Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? Some Thoughts on Writing Excessively

I’d like to ask a question of pictures, and the texts that get written about them. What does it mean, I’d like to know, that in the late twentieth century pictures have come to require so much more explanation than they have called for in any previous century? Why do art historians, art critics, and others involved with images find it necessary to write at such length? Why, in the metaphor of my title, have pictures so recently become so puzzling? In a sense this question cannot be asked within art history, since art history’s ways of answering it would necessarily have to do with what would be taken to be the fact that pictures are complex, and that the words are merely fitted to their objects. Instead the exponential increases in art history and criticism are probably symptoms and the cause lies elsewhere—ultimately, I will argue, in the general outlines of what pictures have come to mean in the late twentieth century.

In a sense, art history’s recent interest in self-reflection is not much help here, because historiographic self-criticism leads to emphasis on the differences between rival historical approaches. The question I want to pursue can only make sense if it abandons those differences, and treats essays that would ordinarily be thought to be distant from one another as forms of a single tendency. To guide that synthetic project, I will be making use of an extended comparison between writing about pictures and solving puzzles. It’s a deceptive metaphor, not least because it can seem to solve the problem before it is properly posed—as if the answer were to be that pictures have come to need lengthy interpretations because late twentieth-century writers enjoy solving puzzles—but it is useful in large measure because it corresponds to some important ways art historians describe their own methods. The puzzle metaphor helps make it clear how much modernist and postmodernist writers are bedeviled by pictures: how pictures seem to make extravagant demands on the faculties of criticism itself. And that, in turn, helps me toward the conclusion I propose at the end, that the need to see pictures as a kind of object requiring a tremendous effort of interpretation can only be the sign of a concerted resistance to the nonlinguistic nature of pictures.

Monstrous Interpretations

It used to be that relatively few words would suffice to describe a picture. Even pictures that Vasari judged to be important, exceptionally skillful, or complicated only occupied him for a page or two. Today that amount of description is scarcely enough to state the basic facts about a picture—to say something about its leading meanings, or to rehearse its title, date, and provenance—and a more reflective response seems to require at least an essay. On occasion art historians write not only a little more than Vasari, but hundreds or thousands of times more.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, for example, is described by Vasari in a little over two pages in the standard edition. Leo Steinberg’s essay on the Last Supper, published in 1973, takes 113 pages, including 19 pages of footnotes and 51 illustrations. ¹ (Vasari did not use footnotes or illustrations aside from woodcut portraits of the artists.) Vasari gives about ten pages to another central image, Masaccio’s frescos in the Brancacci Chapel. By contrast, in the last hundred years there have been at least three book-length studies on the Chapel. ² In a rough count, I think the Brancacci Chapel inspired approximately 50 pages of writing before 1800 and on the order of 1,500 pages since then.

A dozen or so artworks in the Western tradition have attracted so much attention that their literature has become monstrous, incapable of judicious summary. As I have argued elsewhere, such works have outgrown disciplinary art history: they can no longer be treated comprehensively in a year-long seminar or adequately addressed in a monograph, and so much has been said about them that the history of their reception can no longer be...