is the organization of symbolic form and the processes through which the visual world has been

continues to be, systematized and homogenized into a unified
field of enquiry – art history – and the ways in which art can in fact resist these
pressures. This line of enquiry follows the development of art history as an
academic discipline in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries in the work of historians such as Panofsky, Warburg, Riegl and Benjamin
through to the engagement with structuralist and post-structuralist thought.
The chapters in this volume aim to respond in a range of ways to these various
patterns in and approaches to the discipline of art history as they are manifest
across the scholarship of all periods over the last thirty years. There are points of
contact and common themes across the chapters as they examine the impact and
influence of a given approach on the formulation of histories of art alongside its
intellectual consequences. A central concern in the volume is how these issues in
turn raise questions to do with our preoccupation with authorship, authenticity
and chronologically defined linear progression, all of which have informed the
canon of art history but which may be only one way of looking at, analysing and
historicizing art. Of particular interest is what is lost or left out through these
methods of historical enquiry and the points of contact and convergence with
other methodologies. In addition, the porosity between art history and other
related disciplines is brought to the fore and in turn how the archive of the
discipline has changed over time. We now see the link between cognate fields
such as philosophy, sociology, anthropology and art history as a given, and a
significant number of recently published studies of these trans-disciplinary
trends confirm this. Together the chapters combine to present a cross-section of
art history and offer timely new perspectives on method.
A central concern is the emergence of how other kinds of histories – social
histories of art, feminist art history, queer art history – differ from and interact
with the writing on art history at the moment when it emerged as a discipline
during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Specific attention is
paid to the bias towards a male interpretation of the subject, which it is
argued leaves its trace in feminist art history through the binary categories of
gender. Our bodily experience of artworks and the effect this has on art
history is also re-evaluated, and this takes us back to one of the fundamental arthistorical
problems, the complex business of turning visual phenomena into
verbal history. The result of this process is the establishment of canonical subjects
for art history and the notion of linear progression as these are placed in
chronological order to provide stepping stones across the temporal spread of the
discipline. Here the limits of chronology and with it our expectations of progress
are reviewed.
The role of Germany as a locus for the beginnings of art history is also
revisited, and the effects and reception of the intellectual diaspora that spread
from there in the middle years of the twentieth century. The idea of the transdisciplinary
nature of art history is again a common theme across the chapters
and this extends beyond art history’s relationship to philosophy and sociology to
investigate the ways the narratives of artists’ lives become subjects of fiction, both
literary and filmic, and finally how the intertwining of the biography of the
historian and his/her subject object produces discourse.
In the opening chapter, Nick Chare works to destabilize the ways in which our
categories and taxonomies of art are tacitly based on heterosexual discourse.

Gender is defined as a social construct – in this it is unlike sex, which is biologically
determined – and the implications of this established position within art
history are worked out for the discipline. The gendered nature of art-historical
discourse is here undermined in order to disturb our habitual acceptance of male/
female binaries. Chare demonstrates how the discourses of art history are often
complicit with biological and philosophical ‘Old Master narratives’ of sexual
difference, and explores the various ways this complicity has been challenged
over the past thirty years. He considers how concepts of gender have enabled art
historians to expose the ways in which both art and art history have contributed
to the cultural construction of identity. This growing interest in sexuality has
encouraged some art historians to displace the predominantly heterosexual
framework that has characterized the discipline’s understanding of difference.
Through his case studies Chare demonstrates how some of these gendered
approaches to art history have proved problematic and may actually have inhibited
our understanding of visual cultures of the past. For instance, the Venus of
Willendorf is usually interpreted as a representation of a Mother Goddess, but
Chare suggests that this relies upon a cognitive style that would have been alien
to any prehistoric beholder. Chare argues that such an interpretation actually
reveals more about the sexual politics of the late twentieth century than about
any possible gender relations in the Upper Palaeolithic period. He goes on to
consider the representation of sexual difference in art and how ideas about
gender have historically been articulated and reproduced through specific media
and techniques. There has been much scholarship on the ways in which both the
spaces of production and reception and the subject matter of artworks at given
historical moments have functioned to reinforce or subvert norms of femininity
and masculinity, but less research has been devoted to how different media and
techniques enact sexual difference. Chare shows how unstable these binary
categories of male/female can be by examining the ways in which the gendering
of the materials and modes of making art have contributed significantly to the
construction or deconstruction of sexual difference.
The object–viewer relationship and the physicality of both the art work and
onlooker is analysed in a very different way by Amanda Boetzkes. She moves our
attention towards a consideration of the role of phenomenological interpretation
in art history, specifically how one’s encounter with an artwork calls embodied
experience into question. Particularly since the 1960s, when Maurice MerleauPonty’s
Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and The Visible and the Invisible (1959) had
a substantial influence on artists, critics and art historians, the issue of
embodiment has centred not purely on embodied perception, but specifically
on the extent to which the spectator perceives from a state of quasi-immersion in
the artwork. She investigates how our bodily experience in relation to the artwork
can in fact operate to confirm and reproduce our expectations of it, and so
produce a fiction of the object, providing distance rather than engagement with
it. In this way the chapter calls into question our acceptance of phenomenological
approaches in the study of artworks. Boetzkes argues that, as the validity and
possibilities of phenomenology as an art-historical method are reconsidered, we
must take on board the fact that not only are our interpretations of art informed
by our embodied condition, but, even more strongly, that this condition exteriorizes
the subject and denaturalizes our perspective rather than affirming it.

Using examples from contemporary art, postminimalist sculpture, and
installation art, Boetzkes explores the ethical questions surrounding our
phenomenological approach to art-historical interpretation. Through her investigation
of the notions of embodiment, intentionality, and modes of confrontation,
Boetzkes suggests that phenomenology not only mediates a trenchant
understanding of the perceptual experience of the artwork, but that it is predicated
on an acknowledgement of the resistance of art to interpretation. In this
way, phenomenology demands a recognition of the ethical dimension of aesthetic
experience. This ethical dimension is potentially of crucial importance to the
writing of art history, as it calls into question a predetermined history of representation
by shifting our focus to the immediacy of the work of art.
In Dan Karlholm’s chapter, our understanding of chronology as a standard tool in
the writing of Art Histories comes under scrutiny. Karlhom examines a widespread
and influential art-historical genre, the survey text, and concentrates on how the
‘contemporary’ has been absorbed into this form of narrative since the early 1980s.
He is mainly concerned with the uses of language and the problems of classification
and periodization in the writing of these large-scale and broadly ranging art histories.
Karlholm focuses on the accounts given in a series of survey texts of two conceptual
artists, Joseph Beuys and Cindy Sherman, and forges links between contemporary art
of recent decades and philosophical constructions of the contemporary in the
nineteenth century. In this way Karlholm questions our established notions of
chronology and sequence in art history. He proposes instead the idea of co-existing
temporalities for art that run contrary to these accepted norms.
Karlholm’s chapter opens up debate about the function of a genre which, by
definition, presumes the existence of a continuing story of art that has a linear
direction and no end point. At the crux of his argument is the theoretical understanding
of art, prevalent in recent decades, that has privileged the context and
institutions of art over the artwork and artist. This prompts Karlholm to question
first of all how we should engage with this way of thinking about the art of the last
thirty years. Secondly he asks what methods we should use to incorporate the
notion of the contemporary into our chronological, object-based, histories.
Another aspect of how we write about art is examined in the concluding pages
of Catherine M. Soussloff’s chapter in which she reflects on the relationship
between art history and visual studies. Soussloff concentrates on Michel Foucault,
but shifts attention away from Foucault’s acknowledged role as one of the
founders of the field of visual studies to ask what happens if we consider him as
an art historian. This question is explored with specific reference to the four
essays Foucault wrote between the years 1965 and 1975, addressing the importance
of high art, its history, and its episteme, through the medium of easel
painting. Soussloff demonstrates how Foucault used painting to address technical
and theoretical matters of significance to art history and theory. Many of the
themes raised connect with the concerns of the chapters in this volume: for
instance, the nature of the medium of painting, and with it the role of light, shade
and colour; the meaning of representation and resemblance in Western art; the
relationship between word and image; and the effects of photography on painting.
Soussloff goes on to argue that Foucault’s choice of painting, rather than
another medium, is significant in his exploration of its history, or, rather, in his
own terms, its archaeology. For Foucault this archaeology of painting is not about

intentionality but is instead about the discursive practice that is embodied in
techniques and effects. Foucault shared this understanding of the history of
painting with his contemporaries, including Hubert Damisch, and the writing
they produced differed significantly from the phenomenological approaches
found in mid-twentieth-century writings on art by the philosophers Jean-Paul
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. While Foucault accepted the primacy of painting in the
visual arts, as Merleau-Ponty and Sartre had, unlike them he turned to earlier,
Renaissance theories of painting in rejecting a phenomenological approach.
Jeremy Tanner turns our attention to Karl Mannheim, as he says a somewhat
forgotten figure by both sociologists and art historians. Mannheim’s ambiguous
role in the history of art history is outlined by Tanner. On the one hand, he has
been characterized as a secondary player in the development of iconology and
iconography for which Mannheim’s contemporary Erwin Panofsky is better
known. On the other hand, and less positively, Mannheim was the focus of both
Karl Popper’s and Ernst Gombrich’s rage as an ‘enemy of reason’. Tanner takes a
more affirmative view of Mannheim and explores how he and Erwin Panofsky
used Alois Riegl’s concept of Kunstwollen as a common point of departure in the
development of their theories of cultural appropriation. The very different
readings and uses of Riegl by the two thnkers as they grappled with the problem
of how to construct feasible histories of the visual is closely mapped by Tanner. He
shows how the sociological appropriation and transformation of the concept of
Kunstwollen was central to the development of Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge,
and in particular to the analysis of ‘styles of thought’ in his classic study
Conservative Thought (1927).
The journey that Tanner takes us on in his analysis of Mannheim passes
through the early years of art history as an academic discipline in Germany during
the opening decades of the twentieth century. The repositioning of Mannheim in
the group of writers who set out the parameters of the discipline at this time allows
Tanner to offer a new configuration of the relationships between them. In this way,
connections we do not regularly make become apparent between Mannheim and,
for instance, Walter Benjamin and Wilhelm Dilthey. And the resonance of
Mannheim’s thinking is traced forward by Tanner into the work of Foucault,
Bourdieu and Baxandall. The academic diaspora occasioned by the rise of Nazism in
Germany is also unravelled by Tanner, and here he makes particular reference to
the limited reception of Mannheim’s synthesis of sociology and art history as
interpreted in the intellectual context of early post-war Britain.
The biographical trace receives very different treatment in H. Perry
Chapman’s consideration of three recent novels that fictionalize early modern
Netherlandish painters and paintings. These are Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl
Earring (1999); Susan Vreeland’s Girl in Hyacinth Blue (1999) and Michael Frayn’s
Headlong (1999). Chapman argues that fiction about art elucidates a form of art
history that runs in parallel with the more traditional loci of the academy and the
museum, but which also rests outside these powerful and coercive institutions.
This enables her to examine how such fictionalizations operate as mirrors to our
own practices as art historians. The novels focus on paintings of life in ordinary
domestic settings and use similar narrative techniques as artists such as Vermeer
and Bruegel in order to make these everyday scenes appear extraordinary.
Chapman argues that each of these books both exploits and challenges recent

