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city in present day
Turkey) leading from the Ancient City's great theatre to the
Celsus Library and to the Temple of Artemis. The creation of the
marble road dates back to the 1st century A.D, and it was
rebuilt in the 5th century.
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Marble have not only been
quarried in famous ancient cultures in Europe but also
in Africa, Asia and the Americas. |
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In Asia, India and Myanmar
-present day Burma- had a continuous output of beautiful
marble sculptures, structures and items as you seen in
this photos of marble Buddha's and and other figures. . |
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Venetian Colour: Marble, Mosaic,
Painting and Glass, 1250-1550. . - book review
Art Bulletin, The, by
Venetian Colour: Marble, Mosaic, Painting and Glass, 1250-1550
In an essay written fifty years ago on therelationship between
aesthetic and religious experience, Aldous Huxley pondered
provocatively on the nature of the connection between Baroque
religious art and 17th-century religious practice. (1) Did the
state of chronic excitement, the rolling of eyes, waving of
arms, and pressing of hands to palpitating bosoms of the painted
and sculpted holy personages reflect an equally physically
agitated religious life in the contemporary men and women who
prayed beneath them? If so, he wondered, had the art been
modeled on their agitation, or was their agitation due to
familiarity with an art that had become agitated for purely
aesthetic reasons? Or was there in fact no agitation, physical
or spiritual, in the real world, corresponding to those visceral
yearnings prevailing in the world of painting and sculpture?
"Were there then, a few ardent contemplatives and actives
imperfectly leavening a great lump of the lukewarm, the fickle,
the time-serving, and the indifferent?" Hux ley set up these
simple oppositions between art and experience with deliberate
irreverence to insist upon the autonomy of the artistic process
and its separateness from "the brute collocation of opposites
and incompatibles" that, for him, made up the collective
experience of society. The relative uniformity of artistic style
during any one epoch was proof that art did not, indeed, could
not, reflect the unmanageable multiplicity of experience. For
him, all the promptings of the individual will and
temperament--all the potentialities of human nature--that are in
operation within society at any given time work against the idea
of art as the manifestation of any collective impulse, or of
environment as a major determining factor in either art or life.
Today, the attempt to comprehend and to illuminate art by
looking for structural relationships with other areas of
cultural experience is almost axiomatic as an interpretative
strategy. As Huxley was writing, Erwin Panofsky was seeking out
common "mental habits" that would connect Gothic architecture
with scholastic theology, tracing the homologies of structure he
found to "habit forming forces" within society. (2) The kind of
analogical structuralism he advanced was extended by art
historians and cultural anthropologists of the 1970s and 1980s,
who explored further the concept of artistic production as an
activity embedded in a range of social and professional
practices. Of these, the most enduringly influential has been
Michael Baxandall, whose concept of the "Period Eye" and
establishment of certain "cognitive skills" among 15th-century
Florentines provided historians with an apparently sound method
for identifying the mechanisms by which a set of common visual
values were formed. (3)
The importance of this highly original approach is twofold. For
the study of painting, it extends the range of inquiry far
beyond the conventional purview of a discipline that only rarely
looks beyond the fine arts for questions of specific influence
or of general interpretation. Isolating the single--and for
Venetian art, central--element of color enables the author, for
example, to explain Giovanni Bellini's aesthetic within the wide
continuum of a Byzantine heritage more exactly than previous
scholarship has succeeded in doing, and through this approach he
is able to grasp and to elucidate historical and emotional
registers in Bellini's use of color that significantly deepen
our understanding of his art. The second significant consequence
of Hills's approach is that it focuses attention on a whole
range of objects, materials, and visual elements that have so
far been largely excluded from art historical study. Hills's
(often brilliant) attempts to find ways of dealing critically
with the qualities of color ed brickwork, table glass, abstract
ornamentation, or the natural patterning of marble or alabaster
give back to these neglected and overlooked areas of the arts a
centrality and, as it were, an intellectual dignity that they
once enjoyed within their culture.
