John berger ways of seeing pdf

’Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.

’But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.’

John Berger’s Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and the most influential books on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the (London) Sunday Times critic commented: ~This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings ... he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures.’ By now he has.

’Berger has the ability to cut right through the mystification of the professional art critics ... He is a liberator of images: and once we have allowed the paintings ~o work on us directly, we are in a much better position to make a meaningful evaluation’ Peter Fuller, Arts Review

’,The influence of the series and the book ... was enormous ... It opened up for general attention areas of cultural study that are now commonplace’ Geoff Dyer in Ways of Telling

Published by the British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books The front cover shows The Key of Dreams by Rene Magr~tte (photo Rudolph E~urckhardt)

UK £8.99 U~A $14.00

JOHN BERGER Seeing comes before words. The child looks

nizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing

before words. It is seeing which establishes our place rrotmding world ; we explain that world with words,

;an never undo the fact that we are surrounded by relation between what we see and what we know is

r settled.

The Surrealist painter IV~agritte comntented ~resent gap between words and seeing in

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.

But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight. The Surrealist painter Nlagritte commented on this always-present gap between words and seeing in a painting called The Key of Dreams.

The way we see things is affected by what we kr~ow or what we believe. In the IVtlddle Ages when men believed in the physical existence of Hell the sight of fire must have meant something different from what it means today. Naverthe|ass their idea of Hell owed a lot to the sight of fire consuming and the ashes remaining - as well as to their experience of the pain of burns.

When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match : a completeness which only the act of making love can temporari|y accommodate.

Vet this seeing which comas before words, and can never be quite covered by them, is not a question of mechanically reacting to stimuli. (It can only be thought of in this way if one isolates the small part of the process which concerns the eye’s retina.) We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. As a result of this act, what we see is brought within our reach - though not necessarily within arm’s reach. To touch something is to situate oneself in relation to it. (Close your eyes, move round the room and

notice how the.faculty of touch is like a static, limited form of sight.) We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at ~e relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding thiugs in a circle around itaalf, constituting what is present

Soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen. The eye of the other combines with our own aye to make it fully credible that we are p~ of the visible world.

~f we ac~pp~ that we can see ~ha~ hil~ over there, we propose ~hat from that hiBI we can be seen. The reciprocal ~ature o~ vision is more fundamen~l than that of spoken ~ialogue. And often dialogue is an a~empt to verbalize this - an attempt to explain how, either metaphorically or literally, ’you see things’, and an attempt to discover how "he sees ~hings’.

in the sense in which we use the word in this book, a~l images are man-made.

An image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced, it is an appearance, or a set of appearances, which has been detached from the place and time

in which it first made its appearance and preserved - for a few moments or a few centuries. Every image embodies a way of seeing. Even a photograph. For photographs are not, as is often assumed, a mechanical record. Every time we look at a photograph, we are aware, however slightly, of the photographer selecting that sight from an infinity of other possible sights. This is true even in the most casual family snapshot. The photographer’s way of seeing is reflected in his choice of subject. The painter’s way of seeing is reconstituted by the marks he makes on the canvas or paper. Yet, although every image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way of seeing. (it may be, for example, that Sheila is one figure among twenty; but for our own reasons she is the one we have eyes for.)

Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent. Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented; it then showed how something or somebody had once looked ~ and thus by implication how the subject had once been seen by other people. Later still the specific vision of the image-maker was also recognized as part of the record. An image became a record of how X had seen Y. This was the result of an increasing consciousness of individuality, accompanying an increasing awareness of history. It would be rash to try to date this last development precisely. But certainly in Europe such consciousness has existed since the beginning of the Renaissance.

No other kind of relic or text from the past can offer such a direct testimony about the world which surrounded other people at other times. In this respect images are more precise and richer than literature. To say this is not to deny the expressive or imaginative quality of art, treating it as mere documentary evidence; the more imaginative the work, the more profoundly it allows us to share the artist’s experience of the visible.

Yet when an image is presented as a work of art, the way people look at it is affected by a whole series of learnt assumptions about art. Assumptions concerning:

Beauty Truth Genius Civilization Form Status ~ Taste, etc.

Many of these assumptions no longer accord with the world as it is. (The world-as-it-is is more than pure objective fact, it includes consciousness.) Out of true with the present, these assumptions obscure the past. They mystify rather than clarify. The past is never there waiting to be discovered, to be recognized for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past. The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act. Cultural mystification of ’~he past entails a double loss. Works of art are made unnecessarily remote. And the past offers us fewer conclusions to complete in action.

When we "see" a landscape, we situate ourselves in it. If we "saw’ the art of the past, we would situate ourselves in history. When we are prevented from seeing it, we are being deprived of the history which belongs to us. Who benefits from this deprivation ? In the end, the art of the past is being mystified because a privileged minority is striving to invent a history which can retrospectively justify the role of the ruling classes, and such a justification can no longer make sense in modern terms. And so, inevitably, it mystifies.

Let us consider a typical example of such mystification. A two-volume study was recently published on Frans Hals.* It is the authoritative work to date on this painter. As a book of specialized art history it is no better and no worse then the average.

The last two great paintings by Frans Hals portray the Governors and the Governesses of an Aims House for old paupers in the Dutch seventeenth-century city of Haarlem. They were officially commissioned portraits. Hais, an old man

of over eighty, was destitute. Most of his life he had been in debt. During the winter of 1664, the year he began painting these pictures, he obtained three loads of peat on public charity, otherwise he would have frozen to death. Those who now sat for him were administrators of such public charity.

The author records these facts and then explicitly says that it would he incorrect to read into the paintings any criticism of the sitters. There is no evidence, he says, that Hale painted them in a spirit of bitterness. The author considers them, howe~er, remarkable works of art and explains why. Here be writes of the Regentesees:

Each woman speaks to us of the human condition with equal importance. Each woman stands out with equal clarity against the enormous dark surface, yet they are linked by a firm rhythmical arrangement and the subdued diagonal pattern formed by their heads and hands. Subtle modulations of the deep, glowing blacks contribute to the harmonious fusion of the whole and form an unforgettab/e contrast with the powerfuJ whites and vivid flesh tones where the detached strokes reach a peak of breadth and strength. (our italics)

The compositional unity of a painting contributes fundamentally to the power of its image, it is reasonable to consider a painting’s composition. But here the composition is written about as though it were in itself the emotional charge of the painting. Terms like harmonious fusion, unforgettable contrast, reaching a peak of breadth and strength transfer the emotion provoked by the image from the plane of lived experience, to that of disinterested ’art appreciation’. All conflict disappears. One is left with the unchanging "human condition’, and the painting considered as e ma~vellously made object.