trends in art-historical method. For instance Chevalier responds to the emphasis
of the social history of art on economics and cultural context in preference to the
artist. Vreeland and Frayn both take on board reception theory that privileges the
viewer’s response to the artwork and so moves attention away from the artist.
Chapman uses this fact to critique the tendency in visual studies and material
culture to downgrade the status of both artist and work. Through her discussion
of art fiction she argues against this tendency, exploring the unfamiliar idea that,
however determinedly we downplay the role of the artist as author/creator,
images continue to have a vital impact on humankind.
The multifaceted nature of art history is explored further by Adrian Rifkin in a
discussion which delves forcefully into the discontinuities and diversity of the
discipline. Rifkin argues that the strength of art history is rooted in what he sees as
its constitutive irrationality, precisely the quality in art that ultimately prompts us
to speak about art, or to speak through and with it, and to desire art in the first
place. For Rifkin, art history as an academic subject encompasses such a vast archive
and broad spectrum of knowledge that it can sustain scholarship that ranges from
Aby Warburg to Bernard Berenson, Griselda Pollock to Herbert Read. The relationship
between these various modes of art history is complex and, he argues, sometimes
unexpected. These considerations lead Rifkin to reflect on his own work,
especially the notion of a finished piece of writing. For Rifkin, articulating the
almost infinite possibilities of meaning and interpretation in art history helps him
to understand the reasons why he can never think of a piece of work as complete
and what this implies for the project of the discipline and for its capacity to help us
understand and think about the world that art and its commentaries can offer us.
My ambition in this volume has been to try to refocus attention on contemporary
views on method in a series of newly commissioned chapters. The range of
subjects and the ways in which the authors chose to frame their arguments are
representative of the breadth, complexity and ultimately the richness of the discipline.
The format of the edited volume is also important here. Rather than trying to
put together a monograph by many hands I instead wanted, in editing the volume,
to explore and exploit the diversity of the subject matter, methods of writing, and
ways of expressing the authorial voice possible in art history writing. In this way,
Contemporary Perspectives on Method offers a picaresque journey through the
discipline of art history, which I hope is as thought provoking as it is inconclusive.

Many of the earliest definitions of art were probably intended to emphasize salient or important features for an audience already familiar with the concept, rather than to analyse the essence possessed by all art works and only by them. Indeed, it has been argued that art could not be defined any more rigorously, since no immutable essence is observable in its instances. But, on the one hand, this view faces difficulties in explaining the unity of the concept – similarities between them, for example, are insufficient to distinguish works of art from other things. And, on the other, it overlooks the attractive possibility that art is to be defined in terms of a relation between the activities of artists, the products that result and the audiences that receive them.

Two types of definition have come to prominence since the 1970s: the functional and procedural. The former regards something as art only if it serves the function for which we have art, usually said to be that of providing aesthetic experience. The latter regards something as art only if it has been baptized as such through an agent’s application of the appropriate procedures. In the version where the agent takes their authority from their location within an informal institution, the ‘artworld’, proceduralism is known as the institutional theory. These definitional strategies are opposed in practice, if not in theory, because the relevant procedures are sometimes used apart from, or to oppose, the alleged function of art; obviously these theories disagree then about whether the outcome is art.

To take account of art’s historically changing character a definition might take a recursive form, holding that something is art if it stands in an appropriate relation to previous art works: it is the location of an item within accepted art-making traditions that makes it a work of art. Theories developed in the 1980s have often taken this form. They variously see the crucial relation between the piece and the corpus of accepted works as, for example, a matter of the manner in which it is intended to be regarded, or of a shared style, or of its being forged by a particular kind of narrative.

Term that encompasses work in a wide variety of media, including painting, sculpture, stuccowork and printmaking, produced from the 1530s to the first decade of the 17th century in France. It evokes an unreal and poetic world of elegant, elongated figures, often in mythological settings, as well as incorporating rich, intricate ornamentation with a characteristic type of strapwork. The phrase was first used by Adam von Bartsch in Le Peintre-graveur (21 vols, Vienna, 1803 – 21 ), referring to a group of etchings and engravings, some of which were undoubtedly made at Fontainebleau.

More generally, it designates the art made to decorate the château of Fontainebleau, built from 1528 by Francis I and his successors, and by extension it covers all works that reflect the art of Fontainebleau. The principal artists of the school were Rosso fiorentino , francesco Primaticcio , nicolò dell’Abate , antonio Fantuzzi , antoine Caron and, later, toussaint Dubreuil , ambroise Dubois and martin Fréminet . With the re-evaluation of Mannerism in the 20th century, the popularity of the Fontainebleau school increased hugely. There has also been an accompanying increase in the difficulty of defining the term precisely.

When Francis I returned from his imprisonment in Madrid ( 1525 – 7 ) by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, he chose to live in and near Paris rather than in the Loire Valley as he had done in the first part of his reign. For that purpose he embarked on a large campaign of building residences in the Ile-de-France, beginning in 1527 . His favourite residence soon became Fontainebleau, approximately 65 km south-east of Paris, where he owned a ruined medieval castle in the middle of excellent hunting grounds. The structure was rapidly rebuilt and expanded without great architectural distinction; however, for the interior the King decided on an ambitious programme of painted decoration to be executed in the Italian manner. Earlier in his reign he had attempted to attract well-known Italian artists to his court but had been turned down by both Raphael ( 1483 – 1520 ) and Michelangelo ( 1475 – 1564 ). Leonardo da Vinci had accepted his invitation in 1516 , but, no longer able to paint, he died in 1519 near Amboise. In 1518 Andrea del Sarto ( 1486 – 1530 ) was brought to France, but he returned to Florence the following year. The King was more successful with a younger generation of artists. It was probably partly on the advice of Pietro Aretino ( 1492 – 1556 ) that he invited Rosso Fiorentino, who arrived in 1530 and worked for him until his suicide in 1540 . In 1532 Primaticcio arrived, a younger and still unproven artist sent from Mantua by Giulio Romano (? 1499 – 1546 ), who was too preoccupied with work to come himself. In 1553 Nicolò dell’Abate joined Primaticcio at Fontainebleau, where they were both active until their deaths in the early 1570s. After this time artistic activity was much reduced at Fontainebleau because of political instability and the Wars of Religion ( 1562 – 98 ). However, from 1595 activity resumed under Henry IV (reg 1589 – 1610 ) with a new group of artists who constituted what is sometimes called the second Fontainebleau school.

Work of Rosso and Primaticcio.
The first phase of work, which ended with Rosso’s death in 1540 , was the most innovative and complex. For practical reasons, the first projects executed were for the living-quarters of the King and his queen Eleanor and were entrusted not to Rosso but to Primaticcio. Initially this seems surprising, as Rosso was a much better-known artist and had arrived before Primaticcio. However, it is generally accepted that the reason for this apparent anomaly lay with Primaticcio’s having brought with him a project for the Chambre du Roi that had been established by Giulio Romano in Mantua. Giulio was not only Raphael’s heir—and therefore more authoritative than Rosso—but was also much more experienced in executing monumental decorations. Rosso and Primaticcio are often thought of as strongly contrasting artistic personalities, but in the 19th century critics frequently confused their works. This is significant if one is to understand the kind of currency that the term ‘Fontainebleau school’ has acquired. Indeed, at Fontainebleau the two artists were in close contact, and the younger Primaticcio perhaps learnt more from Rosso than is generally assumed. Although Primaticcio worked independently of Rosso, and each had a team of assistants from France and other countries, they worked closely together and collaborated on the decorative scheme for the Pavillon de Pomone (destr.) and the Galerie François I ( 1532 – 9 ; see fig.1). This complicates an assessment of their respective contributions to the most striking innovation of the 1530s at Fontainebleau: a type of decoration in which a combination of painting and stucco relief is placed above a high wainscoting.

Louis Dimier, in Le Primatice (Paris, 1900 ), proposed that the initiatives came from Rosso and that the Galerie François I was the one decisive work. The exuberant and original decoration of this extremely long and narrow room is still fairly well-preserved. The Chambre du Roi ( 1533 – 5 ), however, has been destroyed. Its decoration was carried out on the basis of a project designed by Giulio and apparently brought to France by Primaticcio; the walls were wainscoted up to about 2 m, and frescoes above depicted the History of Psyche encased in a rich framework of gilt stucco with subsidiary pictures. Here, the main elements of the characteristic Fontainebleau scheme were already in place. There is, of course, a long way between drawings for the project and the final execution. The placement over high wainscoting, for instance, was certainly a decision made in relation to French habits, and it would not be clear from the drawing that the framework was to be in full stucco relief. Nor should one exaggerate the importance of this priority because the Galerie François I was surely already being planned while the Chambre du Roi was being decorated. Rosso may have been consulted about final decisions for the Chambre, and Primaticcio’s expertise in stuccowork could have helped in planning the very complex scheme of the Galerie. Rather than individual responsibilities, what is important is that the work done at Fontainebleau, by transplanted Italian masters assisted by French, Italian and Flemish artists and craftsmen catering to French patrons, has a different appearance from comparable decorations in Italy. It is this new ‘look’—hard as it may be to define—and the contacts between many artists of various nationalities gathered in a somewhat isolated place that are the basis of what can be called the Fontainebleau school.

The death of Rosso in 1540 marked a new phase in the art of Fontainebleau. Rosso’s art was most often characterized by an extremely unconventional, bizarre and almost extravagant fantasy and a taste for the rare and unexpected that affected both his subject-matter and treatment of figures. Primaticcio, who had been trained in the discipline of Raphael transmitted through Giulio Romano, produced much more classicizing work. He became the uncontested leader of court art during the last years of Francis I’s reign ( 1540 – 47 ), and when Rosso died he was in fact in Rome collecting antique sculptures for the King and making moulds of some of the best-known Classical works to have them cast in bronze at Fontainebleau. For this task he brought back with him the young Jacopo Vignola as a technical assistant. Other new arrivals from Italy, among them the Florentine goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini and the Bolognese architect and theorist Sebastiano Serlio, could only reinforce Primaticcio’s classicizing tendencies. Cellini crafted the salt of Francis I ( 1540 – 43 ; Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.; see Cellini, benvenuto , colour pl.) and secured his reputation as a significant bronze sculptor with the Nymph of Fontainebleau (?1543; Paris, Louvre; for illustration see Cellini, benvenuto ) planned for the entrance gate of the château. He was set up in Paris rather than at Fontainebleau and had troubled relations with the French. It is difficult to say how much of an impact his rather unsuccessful stay made in France beyond the production of a handful of masterpieces.

For Primaticcio, these years were a time of astounding productivity. As well as the arduous task of supervising the making of casts (Fontainebleau, Château) of such antique sculptures as the Laokoon (Rome, Vatican, Mus. Pio-Clementino) and Sleeping Ariadne, he executed frescoes (early 1540s; part destr.) for the vestibule of the Porte Dorée, decorated the bedchamber of the Duchesse d’Etampes ( 1541 – 4 ) and much of the Galerie d’Ulysse (late 1540s; destr. 1738 ), the latter his largest and most complex painted decoration. The most spectacular commission must have been a suite of baths known as the Appartement des Bains ( 1544 – 7 ; destr.), a series of six rooms for bathing and relaxation set up beneath the Galerie François I. In these rooms such masterpieces of the King’s collection as Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks (commissioned 1483 ; Paris, Louvre) and Andrea del Sarto’s Charity ( 1518 ; Paris, Louvre) were displayed, encased in stucco frameworks. The central room, with a small pool in the middle, was decorated with the story of Jupiter and Callisto, and apparently several murals had explicitly erotic content. This extraordinary ensemble can be understood as the synthesis of a strongly vernacular and medieval tradition of having public and princely baths on the one hand and a humanistic tradition of ancient Roman baths on the other. Although the rooms were destroyed, we have some records of the decoration through drawings and prints. While the subject-matter was partly playful, the style was in a grand antique manner.