In the opening sections, the author considers how the qualities
of a unique natural environment and architecture worked jointly
on the collective Venetian experience of color. In marvelously
evocative prose, Hills describes the atmospheric effects
peculiar to a lagoon site and an exterior architecture that
developed in relation to light, air, and water. It is to this
ever-changeful environment that Hills attributes the Venetians'
earliest exploration of color. The very cast of reflections on
the waters of the canals produces, it is suggested, a response
to color that informs the whole Venetian aesthetic:
After a storm the waters of the canals and the lagoon are
aerated, they lose their transparency, they turn jade green,
opaque and crested with white. Then the vigour of the waters,
the currents of the lagoon, are revealed as the prows of boats
cleave the dense colour, ploughing a momentary furrow of jade
veined salt white.... On the lagoon, colour manifests itself by
turns as a phenomenon adhering to surface.., or filling a
volume.... Such colour is like a substantial film, elastic and
glossy, adhering to the surface, moving with the undulations of
the waters, yet nowhere revealing its depths. (p. 9)
Color as a surface quality, as opaque, and yet as something also
substantial and suggestive of hidden depths are characteristics
the author finds continuously repeated throughout the Venetian
visual environment in the effects of the marble revetments in S.
Marco, in the qualities of mosaic, in polychrome brick
decoration, even in the skein of macchie (stains or marks) of
Titian's mature paintings. It is worth pointing out how the
book's narrative structure is tied at the outset to a poetic
structure of evocation. For implicit in Hills's account is the
idea of a Venetian aesthetic sense in its infancy, drawing from
these primal qualities of light and water at some distant (and
in historical terms, quite mythical) time in the city's early
development.
Moreover, the actual processes by which the environment works on
the Venetian psyche remain largely undetermined. The underlying
premise of this section is the idea that this unique environment
will program the optical and mental structures of the passive
inhabitant to certain cues. The most receptive of these
inhabitants--the artists--are able to abstract from the
environment certain finely nuanced impressions and feelings that
seem to exist barely at the level of consciousness. "Lightness"
and "openness," for example, are qualities Hills recognizes as
peculiar to an architecture conditioned by a marine site. These
in turn produce a distinctively Venetian perception of space, to
which certain artists respond. Thus, a playfulness in denoting
inside and outside, the result of a city without fortifications,
prompted both the screen walls of the Scuola di S. Giovanni and
the architectural carved "frame" behind Giovanni Bellini's
Coronation of the Virgin in Pesaro. Similarly, the tendency of
Veronese to place his scenes of feasting beneath pillared
arcades, which form "interiors" that are yet open on all sides
to the elements beyond, is informed by a uniquely Venetian sense
of natural flow between interior and exterior spaces. Such
devices are the product of a "scenographic sense," nurtured by
"the daily events of passage" of a mercantile society, of a
constant passing of goods in and out of the water gates of
palaces, and of balconies open to the public world outside. The
heightened awareness of balance, engendered by quotidian habits
of travel on water, provides, Hills suggests, "one source of
those figures by Tintoretto that wheel and tip in balletic
postures" (p. 9).
These are compelling intuitions, the result of a profound
engagement with the environment and art of Venice and of a
painter's acute visual intelligence. The problem with such
observations as historical explanation is that they remain
intuitions--a series of ana-logical speculations, highly
suggestive, but as impossible to prove as to disprove, without
other means of substantiation. Such a theory of environmental
determinism also leaves out of account the agency of the
individual will. How, for instance, might an artist such as
Sebastiano del Piombo fit into such a scheme? One of the supreme
colorists of the early cinquecento (who nonetheless receives no
mention in the book), he was yet able to shake off his Venetian
training and the apparent dictates of his formative environment,
replacing the chromatic brilliance of his early work with an
increasingly dour monochrome, once in Rome and subject to the
tutelage of Michelangelo. Sebastiano's case serves to point out
the ineluctable centrality of the individual creative mind in
determining style, which can override, ignore, or consciously
work against the suggestive promptings of environment and
acquired tradition. Hills's insights into Bellini and Veronese
might have been better served if influences of environment were
regarded as possible preconditions for the development of
individual style rather than brought to center stage as primary
causative agents within a theory of a shared visual culture.
Hills's approach is in fact one without boundaries, one that
allows for breathtaking imaginative leaps from the perceived to
the conceptual. He can tie, for example, Belliniesque sfumalo,
the "envelope of air" that gently binds objects and figures to
their ambient space, to the merchant-seafarer's sense of the
ocean as a medium of watery homogeneity, "at once of unlimited
extent and of tangible connection between the distant and the
near" (p. 11). Such a method of linking a quality of style to a
perceived pattern of thought is literally open-ended. One might
just as easily evoke as specifically Venetian the zigzagging
quality of space that the visitor to Venice often perceives when
trying to get between two points: a space that unravels untidily
into a tortuous up-and-down course of steps, landings, cambered
bridges, and snaking alleyways. Without looking too far, one
could find a response to this quality of space in, say, Vittore
Carpaccio's Healing of the Possessed Man (Accademia, Venice),
with its cityscap e of densely jostling buildings, jagged
skyline, and busy linearity both into and across its depth.