Very little is known about Hals or the Regents who commissioned him. It is not possible to produce circumstantial evidence to establish what their relations were. But there is the evidence of the paintings themselves: the evidence of e group of men and a group of women as seen by another man, the painter. Study this evidence and judge for yourself.

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The art historian fears such direct judgement:

As in so many other pictures by Hals, the penetrating characterizations almost seduce us into believing that we know the personality traits and even the habits of the men and women portrayed.

What is this "seduction" he writes of? It is nothing less than the paintings working upon’us. They work upon us because we accept the way Hals saw his sitters. We do not accept this innocently. We accept it in so far as it corresponds to our own observation of people, gestures, faces, institutions. This is possible because we still llve in a society of comparable social relations and moral values. And it is precisely this which gives the paintings their psychological and social urgency, it is this - not the painter’s skill as a ¯seducer" - which convinces us that we can know the people portrayed.

The author continues:

in the case of some critics the seduction has been a total success. It has, for example, been asserted that the Regent in the tipped slouch hat, which hardly covers any of his long, lank hair, and whose curiously set eyes do not focus, was shown in a drunken state.

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This, he suggests, is a libel. He argues that it was a fashion at that time to wear hats on the side of the head. He cites medical opinion to prove that the Regent’s expression could well be the result of a facial paralysis. He insists that the painting would have been unacceptable to the Regents if one of them had been portrayed drunk. One might go on discussing each of these points for pages. (Men in seventeenth-century Holland wore their hats on the side of their heads in order to be thought of as adventurous and pleasure-lovlng. Heavy drinking was an approved practice. Etcetera.) But such a discussion would take us even farther away from the only confrontation which matters and which the author is determined to evade.

in this confrontation the Regents and Regentesses stare at Hals, a destitute old painter who has lost his reputation and lives off public charity; he examines them through the eyes of a pauper who must nevertheless try to be objective, i.e., must try to surmount the way he sees as a pauper. This is the drama of these paintings. A drama of an ¯ unforgettable contrast’.

Mystification has little to do wtth the vocabulary used. Mystification is the process of explaining

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away what might otherwise be evident. Hals Was the first po~raitist to paint the new characters and expressions created by capitalism. He did in pictorial terms what Balzac did two centuries later in literature. Yet the author of the authoritative work on these paintings sums up the artist’s achievement by referring to

Hals’s unwavering commitment to his personal vision, which enriches our consciousness of our fellow men and heightens our awe for the ever-increasing power of the mighty impulses that enabled him to give us a close view of life’s vital forces.

That is mystification. In order to avoid mystifying the past (which can

equally well suffer pseudo-Marxist mystification) let us now examine the particular relation which now exists, so far as pictorial images are concerned, between the present and the past. if we can see the present clearly enough, we shall ask the right questions of tl~e past.

Today we see the art of the past as nobody saw it before. We actually perceive it in a different way.

This difference can be illustrated in terms of what was thought-of as perspective. The convention of perspective, which is unique to European art and which was first established in the early Renaissance, centres everything on the eye of the beholder, it is like a beam from a lighthouse - only instead of light travelling outwards, appearances travel in. The conventions called those appearances rea/ity. Perspective makes the single eye the centre of the visible world. Everything converges on to the eye as to the vanishing point of infinity. The visible world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to he arranged for God.

According to the convention of perspective there is no visual reciprocity. There is no need for God to situate himself in relation to others: he is himself the situation, The inherent contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.

After the invention of the camera this contradiction gradually became apparent.

I’m an eye. A mechanical eye. t, the machine, show you a wortd the way only ( can see it. ! free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I’m in constant movement. I approach and pull away from objects, t creep under them. ~ move alongside a running horse’s mouth, t fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies. This is I, the machine, manoeuvring in the chaotic movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations,

Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be. My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you.*

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The camera isolated momentary appearances and in so doing destroyed the idea that images were timeless. Or, to put it another way, the camera showed that the notion of time passing was ~nseparabie from the experience of the visual (except in paintings). What you saw depended upon where you were whan. What you saw was relative to your posit~on in time and space. It was no longer possible to imagine everything converging on the human eye as on the vanishing point of infinity.

This is not tO say that before the invention of the camera men believed that everyone could see everything, But perspective organized the visua! field as though that were indeed the ideal. Every drawing or painting that used perspective proposed to the spectator that he was the unique centre of the world, The camera - and more particularly the movie camera - demonstrated that there was no centre.

The invention of the camera changed the way men saw. The visible came to mean something different to them, This was immediately reflected in painting.

For the impressionists the visible no longer presented itself to man in order to be seen. On the contrary, the visible, in continual flux, became fugitive. For the Cubists the visible was no longer what confronted the single eye, but the totality of possible views taken from points all round the object (or person) being depicted,

The invention of the camera also changed the way in which men saw paintings painted long before the camera was invented, Originally paintings were an integral part of the building for which they were designed. Sometimes in an early Renaissance church or chapel one has the feeling that the images on the wall are records of the building’s interior life, that together they make up the building’s memory - so much are they part of the particularity of the building.

The uniqueness of every painting was once part of the uniqueness of the place where it resided. Sometimes the painting was transportable. But it could never be seen in two places at the same time. When the camera repr’oduces a painting, it destroys the uniqueness of its image. As a result its meaning changes. Or, more exactly, its meaning multiplies and fragments into many meanings.

This is vividly illustrated by what happens when a painting is shown on a television screen. The painting enters each viewer’s house. There it is surrounded by his wallpaper, his furniture, his mementoes. It enters the atmosphere of his

fami|y. It becomes their talking point, it lends its meaning to their meaning. P~t the same time it enters a million other houses and, in each of them, is seen in a different context, Because of the camera, the painting now travels to the spectator rather than the spectator to the painting. In its travels, its meaning is diversified.

