peculiar to Agostino's work.

To some degree it appears in all Quattro Cento carved and mod­
elled relief. In all representation, of course, there is the ten­
den cy to show the lower half of an object or figure as seen from
above, and the higher half as seen from below. Such a mixture
of perspective i s common everywhere . It i s the most simple
means of showing more of the obj ect or figure than would a
strictly eye-level representation.
But noti ce to what extent and to what resultant shape Agos­
ti no employed this p ri nciple . Let us turn once more to the
Ma donna and child relief. The general principle obtains for
the relief as a whol e . At the top, the head of the Virgin is in­
clined slightly downward and to the left, as she looks at the
child. Her fa ce we see from below; but since she tilts her head
downward we see well above her forehead, we see her hair, veil ,
crown a n d nimbus on the back o f h e r head. (The edge o f the
nimbus i s bevelled i nwards so as to b ring it forward.) We see
t"1 0 thirds of her head, owing to perspective flattening. W e
would see even more of her head if it were not turned t o the side
as wel l as inclined downward. The right side of her face is
shown as far as the further edge of the eye . This right side is so
fla ttened that in a ctual dimension it is only half as long as the
distan ce from the nose to the further edge of her left eye . The
ear is shown in complete profile, the angle at which an ear is
most significant. It is a compli cated ear, in rapport with the
shell forms of the niche behind. The child's face is seen
definitely from below, whereas the angels ' heads adjoining, and
those on the other side of the relief, a re on eye-level . Moreover,
Whereas we see the child's face from below, we see the top of
his h ead and even parts of the back of it from abo ve. Otherwise,
so much of the head could not be rep resented. This transition
from one perspective to anoth er p asses muster because the head
i s tilted to the side and downwards, while the eyes look s lightly
up. Yet the perspective is even more complicated than this .
Parts of the face we see on eye-level, and the ear, like the ear of
the Virgin, i s represented in complete p rofile.
At the bottom of the relief, the child's right foot, fore­
shortened on the outwa rd-tilted framework, is seen entirely
1 78 A rtists and Works of A�t
from above in a ccordance with the general perspective. * Yet
we can see slightly underneath his left foot. Also contradicting
the general perspective, though at the s a me time reflecting its
plan on a small s cale, the tilted angel's face whose chin abuts on
the bottom frame is seen on eye-level, if not from below; while
the top of his head, like the top of the child's head, is seen from
above. The perspective of the vase on the right is not inde­
pendent of the relief's general perspective. The vase's base is
seen from above, its m iddle on eye-level, its lips from below.
Such was the usual way of treating vases and c andelabra in
Quattro Cento arabesques .
These various perspectives cohere : in this m anner several
aspects of an object were represented, while individual per­
spective, so far as it was the micro cosm of the general per­
spective, emphasized that general perspective, that sense of
m any aspects . To some degree you will find such treatment in
all Quattro Cento work, whether it be stone, bronze or terra­
cotta, and in all work that approxi m ates to being Quattro
Cento . And this helps out a classifi cation of Quattro Cento
s culpture in terms of technique. Wherever you find relief
farms, be they ornam ent or figure, arabesque or swag, wherever
you find these shapes, whatever their position, turning to show
to you their m axim um, like flowers tha t thrust and open their
faces to the sun, wherever tha t is the salient point abo u t them,
then that sculpture is Q uattro Cento as I define it. Decoration
sculpted with that feeling will never look 'stu ck on' . For h and in
hand with vertical perspective goes horizontal perspectiv�, the
flattening which means gradu�l and rounded sh apes th at issue
from the block. Of such flattening, Agostino was the sup reme
master.
Consider the child of the Virgin and child piece, consider how
much of his body is shown by this low relief. You s ay i t is like
painting. This, as criticism, means nothing to m e . For I can here
see and touch all the values I love in s tone . Painting is an
offshoot of such carving. The Egyptians someti mes carved the
legs and head in profile, the rest of the body as frontal. Agos-
* That is to say, the general perspective of the bottom half of a

composition as represented from above, the top half from below.

 The Reliefs in the Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini 1 79

tino's figures are a softer stone development of the Egyptian

aim. A characteristic attitude, of which the child is an example,
is a sideways bending of one or both knees, thus bringing in the
curve of the buttock; or an arm thrown across the body bring­
ing in the s houlder and even the shoulder bla de. The first atti­
tude requires one leg in rounded p rofile, so that one sees almost
the whole calf, while the other leg, rep resented frontally, is,
when the cutting has been crude, so flattened as to appear with­
out a shin bone. Furthermore, the bending knees cause the p art
of the legs between knees and thighs to be represented at a
receding angle that is easily foreshortened; which, in tum, en­
hances the circular and ovul a r swirls, represented on eye-level,
a round the stomach and the hips. The trunk is often bent
slightly forward over the knees, while the shoulders and head
turn s lightly the other way. This attitude entails a nodal vortex
a bout the stomach and around the hips, out from which the rest
of the figure undulates. Such figures appear to float rather than
stand. The effect is i ncreased by swirling hai r and swirling drap­
ery that now conceal, now disclose, limbs and breasts .
These figures appear to be embedded i n some buoyant white
liquid s uch as mercury. The s oft yellowish a nd luminous
stone was cut by Agostino to show its original liquidity and
condensation . The bodies of the floaters are thus enmeshed and
carried, but their heads float h igher and rest upon the buoyant
surface. From the knees to the navel, there is a swirl, a vortex,
in the typical Agostino figure. This tends to endow the males
a lso With the female contours and the female suction. Looking
at the relief of Diana and of the other planets, and particularly
the one that represents the spring tides under the aegis of Diana
[Plate 9], one feels t he vast seductive influence of the moon. Not
till the l ast words of this volume s hall I h ave set out to my own
satisfaction this lunar mythology a nd all that it means . I must
show Isotta as the moon, and Sigismondo who built the Tempio
as her counterpart. For directly, even more, i ndirectly, the
Tempio celebrates Sigismondo Malatesta's love for Isotta .
The floating i mage must now give pla ce to another. Agostino's
figures inhabit every plane of the waters . If they float near the
top, they also lie upon the bottom whence they seem to pierce
1 80 Artists and Works of Art
each ripp le as it p asses . The Tempio is at Rimini on the Adriatic
coast. Ripples come low and in quick succession upon that
beach in summer. On arriving last June, I walked to the end of a
small jetty. A white-enamelled i ron chair stood upon the sea­
bed. From the jetty I clearly saw it standing in the depth, with its
round back elongated to an oval or shuddered to an ellipse.
What indeed was its s hape? But there it stood. I thought at once
of Agostino's sculpture in the Tempio, of those flattened forms
in which an i nfluence was at work. In general it was a water
influence. The reliefs were marble and dry; but they were l u­
minous : and thereupon I felt the whole deep connection of
limestone and water.
Next day in the Tempio I s aw the Mediterranean countries as
water and water-life congealed i nto stone : I saw the elements in
flux and trees growing from a crested marble wave . Venus is
represented as coming to l and in a chariot drawn by two white
swans . Around her legs and piled up behind her are the waters .
The topmost wave is smooth, without a ripple. It is the shapely
mountain side. On one summit there grows a myrtle tree, the
aromatic evergreen shrub of l imestone soi l . The rose flowers in a
valley of intermediate swel l .
The relief o f the i nfluxion o f the moon shows land peaks and
similar trees encompassed by the flood. The trees are tinted
black in both reliefs . They are the dark evergreens of the Medi­
terranean light, trees that flourish from the limestone whence
by temple or on promontory they s how off the pure s culpture of
marble. A youth rides the buoyant flood in a boat. But should
Diana's mingling i nfluence relax, his boat would be left high
and dry on the back of a whale or sea-dragon . For half the seas
have attained the same degree of solidity as h ave the mountains
of liquescence. The creation of further limes tones is in hand.
The i nfluence at work keeps the flood encompassing the shores
to which an elephant comes in alarm.
Such pregnant waters, such trees, such pyramidal peaks be­
neath the ovul ar clouds, figure also in the relief of the Crab.
Rimini , the Adriatic and the h interland are again represented.
The limestone layers are the waters . Notice the river Marecchia
flowing between the hills and out into the Adriatic. It is the
 The Reliefs in the Tempio lvlalatestiano, Rimini 1 81

rainy, the torrentia l flow. In s uch waters Aquarius or Gany­

mede stands . They flow behind him from the ovular clouds
that muffle his right arm. Clouds, like so many torpedoes, hide
Mercury's knees, and upon his head is the pyramid as a
ponti fical mitre. From his knees to his n avel and again about his
head there is a vortex. It is the whi rring night from which Diana
emerges clean. It wraps the loins of the Twins, sucks evil
Saturn, hurls up the dripping Virgi n, encircles the Dance and
distributes her wiry coils of hair. But the predom ina nt vortex i s
about the hips. These swirling eye-level middles that disclose so
many attitudes and so many surfaces, tend to put 'out of draw­
i ng ' the upper part of a figure's tru nk . But three lovely reliefs at
Perugia show best how profound is the s tyle based upon this
m annerism . Agostino gave b a ck to marb le i ts primeval eddies .
This vortex is sometimes recalled and set to work by the i n­
cision of a few curving lines in the background.
Where no vortex appears in the middle of a relief, the idea of
i t yet lingers . I n the relief of the influxion of the moon, this
centre, represented on a level with the eye, i s the first big pyra­
mid with the tree i n front of it. Hence a further poignancy. To
the pyramid, to the new limestone a ccrui ng from the waters
and their life, is attributed the concentrated powers of the
whirlpool whose beauty, now that it is a smooth stone, may b e
s hown by a thin and gradual s hape in comp lete objectivity. Here
is expressed in unconscious parable the whole appeal of lime­
stone, t he whole underlying mythology of Mediterra nea n art.
Finally, in the matter of stone and water, I refer again to the
shape of fish, to their extreme yet rounded flattening, to the
predominance of the oval form . No wonder the representation
of marine life has always delighted the Mediterranean limestone
carvers. But it was only in Quattro Cento carving that m arine
decoratives, principally in the s hape of dolphins, attained a
paramount exuberance. There is nothing stylized and orna­
mental about Quattro Cento dolphins or sea-centaurs or scor­
pions . Yet fish are the fundamental carving shape . Fish slither
and wriggle i n Quattro Cento relief and arabesque . The stone is
a live with them. P utti, with the marble dust i n their eyes, ride
the dolphins; a fluke is sometimes cut c lear from the back-
182 Artists and Warks of Art
ground. The block itself wells over l arger deep-sea forms within.
Shells encrust the architectural members . They a re not s tuck
on : they cling; but also they flower there, bloom there : they are
also stone-blossom. For the water and the water-life from which
the marble was formed, in their s tone shapes symbolize a lso the
cliff, the earth, its flower and i ts fruit. Such shells express the
first geological concretion i n the history of the marble, serve to
symbolize the later fruitfulness of the soil which covered it
from the skies. Thus sea and land, upon whose intercourse Medi­
terranean civilization has depended, were celebrated as one i n
the m arble. Either as l and o r as sea-fruit are the shells and
a corns . In the last an alysis, stone-blossom and incrustation are
different aspects of the s ame principle. Marble, then, w as the
prime i nstrument of humanism . For such fantasies as found
their home in m arble were humanistic fantasies . Therein was
implicit the friendliness to man, the 'natura l ' unstrained exuber­
ance \vhich treats of elemental n ature with so little anxiety in
proportion to its dynamic strength . The tension is all of life : from
death is borrowed but its objectivity, its unmitigated petrifaction.
This chapter is finished; but a postscript seems inevitable.
The fine arts are rooted in the h andicrafts, the handicrafts in
various manual l abo ur whose vastly traditional character, to
put it mildly, is changing . Of what kind, if any, is to be the new
skill, the new h andicraft? I h ave no i ntention of pursuing the
subj ect. Instea d, I cal l attention to one contemporary change
which is simple enough, but which in itself upsets the whole
balance between carving and modelling.
I have defended the low relief by pointing to its direct con­
nection with m asonry, with stone architecture. Hitherto, stone
or otherwise, all developed s culpture h as been founded on an
associ ation, at leas t, with architecture; if not specifically with
buil dings, then with monuments, s hrines, tombs and so on.
Except i n the c ase of fetishes and other small personal obj ects,
architecture and sculpture h ave i n every stone-using civilization
gone hand in h and : or, rather, s c u lpture h as been dependent
upon building . This connection mirrors the pre-eminence that
stone h as enjoyed as the desired building and carving m aterial,
has ens ured the preservation of some possible carvi ng values
 The Reliefs in the Tempio lvlalatestiano, Rimini 1 83
amid the usual growth and eventu al dominance of modelling
conceptions . But today stone is no longer the desirable building
material. What is more, m odern building m aterials are essen­
tially plastic. These materials have little emblem of their own.
With an armature of s teel, Le Corbusier can make you a room
of any shape you like . He can express speed with a building.
Rooms will be fas hioned. Thei r organization will be simple sheer
design that has no use for trappings, least of all for s culpture.
Everywhere the s lower carving processes are superseded.
Manufacture, modelling, has superseded its fellow. Such, we
have seen, was always the European trend, though it was sus­
tained, paradoxically enough, partly as a result of the great am­
bitions of European peoples i n carving processes . Synthetic
materials take the p lace of age-old produ cts in which fantasy i s
deposited. The majority o f our pavements and o f o u r ne\v build­
ings are made of synthetic stone; not merely concrete, but syn­
theti c stone that can be fashioned to almost any effect th at i s
desired! You need to know something about stone to disti nguish
it from this moulded product. Modern s cientific power of syn­
thesis fashions a fundamentally new and plastic environment.
Stone architecture is prolonged but a moment by synthetic
stone . Stone architecture dies, the mother of the European
visual arts for more than two thousand years . In Europe of the
historical period, brick and mud and clay and \Vood con­
struction never superseded stone . They h a d their individual life;
still they \Vere largely substitutes for stone. At any rate
European men h ave always built with stone w hen they cou ld
afford it and obtain it. But today stone architecture is dying.
The creations of Le Corbu sier and others show that building will
no longer serve as the mother art of stone, no longer as the
source at which carving or spatial conception renews its
strength . Architecture in that sense of the word, i ndeed in the
mos t fundamental sense of the word, will cease to exist. Build­
ing becomes a plastic a ctivity pure and simple : whereas, in the
past, building with stone or its equ ivalents has not been (at best)
a moulding of shape with stone, so much as an order imposed
on blocks from which there results an exaltation of the spatial
character of stone.
1 84 Artists and Works of Art
Mountains and pebbles still exist : but so far as stone loses its
use as a constructive material, i t loses also power over the im­
agination. Civilized man i s surrounded by n a tural objects t he
intensity of whose imaginative i mport will continue to dim­
inish.
What future is there for carving, or for the full spatial con­
ception? I have rem arked tha t t he s trength of such modern
painti ng as is truly contemporary is founded upon a rea ction
from model ling values in favo ur of carving values . But should
the growth of plastici ty, of manufacture, in labour and in art,
overpo wer carving activi ties altogether, there is then no future
for visual art as hitherto conceived by the European races.

[from Stones of Rim ini, 1 9 34, pp. 1 05-68]

21

Giorgione and the Tempe s ta

Many bad pictures are equivocal i n their subject. It is unlikely

that their painters for the most part h ave seen or even heard of
the Tem pesta [Plate l o] : yet t hey are among t he mindless emu­
lators of this unrivalled masterpiece . The feeling of suspense
belonging to the Tempesta encourages aesth e tic contemplation
in him who sees i t .
Dramatic though i t be, the background does n o t set a s tage ,
Indeed, the figures do little . They are well to the fron t of the
landscape, encased in separate t hought . It is the scenery which
enacts t he scene . But this i s not a landscape with figures : the
figures are insistent . Nevertheless, we h aven' t any idea who
they are or why they are there . They do not belong to the
landscape i n the sense of s hepherds, owners or husbandmen.
They belong i n the sense of hu1nan beings belonging to the
world. Th at is not a personal, but an almost universal, im­
pression . It fol lows tha t the Tempesta is one of the most extra­
ordinary of man's creations. The rel ationship between figures and
landscape i s reve l a tory; though neither landscape nor figures
 Giorgione and the Tempesta 1 85

are simplified i nto a concept . Giorgione' s pictures, relaxed both

i n subj ect and i n treatment, a re the opposite to hieratic.
Above the l andscape to which the figures h ave their b acks
there is lightning, day a nd night near to each other, before
heavy blue clouds taut sunlight that i llumines the sides of build­
i ngs a s for some memorable occasion. The new Renaissance
bu i ldings of Venice stand with the old, with the signs of war
and a ncient feud . Immediately behind t he figures there are frag­
ments of two small columns on a brick plinth; the cylinder and
the c ube, the bare bones of the new Venice.
The two figures commune o n ly in the profoundest sense de­
spite the new-won naturalism of their delineation. A stream
divides them. They do not look at each other. The man [Plate I r]
looks p ast the woman w h o looks out t o the spectator, glancing
s lightly down. She sits higher tha n the man who is s tanding,
confident, romantic, at ease. Though their positions would be
uncomfortable for any length of time (the woman' s pose ,
indeed, i s a n almost impossible one), they s uggest an e nd uring
strength, a strength of youth and a bond between them th at wil l
endure. Just a s they are more co mplete, they a re more abiding
than the fragmentary building of the m iddle distance . The
woman suckles the i nfant. The l andscape i n which they appear
u nruffled, even the impending thunderstorm, are in one sense
s ubservient to this firm-on-the-ground human vitality. Verticals
of the trees i ncline slightly to the right, verticals of the build­
ings s lightly to the left. The l andscape is no decor, but the fig­
ures are at home here : it belongs to their substance. There are
many affinities and approximations expressed between them, a n
organization, a philosophy, a romanticism which have ensued
primarily from an a cute colour sense . And it is, i n p art, Gior­
gione's jewel-like colour that determines the organization i n a
ma nner too complicated for exposition at this point. Chromatic
conception of this kind may be broadly apprehended apart from
its colour, from a photograph.
One j udges the true vertical by imagining a line down the
centre of the man's erect yet turned body . Tha t i n itself is very
extraordinary. It is the architecture that inclines to receive the
dazzling white light and it is the trees that i n cline before the air
1 86 Artists and Works of Art
which g oes as yet softly to meet the thundercloud. Without
central p osition in the picture, without looking beyond any
tree, here is the m a s ter of his fate. On the other h and, it is
s ignificant that the title of the picture is The Tempest. Suc­
ceeding generations h ave not foun d a better title. Yet, although
there are counter-balances, in one sense the calm of the figures
outweighs the value of the i mpending storm. They are present,
future and past, whereas the storm is momentary. They are
t hese things without pride of place i n the picture, without the
guise of gods or symbols, of primitive forces, or even of sem­
piternal peasants. They are young and buoyant people, without
stra in, without straining, h armonious . They are the classical
gods in even more human yet lyrical form. Giorgione h a d no
axe to grind : but he was foremost of originators in art. He broke
down all the systems of insulation. There h a s never been an a rt
less mannered, at the same time less formalized. Accent was
superfluou s . The Tempesta is dra matic in the want of tension,
it is lyrical, s upremely lyrical by t his lack of tension, by what
the Italians call ozio or ease. Tension of some sort has otherwise
always existed in art : and art will need it again immediately.
For all other times an art \Vithout some tightness in organ­
ization, or even some looseness as the tightening bond, has not
been art at a l l . Since Giorgione's time Western art is often skirt­
ing an abyss .
Once at least, then, a l ack of tension was affirmative. The
thunderstorm brews in the background, yet throughout the pic­
ture there is an equal and total insistence . Action of the land­
s cape balances suspense of the figures, a balance to the effect of
utter parity in their diversity, dependent as well, therefore,
upon reversed links ; for instance, s uspense from the flash of
lightning (we await the thunder and the storm) and a ction by
one of the figures in the very recent past. The woman h as obvi­
ously bathed in the stream and is not yet altogether dry. She
s uckles the infant, an action of primal importance, for the
mother as for the onlooker, inducing a sense of calm and self­
sufficiency.
A painting with a dominant 'effect' is j azz to this symphony.
Both figures and lands cape afford superabundant images of their
 Giorgione and the Tempesta 1 87

interpenetration, and i ndeed i dentification, without any

s acri fice of their contrasting ' norma l' character.
I t is time to ask: what were the conditions of this unique art,
for this ease or ozio that art h as rarely enj oyed before or since,
never to the s ame degree?
The first consideration is of lyricism expressing interchange .
Giorgione's man belongs to the landscape, not in the sense of
one of Hardy's peasants, on the contrary, i n the sense of being
at home in the world. Confronted by the rigours of life, by the
opiate of thousands of years of religion accumulated to make
life bearable, how came it that in the Renaissance 'being at home
in the world' was not but a one-sided commotion, not a n
affirmation merely o f youth o r pleasure or defiance? A n answer
must be deferred . First, we must consider what is meant above
by 'interchange' . No less than the soul of poetry and, indeed, of
all art; since the poetic is the essence of art. Often more suc­
cinctly than a 'direct' statement, encompassing a vast range of
meaning which otherwise would be incommunicable, poetry
expresses something l argely i n terms of something else, owing
to the association of i m ages, of sounds and rhythms . Poetic syn­
thesis, characteristic of all art, is a m u ltum in parvo, a trick
invented under the i ntensity of the stimulus. Any metaphor is
an i nterchange of meaning.
We h ave seen a principle of i nterchange i nspiring Quattro
Cento architecture; we h ave seen that Venice herself inspires a
lively sense of poetry, metamorphosis, of i nterchange, of
inner i n terms of outer. Giorgione's a rt, i n turn, synthesizes the
images learned at Venice. Nature, building, m an, the Tempesta
shows all three impartially. Nature is more especially expressed
by the sky, at its l argest in Venice . From the Venetian air itself
rather than the foliage we dis cern the seasons .
Leonello Venturi h as remarked that Giorgione ascribed to the
Tempesta l andscape a drama of the sky that is common in
Venice . At sunset the sky in the west is sometimes clear while
banked-up cloud of a threatening blue holds the east. Houses
looking west are perfectly lit, utterly revealed from the side by
the sinking sun . Night stri des on from the east. Giorgione h as
a dded the lightning, the i mpending storm.
 1 88 Artists and Works of Ar,t
H e has shown the utmost drama i n human pertinence. But it
is poetry, calm poetry, not melodrama. He dreamt of reflection
revealed, without s tiffness or contortion, in the slow and dur­
able forms of space, of relations between forms as the long con·
tact of familiar minds, changing with the ebb and flow of light
yet constant in their local colour. The two figures are not in a

trance : they are amiable and serene, yet l ike the other Gior·
gione figures, instruments of evocation . Their thoughts meet,
their minds meet, not their eyes . There is a pause in living : there
is an interchange between past, future and the present, between
the figures, between themselves and each aspect of the land·
scape, between a deep-set wordless dream and a n outward
world. Giorgione chooses a moment of utmost revelation, in
visual terms sunrise or sunset when things stand 'as they really
are' and When the hush of this revelation induces a con­
templative mood . At such time relationship and affinity be·
tween objects become an essenti al part of their meaning : every
clearly seen object appears to possess equal importance, e qual
insistence whatever the size, owing to the interlocking pal·
pability of local colour.
Imbued with this poetry, Giorgione dispensed with the grave
forrnul a . Although the h our is evening, he creates a situation of
thunderous light where there is also dramatic change of tone to
dramatize in turn the equal gaze of the protagonists . Moreover,
despite this broad tonal range, despite this very first solicitude i n
art for the evanescent exaggerations of appearances due t o the
direction of their light, local colour is still intense, so that the
calm evening value of each thing, though it be an architectural
fragment or a building that crumbles - indeed, because of the
cycles such qualities suggest - possesses added poignancy be­
neath the natural instruments of eva nescence . In purging the
whole of dominating drama, intensity of local colour dissociates
the picture from the stress of a moment of time although that
moment is vividly represented there; from a 'situation], and
this without neglect of naturalistic appearance. I ndeed, tech­
nically considered, Giorgione's revolution was a huge stride
towards the representation of mere appearance i n i ts broad and
hitherto neglected features . Hence the divinity of the ease of h is
 Giorgione and the Tempesta 1 89

spiritual disclosure, hence, by the l ack of any stylization, the full

e mp loyment of a sense of affinities th a t h a s not been equalled.
Without resort of l ater painters to a ·uniform flourish from
the brush, evenness coexists with the broad c hanges of tone
which Giorgione, and Leonardo, were the first to use . Unlike
Leonardo or any other painter except Chardin before the
French nineteenth-century school, after choosing a kind of light
for his subjects favourable to local colour, Giorgione h arnessed
true tonal differences or chiaroscuro to the service of chromatic
organization. Ch anges of light, as a quantitive range, less subtle
but infinitely vaster than the ra nge of colour, those general a nd
diffused changes i n light u nknown to his predecessors, Gior­
gione dedicated to the service of local colour. None of his fol­
lowers was equal to this subtlety. Although the Venetian
school as a whole, headed by Titian, m ay be said to have u sed
his discoveries, it was neither to the end of a greater realism nor
an equal poetry but to the articulation of m asses . As for t he
definitely Giorgionesque periods of these a nd other painters,
they emul ated and sometimes c a ught the poetry with differing
degrees of vulgarism : sometimes l ight a nd shade were exagger­
ated, sometimes ignored and the treatment was Bellinian. At the
end of the sixteenth century, Caravaggio quite consciously
broke up the Titianesque stylization of Giorgione' s tonal inven­
tions w hich had final ly become a m anneris m . Proclaiming a
return to Giorgione, Caravaggio produced a dramatic realism.
Yet Giorgione h ad e mployed chiaroscuro for exactly an op­
posi te effect, for the contemplative, the poetic, pause. That is
why h is use of chiaroscuro is so enriched by colour. He is the
father of m odern p ai nting. Unlike Leonardo, more than one
aspect of tonal painting springs from h im . Not only did he help
to m ake possible the huge achievement of Rembrandt but he
enlarged the scope of equal i nsistence . Venice, as we know,
excels i n black and white . Colour comes between, uniting them,
uniti ng the vastest differences . It is a description also of Gior­
gione's a chievement, a c hi ld of Venice.
He was, it is true, from the country, from C astel Franco, of
h umblest origin. Brought up i n Venice, he was patronized by a
h a ndful of aristocratic collectors . Within this circle he was i n
 1 90 Artists and '1Vo rks of Art
great demand, primari ly, one gathers from Vasari, because of
his singing, his charm and his playing the lute. The 'taking up'
of an artist, likely enough, was something new i n Venice where,
more than in other Itali an centres, painting had hitherto been
regarded as a perquisite of church and state. There were in
Venice before Giorgione with his power of fantasy, no poten­
tates demanding expression of their fancies. His personality
may h ave created this demand. There is a sense in which Gior­
gione's art may truly h ave been an expression of his patron's
fancies, as we s hall see : but only on the broa dest lines . Other­
wise it was they who i dentified themselves with him as far as
there was influence at all. Else there could not have been the un­
rivalled intensity of poetry in his pictures; moreover, Vasari ' s
initial account of Giorgione, how h e delighted in love, how he
was in demand for parties and all gatherings, how he died
young even, suggests a personality as well as an artist. At any
rate no other artist so swiftly bec ame a myth . Within thirty
years very little was for certain known about him, within a
hundred the noble family of Barbarelli was trying to force this
name upon Giorgione's parentage, and every other picture in
the private collections of Venice was a Giorgione. His public
works were few, five or six at the most. One of them, a small
picture in the church of San Rocco, was acclaimed a miracle­
worker some ten years after his death, and brought so much
wealth to the fraternity th at they were able to build the vast
Scuola for which Tintoretto painte d his series of huge m aster-
.
pieces.
Dilrer, who visited Venice in r 506; four years before Gior­
gione died, does not mention him among the Venetian p ainters .
His circle was small . It i s probable that h e w a s painting for n o
more than ten years, fifteen years a t the very most, a nd that a
considerable period was spent in frescoing the lengthy front of
the Fondaco dei Tedeschi as well as on a commission for the
Doge's palace; his only state commissions as far as we know.
In the first part of Venice : An Aspect of Art ( 1 945) I ex­
patiated on the ambience of Venice, inculcator of a sense of
i dentity i n differing things . Giorgione flew from the city of man­
made stone in his dreams and a pplied this poetry to the larger
 Giorgione and the Tempesta 19r

world. He brought his perception o f Venice back to his n a tive

lands cape \Vhere the s trea m loiters u ntroubled by tides .
H e who has learned to find man's i mage i n the wide was tes of
the lagoon wil l be completely at home a mong the p leas ant foot­
hills of the Alps . I don ' t know how m u ch is due to the intensity
of Giorgione's vision of this man-accustomed l andscape, and
how much on leaving Venice for the s lopes after a long sojourn,
o ne would i n any case be of similar mind - something of the
vision is common to many who come from Venice to Asolo, to
B assano, to C astel Franco . It is no s urprise to see the grove and
the blue distance, o r a P al ladian temple a t the foot of a hill, to
feel that delicate detachment, tha t pensive, lyrical detachment,
allied to an embracing i dentification which characterizes Gi­
orgione's dream, tou ch ed with a l ittle sadness . His was a young
yet gestureless nobility attentive to all the long insistent har­
monies of Nature that mirror the young sou l . The p oetry is
p urely reflective : there is not a shadow of a j udgement or of
protestation . I t is the ancient harmony, the harmony of c lassic­
al times re-created by a Venetian in the flush of the Re­
naissance. The Giorgiones que man is calm yet debonair, in a n
elegiac rela tion with h is staff. A pensive yet untroubled beauty
belongs to the woman with her baby. The young man, v ari­
ously called a gypsy (from the earliest times), a soldier, a
peasant, a hero of a Greek myth, is the best lord of creation the
world ever h ad. With h is direct untroubled gaze he is the best
representative of Western m a n . If the word 'mystery', so com­
monly u sed i n disc ussing this picture or anything connected
with Giorgione, is introdu ced, one m u st know at once the com­
plete dissemblance fro m o riental mystery and from mys ticism.
Giorgione's p oetry h as an u nforced ease, an u ncontorted
beauty . He put the soul i nto Nature and he did it with a better
balance than any of the romanti cs (in any of the a rts ) that fol­
lowed l ater i n t heir t housands . Wh at Giorgione felt and a ttained
is of p erennial i mportance : today it is more specially i mportant.
Again the veils h ave s lipped : we stand bet\veen the night and
day. We too must redefine the i nner and the o uter . . .
When Giorgione had p a inted a n ude Ven us * asleep i n a l and-
* At Dresden.
192 Artists and Works of A rt,
scape, the canvas was thought u nfinished. After his death,
Titian added a township, and a Cupid now painted over. Venus,
in utter repose, has her eyelids lightly shut. Any painter might
have made the principal line of the landscape to echo the line of
the body. But again it is evening . No one, yes, no one looking at
this picture could fail to feel a closer link between the figure and
the landscape, between the figure and the time of day. Beneath
her eyes are i mages. In terms of the day and in terms of the
stretch of land and sky and of the a ccents of lone sym metrical
trees, of a poking tuft of foliage growing from the rock above
her head, the dream-life which is itself the concentrated
reflection of her whole span obtains embodiment; in the sense
th at a natural scene reflects our mood and our thoughts which
perhaps sometimes may thus be recognized; not in the sense
that the la ndscape is a dream-landscape, a surrealist proj ection
of the mind.
For the moment barriers were down . It was an aesthetic op­
portunity. Chiaroscuro at the service of colour inspired the
unity of experience on the level of the senses, the identity in the
maximum difference . Visual art could, and can, create thi s
poetry a s c a n n o other art, because a total insistence whi ch
exploits the complications of colour, most swiftly expresses it.
There follow s the unequalled fusion of content and form which
Pater, in his gre at essay on Veneti an painting, took as his text,
with reference more especially to Giorgione or the Giorgio­
nesque . And so, we come to see tha t this art is itself an ex­
pression or celebration of the purest visual art rather th an a
mystic message expressed in visual form .
In writing of Veneti an fifteenth-century architecture and
throughout these volumes I have attempted to show that the
part of early Renaissance art I ha ve called Quattro Cento pos­
sesses as a compulsion the chara cter of all art to make the spirit
ma nifest in outer form . Except for Piero I have called no other
painter to witness. It is appropriate if an account of this aesthe­
tic spread over several volumes and a considerable time should
conclude with Giorgione; since the Tem pesta, some twenty
years ago, was the original stimulation . The Tempesta epitom­
izes the so-ca lled Qua ttro Cento process, this self-celebration of
 Michelanyelo 1 93

visual art. Spiri t had been brought down from the skies to in­
habit a plane whi ch the medieval world consi dered brutish .
Spirit was brought back into Nature of which man partook, the
old frightening home revisited i n maturity . Once i t \Vas spirit
forces, but now the fantasy of man, i nforming Nature . By means
of expression, his perenni al activity, the mind of man vies with
the world in outwardness : deeper things come forward. An ex­
pressive token of all expressiveness, the face of the stone is made
to show through the stone ; and i n the evening light there i s a
moment when mind seems to become extension, stands re­
vealed to the eyes.
Nature is the mirror of man for the mature artist as well as
for the child. B ut, rather than a symbol conceived from an obj ect,
on the most adult occasions of Western visual art, the observed
appearance of an obj ect successfully provi ded an aestheti c mode .
The Tempesta contains none of the tension of conceptual art
nor yet a mi nute chasing of detail uncharged with a general
poetry. An i mmanence is there while the whole is relaxed.