Carpaccio, one might argue, employed a color scheme of low-toned
ochers and browns, splintered with thin triangles and needles of
grayish white highlight, precisely to express that sense of
walled-in, busy movement (the very opposite of Veronese's open,
light-filled compositions). With sufficient linguistic skill,
one might then link this quality to, say, the dense crisscross
of lattimo glass or to the intricate patterns of Venetian lace.
But to demonstrate these qualities as generally Venetian, rather
than particular to Carpaccio, is difficult to do. As Italo
Calvino's Marco Polo reveals to the emperor Kublai Khan, the
memory of one city can prompt a limitless number of different
cities within the span of a single imagination. (4)
Poetic language and metaphor (and it is marvelous language) are
key factors in the construction of Hills's historical narrative.
In the passage quoted above on the effects of color in the
waters of the lagoon, the metaphorical allusions to precious
marbles, to white-veined jade are descriptively and poetically
apt. Yet within the author's larger argument, they assume a
rhetorical function by providing a resonant link--on a level of
purely linguistic analogy--with a subject of his subsequent
chapter: the marbles of S. Marco. In his later description of
the marble revetments, Hills gives a reciprocal sense of the
abstract qualities of marble as liquid or molten:
... marble reveals its own narratives of veiling and unveiling,
as when pale crystals of feldspar loom through "glazes" of colour; in serpentine, for example, splinters of pale green
glow, embedded within the darker matrix of green. Such welling
upwards towards the surface appears as a visual enactment of the
very process of igneous formation, inviting both lateral
scanning--even stroking--of surface and imaginative penetration
of its veiled depths. (p. 41)
The reference to "'glazes' of colour" similarly looks forward to
comparable qualities that will be perceived in Bellini's oil
technique, the subject of a later chapter. This recurrent
cross-referencing between media through evocative description
provides a kind of linguistic glue that acts to bind the various
sections to the larger historical argument.
Chapter 2 situates the basilica of S. Marco as the site of
central historical and symbolic importance in the development of
the Venetian aesthetic. Hills's starting point is the familiar
idea, here applied specifically to color, of the decoration of
S. Marco as a result of fortuitous "sedimentation"--a pell-mell
piling on of Saracen, Eastern, and Western elements and of
spoglie looted from Constantinople. The resultant splendor of
effect creates a cumulative aesthetic of display, symbolic of
both the temporal power of state and the spiritual power of
Church. The reader is taken from a consideration of the outside
portico into the interior, in a visually incisive and
imaginatively discursive examination of the marble columns, the
tiled pavements, the planar revetments of the walls, and the
mosaics. As he leads us into the interior, Hills begins with an
account of the general impression, quoting at length from John
Ruskin's description in The Stones of Venice of this transition
from light into dark, as of entering a "'vast cave, hewn out
into the form of a Cross,'" with its dim light "'from some
faraway casement [which] wanders into the darkness, and casts a
phosphoric stream upon the waves of marble that heave and fall
in a thousand colours along the floor...'" (p. 32). In the
Romantic extravagance of Ruskin's prose one recognizes Hills's
kinship with a long tradition of English art historical writing
that begins with the high Victorian aestheticians and continues
into the 20th century through such artist-critics as Adrian
Stokes, Michael Ayrton, and Lawrence Cowing. Ruskin's
characterization of the marble as almost a living substance
underlines Hills's striking associations of marble with flesh,
by which the marble patterns on the revetments seem to pulse,
contract and expand like body tissue" (p. 41). Such exotic
characterizations serve to introduce a series of archetypal
associations between marble and the body that Hills intuits
within Venetian culture. What is striking is that Hills takes
Ruskin's description quite at face value, as if his impressions
count as sensations of universal application, suitable to
express alike today's or the 16th-century spectator's
experience. This is to treat such impressions as absolute, as
existing outside of historical time, whereas they are, of
course--Hills's as much as Ruskin's--highly subjective and
historically relative. (That Ruskin could say of the
PreRaphaelites, "their system of light and shade is exactly the
same as the Sun's" should signal caution in taking him too
literally.) Such usage is for literary rather than historical
purpose. Hills's inlaying of vivid quotation into the surface
pattern of his own lyrical prose is in fact akin to the very
structure he is describing. In literary terms, form and content
mirror each other to satisfying aesthetic effect. But as
historical writing, such a technique ignores the hermeneutic
implications of the individual parts.