One might argue that all reproductions more or less distort, and that therefore the original painting is still in

sense unique. Here is s reproduction of the Virgin of the Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci.

~o

Having seen this reproduction, one can go to’the Natienal Gallery to look at the original and there~iscover what the reproduction Jacks. Alternatively one can forget about the quality of the reproduction and simply be reminded, when one

somewhere one has already seen a reproduction. But in either case the uniqueness of the original now lies in it being the origins/of a reproduction, it is no longer what i~s i~age shows ~ha~ s~r~es one as unique; i~s f~rs~ meaning found in what it says, bu~ in what i~

This new status of the original work is the perfectly rational consequence of the new means reproduction. But it is at this point that a proce~ mystification again enters. The meaning of the original work no longer ]ies in what it uniquely says but in what it uniquely is. How is its unique existence evaluated and defined in our present culture? it is defined as an object whose value depends upon its ~ariW. This value is affirmed and gauged by ~he pric~ it fetches on the marke~. But because neve~heiess "a work of a~" - and art is thought to be greater ~han commerce - i~ market price is said [~s spiritual value. Yet the spiritual value of’an object, as distinct from a message or an example, can only be explained i, terms of magic or religion. And since in modern society ,ei~her of these is a living force, the art object, the ’work a~’, is enveloped in an atmosphere of entirely bogus religiosity. Works of art are discussed and presented as though they were holy relics: relics which are first and foremost evidence of their own su~ivaL The past in which they originated is studied in order to prove their survival genuine. They are declared a~ when their line of descent can be certified.

Before the Virgin of the Rocks the visitor to the National Gallery would be encouraged by nearly e~erything he might have heard and read about the painting to feel something like this: "1 am in front of it, ! can see it. This painting by Leonardo is unlike any other in the world. The National Gallery has the real one. If I look at this painting hard enough, ~ should somehow be able to feel its authenticiW. The VJrg~ of th~ Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci: it is authentic and therefore it is beautifuL"

To dismiss such feelings as nai’ve would be quite wrong. They accord perfectly with the sophisticated culture of art experts for whom the National Gallery catalogue is written. The entry on the Virgin of the Rocks is one of the longest entries, it consists of fourteen closely printed pages. They do not deal with the meaning of the image. They deal with who commissioned the painting, legal squabbles, who owned it, its likely date, the families of its owners. Behind this information lie years of research. The aim of the research is to prove beyond any shadow of doubt that the painting is a genuine Leonardo. The secondary aim is to prove that an almost identical painting in the Louvre is a replica of the National Gallery version.

French art historians try to prove the opposite.

~he National Gallery sells more reproductions of Leonardo’s cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St ~nne and St John the Baptist than any other picture in their collection. A few years ago it was known only to scholars. It became famous because an American wanted to buy it for two and a half million pounds.

Now it hangs in a room by itself. The room is like a chapel. The drawing is behind bullet-proof perspex. It has acquired a new kind of impressiveness. Not because of what it shows - not because of the meaning of its image, it has become impressive, mysterious, because of its market value.

The bogus religiosity which now surrounds original works of art, and which is ultimately dependent upon their market value, has become the substitute for wha~ paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible. Its function is nostalgic. It is the final empty claim for the continuing values of an oligarchic, undemocratic culture, if the image is no longer unique and exclusive, the art object, the thing, must be made mysteriously so.

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The majority of the population do not visit art museums. The fol|owing tsble shows how closely an ~nterest in art is related to privileged education. National proportion of art museum visitors according to level of education : Percentage Of each educational category who visit art museums

Greece Poland France Holtand Greece Poland France Holland

The majority take it as axiomatic that the ,~useums are full of holy relics which refer to a mystery which excludes them: the mystery of unaccountable wealth. Or, to put this another way, they helieve that original masterpieces belong to the preserve {both materially and spiritually) of the rich. Another table indicates what the idea of an art gallery suggests to each social class.

% % %

Church 66 45 30.5 Library 9 34 28 Lecture hall - 4 4.5

None of these ~ ~ 19,5 No repty 8 4- 9

100(n=53) 100(n=98) 100(n=99)

Source: es above, appendix 4, table 8

in the age of pictorial reproduction the meaning of paintings is no longer attached to them; their meaning hecomes transmittable: that is to say it becomes information of a sort, and, like all information, it is either put to use or ignored; information carries no special authority within itself. When a painting is put to use, its meaning is either modified or totally changed. One should be quite clear about what this involves, it is not a question of reproduction failing to

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reproduce certain aspects of an image faithfully; it is a question of reproduction making it possible, even inevitable, that an image will be used for many different purposes and that the reproduced image, unlike an original work, can lend itself to them all. Let us examine some of the ways in which the reproduced image lends itself to such usage.

¯ Reproduction isolates a detail of a painting from the whole. The detail is transformed. An allegorical figure becomes a portrait of a girl

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When a painting is reproduced" by a film camera it inevitably becomes material for the film-maker’s argument.

A film which reproduces images of a painting leads the spectator, through the painting, to the film-maker’s own conclusions. The painting lends authority to the film-maker.

This is because a film unfolds in time and a painting does not.

in a film the way one image follows another, their succession, constructs an argument which becomes irreversible.

Paintings are often reproduced with words around them.

This is a landscape of a cornfield with birds flying out of it. Look at it for a moment. Then turn the page.

In a painting all its elements are there to be seen simultaneously. The spectator may need time to examine each element of the painting but whenever he reaches a conclusion, the simultaneity of the whole painting is there to reverse or qualify his conclusion. The painting maintains its own authority.

z~ Or"

It is hard to define exactly how the words have changed the image but undoubtedly they have. The image now illustrates the sentence.

in this essay each image reproduced has become part of an argument which has little or nothing to do with the psinting’s original independent meaning. The words have quoted the paintings to confirm their own verbal authority. (The essays without words ~n this book may make that distinction clearer,)

Reproduced paintings, like all information, have to hold their own against all the other information being continuaBy transmitted.

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Consequently a reproduction, as well as making its own references to the image of its original, becomes itself the reference point for other images. The meaning of an image is changed according to what one sees immediately beside it or what comes immediately after it. Such authority

it appears.

