Delving into an Incomparable Work of Renaissance Portraiture

October 8, 2021 / Michelle Kamhi / Art History / 2 Comments

The double portrait of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza by Piero della Francesca in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, is an intriguing masterpiece by one of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance.

Battista Sforza and Federico da Montefeltro - Piero della Francesca

Most familiar to art lovers are its superb profile portraits of two notable early Renaissance personages. But it also comprises, on the back of the portrait panels, uniquely captivating allegorical scenes, representing each of them in a triumphal procession, above a simulated parapet bearing a Latin inscription.

Though now displayed in a rigid modern frame, the work was originally designed as a portable folding diptych (two-panel painting), hinged to fold with the allegorical scenes on the outside. Thus it was no doubt intended for intimate personal reflection rather than for public display.

Despite the diptych’s artistic quality and distinctive content, no documents have as yet shed light on its genesis. Since Federico was a highly erudite patron of the arts, and Piero is known to have spent time in Urbino during the period leading up to the likely date of the diptych, it has generally been assumed that Federico commissioned the work himself.

In-depth consideration of the work’s imagery and inscriptions in the light of key biographical information about the subjects casts serious doubt on that long-standing assumption, however. It also suggests a much more interesting origin, as I will point out below.

First, a little about the couple represented in the diptych.

Who Were These People?

Federico da Montefeltro (1422–1482) and Battista Sforza (1446–1472) were the count and countess of Urbino, a hill town in the Marches region of eastern Central Italy. The Uffizi Gallery website erroneously refers to them as the “duke and duchess of Urbino.” Since Battista died two years before Federico (often spelled Federigo) was elevated to the dukedom, she never became duchess of Urbino.¹

Federico was the greatest of all the Renaissance “condottieri” (commanders for hire)—not for his military prowess alone but for his creation of a ducal court second to none in cultural development and refinement. Baldassare Castiglione’s classic Book of the Courtier dubbed him “the light of Italy.”²

Battista—Federico’s second wife—was a scion of the powerful Sforza dynasty centered in Milan. Classically educated and schooled in the formal duties of court life from an early age, she was a remarkably fit consort for Federico, though 24 years his junior. Not yet 14 when they married, she bore him no fewer than seven children and capably managed their domain during his frequent absences in the pursuit of military campaigns.

Piero’s Depiction

Both Federico and Battista were widely praised in their day for their virtuous qualities and their benevolence as rulers. Piero’s depiction of them amply reflects such nobility of character, showing them in dignified profile high above a landscape backdrop suggestive of their domain.

Clemente medal of Federico da Montefeltro

Medal of Federico da Montefeltro, by Clemente da Urbino. 1468. (Saiko/CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Comparison with other portraits of Federico, both earlier and later, reveals the extent to which Piero idealized and refined the battered warrior’s features to suggest dignity and probity. A telling contrast is the homely countenance shown in a medal by Clemente da Urbino dated 1468. Though probably a few years earlier than the Piero portrait, it lacks the vigor of the later depiction.

Less is known about Battista’s actual appearance. But a striking aspect of Piero’s depiction of her is her extreme pallor compared to Federico’s sanguine complexion. While it may simply be due to conceptions of feminine beauty in that era, it has also been interpreted as indicating that she was no longer living when the portrait was painted.

Significantly, the pairing of such profile portraits with allegorical scenes on their reverse is unique among extant paintings. It was characteristic of commemorative medals dating back to antiquity, however, and thus endows the work with a decidedly monumental quality.

The Allegorical Triumphs

The allegorical scenes on the back of the portraits are especially rich, both stylistically and iconographically, and their meaning is enhanced by Latin inscriptions on the simulated architectural parapets below them.

Their iconography draws on a long and complex tradition harking back to Roman triumphs in celebration of major military victories.

Jean-Guillaume_Moitte_-_Scene_from_the_Arch_of_Titus

That tradition had been greatly enriched by a series of allegorical poems penned in the 14th century by the early Italian poet Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch). In contrast to the Roman military triumphs, Petrarch’s Triumphs were allegories of philosophic and moral abstractions: Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity. Piero’s luminous pictorial triumphs contain elements from both the classical and the Petrarchan traditions. Federico’s triumphal car is drawn by a team of white horses, as was customary for victorious commanders in antiquity. Like them, he is also crowned by a winged personification of Victory.

In addition, Federico is accompanied by four allegorical figures, seated at the front of his car. They differ from those of Petrarch, however, instead representing the four cardinal virtues of the Catholic faith, which also had roots in ancient Greek philosophy. They were Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance—attributes especially relevant to leadership.

In contrast, Battista’s triumph represents the three theological virtues, which were generally regarded as especially relevant to the feminine sphere. They are Faith, Hope, and Charity. Most important here is the figure of Charity, who sits at the forefront of the car holding a pelican.

That attribute has particular significance, as it was not generally employed in secular contexts. Because the pelican was believed to pierce its breast to feed its young with its own blood, it had come to symbolize Christ’s sacrifice for mankind. As we shall see, it bore poignant relevance to Battista.

Next to Charity is the personification of Faith, holding a chalice and a cross. Standing behind Battista and facing toward the viewer is the figure of Hope. The other standing figure, garbed in gray with her back turned to us, may represent a nun of the Clarissan order, with which Battista had close personal ties.

As in Petrarch’s Triumph of Chastity, Battista’s triumphal car is drawn by unicorns, emblematic of Chastity, further suggesting her virtuous character.

The Latin Inscriptions

Important clues to the date and genesis of the diptych are offered by the prominent transcriptions below the triumphal scenes. Federico’s inscription clearly alludes, in the present tense, to his greatness as a commander. Rendered in English it reads:

The famous one is drawn in glorious triumph
Whom, equal to the supreme age-old captains,
The fame of his excellence fitly celebrates,
As he holds his scepter.