Role of printmaking
The production of prints is one of the most original aspects of the Fontainebleau school, although it is not known exactly when or how it started. According to Vasari, engravings of Rosso’s work were made in France while he was still alive. This seemed unlikely, although recent evidence appears to confirm it. Pierre Milan, possibly an Italian immigrant, was certainly making engravings in Paris by 1540 . Rosso was in Rome before the city was sacked in 1527 and was deeply involved in printmaking, drawing compositions specifically to be engraved by Giovanni Jacopo Caraglio. In France he may have decided to renew this practice by collaborating with craftsmen in Paris. Etchings probably began to be made at Fontainebleau in 1542 , a time when frenetic decorative activity was taking place. Antonio Fantuzzi , a painter from Bologna and one of Primaticcio’s principal assistants, may have had the initiating role and was certainly the most productive, along with Léon Davent, a professional printmaker, and Jean Mignon, a French painter employed at Fontainebleau. Prints executed there have a characteristic appearance: they are quickly made, experimental and apparently uncommercial in intention. Most reproduce compositions by Rosso, Primaticcio and Giulio Romano. Primaticcio himself, whatever his degree of involvement, must have at least tolerated this activity, since he surely controlled most of the drawings that were reproduced. Other artists at Fontainebleau, notably Geoffroy Dumonstier and Domenico del Barbiere, produced prints of their own compositions. Printmaking at Fontainebleau seems to have lasted for only a few years. After 1545 , when Fantuzzi produced fewer etchings, the character of the production changed, becoming more careful and commercial, and Luca Penni became the main provider of compositions. Eventually, the whole activity seems to have moved to Paris, possibly when Francis I died in 1547 . Meanwhile, the production of burin engravings in Paris continued in the workshop of Pierre Milan, who employed René Boyvin, the plates made by the two being indistinguishable at this time. Later, Boyvin signed his prints and continued to produce them at least until 1580 . Most of the designs engraved by the Milan–Boyvin workshop were by Rosso; by Léonard Thiry, Rosso’s Flemish assistant at Fontainebleau, who worked in his master’s style (e.g. the Livre de la conqueste de la toison d’or, probably done in the 1540s but not published by Boyvin until 1563 ; see fig. 2); and by Penni, who apprenticed his son Lorenzo Penni ( fl c. 1557 ) to Boyvin. Printmaking made a major contribution to the Fontainebleau school. To a certain extent, the production of prints balanced the stylistically diverse contributions to 16th-century French court art, giving it greater homogeneity than it would otherwise have had. More significantly, perhaps, prints—especially Fantuzzi’s—were an important factor in the conversion of Rosso’s monumental decorations into an ornamental style that could be applied to all kinds of works, from architecture to jewellery.

Dispersion of artists from Fontainebleau.
Fontainebleau also functioned as a school in the more literal sense, in that it was the training-ground for many artists. Pierre Bontemps, a sculptor who worked at Fontainebleau in the late 1530s and probably finished his training there, was later employed on royal projects for many years. The marble Monument for the Heart of Francis I ( 1550 – 56 ; ex-Abbey of Les Hautes-Bruyères; Paris, Saint-Denis Abbey) is a characteristic example of the Fontainebleau school, having strapwork ornament derived from Rosso and relief compositions with elongated, pliant and sensuous figures reminiscent of Primaticcio. It is unclear to what extent Bontemps himself was responsible for the figures, the architectural design in all likelihood being by Philibert de L’Orme. Even artists who arrived as fully trained professionals altered their manner when in contact with Rosso or Primaticcio. This must have been the case with Luca Penni, who worked with his brother-in-law Perino del Vaga ( 1501 – 47 ) in Genoa before coming to France. Although Penni first worked with Rosso, he was much more affected by Primaticcio, whose manner he adapted to his more ponderously Roman taste. The Justice of Otto (Paris, Louvre), the only painting generally accepted as by his hand, was thought in the 18th century to be by Primaticcio. Léonard Thiry, however, adopted Rosso’s stylistic peculiarities and continued to produce many compositions in his manner for a decade after the master’s death.

In many cases, artists who were of considerable repute then are little known today, for example Lorenzo Naldini, a Florentine sculptor who had considerable success in France, and the sculptor and painter Simon Le Roy ( fl 1534 – 42 ), who had moved to Paris by 1542 . When an actual work is identified, it can be disconcerting. The Deposition (originally Orléans Chapel at the Celestins; now Paris, Ste Marguerite) had long been attributed to Francesco Salviati ( 1510 – 63 ; another Florentine painter who came to France, although little is known of his activity there) but has since been identified as a work by Charles Dorigny, a painter active at Fontainebleau under Primaticcio. Generally Florentine in character, with distant echoes of the work of Andrea del Sarto, it has little to do with what is generally thought of as characteristic of the Fontainebleau school. One cannot therefore assume that all those who worked at Fontainebleau practised what would be recognized as art of the Fontainebleau school; nevertheless, the great numbers of artists who participated in the programmes of decoration there undoubtedly played an important part in spreading the style. In the 1540s in particular there was a veritable diaspora of artists who had worked there. After Rosso’s death several sculptors probably left because there was much less work for them. More dramatic changes were brought about by the death of Francis I in 1547 . Henry II (reg 1547 – 59 ), his successor, was much less attached to Fontainebleau, and artistic activity there during his reign was drastically reduced, with the result that a number of artists sought work elsewhere. The centre of gravity of artistic life moved to Paris. In addition, Henry was much less interested in painted decorations of the Italian type and rather more attracted to architecture and to sculptural decoration; he was also more inclined to patronize French artists.

Influence
The strong classicizing tendency of the 1540s was the dominant trend, although the more playful and fantastic art of Rosso was not forgotten. Jean Cousin le père, who moved from Sens to Paris probably shortly before 1540 , was influenced by Fontainebleau. His production of the 1520s and 1530s is unknown, but works of the 1540s, especially his cartoons for tapestries depicting the Life of St Mamas (Langres Cathedral; Paris, Louvre), clearly echo the new classicizing style. Significantly, several etchings from his designs of the mid-1540s have long been considered as products of the Fontainebleau school. This would probably also have happened to Eva Prima Pandora if its attribution to Cousin had not always been perpetuated by his distant relatives who owned it until it entered the Musée du Louvre. François Clouet, whose court portraits betray his southern Netherlandish ancestry, also painted pictures in the Fontainebleau manner: for example, the Bath of Diana (Rouen, Mus. B.-A.; for illustration see Clouet , (2)) and the Lady in her Bath (?Marie Touchet) ( c. 1570 ; Washington, DC, N.G.A.). Such anonymous paintings as the Toilet of Venus (Paris, Louvre) combine borrowings from Rosso and Primaticcio almost as a deliberate demonstration of their compatibility and their validity as works of the Fontainebleau school. The few monumental painted decorations commissioned show the success of Fontainebleau: several rooms at the château of Ancy-le-Franc (Yonne) attributed to Primaticcio and dell’Abate; the 12 painted overmantels at the château of Ecouen (Val d’Oise) done for Anne, Duc de Montmorency; and the paintings of episodes from Virgil’s Aeneid in the gallery of the north wing of the Grand Ecuyer of Claude Gouffier’s château of Oiron (Deux-Sèvres) by Noël Jallier, an otherwise entirely unknown painter who was clearly aware of Fontainebleau but also, it seems, of recent developments in Rome.

In spite of these examples, painted murals of the type prominent in Italy did not become popular in France. During the reign of Henry II the authority of Primaticcio was reduced, and the French architects Philibert de L’Orme and Pierre Lescot controlled most royal patronage; they preferred sculpted decoration, which was more traditional in France. The impact of Fontainebleau was nevertheless considerable. The exuberant decoration of Lescot’s façade of the Cour Carrée of the Palais du Louvre, with its exquisite figures in relief ( 1547 – 50 ) carved by Jean Goujon , would be unthinkable without the example of Primaticcio. The fact that much of the sculptural decoration at Diane de Poitiers’s château of Anet (Eure-et-Loire) was attributed to Jean Goujon points to a similar source of inspiration, even if the attribution itself is discredited. Indeed, the well-known statue of Diana with a Stag (ex-château of Anet; Paris, Louvre), sometimes attributed to Goujon, with its graceful curves and tapering limbs, is the epitome of the Fontainebleau style. Domenico del Barbiere, who had worked at Fontainebleau, established a practice in Troyes and strongly inflected the great local sculptural tradition of Champagne towards the new court style.

Later developments
The later works of Primaticcio have a slightly new character due partly to personal evolution and continued contacts with developments in Italy but also probably to the arrival in France in 1552 of Nicolò dell’Abate, a skilled painter from Modena who had already established his reputation in Italy. A virtuoso draughtsman and an original colourist, dell’Abate’s Emilian training in the tradition of Correggio (? 1489 – 1534 ) and Parmigianino ( 1503 – 40 ) prepared him for his new position as Primaticcio’s almost exclusive executant for painting. Primaticcio’s works of this time display bolder decorative schemes with complex perspective effects and a warmer, more lively and less classicizing manner, as in the decorations ( 1552 – 6 ) for the Galerie Henri II (Salle de Bal) at Fontainebleau. Being less favoured by Henry II, he was able to work for others, especially the Guise family. For the residence of François de Lorraine, 2nd Duc de Guise ( 1519 – 63 ), in Paris (now Hôtel de Soubise) he decorated the chapel with a spectacular Adoration of the Magi (destr.) that filled the walls of the choir. Such paintings had limited impact outside immediate court circles, in part because they were not reproduced by printmakers. However, the charming but weak Birth of Cupid (New York, Met.), one of a group of paintings by anonymous masters, is in the style of the Fontainebleau school and is indebted to both Primaticcio and dell’Abate. The master of Flora , often considered to be the artist, is the result of an assemblage of works, the common authorship of which seems difficult to sustain. Dell’Abate himself produced independent paintings in France (e.g. the Rape of Proserpina; Paris, Louvre) that show that he was not impervious to Primaticcio’s example, thus reinforcing the coherence of the Fontainebleau school. In paintings such as these and in destroyed decorations for Fontainebleau he also developed an original landscape style. Antoine Caron is—with the exception of contemporary portrait painters—the first French artist with a substantial body of easel paintings. His tiny figures, gesticulating in a balletic manner, are reminiscent of dell’Abate’s, but his art—especially his strange sense of colour—is his own, and he is the most typical artist working in the last decades of the reign of the Valois kings.

Catherine de’ Medici assumed much power after the death of her husband Henry II in 1559 , and Primaticcio once again became a favourite, succeeding de L’Orme as surveyor of the royal works. In this capacity he controlled not only buildings and their painted decoration but also the work of sculptors, notably those working on royal tombs. It was within this framework that Germain Pilon formed his mature style under Primaticcio’s direct guidance, continuing the full impact of the art of Fontainebleau until 1590 .

