A Brief History of the Artist from God to Picasso

2. Homer, Hephaistos, and the Poetic Origins of Art History

T W O homer, hephaistos, and the poetic origins of art history . From Vasari to Homer Throughout the history of literature in the West—from Homer to the present—authors have sung or written extensively about what are called the visual arts. Such arts can be defined in various ways. It can mean the arts of design, the interrelated spatial arts of which Vasari wrote in his monumental sixteenth-century Lives of the painters, sculptors, and architects —those individuals who gave shape to space, made objects that filled such space or created the illusion of space. Art can also be defined even more broadly as the class of artifacts or things made with skill, knowledge, or imagination. Clothing, jewelry, weapons, furniture, and various household objects are examples of such artifice often displayed in museums of art. Writing about art and artists is found in many genres: epigrams, epitaphs, poems, anecdotes, short stories, novels, biographies, critical essays , memoirs, guidebooks, theoretical treatises, technical manuals, and what came to be called ‘‘art history,’’ which is in fact less a genre of literature than a variety of academic conventions or approaches, that a brief history of the artist from god to picasso some might call techniques, tools of analysis, or even ‘‘methods,’’ such as iconography, connoisseurship, and the social history of art. Although the distinction has justifiably been made between history as an investigation of the past and historical fiction, history and historical fiction are intimately related, even intertwined. Indeed, they nourish each other. As history aspires to veracity, so a great deal of historical fiction is similarly devoted to the truth, which it renders with verisimilitude . If history is based on facts, so too is fiction. As novelists and readers of fiction are keenly aware, without facts, fiction would be meaningless. Although facts and fiction often seem to be opposed to each other, they are closely related in one respect. Both are rendered fictively, in the root sense of the word, from fingere, to mold or give shape. History, more than an assemblage of facts, is a form of narrative art in which the facts are shaped. So too is fiction. Historical fiction, we might say, is history written with poetic license—sometimes in the extreme. In the broad history of literature about art, Vasari’s epoch-making Lives is one of the greatest and most influential books ever written. It has contributed much to modern poetry and fiction about art and has also powerfully shaped the scholarly field of art history. Like modern scholars, Vasari collected documents that contain facts about artists and their works; but at the same time, he also employed tall tales or fables either borrowed from other authors or of his own invention. Some stories in Vasari’s pages are undeniably and famously fiction, such as the well-known story of how the painter Andrea del Castagno murdered his fellow painter and friend Domenico Veneziano, a deep fiction about envy and rivalry that Vasari embellished by portraying the satanic painter as a type of Judas. We know that this account, which Vasari inherited from an earlier tradition, is a tall tale, since Domenico Veneziano in fact outlived Castagno. Sometimes, however, we have no way of confirming that a story told by Vasari is true. Did Leonardo, as Vasari says, in fact employ musicians and buffoons to entertain Mona Lisa and thus elicit the smile that the painter rendered so effectively and unforgettably, as some believe, or did Vasari invent the story in a kind of poetic fiction as a way of celebrating the singular smile of Leonardo’s portrait? I would suggest that, like the fable of Castagno, Vasari’s story of Leonardo’s clowns and music makers is a poetic fiction true to the art of its subject. As Castagno’s fictional violence is true to the harshness of the painter’s pictorial style, 10 homer, hephaistos, and the poetic origins of art history so Leonardo’s fable of entertainers who brought a smile to Mona Lisa’s lips is true to the expressive effect of Leonardo’s portrait. Vasari’s fable has verisimilitude, since it explains why Mona Lisa smiles, which in turn explains why some readers believe it to be a true story. Many would say that it does not matter whether Vasari’s story of Leonardo’s buffoons and musicians is true, since it is plausible...