In contrast, Battista’s inscription begins by referring to her in the past tense.

She who retained modesty in good fortune
Now flies through all the mouths of men
Adorned with the praise of her great husband’s deeds.

Moreover, the phrase “flies through all the mouths of men” echoes lines that the Latin poet Ennius had penned as his epitaph:

Let no one honor me with tears or on my ashes weep. Why?
I fly living through the mouths of men.

Made famous by the more eminent Latin writer Cicero—who quoted them in his philosophic meditations on death—the epitaph of Ennius was taken to mean that the fame of a virtuous person extends beyond death.

The clear implication of Battista’s inscription, therefore, is that she was no longer living when the diptych was created.

Who Commissioned This Remarkable Work?

In his 2014 biography of Piero della Francesca, James R. Banker argues (based in part on the Latin transcriptions) that the diptych was painted “soon after Battista’s death,” and that it was commissioned by Federico “to memorialize his wife and their marriage.”³

While I agree about the date, I have long believed that Federico’s commissioning the diptych would have been incompatible with the tragic circumstances surrounding Battista’s death. Let me summarize the main events here.

When Battista died, in early July 1472, Federico had just returned home following his most celebrated military campaign. On behalf of the Medici rulers of Florence, he had suppressed a rebellion by the city of Volterra, a mineral-rich Florentine tributary. In gratitude, the city of Florence had granted him the rare tribute of a live triumph, to which Piero’s pictorial triumph may well allude.

Equally important, in January of that year Battista had at last given birth to the couple’s only son and heir, Guidobaldo—after 11 years of marriage, during which she had borne at least six daughters. The death of his young wife so soon after that joyous event inspired intense mourning on Federico’s part, and an outpouring of sympathy throughout Italy.

To compound the tragedy, it was reported that Battista had prayed for a son and heir worthy of her noble husband, offering her own life in return—a pledge she had now fulfilled. The pelican of Charity in her triumphal scene is a likely allusion to that sacrifice.

Given that sorrowful context, I argued decades ago in a thesis on the diptych that the verses inscribed under the triumphs “strike a jarring note.”

The proud vaunt of Federico’s inscription seems inappropriate to his grief. And the meager praise of his beloved countess, whose fame is said to derive not so much from her own virtue as from the deeds of her famous husband, is an ungenerous … final tribute; one would think that the paintings were more a monument to Federico than a commemoration of his consort. Surely this is not the most fitting memorial a bereaved husband could devise for a wife who was eulogized by all Italy.⁴

Consequently, I proposed that the diptych had been commissioned for Federico, not by him—as both a tribute to him and a consolation for his great loss.

As I further suggested, it is tempting to think that the donor of such a splendid gift might have been none other than the eminent patron of the arts Lorenzo de’ Medici—who would have had particular reason to honor Federico, given the crucial victory at Volterra.

This piece is based on my M.A. Thesis (about which, see “Remembering Howard McP. Davis,” For Piero’s Sake, October 20, 2020). It was originally published, without notes, in Epoch Times, September 1, 2021.

Notes

Battista is properly referred to as “Countess” by Elaine Hoysted, for example, in “Battista Sforza, Countess of Urbino: A Privileged Status in Motherhood,” Socheolas: Limerick Student Journal of Sociology, Vol. 4(1), April 2012, 100–116. ↩
Denis Mack Smith, “Federigo da Montefeltro,” in The Horizon Book of the Renaissance (American Heritage Publishing, 1961), 321-28. ↩
James R. Banker, Piero della Francesca: Artist & Man (Oxford University Press, 2014), 146–51. ↩
Michelle Kamhi, The Uffizi Diptych by Piero della Francesca: Its Form, Iconography, and Purpose. M.A. thesis, Hunter College, C.U.N.Y., 1970, 52. ↩

Federico da Montefeltro, Piero della Francesca, Renaissance portraiture, Uffizi diptych

Lessons on Education from Books Our Children Read

September 4, 2021 / Michelle Kamhi / Education, General / 10 Comments

Irate parents at Loudon County, VA, school board meeting. Yahoo! News.

Nearly four decades ago, I produced an educational film entitled Books Our Children Read.¹ It documented a constructive approach to resolving parent-teacher conflict over education in a rural Ohio school district, at a time when such conflict was erupting in violence in other American communities.

The film focuses on the study of literature in the English curriculum. But the issues it deals with and the insights it offers are broadly pertinent to other areas of education. And they remain even more relevant today, when American schools are being torn apart by profound disparities between parental values and the “progressive” agenda of the education establishment.

As I wrote in the Study Guide to the film,

What sort of education is possible in an environment of confrontation? Can meaningful education occur if . . . parents feel that their deepest convictions and values may be undermined in the classroom? Can children caught between loyalty to family and identification with school feel other than confused?

In that connection, it is worth remembering the following observations by Thomas Jefferson, quoted in the Books Our Children Read study guide:

To compel a man to [support] the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical.

[I]t is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible . . . education of the infant against the will of the father.

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.

Who Should Be Teaching Whom?

Recent trends have cast doubt on the assumption that education is exclusively from the top down, because those officially charged with teaching the next generation often seem alarmingly devoid of what Jefferson alluded to as “wholesome discretion.”²

With respect to the issues now roiling American schools—from transgenderism to racism—the view expressed several decades ago by Professor Allan Glatthorn, in the book Dealing with Censorship, remains especially relevant. As further noted in the film’s study guide, he rightly argued that “dialog between schools and the communities [they serve] needs to go far beyond the patronizing condescension and manipulation that too often pass for school public relations.” In his clear-sighted view:

[T]eachers need to show more acceptance and respect for values other than our own. Most of us are intellectuals who see ourselves as liberated, but too often such intellectual independence becomes distorted into a smug conviction that the traditional values of church, country, and family are childish aberrations that must be corrected.