[from Venice: An Aspect of Art, 1 945, pp. 52-61 ]

22

Michelangelo

(i)
When Michelangelo was seventy-three, he wrote to his young
nephew aski ng him to tell a priest not to address letters to Mich­
elangelo, Sculptor, because h e is not known except as Michel­
angelo Buonarroti; and if a Florentine citizen wanted someone
to paint an altar-piece, he must find a pain ter; as for himself, he
was never pai nter nor sculptor in the manner of keeping a shop.
' I h ave always looked to my dignity and the honour of my
father and brothers. I h ave served three Popes but tha t was
under compulsion.'
I do not think i t would be enligh tening to say that Michel­
angelo was a snob. On the contrary, in view of the poor social
status of the artist - a mere artisan - which he did much to
1 94 Artists and Works of Art
alter, the fact that Michel angelo was determined to strengthen
through art the pride and wealth of h is family, is a measure of
his huge belief in the reparative n ature of aesthetic activity. He
cared nothing for appeara nces : though he became rich, he
chose to live very simply in some degree of squalor : he pre­
ferred to be lonely. He continued to accumulate money for the
family long after his father and two of his fou r brothers were
dead. Though this 'saving' of the family was conceived in terms
of restoring their position, it is obvious that the compulsiveness
at work did not issue in the predominant need for social ap­
probation . He paraded himself in letters and poems as the most
miserable of men; he was also not slow to think and s ay that
each of the close relatives was worthless . He felt persecuted by
them. (The father on one occasion at least made use of Michel­
angelo's money without consulting h im, but he was quick to
share with Michelangelo the consequent anger, regret and
alarm .) I n regard to h is unreliable and i mpulsive family, Michel­
angelo s howed bitterness that is the measure, not so m uch of
thwarted self-approbation, as of ensl avement.
It ca nnot be said in the light of their letters that the family
were not affectionate, though they were 'on the make', care less
i n the use of money furnished by Michelangelo, ready to ask a
favour from him. All shared i n the anxiety concerning each
other's safety and hea lth . Both father and B uonarroto urged
Michel angelo at different times to throw up h is work and
return to them : it would seem they were u nable to make an
i mportant decision without his help . Even i n offering advice,
they are usually careful to stress that h e, Michelangelo, is the
wise one. Although narrow and i diosyncratic, the father is
capable of showing humility, not in the face of h is son's genius
but of his prudence and b usiness sense, even at the age of
seventy-seven, in connection with a matter (the value of a farm)
about which he, the father, probably with time on his h a nds,
may well have been better informed. We prefer the father,
Ludovico, on the evidence of the letters to the favourite brother,
Buonarroto, who died of the plague i n 1 528, it is said, i n Michel­
a ngelo's arms . Also Buonarroto, i n spite of h is two m arriages,
depended upon Michelangelo's j udgement, eagerly fulfilled his
 Michelangelo 195
commissions, identifying himself as closely with the Buonarroti
i nterests.
The morose and tortured Michelangelo mothered and, i ndeed,
fathered this motherless, sisterless, narrow family. Ludovico,
the father, married again, but women seem to have p layed little
open p art in the fami ly s tresses .
The first point I want to emphasize in the matter of his family
is Michelangelo's prudence, his grip upon reality in spite of a
great excess of temperament. Unlike pure visionaries, artists
need, whatever the size of their wings, a good stance for the
ground. They seek to dissipate the depression that encloses
them, to restore, to revive; better than most, they h ave recog­
nized the constancy of death .
Michel angelo was, of course, enslaved by his art i n which he
has restored the whole world. It h appens that he was like\vise
enslaved by the family circle, however short the time he could
give to them, however much with another part of his mind he
resented the weight they put on him . Testimony comes in a let­
ter to Buonarroto, probably 0£ 1 5 1 3 . The letter' s complaint is
first of Buonarroto's extravagance. Michelangelo wants to know
if he is keeping an account and he recalls an occa sion when
Buonarroto was in Rome and he had boasted of spending l arge
sums of his own money : Michelangelo had not unmasked him
nor, i ndeed, was he surprised, because he knew his brother only
too wel l .

If you have enough mind to be able to contemplate the truth, you

would not have said: 'I spent so and so of my own money', nor
would you have come here to press me over your affairs after all that
I have done in the past : you would have said instead : 'Mi chelangelo
knows what he has "rritten to us, and if he can 't do something to
help at once, there must be some difficulty for him about which we
know nothing : and we must be patient because it is useless to spur a
horse who is running with all his might and more.' But you don't
know me and have never known me.
Nor h ave his biographers known him i n this respect. I t is
usual to stress his generosity to worthless relations as well as his
many o ther gifts, particularly to the poor. They overlook the
manifest compulsiveness; they overlook the horse who is run-
1 96 Artists and W arks of Art
ning with all his might, spurred invisibly by guilt, anxiety, the
desire to restore, as well as by love. He had l arger thi ngs with
which constantly to occupy his mind; no one wi ll have known
it more clearly than himself. But the wide sublimation through
art could not disengage him from the narrower field of undue
apprehensiveness . It is never easy, in fact, it is finally i mpos­
sible, to separate altogether love and affection from anxiety; yet
we of ten recognize at once a strong degree of anxious
superfluity.
Probably over a third of the extant letters, p ublished and un­
published, that Michelangelo wrote to his father and brothers,
m ust be dated between 1 508 and 1 5 1 2 when he was painting
the Sistine Chapel . There appears to have been a lull in the work
between September 1 5 1 0, after a section had been finished (Pope
Julius was lately dep arted for Bologna) and January l 5 I r . On
September 5th and again on the 7th, M ichel angelo was awaiting
payment for what he had recently comp leted and an advance
for the rest . He says he is money less since the Pope has left
without having settled. Buonarroto is i l l ; Ludovico m ust provide
for Buonarroto by drawing on Michelangelo's savings in Flor­
ence. And should Buonarroto be in danger, he himself would
come at once, even though he would have to risk losing the
money which, he thinks, should already h ave been paid over.
'Men are worth more th an money,' he concludes .
But the enslavement excP.eded the demands of s uch love and
undoubted generosity of mind. The relatives were not for­
bearing : they infl icted themselves upon the distracted artist . All
three younger brothers, doubtless impelled by the appealing
I talian compound of c uriosity, family solidari ty and self­
interest, turned up i n Ro me to further their prospects i n the
early anxious years of the Sistine undertaking. M ichelangelo
writes to Buonarroto in October 1 509 :

It seems to me you don't understand how I am situated here . . . . I

shall do what I can. It seems that Gismondo is coming to expedite
his business. Tell him not to take me into his calculations, not be­
cause I don't love him as a brother but because I can't help him in
any \Vay. I am taken up with loving myself more than others and I
can't provide myself with the necessaries of life. I am i n need, worn
 Michelan9elo 197

out and without fri ends, nor do I want any : nor have I the time to
eat as much as I shou ld; so don't let m e have more trou bl es because I
can't stand another ounce.

It is surely not stra nge th at the prickly, unsociable Michel­

angelo, i n whom there was overwhelming anger as well as his
generosity or his fea r, w ho was notorious for deep melancholy,
should have become the cushion to mitigate the hard life of
others . Nor is it stra nge that we find in the massive, omnipotent
proportions of m any of his figures, a ful l measure of passive and
patient receptivity.
There exists, of course, the other side, the resentment, the
explosiveness, the contempt. More th an a third of a l l the sur­
viving letters are addressed to Michelangelo 's young nephew,
Lionardo, the son of Buonarroto : they were written between
1 540 and December 1 56 3 , two months before Mi chela ngelo died.
He was atta ched to the nephevv, not perh aps for himself but as
the inheritor of the fa mily. Yet on the whole, the letters reflect
a profound irritation. Liona rdo becomes 'them' , that is to say,
1v1ichelangelo' s father a nd brothers (mostly dead) who never
asked him to spend money on hi1nself. Thus, the old man writes
to the nephew :

A bout your rushing to Rome in such haste, I don 't know whether
you would have come so far if I vvere i n the utmost poverty and
lacking brea d. It's enough to throw money about that you ha ven't
earned. Wha t a fear you have of losing the i n herita nce . . . . Yours is
the love of a woodworm . If you really loved me, you would have
written : 'Michel a ngelo, spen d the three thousa nd scudi on yourself :
you have given us much and ifs enough : we care more for your life
than for your property.'

'You all have lived off me now for forty years,' he adds in
wri ting to this young m an of twenty-six, 'and I haven't had
even a good word from a ny of you in return .' Two years earlier
he h a d written to the unfortunate Lionardo, who had come to
Rome because of M ichela ngelo's severe illness : ' Don't my pos­
ses·s ions i n Florence suffice? You can't deny you are just like
your father (Buonarroto) who drove me out of my house i n
Florence.' Lionardo, in spi te of Mi chelangelo's innuendoes, does
198 Artists and Works of Art
not strike us as an unusually cal c u l ating yo ung man. He append­
ed as was his c ustom the date on which he received this un­
a ddressed letter. Doubtless he was in Rome but was not a llowed
to make the visit which had been the obj ect of his journey,
undertaken, i t i s likely, at the instance of Michelangelo's
f riends .
This letter, in which the unc le tells the nephew not to appear
before him, not to write to hi m any more, calls to mind a letter
Michelangelo wrote to h is father twenty-one years before . I n­
stead ofReverendissim o or Carissim o Padre, the missive opens
with the one word, Ludovico. After arguing in a patient tone
about a business matter concerning which he says he entirely
fails to understand what else the (muddle-headed and acc using)
father could want in the affair, Michel angelo goes on :

If it is that you find my very existence tiresome, yo u have hit on a

way to satisfy yourself and to return that key to a treasure which
yo u say I command: and you will do well : after all, everyone in
Florence knows what a rich man you are, how that I have always
robbed yo u and deserve punishment: yo u will be applauded. So, tell
everyone just what you please about me, but don't write to me any
more because you stop me working.

But it must be considered doubtful, even here, w hether the

bitter tone has precedence over the desire to calm the father' s
accusing fancies, to m ake a mend even with ridicule. There is an
extraordinary letter wherein a s ardonic but desperate humility
accompanies the expression of his own very strong feelings of
persecution.

Dearest father, I was astonished by the news of you the other day
when I didn't find you at home : and no\V that I gather you are u pset
with me and say I have turned you out, I wonder the more. For I am
certain that from the day I was born until now I have always had
the intention both in big things and small to please you, and always
the labours I have undergone were out of love for yo u . . . . I t amazes
n1e t hat yo u so quickly forget all this, you with your sons \\rho have
had me on trial for more than thirty years. And, of course, you know
well that I have ahvays schen1ed and done the best for you whenever
opportunity occurred. How then can you go about saying I drove
you away? Don't you see ·what harm you are doing me? Together
 Michelanyelo 199
with the other miseries I endure for other reasons, this completes my
bitterness, and all this misery is the fruit of my love for you . You
certainly repay me well ! But let it be as you say. I want to persuade
myself that what I h ave always done is shameful and harmful: a nd
so, as if I ha d done it, I ask your forgiveness. Try to forgive your son
who has always lived badly and done all the evils that are possible in
this world. Once again, I ask you to forgive me, the wretch that I am,
and spare me the harm of your spreading the story that I drove you
out. It hurts me nlore than you think. I am, you see, your son.

The fear of losing each other, we have said, is the dominant

emotional theme in the family letters . 'Men are worth more
than money.' I n the face of political dangers, Michelangelo
writes, 'Be the first to flee .' 'Think only of keeping alive' (and
not about wealth), he urges his father. 'I wouldn't exchange
your life for all the gold in the world.' Anxiously he tries to
counteract with religious exhortation and common sense the
father's patent persecutory fears whose opposite face some­
times seems to be a certain in consequence. When the father is
ill, though o u t of immediate danger, Michelangelo implores
B u onarroto (who has already shown the utmost concern in
telling Michelangelo) to m ake provision and to employ his wife
in aid of Ludovico. He, Michelangelo, will make it up to all of
them; the fount of all his effort had always been for the h elp of
his father before h e s hould die. (It would seem he could never
entirely convince himself that he had been s uccessful : perhaps
Buonarroto' s wife could do better.) He is very anxious - as he
s howed himself again over the deaths of his brothers - that if,
by chance, there should be a relapse, his father would not lose
the a dvantage of the last sa craments to promote his celestial
living. 'I have always s chemed to revive our family,' h e wrote
much later to his nephew, 'but I did not have brothers whom it
was possible to raise up.' The bitterness, I think, was more sor­
rowful than the usual feeling of failure to satisfy family pride.
There h a d been insufficient proof for his own satisfaction that
his father and brothers h a d exploited him successfully. He hated
to be exploited and he knew them to be worthless : in any case,
his feeling of persecution was very strong : even so, he preferred
to make every anxious sacrifice in order to simulate an eternity
200 Artists and \i\l orks of Art
for his family's motherless life, to secure their slipping exist­
ence. Nothing would be enough, nothing could convince h i m he
had done enough, so profound was the melancholy guilt centred
on them, particularly on the father.
In the lines commemorating the death of his father as well as
the dea th of Buonarroto some years before, he addresses his
father saying that he will speak of his dead son first. To him the
poet was drawn by love , to the father by duty. 'My brother is
painted on my memory but you , father, are sc ulpted alive i n the
middle of my heart . ' I take this wording literal ly : the very
father, primitive as the stone, dwelt within him, a person to be
instructed, sti ll more to be placated, a persecuting as well as a
persecuted figure, evoki ng nevertheless a certain pleasurable
passivity in a host who may often h ave desired to usurp t he
mother's place. Ludovico is so i m mediately settled in heaven by
the poet that some commentators have divined that Michel­
angelo is voicing heresy, that is to say, the deni al of purgatory.
'In heaven, ' he concludes, ' the holy love of father and son wil l
grow . . . ' Thereafter he turned even more t o religion, to a father
embroiled not only with i mages of God but with those of the
Saviour towards whom the last poems attest a deepening p assive
attitude. On the other hand, the death of his father see1ns to
have released t he full hatred of tyrants in his native l a nd, to
which he never returned .
It is p art of my view t hat I assume the pressure (upon us all) of
some such once-corporeal obj ect which Michel angelo carried
about with hi m, a figure he wooed, paci fied, imitated, nursed,
even while the host performed similar conj uring tricks far more
widely with the m aterials of the actual vvorld, primari ly on
behalf of a maternal obj ect through the s ublimation, art. The
broader restorative ai m never ousted the narrower : the striking
feature is their combination. A strong passive, as well as con­
trolling and restora tive, attitude towards the narrower and
nearer i mage was incorporated into the tensions of his art,
whence there flovlers an a l l-inclusive tortu red mastery
characteri stic of h is figures and of h is O \\T D i deal self, his own
self-mastery. Yet even the wrap t furca te agent , God the Father
of the Adam 'history' , possesses a form and a position in regard
 Michelangelo 20 1
to the lower half of his body which would not be inappropriate
to a reclining Venus. The bisexual congregation of the Sisti ne
vault proposes a tremendous and overpowering strength : hence
the terribilita.
I t is likely, apart from Condivi ' s assertion of beatings, that
Ludovico had opposed Michelangelo's desire to be an artist; and
that consent was forthcoming i n the face not only of per­
sistence b ut of a unique skill which seemed to pro mise gold. At
the age of twenty-two, he is signing letters, Michelagniolo, scu l­
tore in Roma. The signature becomes notable eleven years l ater
when he is painting the Sistine vault. Near the beginn ing of
the task, he said that painting was not his profession. Even
after a large part of the ceiling had been fi nished with suc­
cess, he pointed out i n a burlesque poem that he was no painter.
Yet the frescoes of the Sistine vault are generally recog­
n ized to be the most colossal feat kno\vn to pictorial art.
Michelangelo 's humility rings no less truly than his pride.
Except i n the case of the first plan for the Julian tomb, of plans
for the fac;ade of San Lorenzo and for the Church of the Flor­
entines i n Ro me - he was anxious that they should be executed
- we do not know of a ny expression of real satisfaction in what
he performed. Vasari stresses more than once Michelangelo's
modesty as an artist. 'Michelangelo having been \Vont to say
that if he had to satisfy himself i n \Vhat he did, he would have
sent out few, n ay, not even one (sculpture) . ' Though masterful,
he was subservient especia lly to the father within (in reality, i t
seems, a n impetuous yet sometimes h umble man). There was
nothing forward-looking nor expansive i n these attitudes . On
the contrary, he was led to demand some hypothetical, cha nge­
less condition of the once noble fam ily, Buonarroti Simoni, i n
h a rmony with the conservative tendencies of h is own deep mel­
a ncholy : that melancholy served as a barrier to the cor­
responding elation , provided a certain detachment fro m
u nparalleled reparative feats i n art, a certain pessimism that did
n o t disallow the slo w counterpart of omnipotent undertakings,
the Julian tomb, the Sistine vault, the fac;ade of San Lorenzo,
the rebuilding of St Peter's, not to mention the tami ng of m arble
mountains.
202 Artists and W arks of Art
As long as it survives, the great work of art is the sole un­
diminished creation. Such an artist cannot e asily tolerate his
god-like stature. Many h ave failed when most was lying in their
grasp, drowned by an ocean of illimitable a chievement. Hubris
for Michelangelo, whose success is perhaps the most individual
and obvious of all, was not in question. Little as he valued his
near-equals in art, he remained to himself the most Wretched of
men.
[from Michelan9elo, 1955, pp. 33-4 3]
(ii)
We tum to his last extant works of sculpture, the Pieta in the
Duomo at Florence and the Rondanini Pie ta [Plate r 2] now in
th e Castello Sforza at Milan. With death near, at the edge of the
homogeneous realm of shadow, he was at last able to join ele­
ments that had once demanded a resistant strength to ac­
company their merging: or that had been represented as linked
but disparate forces . (There is an early drawing in the Ash­
molean at Oxford of St Anne, the Virgin and the Christ child
which was probably executed in the context of Leonardo's car­
toon of the subject, then on exhibition at Florence. The contrast
between the tugging masses in the drawing with the Leonardo
conception has often been remarked.) It would appear that be­
tween the shadow of the a bsolute merging into nothingness
brought about by death, and the shadow of his long habit in
religious as well as aesthetic expiation, Michelangelo could en­
visage more directly the participation of one being in
another.
We have Vasari's Word for it that Michelangelo himself
figures as Nicodemus, the standing figure at the back of the
Duomo Pieta. He supports the right arm of the dead Christ and
seems to be turning the corpse even more to the side of the
Virgin who has Christ's head upon her cheek. We see Michel­
angelo, then, that most u naccustomed figure, in the exotic
paternal role (more active than is St Joseph as a rule) of consign­
ing the son to his mother. But nothing jars this deeply moving
work; deeply moving because, in a reversed form, we are able to
partake, as was the artist in carving it, of an ideal reconciliation.
 Michelangelo 203

So far from usurping the position of Nicodemus or of St Joseph

- though perhaps that too is recounted here - it is he, Michel­
angelo, who is the son once more, the child who sought to come
between the parents, who longed to restore the father to the
inj ured mother, to join them in harmony. But they are dead or
overcome with melancholy : nevertheless, surrendering more
direct uses of potency, he will stand behind them at the apex of
the triangle, the puppeteer, the artist, for ever the grieving, re­
sourceful child crying out for resurrection, forcing on the hard
beauty that finally coagulates from the endless ceremonia ls of
sadness . . .
Michelangelo's mother died when he was six. One of the
mainsprings of his adult life, we have seen, was to keep his
father going, and his brothers came within the orbit of the same
compulsion, which contributed largely to his extreme family
pride. He fended for them a ll. Yet we ·will suppose that at the
decisive stage of his emotional development it was also the
father he wanted for himself, the mother's place. (A notably
p assive streak in so rebellious a character would make his atti­
tudes unusually many-sided to his p atrons, to Julius and to the
Medici.) In the extraordinary Rondanini Pieta where an up­
right dead Christ is supposedly supported from behind by the
Madonna standing on a higher level, there is the effect, none the
less, that the second figure rides on the back of the first. Mich­
elangelo's father had been dead for thirty years : but in a sense
he was not allowed to die : corpse or no corpse, emaciated by
death, growing dimmer every day, he was still the family's
active principle to his son who had in fact supported him.
At the l ast, in the Rondanini Pieta, heroic conquest was
abandoned. One of the two basic images that inspire Form is
paralleled here by the underlying content of the subject-matter.
Ancient grief and depression calmly occupy the field in virtue
of their paraphrase of death : but Michelangelo's Saviour will
redeem and carry him : at the very last there is the first love,
head by head, mouth at breast, an utterly forlorn contentment
that merges gradually with the undivided nature of the final sleep.

I h ave thought it appropriate to refer to the final 'happy' phase

204 Artists and Works of Art
at this point because it helps us to visualize one of the many
alternatives of his temperament from which Michelangelo's art
proceeded. A p assive inclination to which he finally almost
surrendered, albeit with a masculine austerity, contributed
throughout his working life to the tension of his forms. A virile
force was in control; for long stretches of his art, passive
signifies encumberment and active, disencumberment. There is
little sign, one might have said, before Michelangelo left for
Rome in 1 505 to work for Pope Julius, before the Lao coon came
to l ight in January 1 506, of that encumberment of his forms so
evident in the Julian Slaves whose conception doubtless
influenced the Sistine ceiling. Yet his journeying between en­
cumberment and disencumberment was incessant: it will surel y
be agreed that no figure i n the whole range of art affords so
vivid an image of disencumberment as the marble David, disen­
cumbered of clothes, of weapons other than the sling, disen­
cumbered of the years. This nakedness, of course, belongs to the
subject-matter and therefore to a thousand Davids, but Michel­
angelo adopted the poetic Renaissance conception with an un­
rivalled wholeheartedness : his still David of the turning head
embodies disencumberment as never before or since, not as a
negative but as a positive state of earthy presence : disen­
cumbered of cheers, of f ame, even of the conquest which he has
yet to perform. In this idealized presentation of a p alpable,
nerve-filled body, we encounter the classic synthesis between
ancient experiences of what is undifferentiated or absolute and
ancient experiences of what is particularized, a conjunction
that is part and parcel of the formal elements i n every art. No
wonder that in Florentine eyes so attuned a David became the
image of political, everyday Freedom. Athenian statuary with a
similar self-possessiveness had once provided the same thought.
We are bound, then, to attribute to the weight of Michel­
angelo's figures of early date - to the Cascina drawings, for in­
stance - and to the huge energy that liberates them, the
character of encumberment disenthroned : inheriting themes of
naked energy, of brute strength from Pollaiuolo and Signorelli,
Michel angelo tra nsformed oppressi ve weight into the breadth
and pumping power of the thorax especially, i nto muscles that
 Michela n9elo 205

renew themselves by pa rta k i ng of bulk. The machine for crush­

ing becomes the instrum ent for l i fting, for release . Guilt, bad
intern al obj ects, are identi fied with the oppression of marble
weight, redemption w ith a n eas i ng , but i n a sense ever so stu­
pendously muscular, that there are no overto nes either of smug­
ness or of romanti c enthusiasm for stri ving per se . Faces are not
con torted with sufferi ng or effort; indeed, faces are of much less
signi fi c1 nce tha n torsos to the artist : many drawi ngs, apart
from the studies of moveme nt, show this to be so, none more
clearly than the careful design for the first carving of the Min­
erva Christ. Thu s , i n the dra \v i ngs especia lly, the hu man fra me,
rather than the features , represents the person ; and often, it
seems to us, the state of predicament in which Michelangelo
passed his life , tra nsubstanti ated by this genius of great for­
titude i nto an idea l condition of slow, perhaps cumber­
some, disembarrassme nt . I have parti c ularly in mind the four
u n finished Gia nts (Slaves) who wrestle with their stones, with
time, with eternity, in the Accademi a at Florence [Plate 1 3] .
I am suggesti ng that i n support of Michelangelo 's se nse of
predicament and gui lt there existed a state of uneasy passivity,
known to us in terms of an oppressi ve weight which, however
frightening, h ad at one time been partly w elcome . One of the
so-called Sl aves or Captives of the Louvre, perhaps the most
typica l of Mi chelangelo's surviving maj or works , is bound, tied.
( According to the first plan of 1 505 for the Julian to mb� it seems
that there were to have bee n sixteen of these prisoners, as they
are named by Condi vi and Vasari . ) They are figures of passivity
or suffering, and also of unusual strength . We are not made to
feel that stre ngth evaporate s ; though death will overcome it,
the strength still shows , or, rather, the vision remains, as if
coming from profou nd sleep . I ndeed, while pha ntoms possess
the Captives, a nightmare of pound-by-pound oppressiveness,
their raised, bull-strong bodies translate some of this de­
pendence into the slow partic les of health. The so-cal led Dying
Cap tive of the Lou vre is a re laxed image . He submits tenseless
to his dream, yet s ustains with the h uge, ref ulgent orbit of his
form the vigilance of light. His beauty is the one of a sea-cave 's
aperture that allows and withstands reverberati ng waves with-
206 Artists and Works of Art
in. . . . These beautiful forms, foreign to self-pity or to senti­
ment, are the product of deprivation, surrender, revolt, enlisted
by an idealizing yet naturalistic a rt.

In considering the St Sebastian of the Last Judgement fresco, we

first need to conjure up many Sebastians created in the previous
century. As long as myth retains power, as long as the style of
symbolic treatment remains approximate, art will grow swiftly
from the soil of art. We cannot conceive Michelangelo's
achievement except as a summit rising from the Renaissance,
rising from all the creations of his period whether in a p articular
or in a general sense .
We have conjured up, then, a hundred fifteenth-century Se­
bastians, graceful, suffering, youthful, long-haired, tied to the
tree. But here, on the Sistine wall, the arrows no longer impale
his body : awaiting commendation he holds them in his hand.
No longer tied and upright, he kneels in calm, relaxed expect­
ancy. A tanned champion, he appears to be resting between the
field events of a pitiless Olympiad. The episode of the a rrows
has become in our eyes an episode of training : their tips must
have stimulated the giant body which has massively closed
upon the wounds, which has closed, as it were, on a great deal
of stimulus, shutting it in. The arrows have fertilized Sebastian :
gigantic, muscular, of prodigious weight, he is yet full of spring,
and somehow protected, clothed, muffled even, by his own sleek
nudity, as an elephant by the wrinkled hide. The heroic pro­
portions are so generous that we become aware that his body
might s uggest the agile cushion sometimes associated with super­
lative strength, with the loose-knit silence, for instance, of the
cat-tribe. Not that it is strong, this reference to the animal
kingdom, in a ny figure by Michelangelo. On the contrary, his
men and women of giant frame h ave a power of heroic intellect
in place of the mobility of a nimals. If some s uggestion of the
leonine plays about the head of Eve in the Sistine Fall, and
about the head of the Madonna Pitti (Bargello), it is a s uggestion
w holly subservient to the one of Amazonia n strength: whereas,
in contrast, the recumbent Adam of the famous Creation, ferti­
lized by the finger of the Almighty whose gesture is authority
 Michelangelo 207

i tself (especially when compared with the more usual presen­

tation of divine afflatus), possesses an enduring lassitude. The
fact is that virile creatures such as he and Sebastian are super­
huma n : without a trace of effeminacy they incorporate the
female powers . Hence the terribilita.
And so, on the Sistine ceiling the anomaly of the issue of Eve
from Adam's side, beckoned forth by the Almighty midwife,
dissolves; and we realize with a we that the keen, the sublime,
God the Father of the Creation of Adam controls about him a n
uterine m antle filled with attendants who clamber close, souls
yet to be born, attributes as yet of his own essence . In the His­
tory of God separating sky (or earth) from water, we see the
attendants more deeply ensconced i n the i nflated cloak from
which only the upper p art of his body emerges with taut, cylin­
dri cal simplicity. The features are those of Adam : h air, beard
and h ands flame with the bisexual creative strength which we
readily i dentify with the imaginative urgencies that have
governed the artist.
But vvhat is the final evolution of the superhuman nudes? If
we turn to the l ate Crucifixion drawings, to one at Oxford [Plate
1 4] or at Windsor, we see in each a mourning attendant whose
nudity is, so to s ay, o f a quilted substance and dimension, more
proper for an Eskimo matched for encounter with a polar bear .
Among our thoughts associated with the appreciation of these
superb and moving works of a rt, there may well be those which
suggest that at the back of the long cycle of Michelangelo's
heroic figures, behind the successful omnipotence (successful in
art) to which no homage p ai d will ever seem sufficient, there
lurks i n corresponding strength a frightening image of the
utmost brutality, an oppressive image of s heer weight that h a d
overco me the child. S o it seems, at any rate t o the present writer
who h as been reminded of his subject by R. Money-Kyrle's a c­
count of observations by Roheim concerning the over­
masculinity and underlying femininity of the men in some
central Australian tribes, and concerning the emergence of that
undying, infantile conception, the phallic woman.

[from Michelangelo, 1955, pp. 83-90]

208 A r tis ts and Works of Art
(iii)
The refusals of intimacy to which, among other causes, an ex­
cessive sympathy impelled him, were not invariable. Thorny
though he was, Michelangelo inspired not only respect but an
affection he much valued in a faithful servant such as Urbino or
in a tactful and unselfish man as Luigi del Riccio. The latter used
to advise Michelangelo's nephew, Lionardo, in the making and
timing of little gifts, delicacies, food and wine, which pleased
the old man. Since he lived in a considerable s qualor that
matched his depression and his hardness to himself (he might
otherwise have had to entertain his friends), gifts from his rela­
tives and others were nevertheless a morsel of the honouring
also due to him, a morsel which he could almost readily a ccept.
He used even to visit del Riccio in the Strozzi Campagna villa
and was twice prevailed upon to live out serious illness in the
Strozzi house in Rome . Always emotional, he might welcome an
old friend with tears of joy; but there was a severe limit to that
intimacy, easily ruptured, at any rate for a time. Donato Gian­
notti, the respected associate both of del Riccio and of Michel­
angelo, described in his two dialogues about Dante how that at
the end of their discussions these close friends were unable to
persuade Michelangelo to ,e at with them. He excuses himself on
the grounds that he is more susceptible than any one else of any
time : on every occasion th at he is among those who are skilful,
who know how to do or say something out of the ordinary he is
possessed by them, indeed robbed by them (et me 9li do in
maniere in preda) : he is no more himself : not only the present
company but any one else at the table would separate him from
a part of himself; and he wants to find and enj oy himself: it is
not his trade to have much delight and entertainment : what he
needs to do is to think about death: that is the only subject for
thought which helps us to know ourselves, which may keep
ourselves united in ourselves and save us from being dispersed
and despoiled by relations, friends, geniuses, ambition, avarice,
etc ., etc.
He was about seventy at the time . It is unlikely that longer,
more undeniable court from the powerful has ever been paid to
an artist in the flesh; yet he felt distracted from his own essence,
 Michelangelo 209

even by those who were his worshippers . As, notably, i n the

cases of the actors, Shakespeare and Dickens, there can be no
doubt that the unusual lending of himself (which is also a con­
trol of the object) underlay his phenomenal technical com­
m and, versatility, and, indeed, originality. For the purposes of
art he would initially feel less distrust of the object as he bent it
to his will : yet, none the less, i n spite of the extraordinary,
never-dying warmth of his passionate feelings - extraordinary
a mi d the persecuting fears - love, fascination, i nterest, entailed
oppressive weight, spoliation, a shock to the organization of the
ego. He wanted now to keep himself for death, for the
undifferentiated, for a merging with what is entire . On the other
hand, the separate person 'in his own right', objects good and
bad, animate or inanimate, h a d won from him an overpowering
response . (No art, he sometimes s ays, is sufficient return for the
beauty of the object.) And so, he would ever be as the infant
with the homogeneous world of the s a tisfying breast, and he
would also be as the rather older infant who could restore, not
only this good breast but the self-subsistent mother, the other
person, the whole separate object whom he h a d in fantasy over­
powered; and he would reconcile or fuse the two ambitions,
making the one to serve the other . . .
Such was the constant aim of a supreme artist, and such i s the
aim of all lesser artists too . Not many, however, will have em­
ployed in comparable degree under the aegis of the restorative
aesthetic i deal, psychical trends which when arrayed in
strength, must often preclude this lack of emotional
simplification, this accessibility, preconditions of the creative
refashioning that ends in art.