Hills's exceptional literary gifts are best employed in his
analyses of the principles of design or of the distinctive
impressions produced by the different media he discusses. In
this and the following chapter, which deals with polychromy in
15th-century architecture and sculpture, virtually every page
contains a striking apercu that makes one look with fresh eyes
at familiar monuments and imbues the unfamiliar with an urgent
significance. Almost at random one might take his analysis of
the perceptual shift in the effects of colored tesselation
between the Byzantine and the Latin traditions, which come
together in the 12th-century pavement in S. Maria e Donato in
Murano: "In the space of a single floor, colour is perceived as
in one place inhering in marble, while in another it is effaced
by the brilliant interchange of light and dark" (p. 36); or his
discussion of the role of the colored diaper facing of the
facade of the Ducal Palace ("like a cut from a huge roll of
textile," p. 66), where, in the dancing, unrelieved brightness
of a marine site, relief is flattened and "it was colour that
stood in for, and then usurped, the light and shade provoked by
carved stone" (p. 68). It is difficult to think of another
writer who can so lucidly combine critical acumen, linguistic
precision, and poetic instinct in such equal measure.
In a very stimulating chapter on Venetian glass, Hills sets out
to establish broad agreement of visual values across four media:
glass, enamel, mosaic, and painting. In this case, the links
proposed are not merely ones of common visual effect, but also
of technique and process. According to Hills, the basis for the
development of oil glazes in painting, during the second part of
the 15th century, was already laid by the experimentation of the
mosaicists, both aesthetically and technically. He sees in
Michele Giambono's mosaics in the Mascoli Chapel of S. Marco,
executed in the 1430s and 1440s, an attempt to achieve a new
lucidity and pictorial legibility, not simply by adopting
perspectival and illusionistic devices--the pictorial
conventions developed in painting--but also by introducing a
method of laying the tesserae flush with each other, rather than
in the traditionally uneven manner. The lively surface sparkle
of random reflections created by the Byzantine method is thereby
replaced by a reflective even ness that permitted a clearer
reading of three-dimensional forms in depth. This new technique
was accompanied by a change in the nature of the glass tesserae
themselves, from the Byzantine type a corpo, which are colored
throughout, to one a cartellino, where a thin, transparent layer
of colored glass was laid over a glass body rich in tin and
therefore white. This method, Hills suggests, was akin to
enameling and also to the Flemish manner of painting in thin oil
glazes over a white or light background, which was being
explored by Venetian painters after 1450. Evoking humanist
knowledge of Pliny's discussion of encaustic in the Natural
History and humanist discourses on the technique of enameling,
Hills argues that in the eyes of educated patrons, enamel,
mosaic, and panel painting all shared a common goal of
representation and that luminosity of color was an ideal that
traversed all three. Hills thereby greatly enriches the argument
that sees the decline of the mosaic medium as it followed the
painters into three-dimensional illusionism. Regarding the
different practitioners as participants in a shared artisanal
culture allows him to suggest a more complex picture of mutual
influences and interdependencies among the different media at a
technical as well as at an aesthetic level. The argument here is
extremely compelling. The problem is to bring these suggestive
parallels into closer, concrete relation with each other.
After all, Giovanni Bellini's use of
oils, though it drew from the Flemish ideal of even surface
luminosity, very quickly developed into something quite
different. In the bravura passage of illusionistic painting with
which he rendered the mosaic apse behind the Madonna and Child
in his S. Giobbe Altarpiece, the painter displays--in
spectacularly modem terms for the late 1470s--a dialogue not
with the new mosaic of the Mascoli Chapel but with precisely the
glint and reflective sparkle of the traditional Byzantine type.
Indeed, Bellini's treatment might even suggest a paragone
between the possibil ities of his own medium of oil paint and
that of mosaic, for he renders the dusky glint of the vault in
tones of yellow and brown alone, asserting his modernity and
skill by eschewing entirely the use of gold pigment. Far from
adopting a technique of even, pellucid surfaces, Bellini mimics
the random play of reflected light with touches of freely
brushed opaque color for the brightest highlights. His oil
technique had fast outstripped in expressive power and
versatility anything the mosaicists could achieve. Nonetheless,
the broader notion that the glassmakers' interest in effects of
"transparency, layering and fusing" paralleled and perhaps
stimulated those of the painters remains an insight of great
originality and should prompt further research into the links
between the workshops of glassworkers and painters.