13ecause works of art are reproducible, they can, theoretically, be used by anybody. Yet mostly - in art books, magazines, films or within gilt frames in living-rectus - reproductions are stilg used to bolster the illusion that nothing has changed, that art, with its unique undiminished authority, justifies most other forms of authority, that art makes inequality seem noble and hierarchies seem thrilling. For example, the who~e concept of the National CuJtura| Heritage exploits the authority of art to glorify the present social system and its priorities.

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The means of reproduction are used politlcally and commercially to disguise or deny what their existence makes possible. But sometimes individuals use them differently.

Adults and children sometimes have boards in their bedrooms or living-rooms on which they pin pieces of paper: letters, snapshots, reproductions of paintings, newspaper cuttings, original drawings, postcards. On each board all the images belong to the same language and all are more or less equal within it, because they have been chosen in a highly personal way to match and express the experience of the room’s inhabitant. Logically, these boards should replace museums,

What are we saying by that? Let us first he sure about what we are not saying.

We are not saying that there is nothing left to experience before original works of art except a sense of awe because they have survived. The way original works of art are usually approached - through museum catalogues, guides, hired cassettes, etc. - is not the only way they might be approached. When the art of the past ceases to be viewed nostalgically, the works will cease to be holy relics - although they will never re-become what they were before the age of reproduction. We are not saying original works of art are now useless.

Original paintings are silent and still in a sense that information never is. Even a reproduction hung on a wall is not comparable in this respect for in the original the silence and stillness permeate the actual material, the paint, in which one follows the traces of the painter’s immediate gestures. This has the effect of closing the distance in time between the painting of the picture and one’s own act of looking at it. in this special sense all paintings are contemporary. Hence the immediacy of their testimony. Their historical moment is literally there before our eyes. Cbzanne made a similar observation from the painter’s point of view. ’A minute in the world*s life passes ! To paint it in its reality, and forget everything for that ! To become that minute, to be the sensitive plate.., give the image of what we see, forgetting everything that has appeared before our time..." What we make of that painted moment when it is before our eyes depends upon what we expect of art, and that in turn depends today upon how we have already experienced the meaning of paintings through reproductions.

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Nor are we saying that all art can be understood spontaneously. We are not claiming that to cut 0U~ ~’~agazine reproduction of an archaic Greek head, because it is reminiscent of some personal experience, end to pin it on to s board beside other disparate images, is to come to terms with the full meaning of that head.

The idea of innocence faces two ways. By refusing to enter a conspiracy, one remains innocent of that conspiracy. But to remain innocent may also be to remain ignorant. The issue is not be~Neen innocence and knowledge (or between the natural and the cultural) but between a total approach to art which attempts to relate it to every aspect of experience and the esoteric approach of a few specialized experts who are the clerks of the nostalgia of a ruling class in decline. (in decline, not before the proletariat, but before the new power of the corporation and the state.) The real question is: to whom does the meaning of the art of the past properly belong ? To those who can app|y it to their own lives, or to a cultural hierarchy of relic specialtsts~

The visual arts have always existed within a certain preserve; originally this preserve was magical or sacred. But it was also physical : it was the place, the cave, the building, in which, or for which, the work was made. The experience of art, which at first was the experience of ritual, was set apart from the rest of life - precisely in order to be able to exercise power over it. Later the preserve of art became a social one. it entered the culture of the ruling class, whilst physically it was set apart and isolated in their palaces and houses. During all this history the authority of art was inseparable from the particular authority of the preserve.

What the modern means of reproduction have done is to destroy the authority of art and to remove it - or, rather, to remove its images which they reproduce - from any preserve. For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free. They surround us in the same way as a language surrounds us. They have entered the mainstream of life over which they no longer, in themselves, have power.

Yet very few people are aware of what has happened because the means of reproduction ere used nearly

all the time to promote the illusion that nothing has changed except that the masses, thanks to reproductions, cdi~ now begin to appreciate art as the cultured minority once did. Understandably, the masses remain uninterested and sceptical.

If the new language of images were used differently, it would, through its use, confer a new kind of power. Within it we conld begin to define our experiences more precisely in areas where words are inadequate. (Seeing comes before words.) Not only personal experience, but also the essential historical experience of our relation to the past: that is to say the experience of seeking to give meaning to our lives, of trying to understand the history of which we can become the active agents.

The art of the past no longer exists as it once did. Its authority is lost. In its place there is a language of images. What matters now is who uses that language for what purpose. This touches upon questions of copyright for reproduction, the ownership of art presses and publishers, the total policy of public art galleries and museums. As usually presented, these are narrow professional matters. One of the aims of this essay has been to show that what is really at stake is much larger. A people or a class which is cut off from its own past is far less free to choose and to act as a people or class than one that has been able to situate itself in history. This is why - and this is the only reason why - the entire art of the past has now become a political issue.

I~any of the ideas in the preceding essay have been taken from another, written over forty years ago by the German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin.

His essay was entitled The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. This essay is available in English in a coUlectien called illuminations (Cape, London 1978).

According to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome, the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man. A man’s presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. If the promise is large and credible his presence is striking. If it is small or incredible, he is found to have little presence. The promised power may be moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual - but its object is always exterior to the man. A man’s presence

suggests what he is capable of doing to you Jr for you. His presence may be fabricated, in the sense that he pretends to be capable of what he is not. But the pretence is always towards a power which ne exercises on others.

By contrast, a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, c~o~es, chosen surroundings, taste - ~ndee~ t~ere Js no~hing she can do which does not contribute ~o ~e~ presence. Presence for a woman is so intrinsic ~o her

emanation, a kind of ~eat or smell or aura.

social presence o~ women ~as deveJope~ as a result of their

space. ~u~ ~h~s ~as been at ~e cos~ o~ a woman’s self being spg~ Jn~o ~wo. ~ woma, mus~ continually ~a~eh ~erself.

~e~self. Wh~s~ she is wa~ing across a room o~ whilst she weepin~ at ~he death of her father, she can scarcely

she has been taught and persuaded to survey

~ ~nd so she comes to consider the ;,rveyor and the surveyed within her as the ~o constituent ye~ always dis~inc~ e~eme,ts of her ~den~ity as a woman.

" She has ~o survey ever~hing she is and every~hin~ she ~oes because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears ~o men, ~s of crucial [mportance for what norma~y thought o~ as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.