The superb simplicity or h omogeneity of the greatest a rt which

we enj oy as might a starving man a c lose-grained crust that
links every working and sleeping moment, comes to us as an
attribute of singularity. Wolfflin has remarked how extra­
ordinary it is that Dawn 'for all her movement can be rea d as a
single plane', that the Medici Madonna and child combining
m a ny tempestuous directions of attitude, give the 'impression
of repose because the whole content is reduced to one compact,
2 10 A rtists and Works of Art
general form : the original block of stone see ms to h ave been but
slightly modified' . Though all these indi cations of movement are
transverse, the Medici M adonna tapers like a tower with m any
ledges .
In the combination of the homogeneous with the i ndividual
or speci fi c, we have the crux of Form in a rt, the creed of the
artist's endeavour (for which I h ave i ndicated some com­
pulsions) . There are, of course, a n i nfi nity of methods other
than Michelangelo's firm resolving of contrasted directions : but
his parti cularly powerful combination of restlessness with
repose provides a clear-cut text. All the s ame, the homogeneous
quality is so well fused with the elaboration of a n individual
content that we c an not separate them. (For instance, both
repose and movement speak of the distinctive object per se :
everything will serve a dual function .) But in spite of the
difficulties of analysis, we are well aware i n general that, o n the
one h and, a work of art is a n epitome of self-subsistent or whole
objects which can neither be superseded nor repeated, an epi­
tome of particular a nd individual entirety ; while on the other
h and, striding in upon the presentation of the concrete, upon
the rendering of experience i n terms of touchability and the
synthesis effected by the eye that perpetuates (in visual art) the
image of a separated a nd outward thing,_ there comes the ten­
dency to gain for such poignant p arti cularity, connections with
everything else, connections that blur, a kinship with the uni­
verse, a singleness that vibrates at its junction with the singular;
there comes, m aybe, the homogeneous experience of the
'oceanic feeling', of sleep, the prototype of death and disciple to
the unmatched bliss of the i nfant at the bre ast : these contents
too are communicated in term s of the senses.
Welded together, they underlie what we c all Form in art;
that is, they underlie the systems of completeness and h armony
whi ch i nterpenetrate with the m any cultural aspects of specific
subj ect-matter on which Form works ; in the case of the Ac­
cademia Giants, for instance, not o nly their aspect as Cin­
quecento nudes but at the heart of the writhing, the theme of
conflict in Michelangelo's life .
His figures became more massive a n d simplified after the
 Turner 21 1

early period, without the loss of complicated movement. This

deeply-felt simplification rests on the naturalism of the Bacchus
and David and Cascina cartoon, upon a rapacious yet self-lend­
ing observation, upon a grasp of attitude which is without par­
allel . He sought the utmost scale and intractibility to match the
synthesis demanded of his emotion, the utmost carnality to feed
his universal maxims, the utmost movement to represent
repose, the utmost extensions to serve the centre of gravity. He
offered to beauty the ideal settlement, his inherent conflict
unified by the cha racter of the marble block; he petrified the
body's dynamics of which he was the master; he was of the
body as m agnificently as he was of death and of God; we soon
come upon the genius forcing all the world of sense to serve this
angry a ltar of the nude.

[from Michelan9elo, 1 955, pp. 1 27-3 1 ]

23

Turner

There is a long history of indistinctness in Turner's art, con­

nected throughout with what I have called an embracing or
enveloping quality, not least of the spectator with the picture.
The power grew in Turner of isolating the visionary
effectiveness that belongs to a passing event of light : i t entailed
some loss of definition in the interest of emphasis upon an over­
all quality . To one who complained, Turner is said to have re­
plied : ' Indistinctness is my forte. ' I shall attempt interpretation
of a n arrow compulsion that I attribute to a predominant aspect
of h is embra cing effects : my aim will be to suggest how minor
this theme woul d probably have proved h ad it been abstra cted
from the lengthy apprenticeship of its intrusion, had it not been
long attendant upon contrasting achievements in picture­
making. His supremacy lies not in his compulsions but in the
links established for them, subsidiary yet vastly enriching. It is a
matter of degree, for otherwise it is the same with every a rtist.
212 Artists and Works of Art
Our interest today in aesthetic directness, though in many
senses estimable, in another can be not a little vulgar. Aesthetic
directness, so far from always enjoying a lack of limitation,
may itself be inhibited by an expressiveness that casts away the
many links for a compulsion, that avoids contrast, the means of
sublimation as well as material for integration . But we cannot
summon at a wish what I have called subsidiary and enriching
aims : should they be potential, however, understanding will en­
courage their presence.
Turner's visions founded on Rome and Venice developed grad­
ually over many years. When he first went to Italy he had
concentrated on topographical drawings and sketches, no less
than 1 ,500 or so in probably little over two months, of Rome,
Naples and the surroundings . The habit of drawing must have
asserted itself every day, and often all day. One reason why in
the sketch-books there are so many drawings of Dover Castle
and the coast will have been due to his waits there for the
continental packet. Do \Ve have comparable disciplines ? More­
over his memory for natural effect was no less fully rehearsed
than his power to observe it.
We shall find that the accustomed objects of his art, buildings
among foliage, trees, mountains, ships, eventually shared their
qualities with their media, buildings with the sky, ships with the
sea and vice versa : finally, sky and water were equated with the
paint itself even for large works : the equation had long been
brought about for some drawi ngs and sketches, including oil
sketches. In a word, the homogeneous effect we admire so much
supervened upon a thousand studies amassed from many kinds
of objects under the aegis of contemporary styles for picture­
'
making and of a naturali stic bent that was never lost : the artist
with the mood of nature were first established by the paint and,
in the end, as the paint, a contemporary effect that seems far
less comfortable as a first endeavour. The chief of all painting
problems is here : the j ourneyman starts at the point where a
supreme master laid down the brush, not one master but many;
many more today than at any time before.
A first reference should be to the social determinant of
Turner's art, the studies to provide whatever patrons would
 Turner 213

admire a nd, as the result of unceasing industry, to earn a good

living. The early topographical watercolours and others from
whic� engravings were made - the first was published when he
was just nineteen - depended for their value, of course, upon
the sentiment i nfusing their fact, upon the ele1nent of com­
municated 'truth' , the theme ever-present in art that Dr Meltzer
brought i nto relation with care and love for the obj ect con­
ceived in the depressive or post-depressive position. Viewed as a
'sermon to siblings', visua l art seeks to reflect and embody some
of the needs or tensions of a society, and of the artist' s inner
world, vis-a-vis Nature, i n terms of the outside world. The
painter i s he whose inner world, everywhere intertwined with
the outer, will be projected i n such a way as to communicate to
his fellows a freshness of feeling about objects; ultimately,
though often most superficially, the feeling of being more at
home in a grown-up world. We h ave seen that the scale of
aesthetic integration will vary with conditions of culture and of
preceding art. If we believe i n the truth for him of what Turner
wrote i n a margin of Opie's lectures, from the viewpoint of
today we sha ll consider that he was extremely fortunate regard­
ing the historical context . . . 'every look at Nature is a
refinement upon art', he wrote : and he continues by saying he
conceives the painter as 'admiring Nature by the power and
practicability of his Art, and judging of his Art by the per­
ceptions drawn from N ature' . (As to Art, it has been said that
the l ast ten years of the eighteenth century, the time of
Turner's youth, was the best there had yet been in London for
students of post-Rena issance European painting, due largely to
big sales following the French Revolution.)
The study of Turner, then, is a robust yet romantic subj ect :
part of the attraction i s his silence, the devotion to his work
from the early morning; each year for many years the tours
tha t uncovered the rewarding aspects of the English scene at a
period when many English towns and villages were astonish­
ipgly beautiful, at a moment of poignant beauty inasmuch as
the threat of great changes was sometimes impli cit : at a period
when the smaller country-seat domciins were multiplying i n
number and optimism; when the a chievements o f Trafalgar and
2 14 Artists and Works of Art
Copenhagen fortified ordinary pri de. It is the countryside as we
still want it to be; consequently, in spite of what I h ave said
about the uniqueness of the moment of any art, we do not often
think of Turner as an eighteenth-century or a Regency or a n
early Victorian figure. His vein o f romantic mastery w a s em­
bodied also i n the prescient, was somewhat committed, Kenneth
Clark has pointed out, even to the baby triumphs of a growing
mechanical age. With the vigour and cockiness of small stature
he embraced the huge variety of s cene as we would h ave it, not
altogether nostalgically, because we cannot altogether believe
that it no longer exists : a gleam from What remai ns recon­
stitutes an unaltered conviction about the countryside, re­
inforced especially by Turner's p a noramas of the coast from out
at sea or from near the beach \:Yhere, often, there has been no
change. On the other h a nd the early sea-pieces, and views of
shipping that he discerned with a naval eye, are among the
more 'dated' of his works .
Turner's encircling contemplation was for long closely tied,
except i n sketches, to the a dj unct of several old pictorial tra­
ditions, p articularly the Dutch . An astonishj ng factor i n his de­
velopment was the direct rivalry with Claude to which he felt
himself constrained; it is only emphasized by h is preference for
Punic rather than for the Roman a nd Grecian heroes . For a long
time, perhaps to the end, Turner chose to regard Dido Building
Carthage (exhibited 1 8 1 5) as his chef d'reuvre. Involved today
with pictorial 'breakthrough', we are astonished not so much
that Sir George Beaumont objected to them as that it was apt
enough, in spite of their i ncipient romantic unity, for him to
judge Turner's earlier oil p ai ntings i n terms of Cuyp, Ruysdael,
Claude, artists who had been dead for more than a hundred
years . Due to a variety and development tha t spans such dis­
tance, Turner contrived connections that we find reassuri ng .
Moreover, as I have said, h e made out o f many-sidedness more
powerful ammunition for very personal bents or compulsions :
i ncorporated thus with perennial psychical requirements, they
furnish most i mportant lessons to us his siblings . Of course the
message of truth in Turner's work w as not at all the one of a
sociological survey. His nightmares are by no means specific to
 Turner 2 15

that terrible age. He gives us what he, as an artist, felt, but

rarely what others, figuring in his paintings, might be feeling. Of
this, we shall reali ze, he was almost incapable. Not that he did
not often admit its propriety on a small and crowded scale,
someti mes with passable result, for instance The Ship wrec�
(exhibited 1 805).
B ut before considering the more extreme aspects of the
Turner subject, we must take some cognizance of tension in the
aesthetic situation. What we can view as a spanning - by Girtin
as by Turner - became a struggle, a tension seen in the rival
advocacies of light and darker paintings, largely as a result of
the influence upon oil painting of the effects and technical in­
ventions in watercolour. Turner was accused most variously of
being hesitant, of sacrificing the precept of art to the vul­
garities of nature, of vagueness as of brittleness and, even as
early as 1 798 when he was twenty-three, of a mannered ap­
proach.
Crabb Robinson entered in his diary for 7 May 1 825:

Went to the Exhibition, with the advantage of having my atten­

tion drawn to the best pictures whi ch, for the most part, equalled my
expectations. Turner, R.A., has a magnificent view of Dieppe. If he
will invent an atmosphere, and a play of colours all his own, why
will he not assume a romantic name (for his pictures) ? No one could
fin d fault with a garden of Armida, or even of Eden, so painted. But
we know Dieppe, in the north of France, and can't easily clothe it in
such fa ery hues. I can u nderstand why such artists as Constable and
Collins are preferred.

It seems that Turner's effects of light and atmosphere did not

appear to correspond with their natural phenomena because the
eye of the cultured spectator was still viewing Nature, in front
of pictures at least, through the glass of an older art. On the
other hand, Crabb Robinson perceives that Turner's overall
p aintings of light and atmosphere could pass as his version of
acceptable pictorial manipulations that belonged especially to
the eighteenth century. Even in many of his earlier historical
paintings that aped the p ast, or were meant to rival it, mytho­
logical incident took but a small place, not only in area as in
216 Artists and Works of Art
Claudes, but in regard to the mood of a l andscape or of a
meteorological happening. A more truthful, because more tran­
sitory, natural effect was the vehicle in his h ands of an emotion
that was less restrained, yet without the entire loss, all the same,
of the feeling for a contrived magnitude in virtue of which we
a t once recognize a classical composition . The presence i n
sketch-book numbered 9 0 in the Turner Bequest of contiguous
studies, suggests for a few instances a possibility that the con­
ceiving of a classical composition may have included its pro­
jection upon familiar Thames-side scenes, particularly the pile
of Windsor Castle. It would be in tune with Turner's literary
orientation, powerful to the end, from the eighteenth-century
sublimities of Thomson. At that time Turner was living in Sion
Ferry House, Isleworth. A few years before he h ad painted
many oil sketches on the Thames direct from nature, a rare
procedure for hi m, infrequent in the case of watercolours as
opposed to pencil drawings. I feel that he was able later to con­
join the London Thames as such vvith Venice as such. I must
repeat that the greatness of Turner, and indeed the originality,
was first of all the product of the diversities he linked as he
drew upon much experience. I shall soon suggest that a savage
compulsion dramatized his power of linking, absorbed into
homogeneous effects the varieties of connectiveness . The var­
iety of homogeneous effect is itself astounding. Applied to
Turner's painting, the adjective, 'homogeneous', suggests very
l ate brilliant, light-toned canvases with h ardly a perpendicul ar
feature, or else a whirlpool envelopment by fire, flood, incipient
in all his landscape styles except the first and in some degree,
the l ast. Yet at the very time of his enlargement of a direct,
panchromatic oil technique in the l 83os, he was still painting
grey sea paintings sometimes of limpid scenes, one of his ver­
sions of the Dutch tradition. These, it appears to me, though un­
demonstrative, no less than the all-devouring dramas hot or
cold, prefigure the unified substance of the l ater canvases whose
breadth has needed dual lineage. Thus, Turner's application was
wide . He gained some victories even in the field of calm, con­
templative genre (Blacksmith's Sh op, exhibited 1 807, cul­
minating in Frosty Morning, exhibited 1 8 1 3) : nor can one
forget, though far less successful, what may be called ( cf. Roth-
 Turner 217

enstein & Butlin) the Rembrandt and Watteau figure com­

positions of the 1 82os .
Doubtless attracted by Watteau's colour as by Stothard's,
Turner was no more suited to emulate rococo elements than in
verses his much-beloved Thomson, poet of the picture-like or
picturesque. A measure of i ncongruity, it seems, added fuel to
his ambition : what grew i n him, what he fostered, consorted i ll
i n some respects with the physical impression he made, with a
rusted, hard-bitten (by persecutory fears) man of business; yet
he joined them, i n his art not least a sometimes stilted version of
eighteenth-century sublimity with the inordinate ranging of ro­
mantic verve.
Venice was part of his inheritance, particularly the Venice of
Canaletto. His three visits probably amounted in all to about six
weeks : the first, on the j ourney to Rome in 1 8 1 9 when he made
some detailed topographical drawings and many sketches, will
have subsequently i ntensified a mythology of conflagration and
reflection. But whereas, hitherto, he had romanticized the
strength of building, architecture in some very late Venetian
paintings serves no more than as a grandiloquent sail amid the
suffusion of sea with sky, a medium for the riding of blanched
or darkened boats. I think Turner gained confidence for a
lengthy elucidation of light from his encounter i n 1 802 with the
Old Masters at the Louvre. The criticism written i n his sketch­
book i s concerned almost entirely with falsity of light effect and
poverty of colour combinations. He was to dissolve the kind of
chiaroscuro that dramatizes the world's a ctuality, in favour of a
diffused light that took actuality to itself, even i n finished draw­
i ngs, particularly those he made for their engraving where an
equ ality of effect often overrides most subtly, \vithout under­
mining, the strong chi aroscuro and sturdy relief, even tho ugh
the i n itial terms to be unified within the envelope were a lter­
nations of the topographical or romantic classical stones , the
buildi ngs he had so long studied, toweri ng stone, so often tower­
i ng above, offset by the dark density of foliage. Precipi tous
bui l ding led to the appalling paths of tossed sea, to mountains
a nd cloud and to towering effects of light. The fi rst Ii nk between
early and late Turner is the one between the mutual enhance-
218 A r tis ts and Works of Art
ment of textures to which he was very sensitive, and of those of
colour or light : in painting, texture and colour sensations can be
very close. To m y mind Turner's perceptiveness for building -
the unreliable Thornbury reports Mr Trimmer the younger a s
h aving heard Turner wish that he h ad been an architect - and
for the sense of s uffusion in ordered stone with water that much
Italianate art had diversified on the example of Venice and of
Rome, inspire the s labs of iridescent colour we t hink of when we
call to mind h is l ate works, no less dyn amic i n themselves than
the imaginative dram a and sense of doom and other obvious
instruments by which he engineers a n overall effect of a m a­
jesty to approach the gravity and balance attained by earlier
Masters . His poetic discernment first fed upon, then diversified
as the pictorial instrument, the close enhancements of texture
or of colour, and so of shape.
If the deepest aim was transcendent, Turner employed for it
his vast experience of measure . There is s m a ll appearance of the
arbitrary in his drifts of mountain, sea and sky : they formulate
an erratic architecture or a superb natural habitat, no less than
an irresistible phenomenon; soft and tenuous, warmed as well
as cold. It was as if catastrophes were carvings on the sky : they
s tem from the delicate use of the pencil in thousands of draw­
ings, slight touches to enrich the p aper as if it were a volume
invoked by this touch, remarkable not only for delicacy but for
selectiveness , even in so early an architectural drawing as the
sketch of Stamford, Lincolnshire, of 1 797. Unity of treatment is
matched by that of feeling : what is grasped from the s ubject is
accorded with the projected s train of feeling that encompasses
and adjus ts each detail with another . Turner not only thought
of himself as a poetic p ainter but a ttempted poetry, a t times to
introduce his pictures . He may have intended to preface the
Sou thern Coast series of engravings with a long narrative poem.
His use of words became stiff, repetitious, very confused; so
a lso, very often, the delineation of people in his lands capes .
His growing love of overall effect without loss t o the rep­
resentation of endless distance, the palpability for many ripe
works of the picture plane, prime overall unit, suggest some par­
allel with our own preoccupations : many drawings, often of the
 Turner 219

earlier years, prefigure i n this respect l ate Turner oil p ainting.

For instance the 'Salisbury' sketch-book of about 1 800 (T.B.49 )
has two scribbles of sunset, clouds and water, integrated as one
mass : another early instance ( 1 802) is a wonderful little drawing
- the Finberg c atalogue s ays probably of Brienz - made up of
abbreviated hooked strokes (T.B.77). The minuscule mosaic of
a ngularity, the richness in the poverty, suggest Klee to us. Much
earlier, in 1 795 when Turner was twenty, he could a chieve a not
dissin1ilar compositional effect of the greatest delicacy, such as
the tv{in drawings of two mounted figures descending a hill-side
p ath near the sea (T.B.25). Other drawings conjure up Cezanne :
even in m any grand p aintings some values of the sketch are
obstinately maintained. Although there is evidence that Turner
Would not allow rough pencil sketches to be glimpsed, he seems
to have had more faith in his h andling than had Constable in his,
an artist, we may suspect, who was on less good terms with
himself. Even the technique in some last oils where calligraphy
overlays an unbroken cake of p aint, is foreshadowed by very
delicate pencil drawings on p aper prepared with wash rubbed
out for the lights, such as in the beautiful 'Dunbar' sketch-book
of 1 801 (T.B. 54) or the 1 802 'Schaffhausen' folio set (T.B. 79) or,
better still, the radiant drawings of the 1 8 1 9 'Tivoli' sketch-book
(T.B. 1 83). On the other h and there are prosaic fi nished water­
colours of the middle period that h ave very low value, such as
Saltash in the Lloyd Bequest. Until much l ater, Turner was still
apt to demarcate his work for the public in agreement with the
traditional genres.
A price had to be p aid for the homogeneous effect, a price on
which Turner's critics were agreed; not only that: his flattening
of figures and tempering of foreground in the interest of overall
effect corresponded to a lack of inevitable interest in relief,
shown by the playing down of figures as a result of his growing
concentration upon the enveloping l andscape. We shall find
that these attitudes are possibly linked in deeper layers of the
mind also. On the other hand, early studies of buildings, hills,
and especially rocks, are often very notable for their relief.
Turner w as a phenomenal draughtsman in several genres, but
particularly for choice and disposition of accent and bare space
 220 Artists and vV arks of Art
in a finely controlled sea of detail; for a pointilliste employment
as a youth, i n company with Girtin, of the pencil's point with­
in a pattern of short strokes. His drawings of the figure at the
Academy schools were no more than adequate . Some later
drawings of the nude are considerably better, but do not obtain
high significance. Except in the case of cows and of the early
self-portrait in oil, his delineation of faces seems wooden. \Ve
cannot discover in Turner's art much affirmative relationship to
the whole body, to human beings. They tend to be sticks, or fish
that bob or flop or are stuffed. The prejudice is sometimes al­
lowed such freedom, that many figures who should be dignified
appear to be rustic, to be approached by the artist with uncon­
cealed because untutored nai'.v ety, though this is in fact very
far from the case. To use the psychoanalytic term, they sugges t
part-objects. (A part-object, it may be recalled, i s an organ or
�unction that on the analogy of the first object, the breast, h as
been split off from an object's other organs and functions : a
part-object, therefore, i s a concept at a great distance from the
one of a whole, separate person for whom, i n a regression, it
may come to stand.)
Turner's chosen relaxation was to fish. (The drawing of
young anglers for the Liber Studiorum i s among his most en­
gaging figure-groups.) He saw the feminine in cows but upon
human life he tended to bestovv a phallic cast. He himself w as
small, rather Punch-like, deliberate and usually taciturn. (His
father, even more Punch-like in appearance, was more talk­
ative.) Ruskin found elongated figures, oval elms and flat-topped
pines to be typical Turnerian shapes . Also typical, after 1 820, is
the curvilinear form of crutch or thigh bone along the side of
which, as in the Palestrina painting, there runs a narrow vent.
Very upright figures, such as the one of the strange Letter, may
amount to the crutch-shape with attendant valley. They include
Phryne at the edge of the huge painting named after her. The
many Turner- or Punch-faced people who inelegantly, i f wraith­
like, throng Richm ond Hill on the Prince Regent's Birthday, are
a lso of the species. It is astonishing that on the watercolour
Turner painted i n 1 802 after the woman of the double portrait
in the Louvre (No. 1 590), then known as Titian's mistress, the
 Turner 221

copyist should have grafted the Punch-like quality. It so

happens that we have knowledge of Turner's long and com­
passionate devotion to but one person, his barber father who,
for years a widower, acted as his son's factotum. (It is con­
ceivable that there is an affinity, as Thornbury suggested, be­
tween some of Turner's figure-painting and barber's dummy
heads that had probably once crowded his father's shop window
in Maiden Lane.) F. E. Trimmer gave Thornbury this description
of an unfinished portrait by Turner of his mother:

There is a strong likeness to Turner about the nose and eyes. Her
eyes are blue, lighter than his, her nose aquiline, and she has a slight
fall in the nether lip. Her hair is well frizzed - for which she might
have been indebted to her husband's professional skill - and is sur­
mounted by a cap with large flappers. She stands erect, and looks
masculine, n ot to say fierce; report proclaims her to have been a
person of ungovernable temper, and to have led her husband a sad
life.

At the end of 1 800, when Turner was twenty-five, his mother

was taken to Bethlehem Hospital and discharged uncured the
following year. She died in a private asylum in 1 804 . Other than
the parentage, that is all we know of her.

Ruskin mentions Turner's favourite kind of declivity, founded,

Ruskin thinks, on his early Yorkshire studies, where he draws
the precipitous part of hill or mountain in the lower section and
a gradual slope on the top, a (phallic) formation that reverses
the one typical in Rhine and Alps. When in 1 792, at the age of
seventeen, Turner recorded Magdalen bridge and tower at
Oxford (T.B . l l), he worked from the bank below as he was so
often to do in renderings of ruins, churches and castles. A strong
towering above, a cascading below, were needed to give power
to a delicate, almost pointilliste, drawing. The viewpoint was
common enough, almost a convention, but we attribute to
Turner an intoxication in its use since the imaginative range
grew so wide in the treatment of wave, of masted ship and
terraced, celestial palaces from whose thrust the sky but slowly
withdraws its vapours. His first ( 1 8 1 7) among several voyages to
222 Artists and Works of Art
the Rhine with the crowd of precipitous castles, when he made
drawings, and from them later, watercolours, will have p ar­
ticularly intensified a grasp of towering masses, natural and
architectural, to which he had been long attracted; to which he
could pin the utmost circumstance. Two years later Italian hill­
towns impressed on him their broader affirmation : at that time
he studied a variation he would always remember of the theme,
the cascades, ravines, antique remains and ruins, propped
among the prophetic trees of Tivoli. Before the end it ousted a
stepped, orderly, Poussinesque type of composition such as we
see in the superb, finished watercolour, The Medway (T.B.
208).
Turner's use of the old-fashioned viewpoint from above is
more powerful still and more prevalent; the means of survey, of
the bather's deliberate contemplation from the diving-board.
We are given opportunity to linger there, and through our own
volition we are thereupon immersed and enveloped by the
scene. This appears, so often, a jump into our own past,
heroically presented. The suspicion is surely strengthened if we
consider subjects of his most ambitious work, fire and w ater,
the disasters of fire and water or the wastes of ocean populated
with giant fish and with the gestureless bodies from The Slave
Ship, or by the near-swamped sailors of many a canvas such as
the Calais and the Trafalgar or The Shipwreck, 1 805. Not a few
of Turner's predominant interests coalesced in Venice, boats,
buildings, suffused by light and by the literary associations of
Byron or Rogers, but a sea populated naturally, as it were, with­
out shipwreck, a sea for the first time· filled by people in a con­
text without fury, since in Venice alone countless undistressed
individuals are lying on the water, perhaps for The Return from
the Ball. In his later paintings of the city, Turner relaxed the
piling-up trend of his fantasy : rush and fever subside i nto sad
dreams of restless ease.
It is another miracle performed by that city. I must recall
that the relationship to a part-object has the character of a com­
plete identification, of a whirlpool envelopment into which we
are drawn. Of such kind is Turner's more usual conception of
doom and disaster, of the Fallacies of Hope (his poem, or pre-
 Turner 223

tended poem, fro m which he quoted in catalogues), the con­

ception, in one aspect, of the infant who believes in the
omnipotent and scalding propensity that belongs to his stream
of yellovv urine as it envelops the object so closely attached to
himself, an object split off in his mind from the good breast with
which he is also one. Whereas the two trends are integrated in
Turner's art, he m ust emphasize \Vith less vigour the long­
studied separateness of self-sufficient and whole objects, other
than as the pictures themselves, with a viewpoint, maybe, from
above, now removed from the artist. The overall emphasis upon
the canvas is predominantly the one of envelopment. We are
likely to think first of late Turners in this connection. Though
the approach be traditional the same quality is rarely absent
from any but the earliest drawing and watercolour sketches. In
a sketch-book of 1 800-1 802 (T.B. 69) there are pastels on coarse
blue paper, one of which, a castle on a hill, presents but a pyr­
amidal slab of slightly diaphanous colour, nearly of one tone.
Though early oil set-pieces are particularly dark - eventually
they lighten, first into greyness - and full of detail, they are not
without a characteristic fluidity; hence, in all probability,
Farington's description of 1 796, 'mannered harmony'. After con­
siderable and continuous success as a very young man, Turner's
first great triumph was in 1 80 1 with the Bridgewater sea-piece;
already in 1 802 (elected R.A.) he is accused of lack of finish;
later, it will be of offering his public mere blotches. These, as a
matter of fact, he kept to himself. In some cases, attributable
mostly to the years 1 820-30, of what Finberg in his Turner Be­
quest catalogue calls 'Colour Beginnings' watercolours (es­
pecially T.B. 263 ; there are also uncatalogued oil sketches), one
is a\vare of experimentation with paint, yet of discoveries
s ufficient to themselves, though they can often be read without
difficulty as first sketches in colour of landscapes and seascapes
or as records of natural effects for which his memory was
phenomenal. But it is impossible at this point, the crux of the
Turner enigma, to remove his technical and aesthetic probing,
probings into landscape design, from pressures anterior to them.
All obsession has a vivid aspect of self-sufficiency. Anyone who
looks through items, other than the earliest, of the vast Turner
224 Artists and Works of Art
Bequest, will be amazed at the number of these 'beginnings, and
pencil sketches, often monotonous in simplicity and sameness
in regard to a raining downward of a top area upon a receptive
area below : so many sheets in later times have no other feature,
while others have a reverse surge from the lower section made
up of vibrant stripes parallel to the picture plane, or of piercing
forms as from an uneven sea . It appears that with the later
years, Turner brushed in large oil paintings for exhibition upon
such preparations, sometimes their entirety as representations
during the varnishing days. One element assaults the other in
the simple, zoned beginnings. Concentrating upon sky with land
or sea, the artist was under compulsion to record faithfully and
repeatedly a stark intercourse, then to reconcile, then to inter­
pose, perhaps with a rainbow. Among the 'studies for vignettes,
of the 1 830s (T.B. 280) there is a watercolour sheet of rose with
touches of ochre, saturated at the bottom, thin above. Under­
neath this apparently abstract design of melting colour, Turner
has written - so runs the guess - 'Sauve qui peut'. It is to be
expected that such delicate interplay of two colours enfolded
already for him the terrors of a flood, equal to the chromatic
balm in virtue of which the inevitable alternation of the terror
cou ld be allowed to appear. With comparable obsessiveness in
his middle and final years, Turner would draw rapidly a tower
ensconced on a hill-top, over and over again from every angle,
perhaps six line-drawings on one small page, doubtless with an
eye to the best design for a p ainting, but also to make far more
than certain from every long approach how the one element
fitted into the other : he often drew next d ay another tower and
hill-top with this fervour. An approximation, a drawing
together, the forging of an identity, so to say, out of evident
di:fferences as is revealed by a fine use of colour, was a constant
aim. In his catalogue Finberg wrote of sketch-book 28 1 in the
Turner Bequest: 'A number of these pages have been prepared
vvith smudges of red and black watercolour, the colour then
bei ng dabbed and rubbed, with the object apparently of pro­
ducing suggestions of figures, groups etc.' Maybe, but no figure
or group suggesti ons are to be seen, only the reconciliation of
the dense with the less dense. They resemble another common
 Turner 225

type of beginning that is diaphanous and equal throughout. For,

naturally, rather than a prime imposition of contrast, s ome
coloured beginnings pre-eminently possess, like lay-ins, the op­
posite or complementary value, that of the carver's elicitation
upon the stone's surface of a prevalent form attributed to the
block. Turner often used a rough blue or grey paper on which
his panoramic pencil drawings (even more than watercolouring)
suggest messages that have appeared from within a wall upon
its surf ace. An eloquent surface in this sense was integral to his
art and became increasingly an influence upon its content. Div­
orced from that bent, his flamboyant confrontations would
have lacked their union, the ease of interchange and coal­
escence, the issue of light, so often sunset, that floods .
In a region of the mind, as I have indicated, properties of fire
and water (scalding) are not at variance but united, the h ose of
the fireman with the fire he inflames and, indeed, initiates . 'All
his life,' wrote Kenneth Clark of Turner in passages to which I
am much indebted, 'he had been obsessed by the conjunction of
fire and water.' And : 'He loved the brilliance of steam, the dark
diagonal of smoke blowing out of a tall chimney and the sugges­
tion of hidden furnaces made visible at the mouth of a funnel.'
Earlier, in Landscape into Art, Clark had a heading : 'Fire in the
Flood', a quotation from Beowulf. 'Throughout the landscape of
fantasy,' he wrote, 'it remains the painter's most powerful
weapon, culminating in its glorious but extravagant use by
Turner.' I think he enlarged' upon fire in the flood far beyond this
context of Nature that was feared on every side in a dark and
insecure age; it was a fear that must always have existed every­
where for irrational reasons alone, since there are bound to be
fantasies of revengeful attacks issuing in kind from a scalded
mother. Turner, it seems to me, largely denied this fear, pursued
the attack but accepted the doom : he was possibly eager to
discover those fantasies 'acted out' by a happening that he could
represent as realism. In January r 792, when he was sixteen, he
soon visited the burnt-out Pantheon in Oxford Street. A feature
of his watercolour of the site next morning are icicles clinging
to the fa<;ade, frozen water from the hoses. (In late life he
attended to the processes of whaling - one instance is the boil-
226 Artists and Works of Art
ing of blubber while the boats are entangled by a flaw ice - and,
of course, to giant sea-monsters.) It is the first occasion of which
we know that Turner' s pencil, to use an expression of the time,
was employed upon smouldering disaster. He was on the s cene
when the Houses of Parliament were burning in 1 834 : he made
watercolour sketches and then two oil p aintings : the sketches
are among his great masterpieces. Flames enwrap the highways
of the sky and of the Thames. Vessels coaling by torchlight,
Keelm en Heaving in Coals by Nigh t, is another lurid canvas of
this period. When he returned to Venice, probably in 1 835, he
p ainted several sketches of rockets fired from ships during a
festa. A criticism of his Juliet and Nurse, executed on his
return, in which fireworks figure, was to the effect that he m ade
the night sky far too light. Another writer said that Juliet and
Nurse was nothing more than , a further conflagration of the
Houses of Parliament. Turner exhibited in 1 83 2 Nebu­
chadnezzar at the Mou th of the Fiery Furnace. 'Fire' or 'Heat'
and 'Blood' were words commonly used in contemporary
writing on him. It is surely unnecessary to remark, in res­
pect of fire and water, the many watery sunrises and bloody
sunsets or Rain, Steam and Speed and Fire a t Sea. Turner himself
wrote 'Fire and Blood' in the sky of a drawing that may be dated
1 806-8 (T.B. 1 0 1 ). The onrush of ivy, and other leafage in his best
architectural drawings are profoundly related with effects of
rock and water such as the wonderful watercolour of 1 795, Mel­
incourt Fall, where the ugbroken slab or wedge of water licks
the fractured rock like a flame. Soon after reaching Rome for
the first time in October 1 8 1 9, Turner hurried to Naples where
Ves uvius had become active some days before.
Allied with the one of fire there is often conveyed by his
work a sense of explosion, in the famous Snowstorm (exhibited
1 842), for instance, or even in the e arlier snowstorm of Hannibal
Crossing the Alps of 1 8 1 2 . One sees from afar an atmosphere of
paint and detonation, then one searches for the benighted
human beings who, when found, remark the processes of
meteorological might rather than of individuals who endure
.
them. On the other hand, Olympic vistas, c alm temples, survive
in our general impression of Turner's art: in view of a ceaseless
 Turner 227

lyrical bias it is a humane art. We learn from him that calamity

is asymmetrical.
Ruskin deplored Turner's lack of interest in the detail of
Gothic architecture (despite the numerous, astounding studies
of, say, Rauen Cathedral). A brooding attachment to the classi­
cal orders is strangely suggested by bawdy lines he wrote ero­
ticizing the Ionic. (It is not altogether surprising to discover
there a punning use of words that could reflect the infantile oral
fantasy of the vagina dentata.)
In connection with my mention of scalding attacks I think it
relevant to remark Turner's liberal use of yellows. Dido Build­
ing Carthage was originally thought too yellow. Turner himself
w rites to a friend in 1 82 6 : 'I must not say yellow, for I have
taken it all to my keeping this year, so they say.' And later that
year : 'Callcott is going to be married to an acquaintance of
mine when in Italy, a very agreeable Blue Stocking, so I must
wear the yellow stockings.' Rippingille reported from Rome a
mat about a retailer of English mustard who was coupled with
Turner: 'The one sold mustard, the other painted it.' 'A devil of a
lot of chrome' is how Scarlett Davis described to Ince the Burn­
ing of the House of Lords and Comm ons. (Van Gogh, a more
aggressive handler of everything fiery, and his passion for
yellow, are better known today.)
I find it fair to say that the compulsively unitary, forcing side
of Turner's art strengthened, indeed largely in spired, a further
linking by his late paintings of elements already long harmon­
ized through the delicacy of his touch, through his heightene�
sense of texture and colour relationship, a building, for in­
stance, and its foliage, the structure and its attenuations, what is
rough with what is smooth, the perpendicular with the trans­
verse by means of the ellipse. I h ave emphasized primitive and
aggressive compulsions in Turner's art, but I have wanted to
suggest that in admitting them, in giving due place to ferocity
and the consequent despair, his very powerful lyrical vein was
not impaired : throughout his ceuvre it was enriched : in many,
very many, supremely lyrical works, a linking, a coordination,
an integration, of different degrees of compulsion and different
tendencies of the mind were achieved. In the great last
228 Artists and Works of Art
period, not only is the world washed clean by light, but
humidity is sucked from water, the core of fire from flame,
leaving an iridescence through which we \Vitness an object's
ceremonious identity : whereupon space and light envelop them
and us, cement the world under the aegis of a boat at dawn
between C umaean headlands, or a yacht that gains the
coast.
Together with Turner's whirlpool of fire and water we experi­
ence beneficence in space. There abound calm scenes that
would be sombre or forlorn without the gold, without the agi­
tated pulse and delicacy in so light a key.
Beneficence is very widely scattered; encompasses from
afar.