It is in the luxury wares of the glassmakers of Murano that
Hills finds the most telling evidence for a shared Venetian
aesthetic of color. Perhaps this is because it is in table glass
that the properties of color are found in their most abstracted
form. In the transparency of cristallo glass, in the lilting,
subaqueous effects of millefiori, and, most strikingly, in the
mimicking of veined agate of vetro calcedonio, Hills discovers
qualities that frame what he calls "a shared imagination of the
world," which might, moreover, "condition communal habits of
attention" (p. 120). In a hook replete with skillfully chosen
visual comparisons, one of the most suggestive is between the
swirling, marmoreal veining of a calcedonio goblet now in the
British Museum and the "strangely molten," undulating landscape
background of Giovanni Bellini's Agony in the Garden (National
Gallery, London). While Hills acknowledges that the goblet
postdates the painting by some years (and he would probably not
deny the youthful Bellini' s formal dependence upon the
landscape drawings of his father), the intention of his
comparison is to bring out once more the "essential" qualities
shared between painting, glass, marble veneers, and nature, but
here in a new relation:
When marble was cut into veneers and spread onto buildings, when
chalcedony glass was rotated in the hand, when millefiori canes
were scattered and twisted in cristallo, the eyes and minds of
patrons and their painters were tutored to enjoy cognate
beauties in the veining of rocks and currents of water. (p. 122)
In the notion that it is art that conditions the individual's
response to nature one finds, if not a reversal, then an
answering reciprocity to the idea of a conditioning environment
that was the theme of the opening chapter.
The connections between the goblet and painting are not merely
visual. With another tour de force of imaginative criticism,
Hills suggests a metaphysical link between glass, marble, and
painted landscape. Contemplation of the processes of
liquefaction and annealing involved in the creation of the
goblet, he suggests, might bring to mind the molten flux of
marble's own generation: "A chalcedony goblet, so finite and
graspable, yet dynamic and changing when rotated in the hand,
could offer a conceptual microcosm of a landscape in flux, which
in turn, becomes the arena for Bellini's drama of the Agony in
the Garden" (p. 120). The problem once again is how to back up
such an arresting insight. A century and a half later, Johann Konig, painting on alabaster, could employ the billowing
formations of the natural stone to suggest the towering waves of
the Red Sea that engulfed his (painted) Egyptians; and slightly
earlier, Giovanni Castrucci could construct landscapes of Prague
from cut stones furnished by the mines of Bohemia. (5) Their
engagement in an aesthetic and philosophical dialogue between
art and nature is demonstrable through their productions and can
be illuminated by reference to the intellectual context of the
courtly Kunstkammer in which they worked. In an atmosphere of
collecting framed by a macro-microcosmic understanding of the
natural world, the notion that the surface of a precious stone
(or of glass, replicating stone) might be offered up to
contemplation as a microcosm of the world is easier to
substantiate. Although the Venetian glassworkers were regarded
as "counterfeiters of Nature" by virtue of their replication of
gems and precious stones (something Hills explores), a
comparable context in 15th-century Venice that might justify
such metaphysical analogy has yet to be found.
Hills has written elsewhere with equal suggestiveness on the
metaphorical possibilities of Murano glasswares. (6) In the
delicate white threads of lattimo or filigree glass, which
gyrate endlessly and without fixed point when turned in the
hand, he recognized a metaphor for the melancholic sense of
impermanence, mobility, and evanescence that followed
Copernicus's banishment of the Earth from the central axis of a
fixed universe. To mention this is to illustrate once again the
exceptional imaginative range of Hills's intellectual inquiries,
but also the insouciance of a method that can project into the
aesthetic qualities of an object such a diverse range of
philosophical attitudes and ideas. Once again, one is left not
so much doubting their possible validity as wishing for
plausible substantiation.
Yet whatever questions of approach Hills's account of Venetian
glass may raise, its enormous value lies in bringing to the
foreground a range of objects that have so far found no place in
histories of Venetian Renaissance art. The realization that
patrons like Isabella d'Este and Philip II avidly collected
Murano glass alongside the paintings of Bellini and Titian
should prompt a broader consideration of the tastes,
preferences, and visual values of contemporaries, in a manner
similar to Richard Goldthwaite's examination of Italian maiolica.
(7) Moreover, Hills's stress on the objecthood of virtuoso
glasswares, on their ability to act, quite literally, as vessels
of meaning, and his search for a contemporary terminology
through which their particular qualities were appreciated open
the way to a much wider understanding of contemporary Venetian
visual literacy. Hills's account of glass, as indeed the whole
argument of the book, throws into sharpest relief the narrowness
of an approach that would seek to define and to comprehend
Venetian art solely in terms of painting and sculpture.