~en survey women before treating them. Consequently ~ow a woman appears to a man can ~eterm~ne how she wi~] be ~eated. To acquire some control ove~ this process, women mus~ contain it and interiorize ~t. Tha~ par~ of

~erse~f by herseff ~ons~u~es her presence. Eve~ woman’s

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presence regulates what is and is not "permissible" within her presence. Every one of her actions - whatever its dire~t purpose or motivation - is also read as an indication of how she would like to be treated, if a woman throws a glass on the floor, this is an example of how she treats her own emotion of anger and so of how she would wish it to be treated by others. Ifa man does the same, his action is only read as an expression of his anger, if a woman makes a good joke this is . an example of how she treats the joker in herself and ~ ~. accordingly of how she as a jo.ker-woman would like to he :~: i, treated by others. Only a man can make e good joke for its own sake.

One might simplify this by saying : men act and women appear. P, flen |ook at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most pae~icularKy an object of vision: a sight.

In one category of European oil painting women were the principab ever-recurring subject. That category is the nude, In the nudes of Europeen painting we san discover some of the criteria and conventions by which women have been

d j dg ight

The first nudes in the tradition depicted Adam and Eve. It is worth referring to the story as told in Genesis:

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that itwas a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and did eat; and she gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat,

And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig-leaves together and made themselves aprons .... And the

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Lord God called unto the man and said unto him, ’Where are thou?’ And he said, ’~ heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myse~lf .... Unto the ,,v:~rnan God said, ’ I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in so~’row thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee’.

What is striking about this story? They became aware of being naked because, as a result of eating the apple, each saw the other differently. Nakedness was created in the mind of the beholder.

The second striking fact is that the woman is blamed and is punished by being made subservient to the man. |n relation to the woman, the man becomes the agent of God.

in the medieval tradition the story was often illustrated, scene following scene, as in a strip cartoon.

During the Renaissance the narrative sequence disappeared, and the single moment depicted became~the moment of shame. The couple wear fig-leaves or make a

so much in relation to one another as to the spectator.

Later the shame becomes a kind of display.

When the tradition of painting became more secular, other themes also offered the opportunity of painting nudes. But in them all there remains the implication that the subject (a woman) is aware of being seen by a spectator.

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She is not naked as she is. She is naked as the spectator sees her.

Often - as with the favourite subject of Susannah and the Eiders - this is the actual theme of the picture. We join the Elders to spy on Susannah taking her bath. She looks back at us looking at her.

In another version of the subjeet by Tintoretto, Susannah is looking at herself in a mirror. Thus she joins the spectatorsoof herself.

The mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman. The moralizing, however, was mostly hypocritical,

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakednsss you had depicted for your own pleasure.

The real function of the mirror was otherwise. |t was to make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight.

The Judgement of Paris was another theme with the same inwritten idea of a man or men looking at naked women.

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But a further element is now added. The element of judgement. Paris awards the apple to the woman he finds most beautiful. Thus Beauty becomes competitive. (Today The ,Judgement of Paris has become the Beauty Contest.) Those who are not judged beautiful are [~ot/~eautifu/. Those who are, are given the prize.

The prize is to be owned by a judge - that is to say to be available for him. Charles the Second commissioned ~ secret painting from Lely. It is a highly typical image of the tradition. Nominally it might be a Venus and Cupid. in fact it is a portrait of one of the King’s mistresses, Nell Gwynne. It shows her passively looking at the spectator staring at her naked.

This nakedness is not, however, an expression of her own feelings; it is a sign of her submission to the owner’s feelings or demands. (The owner of both woman and painting.) The painting, when the King showed it to others, demonstrated this submission and his guests envied him.

it is worth noticing that in other non-E~tropean traditions - in Indian art, Persian art, African art, Pre- Columbian art - nakedness is never supine !n this way. And if, in these traditions, the theme of a work is sexual attraction, it is likely to show active sexual love as between two people, the woman as active as the man, the actions of each absorbing the other.

We can now begin to see the difference between nakedness and nudity in the European tradition, in his boo~ on The Nude Kenneth Clark maintains that to be naked is simply to be without clothes, whereas the nude is a form of art. According to him, a nude is not the starting point of a painting, but a way of seeing which the painting achieves. To some degree, this is true - although the way of seeing "a nude" is not necessarily confined to ar~: there are also nude photographs, nude poses, nude gestures. What is true is that the nude is always conventionalized - and the authority for its conventions derives from a certain tradition of art.

What do these conventions mean? What does a nude signify? it is not sufficient to answer these questions merely in terms of the art-form, for it is quite ~iear that the nude also relates to lived sexuality.

To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet

not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. (The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display.

To be naked is to be without disguise. To be on display is to have the surface of one’s

own skin, the hairs of one’s own body, turned into a disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.

In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and be is presumed to be a man. Everything is addressed to him. Everything must appear to be the result of his being there, it is for him that the figures have assumed their nudity. But he, by definition, is a stranger - with his clothes still on.

Consider the Allegory of Time and Love by Bronzino.

The painting was sent as a present from the Grand Duke of Florence to the King of France, The boy kneeling on the cushion and kissing the woman is Cupid. She is Venus. But the way her body is arranged has nothing to do with their kissing. Her body is arranged in the way it is, to display it to the man looking at the picture. This picture is made to appeal to his sexuality. It has n.othing to do with her sexuality. (Here and in the European tradition generally, the convention of not painting the hair on a woma..n’s body helps towards the same end. Hair is associated with~sexual power, with passion. The woman’s sexual passion needs to be minimized so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly of such passion.) Women are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own.

Compare the expressions of these two women:

one the model for a famous painting by Ingres and the other a model for a photograph in a girlie magazine.

is not the expression remarkably similar in each case? It is the expression of a woman responding with calculated charm to the man whom she imagines looking at her - although she doesn’t know him. She is offering up her femininity as the surveyed.

The complicated symbolism which lies behind this painting need not concern us now because it does not affect its sexual appeal - at the first degree. Before it is anything else, this is a painting of sexual provocation.

Bt is true that sometimes a painting includes a male lover.

~ But the woman’s attention is very rarely directed towards him. Ot~ten she looks away from him or she looks out of the picture towards the one who considers himself her true lover - the spectator-owner.