Turner's accomplishment, so large, so various, easil y falsifies an

investigation whose author singles out this or that upon which
to base appreciation, as I have done after studying the several
thousand sketches in water or bodycolour, the countless pencil
drawings (British Museum) of the Turner Bequest and the near
three hundred oils (Tate Gallery).
There is abundant evidence, for instance, to show that Turner
could both record and improvise figures or groups in any atti­
tude and in a variety of styles. His sketch-books reveal that he
was attracted by crowded scenes and new forms of animation.
On first visiting Edinburgh he, most unusually, almost filled
a sketch-book with figures, largely the girls with giant shawls
and bare feet. It was much the same during his first visit to
Holland in 1 8 1 7 and to Switzerland in 1 80 2 : on the first page of
T.B. 78 there is a watercolour of two nude girls on a bed . The
watercolour he exhibited in 1 799, Inside the Chapter House of
Salisbury Ca thedra l, contains figures on the floor about a pillar,
youths and a girl , realized with very apt draughtmanship . If
brilliance in this genre be not uncommon, if in his watercolours
an adequacy for figures is the rule, it seems the more reasonable
to remark as most significant the wooden and childlike element
in the presentation of some of Turner's crowds especially,
though this quality is not shared by a later group of oil figure
compositions, such as Rem brandt's Daugh ter Reading a Lo ve-
 Turner 229

Letter (exhibited 1827) or Watteau Study and Lord Percy under

A ttainder ( 1 8 1 3) nor by an earlier history or myth painting such
as The Garden of Hesperides ( 1 806) or the Macon of 1803. Nor is
it shared by his rapid figure sketches, though they fall short of a
corresponding calligraphy for landscape and architectural jot­
ting, of sublime notations too for crowded shipping with
masts (e.g. T.B. 206 & 2 2 6). On the other hand, feminine fashion
that emphasized an answering slope of bare shoulders and
the pin of the head, fired Turner's droll, unflinching portraits .
Even though earlier landscape and genre masters had been
content to offer no more than an abrupt consort of lay figures,
it is surely interesting that one of the most facile, as well
as the most imaginative, of artists whose forte was the render­
ing of fluidity (apparent even in these portraits), should, in the
course of development, have sometimes populated the seas and
the declivities of vast canvases with variegated dolls . I there£ore
offered in the earlier part of this essay psychological inter­
pretations that so far from increasing the contrast, sought to
unify a fluidity in handling Nature with part-object, doll- or
Punch-like conceptions, a viewpoint that might allo\V us to dis­
cern the aspect of Turner's genius wherein an evident com­
pulsive element, close, at times, to the childlike, was not ousted
by his manifold abi lities nor by an extremely professional
savoir faire. He found a way to employ the whole of himself,
the immature as well as the mature, and to fit them together.
First he was the complete servant of the art taught to him, the
art and culture of his con tern poraries and predecessors. (As late
as 182 1 Turner was bidding at a sale for sketch-books, with
notes on Old Masters, by Reynolds.) Meanwhile and thereafter,
in the interests of wider coordination, he continued to amplify
the resources of his own nature, as of Nature outside, for an
aesthetic purpose.
I contrasted very cursorily what appears in Turner's case an
ideal evolution, with the dilemma of the art student today. It
was said of Turner's later exhibi ted oils that it had no bearing
on an impression of soap-suds or poached eggs that the title of a
painting read 'Whalers' or 'Venice' : the scene was unre­
cognizable, the picture ever the same. But 'pictures of nothing
2 30 Artists and Works of Art
and very like' was H azlitt's famous criticism as early as 1 8 1 6 . It
could be said to have a witty pertinence to a few 'extreme'
canvases that Turner would be painting some twenty or t hirty
years later though not i n one instance of work carried through
are we i n doubt as to the type of subject. Hazlitt's stricture on
the exhibited paintings of 1816 a n d before can be com­
prehended only i n the historical setting.
Even in a very late 'all-over' painting - others, the water­
colour exemplars, had dared i t only on a small scale - that a t
first sight seems abstract, since i t i s featureless i n regard to verti­
cal shapes, i n the last seascapes, for instance, at the Tate, we
acknowledge almost i mmediately that here is a record, an i n­
tense record, of an outward as well as a n inward scene : we are
aware that i n virtue of familiari ty, detail h as been undone by a
virtuoso performer who, conscious of power and i nformation,
has no fear of too great a freedom that might result in an over­
riding of the obj ect and cause the artist to construct shapes, to
use colours, dictated solely by his design. Turner's reverence for
the objects he studied was i ntact. He employed freedom to
realize movement, depth and i nteraction, without m ajor re­
course to the arbitrary. H e has seemed to relax where, i n reality,
he has broken down or eschewed trite constructions i n himself
as in the object after long apprenti ceship and ceaseless
observation.
According to H azlitt, Turner was more concerned with
mediums - the light - i n which things appear than with the
localized aspect of those things themselves . He wrote : 'The
artist (Turner) delights to go back to the first chaos of the
world.' These words suggest not only subsequent canvases such
as Morning after the Deluge (exhibited 1 843), but also the thun­
derous calm implicit i n an unravelled golden mist that charac­
terizes many earlier classical subjects and Crossing the Broo�
(exhibited 1 8 1 5) . I would prefer to say that i nspired with tra­
ditional poetic feeling, he was rehearsing the chief relationships
of the psyche to i ts objects, particularly an enveloping relation­
s hip associated with the breast. In the l ate or extreme 'all-over'
oil p ai ntings, liquid and light-toned, we sense more easily what
might be called a breathing or palpitation of the sky, water and
 Turner 23 1

land: touches of contrasting colour, scattered masses, seem to

furnish a source for the nurture of this ambience, a treatment
evident i n some drawings and sketches of all periods except the
first, from which - and from the best of the earlier English
watercolour school - these oils eventually derive. A light, pul­
s ating, ambience where buildings are sometimes treated almost
as clouds (The Piazzetta: Venice) makes possible the accomplish­
ment within the key 1of a startling foreground relief, or of
masses lying back, in the Venetian Ball p aintings, for i nstance,
or in Norham Castle: Sunrise, the most beautiful.
Once more, the late Turner exists i n some aspects of the
earlier work. For instance, Kilgarran Castle, exhibited at the
Royal Academy i n 1 799, projects, under the influence of Wilson,
flanking hill-clumps and a towering yet misty or enveloping dis­
tance. Clumps and iridescent clefts become an unavoidable
j argon; they provide the principle of most of the early sea- and
subsequent estuary-pieces; they are allegories for feminine form
and function, but often a base as well for the element of
counterpoint, for a union of directions and oppositions, for the
fusion of The Sun Rising through Vapour, if I may instance the
title, in addition to the famous painting itself. By means of low
sun or moon i n low sky, Turner has furnished in his studies an
expanded world, soft, vaporous yet certain, not once but a hun­
dred times.
I must enlarge upon clefts and clumps before referring to the
counterpoint. If these be allegories of feminine form and func­
tion as a whole, yet the nuzzling, the enveloping, the part-obj ect
symbolism, is their stronger facet, so often dramatized in rep­
resentations of vast space, by Turner's own small figure also, in
top-hat and tail-coat (vide the Parrott portrait) with nose almost
pressing it as he works a considerable canvas at the Academy or
British Institution, without stepping back. Though it is written
by an artist who was usually hostile and malevolent about
Turner, some of the account, confirmed in the ;main elsewhere,
is worth remark of Turner and his Burning of the House of
Lords and Comm ons on a varnishing day, 1 835, at the British
Institution. 'He was there at work,' wrote E. V. Rippingille in a
reminiscence of Callcott (Art journal 1 860),
232 Ar tis ts and vVorks of A rt
before I came, having set to work at the earliest hour allowed.
Indeed it was quite necessar y to make the best of his time, as the
pi cture when sent in was a inere dab of several colours, and 'without
form and void' (Hazlitt), like chaos before the creation . . .

Etty was \VOrking at his side (on his pi cture The Lu te

Player).

Little Etty stepped back every now and then to look at the effect
of his picture, lol l i ng his head on one side and half-closing his eyes,
and sometimes spea king to someone near him, after the approved
manner of painters : but not so Turner; for the three hours I was
there - and I understood it had been the sa me since he began in the
morn ing - he never ceased to work, or even once looked or turned
from the wall on which his pictu re hung. All lookers-on were am used
by the figure Turner exhibited in himself, and the process he was
pursuing \Vith his picture . . . . Lea ning forward and sideways o ver to
the right, the left-hand metal button of his blue coat rose six inches
higher than the right, and his hea d buried in his shoulder£ and held
down, presented an aspect curious to all beholders . . . . Presently the
work was finished: Turner gathered up his tools together, put them
into and shut up the box, a nd then, with his fa ce still turned to the
wall, and at the same distance fron1 it, went sidling off, without
speaking a word to anybody.

We can take it that in the act of painting, even his vast dis­
tances were pressed up against the visionary eye like the breast
upon the mouth : at the same time it was he who fed the infant
picture . In these embracing con ceptions, no wonder that figures
gl ue themselves on banks and bases, variegated figures, sal mon­
like, du lly flashing films of colour, perhaps floating beneath a
cloud-like architecture, perhaps pressed to the ground like the
catch in baskets upon a q u ay, glistening at dawn. Ruskin re­
marked on the accum ulations of bri c-a-brac in Turneri an fore­
grounds - I would incl ude bodies and jetsam in seas, or on an
earth so flattened i n some late canvases as to suggest a pavement
of ri ppled water - and referred them to the grand confusion of
Covent Garden where Turner lived as a child. An equation per­
sists, as is well known, betvveen nipple and p hallus . The above
des cription of Turner at work i n 1 83 5 at the British Institution
may recall the couplet twice used i n his incomprehensible
 Turner 233
verses entitled The Origin of Vermilion or the Loves of Painting
and Music:
As snails trail o 'er the morning dew
He thus the line of beauty drew.

He sought daring expedients for his sense of fitness : in the

case of persons especially, I repeat, they were based on part­
o bject m odels. The companions, t he siblings, he proj ected, are
often l ike shoals; as mere members, as mouths perhaps, t hey
m ay flit about the declivities and rises of an encompassing
breast, m uch of it out of reach as p al ace, torrent, ocean, moun­
tains or m urderous sky.
No wonder Turner critici zed Poussin's Deluge in the Louvre
for lack of 'current and ebullition' in the water, though he was
m uch influenced by Poussin at that time ( 1 802). Ruskin wrote
as follows for the firs t volume of Modern Painters about The
Slave Ship :
The whole surface of the sea is divided into two ridges of enor­
mous swell, not high, not local, but a lo\v broad heaving of the
whole ocean, like the lifting of its bosom by deep-drawn breath after
the torture of the storm.
These are mounds, c lumps, of terror and benignity; within
one of the shapes, a pyramid of pearly monsters h as been con­
founded w ith the black, disappearing bodies . The pyramid of
Fire a t Sea, h uge, m assive, is thrown upwards against a mound
of cloud. Swart, irregular pyramids characterize the famous
Sno wstorm whose ship is l ike a broken caterpill ar, whereas t he
engulfed m ariners of Fire a t Sea are near to h aving become, as if
protectively, globular, saffron-coloured fish . A subject of
Turner's attention, particularly in the neighbourhood of Ply­
mouth during r8r r, as numerous drawings and two canvases at
Petworth testify, lay with the tall curving ribs of naval hulks,
rui ned globes of timber, derelict h u l ls t hat rode upon the Tamar.
The Temeraire would later achieve amid sunset fires superb
apotheosis for h ulks ; unruined, full of distance from the fun­
nelled infant steamboat by which it is t ugged, to which i t is
closely attac hed.
It would be tedio us to enumerate the rec urrence of a fluidity
23 4 Artists and Works of Art
that possesses clumps, mounds, pyramids and clefts, thou �h I
am fascinated by this theme, especially in p aintings that Turner
showed at his last Aca demy of 1 850, Visit to the Tom b and
Departure of the Trojan Fleet, among his ultimate Punic p aint­
ings. I must remark the extraordinary volume of such un­
moored shapes, since there was earlier mention of poorness of
relief in another context. H ad he been p rimarily a figure
painter - in this matter it is no contradiction to i magine so -
Turner would have attained poignant compositions in terms of
that theme: the so-called Costum e Piece at the Tate suggests
it.
To summarize Turner's clump or mound conception would
be, I think, to isolate a parting of the ways, a rustling or seething
withdrawal as in the biblical passage of the Red Sea : to many
mythological scenes an opalescent, warm passage is common
through the centre, and on one side m aybe, the silent arm of a
tall pine.
It remains to speak of the tension, the counterpoint, the
bringing together of storm with sun, disaster with beauty, mel­
ancholy with protected e ase in m any, m any, p arkland expanses,
and, in general, the good with the bad. Formal contrivances that
suggest their union are not of course themselves symbolic in the
immediate conscious sense of the rainbow, for instance, of the
Wreck Buoy. More significant, however, even here (as deep-laid
symbol), the high, lit, sail-tops, ghostly against a sky that falls in
curtains of rain, cleave to the rainbow's half-circle triangularly
in contrast with foreground water, wastes rich in light flanked
by darker mounds of sea, that topple over towards the spectator
yet seem at the back to climb up to the boats and to the falling
sky. The meeting of these movements occurs near the centre of
the canvas from where one h as the sense of extracting the
h e art of so vertiginous, so desert, yet so various a scene, in
terms of the red-rose j ib on the nearer sailing boat: at either side
verticals incline outwards and thereby stress that centre.
Awareness of a centre in great space will favour a rencontre of
contrary factors in whatever sense. Turner was no stranger to
the manipulation and perhaps even to the confusion of contrary
factors. I c annot help remarking, as shown to me b y
 Turner 235

B. A. R. Carter, that two demonstration sheets, illustrating a tri­

angle fitted into a circle, that he used for his Perspective lec­
tures, are each headed 'Circle (or circles) within a Triangle'.
A motif more constant in the work of Turner even than the
one of clumps with their clefts, is the rhythmic use of a re­
buttal, very commonly of waves blown back as they break on a
lee shore, apparent already in early sea-pieces and in mountain
brooks whose drums of shallow water rolling over boulders pro­
vide the effect of a reversing power, a break. He often represents
the force of natural agency by demonstrating that it is engaged,
sometimes thwarted by another. The Falls of Terni drop as one
body, then are broken, buffeted. A stoic pathos, inherent in the
beauty, sustains those great last light canvases wherein hardly a
boat interrupts the grappling of sea with sky, wherein naked
oppositions and their reconciliation supply overall bareness to
the opulence of the effect. Yet even in narrow paintings of flat
scenes, Chichester Canal or Petworth Park with Tillington
Church in the Distance (sketches at the Tate for the Petworth
landscapes), at the meeting of ground and sky there is the effect
of a scooped-out pomegranate or apricot common to the pic­
tures of Petworth interiors, a benign application of the whirl­
wind principle, at the picture's centre, at the centre of interest.
(The theme is at least as old as exquisite studies for The Sun
Rising through Vapour.) Maybe a low sun is there to help us
seize upon the otherwise faintly indicated fruit, both soft and
fierce, romantic in promise as in muted danger and elusive dis­
tance. Amid the embraces of hugeness, we have seen that figura­
tion, men more than cattle, are so.metimes a startling variant,
like fossil traces that vivify a rock. The infant's experiences have
been similarly engraved by him upon the sudden breast.
Clasping natural immensity, Turner lent a hard-won grandeur
to the distance, so irregularly spanned by each of us, between
self-destruction and forgetful, infantile love.
[from Painting and the Inner World, 1963, pp. 50-78]
2 4-

Cezanne

We picture him, then, on his way to his homeland which was

his work, part of his work as surely as if he were a farmer. This
was the way of his excitement. It could be called an obsession;
in which case we would have to adapt his words about Monet
and exclaim : but what an obsession. He, Cezanne - and we
consider only his southern landscapes - was partner to the Pro­
ven<;al countryside. He sought to 'realize' his 'sensation', as he
called it, in painting after nature : he sought tirelessly, starting
at dawn, for the essential lie of the land. This meant in his case
an enormous expenditure of a powerful inner fire, all ferocity,
all love : for these, as is the way of life, he found an object; as is
the way of art, a useless object, an epitome of the life-process.
He transmuted his strength, pushed it further away from him­
self than has any other artist, into a living-dead thing, into a
Cezanne-become-a-landscape. For, remember, it was his 'sen­
sation', no mere semblance of the countryside. He. cut the cord
with his fancy; the picture substituted his considerable ferocity
and his remarkable love in terms of a grandiose yet razor-fine
logic imputed to the outside world. His was the most direct
homage ever paid to the infinite coherence of the visual world.
He strove to find for his canvas neither a tendency nor an
echo of a mood, a waxing nor a waning; he strove for his senses
to reveal, for his mind to re-create, a quintessential structure.
And so he hurried away from all the incidental music of things.
Yet Cezanne's painting cannot be called a conceptual art, for it
is with the extreme complication of actual, even momentary,
appearance that he philosophizes. The observational truth of
light, space, colour, tone and mass in their subtlest, no less than
in their generalized, modes, are the sole materials of his struc­
ture. The otherness of the outside world is affirmed, not miti­
gated, by the intrusion of this artist's organizing mind. His art
needed a constant exercise in observation, for each new canvas
 Cezanne 23 7

a forcible detachment from the preconceived; endless thought,

endless vigilance for every inch of the picture space. There was
discouragement, timidity, self-distrust. But, for once, it is not
agonies of mind that point the moral. Cezanne wrestled alone
with the Provenc;al landscape, and his vision, which did harm
to no one, yet sums all h uman activity.
And surely we may learn here of further ways to peace of
mind. If when the senses are fully employed a contemplative
mood supervenes, searching for interconnection, for a form, for
a dominant note in this other, laid-out world beyond the body,
we realize that in these terms of outside things - and we must
not allow them to lean to us : they must preserve a perfect
otherness - deep elements of all experience are observed and
enjoyed. There is a submission to the factors of existence. Thus
does a man breathe in a fresh morning. All men exercise an
imaginative control, an imaginative limitation over their en­
vironment, enclosing as best they may a small world in accord
with the needs of satisfying desire. But an unabashed aesthetic
control (which so many thus rule out by enforcing conditional
limitations) does h arm to no one, depends for its sense of omni­
potence upon no rationalization of prej udice, projects fantasy
as fantasy, aggressive and loving, attaches a most noble im­
aginative logic to sensation, and, by affording so deep a sense of
fitness, may allow the mind, if neurosis * be absent, to be free
for impartial thinking at every point of reality.
May it come to that, if leisure for all will be unlimited: after
an era of supreme vulgarity will have given way to a deep re­
liance upon more vivid uses of the mind and senses : when
works of art, epitomes of all contemplation since they derive
from contemplation of the face of concrete things, will be
valued at a greater worth.

* Cezanne is reported by Gasquet to have said: 'L'Art console de

vivre.' The practice of art is, of course, very often, perhaps always to
some degree, a personal flight from life, possibly the most successful
of all such flights. It is unnecessary for me to enlarge upon this fact
which I fully recognize. But it is incumbent on me, therefore, to
show that, despite this fact, the practice of art is more widely rooted
in life.
238 Artis ts and W arks of Art

Cezanne withdrew from the concourse, withdrew very

largely from Paris after 1 886, withdrew from his friends par­
ticularly in his last twenty years. Perhaps the concourse in
more millions will come to him. He discovered a poetry that is
without afterthought.
'I have nothing to hide in art,' * writes Cezanne to Charles
Camoin in 1903 : and, 'What shall I wish you : good studies made
after nature, that is the best thing.' Two years later to Lo uis
Leydet:
To succeed in formulating sufficiently the sensations we experi­
ence on contact with this beautiful nature - man, woman, still-life -
and that circumstan ces should be favourable to you, that is what I
must wish to all sympathizers of art.

Two months before he died in October 1 906 Cezanne wrote in a

letter to his son :
am sorry that I am so old in view of my colour sensations . . It
I . .

is unfortunate that I cannot make several specimens of my ideas and

sensations; long live the Goncourt, Pissarro and all those who have
the love of colour, representative of light and air.

A month later:
Finally I must tell you that as a painter I am becoming more clear­
sighted in front of nature, but that with me the realization of my
sensations is always very difficult. I cannot attain the intensity that
is unfolded before my senses. I have not the magnificent richness of
colour that animates nature. Here on the edge of the river, the motifs
are very plentiful, the same subject seen from different angles gives ·a
subject for study of the highest interest and so vari ed that I think I
could be occupied for months without changing my place, simply
bending a little more to the right or left.
In the same month to Emile Bernard : 'I am always study­
ing after nature and it seems to me that I am progressing slowly.
I should like to have you near me for the solitude weighs rather
heavily on me. But I am old and ill, and I have sworn to myself
to die painting' : as he did less than a month later.
* Except where otherwise stated, the quotations from Cezanne's
letters are from the translations by Margaret Kay, edited by John
Rewald (Paul Cezanne. Letters, Bruno Cassirer, 1941).
 Cezanne 239
In Cezanne' s last letters, particularly in the letters to his son,
the reader is struck by the constant j uxtaposition of small re­
quests and observations on nature or on painting. We realize
that the lie of the land obsessed him, that he worked out his life
there : not only in the manufacture of paintings but in front of
the landscape or still-life, in his sensation before the object. But
to estimate his achievement one must consider what he, for the
first time in landscape or still-life painting, resisted in the object
once he had settled to painting it: for instance, one must think
of the low reminiscent murmur of wind among trees, along
hedges; of slow thought among mounting land; of the passage
of water; of soul-searching or else lyric mornings, of wrapping
clouds : in e:ffect, of the moods and evocations that we all have
from nature to some degree, Cezanne by no means least. It has
been said he painted portraits and landscapes as if they were
still-lifes : indeed, he could resist as far as possible the seasons.
Where are the voices of the fountains of Aix or the roistering
yet ghostly Mistral blowing out of a blue sky; where the shut­
tered liquid peace of a calm Provenc;al afternoon? Neither in
what we know of Cezanne's mature aims nor in the treatment
of his subjects do we find any desire to reflect discursive mess­
ages from nature. And yet to visit Aix is at once to recall his
pictu!es, to view them as an astonishing, faithful, mirror of that
countryside, not only of the lie of the land but of the feel of the
air, the character, the 'life'. It will then be no surprise to dis­
cover that Cezanne's youthful letters to Zola reveal an ado­
lescent and a young man of extreme romantic temperament, of
fervent poetry, whose roaming and bathing in his native land­
scape had become the centre of imaginative life. This landscape
remained there, at the centre of his life. It is more true to say
that his portraits and still-lifes are Provenc;al landscapes; while
the many canvases of male bathers, particularly of the early
middle period, as well as from the Louvre, from Rubens, from
the Venetians, from 'Poussin after nature', derive from the
passionate aquatic displays and the first freedom of the three
inseparable youths Cezanne, Zola and Baille.
Although we emphasize Cezanne's sense of structure , we
must, then, also emphasize how close was his impact with
240 Artists and Warks of Art
nature; that a t first it was a stark, even primitive, romantic
onset in relation to his subjects, hinged to a Baroque com­
plication, a Baroque posturing. His primitive simplicity, after
emulating the counterpoint of Baroque design, subdued this ele­
ment, especially in the early middle period, to the ends of a
rectilinear grandeur that informs every inch of a painting's sur­
fa ce. Under the tutelage of the Old Masters whom he studied,
copied and emulated all his life, particularly the Venetians,
Rubens and Poussin, under the influence of Pissarro, under the
in fluence of the deeper meaning of his native southern prov­
ince, his love of Virgil and the classics, even perhaps of his own
Italian ancestry, a roma ntic onset than which none more wild or
savage or honest in primitive directness (yet from the first
always subtle in counter-balance) had yet appeared in visual art,
was miraculously enlarged with a majestic consensus of calm
and even factual sensation ; so that in spite of his life-long de­
votion to the art of Dela croix and of his denigration of Ingres,
Cezanne's work stands to us as one of the greatest achievements
of classic art; at any rate in one sense - a nd that perhaps the
most dyn amic - of the word classic. When we attempt to
clarify the ultimate intention, Van Gogh, for instance, is found
to stand at the opposite pole.
Classicism in the sense of a truly Mediterranean art, while
keeping the broad grasp and the dignity associated with the
wider use of the word, is 'close to nature', far closer than is a
great deal of romantic art \Vhi ch treats of nature as a raw pro­
jection of emotional states, of the inside man. This classical art
springs from a precise love and a passionate identification with
what is other, insisting upon an order there, strong, enduring
and final as being an o th er thing, untainted by the overt gesture,
without the summary treatment, without the arriere pensee
of 'thinking makes it so' .
How then did this classicist who insisted so fiercely upon the
otherness of the spatial world behave if he opened his heart
when out for a walk? Gasquet's account of the lonely ageing
artist whom he so passionately admired - such admiration had
taken the shy and rejected Cezanne entirely by surprise - is
probably a broad effect : even so, it is the text to which we feel
 Cezanne 24 1

entitled. 'He drank in the countryside with delighted eyes,' wrote

Gasquet; the countryside that he studied every day.
The first pale leaves moved him deeply. Everything touched him.
He would stop to look at the white road or to watch a cloud float by
overhead. He picked up a handful of moist earth and squeezed it to
bring it closer to him, to mix it more intimately with his own re­
invigorated blood. H e drank from the shallow brooks.
Earlier in this account of a walk, Gasquet wrote :
He regretted that I was not a painter. The countryside thrilled us.
He showed me, and explained to me at length, the beauty of all his
conceptions of poetry and art. My enthusiasm refreshed him. All that
I brought him was a breath of youth, a n ew faith that made him
young again.*

It is easy to see that Cezanne was recapturing the original sense

of those diurnal rushes at the landscape, with the youths Zola
and Baille, which had so largely determined the channel of his
life. Let the reader at once juxtapose an image of his painting
where he translated this tender and ferocious pagan impetus into
voluminous form. Nothing more conceptual as well as nothing
less constructive seemed worthy to him.
Cezanne clung closely to nature. It is not said with the im­
plication so familiar in art criticism today that at this one point
the arch-revolutionary could not free himself, that here by a
last divorce lay the best chance for his successors. It is said with
the opposite implication . The validity of his abstraction, of his
distortion, even, depended initially and continuously upon his
emotional yet slow, painfully slow, thoughtful, consideration of
.
mere app earance qua mere appearance. A sudden or conceptual
management of appearances was entirely alien to him. Vollard,
in describing the r 1 5 sittings he gave Cezanne for his portrait
w hich was left unfinished, remarks on the great proportion of
the time spent by the painter in looking at the model. True, he
* cf. Cezann e by Joachim Gasquet (Bernheim-Jeune, 192 1). This
passage is quoted by Gerstle Ma ck, whose translation I use, in Paul
Cezann e (Cape, 1 935). Gasquet's reconstructions of conversations
with Cezanne are the source of many of the remarks attributed to
him which do not come from the letters.
242 Artists and W arks of Art
went on with the portrait without the sitter b ut only, it become s
obvious, when he felt able to carry in his head a vast con­
catenation of appearance relationships . But not one touch
would he put on except in reference to the whole, that is to s ay,
in reference to his vision of what he wanted to s ubtilize as well
as to abstract and emphasize in the whole. This construction, as
one might call it, was a simplification of what the artist deemed
to be the essential appearance, rather than an image s ubstituted
for a variety of appearances, which is the way of conceptual a rt.
It has been possible for s ubsequent p ainters, while preserving
something of Cezanne's classicism, to cut out the long agony,
indeed, to impose a summary concept or image upon the object.
Such achievement, though s ometimes it would appear closely
related to Cezanne, is in m any w ays at the a ntipodes . A s uper­
i mposed pattern of the object, though it rely upon less dis­
tortion than was employed by Cezanne in formulating his p lan,
may still bear no resemblance to his respectful use of an object.
No artist looked harder and longer at the model. The o nly
'truth' he would recognize in his scheme was a concatenation of
relations that corresponded with the· i nfinite pictorial elements
of a n a ctual appearance. He was, of c ourse, by no means a slave
to the model : but that is not to say that in his search for the
appearance behind the appearance he was prepared to simplify
a form, unless it be to elaborate contingent forms or con­
tingent spaces .
Conceptual art of all degrees h as its great masters : but it is
i mp ossible to bring Cezann e within this fold. Indeed, he took no
interest in primitive or archaic or form alized art; which is re­
markable to the student who is aware that in his p osing of
figures, for i nstance, there was often an i nsistence upon a
simple, primitive and even n a1ve attack which was a part of
his great strength that he never forsook, a p rere quisite · of the
s ubtilization and the synthesis he p erformed. Here, first of all,
he was most original : i n view of m any of his successors, he
would appear yet more original in not being contented with it;
for, his subtilization and complication in no way mitigate or
detract from this firs t simp le onset: they i ndicate not a re­
traction but an enforcement.
 Cezanne 243
He abominated in painting the unbroken surface whether in
the earlier masters or in the paintings of Gauguin who at one
time professed himself Cezanne's disciple. Cezanne would have
nothing of it and Bernard says Cezanne 'spoke very harshly
about Gauguin whose influence he considered disastrous' . When
Bernard protested mildly that 'Gauguin admired your painting
very much and imitated you a great deal', Cezanne replied furi­
ously: 'Well, he never understood me : I have never desired and
I shall never accept the absence of modelling or of gradation :
it's nonsense.' *
If we remember Cezanne's omnipotent, almost fauviste,
flourish in his early bohemian days, t if we consider what he
'worked through', it is easy to understand his revulsion from
Gauguin and from the use the post-Impressionists made of his
achievement, whose dismemberment he would naturally regard
as disastrous. Perhaps the later letters, with their emphasis upon
studying after nature, reflect this same revulsion. Nevertheless,
if we wish to learn more fully from Cezanne than have many of
his notable successors, it may at least help us if we turn to these
last letters,+ most of them to young admirers, in which he
expresses the sum of his artistic experience: and we shall find
that the emphasis is in fact by no means where the Cubists
chose to find it.
Thus, in May 1904, he wrote to the young painter Emile Ber-
nard:
I go ahead very slowly, a s n ature appears very complex to me and
incessant effort is required. One must look at the model carefully and
feel very exactly, and then express oneself with distinction and
power . . .
. . . The artist should scorn any opinion that i s not based on an
intelligent observation of character. He should avoid the literary
spirit, which so often leads the painter astray from his real mission,

* Mack, op. cit., p. 307.

t At several points I find I have closely followed Roger Fry in his
Cezanne. A Stu dy of his Developmen t (Hogarth Press, 1 932.) It con­
tains among other virtues an unrivalled critique of some of the paint­
ings themselves.
:j: Now ava ilable in one volume in English. Rewald, op. cit.
2 44 Artists and Works of Art
the concrete study of nature - and causes him to lose himself far too
long a time among intangible speculations .
. . . The Louvre is a good book to consult, but it should be only as
an intermediary. The true and immense study to be undertaken is
the diversity of the spectacle of nature.*