Glatthorn’s sage advice applies equally to today’s school boards and administrators, whose heavy-handed imposition of misguided “progressive” attitudes and policies is being opposed with justified ire by the parents whose children are entrusted to their educational supervision.

Notes

Readers who would like to view a clearer print of the film than that on Vimeo can search for it in libraries on WorldCat. ↩
Regarding dubious ideas all too readily embraced and promoted by today’s education establishment, see “Canary in the Coal Mine of America’s Future,” American Greatness, August 21, 2021; and “Poisoning the Well of Art Education,” Academic Questions, Fall 2021. ↩

A Day No Pigs Would Die, Allan Glatthorn, conservative values, controversial literature, parents vs. teachers

Revisiting Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini “Wedding” Portrait

November 17, 2020 / Michelle Kamhi / Art criticism, Art History / 3 Comments

Jan van Eyck, Portrait of Giovanni(?) Arnolfini and his Wife (1434), National Gallery, London. Oil on oak, 32.4 x 23.6 in.

In both Who Says That’s Art? and my blog post “How Not to Teach Art History” (reprinted in Bucking the Artworld Tide), I cited the eminent art historian Erwin Panofsky’s interpretation of Jan van Eyck’s famed double portrait in the National Gallery, London. Panofsky viewed the work as a marriage portrait, memorializing the private wedding vows between the Italian merchant Giovanni Arnolfini and his young wife, Jeanne Cenami, in the Flemish city of Bruges. Having recently learned of scholarship challenging that view, I aim to correct the record here.

Panofsky first published his account of the painting in 1934 in the Burlington Magazine and later summarized it in his Early Netherlandish Painting.¹ The “Giovanni Arnolfini” he referred to was Giovanni di Arrigo Arnolfini, the most illustrious member of the Arnolfini family living in Bruges around 1434, when the portrait was painted (the 1434 date appears prominently in the painting, just below the artist’s flamboyant signature on the back wall). Documents have since come to light that belie that identity, however. The most important of them indicates that the marriage of Giovanni di Arrigo Arnolfini and Jeanne Cenami did not take place until 1447, thirteen years later than the painting and six years after the painter’s death. Moreover, the earliest documentary evidence of Giovanni di Arrigo’s presence in Bruges dates from 1435.

An elder Giovanni Arnolfini was living in Bruges at least as early as 1419, however. He was Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini—whose only known marriage was to Costanza Trenta, a fellow Luccan. Their betrothal took place in 1426, when she was just thirteen years old, and their marriage presumably followed not long after (very early marriage was then common)—which would have been too early to be represented in the double portrait. To complicate matters, a letter by Costanza’s mother testifies that she had died by 1433.

Revisionist Views

In light of the foregoing facts, a research curator at the National Gallery, the Scottish art historian Lorne Campbell, suggested that the double portrait represented Giovanni di Nicolao with a second wife—although no record of such a subsequent marriage has been found.² In addition, Campbell more crucially argued that the painting was simply a secular portrait, with no connection to the sacrament of marriage. Whereas Panofsky had read the husband’s raised right arm as signifying a marital vow, for example, Campbell argued it was a gesture of greeting to the two visitors reflected in the mirror depicted on the room’s rear wall. Not surprisingly, however regrettably, Campbell’s interpretation appears in the work’s description on the National Gallery’s website. Key details are viewed as merely “proclaim[ing] the couple’s wealth and social status,” rather than as indicating the sacramental meaning Panofsky had postulated. Such a secular interpretation is further indicated in the video on the gallery’s web page for the painting—which even suggests that the scene was set in a living room, rather than in a bedchamber.³

Campbell’s secular interpretation is echoed by the art historian Carola Hicks in her 2011 book-length study Girl in a Green Gown.⁴ In her view, van Eyck’s “meticulous depiction of the contents of the room and the couple’s dress” mainly served to reveal “a burgeoning consumer society revelling in vigorous international trade.” She further argued that the couple are merely “showing off the signs of [their] success—expensive clothes and other status symbols.”

The glaring problem with such revisionist views is that they largely ignore the work’s expressive aura—the qualities that fall under what Panofsky had astutely identified as the “primary or natural meanings” of a work of art. Such meanings emerge from “both the factual and the expressional” content, which are directly accessible and require no specialized knowledge or documentary evidence.⁵

The Painting’s “Primary or Natural” Content

As Panofsky rightly emphasized in Early Netherlandish Painting, an “atmosphere of mystery and solemnity . . . seems to pervade” the Arnolfini portrait. The couple “do not look at each other yet seem to be united by a mysterious bond, and the solemnity of the scene is emphasized by the exact symmetry of the composition”—as well as by their soberly contemplative facial expressions, I would add. Far from resembling a casual sign of greeting, moreover, the husband’s raised right hand appears, in Panofsky’s view, to be a “gesture of solemn affirmation,” one “invested with the . . . humility of a pious prayer” (as he suggested in his Burlington article). Also significant is the portrait’s setting in the “hallowed seclusion” of their bedroom, rather than the more public space of a sitting room.

In Who Says That’s Art?, I argued that such qualities (not the symbolic elements or the technical brilliance per se) are what ultimately make this “a great work of art, a compelling image that transcends the particular historic moment being represented and conveys something about the gravity of marriage in general.” Scholars bent on discrediting Panofsky’s symbolic interpretation lose sight of those qualities, however. Yet those are the very qualities that I maintain most hold viewers in thrall nearly six centuries after the work’s creation.