General character
The term ‘Fontainebleau school’ has been applied so loosely, referring to any 16th-century Italianate work with elongated forms, especially within a market-place eager to give a more precise appellation to mediocre anonymous products, that it can appear meaningless. Nevertheless, used more prudently it points to an important phenomenon: the creation of an original kind of court art in France under Francis I and its partial transformation and diffusion over the next 40 years. While its components may seem disparate to the scholar of Italian art, it must be remembered that for the French, who had come from a tradition of late Flamboyant work and millefleurs tapestries, this must have seemed very new and highly classical in style. As has been noted, there were also such homogenizing factors as the production of prints and the training of artists at Fontainebleau. Other artists were instrumental in giving currency to the art of the court, principally the architect and engraver Jacques Androuet Du Cerceau I and the goldsmith and engraver Etienne Delaune. Through various channels, the art of Fontainebleau affected all areas of visual production, from monumental buildings to the design of jewellery. The decorative arts had always had an important tradition in France, and this continued, though with the adoption of the new style from Fontainebleau. While the Italian artists at court were occasionally occupied with the decorative arts, Jean Cousin I—although always designated as a painter—was in fact mostly occupied with projects for tapestries, stained-glass windows, Limoges enamels, luxury vessels and armoury for execution by various craftsmen. Thus, the ‘Fontainebleau school’ affected the whole visual environment of upper-class society.

To see this phenomenon as mere fashion belittles its importance. It has deep ideological implications. Through its origins and associations, what might be called the ‘classicizing Mannerism’ of the Fontainebleau school was very much a royal style. As such, it made royal power manifest and thereby reinforced it, contributing to a sense of national identity at a particularly important time in the history of France, when there was great instability. In that sense the phenomenon of the Fontainebleau school is an active element in the complex establishment of the modern or ‘absolute’ monarchy. On the other hand, display was a prime method of establishing prestige on the European stage, making luxury a necessity.

3. Second Fontainebleau school.
The Wars of Religion and the dynastic crisis caused by the death in 1589 of Henry III, last king of the Valois line, marked a caesura in French life. Once peace was restored by the new Bourbon king Henry IV, a deliberate effort was made to re-establish continuity as a marker of legitimacy. Painters had never entirely abandoned Fontainebleau; Henry IV undertook its vigorous rejuvenation, as well as that of a few others such as the château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye and the Palais du Louvre. An artist of great talent, Toussaint Dubreuil ensured real continuity by collaborating with Ruggiero de Ruggieri ( fl 1557 – 97 ), one of Primaticcio’s Italian assistants, who had become Premier Peintre to the King. Dubreuil’s references to Primaticcio and the art of the great reigns of Francis I and Henry II are clear and deliberate. Cybele Awakening Morpheus (Fontainebleau, Château), for example, is a paraphrase of Primaticcio’s composition in the vestibule of the Porte Dorée. However, Dubreuil was a fertile and elegant composer in his own right who, like Primaticcio, did not execute the paintings himself. His decorative projects have all been destroyed, but his drawings and descriptions of them (Paris, Louvre and Ecole N. Sup. B.-A.; Amsterdam, Rijksmus.) show that he was inventive and original. Unfortunately, this heir to Primaticcio died prematurely in 1602 . Concurrently with Dubreuil, Ambroise Dubois from Antwerp produced fluent, if less original, work. He is supposed to have arrived in France fully trained, but his art shows that he may have had close contact with the earlier Fontainebleau style. However, this may have been because Fontainebleau and Paris were requisite stops for northern European artists on their training journeys to Rome. Some did not feel it necessary to go further south. After Dubreuil’s death Henry IV recalled Martin Fréminet from Italy, where he had spent several years. In Rome he had been particularly attentive to Michelangelo and had formed a vehement style with highly pliable figures that also recalls the art of such northern European artists as Bartholomäus Spranger, although it is difficult to know whether this was due to direct contacts or to an independent synthesis of similar elements. Fréminet’s decoration ( 1606 – 19 ) of the chapel of the Trinity at Fontainebleau is the most important decorative ensemble surviving from the period. His death in 1619 , a few years before the execution of the cycle of paintings of the Life of Marie de’ Medici (Paris, Louvre) by Peter Paul Rubens ( 1577 – 1640 ) for the Palais du Luxembourg, marked the end of an era.

During Henry IV’s reign the deliberate return to the art of the earlier Fontainebleau school is strikingly felt in a series of erotic pictures, the most famous of which is Gabrielle d’Estrées and her Sister, the Duchesse de Villars (Paris, Louvre; see colour pl. 1:XIV, fig. 3), where the anonymous artist combined two earlier prototypes, François Clouet’s Lady in her Bath and Lady at her Dressing-table (Worcester, MA, A. Mus.), for Henry’s mistress. In this case, the sense of a second Fontainebleau school seems proclaimed in an almost programmatic way.

This act of negotiation varied in different arthistorical periods; with occasional exceptions, however, portraits of rulers continue to emphasize the ‘effigy’, or social role of the individual, over the likeness or personality. Such depictions have been called ‘state portraits’, as they serve a largely political function. As Marianna Jenkinsput it in her definitive study of state portraiture, ‘The primary purpose is not the portrayal of an individual as such, but the evocation through his image of those abstract principles for which he stands.’
This idea of the transcendent authority of the ruler was strongly
implicated in religious beliefs, and often the ruler was seen to derive
power directly from God. This was particularly true in seventeenthcentury
Europe, when the theory of the Divine Right of Kings
endowed rulers with a God-given authority.

However, such a legacy can be traced back to the ancient world, when artists depicted Alexander the Great clad in a panther skin, normally associated with gods, demigods, and legendary heroes like Dionysus or Hercules. This symbolism created a visual association between the ruler and the higher order of gods.

Medieval and early Renaissance artists made similar connections. One of the clearest ways of doing this was by representing the ruler in a pose normally associated with depictions of Christ. Portraitists have tended to favour poses that put their subjects into some sort of partial profile, breaking up the stark symmetry of a frontal gaze by angling the face and thus preventing the portrait subject from staring too glaringly out of the canvas.

However, in portraits of rulers the frontal pose was
used from the third century ad and was associated with Byzantine
mosaics of Christ. Frontality was often combined with a seated pose
that further reinforced an aura of divinity and command, particularly if
the subject of the portrait was seated on a throne. This frontal, seated
pose was popular from the fifteenth century when Jan Van Eyck
included a monumental figure of God on a throne gazing forward on
the inside top panel of his Ghent Altarpiece (1432). Echoes of this Godlike
pose appear in portraits of rulers from Richard II of England to
Napoleon. Each of these rulers was shown seated, facing the
viewer and displaying their authority through both the directness of
his gaze and the divine connotations of his pose. Although the stark
frontal view was not employed frequently in portraiture, the seated
figure was commonly used to represent power.
The poses chosen by portraitists to portray rulers have been remarkably
consistent and convey as much about the authority of the subject as
the inevitable accompanying symbolic trappings. Other poses used
for rulers include the full-length standing position and the equestrian
portrait.
The full-length standing figure of the ruler owed its origins to representations
of saints, and it is notable that most formal portraits of rulers
before the nineteenth century show their whole bodies rather than just
a bust or head and shoulders. The many portraits of Queen Elizabeth I
of England are examples of this. Like her father, Henry VIII, Elizabeth
was highly conscious of her royal image, and as she aged and
consolidated her power her portraits became increasingly static, stylized,
and symbolic. Elizabeth’s portraits are a key example of the way
the monarchs’ symbolic status was more important than their physical
likeness. She attempted to control her image by issuing a proclamation
in 1563 that allowed only an approved representation, justifying this by
suggesting that the ‘errors and deformities’ of some of her portraits
‘grieved’ her subjects. This established model showed Elizabeth frozen
in an ageless and emotionless beauty, surrounded by symbols of her
power and virginity, qualities which were portrayed as interdependent.
The portraits were always full length and took on the frontal formula of
earlier representations of Christ and the saints.
The full-length portrait of rulers has had a remarkable longevity.
It is interesting to note the way some portraits of the first American
president, George Washington, employed this European tradition for
rather a different purpose. Unlike a European monarch, the president
of the United States was democratically elected (although the
early American practice of democratic election did not mean universal
franchise). However, in Gilbert Stuart’s ‘Lansdowne portrait’, Washington
is shown standing in a traditional full-length pose that still
held lingering associations with saints and divine right. The symbolic trappings surrounding him this time are symbols of American freedom
and democracy.

Washington stands next to an armchair which is decorated
at the top with an oval medallion containing 13 stars and stripes
representing the original colonies of America. The table leg includes
figures of eagles clutching arrows, an emblem borrowed from the Great
Seal of the United States. The books on the floor and table (with titles
such as Journal of Congress and Constitution) allude to Washington’s role
in the political foundations of the American republic. Stuart used this representation of Washington’s face in several portraits, and this particular
image became inextricably associated with the idea of the first
president.

As in the portraits of Queen Elizabeth, Washington’s face
became a sort of iconic motif even though, unlike Elizabeth, Washington
did not issue any proclamations.
The equestrian portrait, however, was almost universally used for
male figures of authority. The model for the equestrian portrait was the
ancient Roman statue of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, which later
became a potent symbol of both leadership and the imperial power of
the ancient Roman world. This monument-cum-portrait format was
particularly popular in fifteenth-century Italy for commemorations of
military heroes, for example. The most notable of these, Donatello’s
statue of Gattamelata in Padua (1443–53) and Verrocchio’s Bartolommeo
Colleoni in Venice (begun 1479), adopted the form of the Marcus
Aurelius statue for Cinquecento purposes. The monumental equestrian
portrait continued to be used for several centuries, not only in western
Europe but in other parts of the world as well. The same format was also successful in painted portraits, most notably Titian’s portrait of
Emperor Charles V in the midst of his victory over the united Protestant
forces in 1547 and Van Dyck’s portraits of Charles I of
England. In each case, these monumental works expressed the majesty
of the leader, his control over nature, his military valour, and his towering
stature above ordinary subjects. Whether seated on a throne,
standing in a full-length format, or sitting astride a horse, these different
types of poses became iconically linked with the power and
authority of the leader.

Most of the poses discussed so far represented the ruler’s entire body,
but a different strategy of projecting leadership focused on the isolated
head of the ruler, usually depicted in profile. Coins and medals provided
a schematic image of rulers from the fifth century bc onwards, and
stamps became the modern equivalent of this form of dissemination. In
ancient Greece and Rome, the use of a ruler’s profile on coins became a
means of establishing his identity throughout his often geographically
dispersed empire. The self-conscious revival of the profile portrait in fifteenth-century Italy led to its use again on coins and medals, but this
time the iconic authority of civic leaders was enhanced by the association
of the pose with the power of ancient imperial Rome.
Another common way leadership and power were signified in portraiture
was by a blending of portraiture with history painting. History
painting—what the Renaissance theorist Leon Battista Alberti called
istoria—traditionally represented gods and heroes enacting great deeds,
or displaying moral virtue or physical valour. As history painting was
normally about people in the past, the representations of these people
were inevitably imaginary, and the life-likeness of portraiture was contrary
in principle to the purpose of history painting.

However, artists were happy to blend the two genres and show living individuals amidst historical or heroic characters.

The boundaries between contemporary people and timeless heroes or saints thus became blurred.