It was a wonderful balance Cezanne held between what he

called 'intangible speculations' and the acceptance of nature as
most complex, with a complexity requiring a continuous obser­
vational effort. The letter which has these phrases succeeds the
famous one written to Bernard a month earlier in which he
said: 'May I repeat what I told you here : treat nature by the
cylinder, the sphere, the cone'; those words which, rather para­
doxically, became the text of Cubis m. But putting the two texts
side by side we more nearly glimpse his whole achievement,
especially if we add a sentence from one of the last letters to his
son : 'I felt well there yesterday; I started a watercolour in the
style of those I did at Fontainebleau, it seems more harmonious
to me, it is all a question of getting as much affinity as possible.'
Cezanne did not baulk the extreme complexity of nature, a far
greater complexity than the Old Masters allowed; he learned to
organize it and in so doing to 'obtain as much affinity as pos­
sible'. This last phrase elucidates the character of a modem
classicism, t how it is possible to modulate - Cezanne's own
term - in a way more contemplative than is the one of the
romantic, often slap-dash, sometimes successfully slap-dash, ap­
proach, how it is possible to modulate into pictorial terms the
great variety of sensation from the object.
[from Inside Ou t, 1 947, pp . 53-62 ]
* Mack, op. cit. His is the more literal and the better translation.
For the text of the letters to Emile Bernard see his 'Sou venirs sur Paul
Cezanne' in Mercure de France, Sept.-Oct. 1 907, Vol. 69.
t An infinitude of creation, particularly in the matter of the
kind of form that arises from acuity of colour sense, remains to us in
'painting after nature'. cf. Colour an d Form (Faber, 1937).
2S

Cezanne ' s Les B aign euses, and Two Other

Pictures in the National Gallery

At first sight these figures could suggest a quorum of naked

tramps camped on top of railway carriages as the landscape
roars by from left to right; except, of course, that studied, monu­
mental, they altogether refuse the character of silhouettes [Plate
15]. They absorb, and in absorbing rule, the environment.
Beyond the long seal-like woman who regards the depths of the
background, the standing, studious, twin-like girls with backs to
us lean across towards the trees and clouds as if to be those
upright trees. All the same the stretching across the picture
plane is more intense, the stretching of these governing bodies
that now seem poised on the easy rack of a level moving stair­
case . But movement to the left is blocked by the strj ding figures
on that side, and since movement is braked at the other end as
well it is as if shunted trucks were held between two engines.
The tall, contemplative figure on the further bank remembers
for us the stretching movement that, in effect, has crammed the
centre where the two groups of bathers meet. Rich with dy­
namic suggestions, the movements coalesce into a momentary
composure so that even within the crowd there appears to be
airiness and space. It is now that we contemplate the broad
back, laid out like a map, of the sitting woman with black hair
on the left. Only in art, in an image, in a concrete realization of
emotional bents, such powers with their reconciliation are
found perfected.
Another image comes to us in terms of the heads of hair of
walnut and stained oak. It speaks to us of the strength of the
trees in those women and of the tawny arena on which the
bodies lie and, by contrast, it includes the circumambient blue,
the knife-like blue day that these nudes have crowded to in­
habit. They feed on the blue, on the distance at which the seal­
woman exclaims. The close, clumsy yet heroic flesh sips the
sky. These nudes are blue-consuming objects and bl ue is the
246 Artists and Works of Art
only colour almost entirely absent from all the varieties of
nourishment. The dissociation invites us to examine them more
for their sculptural value, to grasp the monumentality not only
of the group but of the knife-sharp, simplified faces without
mouths, the alternations between astounding bulk and sum­
mary, distorted sharpness that both underwrite the com­
positional movements and, from a faceted flatness, heighten the
picture plane. The sky too is faceted, spread thick like butter.
The distorted angularity of many shoulders, the insistence
upon angle and strength of line, oppose with ferocity a facile
n1ingling of these bodies, in order to rejoin them sharply; with
the result that our apprehension of the bulky, answering V
shapes is a startled apprehension, as if experienced by means of
the extreme flare of a forked lightning flash . Coupled with the
contrasting monumentality, this sharpness persists in the im­
pression ho-vvever long we gaze. Another reconciliation is be­
tween the sheet-lightning of the en wrapping towels and the slow
swathes of blue daylight that dwell on ochre-tinted flesh and
ochre hair and the ochreous strand.
For me the blue embrace is the final impression, withstanding
a hurricane-like flattening of the light-toned foliage and a sug­

gestion in the shape of the right-hand bathers' group of a petal­

shaped volcanic orifice erupting into a steamy cloud beyond.
But the group as a whole does not appear settled or rooted to
the ground. The figures almost slide on it. We sense the pos­
sibility of fresh forms burrowing up from the ground's lightness
to meet the blue embrace. This sense of lightness and fruit­
fulness balances yet enhances both monumentality and angu­
larity.
The left-hand group is pyramidal; incline of the tree-trunks is
an important element of the design, in the arrest and, on the
right, in the reversal of movement. But especially in regard to so
great and complex a picture I a m the more unwilling to speak in
the plainer functional terms of composition and design. I prefer
to i nsist that the formal elements not only enrich but enlarge
the subject-matter. The fact that you do not agree with every
image that I have associated with this picture does not in­
validate my point. The emotive arrangements carry a number
 C ezanne' s Les Baigneuses 247
of such interpretations. Form is the container for a sum of
meanings while it is from a concatenation of meanings that
form is constructed, meanings that have been translated into
terms of spatial significance. Without appreciation of spatial
value, of empathy with bodies in space, there can be no u nder­
standing of the emotive images that form conveys. I believe that
there is a nexus of meaning that we all recognize however
various our explanations; it is composed from experiences
otherwise divergent. The experiences will be l argely individual
but the power of an integrated communion between trends in
concrete or corporeal terms is palp able. Let us agree that the
material for creating this nexus is drawn from the artist's ex­
periences and intentions, particularly, of course, his aim in
regard to art. There are also broader limitations upon the real­
ization of form without which we have no licence to conceive
of art, matters of style, of the moment in the history of art and
of the culture it mirrors, the many-sided limitations that are the
concern of art history. But here, too, proper understanding
depends upon an acceptance that cultural aim has been trans­
lated by all art, even sometimes without the help of icon­
ography, into the concrete terms of the senses and within the
range of our long memory for sensory experiences wherein
traces of the first and primary objects are preserved. One more
word about The Bathers. Some of the faces p articularly are con­
ceived as a series of ledges or blocks, wooden, primitive, strong.
The tendency exists throughout Cezanne's development from
the seventies. I believe this aspect of his work, especially in the
last compositions of Bathers, is the first of his influences upon
the evolution of Cubism. This same aspect of his influence is far
more obvious upon Les Dem oiselles D'A vignon and upon all
those works that were so soon to forge the e asiest of links with
Negro sculpture. I c annot help speculating in the most far­
fetched manner whether one day it will be possible to claim for
The Bathers that it is among the first and perhaps the greatest
works of a deeply founded cosmopolitan art which was to pre­
figure the eventual evolution of a multi-racial society. That
would indeed be to specify a very pregnant image implicit in
form, the compulsions of which in the Industrial A ge had
248 Artists and Works o f .A.rt
substantiated out of the inner life a compulsion even of a
history to be.
No manifestation, particularly psychological m.anifestation,
no behaviour, no ritual, is as foreign as it v1as . We found a new
culture from remnants that remain of our own and possibly
from what we have understood of other cultures past and pre­
sent. If one had to choose to say only one thing about modern
art, it would have to be in relation to this, it seems to me, not as
a matter of ideas, of rationalizations, but as avid necessity in
regard to an externalization of the inner life, deeply qualified, as
for an art activity it must be, by the social setting, by the look,
by the quality of the external world on which the social setting
has been projected.
The controlled tenderness of Bellini's Christian piety, as seen
in The D ead Christ su pported by A ngels (National Gallery), em­
braces an illumined land. That view of the body had come down
to him from Attic Greece. Pentelic sanity confronts muted elo­
quence. The stillness of the candid dead torso dignifies life with­
out separating it from grief. Dead, the body of Christ connects
with the living who take into their minds the image of Christ as
an ideal body, it is suggested here, as a chest in part, smooth,
sloping, elephantine in wisdom; breathing, it seems, a warm
silence. More generally we are offered images of life and death,
deft angels and the mortified head of the corpse. The habit of
bodies, whether sensitive or dead, is disclosed once more : we are
told that in the variety of meanings to which it points a body is
as expressive as a face. The partial nude always conveys the
sense of disclosure : it is appropriate here to the Christian mean­
ing. At the same time the angels perform a slow gentle wrap­
ping of the corpse.
Many characteristics of flesh are suggested by this
delineation, but only one characteristic is omnipresent to
which other delineations are subordinate : shape against a back­
ground. The spaces thus contrived are roughly triangles. The
angels' heads both echo and vary Christ's head, the cylinders of
their arms the corpse' s arms. The element of geometry or of
reduplication is an armature, the aesthetic armature, to vvhich
our feelings, as if they too could be solid things, as if they could
 C ezanne' s Les Baigneuses 249

be clay, cling; that is to say our feelings of contact, our meeting

with a separated object or with ourselves now encouraged to
separate from the splitting of ourselves . We feel in ourselves the
tautness of the angels' feathered wings, the wrinkled clinging
sleeve, the arm covering in the making for the corpse below
those wings. We feel in us the corpse's beautiful listless hands.
Christ's right arm droops but it is half-supported by a ledge on
which the fingers bend, and by the angels' enwrapping grip.
That demonstration of gravity serves less the effect of momen­
tum than of poise, so nearly compounded of compensations as
to be rest.
How often is this the effect upon us of the Old Masters, par­
ticularly of paintings with nudes . In my own mind I revisit
early years abroad, the sense of discovery in many galleries, the
predominant effect of the pictures in relation to the
discomfiture of loneliness . Art meant oasis for the body as well
as for the mind but also a ritual that affirmed unalterable con­
tact, on the whole in a fully adult sense, rescued from the
excess that had obscured or depleted an embrace.
Rembrandt's Belshazzar's Feast [Plate 1 6] in the National Gal­
lery is far from conveying this invo lucre of Pentelic marble; on
the contrary, it shows human beings \Vith the incorrigible
character of scored, used pots . A darker conception of the body
assumes a vivid clay. Hence Belshazzar's i mposing pallor even
though he suggests a richly feathered hen or turkey amid a
treasury of filth, though the quilted magisterial stomach mounts
to a plucked neck and head. Leaden with the threads of gold and
silver, turban and diadem reiterate the blindness of heaped
matter as does the great weighted see-saw of Belshazzar's out­
stretched arms. The woman recoiling on the right who spills
from a cup herself suggests a rounded, stoppered vessel. The
clattering gold, like all treasure, has its threat or is threatened.
Amid the fur of light upon the wall incon1prehensible letters
speak out the traun1atic counterpart sometimes associated with
these bodily products.
I believe that strong feelings of such a kind, or feelings de­
rived from them, possessed Rembrandt; they are one root of his
power; and that otherwise he could not so m agnificently have
250 Artists and Works of Art
imposed the weighty articulation, for instance, of Belshazzar's
right hand.
Many of us find Rembrandt to be the greatest of artists, I
think because no artist approaches him in projecting the feel I
h ave spoken of, the feel of presences not only substantiated
from observation in the outside world but substantiated equally
from the hazy presences in the mind. We are aware of a lineage
for his every face far beyond the range of iconographic study.
These presences are charged, weighty, condensed from the light
and from the dark literally and metaphorically, with a finer
drama than the apparition of writing on a wall. They are com­
pendia, bodies that manifest the history of their growth : each
speck gives power to an opaque fellow.
[from Reflections on the Nude, 1967, pp. 53-8]

26

Monet

Before referring to the general aspects of Monet's art, I stress his

predilection for certain shapes, since the larger matters of style
in the work of an artist will possess no urgency unless allied to a
quality of obsession with specific space and pattern . There is an
irregular and elliptical untidy tallness common in all periods of
Monet's work, and similar horizontal shapes. We may call to
mind the caricatures which were his first venture as a boy. It is
an attribute of some Chailly pictures painted under Barbizon
influence : in such works of the middle sixties we can even dis­
cern forerunners of his fruitful invention for many Impression­
ist compositions, p ainted from a boat, characterized by
horizontal strokes for the water and by upright strokes for a
curving bank of trees whose further edge sometimes occupies
the centre of the canvas : the sky has an intermediate texture, is
·broken, perhaps, with roundish clouds . Similarly, female figures
in the landscape often carry sunshades, a contour both taut and
flaccid like the lily-plants which will attract the painter's atten-
 Monet 25 1

tion continuously i n old age. This second theme inspires a

late still-life with eggs in a bowl and a carafe on the table
top, a relaxed yet economic a ccommodation of rectangularity
with circularity that suggests Bonnard's debt to Monet. More
than one painting of the late eighties shows a girl with open
sunshade on a field ridge seen from below : she is very tall
against the sunlit sky whose horizon is level with her feet.
This subject should be put beside an example of the Poplar
series . With the use, as ever, of divided brush-strokes and
broken colour, Monet often painted Normandy cliff-faces, un­
p romising subjects, it might be thought, of beach and sea in
combination with a stark vertical plane, whereby perceptions
of growth, progression, a softness as well as resistance, a fluidity
as well as rigidity, are conveyed to us . Seurat later showed by his
precise method that together with fragmentation and dis­
solution, an extremely weighty reconstruction could be evolved
from the careful verve in such canvases by his predecessor.
Monet first won some recognition in the middle sixties as
a p ainter of figure compositions out-of-doors . From time to time
throughout his career he worked at still-lifes . He painted Paris in
the sixties and seventies; his two animated Boulevard s cenes in
the early s eventies are of a kind comparable with Pissarro's
wonderful series of the nineties . H arbour scenes in Normandy
and Holland, boats on the Seine, form a l arge morsel of his
reuvre : yet it is not too soon to confine attention to Monet the
landscape and waterscape painter, since in this way it will be
easier to suggest the m agnitude of his influence on modern art
and the extent of his achievement.
Some of his greatest p aintings are calm and exquisite, those
that incorporate the loud iron and blue suffusing smoke in the
Gare St Lazare beneath the roof's vast triangle, no less than
snow scenes. At his house at Givemy where he went to live in
1 883, Monet constructed a water-garden by diverting a stream.
He p ainted the surface of a s mall pond sown with water-lilies,
on and off for about twenty years. There is no 'lead in', we are
in fact enveloped by a relaxed and fluid state. Some of his best
p aintings are of a frangible, crumbling world, ice-floes on the
Seine and the thaws . These too are p ictures that convey
252 Artists and W arks of Art
envelopment or oneness. We have the same feeling from his
poppy-fields or from the series of paintings in the early morning
on the Seine (of which there is now a very fine example in the
Tate Gallery, London), or from many snow paintings . The sub­
ject-matter is broken down, reconstituted in a configuration of
manifest, fragmented brush-strokes. Also fog, mist, lend them­
selves to the same dissolution that can provide the means of a
uniform re-building of uninterrupted openness in which we are
invited to partake; and we are invited to examine the picture at
as close range as did the artist standing or sitting at the easel.
In the Faber Gallery Renoir, R. H. Wilenski quotes Renoir as
saying : 'In landscape painting I like pictures which make me
want to wander about inside them.' Mr Wilenski comments :

When painting landscape he (Renoir) n ever took a point of focus

. . . and he never used the defined foreground of the classical-pic­
turesque tradition which closed as it were the picture at the bottom
and provided a point where the spectator himself could stand . . . •

The entrance to the landscape depicted in his pictures i s always open

at all sides; and the spectator is thus tempted to enter and 'wander
about inside them'.

There are similar paintings of the Argenteuil period by Monet

painted several years earlier. It is impossible to know to whom
this 'idea' should be principally attributed. Other evidence sug­
gests that Renoir learned more from Monet than did Monet
from Renoir. Indeed, apart from the pioneering by Manet in
regard to the new type of immediacy, Monet' s influence on his
fellows, as on Manet himself, was the paramount current in the
interchange of ideas during the seventies, the finest years of
pure Impressionism. 'Without him I should have given up,'
Renoir said later. This remark refers to Monet's firmness, stoic­
ism, but especially, I think, to his sense of dedication. \A/e can
see from their subsequent histories that Monet's devotion to an
extreme envelopment was more one-sided than that of his com­
panions. There are many exceptions, but the main effect of his
work did not alter, that is, the effect of a relaxed or enveloping
state which reaches us in terms of a natural scene and of a
tumultuous pictorial fabric. The three last words are pertinent
 Monet 253

as well to the later developments of Renoir, Pissarro and

Cezanne, to the work of Seurat and Van Gogh . The term post­
Impressionism is misleading where it is intended to mark a fund­
amental division. I consider that so deep a reliance upon the
fragmented brush-stroke as a principal member in a picture's
architecture, betrays the essence of much modern painting, a
distinction more fundamental than any issuing from the degrees
of monumentality, naturalism, distortion or abstraction. Of
course there are many methods other than the Impressionists'
for 'revealing the paint', for presenting the picture plane to be
itself a meaningful substance; for instance, Gauguin's flat, linear
patterns; these too, in the blatant urgency of a unifying sur­
face principle, derive directly from the glorification of the
sketch and from painting out-of-doors .
Probably Daubigny, one of the Barbizon painters, immediate
forerunners to the Impressionists, was the first artist to feel he
bad made a finished painting while worki ng entirely out-of­
doors. He turned a boat into a floating studio as did Monet.
Daubigny, unlike Corot, admired Monet's work and bought a
painting. At the time of the 1 870 war he introduced him in
London to an all-important contact, the dealer Durand-Ruel.
While still a boy at Le Havre, Monet, the grocer's son, had been
taken by Boudin to paint out-of-doors . After a visit to Paris and
two years of military service in Algiers, he returned to Sainte­
Adverse, by Le Havre, in 1 862, and \vorked there not only with
Boudin but with Jongkind. As is well known, Monet became the
most extreme and most hardy of plein-airistes. It follows that an
envelopment of light in a sense more inclusive than even the
light-effects and vortices of Turner - Monet was able to sample
them in London - became the point d'appui for a method of
embracing uniformly each object that is at the same time
closely observed, and perhaps particularly the distance which
enjoys little studious gradation in Impressionist paintings.
I feel that that is the right way to put the matter from the
angle of our time. Certainly, if you will, Impressionists were
painters of light; but why did they produce such great paint­
ings, why could Monet record at Belle-Ile-en-Mer a flowing
colour of the waves that colonies of painters, dedicated to this
 254 Artists and Works of Art
subject through several generations at sea-side places, have been
unable subsequently even on one occasion to approach? Or con­
sider the draughtmanship of Monet's railway trains, simplified
into telling smudges, and the Corot-like relief of their smoke.
Was Monet's 'eye' ;more perceptive? Possibly; the perceptiveness
was certainly inspired by a greater compulsion, a greater need.
The artist's conviction counts, not only in the light of his tem­
perament and his capacities but in the light of the coincidences
that a particular cultural situation offers . Everything happens in
art at once and at its height. Monet and his friends were 'on' to
something very good. Impressionism was inspired by the decay
of the European architectural conception in visual art; those
artists were able to reject the conventional, stepped com­
position : indeed, they signalized the end of a major creativeness
of stone or stucco in architecture itself: vivid and smooth sur­
f aces, the body philosophy of void and aperture will now
depend more largely from the uses of manifest pigment, as in
the graphic art of the Far East which had never been subject to
an architectural format for the projecion of bodily feeling such
as balance and rhythm. An emphasis upon texture in Im­
pressionist paintings, an European art amid the ruins of archi­
tecture, meant chromaticism, the division of a dominant colour
by another that will add to it, a substitution to some degree of
colour for tone. And now that the chance of new cathedrals
was finally done for, not to mention the hierarchies of older
ways of living, moments in field and street will not be separated
from an informal context. A new reviving beauty in response to
cultural negation, a great wealth in ordinary acts and things
was sought and found. Antecedents had been numerous for fifty
years; in this direction or that for a great deal longer. The pro­
minence of the paint itself was, I think, the element most shock­
ing to the public in the early days of Impressionism, the wilful
sketchiness as it was felt to be : rightly shocking since the
accentuation of a broad technique exorcised as a mere ghost
the classical m ise-en-scene that lurked in subjects treated by the
traditional painters. Moreover, the use of overlapping textures
was not primarily to represent the texture of objects but of the
light, the atmosphere; it provided a means of composing objects
 Monet 255

very vividly in the tactile ensemble however unpromising the

subject from the angle of the traditional art of composition.
Destruction in art and re-creation must always proceed simul­
taneously. The colour, as well as the brush-strokes and the sur­
faces represented was apt to appear in fragments so as to allow
of a generous reconstruction in the name of light, in the name
of science even, generous in the sense that you can see the artist
at work, you can see how he reconstitutes surprisingly the
dominant effect, puts on the paint. Without intrusion of fancy
the painter's attention was riveted to the motif; yet we can
imagine that in the heroic years of the seventies Monet and
Renoir were carrying in their heads the skeletons of many
further paintings, and that Monet at any rate, in the alternation
with despair that he so often experienced, felt a sense of power,
of omnipotence even, which sustained him through years and
years of semi-starvation. He was attracted, as I have said, by
scenes of near-dissolution - at least, that is where we find him
greatest - from which he distilled an instant yet solid loveliness.
They were hard subjects, one would have thought, from which
to extract even a tentative architecture. As for Cezanne, and
Seurat in his turn, no sooner was the old architecture down
than they reconstructed its elements with the new means on a
titanic scale, with emphasis, that is, upon the picture plane.
Monet, for all his humility and his honesty in front of the motif,
was more omnipotent in the pursuit of envelopment, with less
concern for the self-sufficiency and separateness of the object.
He assisted in this \vay at the birth of Expressionism. Degas on
the other hand, Renoir, Pissarro, developed new language to
express the monumental. Monet was far the least of them as an
authority on the Old Masters either considered for themselves
or for a source of emulation in the terms of new pictorial
language. He was probably the first of his friends to come
deeply under the influence of Japanese prints, prized by some of
those artists both for lightness in the predominant tone and for
decorative representation of ordinary life without the employ­
ment of an architectural type o f composition.
But it would be entirely false to suggest that Monet's treat­
ment of his motifs was arbitrary. No artist, as is well known,
256 Artists and Works of Art
recorded more intelligently an instant of the general scene. His
ceuvre has great variety : he appears to have sought out motifs
characteristic of each district and country visited. He trans­
muted such awareness into a sentience devoid of what is called
literary reference. Yet there are paintings by him of the eighties
and nineties which may with reason be called Expressionist
though they are agonized records of place and time. The over­
strong, and even sometimes vulgar, pattern of brush-strokes sug­
gests a manipulation of the object less to convey the object's
strength than to exhibit the control by the artist over it, less a
state of conflict projected into the outside world as by Van
Gogh, than an act of power over Nature though it be in no way
capricious. Cezanne, on the other hand, with small regard for
the momentary state of objects, transmuted a masterful tem­
perament so as to reinforce the obj ect's architecture : \Ve, the
spectators, are over against the self-sufficient motif, whereas a
painting by Monet, self-contained though it be as an object of
art, tends as well to envelop us far more strongly in a pervasive
deliquescence . Thus the two most general effects afforded by
works of art were sharply redefined at the beginning of what
we call the modern movement; they flow in one direction from
Monet and in another from Cezanne however frequent the
confluence. These two protagonists held each other in the high­
est esteem.
I must again emphasize the relaxed state of mind that many
quiet and exquisite works by Monet engender since I have sug­
gested for some others the quality of manic control over Nature.
His temperamenta l reserve, his lack of introspection, is surely
notable. As I have said, for some twenty years at the end of a
long life he was recording what he saw upon the face of a pond:
these opaque waters do not reconstruct the depression with
which Monet was familiar, nor the face of death . We may feel
he could see no more than such changing coverlets w hen he
looked within himself; all power was for the outward eye,
whose task, however, w as never considered easy. A little before
his death he swore to his friend Clemenceau that his life was a
failure, that there remained nothing but to destroy his paint­
ings . He despaired constantly, no less than Cezanne.. and he ob-
 Monet 257

!iterated his work, it seems, on as large a scale. Had Monet's art

served an easy sense of omnipotence, he would not of course
h ave been a great artist. We can imagine the twirls of fierce
iridescent paint that is noted some years later to have captured
nothing. Aesthetic circumstances cannot be repeated nor, there­
fore, Monet's manner of discovering a truthful chromatic
counterpart for tone. The first emptiness of an architectural
void, the paramount need for reconstruction, brought to light a
faculty stirred by his precursors and adapted to eternalize the
summary and passing characteristics in an ambience.
The new aesthetic situation was the forerunner of a new cul­
tural situation : hence the odium that met the Impressionists,
unparalleled by the impact of any subsequent development in
art. Possibly the greatest outrage of all may have been dimly
seized, the extraordinary liberating power of a standpoint
which could bring together for a time talents as powerful yet
utterly diverse as those of Degas, Cezanne, Renoir and Monet.
But it was not, I make bold to say, the Impressionists' chro­
maticism in itself (which partook especially of their conscious
aim) that shocked the public, so much as their consequent
neglect of chiaroscuro, the accepted means of monumentality.
Shade is not given an equivalent value by Manet, nor by his
pupil Berthe Morisot, nor usually by Cezanne entirely, nor by
Seurat, Gauguin, Van Gogh . The early Impressionist pictures
display both blurring and brilliance; there is a small-scale pat­
terning that also mitigates shade : bright concordance of brush­
stroke, and in the tone and colours, brings about a static or
settled quality, a n all-overness that contrasts with the frag­
mented quality of the technique and with the moment of time
represented: evanescence is thereby eternalized in contrast with
the aim of monumental or ideal art which has always sought to
prolong drama, purge it of its passing. Impressionism contrived
a new naturalism of immense ingenuity : some of the tension on
picture surf ace derives from the paradoxical influence of an
oriental perfectionist art that we think of as predominantly dec­
orative; or we can say the tension flows from a colourful paint­
ing of light without the buttresses, the reduplicated mouldings,
the cornices and notching of a gradual chiaroscuro.
258 A rtists and Works of Art
But some criticism went home, or at any rate self-criticism
drove those painters to rather different heights. The problem of
'finish', if not of monumentality, plagued Monet no less than
Cezanne, in the eighties. In 1 890 Monet wrote to Geffroy : 'I am
more than ever disgusted by mere effects easily thrown off'
(venues d'un jet), at the very moment the public was beginning
to accept then1. The jets became a bugbear; and what brilliant
essays they had been. In 1 909 Renoir wrote of his admiration for
Monet 'who can in so little time make things that are of great
i nterest' .
It seems to me that Monet adopted three methods in an at­
tempt to s urpass the je t without loss of immediacy. None of
them entailed reduction of an open brush-work, of a generalized
treatment. The first method led to an almost uniform agitation
of brush-strokes to which I have already alluded. Then there was
the concentration on series, the procession, for instance, of
Rouen Cathedral seen to be transformed at differing times of
the day, or of haystacks in three seasons . Fifteen haystacks were
exhibited together, segments of an unified achievement. In the
series of the Thames, paintings of Waterloo and Charing Cross
bridges, and to far lesser extent in the Venetian paintings, the
painter of light, as did Turner, devotes himself to what also are
included among 'effects of light', that is to subjects of ob­
fuscation, fog, mist, haze, all of which demand as broad a treat­
ment as if the subject were night or the dazzle of the strongest
sunshine. (The Riviera defeated him in this respect.) Such treat­
ment could be intensified or simplified to be a form of 'finish'.
Monet was working on the London paintings all together two
years after leaving London : and it was four years before he let
them go. His last and, I feel, most successful method to combat
the bogy of the 'finish' problem was the concentration upon a
theme, the lily-pond, of utter lassitude; he still employed thick
paint and in numerous impressions a strong, divided brush­
stroke. He thus intensified a concatenation of end and means so
strange and so difficult that there could be no conclusion to it:
the problem of 'finish' was thus often shelved.
The gifted Monet might have won s uccess easily as a con­
ventional painter at an early age. Instead he often starved: in his
 Monet 259

most productive period he was sometimes unable to work for

lack of means. His first wife died in 1 879 : he then had no re­
sources and two small children. At another time he was forced
to offer twenty-five canvases to a friend at twenty francs apiece.
This went on, or something like it, for a quarter of a century.
The good life in scenes of ordinary experience that we enjoy in
the paintings of the early period by Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley and
Monet was the product of an enormous resilience and courage
on the part of penurious men who were by nature prone to
melancholy.
[from Mon et, 19 5 8, pp . 4-7]
Places
27

Venice

(i)
I need to introduce you gradually to southern stone. The easiest
images will at first be those Venice can inspire. There, even a
Northerner must observe stone; for it is omnipresent. And he
can bear this omnipresence because water, though silent,
courses irresistibly, stemming for a time images of death that so
much stone might shower on desperate lovers of green fields.
Yet since the water runs slow, stone stands among it with the
minimu m of distraction, between water and sky. It is rare to see
a stone building rise compact and white from soil : how much
more solid when grown from water that bears a gondola brush­
ing its hollowness against the lowest moulding.
[from The Quattro Cento, 1932, p. 8]
(ii)
When with a rap, a groan of wood and a clatter, shutters are
thrown wide (try the campo San Polo after a hot day at even­
ing), unavoidably one looks up. For in such appearance at a
window, in this heralded apparition, the heart recognizes its
oldest wish for the dawn, the new day, the new unimagined sun
at arching rise. And should the figure that appears after the
flung-out shutters, appears from the gloom into the white-speck­
ed even light, be old, then to this curious emotion of the dawn
is added a thought of dying suns, the light to which we live and
by which we die.
The distinct windows and doors of Italy are symbols of birth
pre-eminently. And if the chill frightens, the stoniness of Venice
when water seems to blacken against the teeth of rats, when
garbage dulls the echo of feet on those terra firmas or filled-in
canals to w hich no sun can penetrate, so that they seem frozen
dirt - remember that from similar hard stones Giorgione figured
forth the rich softness of Venetian painting, from colours of
these geologies drew out suffusion, that warmth of blue dis·
264 Places
tance, of the earth without its many impurities , steeled by
memorable summers . .
With some days of sirocco Venice is a sea-monster, on whose
glassy tongue you are scaled. Now this, now that campanile is a
sharp decaying tooth, minatory, while the oily sirens of ships
are noises in the head of the monster who has caught you, rous­
ing your envy of fish that squirm from between claws to depths
of basalt rock.
But at twilight things lie horizontal among the bell-peals.
Nothing mounts . So churches have their svvay over the toppling
water. Everything rests on the bobbing water, rests at ease or
firm. The very smell of the boats which fought with whiffs from
the calli, now are fresh out there on the lagoon, released; while
the churches float firm like swans, the water risen to its greatest
fluidity in these motions of spread and relaxation.
People walk or glide in boats, ever passing j unctures of stone.
But s hould you fall there's no secrecy available. The sick must
be carried through a holiday crowd to the hospital, on a stret­
cher. There are not four wheels in the whole of Venice. Anyone
who is moved here on land recumbent . . . one knows that a sick
person comes from the swooping of the pedestrians about, a
silence and a current of air that lifts the tail of a pigeon escaping
between the marbles . You cannot fall by the kerb . There is no
kerb . The piazza will serve up a stricken body as on a plate. You
must keep upright in Venice when on the move and not on the
water, otherwise all the bipeds from the nearer tall stones and
porticoes will be on you, released from chatter around the
columns . Prisoners are moved at night so as not to excite the
day. Nothing can be sunk here except in water, and then abys­
mally. One realizes, almost with horror, the impossibility of the
earth opening to swallow you up . There is no earth. Beneath the
stones more uprights, a forest of piles driven in s and, sodden
some of them for a millennium.
[from The Quattro Cen to, 193 2, pp . 9-1 l ]
 Venice 265