There was a special category of private pornographic paintings (especially in the eighteenth century) in which couples making love make an appearance. But even in front of these it is clear’that the spectator-owner will in fantasy oust the other man, or else identify with him. By contrast the image of the couple in non-European traditions provokes the notion of many couples making love. ’We all have a thousand hands, a thousand feet and will never go alone."

Almost all post-Renaissance European sexual imagery is frontal - either literally or metaphorically - because the sexual protagonist is the spectator-owner looking at it.

peak in the

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The absurdity of this male flattery reached its public academic art of the nineteenth century.

Nien of state, of business, discussed under paintings like this. When one of them felt he had been outwitted, he looked up for consolation. What he saw reminded him that he was a man.

There are a few exceptional nudes in the European tradition of oil painting to which very little of what has been said above applies. Indeed they are no longer nudes - they break the norms of the art-form; they are paintings of loved women, more or less naked. Among the hundreds of thousands of nudes which make up the tradition there are perhaps a hundred of these exceptions, in each case the painter’s personal vision of the particular women he is painting is so strong that it makes no allowance for the spectator. The painter’s vision binds the woman to him so that they become as inseparable as couples in stone. The spectator

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can witness their relationship - but he can do no more: he is forced to recognize himself as the outsider he is. He cannot deceive himself into believing that she is naked for him. He cannot turn her into a nude. 3"he way the painter has painted her includes her will and her intentions in the very structure of the image, in the very expression of her body and her face.

The typical and the exceptional in the tradition can be defined by the simple naked/nude antinomy, but the problem of painting nakedness is not as simple as it might at first appear.

What is the sexual function of nakedness in ~ reality? Clothes encumber contact and movement. But it would seem that nakedness has a positive visual value in its own right: we want to see the other naked: the other delivers to us the sight of themselves and we seize upon it - sometimes quite regardless of whether it is for the first time or the hundredth. What does this sight of the other mean to us, how does it, st that instant of total dlsciosure, affect our desire ?

Their nakedness acts as a confirmation and provokes a very strong sense of relief. She is a womaK like any other: or he is a man like any other: we are overwhelmed by the marvellous simplicity of the familiar sexual mechanism.

We did not, of course, consciously expec s to be otherwise: unconscious homosexual desires (or unconscious heterosexual desires if the couple concerned aru homosexual) may have led each to half expect something different. But the "relief" can ~e explained without recourse the unconscious.

We did not expect them to be otherwise, but the urgency and complexity of our feelings bred a sense of uniqueness which the sight of the other, as she is or as he is, now dispels. They are more like the rest of their sex than they are different, in this revelation lies the warm and friendly - as opposed to cold and impersonal - anonymity of nakedness.

One could express this differently: at the moment of nakedness first perceived, an element of banality enters: an element that exists only because we need it.

Up to that instant the other was more or less mysterious. Etiquettes of modesty are not merely puritan or sentimental: it is reasonable to recognize a loss of myetery. And the explanation of this loss of mystery may be largely visual. The focus of perception shifts from eyes, mouth, shoulders, hands - all of which are capable of such subtleties of expression that the personality expressed by them is manifold - it shifts from these to the sexual parts, whose formation suggests an utterly compelling but single process. The other is reduced or elevated - whichever you prefer - to their primary sexual category: male or female. Our relief is the relief of finding an unquestionable reality to whose direct demands our earlier highly complex awareness must now yield,

We need the banality which we find in the first instant of disclosure because it grounds us in reality. But it does more than that. This reality, by promising the familiar, proverbial mechanism of sex, offers, at the same time, the possibility of the shared subjectivity of sex.

The loss of mystery occurs simultaneously with the offering of the means for creating a shared mystery. The sequence is: subjective - objective - subjective to the power of two.

We c~n now understand the difficulty of creating s static image of sexual nakedness, in lived sexual experience nakedness is a process rather than a state, if one moment of that process is isolated, its image will seem banal and its banality, instead of serving as a bridge between two intense imaginative states, will be chilling. This is one reason why expressive photographs of the naked are even rarer than pain~:ings. The easy solution for the photographer is to turn the figure into a nude which, by generalizing both sight and viewer and making sexuality unspecific, turns desire into fantasy.

Let us examine an exceptional painted image of nakedness, it is a painting by Rubens of his young second wife whom he married when be himself was relatively old.

We see her in the act of turning, her fur about to slip off her shoulders. Clearly she will not remain as she is for more than s second. In a superficial sense her image is as

instantaneous as a photograph’s. But, in a more profound sense, the painting "contains" time and its experience,~ it is easy to imagine that a moment ago before she pulled the fur round her shoulders, she was entirely naked. The consecutive stages up to and away from the moment of total disclosure have been transcended. She can belong to any or all of them simultaneously.

Her body confronts us, not as an immediate sight, but as experience -the painter’s experience. Why ? There are superficlal anecdotal reasons ~ her dishevelled hair, the expression of her eyes directed towards him, the tenderness with which the exaggerated susceptibility of her skin has been painted. But the profound reason is a formal one. Her appearance has been literally re-cast by the painter’s subjectivity. Beneath the fur that she holds across herself, the upper part of her body and her legs can never meet. There is a displacement sideways of about nine inches: her thighs, in order to join on to her hips, are at least nine inches too far to the left.

Rubens probably did not plan this: the spectator may not consciously notice it. In itself it is unimportant. What matters is what it permits, it permits the body to become impossibly dynamic. |ts coherence is no longer within itself but within the experience of the painter. N~ore precisely, it permits the upper and lower halves of the body to rotate separately, and in opposite directions, round the sexual centre which is hidden: the torso turning to the right, the legs to the left. At the same time this hidden sexual centre is connected by means of the dark fur coat to all the surrounding darkness in the picture, so that she is turning both around and within the dark which has been made a metaphor for her sex.

Apart from the necessiW of transcending the single instant and of admitting subjectiviw, there is, as we have seen, one further element which is essential for any great sexual image of the naked. This is the element of banaliW which must he undisguised but not chilling, it is this which distinguishes between voyeur and lover, Here such banality is to be found in Rubens’s compulsive painting of the fat softness of H616ne Fourment’s flesh which continually breaks every ideal convention of form and {to him) continually offers the promise of her extraordinary parUculariW.