Astonishingly, in answer to the key question Why do we still so like the portrait?, Carola Hicks’s husband reports in her stead (she died before completing the book’s “finishing touches”) that she would have said that its “[technically brilliant] precision, clarity and luminosity” are what make it “particularly appealing to us today.” As he further emphasizes, she regarded “obsession with what it means” as a “blind alley, a profitless diversion that detracts from enjoyment of the painting as a work of art.” Finally, he reiterated her view that the image was (as he phrases it) “primarily designed to show off social status, wealth and importance.”

Quite a different revisionist view based on the latest documentary evidence had been offered by the art historian Margaret L. Koster in 2003, however. Surprisingly, Hicks summarized Koster’s intriguing view in Girl in a Green Gown (page 211) but omitted crediting its source, leaving the unfortunate impression that it was her own speculation. In any case, that interpretation evidently failed to alter her narrowly materialistic reading of the work. I, on the other hand, have found Koster’s view quite persuasive.

Margaret Koster’s “Simple Solution”

Briefly stated, Koster’s hypothesis is that the picture represents Giovanni di Nicolao and Costanza—not at their wedding but sometime after her untimely death, which had very likely been in childbirth.⁶ Thus it would have served not as a marriage record but as a memorial to a presumably cherished wife, lost at the tender age of twenty. Koster ingeniously supports this reading with an informed analysis of the painting’s iconography. In so doing, she reprises some of Panofsky’s key observations (albeit with varying interpretations), in addition to citing details he missed.

Jan van Eyck, Arnolfini Portrait, detail.

Whereas Panofsky had commented on the single candle burning on the left side of the image’s elaborate chandelier—he read it as signifying the “all-seeing Christ,” and further connected it to the frequent use of a candle in marriage ceremonies—Koster points out that a second, spent candle is faintly discernible on the side of the chandelier nearer the wife. She very plausibly argues that the burning candle signifies that Giovanni was still living, while the spent candle betokens Costanza’s demise. In addition, while Panofsky had identified the figure carved on the high-backed chair behind the wife as St. Margaret [of Antioch], the patron saint of childbirth, Koster more specifically posits it as perhaps alluding to Costanza’s death in childbirth.

Another intriguing detail viewed by Koster as alluding to Costanza’s death is the monster carved on the bench directly behind the couple’s joined hand—as if “threatening their union.”

Jan van Eyck, Arnolfini Portrait, detail.

Significantly, as reported by Campbell, infra-red reflectograms of the painting reveal no underdrawing for that detail or for the chandelier, the chair featuring the figure of Saint Margaret, or the dog at the couple’s feet (which both Koster and Panofsky compared to the dogs often represented at the feet of recumbent tomb sculptures). Such evidence of the late addition of those details prompts Koster to suggest that the painting had been begun as a straightforward portrait while Costanza was still living and that they were added after she died.

Most important, Koster’s poignant hypothesis is entirely consistent with the painting’s solemn aura (as was Panofsky’s)—though oddly she scarcely mentions the painting’s expressive qualities.

Conclusion: What Matters Most

As one observer has wisely observed, the precise circumstances and intention of the Arnolfini portrait may never be “indubitably uncovered,” for it would depend on evidence that may simply never be available.⁷ What is available to us, however, is a core level of meaning discernible from the work’s expressive content. Whether intended as a marriage record or as a memorial to a dead wife, what the Arnolfini portrait clearly conveys is a moving sense of the grave import of conjugal union. That core meaning emerges from van Eyck’s incomparable handling of the work’s primary, “natural” subject matter. In the end, I maintain, that is what most matters in this, as in any, work of art. Anyone can pepper a painting with symbolic details. The artistry lies in creating a meaningfully compelling image.

Notes

Erwin Panofsky, “Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait,” Burlington Magazine, March 1934, 117–27; and Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character (Harvard University Press, 1964), I, 202–3. ↩
Lorne Campbell, National Gallery Catalogues: The Fifteenth-Century Netherlandish Schools (National Gallery, 1998), 174–204. ↩
A much more informative video than the National Gallery’s is offered by Carel Huydecoper on Stories of Art. ↩
Carola Hicks, Girl in a Green Gown: The History and Mystery of the Arnolfini Portrait (Chatto & Windus, 2011; Vintage reprint, 2012). ↩
Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art,” a 1939 essay reprinted in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Doubleday Anchor, 1955), 26–54. ↩
Margaret L. Koster, “The Arnolfini Double Portrait: A Simple Solution,” Apollo, September 2003. As it happens, I had proposed a similar hypothesis regarding Piero della Francesca’s double portrait of Federigo da Montefeltro and his wife, Battista Sforza. See Chapter V of The Uffizi Diptych by Piero della Francesca: Its Form, Iconography, and Purpose (Master’s thesis, Hunter College, CUNY, 1970), 49–54. ↩
Tristan Craig, “The Arnolfini Portrait and the Limits of Interpretation,” Retrospect Journal, November 17, 2019. ↩

Carola Hicks, Costanza Trenta, Erwin Panofsky, Giovanni Arnolfini, interpreting art, Jan van Eyck, Jeanne Cenami, Lorne Campbell, Margaret Koster, meaning in art, National Gallery - London, primary subject matter

Remembering Howard McP. Davis

October 20, 2020 / Michelle Kamhi / Art History, Contemporary art / 8 Comments

Howard McP. Davis (1918-1994)

In early March, as New York was beginning to descend into its long, grim Covid-19 lockdown, I was unexpectedly cheered by a remarkable bit of art-related news. Columbia University announced the creation of the Howard McP. Davis Professorship of Art History.

What made this news especially remarkable was that Davis had died more than a quarter century ago, and had retired from teaching in 1988. Yet the impression he had made on a former student was so indelible that these many years later that student was moved to honor him by an anonymous gift to the university to establish an endowed professorship in his name.