(iii)
I write of stone. I write of Italy where stone is habitu al. Every
Venetian generation handles the Istrian stone of which Venice
is made. Venetian sculpture p roceeds now, not by chisel and
hammer, but under the hands, the feet, under the very breath of
each inhabitant and of a few cats, dog s and vermin. See the
knobs upon the ponte della Paglia, how fine their polish, how
constantly renewed is their h and-finish .
Hand-finish is the most vivid testimony of sculpture. People
touch things according to their shape. A single shape is made
magnificent by perennial touching . For the hand explores, all
unconsciously to reveal, to magnify an existent form . Perfect
s culpture needs your hand to communicate some p ulse and
warmth, to reveal s ubtleties unnoticed by the eye, needs your
hand to enhance them. Used, carved stone, exposed to the
weather, records on its concrete shape in spatial, i mmediate,
simultaneous form, not only the winding passages of days and
nights, the opening and shutting skies of warmth and wet, but
also the sensitiveness, the vitality even, that each successive
touching has communicated. This is not peculiar to Venice nor
to Italy. Almost everywhere man has recorded his feelings i n
stone. To the designed shape o f some piece, almost everywhere
usage has sometimes added an aesthetic meaning that cor­
responds to no conscious aesthetic aim. B ut it is i n Italy and
other Mediterranean countries that we take real courage from
such evidence of solid or objectified feelings, quite apart from
the fact that these a re the countries of marble, of well-heads and
fountains, of assignation or lounging beneath a rcades and porti­
coes, of h uge stone p alaces and massive cornices where pigeons
tramp their red feet. We are p repared to enjoy stone, in the
South . For, as we come to the southern light of the Mediter­
ranean, we enter regions of coherence and of settled forms.
The piecemeal of o ur lives now offers some mass, the many
heads of discontent a re less devious in their looks . When we
stand in the piazzas of southern towns, it is as if a b and had
struck up; for when grouped at home about o ur n ative band­
stand we have noticed the feeble public park to attain a h urried
definiteness. Similarly we are prepared i n the southern light to
266 Places
admire the evidence of Italian living concreted and objectified
in stone.
But exhilaration gained from stone is a vastly different en­
couragement from the one that music may afford. It is an op­
posite encouragement. Or rather it is something more than the
bestowal of a tempo on things . For tempo, the life-process itself,
attains concreteness as stone. In Venice the world is stone.
There in stone, to which each changing light is gloss, the human
process shines clear and quasi-permanent. There, the lives of
generations have made exteriors, acceptable between sky and
water, marbles inhabited by emotion, feelings turned to
marble.
Without a visit to Venice you may hardly envisage stone as
so capable to hold firm the flux of feelings. Stone sculpture
apart, stone is more often conceived in the North as simply rock­
like. And who will love the homogeneous marble sheets in the
halls of Lyons' Corner Houses? No hands will attempt to evoke
from them a gradual life. For nowhere upon them is the human
impress. Few hands have touched them, or an instrument held
in the hand. They were sliced from their blocks by impervious
machines . They have been shifted and hauled like so many
girders . They are illumined in their hues beneath the light; yet
they are adamant.
In writing now of Venice, I have not in mind Venetian sculp­
ture nor marble palaces reflecting the waters between them. I
refer to the less signal yet vast outlay there of the salt-\vhite
Istrian stone, every bit of it used; to bridge-banisters and fonda­
menta-posts made smooth and electric by swift or groping
hands and by the sudden sprawls of children; to great lintels
seared like eaten wood above storehouse doorways on the Giu­
decca; to the gleaming sta nchion on the quay in front of the
Salute, a stanchion whose squat cylindrical form is made all the
more trenchant by the deep spiral groove carved by the re­
peated pull of ropes; to vaster stanchions on the Zattere, l ying
as long and white and muffled as polar bears . . . . Stone enshrines
all usage and all fantasies . They are given height, width, and
breadth, solidity . Life in Venice is outward, enshrined in gleam­
ing white Istrian. Each shrine is actuality beneath the exploring
 Venice 267

hand, is steadfast to the eye. Such perpetuation, such in­

stantaneous and solid showing of a long-gathered momentum,
gives the courage to create in art as in life . For living is exter­
nalization, throwing an i nner ferment o utward into definite act
and thought. Visual art is the clearest mirror of this aim . The
p ainter's fantasies become m aterial, become c anvas and p aint.
Stone the solid, yet the habitat of soft light like the glow of
flesh, is the m aterial, so I shall maintain, that inspires all the
visual arts . Marble statues of the gods are the gods themselves.
For they are obj ects as if alive which enjoy complete out­
w ardness.
In Venice, even pai n h as its god-like compass. M asks of tooth­
ache, mas ks of suffering, s now-white, incorrigible, overhang­
ing dark waters, these great stone heads line the base of the
palazzo Pesaro on the side canal. The gondolier who enters
from the Grand Canal will need to use the m asks to correct
his black boat. He thus polishes one or two heads, damps the
swollen cheek of another, strikes a hollow roaring mouth .
The cries from c an al and from calli, new noises that are c aught
to the clammy, still livid recesses of the stone, released old and
thin and o minous as echo, are as s ustenance to these perennia l
faces . . .
That a stone face representing Vice or toothache should be an
assistance i n navigation, that misery should be exemplified as
solid, attaining beauty i n completeness, lends to all phenomena,
even the least wel come, an almost positive zest. And see how
these stones make permanent dran1 a of the sky's shifting m at­
erials ! Istrian m arble blackens in the shade, is snow or s alt-white
where exposed to the s un . Light and sh ade are thus recorded,
abstracted, intensified, solidified. Matter is dramatized in stone,
huge s tonework p alaces rebutting the waters .
No : it is the sea that thus s tands petrified, sharp and con­
tinuous till up near the sky. For this Istrian stone seems com­
p act of s alt's bright yet shaggy crystals . Air eats into i t, the
brightness remains. Amid the sea Venice is built from the es­
sence of the sea . Over the Adriatic, mounted upon churches and
palaces, a thous and statues posture, distilled agleam from the
whirls and liquid tresses of the Adriatic over which they are
268 Places

presiding. They stand white against the sky, one with a banner,
another with a broken column in her hands.
Yet this whiteness as of salt is not dazzling. On the contrary,
though here the sea is petrified, it still is ruffled or is cut i nto suc­
cessive cylinders and pillars. Istrian stone has always been
hammered. It is a convention of its use which probably arose i n
the construction o f bridges and water-stairs. For this ham­
mering, which makes the smallest surface a microcosm of the
larger growths in light and shade, prevents the stone from being
slippery. So, we are reminded of the substances that batten on
slippery rocks and roughen them, shells with crusted grooves,
or hard sponges. When such thoughts are uppermost, Istrian
stone itself, Venice herself, is an i ncrustation.
Or again at night, Istrian is lace. The Baroque fronts are like
giant fretworks that stiffen the brighter stars . Lace, in fact, has
always been an industry in Venice, though more particularly at
Chioggia where they have woven it large and coarse.
Again, if in fantasy the stones of Venice appear as the waves'
petrification, then Venetian glass, compost of sand and water,
expresses the taut curvature of the cold under-sea, the slow,
oppressed yet brittle curves of dimly translucent water.
[from Stones of Rimini, 1934, pp. 1 5-20]
(iv)
You might have expected a wealth of marine ornament in
Venice. The Venetians, however, were more concerned to sug­
gest ties with the green land. But the sensitiveness to marine
effect in the Renaissance must be directly related to the exist­
ence of Venice, or, rather, to its becoming, at the time, the
Venice we have, city of stone and water, the most stupendous,
the most far-reaching of humanistic creation. After all, Venice
is the one permanent miracle, and the presence of this miracle
in the heart of Europe for fifteen hundred years is an historical
factor whose influence is too vague and large for its conceiving
by historians. All that we should note here is the gigantic outlay
of stone, hiding the Venetian mud, an undertaking, a re­
investment, a transformation the rumour of which passed
throughout Italy. Marble palaces are cliffs now as well as
 Venice 269

houses, and the marble water-stairs run without a break be­

tween air and sea, only that the deeper steps l apped and sub­
merged, seem to serpentine, and this movement interrupts on
the s urface the reflection of a palace opposite; only that the step
on a level with the flood, from which there is a dry passage into
the cavernous marble hall of a p alace, continually rebuts the
slap of the tide, and at each pause shows white, wet teeth . The
creations only of man and of water, no intermediary, except
their fusion by half-visible marble that glimmers below the sur­
face like a sea-serpent; while the stretched and relaxed seaweed
adhesive shows the direction of the tide as a weathercock the
point from which the wind comes . A ship has no such fusion
with the element it rides . Without conscious effort and without
sacri fice of their humanity, the Venetians have come nearer to
an element than have done all the races to another element,
earth, with various mysteries and nature worship, especially
spring and autumnal rite. Without loss of humanity, without
dark ecstasy, without priests, they have done it. Such closeness
of rational, supremely p ractical man to Nature is h umanistic;
and so pervasive is the closeness, that either man or sea animals
may well find a home here. Even today in this the city of his­
torical commerce created out of business enterprise, though the
trappings of several civilizations are vaunted here, it would be
little s urprise if shading one's eyes when upon the piazzetta,
scanning the lagoon that is only inches below the marble floor,
one were to see framed between the two columns, twin heads
and fast approaching coils, Laocoon's serpents coming over from
the horizon in the time that it takes to give a speech, and now
breasting up the water-stair between the tattered gondolas . In
spite of the ubiquity of their art here as nowhere else, human
beings, with their staccato movement and perpendicular line,
sometimes seem matchstick-like, superfluous . Then one would
like the marine animals to take possession. Imagine rows and
rows of serpents in horizontal glide across the piazza, not stop­
ping or turning at St Mark's, but rearing up their wet scales to
coil them about the porphyry and serpentine pillars, to lay their
eggs in the recesses of the massive foliage of the capitals, to
leave their slime upon the porphyry head of Justinian and slither
270 Places
down the sheeted walls. Imagine the already bejewelled palaces
of the Lombardi further encrusted with salt and brittle shells,
imagine dolphins sporting beneath a bridge, fl apping t heir tails
with hollow sound against its steep u nderside. Along a narrow
back canal an improbable monster is paddling, his head reared up
on a level with the piano n obile so that he spews through
windows either fl ank on to brocaded ch airs. Now his head is
three canals in advance of his t ail, his body is grinding scales in
three places against right-angled marble corners. R ank wash
rushes up the water-stairs and refloats a flotilla of oozing toads .
Seals crease their bodies poised on a narrow pink parapet, down
t he banisters of the Giant's staircase eels race. A grampus with
dripping paws has replaced St Theodore upon his column and
cetacean roars reverberate in the porphyry dingles . Sal mon
jump a fondamenta, sea-snakes crawl up the sheer sides of every
campanile, parti-coloured cuttle-fish staining the p avement
black squirm to reach the shoals stranded upon Rialto . The ten­
tacles of giant o ctopi, like so m any h ands raised in mysterious
benediction, rise out of the lagoon over the f a<;ade of Palladian
San Giorgio . . .

[from Stones of Rimini, 1934, pp. 100-102]

(v)
Venice excels in blackness and whiteness; water b rings com­
merce between them. Italians excel in the use of black and
white, white stone and interior darkness . Colour comes be­
tween, comes out of them, intensely yet gradually amassed, like
a gondola between water and sky.
I saw today a great grey sail patched with white, a w arehouse
in fact on the Giudecca it looked : it moved away to revea l such
aw arehouse. Commerce between mobile and static (lacking in
modem streets}, commerce between what thus becomes dra­
matically identified as well as contrasted, a deep and necessary
commerce rather than an interplay, provides the clue to Venice,
to Giorgione and to all the greatest art.
If we look away from the w ater at the w hite stone surround­
ing door and window, we seem to see all the potential whiteness
in the water abrogated for the finest day, solid, geometric, still.
 Venice 271
If we swi m round a rock, we are p oignantly aware of its
stature . We see t his hardness from below rearing o ut of the
continuousness of water, in contrast to our slow horizontal
movement on top of the water. We are on top, superficially on
top of the water, but the embedded rock rises far above. It is the
s ame relationship we h ave on land with a tree. The buildings of
Venice appear in organic relationship with water j ust as trees
with earth.
And it is one thing to walk past a building, another to glide
past, to slip slowly in a continuous movement. The hesitancy of
water reveals architectural i mmobility.
Those parts of any town apparent from water are deeper than
the stream, still and solid. Each projection is enhanced when
some of them divide the medium of water as well as that of air.
The thinner air is then divided with increased clarity. And each
recess obtains a static cave-like depth. From pavement to wall is
a comparatively dull progression . On the water, swimming or in
a small boat, we are the insects, the may-flies, buoyant. And
when we disturb this translucent medium, breasting a way that
h as repercussion upon the shore of stone, not only immobility
remarks itself but each water-level cranny is discovered. Our
p assage discovers the building anew. This is h ardly the case
with any other locomotion .
It fallows that the first c haracter of Venetian building is
sheerness and height. Yet, tall brothers, Venetian palaces never
lost reverence for their pollard mother, St Mark's . The essence
of Byzantine organization was in no period forgotten, but in the
Gothic period and thereafter, principal windows became tall
and narrow. The oblong p anel, at first enclosing a pointed arch,
entered an enduring relationship with the braided Byzantine
curve : (a relationship, however, already apparent in St Mark's).
Perhaps their original and most naked fusion is the cylindrical
Gothic chimney-stacks with bell-like tops. This fusion was de­
cocted i n the Renaissance upon the p artial return to Byzantine
form : the relationship of oblong, cylinder and curve is the pre­
eminent s ubject of Venetian Renaissance architecture, es­
pecially preoccupation with rectangular panel and oblong j a mb
to door and win dow or oblong face to pilaster, in association
272 Places
with the new emphasis upon rounded and circular shapes. The
re-fusion of these elements in the form of the cylinder became
the preoccupation of Venetian sculpture and, to some extent, of
Venetian painting, especially when the subject was the long
Venetian countenace.
Emphasis on the fac;ade of buildings upon the rectilinear was
the result of a widespread outlay of rectilinear stone in the
paving and ground decoration of campi and of the piazza itself,
of the s teps and handrails of curved bridges. This stone
flooring, and stone links above the water, bridges of a type that
more or less precluded the horse, did not exist in any number
before the Renaissance. Venice itself, as we think of it today,
was a creation of the Renaissance. And it was at the time of
the Renaissance and after, that the liston, the thin oblong of the
most white Istrian stone, was set as an inlay everywhere, mark­
ing even the plainest apertures throughout the city.
But the first quality, as above, of Venetian building is sheer­
ness and height. Opposing water at their bases, the palaces lean
back. At water level, moul dings are so heavy and protuberant
that architectural projections around the apertures aloft, appear
less as proj ections than as incrustations at the mouths of caves
raised above the sea, incrustations not only from the sea but
from the moving springs within . So heavy are Venetian buildings
at ground or sea level that they appear sometimes to be upside
down, especially since it is rare that they are crowned with the
usual projecting cornice. The untapering lightness of the higher
storeys, combined with the narrowness and sheerness of the
whole, affords a minimum effect of weight. Weight is below:
foundations are visible, all that is raised above the piles; but
these projections, like the roots of trees, suggest a rising sap and
strong grip captured for growth . Naturally, it is the same w ith
buildings away from the water, and even with Venetian build­
ings far removed from Venice . Not even columns in Venice
express the carrying of weight. Arches spring from them in a

rapid curve; trabeation is not stressed. Columns project as much

or more than the archivolts they c arry, and are not, therefore,
altogether under the archivolts . Ionic volutes on the capitals
often appear to be without connection with the archivolts . As
 Venice 273

often as not, too, and not only at the entrances of St Mark's,

twin columns upon i mposts, with spaces between them, support
heavy archivolts with little intervening trabeation . There is
little tight-linked effect of support.
Again, in humanized and ordered classical form it is the archi­
tecture of rock and cave with strong bulwark at the base, with
precipice and scattered encrusted orifice. As in cliff there is no
display of constructive stren9 th . Each member enjoys a distinct
life, each column, each capital is distinct : there is a complete
equality of all the members; yet they compose together with
the graciousness of all classical members : no affiliation, then,
with rock-hewn temples of South America or of India w here
inhabited rock i s indeed rock with apertures, or with strong
irregular architecture in general . These p alaces have that
strength, but they have also the separated, civi lized grace of the
classical. Organization or composition though abundant and,
indeed, often regular, is an organization that depends less upon
opposing balances than upon a commerce, and so an identifi­
cation, between disparate units. It is, therefore, an organization
that approximates nearer to the one of Piero della Francesca
and of other masters of equality allied to distinctness, than to
the one of the draughtsman with his groups of balancing forces.
A colour, rather than a linear, organization .
Similarly, in Venice as a whole, tone so easily acquires these
values ascribed to colour. Thus blackness, as well as whiteness,
obtains a meaning over and above i ts tone value, more es­
pecially that value fundamental to profound colour relation­
ship, identity-in-difference. The gondolier's seaworthy serpent,
we have seen, is black between water and sky: but rather than
as a s ilhouette whose character is to stand out, and the charac­
ter of whose background is thus to be a contrasting background,
the black gondola appears in organic connection with its light
surroundings, an organic connection, suggestive of circulation,
which belongs to colour rather than to tone. This solid blackness
seems to have been extracted from the dark places of water
which therefore now appear lighter. Similarly, the gondolier's
rhythmic s troke sums in an orderly succession the crowded
flood upon which he works.
274 Places
It is rare in Venice to see bulks looming in the flood, a Turner­
esque mesh ambuscading a river-mouth . What one sees near­
ly always rises clear from the water: the- waters do not suffer it;
they carve it. The concourse of waters, both in their lightness
and in their darkness, are resolved as building, as if, at the mercy
of the winds, watery reflections were the i mpress left behind in
an emptied shell. Water h as no lid. An oar fathoms i t, i t opens
just so m uch, closes, heals from beneath . The undulating floor
of St Mark's is water with all its colours eterna lly healed. Simi­
larly the darkest windows obtain a kind of radiance from the
fact of aperture a bove the closed waters : their darkness bums
slowly and forever over the reflecting element beneath that is
p artly dark and p artly light; j ust as the white stone sums and
solidifies the light p art. And because Istrian stone bleaches
in the light, blackens in the shade, m any columns and pro­
jections upon Venetian building are most dramatically most
intensely light and intensely dark . This darkness that radiates
evenly has inspired as well as the characteristic chiaroscuro
of Venetian painting, the extensive use of dark-coloured disks
and circular holes in Veneti an architecture, common in all
periods .
So propitious are the black Venetian interiors as seen from
outside, framed by the white or blackening stone, that however
decrepit the palace above the water, something from inside, es­

pecially from the top windows, is expected to fructify. From

the quatrefoils above the arches of the Doge's p alace, some­
thing, we feel, comes to pass . 111is n avel held above the pillar
has a torch-like quality. Venetian Gothic, which developed cir­
cular shapes, possesses a p arti cular still radiance in aperture.
There exist in the Gothi c p alace windows flanked by p orphyry
or serpentine disks, a constant communication - and a musical
one - between the inside and the outside world, as if flambeaux
burnt steadily near the balconies and the palace lay open to the
night m usic of the serenade. And how melodious this music
coming from the canal which cleaves to, and carves, the palace
feet and now is raised in sound to pierce the apertures above!
Circular apertures suggest a ship ; and an emphasis upon aper­
ture must be strengthened by an emphasis upon the surf ace in
 Venice 275

whi ch apertures appear. Here, at any rate, we are constantly

reminded of construction by the Venetian palaces . Aperture,
empty space, existed first, then the skeleton, then the walls that
withstand the w ater. In these terms, the ribs are still visible in
pilaster, pillar and cornice : they are allowed to project as first
defence. The wall lies behind them. And if the remaining aper­
tures suggest caves, then the circular disks, so often in attend­
ance upon Venetian w indows, are stones that h ave been rolled
away from these entrances . The first development from the
origin al Byzantine architecture was a sealing up, in the Gothic
peri od, of the open Byzantine arcades . Byzantine secular wall­
space, as we see i t in the Fondaco dei Turchi, even though
sheeted and embossed with emblems, does not sustain any of
the above images. W here long rounded arcades are open, one
above the other, there is no impression of a rock or of a cave or
of a radiant darkness and lightness amassed from the reflecting
water. But Gothic builders filled up with steep walls, added ribs
to the windows by dividing them with a mullion column.
Nevertheless, the deep bays of St M ark' s and the precious sheet­
ing of its w alls gave the prototype, if not for these forms, then
for the i mages employing them .
Projections from a w all, particularly in the shape of a pilaster
whose thickness we can see, reinforce our sense of the wall
behind them. But the greater part of a Byzantine palace wall l ay
too far behind deep loggias . Gothic and Renaiss ance builders,
while at times keeping such loggias, generally contrasted them
on the same plane with sealed walls, walls sealed with disks,
walls whose proj ections suggested a further structure or frame­
work that reinforce the walls. Conversely, when we conceive
the buildings from inside rather than outside, the projections
are incrustations at the apertures of c aves, while the walls are
the sheer rock. In short, Venetian architecture after the By­
zantine period is a lw ays concerned with the wall, its thickness
as a bulwark or its crystallization from the water that it rebuts.
The unusual placing, at fi rst of Gothic windows, made walls
more precious, a novel way of emulating the costly or lite� al
preciousness of the walls of St Mark's. We are back to our ong­
inal conception of the Venetian palaces, attributing to them a
276 Places
sheerness and height in which each orifice and c arved recess has
deep meaning to the mind .
We h ave mentioned an identity-in-difference as characteristic
of form conceived in terms of colour: all that we h ave to say
about Venetian architecture is relevant to the feats of Gior­
gione. When associated with the richness of an identity-in­
difference, i mages of interchange, of transformation and of
metamorphosis may serve us without a tinge of mysticism.
Thus, the five blackening balustrade-supports to the last
window of the old prisons have white swelling breasts . They are
like penguins . The black and white of sea-birds are stones in
Venice. A seagull in Venice is of no interest. One sees it o nly as
a finial released from a building . But the pigeons of St Mark's are
a solace to tired feet, grey softnesses above the hard and grey
volcanic p avement. Feeding the pigeons is a ritual, an offering to
the stones we tread.
In Venice we note particularly any transformation of mat­
erial. On the sides of some fondamenta, moisture causes the
Istrian stone coping to mix with the brickwork below ; similarly
in the c ase of layers of stone between the bri ck. From mortar
also, crystallizations appear on brick . Again, the copper dome of
the church opposite the station has dripped greenly on the Is­
trian dru m : the bronze statue upon the dome is similarly dyed.
This building, the visitor's first sight of Venice, though unlike
any other building there, in viridescent form, in a colour most
unusual for Venice, symbolizes the prevailing proces s . This
dome confounds the heights with the depths, s uggesting in clear
and stationary form exalted to an apex, the long tilted lift of the
swell against the stone, which subsiding, reveals the greens of
seaweed and of slime .
At sunset the water reflects the sky. That which the water
reflected a ll day now i t clasps and incorporates . Fusion is com­
plete : the sky itself now rocks beneath the grandeur of yet
whiter stone. Thi s same rocking, one feels, sets the more distant
churches swaying and swi mming, sets their evening bells to roll_.
The brown prayers from the Redentore are loosed at evening i n
unmoored sound : and the church slips i n upon the sky-and­
water, aloft the white e mbannered ·Christ upon the dome.
 Venice 277

The richness, the s alt, the hardness of the water has caked
into gleaming and hammered stones, particularly on rough days
when the Giudecca's sea-green canal is tipped vvith foam. The
past in Venice seems to be the period taken for crys­
tallization : the store of Venetian history is encased by an i mage
of an accumulated sea-change. So deeply laid are the i m­
aginative foundations of Venice, to such an extent has stone
abrogated the meaning of soil in our minds, that decay, as we
have seen, takes the form of metamorphosis, and even of re­
newal.
Venice is a potent symbol of the mother. As we ride the
canals we move within her circulation . All we have said of
Venetian architecture reflects the same symbolis m. It is not s ur­
prising, therefore, to find that it worked, that is, the oligarchical
Venetian government : worked with more public spirit than did
any other large political organization of those centuries; and
lasted longer. History gives few comparisons with the internal
unity of Venice. Elsewhere political sagacity has not combated
destiny with such success :- no other statesmen have seen so far
ahead : and by means of the s upreme realism of correct prognos­
tication, Imperial Venice perpetuated herself, artificially as i t
were, for some two hundred years after her expected death .
Such artificiality in astonishing unity with such realism is the
measure of all Italian civilization, but more particularly in
Venice where nature in exotic form conspires with good sense.
Ceaselessly the waters must be carved for carrying things, cease­
lessly the lagoons m ust be marked and dredged. The i mmense
toil of water portage is vividly yet slowly contemplated. The
ruling classes, however luxurious, could at no time isolate them­
selves from communal life. Their palaces could not be apart or
carriages at the door. They took s hip or walked with others in
the midst of the sea . Here nature conspires also with beauty.
Even ostentation here, even flamboyant intricate adornment, are
often no less effective, no less utilitarian than a racing motor­
car. Thus, no other kind of craft but the gondola, and so, none
less beautiful, could navigate as well the narrow canals.
When the standard of St Mark's is ablaze on a Sunday in the
piazza between two Italian flags, when one notes the crack of
278 Places
the six tapering pennants in the wind like the 'gives' in the body
of a toy dragon - and the lion of St Mark is most dragon-like
with gold-scarlet archaic roar, with brazen wings and latin
speech - when one considers that this ensign was the emblem of
efficiency, foresight, strength and restraint near to the end, it is
as if some 'cunning' machine of war, some embossed and cor­
uscated cannon spitting fire from gilt lips or carved nostril, was
the better weapon, quicker than the machine gun, with longer
range than the German colossus .
But display became more and more slow and scarlet in the
a-equinous square of St Mark's. Pedestrian pomp, secular triumph
celebrated afoot with aquatic interruptions, has communicated
to the deep marbles of St Mark's an archaic, loaded dwarfish­
ness, witness of the priest-like, ephor-like Doges in solemn
perambulation. Nevertheless these same Doges, and very likely
with the horns of satin on their heads, witnessed the sailings of
the most powerful navies and richest merchant fleets in the
world, bulwarks, at times the only defence, of Europe against
the Turk. Even in the eighteenth century the Venetian navy was
still formidable. The arsenal turned out replicas of D utch and
English frigates . The m assive breakwater, the Murazzi, was built
from the Lido at a cost of twenty million Venetian lire from
1 744 to 1 75 r .

Let us for the moment be as if settled in Venice to live

continuously through the summer, predestined long before to
these waters by the dry bright winter sounds of Genoa. There is
more background, the Tuscan, for our perpetuation in the sun
this June, for our perpetuation among the palace shoals and the
out-to-sea horizons . And here on the Giudecca where the Re­
dentore is eager to echo other bells across the lagoon, where the
long plane-less hammering of caulkers sounds all day, there are
gardens towards Chioggia on the south side. Bird noises, one
burst upon another, congregate, air for stones to breathe in the
heat, given out in evening suspiration by long bass cries, by the
sudden s hattering shutting of s hops ; later, by the dizzy passage
of guitars and of slow feet. Or else the bird cries slip across the
 Venice 2 79

shallows, are lost in silence before they may beat upon the
reddish walls of San Lazzaro.
To such reciprocations and transformations the proud bands
of Genoese winter rumour h ave now proceeded. At twilight the
biggest ships funnel a way to the open Adriatic. They c arry
with them nothing of Venice : these lassitudes are not in flux.
Because the stones arranged by a thousand years of man, be­
cause the very p avements are omnipotent, rhythm remains
regular, undisturbed by the less remarkable evolutions of the
skies, here at their largest. Which is the released and releasing
sky? There is no dust in Venice. Which indeed the clouds ? All
day long bright and sombre clouds carry away the storms over
the undulating sea, conduct the in-bound draughts between . All
movements administer to the stones .
One may know this best away from the canals, at St Helena,
at Malamocco, at the Lido, because it is surprising there . Not
th at these modem buildings are beautiful . Some are hideous, but
most of them pleas ant enough in unforced reminiscence of
Venice. On the whole their contours are clean . Buildings here
too are awake while the whole heaven, wind and trees are sub­
servient. So strong the tradition of man's dominion, that it is but
necessary to put up the sign 'Viale Francesco Morosini', matt
black lettering on a matt white ground, in order to s catter the
wilderness . Modern concrete, too, can dominate waste land, also
new sto nes hammered throughout their surfaces as is the Ven­
etian tradition, causing those tiny recesses which link them
with the deep bays of St Mark's . And thus, because of Venice's
overwhelming impression, paradoxically the Lido, s paciou s and
green, whose villas are like the eyes of an owl, indifferent to the
day, p iercing the night which they assume, may give back to
one the feeling of architectural dominion if this feeling h as sunk
too deep amid the ancient fevers of Venice herself. The very
trams that grind along the Lido are unreal, barging through the
heat-haze, as sorry as cab-horses, unable to influence the habit­
able stucco and stone . The tram comes to rest, gives out a long
somnolent sigh that mingles with the happy trees. Trees are the
Venetian dogs, comp anions to man : forgotten their primeval
280 Places
savagery and forest. Natural colour is subservient, man-made
colour dominant: certainty of the houses is but the servant of
their tone and colour. All strength displays itself through
colours and their shadows .
But we are well stocked for lassitudes i n Venice where Italy
and history reach their pitch. Remembered the long s alute of
the Tuscan landscape this spring, the attentive, waterless, villas :
the up-raised loggias of those p arts, roofed like sunshades, equal
to rain and to sun, open to the fo ur winds which are withheld
except to the evening nod of cypress : loggia towers like many
moons risen on gradual valleys : white farmhouses with big
clocks, houses of noonday somnolent brightness whence the
beautiful oxen disentangle the dust from the white roads .
Poppies bloom amid the tides that set the cornfields and stiff
bamboos in delicate motion. In the height of day the s mells of
flowers and animals peruse the light air, as if nocturnal . The
early summer sits wide, but there is lightness in every line upon
the sky.
The tall windows of Italy, steep windows of Venice! And,
arrived there now, to linger through long July afternoons, to
savour the counting-house gloom dim with warmed stones,
though the windows are huge, of the typically Venetian chari­
table organization, apotheosis, as it were, of sailors' benevolent
institutions everywhere, a Scuola San Marco, a Scuola San
Rocco, a Scuola San Giovanni . . . to feel these halls now dere­
lict of their object, still gracious, still grandiose, sti ll superbly
ship-shape, to be impelled by the frescoes of Tintoretto on wall
and ceiling at San Rocco so to view them with the astonished
eyes of an orphan, a beneficiary; to have the practical intention
of such halls so long, so many centuries after, well in mind a mid
the m asterpieces, is to know most poignantly that these great
windows of black bottle glass give out upon the sea like port­
holes, is to visualize the opaque outs ide staircases as broad at
their tops as at their bottoms, the Giant's staircase in the Ducal
palace as well as the Gothic one in the courtyard in a palace at
San Toma, these and other wide stones hung between high sala
and courtyard, magnifications in stone of the rope-ladders let
down coiled and uncoiling in the active air above the sea. Man
 Genoa 28 1

would seem to climb these stairs by right of pygmy-hood, j ust as

swallows do not fail to nest in the ears of gigantic statues .
Someti me before this general magnification in stone, on
another shoal of the lagoon, at Murano, sand and water began to
petrify at the hands of the thrifty Venetians . Apart from glass
utensils and ornaments, at Veni ce, probably for the first time in
Europe, glass was used as window-p anes . The very translucence
of water was fixed to palaces affronting the sea .

[from Venice: A n A spect of Art, 1 945, pp. 1 - 1 l ]

28
Genoa

Up a pediment, up the red stucco slope I see a white dove strut­

ting, and j ust beneath that inclined eave, over the h arsh con­
fusion of p alaces, over clear and raucous harbours, black in the
window two off-duty c arabinieri swing locked in play.
The dove moves slowly up the long slope, easily through an
air riddled with noises none of them composite. The air patched
up in a moment is torn again by a pure sound. So buildings on
different levels s tand firm to inhabit the blue . No rococo fancy
can live among these pure reports from steamer and electric
train, p arched as the cries of peacocks . Sunlight adamant, with­
out garrulity, cleans the livid and dusty stone dry and fine like
the dust cloud from the collapse of a house, each particle sting­
ing the face : so that a heavy Baroque remain, the Porta Pila,
isolated amid the weary new roads and the ponds of railway
network, suggests the settling of overthrown houses and the
material for new construction.
Horizontal movement thunders minute in the immense
space about Brignoli where the new commercial house-blocks,
terrace upon terrace of them, tip up the sky. Or else some dwarf
wrinkled bit of Baroque holds up the traffic and menaces the
latest lithe and russet stuccos. The Doria gardens, once of many
degrees, now possess but the lowest level, the higher taken up
 282 Places
by the Miramare Hotel . But behind the h otel, looking into fifth­
floor bedrooms, is the gigantic statue of the Doria admiral as
Neptune.
Dry, distinct, but incessant and distraught like the streaming
of red h air, t he hair of a mad and desiccated Elisabeth - such the
general effect. But the rigidity of noise between tall buildings
sustains you . Later, in other parts of Italy, you must learn to
recognize the instantaneous concert pitch without the aid of
noise. Genoa, though, is your best introduction to space, to the
distant brought near. The very vacuity of the russet blocks in
sunlight allows you, brought swift to your surf ace by peacock
n oise, to confront the city with what i magining you choose.
Extraordinary distinctness, the exciting soberness of sheer
drops from level to level, easy apprehension of the crowning,
circumventing mountains, near, it seems, above the last range of
houses; the lofty viaduct, say, Ponte di Carignano, that strides
over tenements, others creeping thin up its sides to overlook the
track, bare tenuous brick i nstead of ivy, or lower roofs rubbing
an apex against the key-stone of an arch - i nvite imagination to
figure forth out of this crude space, especially a Roman sky-line,
heaven p opulated with statu ary, columnar sky-scrapers and
their toga-ed figu res contemplating the h arsh cascade of baths
and villas, marble p arliaments and rose terraces, forum and
temple, down to the dappled bay.
In Genova la Superba the images do not teem as at Naples,
also a city of different levels upon the h arbour. Rubbish is clean
in upper Genoa, m an makes his own earthquake as the broad
electric trains thunder over the house-tops or crash into the
wide embrace of white p anicky tunnels; or as the trams of the
via Garibaldi which push you into a Baroque orange courtyard
fumigated with petrol from the street, make rattle against the
stone hollow, without give, until after their p assage crumbling
yet immaculate specks of dust record the detonation like unre­
pentant tears their evocative.
And lest the reader should feel that I introduce some i mage of
New York with so much insistence on height over h orizonta l
movement, let me quickly add that the buildings are rec­
tangular, rising to no peak but shouldering the sky, windows
 Genoa 28 3

long and distributed on the side of the mountain - let me quickly

add that the noise, the restlessness of Genoa are ancient as its
Gothic tone, its hard finery; that the modern blocks are built
previous to the s treets which they determine, that they are
looming with space between, themselves in conformation with
the curves and steepness of the slopes, each building of mu­
nicipal regulation height, seven storeys, so that this measure is
seen a-jostle at all angles, blocks remarkable for their equality
in perspective carried to great distance in the clear light, and for
the dramati c spaces between them which dusk snatches tremu­
lous, night forgotten but for its breeze that lifted the dark foli­
age of orange trees at basement and roof and public arbour - it
must be quickly added that dusty Genoa is smokeless, gleam­
ing, broken by country ·walls and scaleable piazze upon each of
which sounds a different gong of peacock noise, that palms
watered with sirocco spread over embankments upon railroads
arid of smoke. Shadow and light seem interminable as the trains
run smoothly under and o ver the houses, so m any rivulets of
steel as to make their pond at Principe beneath the old light­
house which searches the early morning trams, beneath the
f urther Miramare, beneath again the Doria giant at the back,
from the station platform seen above, n aked in the cameo of his
grotto, s hould you be able to arrest your eyes at the middle
distance.
One image of Genoa is not at all arbitrary. I have hinted that
Italian reference to the sea is not direct but yet more profound
than in Northern countries, as· if unconscious . Proud Genoa, his­
toric emblem as m uch as Venice of sea-power in Italy, herself is
the pattern of a vessel. I do not intend anything so far-fetched as
the shape of the town seen from an aeroplane. I am thinking of
the old city by the harbour, gloomy, narrow, loaded and gut­
tered like the hold of a ship; then the emergence into space
about the main thoroughfares, and then above, reduplications
of levels like poops and superstructure o ver the deck, and
above, the long line o f tall tenements which catch all the stac­
cato noises like wireless upon the masts, w ashing and telegraph
wires making the strands. Thus Genoa's pride is expressed by
turmoil. Like a ship she is now hollow, now replete, con-
2 84 Places
stitutiona lly prepared for p atching and mending and for the
raucous vibration of engines . A ship h as stateliness to its very
bowels ; distra ught red hair was but the wind whistling p ast.
Like a sailor to the rigging you will take to the pleasures of the
house-tops and the different levels . You stumble over refuse, you
have dis appeared up alleys of towering p ainted walls tha t float
in the gloom, to emerge on a n open place of bright stucco, beg­
g ars and churches i n the sun, light i n which things stand . . .