This was a common practice in Italian Renaissance art, in which the faces of highborn men and women often stood in for saints and martyrs, or appeared
as witnesses to significant moments of Christian history. A notable
example is Ghirlandaio’s frescoes of the life of St Francis in the Sassetti
Chapel in Santa Trinità, Florence. Here the life of St Francis is told in a
complex iconographic programme, which includes familiar members of
the Tornabuoni family, who were patrons of the chapel, witnessing and
participating in Francis’ life and miracle working. Using a somewhat
different tactic, Andrea Mantegna created a history-like representation
of the Gonzaga family in his fresco devised for their private chambers
in their palace in Mantua. In this fresco Mantegna depicted the
interactions between the family members through detailed study of
their visages amidst an elaborate landscape setting.
The incursions of portraiture into history painting were consolidated
by the theory and practice of the eighteenth-century English
artist Sir Joshua Reynolds, who justified the prevalence of portrait practice
by claiming that portraits could be raised to the level of history
paintings through an appropriate combination of symbolic trappings
and painterly technique. Reynolds contended that by devoting attention
to the ‘general’ rather than the ‘particular’, artists could transcend
the mundane mimetic qualities of portraiture and create works of
lasting significance. His own means of achieving this was by depicting
his subjects in the poses of ancient sculpture or old master paintings,
and dressing them in timeless garments that elevated the sitters by association with ancient deities. It is notable that many, but not all,
of Reynolds’s sitters were from the higher echelons of society, although
he was never asked to produce a formal portrait of King George III and
Queen Charlotte. The blurring of history painting with portraiture was
thus another way of signalling the power of the already powerful
through visual and historical associations.
Paradoxically, although people without power were slow to appropriate
the portrait formats of rulers and aristocrats, by the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries it became increasingly common for monarchs,
the aristocracy, and the gentry to commission portraits of themselves in
domestic settings or intimate circumstances. In many instances, such
portraits still contained vestiges of standard power portraits, such as the
standing or seated full-frontal pose, or elaborate symbolic trappings.
However, these portraits were domesticated in a number of ways.

Portraits were more frequently set in private rooms or other intimate
spaces, rather than state rooms or theatrically curtained and columned
interiors. These portraits more often included children, or animals
shown playing or interacting with the adults and adding an air of  informality. This can be seen in Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s portraits of
the late eighteenth-century French queen, Marie-Antoinette.

Vigée-Lebrun did paint conventional formal portraits of her, showing her
standing in a full-length pose in contrived settings with the familiar
accompaniments of column and curtain. However, she also represented
Marie-Antoinette with her children. Marie-Antoinette was a
monarch reviled by many of her subjects for her extravagance; through
portraiture, however, Vigée-Lebrun helped her manage her public
image, emphasizing her domestic virtues and maternal occupations in
order to counter her public reputation as the Queen who play-acted the
role of shepherdess while living in the splendour of the Versailles palace.
Vigée-Lebrun’s portraits veer between signalling this domestic image
and retaining a decorous formality in the figure of the Queen.
In England, by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the royal
portrait in a domestic setting became a common foil for the more
formal portrait. It is important to realize that such informality was as
contrived as the more hierarchic signals of Divine Right. By having
herself represented as interacting with her family in the drawing room,
Queen Victoria for example could seem more familiar to her subjects
and provide a moral exemplum. Such images could also create a
publicly palatable image of a powerful Queen’s relationship with her
consort, Prince Albert.
A similar change of direction can be discerned in other sorts of institutional
portraits of powerful people in England. While university
deans or vice-chancellors and captains of industry were once shown
uniformly in sombre suits or black gowns, standing or seated in traditional
leadership roles, nowadays such individuals are represented just
as often in shirt sleeves or private domestic environments. This is partly
a matter of portrait practice, but it also indicates changes in the social
conception of leader from an exalted to an everyday figure. Nevertheless,
these portraits project an image of a different kind of power and
authority, but one which is no less recognizable to the viewer. So
although portraits of rulers and other powerful figures have tended to
be formal, iconic, symbolic, and imposing, they can also be informal,
domestic, and familiar.

However, the Enlightenment concept of a museum differed in significant ways from the predominantly nationalist, political phenomenon that flourished after 1790. In 1706, for example, The New World of Words: or, Universal English Dictionary, compiled by Edward Phillips, defined a museum as “a Study or Library; also a College or Publick Place for the Resort of Learned Men.” Understood as a place for the shared pursuit of “true” or normative knowledge, this museum was an introspective site of contemplation that was disengaged from display.

The Ideal Museum

Both prongs of Phillips’s definition point to the longstanding association of the museum with the lyceum, a place for collective study with particular emphasis on the arts and sciences patronized by the nine Muses and fostered by their mother, Mnemosyne (Memory). Describing Aristotle’s Lyceum at Athens, John Milton wrote:

See there the olive-grove of Academe,

…where the Attic bird

Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long;

There

,…the sound Of bees’ industrious murmur, oft invites

To studious musing.

Paradise Regained, 1671, IV.253

To “muse” in this idyllic garden was to absorb nature’s lessons through all the senses, thereby accessing privileged knowledge ranging from musical and mathematical harmony “in tones and numbers” to the deep contemplation of poetry and philosophy.

Such broad intellectual aspirations made Aristotle’s Lyceum an important model for the Hellenistic Musæum of Alexandria, a scholarly community that also shared features in common with Plato’s Academy. As an academic body held inside a building conducive to gathering and conversation, the Musæum of Alexandria was conceived as the necessary complement to the equally celebrated Library of Alexandria, to which the men of the Musæum contributed and from which they learned.

Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, as well as eighteenth-century editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a profusion of other scholarly sources, regularly offered the Alexandrian project as the primary and even uniquely correct denotation of the Latin term musæum and its German, French, and Italian derivatives museum, muséum, and museo. Via its historical roots, the word museum itself consolidated “study,” “library,” and “academy” together, thereby emphasizing idealist aspirations to universal knowledge that could be attained through close attention to natural phenomena in tandem with textual authority. As a result of this inheritance, the ideal Enlightenment museum was heterogeneous in content but compact in size, striving after the impossible but tantalizing ambition to fit the “boundless Musæum of the Universe”  into a single mind, a logical series of printed volumes, a rational suite of rooms, or a freestanding neoclassical building.

In 1704, for example, a design for a museum submitted by Leonhard Christoph Sturm specified rooms for antiquities, natural history, precious metals, and works of art. A series of French architectural projects initiated after 1770 likewise endorsed the “universal” ideal: in 1774, the Académie des Beaux-Arts called for “a muséum or an edifice dedicated to the letters, sciences, and arts.” In 1778, another competitive project defined the museum as “an edifice containing the records and achievements of science, the liberal arts, and Natural history.” In 1779, the annual Rome Prize requested a design for a museum, which the Academy defined as a repository intended to hold objects from the sciences, liberal arts, and natural history. In 1786, the École des Ponts et Chaussées requested a “Museum with four Academies” for its own competition. In 1791, Armand-Guy Kersaint explained that “one understands by this word [museum] the bringing together of everything nature and art have produced.”

He submitted his proposal for a Muséum français with designs by the architectural team of Jacques Molinos and Jacques-Guillaume Legrand, whose building plans assigned rooms to painting, sculpture, drawing, architecture, botany, chemistry, mineralogy, metallurgy, medicine, surgery, pharmacy, zoology, anatomy, antiquity, and agriculture. The fullest resolution of the ideal museum-library-academy was imagined by the French architect Étienne-Louis Boullée, who in 1783 designed a museum with a circular “temple to fame” at its center.

This influential drawing was followed in 1785 by his design for the Royal Library in Paris, which directly conjoined the production of knowledge (museum) with its preservation as text (library). Inside a starkly geometric interior lined with endless rows of books, Boullée placed an assembly of men that quoted Raphael’s fresco, The School of Athens (1509–1511), in which Plato and Aristotle stood united at the center of a gathering of philosophers.

The eighteenth-century architect thus linked the cultivation of mind to object collections and placed both beneath an immense barrel vault that signaled the overarching political and intellectual ambitions of the project, which encompassed past and present as well as the diversity of the terrestrial globe.

The Museum in Actuality

Actual Enlightenment museums were necessarily less dramatic in scale, but still remarkably eclectic. As “publick” places invested in various academic models, they combined the sociability of the aristocratic salon with the privileged contents of the Kunst- and Wunderkammer, library, and cabinet.

Objets d’art, shells, birds, fish, mammals, minerals, fossils, coins, optical devices, musical instruments, military arms, clocks and other machines, manuscripts, books, and all manner of rare and curious objects were at the core of prominent museums such as the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, begun in 1678, which featured the naturalist and explorer John Tradescant’s “Closet of Curiosities.” The Ashmolean Museum opened in its own building in 1683, and, unusually, charged an admission fee. Numerous eighteenth-century collections were set up as museums, such as the Museum Veronense established by Count Scipione Maffei in Verona in 1749, or the Museum Fridericanum in Kassel, built for Frederick II by Simon Louis du Ry from 1769 to 1777. Some were institutionally linked to academies, such as the Capitoline Museum and Accademia (1734) in Rome. Most featured a collection of curiosities as well as a library, the most prominent example being the British Museum in London, formally created in 1753 by an act of Parliament out of the object collections amassed by Sir Hans Sloane and the manuscript collections of Sir Robert Cotton and of Robert Harley, earl of Oxford.

These collections were settled in Montagu House in 1759. Other museums included the Charleston Museum in South Carolina (now the oldest American museum), assembled in the 1770s as a collection of curiosities; Sir Ashton Lever’s Museum in London, a collection of animals and other natural rarities placed in Leicester House in 1774; the American painter Charles Willson Peale’s Museum in Philadelphia, which opened in 1782 and was later housed in Independence Hall; the Prado in Madrid, initiated in 1784/1785 by Charles III as a museum of natural history inside a building designed by Juan de Villanueva, but finally opened in 1819 as the Royal Museum of Painting; and Scudder’s American Museum in New York, assembled by the Tammany Society at the close of the century as a museum of natural curiosities, art, and antiquities, and curated by John Scudder until his death in 1821.

Various sorts of published compendia also offered themselves as “museums,” including those that cataloged the contents of established object collections, such as John Tradescant’s own Musæum Tradescantianum (1656); the Musæum Kircherianum (1709), which described Egyptologist and antiquarian Athanasius Kircher’s renowned collection in the College of the Jesuits at Rome; and Laurentius Theodorus Gronovius’s Museum ichthyologicum (1754–1756), a study of fish and reptiles. Other scholarly volumes invoked the title to signal the intellectual breadth of their compressed contents: Musæum Metallicum (1648), an important early mineralogical study by Ulisses Aldrovandi; Musæum hermeticum (1749), an anonymous work pertaining to alchemy; and Musæum lapidarium Vicentinum (1776–1804), a three-volume catalog of epitaphs and inscriptions. All three printed works could operate under the authoritative rubric of “museum,” a claim presumably justified because of the closed or secretive character of the information amassed in their pages. By the late eighteenth century, even a British auction catalog listing the collections of Ralph Thoresby could exalt itself with the title Musæum Thoresbyanum (1764).

In 1792, the neoclassicist A.-C. Quatremère de Quincy, later the perpetual secretary of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, complained bitterly about the “abuse” of the term museum, which had not only been appropriated by such catalogues but had also been wrongly applied to places full of “objects that are foreign to study & the cult of the Muses.” To understand Quatremère’s irritation, it is helpful to take the representative example of Peale’s Museum. This was a respected museum of art that expanded into natural history, and its collections subsequently included “a chicken with four legs and four wings, a turnip weighing 80 pounds, [and] the trigger-finger of a convicted murderer.” Quatremère argued that the title should be restricted to the Alexandrian Musæum, and all other applications of the term should exclusively refer to serious collections of art such as those held in the Vatican in Rome and the Uffizi in Florence. Yet in his desire to preserve the clarity of the classical inheritance, Quatremère’s attempts to constrain the term’s proliferating avatars by distinguishing ancient from modern usage, and breaking art away from science, also reflected the rising emphasis on disciplinary specialization and social categorization that was an expressly contemporary position. A new understanding of museum was emerging that demanded it serve the rationalist cause of “legitimate knowledge” by sacrificing a Renaissance-derived mode of wonder and curiosity, and suppressing the desire to include the entire world synoptically under one roof.