The news was also remarkable for me personally, because I too am one of Professor Davis’s former students. As noted in the Preface to What Art Is, his “introduction to the humanistic values of the art of the Italian Renaissance was a transforming experience” for me. He was also one of the mentors I had in mind when I dedicated Bucking the Artworld Tide “In grateful memory of the teachers who believed in me.” I should have added “and whom I learned from.”

What I Learned from Him

As a teacher, Professor Davis was vastly different in style from Vincent Scully, an architectural historian who became legendary at Yale for his charismatically flashy teaching of an introductory course on Western art to generations of undergraduates.¹ Unlike Scully, Davis was no showman. Tall, thin, and ascetic-looking, he had a deliberate, soft-spoken manner in keeping with his physical mien. What he communicated above all was a deep seriousness—a sense that the art he talked about mattered profoundly because of the human values it powerfully embodied.

My first contact with Professor Davis was as a student in his course on Italian Renaissance Painting in the 1960 summer session at Columbia. I had returned the year before from a post-collegiate year in Paris (having majored in Geology at Barnard, I had gone to Paris as a Fulbright scholar, to study vertebrate paleontology, not art), and was just beginning to indulge an interest in the fine arts that had germinated abroad. I still have my complete set of notes from that course. As they testify, Davis’s discussion of Giotto’s great cycle of frescoes for the Arena Chapel in Padua was especially memorable for its clarity and insight. Through in-depth formal analysis of the paintings, he demonstrated the brilliance of mind and depth of feeling involved in the creation of this early Renaissance work. And as he helped us to see, Giotto was concerned less with miracles and dogma per se than with the nature of the human relationships in each event. Giotto’s purpose, Davis made clear, was to show “the human significance of the sacred legend.” In that, we learned, Giotto was a precursor of all that was to come in the Italian Renaissance.

“I’m anxious to make the students feel the quality of these things,” Davis told the New York Times in an interview before his retirement. “I’d like to feel that I’ve . . . contributed something to the way they feel about works of art, something lasting that has come out of the courses.” In that, he surely succeeded with me, as with countless others.

In the fall of 1960, I moved from New York to Boston with my first husband, who was joining a research group at Massachusetts General Hospital. Taking a day job doing editorial work at Houghton Mifflin Publishing, I began attending art history classes at night, and on returning to New York four years later, resolved to pursue an M.A. in art history. Because I was employed full time as an editor at Columbia University Press, I enrolled at Hunter College, which (unlike Columbia) offered a full complement of evening and weekend courses.

As I would soon discover, Hunter was a hotbed of modernism,² for which I felt no affinity. But my good fortune was that Professor Davis was an adjunct there. I was therefore lucky enough not only to take his course on Northern Renaissance Painting but to have him as my thesis adviser for a study on Piero della Francesca’s great diptych of Federico da Montefeltro and his wife, Battista Sforza. As I wrote in the Preface of that thesis, his lectures on Renaissance painting had been my first introduction to the discipline of art history and his “discernment and sensibility have ever since served as an example.”

Confronting the Dystopian Artworld

On earning my M.A. in 1970, I faced with dismay an artworld that struck me as a mockery of all Professor Davis had stood for and that had inspired me to enter the field of art history. In place of emotionally meaningful imagery, the contemporary art scene was awash in Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Pop art—work ranging from the incomprehensible to the utterly banal. Unable to reconcile it with the art I loved, and unwilling to pretend that I could, I shelved my art history diploma and turned to other, very different work.³

Not until nearly fifteen years later—when I met my second husband, Louis Torres—was I introduced to a theory of art that made sense of my rejection of what had come to pass as art in contemporary culture. Only then did I return to serious study of the arts. And soon after, I began writing for Aristos, the little journal Lou had founded in 1982.

A visit to an exhibition at the Morgan Library together not long after we had met resulted in a chance encounter with Professor Davis, whom I had not seen since completing my M.A. work. To my great astonishment and delight, he not only remembered me but commented to Lou on the subject and quality of my thesis. He then alluded to the fact that I hadn’t pursued a Ph.D., by adding “the good ones never go on,” or words to that effect. I was bowled over, as I had had no idea that he regarded me as in any way exceptional. It also suggested a kinship between us, because he had never obtained a Ph.D. (although, unlike me, he had pursued doctoral studies). His words have buoyed me through a difficult path as a contrarian.

When Professor Davis died a decade later, I attended the memorial service for him in St. Paul’s Chapel at Columbia. A nobody among the notable art historians he had nurtured, I sat in mute awe at the service, feeling I had not yet lived up to the promise his words of praise had implied.

One of the eminent art historians who studied with Professor Davis was Laurie Schneider Adams [more]. Extraordinarily prolific, she made impressive contributions to the field of Italian Renaissance studies, among other wide-ranging accomplishments—in addition to teaching art history at John Jay College for more than four decades. My modest achievements pale in comparison.

As I only recently discovered, Adams dedicated her widely used survey Art across Time to the memory of both Professor Davis and Rudolf Wittkower—another outstanding art historian who taught at Columbia, where she had obtained her Ph.D. In view of that connection, her account of twentieth-century art in that volume, as in her History of Western Art, is to my mind truly astonishing.

Like other leading art historians, Adams in those volumes uncritically embraces every anti-traditional invention since the early twentieth century, however baffling, bizarre, or banal—along with every cockeyed idea spouted by the inventors to justify their unprecedented work. In so doing, she either ignored or was untroubled by the radical respects in which such work had deliberately flouted the humanistic and aesthetic values emphasized by Professors Davis and Wittkower—the very values that had presumably inspired her to engage in art history. What an egregious irony!