[from The Q uattro Cento, 1 9 3 2, pp. 4 1-3 ]

29

Ports

Even the port of London has its Mediterranean aspect, where at

W apping or Limehouse the stout warehouses are steeped in the
river. The Genoa-like pass ages between them are narrow and
tall : at their ends you emerge into the light and into the open,
discover a n array of steps, or a quay that locks the river i n a

seething stone or brick embrace. The stones retain a n equal

w armth if the sun is out, an equ a l radiance that contrasts with
the polyp-like elongations and contra ctions of the water's glassi­
ness.
The water never palls against the stone: the radiant cause­
way swarms . Water and builded stone vivify the one the other;
th ey are at peace. The certainty of man-placed stones contracts
the ocean's awfulness . In the port, i t i s a s if the seas had been
sifted and winnowed : upon the tall mole we can admit and gaze
at their depth . Nothing is kinder to the ephemeral movements,
the ephemeral reflections, refractions and shadows of water
than the even-lighted masonry; no materi a l less stalwart would
provide such vivid opportunities to the water's reflective
tri cks .
Amid the h urly-burly of the port there exists the wideness of
all space i n miniature, the Mediterranean spaciousness or dis­
tinctness. In the harbour world of stone and water - this open,
 Ports 285

flat, world of different levels - there exist the broad angles

which airs and winds c aress , there exist the means of pro­
menade, of convers ation, of taking the evening leis urely : there
are stanchions and rails and other significant shapes, stations for
human attitude : there exists the s cenery for gesture. Acoustic is
plain in echo. Without mutual interruption, sounds glide to and
fro like gulls . Bells from the towers of the upper town, or from a
church reached by steps from the quay, plumb with their peals
the h arbour's breadth and depth.
However great its merchandise, the port is a haven, a repose, a
meas urer of passing things . The sun moves round, warming in
turn those m ammoth recording dials, the moles and quays,
which the well-travelled waters lap . The scene is animated but
steadfast. At night the waters are the dial. They show a shimmer­
ing rod or a hesitant p atch of light. We can hardly discern the
quays : we hear against them the home waters as they weigh us
down carefully with the heavy finery of sleep.
What looks more apprehensive than the whiter stones before
a storm, at the moment when the fall of l ivid ripplets against
beach or mole is a distinct and almost shattering sound? This
horizontal world of m asonry and moving water is the ideal set�
ting for the perpendicular rain and for the lightning. The storm
passes, the dampened stones remain : even the waters are be­
mused and deaf to the wind. Ourselves along the wharves, per­
pendicular as the forest of m asts upon the ships, appear
intensely human : o ur houses stand up well above the port to
which each alley leads .

[from Stones of Rimini, 1 9 34, pp. 2 1 -2]

Autobiographical
30

Childhood

Going down the hill one morning towards Lancaster Gate, my

eldest brother remarked on an orange cloud in a dark sky : a

thundercloud, he said. And sure enough, that afternoon there

was a thunderstorm . At nearby Stanh ope Gate, an old woman
sold coloured balloons. It was as if the lot had burst. I think I
remember well this small event s ince it symbolizes an excep­
tional h appening. For once the glowering suspense, the feeling
of things h ardly redeemed, was contradicted by a menace that
came to violent fruition. The thing was done and finished with :
the storm h appened and passed, and the small orange cloud h ad
shown it was to happen . None of the other omens I can remem­
ber was either read or fulfilled as was this . The year would be
1 908 or so, when I was six.
I used to single out the cars i n the processional traffic on the
road round the Park, and count them. Their cautious, noisy ex­
plorations without an objective, \vithout a n arrival point, a
trundling round the Park, helped to create the atmosphere of
grinding suspense. Meanwhile, beyond the cruel railings, the
scarlet horse-buses with Tatcho advertisements plunged down
Bayswater Road. The railings were cruel, I think, because of the
tramps who sat on seats outside, in waste-paper and drowsy filth :
and whatever was railed within the Park, suggested a burning­
cold, a searing prohibition against those who would slink away
into the iron ivyness of copse or plantation . Other single railings
were isolated in the open p arts of the Park. Their usefulness
would seem to be confined to that of a threat against the
couples who blundered in the dark, choosing an exposed and
therefore isolated p lace in which to l ie. There seemed to be no
love i n that love-making. To the small boy, the immersed, in­
rolled couple suffered from a still greater poverty than did the
single drunks who slumbered face to the sky. The evil was pov­
erty, not crime or drink. Poverty itself was destructive . Dirt,
290 A u to bio9raphical

s mell and the bleary eye, all, to my mind, smart and noisome
activities, were the predominant performances of poverty.
I was forbidden to sit on the seats with complicated cast-iron
sides frequented by the destitute . Nevertheless, regarding these
seats as forlorn homes, I was fascinated, not only by the danger
imputed to them, an infection, as it were, of poverty, but by the
possibility of constant acts of restitution . I would therefore i m­
plore my governess, in spite of the ban, to use these seats ; and I
would get behind, between the low railing at the side of the
walk and the back of the seat, and i m agine th at I was making
this last refuge, for all the bareness of board and of cold, j arring
contortion of cast-iron, to 'work', whether as a ship or car or
whatever purposeful vessel took my fancy.
The u n derneath of the seat, at any rate, was my discovery,
this space between the seat and the low rail in front of the grass ,
almost roofed by the sloping of the seat's b ack. Those who h ad
forbidden it, had not examined that side . Could I keep the
undernea th alive and thus c ause t he ani m ation of the whole?
This occasional g an1e helped me very little to endow the Park
and its inhabitants with health. There were vaster engines than
my seat which I could not control. The machine house of the
fountains, for i nstance, had an ominous air. A scour of mys­
terious steam hung over a sunken tank at the back of the engine
house and was apprehended at the s ame time as the smell of oil
and the clanking of the lethal cylinders . The cold and grind­
ing mechanism was housed in Portland stone of a l ate Victorian
style, both white and darkened. The fountains themselves had
little grace owing to the pretentiousness of every detail of the
stone lay-out . Moreover, the smell of decay was freshened by
the sprayed water that dropped like pellets on the surf aces of
the basins . Surplus water from the final basin po ured away into
the Long Water. Here was the inky-dark medium of the Park
suicides . My governess and I used to read outside the Park police
station the notices recounting, in the hope of further i nfor­
m ation which brought a reward (printed in l arge letters), all the
crimes that h ad recently occurred, chiefly suicides in the Ser­
pentine. A police description of a de ad body exactly expressed
my predominant i mpression of the Park as a whole . Yet I did
 Childh ood 29 r

not altogether give up hope of i nfusing these remnants with life.

I would return again and again to the fountains and hope
against hope that the engine-house activity would spell out
s omething good . It was indeed worse when, as so often, the
fountains were not working and the water licked the lichened
sides more blackly without the bombardment of pellets . To see
the fountains turned on - as I often did - was a fine sight, since
the spouts grew from a trickle to an inch, to a foot, to a yard,
finally rea ching a great height, sustained there by an eager,
pumping pulse : at the summit, rainbow colours could be dis­
cerned : a thin elegant summit sometimes torn by the wind but
formed again immediately . The wind might tear off the whole
summit or bend the column like a tree, but the compensating
power returned in the end. This entirely mechanical restitution
did not please me : the power behind i t was blind, exa ct and
faithless in the sense that it did not deal in faith . Perhaps,
indeed, the relentless mounting of the fountains when they were
turned on, propel led by each stroke of the very extensive
engine, was really most frightening to me.
The fountains played. Dirty children rushed from basin to
basi n : suspicious park-keepers stalked their antics, generally
from afar. The keepers had boxes scattered in the Park, so that
their emergence could have something of the suddenness associ­
ated with the paratroop whose landing h as not been observed.
The keepers carried whistles. Emergence from a telephone
booth is always asso ciated by me with the fingering of some­
thing tucked away on one side of the chest, a cold, punishing
little organ that it was a positive duty to handle. When a Park
whistle was blown near the fountains, the shrill sound seemed
to travel on an ea gle journey, piercing the water pellets whose
clattering was considerable . In fact, you had to shout to make
yourself heard near the fountains .
We called the elderly ragamuffins and tramps of the Park,
'parkees'. I had wandered away from my nurse who was chat­
ting on the walk above the fountains. Among the basins I was
seized by a p a ck of parkees an d my shouts could not be heard
even a few feet away. I managed to break loose - I had the
wooden handle of a push-cart with me - and regained the nurse
29 2 Au tobiographical

who had noticed nothing . In spite of my remembrance, I have

little doubt that no such actual thing happened. Probably the
con text existed; parkees spoke to me and I h ad been warned
against such intercourse by having the fear of being kidnapped
instilled in me . But a kind of feud was invented. When the
nurses and their children congregated, I would glance across at
the other encampment of mothers and poor children and tramp
women who seemed to watch every straying movement : and
perhaps, well armed with a stick, I would run half-way in their
direction, testing the evil in comparative safety.
Sometimes the positions of the opposing camps would be re­
versed. We would be in the fountains, and the less intent
parkees (since they always inhabited these seats) would be the
objects of apprehension as they sat on a stone seat with a
curious round termination on the walk above, or in the hig h,
disproportionate alcove on the hill, down from Victoria Gate.
The tall, disproportionate a lcove, shallow, high and cold, with
toddlers squirming on a low brown seat, was, and is today
(though it be attributed to Wren), an image to me of blindness.
This kind of ethical ugliness in the use of a classical form, par­
ticularly the cruel denial of shadow or depth in proportion to
the height, afflicted me to such an extent that I think it h as
helped me in later life to find good architecture to be a par­
ticular symbol of life . Nearly all the monuments and buildings
in the Park, including the fountains, professed for me the same
cruel discrimination.
It was little better with the forms of life abounding on the
lake, or with the dogs allowed to race and bounce about for a
liverish hour, or led to lamp-post or rail on a lead. Obscenely
different in size, they fought each other, raced and wrestled. In
conj unction with the drawing-room salutations of their owners,
their curiosity about each other appeared p articularly morbid.
The animal world seemed a sheer imp ortation, a waywardness
controlled with distaste and severity.
It was the same with the birds, largely fed by hand. An old
man would be feeding sparrows . Their hopping and twittering
and mass scurries of flight seemed to express his own accumu­
lated evasions.
 Childhood 293

There were the peacocks which could be watched between

the bars of the railings at the side of the Long Water. These dis­
consolate birds would sometimes spread a tail. A keeper fed them
and to him was attributed all the powers of their control.
Yet occasionally, at times of post-luncheon winter sunsets,
there was an atmosphere of Nature in the Park. Smoke from
bonfires and a decreasing light suggested some limit to control,
and the yelling of peacocks from a nook surprisingly distant,
dislodged for a time an imputed curriculum.
Nevertheless, the ducks and other water-fowl seemed no less
chained than the sparrows upon the neat paths. There are two
gaps by the side of the Long Water, where the railings and
concealing shrubbery cease, where the path comes to the edge
of the water. In these two small bays the ducks are visited and
fed. Even here, there is a kind of fencing, though it is in the
water. The ducks enter through gaps . The shore is edged by a
sloping stone kerb. A thin line of scum, feathers, soot, twigs,
laves the lower edge of the rough stones which above are
wetted by the slitherings of those ducks who land to be fed.
Sometimes, too, there is a collection of geese with pin-cushion
foreheads, needle eyes and evident ill-temper. The easy floating
of the birds on water causes the uneasy trundling and shooting
necks of the birds ashore to appear painful. The swans par­
ticularly look broad and gross in this shore wrangling for
crumbs . The eyes of all the birds seem to pierce their heads as
the keepers' whistles pierce the fountains' spray. They have
their home upon an island in the Serpentine where at night they
may be self-governing, though watched, as it were, by the mono­
tonous sentry duty of the traffic in Knightsbridge.
The swans I knew to be fierce. There were stories of a blow
from a wing smashing a man's leg and of the uselessness of an
opened umbrella as a guard. Sometimes they moved on the
water with ruffled plumage . Once, in minatory Edwardian
stateliness, a swan was seen sitting on a nest below the foun­
tains, just to the side of the dangerous overflow from the foun­
tains into the Long Water, a miniature eddying waterfall whose
downward suction or pull was challenged, but not refuted, by
the even keel of the giant bird sitting on her dry nest.
294 Au tobiographical
J ust as in the case of the parkees, when I was older and able
to row a boat I used to come as close as I dared to this waterfall­
termination of the Long Water. The flow, in fact, was small. But
the dangers of the Park as a whole could not thus be dis­
proved.
Where did the water go? At the other end of the l ake there
was a low white bridge whose severa l arches were perhaps not
more than a foot above the level of the water. Did the water
flow away here, where even a swimmer, still less a boat,
could not penetrate the mystery? This white stone bridge had
a certain grace : the exceedingly low arches, however, were
associated in my mind with a challenge to any inquisitive
and anxious head whether of water-fowl or man, who tried to
share the fate, whatever it might be, of the water beyond the
Serpentine.
On the further s ide of the white bridge there was a sharp
declivity and a high though meagre w aterfall. I don't think I
connected this water with a flow from the Serpentine . Later, I
was to hear that most of the Serpentine water passed under­
ground and came up in the p ark of B uckingh am Palace. I was to
be told that the Serpentine could be drained, that everything
flung into it could be brought to light. All the miseries of the
torn, attacked and divided mother without me and within, she
who was the Park and all th at happened there, to be known,
controlled and restored? No wonder that in many later inquiries
I h ave sought for the cle a n sweep . I h ave h ad an absurd faith in
the efficacy of generalization and, at times, a neurotic s ub­
servience to the behests of an apparent logic . By this would-be
control I have been s ubservient to the s ame relentless animus
that informed, to my mind, the face of the Park.
The Park, of course, was not the first desolation but it i s the
one I remember first, the setting down in the external world of
the sum of earlier desolations . Nature, i n man and beast and
flower, was a thing chained and divided . It would seem that
each blade of grass, s melling of London even when it grew rank­
est, could be examined. There were no weeds Sheep left drop­
pings on the grass, left them there, so i t appeared, j us t as
towards sunset some living bundle of rags would seem to be left
 Childh ood 295

forlorn on a green chair for the use 0£ which a penny should

have been paid.
It was not usual for us to sit on these chairs . If we did, often
the ticket collector would come unseen from behind us, cutting
across the grass with a town gait, with his roll of tickets and his
clippers moving loosely in front of him like a sporran . This ship
of the Park was another examining agent.
Banked-up by gardeners, flowers were viewed through rail­
ings, a splendent array in spring near Victoria Gate, j ust in front
of the dogs ' cemetery of which you could obtain one glance
from the top of a bus bound for Queen's Road. Between you and
the military rows of flowers was a wide grass verge and a high
railing. Nearby there was a rustic cottage. In the course of time
I grew very curious concerning this and other cottages, and a
well-sized house in the middle of Kensington Gardens . I bad
never s een anyone go in or come out, but most delicious wood
smoke was often climbing from the chimneys . These cottages
and their small enclosed gardens, far more than the Park grass
or the trees or the flowers, suggested to me the open country,
unknown to me except from the landscapes I saw from the
train window on the way to the seaside. Later I used to imagine
myself inhabiting the h ouse in the middle of Kensington
Gardens; walking the Park in the early morning, watching the
dawn and later seeing the lines of trees, an unspoilt natural
panorama ; living in the country in the middle of London . From
adolescence onwards I did what I could with my i magination to
restore the Park. Standing at the Round Pond, I looked across
the Long Water and conj ured up the vista of an eighteenth­
century p ark, a royal park having no essential connection with
the lives of children .
But it was dust-laden; every blade of grass was discerned for
a metropolitan purpose. The sheep would leave wool on trees, a
dubious trail in a well-known spot on all sides of which London
traffic roared. In summer there \Vas the clipping and a branding
and a dip, down near the police station . The startled s horn
bodies suggested a tou ch of extreme 'nature', a nakedness, an
exhibitionism, even, a su dden p roduction of the pale body, a
child's amorous game, a suicide, a thousand little boys running
296 A u tobio9raphical

nude into the Serpentine on a hot summer evening, allied some­

how with the world of correctitude, railings and park-keepers;
with parkees and violent dirt, no less .
And so, the candles of the bea utiful chestnut trees were sul­
lied and dangerous, in my eyes . Only the countless blossom of
may trees with their sweet dusty town smell, seemed poised and
without potential disaster. In a polite and a young form the
bloom of these trees was the microcosm of the continent of
endless brick where hope lay among the clustered varied chim�
ney pots. I remember picnics under may trees near Victoria
Gate : I remember the brown osier lunch basket with osier pin
like a giant hat pin, and the contents spread on the tame grass .
Two older girls with their nurses used to join our party of three
brothers and a nurse. Sylvia had a reddish face and Enid was pale,
with freckles, green eyes and loµg legs . A s aga about parkees
was begun at those picnics . Heat glittered beyond the tossed-up
may trees in flower; between the trees traffic glinted, seen from
the eye-level of the grass . This circular flow of traffic served as a
kind of watchful coasting on the fringes of conscious ness : at
times, also, as vehicles which carried correspondence to the
deeper depths of the mind, bringing thence the matter for new
affinities . And yet this upward, as it were, and downward move­
ment was expressed by a steady low-lying motion along a flat
surface. There is p leasure, there is life, when movement, p ar­
ticularly even movement in space, when the outward world at
large, takes for us the form of the j agged, shifting promontories
of the mind. It is notable, however, that the first glimpse of the
sea, that closer parallel to the tossing mind, has a meaning of
limitless release : and words wrested from a life at sea ring true
of the mind.
As I walked at the side of the traffic from the bridge over the
Serpentine to Victoria G ate, the extended movement of vehicles
would express for me the hostile, unforgiving expanse of the
sky. To the left there was rough ground \Vith a deep ditch, the
railed boundary between the Park and Kensington Gardens .
The rough ground just beyond the ditch epitomized the
depth of frustration and hostility. It was here, I think, after my
brothers h ad gone to school, that I tried to m ake casual friends
 Childhood 297

by joining to kick a football . Also, at the end of this bit of

ground, by the path going down to the fountains, I had con­
fronted a little girl with a doll-like face called Helen who was
the sister of a boy at my kindergarten . I longed to get to know
her. I think there were rows and fights with possible friends on
this piece of ground, the scene of failures in early attempts at
sociability . For me, other children, like the rest of the furniture
of the Park, were objects of potential danger. Any difference in
upbringi ng and in routine indicated a lost sou l : for I was wrapt
by the prohibitions and rituals in which I w as educated and in
terms of whic h I still hoped to m ake ultimate restitution. Pro­
jected on to the face of the Park a nd there apprehended, the
struggle \Vas ugly, torn, stern, harrowed and dirtied, redeemed
slightly - and here figured a half-concealment of the most pro­
found anxiety - by a morbid melodrama .
I was a happy boy. By that I mean th at both elders and con­
temporaries have told me that I gave them the impression of
being h appy, healthy, energetic . From my parents I h ad love
and great care . There were occasional s creaming fits, I am told,
when I used to shout without end, 'I want it all right. '
What did I want put right? I had best s a y the Park, since there
is very little else th at I remember either of the pleasure or the
pain . The Park I remember wel l .
I shall soon try to give a picture of the other side of this
predomi nant state but in a s ubsequent form . I shall show how a
good mother was finally constructed, i n the external world a s
wel l as in myself. Art has played an i mportant role. This i s
perhaps foreshadowed by my vain scrutiny of the monuments
i n the Park : the giant Achilles statue at Hyde Park Corner,
for instance, and, later, the Watts equestrian s tatue in the
middle of the Long Walk. I had h igh hopes of the Watts be­
c ause i t was new ; I remember it veiled and then unveiled.
Such figures were to me stern yet i mpotent; figures of a father,
then, w ho both attacked and h ad been attacked. These statues
attempted to affront the sky yet they were recipients of fog, of
bird droppings and of soot : they seemed unconnected with .light.
The Albert memori al was of the category, with vain groupings
and pseudo-sacred steps. Here was a great fuss about solid
298 Au tobioyraphical

matter; here was a thing of arrest \Vhich, unlike the prohibiting

railings, protested as well as forba de. It took m any years for me
to discover that art was not a kind of warning. What else was to
be made of the sharp, pa le, granite obelisk i n the Long Walk,
with the one word 'Alma ' , with two steps and a platform edged
by a decorous iron chain?
I think it might h a ve been different if I had been allowed to
approach Kensington Palace, the sunken Dutch garden and the
Orangery. The only time I saw the Orangery, at the age of eight
or nine, I was much impressed. For some reason, probably a fear
of infection in an enclosed space, this p art of the gardens was
rigorou sly out-of-bounds. Perhaps because of this, still more be­
ca use of the deep impression of the Orangery and its mild his­
toric associations, the extreme limits of Kensington Gardens on
the west side h a d magic for me : so m uch so, that I found it
difficu lt to decide where were the exact limits . A sense of the
infinite informed this very restricted space to the east of
Kensington Park Gardens . The wall was high, but gardens
stretched on the further side : termination came gently. In the
shadow of that mysterious wall there lay a flat green where
organized games were played of a different order from the hap­
h azard kicking of a ball in the body of the Park . I thought of
this piece of ground a s outside the Park, yet at the s ame time,
inside it, like a historical association pursued i nto the present. I
was later to take great comfort i n history, as if the things of the
Park, as if all that w:as c arried inside my mind, could be pinned
down, arranged, comprehended .
Meanwhile the traffic circulated without the Park and within.
All existed in suspense, and in pieces, yet stuck together. My
suffering was a t least magnified by the Edwardian centre of
Empire.
Th e best epitome of massive, meticulous incoherence pro­
vided by the Park, was the Magazine at the end of the Ser­
pentine bridge. Explosive povvder stood stored in this building
of grey brick . A sentry always marched o utside, and for all
I kno\v, does so to this day. Potentia l murder and death were
guarded with careful pageantry. Except for the sentry's footfall
there was a silence about the place, the seat of the greatest
 Childh ood 299

potential noise. Those stronger w alls held the greater danger. I

delighted i n the sentry : I delighted i n all soldiers. He was con­
trolling the explosive powers within by his drilled movements .
What I remember most would seem to belong to autumn and
winter. But singing of birds, in spring especially, the bursting
buds on the trees, were not unnoticed: even a certai n ecstasy i n
the air i n early spri ng . The heart was not freed for long : the
overlay of town s mell and dirt, the very encouragement by the
onlooker of pastoral things, denied them a reality that was s u­
preme. Railings, decorous i ron chains and p ark-keepers con­
trolled s uch marionettes. I did not know the power of the earth .
A row of hyacinths growing at Victoria Gate were ' fixed' there
by the authorities like the diminuti ve cockade in the top-hat of
the coachman-like keeper of the Gate. And there was no h or­
izon, no horizon at any time.
I associate Kensington Gardens most of all with years before I
was s ix, Kensington G ardens rather than Hyde Park. From the
time I w as three until I was six, we had a very strict governess, a
most p atriotic Irish lady. If shoelaces came undone while out
for a walk, there would be no j a m for tea : if they again came
undone, no cake either. Thi s penalty fell parti cularly on my
second elder brother to c atch whom it was doubtless designed. I
don't remember that it happened to me : nevertheless to this day
I am extremely bad at improvising knots. After my brothers had
gone to boarding school, Miss Drew was dismissed for mal­
treating me, so it is s aid, i n the Park . My mother has since told
me that she had a letter from someone who witnessed the bad
temper. I remember nothing about it: indeed, I remember little
about Miss Drew except that s he h ad a w atch i n the shape of a
sword pinned to her breast, that s he had moods of vivacity as
well as of hot temper and that she painted p ictures of battle­
ships i n moonlight.
After Miss Drew's time, the s cene i s more especially Hyde
P ark. My next caretaker was a Miss H arley, a morbidly religious
m iddle-aged woman. Miss Drew had also been religious, a Cath­
olic . But now I was alone, without my brothers, as if the war
were already starting a nd the Edwardi an world were already
crashing.
300 Autobiographical
I had myself rea d in the Old Testament and had been deeply
i mpressed by the effrontery ' shown by one side or the other in
every issue, and by the venomous consequences. Miss Harley
used to sing me hymns . She was for me the Salvation Army of
morbid streets and morbid walks. Even the Park sheep looked
wicked and guilty, particularly the sheep, poor, smelly and
sniffing. There was, I think, no talk of Christ. Perhaps it was
forbidden since I was to be brought up as a simple theist at
most. An essentially bachelor omnipresence, then, a bachelor
blood-and-thunder, lay upon the slight hill beyond the Rotten
Row, seared with paths like slow rolling tears of shame. He was
a kind man - I understood that - this witness of all Park love­
making, sexua l crimes and suici des, the magi ci an among park­
keepers as he proved himself to be in the garden of Eden or in
speaking from bushes, or in h urling stone tablets out of the
c louds . 'Am I my brother's keeper?' C ain had said. That was a
wicked, frightened joke of Cain' s .
'Time like an ever-rolling stream, bears all her sons away .' We
used to sing that hymn, the thin sounds torn by the wind. I h ad
never seen a rolling stream . I thought of it a s the low thunder of
the London traffic. And Time was the gloomy sky over the Park,
which , by turning into night, bore a w ay the soiled fretfulness
of all h appenings there e a ch day. The Park monuments, then,
especially the would-be works of art, possessed in my eyes an
almost masochist quality in their utter poverty; impotent under
the lash of Time, borne away ea ch night to build their grimy
ugliness anew each dawn. Between Marble Arch and Albion
Gate there is a kind of Gothic steeple whose function is to pro­
vide several vents of drinking water. To this globuled mon­
strosity in p articular I attributed a horrible masochism . There
lingered no romance in its poverty nor in the poor frequenters;
and as I was not allowed to drink such public water, I shunned it
for being something blind and grey. Here stood no source, no
spring . . . . It is horrible that a flow of w ater, thin though the
trickle, should come to represent a blindness.
But more than this . Except for that all-seeing eye, everything
was blind, a skein of unseeing veins and sodden skin. Where
were the eyes of those motor cars, those a utomobiles (under
 Childhood 30 1

the crushed-down Renault bonnets), those vehicles of Time

itself? Vision, as wel l as Design, lay in the effortless sky
alone.
I had the makings of a true a nd terrible fanatic for whom a
single string of argument could trap the whole u niverse : I was
later at one with the more inhuman speakers at Marble Arch . At
another period every secret of the universe was contained for
me on the walls of a big bookshop .
There were, however, rare moments when the purlieus
known to me had stature. They were moments of pageantry
preceded by weeks of preparation. 1 9 1 0 was the year of Edward
VII's funeral, 19 1 l of George V's coronation. I saw both pro­
cessions . What stays in mind were the long thin festive poles
swathed i n s carlet c loth, tipped with golden spear-heads, that
lined both sides of Bayswater Road. Even railings were tipped
with gilt. It was not the gaudiness so much as the picking out of
features, the s light rearrangement of the London forgetfulness,
which gave the s treet a life to me. I saw, as it were, for the first
time that Bayswater Road was a thoroughfare : some kind of
plan appeared. But for a long time to come, apart from extreme
religious fears especially for those I loved, I relied principally on
the reading of history to reveal some connection i n the sur­
roundi ng s cene.
The coronation brought soldiers to the Park; thousands were
encamped. A year or two before, Miss Harley had been s u c­
ceeded by a Swiss, French-speaking governess, Mathilde. I think
s he must h ave been a fairly normal girl. She brought a home­
sick warmth. But the Park held sway, and when we ate a rasp­
berry cream-filled chocolate bar w hi ch I had been forbidden,
sitting in the Park on one of the forbidden s eats , my pleasure
was not entirely sweet. I remember particularly some bedroom
slippers on which had been spilt a n extremely sticky spread
which I liked, called Frame food j elly. This sweetness in the
wrong place was agonizing. I used to wear those s lippers be­
cause the nursery stood over my parents' bedroom and my
father, at that time, l ay fighting for h is life although his i mmedi­
ate death had_ been prophesied by doctors who were crowding
the house. Later, he was to watch in a dressing-gown through
302 A utobioyraphical

racing glasses, the distant passage of the King's funeral, seen in

the distance from the balcony of the house.
Both Mathilde and I worshipped the soldiers. For a time I
clung to military pomp and discipline as a 'solution' of the Park
and i ts environs . In earlier years I had tried to order the universe
by the arranging of lead soldiers. If one fell I was i nconsolable.
And so, the face of the Park came in part to be symbolized by
a hybrid image of soldiers in scarlet j ackets and by Marble Arch
orators standing on soap-boxes . At this time, Mathilde and I
sought the press of the crowd, i n Rotten Row on a Sunday
morning or around the bandstand of a summer evening. I h ave a
p ictorial, almost a Renoir-like, im age - the only one - of those
times, based, I have little doubt, on much later experiences. For
i t i s n ight, a dark, still night with rain i n the a ir. The speakers at
Marble Arch are lit with their torches; the outer fringe of whisp­
pering couples are lit by the l amps. Where i t is dense the crowd
is dark. Hats are i n silhouette, so too the railings behind the
speakers . Beyond, unwhispering grass is black except where a

beam of light turns an outer fringe to emerald, the tired-smell­

ing grass that otherwise would h ave been long obscured.
A soldier i n a red tunic detaches h imself from the crowd,
takes the path a cross the P ark, probably making for Knights­
bridge barracks. I watch him going between the far-flung
lamps, making for the centre of the Park and, s o it seems, for
the centre of the n ight since the Park symbolizes all . I watch
him go, getting less s carlet. Steadied by the lamps, my thoughts
follow him i nto an immense space; for he has reached the open
space where the enfolding pulse of the traffic is best felt. The
lights, both near and distant, stare : an i ron urge is to be attri­
buted both to the soldier and to the preacher. Once and for all, I
now put up the railings inside myself. I h ave an inspired feeling
of Destiny, of Duty. I will follow out the most exacting i nner
imperative. With consistent dutiful fire I will equal the coldness
and steadiness of the lamps : with a certain inner talisman I shall
part the murmuring London sea : I shall prolong a selfless p ath
with such resolution that the astonishing hideous pile of the
Hyde Park Hotel, so often figuring on the limits of vision, shall
fall defeated below man's horizon . . .
 C�ildhood 303

Mathilde and I sought the crowds. Cross, genteel s cents

became fa miliar to me of a Sunday morning. The s cene was shot
with violent colou r, of soldiers or perh aps of rhododendra . I
think I attributed to these strong colours the power to strike, to
hit out with the power of a dazzling wing.
We would often go to feed the ducks, either in the Long
Water or in the Serpentine, taking b ags of stale bread. I was
a\vare of the possibilities of a certain ritual in the throvving of
bread on the waters . The crumbs bobbed about and soaked;
whereas the stale dry bread, p articul arly the brown, I found
very appetizing. It made me hungry; I gru dged the food to the
ducks . However, i n the feeding, the inte rest partly lay i n trying
to a rrange for the ducks, or for any m isguided bird on the out­
ski rts, to have a share . Geese and baleful swans were the
enemies . The ducks \Vere defenceless and kind-hearted, u n­
mackintoshed mothers fed on sodden c rumbs . Their sur­
rounding water looked extremely desolate . Sparrows were at
our feet, gulls in the air.
There was no haze of delight in this rapacious hunger. Fin­
ally, the empty bag h aving been burst, the paper was put to bob
on the murkv water in a ccordance with the wind . The walk
�

home was marked by the p assage u nderneath the Serpentine

bridge . The dirty echoi ng tunnel with i ts l ingering airs was cold
at all times of the year. It was as if the pass age lay beneath the
dark \Yater, here at its deepest according to a n otice of warning.
A dog would be barking like Cerberus . In view of the thun­
derous echoes, additiona l heads wou ld h ave been i n keeping.
I think to this obscene hole I attributed the home of the
animus th at tore the body of the Park to shreds; the p arkee
spirit th at made the Park poor, hungry, desol ate .