The nude in European oil painting is usually presented as an admirable expression of the European humanist spirit. This spirit was inseparable from individualism. And without the development of a highly conscious individualism the exceptions to the tradition (extremely personal images of the naked), would never have been painted. Yet the tradition contained a contradiction which it could not itself resolve. A few individual artists intuitively recognized this and resolved the contradiction in their own terms, but their solutions could never enter the tradition’s cu/tura/terms.

The contradiction can he stated simply. On the one hand the individualism of the artist, the thinker, the patron, the owner: on the other hand, the person who is the object of their activities - the woman - treated aa a thing or an abstraction.

DOrer believed that the ideal nude ought to be constructed by taking the face of one body, the breasts of another, the legs of a third, the shoulders of a fourth, the hands of a fifth - and so on.

The result would glorify Man. But the exercise presumed a remarkable indifference to who any one person really was.

in the art-form of the European nude the painters and spectator-owners were usually men and the persons treated as objects, usually women. This unequal relationship is so deeply embedded in our culture that it still structures the consciousness of many women. They do to themselves what men do to them. They survey, like men, their own femininity.

in modern art the category of the nude has become less important. Artists themselves began to question it. in this, as in many other respects, Manet represented a turning point. If one compare~his 01yrnl~ia with Titian’s original, one sees a woman, cast in the traditional role, beginning to question that role, somewhat defiantly.

The ideal was broken. But there was little to replace it except the "realism" of the prostitute - who became the quintessential woman of early avant-garde twentieth- century painting. (Teulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Rouault, German Expressionism, etc.) in academic painting the tradition continued.

Today the attitudes and values which informed that tradition are expressed through other more widely diffused media - advertising, journalism, television.

But the essential way of seeing’women, the essential use to which their images are put, has not changed. Women are depicted in a quite different way from men - not because the feminine is different from the masculine - but because the ’ideal" spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him. If you have any doubt that this is so, make the following experiment. Choose from this book an image of a traditional nude. Transform the woman into a man. Either in your mind’s eye or by drawing on the reproduction. Then notice the violence which that transformation does. Not to the image, but to the assumptions of a likely viewer.

Oil paintings often depict things. Things which in reality are buyable. To have a thing painted and put on a canvas is no~: unlike buying it and putting it in your house. If you buy a painting you buy also the look of the thing it represents.

This analogy between possessing and the way of seeing which is incorporated in oil painting, is a factor usually ignored by art experts and historians. Significantly enough it is an anthropologist who has come c|osest to recognizing it.

L~vi-Strauss writes* : It is this avid and ~mbitious desire to take the object for the benefit of the owner or ~ spectator which seems to me outstandingly original features of the art of civilization.

~f this is true - though the historical span of L~vi-$trausa’s generallzation may be too large - the reached its peak during the period of the traditional oil painting.

The term o//painting refers to more than a technique. It defines an art form. The technique of mixing pigments with oil had existed since the ancient world. But the oil painting as an art form was not horn until there was a need to develop and perfect this technique (which soon involved using canvas instead of wooden panels) in order to express a particular view of life for which the techniques of tempera or fresco were inadequate. When oil paint was first used - at the beginning of the fifteenth century in Northern Europe - for painting pictures of a new character, this character was somewhat inhibited by the survival of various medieval artistic conventions. The oil painting did not fully establish its own norms, its ~wn way of seeing, until the sixteenth centuw.

Nor can the end of the period of the oil painting be da~ed exactly. Oil paintings are still being painted today. Yet the basis of ~s traditional way of seeing was undermined by impressionism and overthrown by Cubism. At about the same ~ime ~he photograph took the place of the oil painting as the principa~ source of visual imagery. For these reasons ~he period o~ ~he ~radi~ional oil painting may be roughly se~ as between 1500 and

The ~radition, however, still forms many of our culturat assumptions. It defines what we mean by pictorial likeness, g~s norms still affect the way we see such subjects as landscape, women, food, dignitaries, m~hology. It supplies us with our archetypes o~ "artistic genius’. And the history of the tradition, as i~ is usually taught, teaches us that art prospers enough individuals in society have a love of

What is a love of a~?

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consider a painting which belongs to the

What does it show? The sort of man in the seventeenth century for

whom painters painted their paintings.

What are these paintings ? Before they are anything else, they are themselves

objects which can be bought and owned. Unique objects;/1 patron cannot be surrounded by music or poems in the same way as he is surrounded by his pictures.

It is as though the collector lives in a house of paintings. What is their advantage over walls of stone or wood ?

They show him sights: sights of what he may possess.

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©

P, gain, L~vi-Strauas comments on how e collection of paintings can confirm the pride and amour-propre of the collector.

For Renaissance artists, painting was perhaps an instrument of knowledge but it was also an instrument of possession, and we must not forget, when we are dealing with Renaissance painting, that it was only possible because of the immense fortunes which were being amassed in Florence and elsewhere, and that rich Italian merchants looked upon painters as agents, who allowed them to confirm their possession of all that was beautiful and desirable in the world. The pictures in a Florentine palace represented a kind of microcosm in which the proprietor, thanks to his artists, had recreated within easy reach and in as real a form as possible, all those features of the world to which he was attached.

The art of any period tends to serve the ideological interests of the ruling class, if we were simply saying that European art between 1000 and 1900 served the interests of the successive ruling classes, all of whom depended in different ways on the new power of capital, we should not be saying anything very new. What is being

proposed is a little more precise; that a way of seeing the world, which was Ultimately determined by new attitudes property and exchange, found its visual expression in the oil painting, and could not have found it in any other visual art form.

Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became excha,geable because everything became ~ commodity. A~I reality was ~echan~catly measured ~y i~s ~a~eriali~y. The sou~, ~ha~ks ~o ~he Cartesia~ system, was save~ ~ a catego~ apart. A painting coul~ speak to ~he souB - ~y way of wh~ i~ referred ~o, but never ~y way i~ e~visaged. ~i~ painting conveyed a visio~ o~

~h~s asse~o,. Wo~s ~y Re~ra~, ~ G~co, G~orgio~e, Vermeer, Turner, etc. Yet if one studies ~hese works in relation to the tradition as a whole, one discovers that they were exceptions of a yew special kind.

The tradition consisted of many hundreds thousands of canvases and easel pictures-distributed throughout Europe. A great number have not survived. Of those which have survived only a small fraction are seriously

87

treated today as works of fine art, and of thi~ fraction another small fraction comprises the actual pictures repeatedly raproduced and presented as the work of "the masters’.