For my very different account of the modern artworld, see “Art History Gone Amuck,” and “The Lamentable Politicization of Art.”

Were Howard Davis alive today, I can’t help but wonder whose account he would regard as truest to the values he held dear.

Notes

See Heather Mac Donald’s account of Scully in “Yale against Western Art,” Quillette, February 13, 2020. ↩
Hunter College’s history of promoting modernism is well documented in Howard Singerman et al., Robert Motherwell and the New York School at Hunter, published in connection with an exhibition with the same title at the college in 2015. ↩
See “Sampling of Previous Work” appended here. ↩

"Art History Gone Amuck", Arena Chapel - Padua, Art across Time, Columbia University, Giotto, Howard McP. Davis, Hunter College, Italian Renaissance painting, Laurie Schneider Adams, Piero della Francesca, Rudolf Wittkower

Art History Gone Amuck

October 2, 2020 / Michelle Kamhi / Art History / No Comments

Widely used art history textbooks such as Gardner’s Art through the Ages present a distorted narrative of visual art from the early twentieth century on. They focus on countless modernist and postmodernist inventions—from “abstract art” to “conceptual art” and “performance art”—at the expense of traditionally representational painting and sculpture. The result is an utterly incoherent view of this culturally significant mode of expression.

For a detailed account of major errors and omissions involved in that false narrative—which dominates thought about art in education and the culture at large—see my article “Art History Gone Amuck,” published in the Fall 2020 issue of Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars.

abstract art, Academic Questions (journal), avant-garde, conceptual art, Gardner's Art through the Ages, performance art, traditional art

Art Critics or Political Agitators/Activists? (redacted)

June 27, 2020 / Michelle Kamhi / Art and Politics, Art criticism, Contemporary art, social justice / 39 Comments

[July 3 Addendum] As a member of AICA-USA (the U.S. section of the International Association of Art Critics), I recently received an email message from the Board of Directors announcing: “AICA-USA has issued a statement of solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives [M4BL].”¹ That statement—which had not been submitted to members for input or approval beforehand—does not speak for me and I emphatically reject it. While I deplore, as would any decent person, the callously brutal murder of George Floyd [August 23 Addendum] (as well as instances in which other blacks have been victims of police abuse at worst or misjudgment at best), I question the narrative of “systemic racism” they have given rise to in the black-lives-matter movement. Even more important, I reject the destructive approaches that are being advocated and pursued in response.

What Does Solidarity with M4BL Mean?

I adamantly reject this goal prominently posted on the M4BL website.

To understand my objections, one needs to examine the Movement for Black Lives website (M4BL.org), since being “in solidarity” with that consortium implies agreement with its platforms. “Defund the Police” is one of their chief goals.² Like so many other purportedly liberating goals, however, it would probably most hurt the people it promises to help. The rich could afford to hire their own protection, while economically disadvantaged blacks would be left vulnerable to the criminal elements in society. How well did getting rid of the police in Seattle’s CHOP district, for example, work for the two black men who were shot there before Seattle’s mayor at last decided to take action? Still worse, her failure to quickly shut down that anarchist project has inspired similarly destructive anti-police efforts across the nation—even in the capital, directly across from the White House.

Meanwhile, criminal violence continues at an appalling rate in Chicago, virtually ignored by the anti-racist protesters. How would defunding the police have saved the three-year-old black boy shot dead in Chicago on Father’s Day, or the 13 others killed there that weekend, or the countless black victims of black violence in other cities? Once again, events have shown that blacks are far more often the victims of other blacks than of white police abuse, and the crime rate among blacks is alarmingly high (more on that below). Those black lives don’t seem to matter to the BLM movement, however; only the deaths that can be blamed on alleged white racism do. Could it be that the ultimate goal for many of the agitators (though not for the well-meaning people who joined them to protest Floyd’s murder) is not to preserve black lives but, rather, to overthrow the entire American system?

“Solidarity” with M4BL also entails being expressly “anti-capitalist.” That goal no doubt resonates with one of the more vocal AICA members, who was the first to propose, on June 5, a statement of alliance with the black community and others “who have been disenfranchised by [the] current social, political and economic circumstances” of our “system of oppression.” As I responded, his statement was just the sort of inflammatory rhetoric that destructive groups like Antifa thrive on. “If you want to see what real ‘oppression’ looks like,” I added, “check out their violent tactics—not to mention the Communist crackdown in Hong Kong.” I then asked: “By the way, exactly what system would you like to replace our system with?”³ I’m still waiting for an answer.

“Solidarity” with M4BL further implies agreement with its constituent groups, including Black Lives Matter. Subscribing to #blacklivesmatter does not just mean valuing black lives. It has come to imply embracing the organized movement under that rubric, and all that it advocates and represents. A primary aim of Black Lives Matter is “disrupt[ing] the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” Undermining the black family has lamentable consequences, however, as shown by Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Democratic senator from New York, 1977–2001) more than half a century ago.⁴

I should add that much of the intensity of the current response to #blacklivesmatter is inspired by hatred of the current president, which knows no bounds among AICA members. One of them recently posted a cartoon representing him in the guise of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Children—with one knee on the neck of George Floyd, and the Statue of Liberty in place of Saturn’s child. I responded that it was

outrageously inflammatory, falsely implying that the president has condoned Floyd’s murder. The president is by no means beyond criticism, but this cartoon is an example of the Trump Derangement Syndrome totally off the rails.

Only one other member commented critically on the cartoon.

The work by Goya that is most apt here is The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.