Each man invents a myriad states to counter his inferno . They

exist abreast of the i nferno; compensations, m itigations, tran s­
ferences, controls, stern deletions, rep arations . A nd so i t has
been with me . I have already referred to some of the priority
repairs, as i t were, by whi ch a n i mmediate patching-up was
attempted. But a truly exacting person, a nxious to discover a
reparation of even the s mallest detail, i s likely to construct a
304 Autobiographical
state parallel to that by which inferno is summed. And indeed,
it is the' initial imputation, in such a strong degree, of
emotional states to the external world, inferno or paradiso or
both at once, that characterizes the person who will primarily
be an artist, even w hen childhood is p assed. In this, however, I
do not think he is peculiar, but only extreme and exa cting in
the use of a compulsion commensurate with his anxiety.
Another tunnel, a long railway tunnel, the Mont Cenis, was
the approach to the counter-lands cape, to the rested mother, to
love and life. This tunnel was the approach; not the centre of
the lands cape, but a symbol of rebirth .
On the near side of the tunnel there h a d been the Parisian
evening, a wide glow, a width beyond \vhat I knew . Then the
rush through the night, the shriek of engines, like those of pea­
cocks, through the ancient towns of Burgundy . They banished
for me t he engine cries of Victoria heard in Hyde Park, noises
which at night h a d seemed deliberately to hollow an oblong
trough of w hite upon the dark.
The Swiss mountains pointed a way in the morning . The
pines too had the mountainous brow, the mountainous gesture,
ranged in loftier and loftier perspective, many-armed as Siva,
plated with snow.
I was prepared for Italy : I h a d been preparing from an early
time. At the age of seven, in the years of Mathilde, I had gone to
a day s chool . After a few terms, I s tarted Latin grammar. I had
learned from Mathilde a little Fren c h but my imagination had
not been moved. I was fascinated immediately by Latin . I knew
one word the first day - mensa, a table - and how to decline it. I
was fascinated, deeply s tirred : I can remember the s cene of that
first lesson, w here I s at, where the desks were, where the man­
telpiece was. Not that I have any gift for languages; yet I
possess the image of this declension of the word 'mensa' on the
first day of L atin, taught by a Miss Brown whom I liked. Of the
"
table, for the table, by the table, each expressed by one simple
word. The genitive case was the possessiveness of a simple
love.
It is a scrubbed, s turdy, deal kitchen table, very bright : the
fact that it is solid, that it stands on the floor, is beautiful. The
 Childh ood 305

mensa table - or rather, a nexus of such experience, since i t i s

most unlikely to h ave been in isol ation - was a revolution in my
life, an i mage the ' feel' of which corresponds with an adult
i mage of a s i mple table prepared for an al fresco meal, the
family midday meal under a fig tree, with a fiasco of wine on
the table, olives, a cheese and bread. With one word I possessed
in embryo the Virgilian scene; a robust and gracious mother
earth .
Although I continued to love Latin, and later Greek, until I
c ame through the Mont Cenis, I did not repeat this experience
so vividly .
Even as a small child I took p arti cular note of barrel-organs,
of their effect upon the neighbourhood. If their tunes were no
s ubsti tute for the mensa experience yet somehow they had a

connection with it; an i nterest, i t would seem, in another Italy,

in the Baroque Italy.
From what I have attributed to the traffic i n Hyde Park it will
be obvious that I found i n s o un d a most effective qualification
of the visual world. A street became inform ed for me by the
sounds of a barrel-organ. Everything h a d a new angle of light
upon it, a new a rrangement with a centre pulsating l ike a heart.
Thus the street was not only organized; it became an organism,
it c a me alive . The images of dismemberment and anxious ar­
idity that haunted me were not i n this way dissipated : but an
element of drama, even of 'healthy' catastrophe, was a relief.
Aided by the pictures on my father's cigar boxes and on the
barrel-organ and by visits to the p antomime, that distant, ang­
licized cousin of the Commedia dell 'Arte theatre, the music i n
the street coul d provide me with a variety of scenes , popul ated,
c

Baroque, catastroph i c .
I t i s now a Neapolitan tune the Italian grinds; whic h says : the
tall casa has painted sh u tters and each window a painted rococo
entablature, brown u pon the pink stucco of the wal l . Families
cluster at the rickety balconies. A man beats a carpet; the
flotsam floats and swims in the sunlight towards the gay wash­
ing hanging below. Under the roof there i s a broad band of
fresco. (Gigantic .m erm aids wreck the fisher boats and tritons
blow blue horns.) I n a window a bird-cage dangles. At first I
306 Au tobiographical
think there is but one bird, but the hops are now frequent and I
see the cage is overpopulated . .The tiny movements are so vivid
that the great damp sheets which h ang from the side of the
balcony appear grey, a nd the bundle between the iron b ars, not
a little girl. You were young then too, and over t he clambering
terraces of houses, each with a fla t s quare roof, you h ad ar­
ranged a cord that joined you to my house, a little higher up on
the other side of the val ley. By jerking this cord we could ex­
change exciting messages, words whic h the roar of the mills on
the brook between could not silence. Inside the room is bric-a,.
brae, particularly ornamental feathers dusty with canary seed.
The breeze softly lifts the light wooden frame of a mirror on the
wall . As you jerk the cord, sirens are s creaming in the h arbour,
tugs s curry and hoot, white figures below labour with s acks of
flour while, above, smoke rises s traight a nd blue from the black
volcano.
The tune changes . . . . Sometimes the old men sat upon the
mountain, each upon a stone seat. Their heads touched the blue
sky. Night clattered on in valleys below and over night's in­
visible back a portent leaped. Another darkness, a cloud of
ashes, overwhelms the feeble day. Some j ump from terrace to
terrace; from vineyard and from vineyard, mothers round up
their children, moving like Hecubas; while below upon the
lowest road the fire of the dying sun draws s carlet b ands about
the feet of fugitives, is now extinguished by dust, now clutches
at a cart upon whose fra me winnowing petals open . . . a cart
a mong the rain of ashes and overtaken women bundled in to
fantastic attitudes : a cart, on and on, carts piled with toppling
bric-a-brac crowned by sobbing c hildren, by b asket and spring
that last saw the full light of day strong in the early m arket : on
and on to the sea that rises from the bosom of a gully ahead like
a gown that opens its velvet grasp a nd leaves the s houlders
bare. Cruel, even sea, you throw no rescue ropes . Uprooted
olive trees festoon the road as it rocks. Light of this last day is
butchered by lava and stea m : yet, every now and then, a bloody
ray of seared sun-fire shoots a mong the fugitives.
We survivors, as we approach the gully, look back and there,
sure enough, above the black of the earthquake and of the
 Childh ood 30 7

vapour, above the well-established night that glows. red with

illicit warmth, the old men sit agleam against a blue sky. In this
cursed double nigh t they still possess the day . Surely we wake
to their tomorrow when at dawn, s tiff after dead sleep upon the
deck of the rescue ship, we pluck the morning air and search
with sudden glance the shimmer of the cold and velvet deep . . .

It is noticeable that not only were these fantasies provoked by

sound but contain in them the projection of a great deal of noise.
Even the s cenes of my early childhood sustained their life
through movement, the circul ation of traffic. Where there is
movement there is noise, and from the noise we fashion images
of movement.
In our urban life, sound qualifies visually s cenes which other­
wise are confusing and meaningless to the eye. What the eye
alone might perceive is inhuman to a degree . The arts today
concerned with interrelationship of sound and movement, par­
ticularly ballet, are able to draw upon a wealth of life-giving
fantasy which in one form or another is common to millions.
Thus, the barrel-organ did not restore i n the fullest sense the
visual world for me. Such was my anxiety and consequent a m­
bition that it could be satisfied with nothing less than an in­
stantaneous, silent manifestation, i ndependent of sound and of
a dramatization of the passage of time : a h appy coexistence,
then, of things in space after the manner of mensa the table. It
is possible, following an older h abit, that the intrusion of sound
will still provide a point d'appui, but it will nevertheless be
serving an entirely different effect.

As the train came out of the Mont Cenis tunnel, the sun shone,
the sky was a deep, deep, bold blue. I h ad h alf-forgotten about
my t able for more tha n ten years . At once I s aw it everywhere,
on either side of the train, purple earth , terraces of vine and
olive, bright rectangular houses free of atmosphere, of the pass­
age of time, of i mpediment, of all the qualities which steep
and m assive roofs connote in the North. The hills belonged to
man in this his moment. The two thousand years of ·virgilian
p ast that carved and habituated the hill-sides, did not oppress :
3o8 Autobiographical
they were gathered into the present aspect. At the stations
before Turin, the p ure note of the guard's horn but sustained
and reinforced the pro cess by which time was here laid out as
ever-present space.
We arrived a t Turin in the late afternoon . There was a change
with a wait of h alf an hour. On a low platform in the clean
electric space - shadowless, it would seem - I stood enraptured.
I watched the sky between the trains and the edge of the huge
gradual curve of the station roof. The sky was now a p aler blue
but was still close, like the near sound of trumpets .
Day g ave way to night without misgiving. Soon, in the new
train, it was entirely dark. Although for the last hours of the
year, the air was soft, tender, a d arkness as of a perfect-fitting
lid. After dinner in the restaurant c ar, most of the p assengers
had left, the tablecloths were removed. On the other side of the
gangway, one t able ahead, I again saw the mensa table. Not the
plain deal table, it is true. But two Italians s at there with instant
faces . Between them in a fi asco was the wine, and to my e ars
they talked like Romans. Their w arm precipitation of life sus­
tained, as it seemed to me, by the glowing reflected light of
t housands of sunlit years, banished memories of Hyde Park. In­
stead of the Serpentine, I saw the Mediterranean, the end of my
journey. I n their eyes I read t he pleasure of house-tops and of
different levels .
We were in a n electric train. While we stopped at Genoa, I
could imagine a giant taut city a bove the Mediterranean . A
young man with a red s carf escorts h is s weetheart to the train.
He is ugly, but he, too, holds in his eyes the pleasure of the
house-tops and the different levels; of alleys between towering
p ainted walls that float in the s hade like goldfish in the sun­
light.
The train began to move through Genoa . I could see through
the many lighted windows of clear-shaped tenements . In every
apartment, I felt, there is this h appy evening return, a state of
the night which is sheer a cquisition; in which, like the men in
the train, the inhabitants t ake up the night by expending the
strength of a Latin day. Their t alk is now the balustrades, the
terraces, the b alconies spread out upon the h arbourl the radiant
 Childhood 3 09

open places of the town. The ebb and flow of conversation, still
more, of gesture, reconstruct the thorough£ares. As the train
glided on, more and more peep-shows appeared at every angle
to the line. The inhabitants had no need for blinds : since no
dominant misery and no surfeit of unexpressed emotion lurked
inside them, there was nothing beyond the houses to be shut
out.
Meanwhile in a straight passage the train was passing houses
on every level to the line, now above them, now on a level with
the second storey, now at the foot, now crossing a great viaduct.
I had the sensation of passing through the inside as well as along
the outside of the houses : never before had I been so much at
home. There was every kind of light, perhaps a darkness except
from the windows, perhaps a lit campo with ever-bustling
happy trees tenacious of root, silent and s oft, or a terraced
garden with an easy iron gate and steps upon the prospect.
There was a conspiracy abroad of universal triumph informing
even the roads, the p·avements and the harshest stucco. And
when we stopped at stations beyond Genoa, at Nervi for
example, and finally at Rapallo, the air held scents of flowering
trees and of eucalyptus enclosing and disclosing the villas
mounting on their gardens. I drove in a carriage through the
town to the pension. Echoes of the horse's hooves upon the
cobbles brought with them from the walls a sensation of their
diurnal brightness. At the end of the ride, the horse was walking
up a steep incline through the garden to the pension, a large
Riviera villa set behind a balustrade. The scents intensified :
there was the sound of waters falling to the sea. Church bells
began, and then rang out from every side, from overhanging
levels as well as from distances ; swift, hammering, light bells. It
was midnight, the new year.
On waking jn the morning I saw through the open french
windows, over the top of a russet-red villa with green shutters,
the Mediterranean, the place-name of our civilization . There
was a revealing of things in the Mediterranean sunlight, beyond
any previous experience; I had the new sensation that the air
was touching things; that the space between things touched
them, belonged in common; that space itself was utterly re-
3 10 Au tobiographical
vealed. There was a neatness in the light. Nothing hid or was
hidden . Soon, an electric train passed, gliding with ease on the
h ard way j ust below, entered a tunnel . Unlike the electric
trains on London's metropolitan railway which h ad a lways
been a disturbance, this train and the tunnel did not prolong
themselves inside me. It seemed that for the first time things
were happening entirely outside me. Existence was enlarged
by the miracle of the neat defining light. Here was an open and
naked world. I could not then fear for the hidden, for what
might be hidden i nside me and those I loved. I had, in fact,
incorporated this objective-seeming world and proved myself
constructed by the general refulgence. Nothing, for the time,
lurked, nothing bit, nothing lurched .
As I think now of that valley at Rapallo that goes up to Mont'
Allegro, as I think of the afternoon winter sunlight, I have the
sensation of a sound which contains every note, prolonged, en­
tirely sustained, as good beneath as above, a sound that pro­
vides every aural want; at the same time it is itself the epitome
of complete realization . Nature spreads and mounts before me,
fixed and growing, c hangeless in the clearness of its cycle. I
have here the means of action, a demonstration, not of the pur­
pose of life but of the power of life to be manifest; not of one
thing but of the calm relationship of many things, concrete
things, each bound to each by an outwardness that allows no
afterthought to the spectator: an outward s howing goes within
him. An answering life wells to the surface, and he feels - hen ce
the great beauty of Mediterranean lands cape - that the process
of a man's existence is outward, giving shape, precise contour to
the few things that lie deepest; whatever the distortion they
mutually endow, making the expenditure in terms of a surface
we call expression, be it in action, art or thought.

[from Inside O u t, 1947, pp . 7-3 2]

31

Cornwall and the Sense of Home

There are often two sounds on a cliff in August, the long hl:lm·
ming of the summer seas between the l ifting of grasses by t he
wind . The ocean's s usurration expands fi ne weather . If we
return i n winter o n a day th at is not rough, we expect to ob­
serve once more the spatial weaving of a bee, to attend to buzz.
i ng i n a sheltered patch that protrudes from the wind like rock
from swell.
Pools restore images of quiescent i nner states whereby the sea
which fills and renoun ces only to return, assumes the character
of the protean mind. We infer on a cliff our separateness, re­
cognizing tufts visited by bees who bri ng the pertinacity of a
closed world like figuratio n on a bare expa nse of cloth .
If the wind rises, branches cascade, hurtle, pour. The giants of
English parks, fully swaying, call with the sea's bass, deta ching
a surf of leaves . A few will t ap upon window-panes; theirs is the
fugitive touch of a taut dry palm su cceeding the touch of finger­
nail, light blows from the external world, momentary visit­
ations as of a n overtaking passing and receding vehicle th at forces
us to witness an action whose mental counterpart is unprepared.
Slight, yet very frequent, traumatic experiences are peculiar
to the modem world.

The sheltered bay was well wooded: the trees above, below and
at the back of our house at Carbis Bay grevv large for coast-land.
One walked in at the top floor of the house and could then go
down to other rooms sin ce the garden fell away i n high broad
terraces. The ocean, far beneath to the side of a lawn flanked by
i nterlacing conifers across a sunken lane, a ppeared o n a level
with the lower · branches : between them and a loft an expanse of
ocean and air sparkled, smoked as one element i n rain . On per­
pen d icular draughts risen to great height, freshened by the
trees, a hilarious shouting from bathers between the waves on
the vast beach c ame up to us i n summer.
312 A u tobiographical
My own room at the sea end of the house, partly beyond our
garden boundary, looked on · to the torsos or tops of many trees
sapient, i t appeared, in their arrest of the gardens and terraces
of the gradual cliff. Beneath the nearer branches I could see
across the bay to Hayle and to the s and dunes that curve round
to the point of Godrevy lighthouse . The bay was often pure
green; the wind would drive the surface sea-green wrinkles
shorewards where they would be lost among the roots of the
lower trees or be rediscovered after contact with the stabilizing,
temperate earth, in the topmost plumes of firs .
I had first glanced up at the house from the side-lane, below
what was to be my room. I had experienced a quick halluci­
nation - a picture without figures as I gazed at a central slatted
feature roofed with copper, carrying the weather vane - a sen­
sation of s mall stature and the thronging cries of children issu­
ing l ike bees from this white granite hive. Later, we bought the
house. My wife gave birth there to our son.
Throughout the first summer at tea-time the prospect of war
opposed the green-yellow of saffron cake. During six years,
except for the Home Guard, for the sale of vegetables, for
market garden purchases, I rarely went outside the two and a
half acres .
Visits in childhood connected me with Cornwall and with my
brother who was killed in the first war. I had occasion once or
twice to drive a car on the main road some ten miles behind and
above the Newquay coast where we had been, above the vil­
lages whose spires were j ust visible in the remote sea-haze,
whose names I barely remembered . It was raining on these
drives from a riven mist, riven towards the sea so that I could
distinguish in comparative brightness a panorama that stood for
half-known feelings .
My brother, exercising a love for geology, had examined the
freakish Cornish sub-soil . I was attracted l ater to the peninsula
between the two seas, extending on the north from St Ives to
Land's End. I thought of it as the only part of Britain belonging
to the geography of the Ancient World . It was certainly a fount
of tin and so, perhaps, of Greek bronzes . Hills of Celtic and
stone-age traces were once Phoenician landmarks, traversed for
 Cornwall and the Sense of Home 3 13

lo ng after b y the single file of p ack-mules . O n the north coast

near Zennor, a wide pasture-land spreads between the surf and
the hills, of Homeric scale it seems to the observer who is pick­
i ng out the farm communities and noting the inhospitable sea,
the isolated perpendicular stones and the network of bright
walls. Warm fertile valleys that run down the other side to
Mount's Bay where, they s ay, Phoenician tin was shipped,
would accord with the sense, p articularly in autumn, of ancient
fire .
From the terrace o f o u r house, a t a few feet higher than the
front door, parts of the roof were available to the hand . Across
the bay, dunes lay open like a fan. Calm and condensation, even
vastness, characterized the lime-washed roof as Peter, com­
p anion in agriculture, and I would see it framed upon the ocean.
We would be working on the land immediately above and to
the side. Bending over the rows in daily discussion, we would
also observe every aspect of the house. We commanded the
coast as far as Trevose Head. The lighthouse was j ust visible on
clear days . To our right was Carn Brea with silhouetted cross on
the broad summit above Redruth and Cambome .
From the main road to our entrance, this panorama topped
houses and trees . If the bay were blue, I could sornetimes iden­
tify it with Palermo, a well-lit, spacious depository for all tem­
pestuous process . The mute tallness of our eucalyptus tree, with
so pointed leaves, afforded p attern to the sunlight. The fir trees
h ad lost their lower branches and h ad grown voluminous heads
of s moky-green, a filter to the light, a brake upon darkness . The
fattest birds would perch on the topmost tufts .
Every Sunday afternoon towards half past three, I would
leave by the back gate, pass through the firs that sheltered our
north side, to a curved sight of the ocean over the top of a small
wood, a view that seemed to me Samo an . Meadow-land sloped
down to the trees near the bay. I had started for the letter-box, a
w alk that marked division between two weeks .
But it was useless to expect immobile days of a kind in which
the movement of the water at the fringe of the tide is but a skin,
an iridescent skin upon the stone . The sea worked beneath still­
ness, less the i mage of s p atial magnitude than of the interf used
3 14 A u tobioyraphical
depths of the mind. The sporadic tides of war were super­
imposed upon ceaselessness : The sea-noise, often only a
murmur, threaded those years . Sometimes we would uncover,
as it were, the source, when, later on, we walked across the
Lelant golf links. On a grass ridge we would come face to face
with the vast transverse sand on which the sea roared. At the
same instant, along the warm west curren ts, we became aware
of soft-smelling residues of seasons other than the one of the
moment. Throughout the length of vision a s we paused, foam
glinted in the same places . Godrevy lighthouse also, and its rock,
over the rough bay, were caught by the sun.
After s hopping one winter morning we walked beyond the
Porthmeor beach, along the cliff and away from the sea. The
road was sunk below the hedges, below the level of the wind : it
led to farmhouses similarly protected by uneven ground and
rocks . The swift winter sun seemed to loiter. We stayed only for
a moment. What is this spread country, what are these houses,
these homes?

[from Sm ooth and Rouyh, 195 1 , pp. 1 5-19]

32

Living in Ticino , 1947-50

The storm had been immense along the line . I was soaked at
Genoa running thirty yards in the open to the platform for the
Ventimiglia train . When I got out at San Remo the sky had
cleared, but the wind remained i n the south : the sea was pound­
ing. I had a room high in the hotel, with windows on two sides,
at the angle of the building, I opened all win dows, let in the sea
noise from j ust beyond the railway below. Since the St Ives
days I had scarcely heard the sea . As if purged by its movement,
the main street - it was a very dark night - seemed still a nd
decorous and the young people about, calm, serene; Italians
again, out-door figures of sky and earth . Observed i n the sub­
dued light from a cafe opposite, the closed casino looked simple
 Living in Ticino, i947-50 3-I 5

and uncrowded, parti cularly the shops built i n below the upper
carri age-way. I drank beer, gazing at the retiring, discreet flashi­
ness of thi s building, an impression no doubt assisted by night.
After the j ourney it stood for a degree of stability and comfort :
rain and movement were cleared : this steadfast yet opulent
white took possession . How different back in my room with the
pounding sea . On leaving the cafe I had tried to approach the
sea and I found myself in a desolate and incomplete place as if
half-built, bombed or bashed by w aves . It was i mpossible to see
the ground distinctl y . I had to go back, picking very carefully
t he way I had come . Up in my room above the sea again, the
shutters of one window were banging. I closed the window
and then, when I got into bed, fastened the others as the draught
was too great, shutting out the sea subject to a constant sirocco
s uch as I had often seen and heard for days on end at Rapallo
j ust beyond Genoa . I had of ten watched from the side the exact
speed of the waves as they came into the bay . Rain would be
pelting on the ever-bright tumult of the craning tenements i n
Genoa itself.
As this memory faded I felt the calm of my tempestuous
eyrie to be a symbol of the mind, president to the speechless
deliberations of the p assions beyo nd the windows .
In art and architecture our eyes follovv a design, an exter­
nalization of primitive force and of primitive attachment by
means of a stable form . One day the artist will occupy the philo­
sopher's throne : not the artist as we generally conceive him,
no less compulsive than the mystic . . . . One day men will learn
to think of sanity as an aesthetic achievement .
We travel emotional distances, carrying the same i n­
exhaustible luggage . As I lay on the w hite bed I took p leasure i n
a life-process that I could project into the sea and into calm
buildings that range the coast lashed by rain, i nto the nearness
of the meas ured, Mediterranean interval and the warmth of the
i nh abitants w ho absorb it, who appear spurred by the very ex­
tension of the external world. It is our own powers that stretch,
our own experience that seems never-ending.
I w as happy that reason tapers as a tower above the sea .
3 16 Autobiographical
The rain falls, trees starrd up. The sound of steady rain on leaves
makes the image hold. The ' skies are grey, trees the greener,
glistening with wet. Throughout a day of rainfall the standing
up of the trees or of dripping houses, colours action and thought
so that whatever is dry yet perpendicular, such as umbrellas in
a stand, seems to lack benison or contact, to have become less
definite or positioned, tending to float, to be emanations of a
wall that is itself less ordered owing to the predominance of the
chords of water between sky and earth; owing to this bound­
less, loose-stringed harp with a complex sound of melting over­
tones. Change is only of the volume of the sound . . . . The earth
receives : the giant capacity of reception mocks fires as rest­
less.
As I walk under the arcade of Locarno's main square, I see in
a clear and liquid shade a cafe table with a light-blue cloth that
touches a stone pier. I think I would be entirely safe there : lean­
ing against the pillar I would be able to partake utterly of every
thought : I would be immobile, provided for, as in the womb yet
out-of-doors : existence within and existence without would
be thinly divided : in the blue tablecloth I would clutch the
sky.

To explain anything we go back.

Berenson has not realized that what he cans 'lack of skill' is, in
many cultural contexts, 'lack of will' . Sickert too, when he
writes that Cezanne was a bungler who couldn't get the eyes in
a portrait 'to go together' . He couldn't try to : he was putting
bits together.

Particularly from art there is often gained a h aunting quality, as

from a naked body glimpsed through trees, from an experience
that at the time was noted anatomically or in terms of indecency
but that proved to be a minute incident returning in a dream,
in dreams, a circumstance widely evocative.

That which arrests us in a painting will not continue to do so

unless it contains a structure that evokes or fits in with some
 Living in Ticino, 1947-50 317

aspect of what is permanent in many states of mind, in all our

various relationships with objects .

When passion recedes, some are apt to turn to thoughts of

dross, conceiving the dirt and filth of the physical to be the real
'reality' of the body, substituting one set of fantasies with
another. Reality, like death, has no corresponding 'feel' to it:
whereas the pursuit of s cience, the contemplation of what
science reveals, has a strong emotional side, truth itself re­
sembles numbers to which, were it possible, no association and
no images are atta ched. In attempting to grasp what is real, we
are unable altogether to disentangle emotion. This consideration
must be the nlodern version of appearance and the Ding-an­
sich.

An oak tree is the leg of the beloved corrugated with arteries

and veins, fluted with the s caffolding of growth .
I believe we regret a loss of mass as may happen on a journey
in mistaking a line of cloud for a range of mountains . I have had
this acute disappointment several times, especially at sunset in
Indi a . Works of art attempt to repair such a loss, the loss of the
mother's body that takes over, banishes yet incorporates, a final
distance .

In the imagery of music a bald head has more shape, takes

longer to go over, to explore, than one of bewitching curls .

A church clock striking the hour parcels out the disordered

noises of a to\vn, submits to our reckoning the tenor of reason.
The broad and easy flatness of such comprehension is like a fine
wooden floor in a house set high over a town, as I had it once in
Veni ce and again in Ascona.

The bells, i n perspective of sound, proclaim the unity and calm

of a ll visual things . Under the influence of a Sunday morning in
the sun, I am reminded by the spread of the plain, by the small
clusters of communities, by Locarno between lake and moun­
tain, climbing the bright aromatic hill, by villages in Switzer-
3 18 Au tobiographical
land and in Italy disposed glistening upon the points above the
lake, by bells near and distant, ·I am reminded of Athens and the
early Rome, so vivid once from afar.

I was clearing up at Lower Stonehams, throwing away, m aking

a clean s weep of more than rubbish there. I thought as I worked
of the thi rty years ' accumulation of family emotion that I seem­
ingly dispersed. My parents would never again come into the
house : it was as if it reverted to the former owners (who h ad
taken so much more c are of i t) of thirty years ago . Traces of our
occupation were disappearing fast; many symbols of absence
came together : the experience wa s painful, confused, and dis­
coloured by a rush of time. I went finally into the garden where
this mental state was shaped and limited by taking on the
c haracter of a thing. For, i n the quietness of Saturday lunch­
time, the gardener had left burning a steady bonfire that s moul­
dered easily. It s implified the confused feelings I had felt i n the
house concerning 'the clean s weep ' . But the spectacle was itself
appealing because of the intense, directed and simple action it
contained . . . . Such is a work of art vis-a-vis emotion . I was
grateful for this bonfire as if to a remaining, administering
person . It performed a ritual I felt was needed : I took pleasure
i n the palpable image outside me of all I felt : it, a concrete form,
was my feelings, yet c alm, noble, wrapt and also more vivid
than they, without the confusion or successiveness of feelings :
it was new and disinterested. I had here both the essence of
what I h ad felt and a renewal of love for an object.
The ego gains some s afety through projection and then
through the act of perception chara cterized, as we know, by
orderliness or Gestalt. It seems that in this, the external world
performs a constant role : we call it art only in those c ases i n
which it is induced deliberately. Of course the reverse process i s
n o less ceaseless; an aspect o f the external world seen i n con­
templation, excites thereby associations with feelings that do
not necessarily correspond with any call for action . In fact we
contemplate mental states themselves only after we have en­
dowed them with some of the definition of perceptual experi­
ence.
 Living in Ticino, 1947-50 3 19

There is no need, therefore, to offer any special explanation

for the proj ection of id content in art: aesthetic figuration is but
a refinement of one that is far more general : nor is it remarkable
that the creation of symbolism should be uppermost when ques­
tions of action in regard to the external world are in abeyance.
It is more significant that symbolism permeates even the
weapons for thinking, irradiates l anguage even when language
attempts most to be matter-of-fact.

Consciousness is like the unseen air surrounding us with light.

Unknown to us, each sensation is qualified by every other sen­
s ation we have experienced.
We are more prone to attribute texture to a clear light than
to the palpable pall of a fog .

As well a s a need for some beauty, m any people have a penchant

for ugliness . Art is 'a criticism of l ife' in the sense that it is a

critic is m of denials ; to which ugliness may be preferred, sym­

bolized by the uncritical dog with his grown-up teeth and snarl,
his unequivo cal bark that is so much worse than his bite. Phil­
istines, especially, escape : they keep to 'brass tacks' at the ex­
pense of the gold and the filth and unadorned hostility. Ugli­
ness is, in fact, a form of culture.

Pleasure i s a lighthouse flash seen across empty wastes en­

compassed by the sense of los s . At a death bed there is a h olding
of h ands, the h and of any one : though we die the good object
must be preserved. This concern for the object cannot be ex­
plained entirely by viewing it as a part, the good part, of our­
selves . We can learn from art that there is a s trong emphasis
upon the status of the object as object: on the formal side it is
both o urselves and not ourselves.

An area of s ignificant space is a substitute for blind, narrow,

intensity .

Meals preserve a ritual, and culture an extension o f the totem

feast : culture is identified with the good breast and the incor-
320 Autobiographical
poration of a self-contained mother as well as with an incor­
poration of what has been' ·violently done away with : the
massacre may be repeated in the appreciation : aspects of popu­
lar culture or proto-culture suggest it.

The nude is the absolute of nakedness, all too quickly at­

tained.

The history of drugs reveals longing for the choicer monolithic

states of infancy, for an undivided world that will contrast with
the functioning of an analytic mind.

A gross Edwardian bowl becomes in the course of time more

than an object of vulgarity : every year endows it with further
independence, so that we see it more as the product of a certain
kind of society than as the echo only of that society's pre­
tension : we are then aware of a symbol 's evocative power as
well as of the specific content symbolized which, in turn, we
begin to value.

[from Art and Literature, March 1 �4]

ART

The I mage i n Form ,

Selected Writings of ·

Ad rian Stokes
Edited by Richard Wollheim
Ove r t h e l as t fo rty yea rs A d r i a n S t o k e s h a s
a c q u i red a n a l m o st m yt h i c a l re p u tat i o n as o n e of
t h e f i n est a n d m ost d i sc ri m i n at i n g w ri te rs o n a rt
l i vi n g t o d ay . Sto ke s ' s c ri t i c a l w ri t i n g s l i e at t h e
j u n ct i o n o f t h ree d i ve rse i nf l u e n ce s : psyc h o a n­
a l ys i s , t h e E n g l i s h t ra d i t i o n of aest h e t i c w ri t i n g .
w h i c h d e ri ves f r o m R u s k i n a n d Pate r, a n d t h e
a rt i st ' s o w n s pec i a l i n vo l ve m e nt wi t h a rt . A p a rt
f ro m b e i n g a w ri te r, h e i s h i mse l f a p a i n te r of d i s­
t i n c ti o n . T h i s s e l e c t i o n of Sto k e s ' s w ri t i n g s (so m e
ta ke n f ro m vo l u mes l o n g o u t o f p ri n t) h a s b e e n
a b l y e d i te d a n d i n t ro d u ce d by R i c h a rd W o l l h e i m
a n d p rovi d es t h e f i rst o p p o rt u n i ty eve r offe red to
a s i z e a b l e p u b l i c to a c q u a i n t i t s e l f w i t h t h i s
st ra n g e a n d fas c i n at i n g b o d y of w o r k .
" T h o u g h t h e b o d y o f t h i s w ri t i n g . . . i s n ot
fa m i l i a r to a w i d e c i rc l e of rea d e rs , i t ' s i nf l u e n c e ,
d i rect a n d i n d i rec t , h a s bee n c o n s i d e ra b l e . T h e re
a re c e rt a i n p a i n t e rs , s c u l p t o r s , p o e t s , p h i l o s ­
o p h e rs , c ri t i c s a n d h i sto r i a n s of a rt w h o a re p ro­
fo u n d l y i n d e bted to h i m . . . . F o r f ro m t h e b eg i n n i n g
t h e n o t i o n f i n ds a c c e pt a n c e t h at a rt i s a fo rm of
e x t e r n a l i z a t i o n , of m a k i n g c o n c r e t e t h e i n n e r
w o r l d , a n d t h e evo l u t i o n of Sto kes ' s c ri ti c i s m c a n
l a rg e l y be a c c o u n te d f o r by t h e i n c reas i n g l y r i c h e r
v i ew t h at i s t a k e n o f t h e i n n e r wo r l d a n d h ow a n d
b y w h at m e a n s i t wo rks i ts way o u t . "
-from the In troduc tion
·

by Richa rd Wollheim

Icon Ed itions
H a rpe r & Row, P u b l i s h e rs

S B N 06-430028-5 Cover des i g n by J a net H a l ve rson