In chapters devoted respectively to 15th-century humanist
attitudes to color and to textiles and dyes and their social
signification, the author finds contexts that are more
historically specific and therefore the more convincing for the
arguments he proposes. The first considers the implications for
color of the emergence of a new classically inspired art. Hills
associates the high premium placed on relief modeling by Andrea
Mantegna and his followers to an attitude, born of the artists'
and patrons' admiration for antique statuary, that prized above
all clarity, rationality, and legibility. These values derived
from a theory of art based on a fresh reading of Aristotle, via
Pliny and Vitruvius. In the field of Paduan manuscript
illumination, specifically, in a style of epigraphy derived from
classical majuscules--of letters modeled in relief--Hills sees
the origin of an abstract, nonperceptual treatment of color
planes that emerged as a principle of style, best observed in
the faceted drapery of the Mantegn a school. In such a context,
the traditional ornamental and independently expressive uses of
color became subordinate to a more austere role in relation to
modeling, as a function of light and shade. Yet even here, in
the sober field of Paduan manuscript illumination, Hills is able
to demonstrate how color maintained an independent,
nondescriptive, and nonreferential role, as a medium that could
bind near and far or act simply as an abstract link between
figure and field. More generally, Hills views the reconciling of
color as a function of relief and of color as unbounded,
ornamental, or expressive as the chief dilemma facing
quattrocento artists. In the work of Giovanni Bellini, he sees
these qualities marvelously reconciled in a way that had
important consequences for the character of Venetian painting.
In two chapters devoted to Bellini's color, Hills offers a
searching exploration of the artist's choice of pigments and a
deeply meditated study of the broader meanings that his unifying
light and warmth of tone could connote. In Hills's recognition
of a quality of "Venetian being" as opposed to "Florentine
action" (or later "Dutch describing"), one is brought to the
emotional and temperamental wellsprings of Venetian art, and of
what separates it from other artistic traditions.
In the chapter entitled "Silks, Dyes and the Discrimination of Colours, 1470-1530," Hills comes closest to Baxandall's concept
of the "Period Eye." Taking an area of demonstrably shared
experience within Venetian society--of color in dress--Hills
convincingly shows how this could frame contemporary responses
to color more generally. Because color in dress is well
documented as a marker of social distinction in public
ceremonial as well as in personal appearance, the field is one
that can illustrate very clearly a set of collective
discriminatory skills. As evidence, Hills uses the statutes of
the dyers' guild and dyers manuals, from which we learn that the
distinctions of quality involved were between not merely
different types of dye but also the weave and textures of the
materials. This is matched to evidence of usage, drawn from
other sources (from sumptuary laws and contemporary commentary),
which makes clear how Venetians distinguished even between
shades of a single hue and between different kinds of cl oth.
Hills demonstrates how painters were aware of such
considerations and incorporated them into their treatment of
different fabrics. Yet his great insight is to recognize that it
was the hue and texture of fabric taken together, more than the
cut and tailoring, that determined the value of a garment. The
"materiality" of the fabric and its color as substance were the
true objects of contemporary discrimination. Such awareness in
turn made the Venetians alert to how color works in different
kinds of fabric. As Hills finely puts it:
Consider how the cutting of velvet deepens the colour at the
edge, a tiny cliff between the higher and lower pile, and
renders it more vivid at its summit. Differentiation is
introduced within a colour field simply by the cutting of the
pile, and line emerges as a step within colour rather than a
boundary or something separate from colour itself. (p. 184)
Hills shows how Titian developed an equivalent to this effect in
paint, applying it to the fabrics of the patrician sitters of
his portraits and then extending it to a general principle in
his painting, especially in his tendency toward a more
restricted palette. In this case, the connections advanced
between these two aspects of a culture are particularly
convincing because they are not merely treated as parallel
effects between different media but are explained by a set of
cognitive apparatuses that grew out of particular professional
and social activities.
In the final chapter, "The Triumph of Tone and Macchia," Titian
is the primary focus, appropriately forming the triumphant
apotheosis of the Venetian tradition. Hills follows the artist's
developing sense of painterly handling and tonal distribution
within the context of two broad considerations. The first is
"the growing artistic value of black and white in the first age
of print culture"; the second is "the debate, known as the
paragone, about the relative merits of painting and sculpture."