AICA’s “Progressive” Echo Chamber

On matters of art as well as politics, AICA is overwhelmingly “progressive.” (A lone vocal ally against that political tendency has been Franklin Einspruch.) That it is more concerned about politics than about art, however, is evident from its solidarity statement. It says nothing to condemn the attacks on museums or works of art during the recent protests, although one of the organization’s stated purposes is “to act on behalf of the physical preservation and moral defense of works of art.”⁵ The solidarity statement instead advocates that art institutions should “divest from police organizations,” “remove defense contractors from their boards,” “protect . . . frontline staff during the COVID-19 crisis,” and “diversify other departments.”

Diversifying of course relates only to race, gender, ethnicity, and economic status—not to views about art or politics.⁶ When I expressed some of my contrarian views (in response to members’ Trump-bashing, for example, I dared to say that the president’s policies were better than the Democratic alternatives), several members dubbed me a “racist.” Among them was a New York Times art critic, who asserted that anyone not “working against the current president” was a racist, “complicit in upholding white supremacy.” A former Newsweek art critic charged that if I didn’t see systemic racism and the poverty engendered by it as the main cause of the high crime rate among blacks I must believe that “there’s something inherently wrong with black people.” Never mind that wiser heads than his (such as Moynihan) have identified other likely causes.⁷

AICA Views on Art

The member who first proposed a solidarity statement touted “AICA’s unique position of leadership in the field of visual art.” I questioned that position, arguing that most of the contemporary “art” defended and promoted by him and other AICA members in the name of social justice isn’t even recognized as such by ordinary art lovers. For evidence, I referred to my “Hijacking” article and “What’s Wrong with Today’s Protest Art?.”

A former tenured professor of art history whose specialty is “art and politics” commented: “Michelle has written a book on the Aesthetics of Ayn Rand, that should give all of you some insights into what is going on here.”⁸ After actually reading my “Hijacking” article (few AICA members seem to have bothered to do so), the only point she referred to was my distinction between neo-Marxist critical pedagogy and logical critical thinking, which she dismissed as “non analytical,” offering no argument to justify her objection. She also claimed that I had failed to engage in critical thinking—without ever saying in what respect I had failed to do so. Further, she seemed to imply, mistakenly, that I think art can never deal with political subjects. In that, of course, she entirely missed my point. And neither she nor anyone else in the AICA online discussion dealt with that point’s elaboration in “What’s Wrong with Today’s Protest Art?.”

Most remarkably, the former professor had nothing to say about my noting, in the “Hijacking” article, that Gregory Sholette (an AICA member who is now a professor at Queens College, C.U.N.Y.) had expressly welcomed the widespread “‘de-skilling’ of artistic craft” that has occurred in the artworld since the 1960s—in particular, the fact that, as he observed, “conceptual art” has led, in effect, to “the total disappearance of the art object” (emphasis mine). Then what is left for “art critics” to deal with, I would ask. Attempting to answer that question might have provided the professor with a much-needed exercise in critical thinking.

One of AICA’s stated aims is “to develop professional . . . standards for the field of art criticism.” Early this year, therefore, I posted the following message, with the subject line “Food for thought regarding critical standards”:

I’d like to put some thoughts up for consideration regarding “contemporary art.”
A decade and a half ago, our colleague Peter Schjeldahl observed: “Art used to mean paintings and statues. Now it means practically anything human-made that is unclassifiable otherwise. This loss of a commonsense definition is a big art-critical problem.”

The year before, Ken Johnson had similarly noted in the New York Times: “Contemporary sculpture knows no boundaries. . . . This makes [it] a zone of enormous creative freedom. The down side is, if sculpture can be anything, then maybe it is not anything in particular. . . . And it becomes hard for people to care very passionately about it . . . , much less evaluate it.”
In the years since those astute observations, “creative freedom” has expanded exponentially, leaving the public increasingly baffled by and alienated from what passes for “modern” and “contemporary” art in the artworld at large. . . . Yet the dominant trend in criticism is to write sympathetically about all such work, with no regard to the effect it often has on artworld outsiders.

In that connection, I recently came upon this observation by John Canaday: “When sympathy for avant-garde art per se is the assumption behind a critical attitude, criticism can cease to be judgment and become a form of pedantry in which the goal is to find excitement and meaning in an object where they may not exist.”

I would argue that Canaday’s point remains ever more relevant today, and risks rendering our profession worthless in the culture at large.

The minimal response to my post was telling. Just one member wrote (privately, not to the full list) to say that she agreed with me—that my message was “spot on,” especially with regard to sculpture. The only other member who commented (also privately) was the former Newsweek critic. He snarkily dismissed the idea that contemporary critics are seriously out of touch with the public, by simply noting that it has been “the case with criticism sympathetic to modern art since, well, the beginning of modern art.” As if that resolved the problem! Then he directed a parting swipe at Canaday as “the guy who said that Abstract Expressionism had ‘exceptional tolerance for incompetence and deception.’” Indeed it had.

What sort of contemporary or modern work do AICA members find praiseworthy? The recent demise of Susan Rothenberg prompted hearty kudos for her horse paintings. (The New York Times eulogized her as an “acclaimed figurative painter.”)

Susan Rothenberg, Triphammer Bridge, 1974, 67 1/8″ x 9′ 7 3/8″ (170.5 x 292.1 cm). Museum of Modern Art. New York.

Not wishing to speak ill of the newly dead, I refrained from commenting that Rothenberg’s horses struck me as incredibly inept.

For another example: an AICA member posted an appreciative review of a show she had just curated at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha—Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens’s Look, it’s daybreak, dear, time to sing. I responded:

I’ve read Gregory’s review, but fail to see what it has to do with art. Whatever value the exhibition may have in educating the public about threats to the natural environment, Ibghy & Lemmens bring nothing of artistic value to it.