In the Service of Knowledge

With the founding of the Musée du Louvre (1792), the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle (1793), the Musée des Monuments Français (1795–1816), and the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers (1794) in revolutionary Paris, the institutional shift from wonder to reason commenced in earnest.

Dedicated to works of art, to natural history, to national history, and to technological progress, respectively, these revolutionary museums rejected universality in favor of specialization in the name of social “utility.” Moreover, earlier museums had been either princely or private collections housed in their own buildings, and correspondingly understood to have a public component, but they were not open to the public in the modern sense of the term. By the 1790s, this elitist structure could be sustained neither within the political arena nor inside the museum’s walls. Its demise initiated what Germain Bazin has described as the “museum age”: the age of the public institution that stood as the cultural property of the nation. Museums subsequently proliferated, each tending to stress a programmatic collection that had been selected according to discipline or genre in increasingly refined degrees. However, the corresponding conceptual shifts were not accomplished without a great deal of negotiation. For example, when the Constituent Assembly first debated converting the Louvre palace into a museum in 1791, it was understood to encompass the “monuments of the arts and sciences”; actual specialization to works of art was not accomplished until a decade later. Later civic “temples to art,” such as the Glyptothek in Munich (1816–1830) and the Altes Museum in Berlin (1825–1828), adopted Enlightenment idealism to support a stance of aesthetic transcendence, holding themselves out as bastions of high culture in an era of burgeoning materialism.Even as the activities of the modern museum gradually assumed an extroverted pedagogical role that underscored its newfound social obligations, echoes of the Enlightenment quest for knowledge continued to reverberate throughout the nineteenth century. In 1790s Paris, courses of public lectures were given by noted naturalists such as the comte de Lacépède and Louis Daubenton, who were among the resident professors at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle.

Known as the Jardin des Plantes throughout the eighteenth century, this site was renamed the Muséum during the Revolution. Having already risen to prominence in the mid-1700s by endorsing the encyclopedic urge to comprehend and collect the natural world, the nineteenth-century Muséum continued to sustain the lyceum-museum model, retaining a resident academic body inside an extensive garden setting that, like Aristotle’s Lyceum in Athens, inspired “studious musing.” Professors at the Lycée (also known as the Athénée), founded in Paris in 1786, likewise delivered daily public lectures on literary and scientific subjects, perpetuating the oral mode of transmission and promoting open intellectual exchange. These efforts were complemented by textbooks such as the Lycée, ou Cours de littérature ancienne et moderne (1798/1799–1810) by Jean-François de la Harpe, the Lyceum der schoenen Kuenst (Lyceum of Fine Art, 1797), and the Lycæum of Ancient Literature; or Biographical…Account of Greek and Roman Classics (1809), compiled by Okey Belfour—all texts that put canonical scholarship directly into the hands of an interested and growing readership. Scientific, medical, and literary societies in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth regularly took the name lyceum, such as the Lyceum Medicum Londinense, the Lyceum of Natural History of New York (later renamed the New York Academy of Sciences), and the Baltimore Medical Lycæum. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other notable figures lectured for the influential American Lyceum movement founded by Josiah Holbrook in 1831, in order to establish local lyceums for the popular dissemination of knowledge and the promotion of civic-mindedness through learned lectures and artistic performances. The movement led to the establishment of museums and libraries in urban communities across the United States. (To underscore the permeability of the lyceum-museum connection, the Lyceum established in 1839 in Alexandria, Virginia, is presently its museum of history.) After that final flourishing, lyceums gradually lost popularity; not so museums, which have since become emblematic of political struggle over cultural property and the vulnerable position of nature within history. Nonetheless, the complexities of the museum’s history and its lingering encyclopedic ideals continue to shape current debates regarding its definition and responsibilities in the present.

If French philosophical traditions are often characterized as rationalist and deductive (a reliance on reason, conclusions deduced from pre established premises), British philosophy is often said to be empirical or inductive. Empiricism, in its most general sense, argues that sensory or practical experience has primacy in human knowledge (over that of reflective reason). In its purest form, it opposes the notion of ‘‘innate ideas,’’ as espoused by such earlier philosophers as Descartes, and it argues that the mind is essentially a blank slate (tabula rasa) at birth, one that subsequently fills out, as it were, by the recordings of the senses. The strict dependence of all mental states on sensations (and the mental ‘‘associations’’. they give rise to) is known as ‘‘sensationalism,’’ yet not all empiricists are sensationalists. John Locke, for instance, emphasized the primacy of sense experience, but he also argued that the mind’s reflections on its own mental operations were another source of ideas.

Empiricism, by its very premises, stands in opposition to the aesthetic norms of classicism. When Alberti argued that judgments of beauty were formed from ‘‘a reasoning faculty that is inborn in the mind,’’ he was equating beauty with universal and innate ideas essentially of divine origin; objects are beautiful to the extent to which they mirror perfectly these preordained ideas. When Winckelmann insisted that Greek artists had attained the most perfect beauty possible, he too was establishing an idealized norm against which all subsequent artistic efforts should be measured. Empirical thought, however, essentially deprives art of any such norms. As we are born without innate ideas of beauty, we can only make judgments of beauty from the sensations of pleasure or displeasure that arise from the objects we contemplate. When we try to penetrate the cause of this pleasure or displeasure, we can only point to certain attributes or qualities associated with objects and our perception of them – often culturally ingrained. Therefore some empiricists argue that judgments of beauty are relative or lack any other standards than our own subjectivity, while others argue that the correctness of these judgments, while intrinsically subjective, is universal because people share common experiences and judgments as human beings.

We can see how these philosophical distinctions might translate into architectural theory by considering garden design. One might view a Renaissance or French classical garden and judge it beautiful, because nature is arrayed in a mathematical order and displays such attributes as symmetry, regularity, and hierarchy of forms. These attributes are aesthetic premises that the gardener brings to the design in the desire to create something beautiful. Someone else, however, might come upon a natural stream or wooded glen and judge it beautiful precisely because it lacks such attributes. Here the judgment is made intuitively on the scene or ‘‘picture’’ one sees, and not on the presence of preconceived mathematical rules. The development of the so-called English garden exploited nature in the latter sense, and as we shall see this innovation in garden design also carries with it major aesthetic implications.

JOHN LOCKE from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

Although several earlier thinkers – such as William Ockham (c.1285–1347), Francis Bacon (1561–1626), and Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) – developed models of empirical thought, John Locke was the first modern philosopher to raise it into a coherent and logical system. A friend of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, Locke originally studied scholastic philosophy at Oxford in the 1650s, but chose medicine and science as a profession. He became an avid defender of civil and religious freedom, and this interest attracted him in 1666 to the politician Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the first Earl of Shaftesbury. The next year Locke moved into the lord’s household as both his physician and personal secretary; he tutored Ashley’s children, among them the third Earl of Shaftesbury. Locke’s political sympathies proved dangerous, however. When the first Earl of Shaftesbury fell from power in 1675, Locke was forced to join him in exile in Paris. And although Locke returned with Ashley to Londo four years later, another charge of insurrection in 1682 led both men once again into political exile, this time to the Netherlands. It was here in Holland (as with Descartes earlier) that Locke wrote the first draft of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which he published shortly after his return to England in 1689. The two passages below, taken from the beginning of Books 1 and 2, outline his system. Book 1 opens with his rejection of innate ideas, which Locke follows by arguing that all ideas (knowledge) come from sensation (the senses) and reflection (mental operations). The remainder of the two books, as well as Books 3 and 4, develop in great detail the arguments for and implications of such a model.

No Innate Speculative Principles

1. It is an established opinion amongst some men,1 that there are in the understanding certain innate principles; some primary notions koinad _nnoiai, characters, as itwere stamped upon the mind ofman; which the soul receives in its very first being, and brings into theworld with it.

2 It would be sufficient to convince unprejudiced readers of the falseness of this supposition, if I should only show (as I hope I shall in the following parts of this Discourse) how men, barely by the use of their natural faculties, may attain to all the knowledge they have, without the help of any innate impressions; and may arrive at certainty, without any such original notions or principles. For I imagine any one will easily grant that it would be impertinent to suppose the ideas of colours innate in a creature towhom God hath given sight, and a power to receive them by the eyes from external objects: and no less unreasonable would it be to attribute several truths to the impressions of nature, and innate characters, whenwemay observe in ourselves faculties fit to attain as easy and certain knowledge of them as if they were originally imprinted on the mind. [ . . . ] the constant impressions4 which the souls of men receive in their first beings, and which they bring into the world with them, as necessarily and really as they do any of their inherent faculties.

3. This argument, drawn from universal consent, has this misfortune in it, that if it were true in matter of fact, that there were certain truths wherein all mankind agreed, it would not prove them innate, if there can be any other way shown how men may come to that universal agreement, in the things they do consent in, which I presume may be done.

4. But, which is worse, this argument of universal consent, which is made use of to prove innate principles, seems to me a demonstration that there are none such: because there are none to which all mankind give an universal assent. I shall begin with the speculative, and instance in those magnified principles of demonstration, ‘Whatsoever is, is,’ and ‘It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be’; which, of all others, I think have the most allowed title to innate.

Of Ideas in General, and their Original

1. EVERY man being conscious to himself that he thinks; and that which his mind is applied about whilst thinking being the ideas that are there,6 it is past doubt that men have in their minds several ideas, – such as are those expressed by the words whiteness, hardness, sweetness, thinking, motion, man, elephant, army, drunkenness, and others: it is in the first place then to be inquired, How he comes by them?

I know it is a received doctrine, that men have native ideas, and original characters, stamped upon their minds in their very first being. This opinion I have at large examined already; and, I suppose what I have said in the foregoing Book will be much more easily admitted, when I have shown whence the understanding may get all the ideas it has; and by what ways and degrees they may come into the mind; – for which I shall appeal to every one’s own observation and experience.

2. Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: – How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety?

Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE. In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either, about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking. These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring.

3. First, our Senses, conversant about particular sensible objects, do convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things, according to those various ways wherein those objects do affect them. And thus we come by those ideas we have of yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet, and all those which we call sensible qualities; which when I say the senses convey into the mind, I mean, they from external objects convey into the mind what produces there those perceptions. This great source of most of the ideas we have, depending wholly upon our senses, and derived by them to the understanding, I call SENSATION.

4. Secondly, the other fountain from which experience furnisheth the understanding with ideas is, – the perception of the operations of our own mind within us, as it is employed about the ideas it has got; – which operations, when the soul comes to reflect on and consider, do furnish the understanding with another set of ideas, which could not be had from things without. And such are perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and all the different actings of our own minds; – which we being conscious of, and observing in ourselves, do from these receive into our understandings as distinct ideas as we do from bodies affecting our senses. This source15 of ideas every man has wholly in himself; and though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called internal sense. But as I call the other Sensation, so I call this REFLECTION, the ideas it affords being such only as the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations within itself. By reflection then, in the following part of this discourse, I would be understood to mean, that notice which the mind takes of its own operations, and the manner of them, by reason whereof there come to be ideas of these operations in the understanding. These two, I say, viz. external material things, as the objects of SENSATION, and the operations of our own minds within, as the objects of REFLECTION, are to me the only originals from whence all our ideas take their beginnings. The term operations here I use in a large sense, as comprehending not barely the actions of the mind about its ideas, but some sort of passions arising sometimes from them, such as is the satisfaction or uneasiness arising from any thought.

study of our subject itself. But the introduction, where we still are, can in this

respect do no more than sketch for our apprehension a conspectus of the

entire course of our subsequent scientific studies.

