Historical Perspectives on the Visual Arts, Science, and Technology

Leonardu. Vol 15. N o 3. pp 234-237, 1982 Printed in Great Britain 0024-094X/82/030234-04%03 .OO/O Pergarnon Press Ltd. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE VISUAL ARTS, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY David R. Topper Readers are invited lo draw attention to noreworthy arrirles on rhe above subjecl.for review by Professor Topper, Department of History, rhe Universiry o f Winnipeg. Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 2E9. Canada J. Kenseth,Bernini’s Borgnese Sculpture: Another view, TheArt Bulletin63, 191(June 1981).Bothmuseumsandart books(those ‘museums without walls’) often violate the artifacts of history by taking them out of their original context. The role of the historian as teacher is then to rectify this distinction. if possible. This is what Kenseth attempts in this analysis of three sculptures of Bernini-‘David’, ‘Apollo and Daphne’, and ‘Pluto and Persephone’.-executed between 1621 and 1625 for Cardinal Borghese’s Villa. Virtually all scholars have assumed that the statues (placed against walls in the Villa) were viewed from a single viewpoint. and that Bernini composed them with that intent. But Kenseth’s thesis is that Bernini structured the statues in such a way that their meaning unfolds as the spectator makes a 180”arc around them. Drawing upon 17th- and 18th-century guidebooks, Kenseth says that the statues were placed against walls, but not where previous scholarsthought. Consider Kenseth’s placement of the Apollo and Daphne: ‘upon entering the r o o m . .., the spectator’s first encounter with the sculpture would have been a most unexpected, indeed very surprising, rear view of Apollo’s body ... This striking and unusual view of Apollo ... urges one to move about the statue to seek more of its form and to discover its meaning. The fable of Apollo and Daphne is disclosed then not in one dramatic vision but gradually and sequentially as one moves around the statue’ (p. 195).Kenseththen makes thesame argument for the other two statues. (It may be difficult for the reader to grasp this fully without seeing the sequences of 10 figures that accompany the text for each statue.) Kenseth’s visual reconstruction of the viewer’s sweeping perspective, plus the documented evidence for this, is quite convincing. 1 think she has discovered the original spatial context of these statues. A. Murray, ‘Strange and Subtle Perspective ...’: Van Gogh, The Hague School and the Dutch Landscape Tradition, Art Hist0r.v 3, 410 (Dec. 1980). The space in Vincent Van Gogh’s pictures has been an almost inexhaustible source of hypotheses about why he painted that w.ay.Murray, in this article, mentions a few recent ones; for example, A. S. Wylie’s thesis that Van Gogh’s perspective projection technique can be traced to a popular text on perspective used by him, and P. Heelan’s contrasting argument that Van Gogh saw the non-Euclidean nature of vision, and drew that world. The key difference between these two theses is striking: one posits the importanceofwhat we may call ‘internal’ forms (learned ways of drawing things) that the artist can employ when required, with the implication that the artist relies less upon the visual sensations themselves; the other thesis places the major emphasis upon the visual perception of the world as the source of picture making, that is, ‘external’ forms. The ‘internal’thesis is nicely summarized in H. Wolfflin’s famed pronouncement that ‘all paintings owe more to other paintings than they owe to direct observation’. The ‘external’ thesis has been repeated numerous times by assorted ‘Realists’ asserting, ‘I paint what I see’. Murray’s well-researched article proposes an ‘internal’thesis. ‘The present study’, she writes. ‘is an attempt to demonstrate that Van Gogh’s perspectival distortions, whether they deviate in degree or in kind from projections of a Euclidean spatial structure. are present not only in his paintings of 1888 onward, but are latent in his earlier pre-Paris drawings and relate ultimately to his own Dutch artistic heritage’ (p. 41 1). By emphasizing the role of the ‘The Hague School’ of Dutch artists upon Van Gogh in the mid-1880s. Murray minimizes the later impact of Paris-Impressionism and the vogue of Japanese prints. On this point Murray is probably correct...