A Brief History of the Artist from God to Picasso

9. Myths and Mysteries of Modern Art

N I N E myths and mysteries of modern art Ever since Homer, nearly three millennia ago, told the tale of the shield made by Hephaistos for Achilles, writers and artists have been telling stories or writing fables about art. Sometimes such fables are passed on as matters of fact, as when Picasso, who was born at 11:15 p.m. on October 25, 1881, according to birth records, would later tell the charming tale of his nativity at midnight. This seemingly casual alteration of the facts, a mere rounding off of numbers, is not so innocent and not without poetic significance, since, according to legend, midnight was the hour of Christ’s birth. We cannot forget here that when Vasari described the nativity of Michelangelo, he pictured the advent of the messiah of art. ‘‘Seldom any splendid story,’’ Dr. Johnson once said, ‘‘is wholly true.’’ Or, if it is wholly true, we might add, its ‘‘truth’’ rises above the condition of mere ‘‘fact.’’ Sometimes the fable of art has been carried to the pitch of high farce and fantasy, as in William Beckford’s largely forgotten, late eighteenthcentury Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters, the mock-heroic ‘‘lives’’ of imaginary artists. Of all these artists the greatest was Aldrovandus Magnus, the epic painter whose labors on a heroic cycle of painting were tragically terminated when his supply of canvas vanished in a great conflagration, which, singeing the beards of his disciples, caused the a brief history of the artist from god to picasso painter to die of grief. His epitaph, written by Professor Clod Lumpewitz or ‘‘Dim Wit’’ and rendered in English by John Ogilby, who was immortalized in Pope’s Dunciad, likened Aldrovandus to Alexander the Great: the one died for want of worlds to conquer, the other ‘‘for lack of canvas.’’ Here in a peak of parody, a summit of satire, the whole Renaissance tradition of the heroic artist goes up, you might say, in smoke. That tradition is epitomized in the monumental Lives by Giorgio Vasari, unarguably one of the great novelistic authors of the modern period and the ‘‘father’’ of the modern history of art. As Ovid’s myth of Pygmalion and Pliny’s fables of Apelles became legendary, so eventually did Vasari’s fables. Giotto drew a perfect O with a single flourish, Fra Filippo Lippi fled the Medici palace to pursue his carnal urges, and Paolo Uccello was so enamored of his ‘‘sweet perspective’’ that he refused to come to bed when called by his wife. The story of Uccello entered into the global imagination of literature, where it merged with the tale of Don Quixote, the greatest illusionist of them all, tilting at windmills. As his niece observed and as he himself later said, Quixote was himself a poet, an artist, whose romantic ‘‘picture’’ of the world is one of the masterpieces of art history. Although Vasari’s artists were real people, not imaginary characters like Quixote, our sense of their reality is vivified, indeed magnified, by his fables in much the same way that Quixote is made ‘‘real’’ to us, comes to life, thanks to Cervantes’ fictive powers. Vasari’s power as a fabulist is equally evident in his description of actual works of art. Painting the Last Supper, he tells us, Leonardo had difficulty imagining the head of Judas, since he did not think he could find a model for one so evil as the apostle who betrayed Christ. Centuries later, Vasari’s fantasy would fire the imagination of the Czech writer Leo Perutz, who devoted his novel Leonardo’s Judas, an imaginative portrayal of Leonardo’s iniquitous traitor, to the question of what such a person was like. Vasari also pretends that Leonardo encountered a similar difficulty imagining the visage of Christ and therefore never finished it. Although there is no reason to doubt that Leonardo painted Judas’s head, Vasari shrewdly comments on the theological problem confronting any painter who would seek to probe the mystery of incarnation by painting the image of God incarnate. The fiction of the unfinished fresco is keyed to a deep theme of Vasari’s biography of Leonardo, the painter’s tendency to leave works unfinished or ‘‘imperfect.’’ This issue arises sig104 myths and mysteries of modern art nificantly, if not paradoxically, in the life of the artist who, as Vasari says, brings...