But since we have spoken of

art as itself proceeding from the absolute Idea, and have even pronounced its

end to be the sensuous presentation of the Absolute itself, we must proceed,

even in this conspectus, by showing, at least in general, how the particular

parts of the subject emerge from the conception of artistic beauty as the presentation

of the Absolute. Therefore we must attempt, in the most general

way, to awaken an idea of this conception.

It has already been said that the content of art is the Idea, while its form is

the configuration of sensuous material. Now art has to harmonize these two

sides and bring them into a free reconciled totality. The first point here is the

demand that the content which is to come into artistic representation should

be in itself qualified for such representation. For otherwise we obtain only

a bad combination, because in that case a content ill-adapted to figurativeness

and external presentation is made to adopt this form, or, in other words,

material explicitly prosaic is expected to find a really appropriate mode of

presentation in the form antagonistic to its nature.

The second demand, derived from the first, requires of the content of art that it

be not anything abstract in itself, but concrete, though not concrete in the sense

in which the sensuous is concrete when it is contrasted with everything spiritual

and intellectual and these are taken to be simple and abstract. For everything

genuine in spirit and nature alike is inherently concrete and, despite its universality,

has nevertheless subjectivity and particularity in itself. If we say, for example,

of God that he is simply one, the supreme being as such, we have thereby only

enunciated a dead abstraction of the sub-rational Understanding. Such a God,

not apprehended himself in his concrete truth, will provide no content for art,

especially not for visual art. Therefore the Jews and the Turks have not been able

by art to represent their God, who does not even amount to such an abstraction

of the Understanding, in the positive way that the Christians have. For in

Christianity God is set forth in his truth, and therefore as thoroughly concrete

in himself, as person, as subject, and, more closely defined, as spirit. What he is

as spirit is made explicit for religious apprehension as a Trinity of Persons, which

yet at the same time is self-aware as one. Here we have essentiality or universality,

and particularization, together with their reconciled unity, and only such unity

is the concrete. Now since a content, in order to be true at all, must be of this

concrete kind, art too demands similar concreteness, because the purely abstract

universal has not in itself the determinate character of advancing to particularization

and phenomenal manifestation and to unity with itself in these.

Now, thirdly, if a sensuous form and shape is to correspond with a genuine

and therefore concrete content, it must likewise be something individual,

in itself completely concrete and single. The fact that the concrete accrues

to both sides of art, i.e. to both content and its presentation, is precisely the

point in which both can coincide and correspond with one another; just as,

for instance, the natural shape of the human body is such a sensuously concrete

thing, capable of displaying spirit, which is concrete in itself, and of

showing itself in conformity with it. Therefore, after all, we must put out of

our minds the idea that it is purely a matter of chance that to serve as such a

genuine shape an actual phenomenon of the external world is selected. For art

does not seize upon this form either because it just finds it there or because

there is no other; on the contrary, the concrete content itself involves the factor

of external, actual, and indeed even sensuous manifestation. But then in

return this sensuous concrete thing, which bears the stamp of an essentially

spiritual content, is also essentially for our inner [apprehension]; the external

shape, whereby the content is made visible and imaginable, has the purpose of

existing solely for our mind and spirit. For this reason alone are content and

artistic form fashioned in conformity with one another. The purely sensuously

concrete—external nature as such—does not have this purpose for the sole

reason of its origin. The variegated richly coloured plumage of birds shines

even when unseen, their song dies away unheard; the torch-thistle, which

blooms for only one night, withers in the wilds of the southern forests without

having been admired, and these forests, jungles themselves of the most

beautiful and luxuriant vegetation, with the most sweet-smelling and aromatic

perfumes, rot and decay equally unenjoyed. But the work of art is not so

naïvely self-centred; it is essentially a question, an address to the responsive

breast, a call to the mind and the spirit.

Although illustration by art is not in this respect a matter of chance, it

is, on the other hand, not the highest way of apprehending the spiritually

concrete. The higher way, in contrast to representation by means of the sensuously

concrete, is thinking, which in a relative sense is indeed abstract, but

it must be concrete, not one-sided, if it is to be true and rational. How far a

specific content has its appropriate form in sensuous artistic representation,

or whether, owing to its own nature, it essentially demands a higher, more

spiritual, form, is a question of the distinction which appears at once, for

example, in a comparison between the Greek gods and God as conceived by

Christian ideas. The Greek god is not abstract but individual, closely related

to the natural [human] form. The Christian God too is indeed a concrete

personality, but is pure spirituality and is to be known as spirit and in spirit.

His medium of existence is therefore essentially inner knowledge and not the

external natural form through which he can be represented only imperfectly

and not in the whole profundity of his nature.

But since art has the task of presenting the Idea to immediate perception

in a sensuous shape and not in the form of thinking and pure spirituality as

such, and, since this presenting has its value and dignity in the correspondence

and unity of both sides, i.e. the Idea and its outward shape, it follows

that the loftiness and excellence of art in attaining a reality adequate to its

Concept will depend on the degree of inwardness and unit in which Idea and

shape appear fused into one.

In this point of higher truth, as the spirituality which the artistic formation

has achieved in conformity with the Concept of spirit, there lies the basis

for the division of the philosophy of art. For, before reaching the true Concept

of its absolute essence, the spirit has to go through a course of stages, a

series grounded in this Concept itself, and to this course of the content which

the spirit gives to itself there corresponds a course, immediately connected

therewith, of configurations of art, in the form of which the spirit, as artist,

gives itself a consciousness of itself.

This course within the spirit of art has itself in turn, in accordance with its

own nature, two sides. First, this development is itself a spiritual and universal

one, since the sequence of definite conceptions of the world, as the definite

but comprehensive consciousness of nature, man, and God, gives itself artistic

shape. Secondly, this inner development of art has to give itself immediate

existence and sensuous being, and the specific modes of the sensuous being

of art are themselves a totality of necessary differences in art, i.e., the particular

arts. Artistic configuration and its differences are, on the one hand, as

spiritual, of a more universal kind and not bound to one material [e.g. stone

or paint], and sensuous existence is itself differentiated in numerous ways;

but since this existence, like spirit, has the Concept implicitly for its inner

soul, a specific sensuous material does thereby, on the other hand, acquire a

closer relation and a secret harmony with the spiritual differences and forms

of artistic configuration.

However, in its completeness our science is divided into three main

sections:

First, we acquire a universal part. This has for its content and subject both

the universal Idea of artistic beauty as the Ideal, and also the nearer relation

of the Ideal to nature on the one hand and to subjective artistic production

on the other.

Secondly, there is developed out of the conception of artistic beauty a particular

part, because the essential differences contained in this conception

unfold into a sequence of particular forms of artistic configuration.

Thirdly, there is a final part which has to consider the individualization of

artistic beauty, since art advances to the sensuous realization of its creations

and rounds itself off in a system of single arts and their genera and species.

(i) The Idea of the Beauty of Art or the Ideal

In the first place, so far as the first and second parts are concerned, we must at

once, if what follows is to be made intelligible, recall again that the Idea as the

beauty of art is not the Idea as such, in the way that a metaphysical logic has to

apprehend it as the Absolute, but the Idea as shaped forward into reality and

as having advanced to immediate unity and correspondence with this reality.

For the Idea as such is indeed the absolute truth itself, but the truth only in its

not yet objectified universality, while the Idea as the beauty of art is the Idea

with the nearer qualification of being both essentially individual reality and

also an individual configuration of reality destined essentially to embody and

reveal the Idea. Accordingly there is here expressed the demand that the Idea

and its configuration as a concrete reality shall be made completely adequate

to one another. Taken thus, the Idea as reality, shaped in accordance with the

Concept of the Idea, is the Ideal.

The problem of such correspondence might in the first instance be understood

quite formally in the sense that any Idea at all might serve, if only the

actual shape, no matter which, represented precisely this specific Idea. But in

that case the demanded truth of the Ideal is confused with mere correctness

which consists in the expression of some meaning or other in an appropriate

way and therefore the direct rediscovery of its sense in the shape produced.

The Ideal is not to be thus understood. For any content can be represented

quite adequately, judged by the standard of its own essence, without being

allowed to claim the artistic beauty of the Ideal. Indeed, in comparison with

ideal beauty, the representation will even appear defective. In this regard it

may be remarked in advance, what can only be proved later, namely that the

defectiveness of a work of art is not always to be regarded as due, as may be

supposed, to the artist’s lack of skill; on the contrary, defectiveness of form

results from defectiveness of content. So, for example, the Chinese, Indians,

and Egyptians, in their artistic shapes, images of gods, and idols, never get

beyond formlessness or a bad and untrue definiteness of form. They could not

master true beauty because their mythological ideas, the content and thought

of their works of art, were still indeterminate, or determined badly, and so did

not consist of the content which is absolute in itself. Works of art are all the

more excellent in expressing true beauty, the deeper is the inner truth of their

content and thought. And in this connection we are not merely to think, as

others may, of any greater or lesser skill with which natural forms as they exist

in the external world are apprehended and imitated. For, in certain stages

of art-consciousness and presentation, the abandonment and distortion of

natural formations is not unintentional lack of technical skill or practice, but

intentional alteration which proceeds from and is demanded by what is in

the artist’s mind. Thus, from this point of view, there is imperfect art which

in technical and other respects may be quite perfect in its specific sphere, and

yet it is clearly defective in comparison with the concept of art itself and the

Ideal.

Only in the highest art are Idea and presentation truly in conformity with

one another, in the sense that the shape given to the Idea is in itself the absolutely

true shape, because the content of the Idea which that shape expresses

is itself the true and genuine content. Associated with this, as has already

been indicated, is the fact that the Idea must be determined in and through

itself as a concrete totality, and therefore possess in itself the principle and

measure of its particularization and determinacy in external appearance. For

example, the Christian imagination will be able to represent God in human

form and its expression of spirit, only because God himself is here completely

known in himself as spirit. Determinacy is, as it were, the bridge to appearance.

Where this determinacy is not a totality emanating from the Idea itself,

where the Idea is not presented as self-determining and self-particularizing,

the Idea remains abstract and has its determinacy, and therefore the principle

for its particular and solely appropriate mode of appearance, not in itself,

but outside itself. On this account, then, the still abstract Idea has its shape

also external to itself, not settled by itself. On the other hand, the inherently

concrete Idea carries within itself the principle of its mode of appearance and is therefore its own free configurator. Thus the truly concrete Idea alone produces

its true configuration, and this correspondence of the two is the Ideal.

(ii) Development of the Ideal into the Particular Forms

of the Beauty of Art

But because the Idea is in this way a concrete unity, this unity can enter the

art-consciousness only through the unfolding and then the reconciliation

of the particularizations of the Idea, and, through this development, artistic

beauty acquires a totality of particular stages and forms. Therefore, after studying

artistic beauty in itself and on its own account, we must see how beauty

as a whole decomposes into its particular determinations. This gives, as the

second part of our study, the doctrine of the forms of art. These forms find their

origin in the different ways of grasping the Idea as content, whereby a difference

in the configuration in which the Idea appears is conditioned. Thus

the forms of art are nothing but the different relations of meaning and shape,

relations which proceed from the Idea itself and therefore provide the true

basis for the division of this sphere. For division must always be implicit in

the concept, the particularization and division of which is in question.