These two themes Hills regards as the "necessary foil and
stimulus to the rise of Venetian oil painting and of Titian's
colourism in particular" (p. 201). Hills's inclusion of prints
in the paragone debate is in danger of overstating the case.
While it seems clear that Titian's ambitions as a painter were
framed within a cultural context of rivalry," the differences in
functions and economic worth between the two mediums were
sufficiently defined for prints never to rival painting in any
important sense. Only in the sphe res of certain minor
categories of painting--in pastoral scenes and landscapes, or
small devotional works, perhaps--might prints be thought in any
way to compete with similar types of painting. And it is of
interest, if rarely remarked on, that by and large, the often
abstruse and allegorical subject matter developed by the
printmakers of the Veneto, which passed easily into other
fields, such as majolica painting, was not adopted as a serious
taste among the painters. Painters and engravers seem to have
found quite distinct fields of subject matter, according to
established differences of function. Hills's main point,
however, is undoubted.
The increasing aesthetic
sophistication of prints, which developed under the stimulus of
northern examples, and the new formal values of the
black-and-white medium they introduced gave both artists and
collectors a new appreciation of tonal value and its
distribution. Hills uses Giulio Campagnola to demonstrate this
point. Yet, considered more broadly, the stylistic influ ence of
northern printmakers--overridingly, of Albrecht Durer-can be
traced quite concretely in a large number of talented engravers,
such as Nicoletto Rosex, Zoan Andrea, or Benedetto Montagna.
They borrowed individual motifs from Durer's prints with an
astonishing freedom, and in so doing adopted his principles of
tonal composition into their work. The same process may be
observed in the works of Giorgione, Titian, and their followers.
Here, as elsewhere in the book, the careful choice of
illustrations can serve not only to reinforce the arguments of
the text but also to extend them. A comparison between Durer's
Madonna and Child with a Monkey and Titian's Sacred and Profane
Love (although illustrated a few pages apart) underlines Hill's
characterization of Titian as "a master of engaging or rhyming
bright distances with masses of white in foreground draperies"
(p. 203) while further suggesting a source for this device. The
burgeoning clouds that resolve into horizontal bands across the
sky, the fulsome dra pery, the contre-jour of middle ground
against the brighter distance, and the overall ornamental
quality that ties figures to field by an organizing principle of
juxtaposed tonal blocks are qualities common to each. They
strongly suggest the direct cognizance of the print by the
painter.
Ruskin wrote, "The true work of the critic is not to make his
hearer believe him, but agree with him." By the end of the book,
the breadth of imaginative and intellectual reach, the subtlety
of prose, the richness of the illustrations and the
suggestiveness of their juxtapositions combine to make one agree
with Hills that the city of Venice itself did indeed nurture a
"peculiar distribution of attention" (p. 226), even while one
may not completely believe in all the methods that have got him
there. Ultimately, the boundaries between what the individual
artist might observe and extract from the environment and what
are held up to be elements of a collective perception remain
only indistinctly drawn. Yet even this looseness of approach,
one feels, is the result of a kind of critical tact, of an
unwillingness on Hills's part to subject his subtle and
wide-ranging intuitions and observations to the grip of an
unwieldy theoretical structure. And perhaps such an approach
actually reflects to some degree the elusive workings of visual
values in society, by which a set of broadly understood criteria
is constantly crossed and inflected by the ungraspable
multiplicity of individual experience. Indeed, the exceptional
qualities of the book prompt one to reflect on the kinds of
cognitive apparatus that Hills himself brings to bear in his
attempts to retrieve those of the past. A critical language
informed by 19th-and 20th-century antecedents, an attention to
visual effects inflected by plein-air traditions of landscape
painting, an appreciation of the metaphysical
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qualities of abstraction
fostered by 20th-century modernism, not to mention the
effects of close-up color photography on contemporary
habits of address: these might be among the countless,
time-bound elements that color Hills's interpretative
response. Yet if he demonstrates more clearly than most
the paradox that lies in the unbridgeable distance
between the historical object and the occluded lens of
language through which we seek to frame it, he also
magnificentl y affirms the power of the passionately
engaged visual intelligence to profoundly enrich and
extend the continuum of historical understanding. |
New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1999. 240 pp.; 160 color ills., 40
b/w. $55.00
Notes
(1.) Aldous Huxley, On Art and Artists (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1960), 31-35. Originally published as "Art and
Religion," in Themes and Variations (New York: Harper, 1950).
(2.) Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism
(1951; New York: Meridian Books, 1957), 20-21.