Visitors to art museums are often overwhelmed by the number of works on display, and by what they take to he their own culpable inability to concentrate on more than a few of these works, in fact such a reaction is altogether reasonable. Art history has totally failed to come to terms with the problem of the relationship between the outstanding work and the average work of the European tradition. The notion of Genius is not in itself an adequate answer. Consequently the confusion remains on the walls of the galleries. Third-rate works surround an outstanding work without any recognition - let alone explanation -- of what fundamentally differentiates them.

The art of any culture wii| show a wide differential of talent. But in no other culture is the difference between "masterpiece" and average work so large as in the tradition of the oil painting, in this tradition the difference is not just a question of skill or imagination, but also of morals. The average work - and increasingly after the seventeenth century -was a work produced more or less cynically: that is to say the values it was nominally expressing were less meaningful to the painter than the finishing of the commission or the selling of his product. Hack work is not the result of either clumsiness or provinclalism; it is the result of the market making more insistent demands than the art. The period of the oil painting corresponds with the rise of the open art market. And it is in this contradiction between art and market that the exp|anations must be sought for what amounts to the contrast, the antagonism existing between the exceptional work and the average.

Whilst acknowledging the existence of the axceptiona~ works, to which we shall return later, Ict us first look broadly at the tradition.

What distinguishes oil painting from any other form of painting is its special abiliW to render the tangibility, the texture, the lustre, the solidity of what it depicts. It defines the real as that which you can put your hands on.

Although its painted images are two-dimensionalo its potential of illusionism is far greater than that of sculpture, for it can suggest objects possessing colour, texture and temperature, filling a space and, by implication, filling the entire world.

Holbein’s painting of The Ambassadors (1533) stands at the beginning of the tradition and, as often happens with a work at the opening of a new period, its character is undisguised. The way it is painted shows what it is about. How is it painted? ~

It is painted with great skill to create the illusion in the spectator that he is looking at real objects and materials. We pointed out in the first essay that the sense of touch was like a restricted, static sense of sight. Every square inch of the surface of this painting, whilst remaining purely visual, appeals to, importunes, the sense of touch. The eye moves from fur to silk to meta| to wood to velvet to marble to paper to felt, and each time what the eye perceives is already translated, within the painting itse!f, into the language of tactile sensation. The ~wo men have a certain presence and there are many objects which symbolize ideas, but it is the materials, the stuff, by which the men are surrounded and clothed which dominate the painting.

Except for the faces and hands, there is not s surface Jn this picture which does not make one sware of how it has been elaborately worked over - by weavers, embroiderers, carpet-makers, goldsmiths, leather workers, mosaic-makers, furriers, tailors, jewellers - and of how ~his work~,g-¢ver and ~he resulting richness of each sumacs has been ~na~ly wor~ed-over and repreduced by Holbein the pa[nta~.

This e~phas~s an~ ~he skill that ~ay behind it was ~o rem~, a consta,~ ~ ~he ~red~on of o~J

Works o~ a~ in earlier traditions weaB~h. Bu~ wealth was then a symbol of a fixed socia~ or dJy~ne order. 0~ painting celebrated a new kind of weaith - which was ~ynamic and which found its only sanction in the supreme buying power of money. Thus painting itself had be ab!e ~o demonstrate ~he desirebiliW of what money could ~uy. And ~he ~sua~ desirability of what can be bought lies in its ~angibi]i~y, in how ~ wil~ reward the touch, ~he hand, of the

9O

In the foreground of Holbein’s Ambassadors there is a mysterious, slanting, oval form. This represents-~a highly distorted skull: a skull as it might be seen in a distorting mirror. There are several theories about how it was painted and why the ambassadors wanted it put there. But all agree that it was a kind of memento mori: a play on the medieval idea of using a skull as a continual reminder of the presence of death. What is significant for our argument is that the skull is painted in a (literally) quite different optic from everything else in the picture. If the sk~ll had been painted like the rest, its metaphysical implication would have diseppeared; it would have become an object like everything else, a mere part of a more ske|eton of a man who happened to be dead.

This was a problem which persisted throughout the tradition. When metaphysical symbols are introduced (and later there were painters who, for instance, introduced realistic skulls as symbols of death), their symbolism is usually made unconvincing or unnatural by the unequivocal, static materialism of the painting-method.

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it is the same contradiction which makes the average religious painting of the tradition appear hypocritical. The claim of the theme is made empty by the way the subject is painted. The paint cannot free itself of its original propensity to procure the tangible for the immediate pleasure of the owner. Here, for example, are three paintings of ~tlary I~agdalene.

The point of her story is that she so loved Christ that she repented of her past and came to accept the mortality of flesh and the immortality of the soul. Yet the way the pictures are painted contradicts the essence of this story, it is as though the transformation of her life brought about by her repentance has not taken place. The method of painting is incapable of making the renunciation she is meant to have made. She is painted as being, before she is anything else, a tskeable and desirable woman. Bhe is still the compliant object of the painting-method’s seduction.

It is interesting to note here the exceptional case of William Blake. As a draughtsman and engraver Bl~ke learnt according to the rules of the tradition. But when he came to make paintings, he very seldom used oil paint and, although he still relied upon the traditional conventions of drawing, he did everything he could to make his figures lose substance, to become transparent and indeterminate one from the other, to defy gravity, to be present but intangible, to glow without a definable surface, not to I~_e reducible to objects.

This wish of Blake’s to transcend the "substantiality" of oil paint derived from a deep insight into the meaning an~l limitations of the tradition.

Let us now return to the two ambassadors, to tbsir presence as men. This will mean reading the painting differsnt~y: not at the levsl of what it shews within its frame, but at the Isve~ of what it refers to outside it.

The two men are confident and formal; as between each other they ars relaxed. But how do they look at ~he painter- or at us? There is in their gaze and ~heir stance a curious Jack of sxpectation of any recognition. ~ is as though 6n principle ~heEr worth canno~ be recognized ~y others. They Joo~ ~s ~hough ~hey are gook~ng a~ something of which they are no~ p~. A~ something which surrounds them but from which

crow~ honouring ~hem; a~ ~he worst, intruders.