We have here to consider three relations of the Idea to its configuration.

(a) First, art begins when the Idea, still in its indeterminacy and obscurity,

or in bad and untrue determinacy, is made the content of artistic shapes.

Being indeterminate, it does not yet possess in itself that individuality which

the Ideal demands; its abstraction and one-sideness leave its shape externally

defective and arbitrary. The first form of art is therefore rather a mere search

for portrayal than a capacity for true presentation; the Idea has not found

the form even in itself and therefore remains struggling and striving after

it. We may call this form, in general terms, the symbolic form of art. In it the

abstract Idea has its shape outside itself in the natural sensuous material from

which the process of shaping starts and with which, in its appearance, this

process is linked. Perceived natural objects are, on the one hand, primarily

left as they are, yet at the same time the substantial Idea is imposed on them

as their meaning so that they now acquire a vocation to express it and so are

to be interpreted as if the Idea itself were present in them. A corollary of this

is the fact that natural objects have in them an aspect according to which

they are capable of representing a universal meaning. But since a complete

correspondence is not yet possible, this relation can concern only an abstract

characteristic, as when, for example, in a lion strength is meant.

On the other hand, the abstractness of this relation brings home to consciousness

even so the foreignness of the Idea to natural phenomena, and the

Idea, which has no other reality to express it, launches out in all these shapes,

seeks itself in them in their unrest and extravagance, but yet does not find

them adequate to itself. So now the Idea exaggerates natural shapes and the

phenomena of reality itself into indefiniteness and extravagance; it staggers

round in them, it bubbles and ferments in them, does violence to them, distorts

and stretches them unnaturally, and tries to elevate their phenomenal

appearance to the Idea by the diff useness, immensity, and splendour of the

formations employed. For the Idea is here still more or less indeterminate and unshapable, while the natural objects are thoroughly determinate in their

shape.

In the incompatibility of the two sides to one another, the relation of the

Idea to the objective world therefore becomes a negative one, since the Idea,

as something inward, is itself unsatisfied by such externality, and, as the inner

universal substance thereof, it persists sublime above all this multiplicity of

shapes which do not correspond with it. In the light of this sublimity, the

natural phenomena and human forms and events are accepted, it is true, and

left as they are, but yet they are recognized at the same time as incompatible

with their meaning which is raised far above all mundane content.

These aspects constitute in general the character of the early artistic pantheism

of the East, which on the one hand ascribes absolute meaning to even

the most worthless objects, and, on the other, violently coerces the phenomena

to express its view of the world whereby it becomes bizarre, grotesque,

and tasteless, or turns the infinite but abstract freedom of the substance [i.e.,

the one Lord] disdainfully against all phenomena as being null and evanescent.

By this means the meaning cannot be completely pictured in the expression

and, despite all striving and endeavour, the incompatibility of Idea and

shape still remains unconquered.—This may be taken to be the first form of

art, the symbolic form with its quest, its fermentation, its mysteriousness, and

its sublimity.

(b) In the second form of art which we will call the classical, the double

defect of the symbolic form is extinguished. The symbolic shape is imperfect

because, (i) in it the Idea is presented to consciousness only as indeterminate

or determined abstractly, and, (ii) for this reason the correspondence of

meaning and shape is always defective and must itself remain purely abstract.

The classical art-form clears up this double defect; it is the free and adequate

embodiment of the Idea in the shape peculiarly appropriate to the Idea itself

in its essential nature. With this shape, therefore, the Idea is able to come into

free and complete harmony. Thus the classical art-form is the first to afford

the production and vision of the completed Ideal and to present it as actualized

in fact.

Nevertheless, the conformity of concept and reality in classical art must

not be taken in the purely formal sense of a correspondence between a content

and its external configuration, any more than this could be the case with the

Ideal itself. Otherwise every portrayal of nature, every cast of features, every

neighbourhood, flower, scene, etc., which constitutes the end and content of

the representation, would at once be classical on the strength of such congruity

between content and form. On the contrary, in classical art the peculiarity

of the content consists in its being itself the concrete Idea, and as such the

concretely spiritual, for it is the spiritual alone which is the truly inner [self].

Consequently, to suit such a content we must try to find out what in nature

belongs to the spiritual in and for itself. The original Concept itself it must be

which invented the shape for concrete spirit, so that now the subjective Concept—

here the spirit of art—has merely found this shape and made it, as a

natural shaped existent, appropriate to free individual spirituality. This shape,

which the Idea as spiritual—indeed as individually determinate spirituality—

assumes when it is to proceed out into a temporal manifestation, is the

human form. Of course personification and anthropomorphism have often been maligned as a degradation of the spiritual, but in so far as art’s task is to

bring the spiritual before our eyes in a sensuous manner, it must get involved

in this anthropomorphism, since spirit appears sensuously in a satisfying way

only in its body. The transmigration of souls is in this respect an abstract idea

and physiology should have made it one of its chief propositions that life in

its development had necessarily to proceed to the human form as the one and

only sensuous appearance appropriate to spirit.

But the human body in its form counts in classical art no longer as a merely

sensuous existent, but only as the existence and natural shape of the spirit, and

it must therefore be exempt from all the deficiency of the purely sensuous and

from the contingent finitude of the phenomenal world. While in this way the

shape is purified in order to express in itself a content adequate to itself, on

the other hand, if the correspondence of meaning and shape is to be perfect,

the spirituality, which is the content, must be of such a kind that it can express

itself completely in the natural human form, without towering beyond and

above this expression in sensuous and bodily terms. Therefore here the spirit

is at once determined as particular and human, not as purely absolute and

eternal, since in this latter sense it can proclaim and express itself only as

spirituality.

This last point in its turn is the defect which brings about the dissolution

of the classical art-form and demands a transition to a higher form, the third,

namely the romantic.

(c) The romantic form of art cancels again the completed unification of the

Idea and its reality, and reverts, even if in a higher way, to that difference and

opposition of the two sides which in symbolic art remained unconquered.

The classical form of art has attained the pinnacle of what illustration by art

could achieve, and if there is something defective in it, the defect is just art

itself and the restrictedness of the sphere of art. This restrictedness lies in the

fact that art in general takes as its subject-matter the spirit (i.e. the universal,

infinite and concrete in its nature) in a sensuously concrete form, and classical

art presents the complete unification of spiritual and sensuous existence as

the correspondence of the two. But in this blending of the two, spirit is not in

fact represented in its true nature. For spirit is the infinite subjectivity of the

Idea, which as absolute inwardness cannot freely and truly shape itself outwardly

on condition of remaining moulded into a bodily existence as the one

appropriate to it.

Abandoning this [classical] principle, the romantic form of art cancels

the undivided unity of classical art because it has won a content which goes

beyond and above the classical form of art and its mode of expression. This

content—to recall familiar ideas—coincides with what Christianity asserts

of God as a spirit, in distinction from the Greek religion which is the essential

and most appropriate content for classical art. In classical art the concrete

content is implicitly the unity of the divine nature with the human, a unity

which, just because it is only immediate and implicit, is adequately manifested

also in an immediate and sensuous way. The Greek god is the object

of naïve intuition and sensuous imagination, and therefore his shape is the

bodily shape of man. The range of his power and his being is individual and

particular. Contrasted with the individual he is a substance and power with

which the individual’s inner being is only implicitly at one but without itself  possessing this oneness as inward subjective knowledge. Now the higher

state is the knowledge of that implicit unity which is the content of the classical

art-form and is capable of perfect presentation in bodily shape. But this

elevation of the implicit into self-conscious knowledge introduces a tremendous

difference. It is the infinite difference which, for example, separates man

from animals. Man is an animal, but even in his animal functions, he is not

confined to the implicit, as the animal is; he becomes conscious of them, recognizes

them, and lifts them, as, for instance, the process of digestion, into

self-conscious science. In this way man breaks the barrier of his implicit and

immediate character, so that precisely because he knows that he is an animal,

he ceases to be an animal and attains knowledge of himself as spirit.

Now if in this way what was implicit at the previous stage, the unity of

divine and human nature, is raised from an immediate to a known unity,

the true element for the realization of this content is no longer the sensuous

immediate existence of the spiritual in the bodily form of man, but instead

the inwardness of self-consciousness. Now Christianity brings God before

our imagination as spirit, not as an individual, particular spirit, but as absolute

in spirit and in truth. For this reason it retreats from the sensuousness

of imagination into spiritual inwardness and makes this, and not the body,

the medium and the existence of truth’s content. Thus the unity of divine

and human nature is a known unity, one to be realized only by spiritual

knowing and in spirit. The new content, thus won, is on this account not

tied to sensuous presentation, as if that corresponded to it, but is freed

from this immediate existence which must be set down as negative, overcome,

and reflected into the spiritual unity. In this way romantic art is the

self-transcendence of art but within its own sphere and in the form of art

itself.

We may, therefore, in short, adhere to the view that at this third stage the

subject-matter of art is free concrete spirituality, which is to be manifested as

spirituality to the spiritually inward. In conformity with this subject-matter,

art cannot work for sensuous intuition. Instead it must, on the one hand,

work for the inwardness which coalesces with its object simply as if with

itself, for subjective inner depth, for reflective emotion, for feeling which,

as spiritual, strives for freedom in itself and seeks and finds its reconciliation

only in the inner spirit. This inner world constitutes the content of the

romantic sphere and must therefore be represented as this inwardness and

in the pure appearance of this depth of feeling. Inwardness celebrates its triumph

over the external and manifests its victory in and on the external itself,

whereby what is apparent to the senses alone sinks into worthlessness.

On the other hand, however, this romantic form too, like all art, needs an

external medium for its expression. Now since spirituality has withdrawn

into itself out of the external world and immediate unity therewith, the sensuous

externality of shape is for this reason accepted and represented, as in

symbolic art, as something inessential and transient; and the same is true of

the subjective finite spirit and will, right down to the particularity and caprice

of individuality, character, action, etc., of incident, plot, etc. The aspect of

external existence is consigned to contingency and abandoned to the adventures

devised by an imagination whose caprice can mirror what is present to

it, exactly as it is, just as readily as it can jumble the shapes of the external world and distort them grotesquely. For this external medium has its essence and

meaning no longer, as in classical art, in itself and its own sphere, but in the

heart which finds its manifestation in itself instead of in the external world

and its form of reality, and this reconciliation with itself it can preserve or

regain in every chance, in every accident that takes independent shape, in all

misfortune and grief, and indeed even in crime.

Thereby the separation of Idea and shape, their difference and inadequacy

to each other, come to the fore again, as in symbolic art, but with this essential

difference, that, in romantic art, the Idea, the deficiency of which in the symbol

brought with it deficiency of shape, now has to appear perfected in itself as

spirit and heart. Because of this higher perfection, it is not susceptible of an

adequate union with the external, since its true reality and manifestation it

can seek and achieve only within itself.

This we take to be the general character of the symbolic, classical, and

romantic forms of art, as the three relations of the Idea to its shape in the

sphere of art. They consist in the striving for, the attainment, and the transcendence

of the Ideal as the true Idea of beauty.

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