(3.) Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in
Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).
Clifford Geertz's essay "Art as a Cultural System," Modem
Language Notes 91 (1976):1473-99, and Svetlana Alpers's The Art
of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1984) have been among the most
influential studies of this kind.
(4.) Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver
(London: Picador Books, 1979).
(5.) On Johann Konig, see Hans-Olaf Bostrom, "Philip Hainhofer
and Gustavus Adolphus' Kunstschrank in Uppsala," in The Origins
of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and
Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. Oliver Impey and Arthur
MacGregor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 90-101, esp. 132;
also Lorraine Daston, "Nature by Design," in Picturing Science,
Producing Art, ad. Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (New
York: Routledge, 1998), 232-53, cop. 235-37; for Giovanni
Castrucci, see Prag um 1600: Kunst und Kullur am Hofe Rudolfs
II, exh. cat., 2 vols., Kunsthistoricshces Museum, Vienna, 1988,
vol. 2, 244-45.
(6.) Paul A. Hills, "Venetian Glass and Renaissance
Self-Fashioning," in Concepts of Beauty in Renaissance Art, ed.
Francis-Ames Lewis and Mary Rogers (Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate,
1998), 163-78.
(7.) Richard Goldthwaite, "The Economic and Social World of
Italian Renaissance Mailolica," Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989):
1-32.
Author Andrew MorrallBard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design,
and Culture
COPYRIGHT College Art Association & Gale Group
Tinos Greece, A Cycladic Island with
very special Marble mines.
Tinos Greece is a Greek island in the Aegean Sea, part of the
Cycladic archipelago, 78 nautical miles southeast of Athens. It
has had name changes through history, including being called
Ophiussa, for the snakes, and Hydroessa, for the water.
Aristophanes called it Skordoforos for the quality of the garlic
grown here.
The Cyclades Islands are most likely remnants of an ancient
mountain chain that once connected Greece to Asia Minor.
Historically, Tinos island has been inhabited by the
Phoenicians, Ionians, Athenians, Macedonians and Romans. Tinos
island was named for the first settler, Tinos. After Roman
times, Tinos Greece became a possession of the Byzantine Empire.
It was a remote colony, and the target of numerous pirate raids
by Turks, Arabs, Saracens, Sicilians, Huns and Goths. Along with
all this civil uproar, Tinos island in Greece was geologically
challenged, being the site of frequent, very destructive
earthquakes. And to further add to the chaos, epidemics plagued
the population. Tinos Greece has never been geared so much for
development as for survival.
The feudal Byzantine system, with knights owing lands slaved
over by peasants, was replaced when the Venetians took over in
the 1200's. By the 1700's, this Greek island was part of the
Ottoman Empire.
After the Turkish invasion, Tinos island was relatively free of
restrictions placed on the people of nearby islands. The people
of Tinos Greece were allowed to wear traditional garb, not being
forced to wear a fez. They also built their own schools and
churches. In fact, Turkish boats did not land on this island
without he permission of the people.
Today Tinos island has a population of about 8000. It is famed
for its 20 windmills, 1,000 dovecotes, 50 villages. It is noted
as a place where Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic peacefully
coexist.
Tinos island's capital, Ermoupoli, is quite unique. It is the
one of the most important port in the archipelago. Much of this
Greek island's success is due to marble. A noted, beautiful
green marble is mined here, as is asbestos and granite.
Marble brings artists, and indeed, Tinos is an art center.
Many
sculptors and painters live and work on the island. Tinos is
sometimes referred to as Small Paris.
Perhaps the artists are inspired by the unique and varied
landscape and many beaches on the island. Or maybe it's the the
highest mountain, Mt. Tsiknias, and the quaint village it
protects...or maybe it's the nearby area. scattered with
boulders, some the size of multistory houses.
The people of Tinos Greece remain inspired by a miracle, and
they commemorate that miracle every August 15, the Feast of the
Assumption. On 15 August 1940, the people were celebrating and
the ship, Elli, was in the harbor, fully decorated. An Italian
submarine sneaked into the harbor, attacked and sank the ship,
because Greece had broken diplomatic ties with fascist Italy.
But, the Italians had also fired two more torpedoes, aimed right
at the piers, crowded with people. Neither torpedo detonated,
sparing the people. This miracle was attributed to the Virgin
Mary and every year the people of Tinos Greece remember, and
celebrate.
Here are also a couple of more travel tips which can help you
out while visiting Greece
Author S Pappas greekinfo@gmail.com
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