Dubbing their pieces “minimalist” does not help. Although unthinkingly embraced as art by the contemporary artworld, Minimalism was an especially vacuous form of anti-art. Nor does it matter that the pieces in question (they are not “mini-sculptures”)—which resemble “the wooden blocks children use for building and games”—“are actually based on data, graphs, and charts,” since no one could guess that connection without the labels. And reading the graphs and charts themselves would convey far more than the pieces alluding to them do. Isn’t art supposed to deepen our experience?

Finally, I would argue that the exhibition’s video of Eastern Loggerhead Shrikes being banded belongs in a museum of natural history or on PBS’s Nature series, not in a museum of art. It is essentially a piece of documentary footage, not a work of art.

Only one member wrote to say he was sympathetic to my point of view. “I do not think that a lot of what Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens are doing constitutes art-making activities,” he admitted. Yet he defended their piece Sales Volume of the 10 Top Meat Processing Companies (2014) as art. And he confided that he had long since given up arguing “it’s not art” about “all the poorly crafted, conceptualist dreck that clogs up exhibitions spaces on a global scale.” All the other comments were from members who regarded me as hopelessly out of touch with the “advances” in contemporary art. The curator in question acknowledged our “widely disparate understandings of art,” and suggested an extended conversation about them in an open forum. I replied that I’d “like nothing better than to debate these issues of critical and cultural importance in a public forum.” No one on the list seconded the idea, however.

In view of all the foregoing, how much would you stake on AICA’s aim “to develop professional . . . standards for the field of art criticism”?

July 3 Addendum
The co-presidents of AICA-USA have asked me to remove all quotes from other members in this post that originated on the organization’s online listserv, as they violate the listserv’s guidelines for preserving the privacy of members’ communications. I redacted my original post by removing relevant members’ names, but I have retained the quotes themselves, because they are needed to convey my point. As I explained in my response to AICA:

My use of a few brief anonymized quotes in no way violates anyone’s privacy. . . . What it does, in the public interest, is shine light on a profession that has for too long gone largely unchallenged for its views—views which are overwhelmingly at odds with those of much of the American public.

If AICA is sincere in seeking “to promote the values of art criticism as a discipline and to emphasize its contribution to society,” it should welcome public debate on the issues I’ve raised. And you as co-presidents should be more concerned about dealing with the issues themselves than with any minor infringement on my part of the listserv guidelines.

. . . AICA members are free to post Comments in response to my post, provided they do so in a more civil vein than was the case for all too much of the listserv content.

MMK

August 23 Addendum
Evidence is emerging that indicates George Floyd’s death was due to factors other than the appearance of police brutality conveyed by the widely circulated video showing him in a protracted neck hold. Leaked video that had previously been deliberately withheld from the media by the Minnesota attorney general shows events leading up to the neck hold and strongly counters the narrative of “police brutality” that has sparked months of protest and destructive rioting, along with movements to defund the police. All this suggests that the most alarming “systemic” problem we face is not racism but political manipulation abetted by biased and irresponsible journalists—which was given unwarranted legitimacy by AICA’s statement of BLM solidarity. I regret that in characterizing Floyd’s death as due to a “callously brutal murder” I too was guilty of an irresponsible rush to judgment.

Let us hope that true justice will ultimately be done in this case, though in today’s politically inflamed climate it will require extraordinary courage and integrity on the part of all.

Notes

The message was signed by sixteen board members, several of whom are prominent figures in the artworld. ↩
Ironically, the founding of M4BL was itself inspired by, and has perpetuated, a false narrative of police brutality in 2014 against Michael Brown, Jr., in Ferguson, Missouri. ↩
I added that I would resign from AICA if it approved his proposal. Though I equally reject the proposal that was adopted, I will not resign, and remain instead as a contrarian voice. ↩
In The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, his 1965 report to the U.S. Department of Labor, Moynihan forcefully argued that the high rate of black families headed by single mothers (a legacy of slavery) greatly hindered the progress of blacks toward economic and social equality. (Though many single black mothers have heroically prevailed despite that disadvantage, the overall effect on the black community has been devastating and has been exacerbated by misguided welfare programs.) See also Steven Malanga, “The Left Needs a Moynihan Moment,” City Journal, February 14, 2017. Addendum: The eminent community activist Robert L. Woodson argues that family breakdown was not a legacy of slavery but was instead a consequence of leftist political activism in the 20th century. “1776 vs. 1619,” National Association of Scholars, August 27, 2020. ↩
The prominent BLM activist Shaun King recently approved the toppling of historic statues across the nation and tweeted: “All murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down. They are a gross form white supremacy. Created as tools of oppression.” If AICA has issued any statements rejecting King’s tweets, I haven’t seen them. ↩
This recalls what journalist Nicholas Kristof observed a few years ago about the diversity craze in academia: “Universities are the bedrock of progressive values,” he wrote, “but the one kind of diversity universities disregard is ideological and religious. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.” “A Confession of Liberal Intolerance,” New York Times, May 7, 2016. ↩
See also Barry Latzer, “Race, Crime and Culture,” Academic Questions, Winter 2018; and Edward Guthmann, “Shelby Steele has a lot to say about black society,” SFGate, May 15, 2006. ↩
For a sense of the anti-Randian animus of another AICA member, read “Award-Winning Critic Maligns Ayn Rand’s Theory of Art.” For Piero’s Sake, January 16, 2018. The critic in question is now at the New York Times. ↩

"systemic racism", AICA-USA, art criticism, avant-garde, conceptual art, contemporary art, critical pedagogy, critical standards, critical thinking, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, de-skilling of art, Defund the Police, diversity, George Floyd, Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Children", Gregory Sholette, John Canaday, M4BL, Marilou Lemmens, Peter Schjeldahl, Richard Ibghy, Seattle's CHOP district, Shaun King, Susan Rothenberg, Trump Derangement Syndrome

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