Honoring America’s Promissory Note

July 4, 2022 / Michelle Kamhi / General / No Comments

A Fourth of July message from Akhil Reed Amar, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, rightly emphasizes the need for every generation of Americans to engage in thoughtful, informed reflection on, and debate about, our founding principles. His message focuses on the Constitution but, given its timing, it is of course intended to apply to the Declaration of Independence as well. Those magnificent documents contain what Martin Luther King, Jr., memorably referred to as the “promissory note” of equal liberty that all Americans fall heir to and are obligated to work toward in word and deed.

An article I wrote last year is relevant here. Entitled “Canary in the Coal Mine of America’s Future,” it offers a defense of the melting pot ideal inspired by our founding documents. Honoring those documents requires remembering what they actually stand for, which is too often obscured by America’s critics in today’s media and classrooms. In that connection, it is also worth reading “Frederick Douglass Didn’t Hate America, and Neither Should You,” by Angel Eduardo, on the Substack page of the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism.

Heartfelt wishes for a Happy Fourth!

education, Frederick Douglass, July 4, Martin Luther King Jr.

Debunking Jasper Johns

January 31, 2022 / Michelle Kamhi / Art criticism, Art History / 16 Comments

Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror—a mammoth two-part show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art through February 13, 2022—is the most comprehensive retrospective ever devoted to Johns’s work.

What entitles him to an exhibition of such unprecedented scope? In the Whitney’s exalted view (generally shared by the artworld mainstream):

Johns’s groundbreaking work sent shock waves through the art world when it was first shown in the late 1950s, and he has continued to challenge new audiences—and himself—over a career spanning more than sixty-five years. . . . [His] early use of common objects and motifs, language, and inventive materials and formats upended conventional notions of what an artwork is and can be.

Circumstances have kept me from visiting the exhibition in person. But I know enough about Johns and his work to suspect that I would have found it mind-numbing in the extreme. Because I subscribe to the old-fashioned idea that art needs to do more than challenge prior notions of what art is.

In lieu of an exhibition review, therefore, I cull here some of my previous thoughts about Johns and his ill-founded artworld repute.

To begin, here’s what I wrote in Who Says That’s Art? (links are added here):

The pointlessness openly admitted to by [Robert] Rauschenberg also characterizes the work of his younger colleague Jasper Johns. Typical works by Johns featured in a 2008 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum included such banalities as Coat Hanger II and Flashlight, both from 1960. Johns first achieved fame in the 1950s, with paintings of flags and targets. Regarding his choice of these pictorially unpromising subjects, he told Time magazine: “[P]ainting a picture of an American flag . . . took care of a great deal for me because I didn’t have to design it. So I went on to similar things like the targets—things the mind already knows.”¹ On another occasion he explained: “My primary concern is visual form. The visual meaning may be discovered afterward—by those who look for it. . . . I feel that what I am doing is quite literal.”² And another: “[Such subjects] are just the forms . . . which I have chosen to limit and describe space.”³

Nor do Johns’s notebooks suggest any deeper meaning or thought. Among their aimless jottings are the following: “Put a lot of paint & a wooden ball or other object on a board. Push to the other end of the board. Use this in a painting.” And “Take a canvas. / Put a mark on it. / Put another mark on it.”

What Johns and Rauschenberg did is in no significant way comparable to what true artists have always done. As their own words attest, they made no attempt to embody meaning intelligibly. Instead, they were engaged in what my grandmother might have referred to as potchkeeing around in the studio. As translated by Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish, that apt term means “To fuss or ‘mess around’ inefficiently and inexpertly.” One of Rosten’s sentences illustrating the word’s proper use fits perfectly here: “He potchkees around with paint and they call him a painter.”

In “Modernism, Postmodernism, or Neither?,” I had previously cited Johns’s inane sketchbook jottings and further observed:

Notwithstanding the mindlessness of such an approach to the creation of art, the head of the prestigious Wildenstein art gallery in New York—a gallery famed for its handling of Old Master paintings—recently referred to Johns as today’s “greatest living artist.” Surely a sign of just how precipitously the artworld has declined from any meaningful standard!

Also indicative of the artworld folly regarding Johns’s work was this brief note by Louis Torres and me in the January 2004 issue of Aristos:

When the expanded and renovated Museum of Modern Art in New York reopens next year, one of the new acquisitions you will have a chance to see is a drawing by Jasper Johns entitled Diver (1962–63)—“one of the most important works on paper of the 20th century,” according to the ever-credulous Carol Vogel of the New York Times. At nearly seven feet tall and six feet wide [!], the work is said to be worth over 10 million dollars. According to John Elderfield, the museum’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, it is “the most profound and intense work of art that Johns has created in any medium.” Purportedly alluding to novelist Hart Crane’s suicide by drowning in 1932, the drawing was a study for the painting of the same name. Just in case you can’t make out much from Johns’s inept scrawl, here is Vogel’s description: “Drawn on brown paper with charcoal, chalk, pastel, and probably watercolor, the work abstractly suggests a diver in motion, showing two sets of hands, one touching and pointing down as though preparing to dive and the other coming back up as if the figure were rising.”

Which led us to ask: “What?”

On the mental somersaults engaged in by critics who strive to find meaning in Johns’s inane work, I noted the following in Bucking the Artworld Tide:

In suggesting a possible lesson for a high school art class studying American painting after World War II, [Arthur] Efland unquestioningly accepts a highly dubious interpretation of a work by Jasper Johns. He approves the notion disseminated by the critic Robert Hughes (in his televised American Visions series) that the “submerged text of Johns’s target paintings connects to the stresses of Cold War America.” In addition, he accepts Hughes’s claim that Johns’s Target with Four Faces (1955) may also relate to the sense of personal paranoia that Johns, a homosexual, probably felt in a period when homosexuality was thought to have (as Hughes put it) “secret affinities with Communism.”

Such interpretations fly in the face of everything Johns has ever said about his work, however. To judge from his own repeated statements, his creative choices were arrived at casually, the product more of whim and happenstance than of paranoiac feelings of any kind. On his use of flags and targets as subjects, for instance, he told Time magazine in 1959: “[P]ainting a picture of an American flag . . . took care of a great deal for me because I didn’t have to design it. So I went on to similar things like the targets—things the mind already knows.” He told another interviewer: “My primary concern is visual form. The visual meaning may be discovered afterward—by those who look for it. . . . I feel that what I am doing is quite literal.” And another: “[Such subjects] are just the forms that interest me and which I have chosen to limit and describe space.” Finally, Leo Steinberg, the art historian who first put Johns on the artworld map, has reported: “I . . . once ask[ed] why he had inserted these plaster casts [in the target painting], and his answer was, naturally, that some of the casts happened to be around in the studio.” As for why Johns cut off the masks just under the eyes, he told Steinberg: “They wouldn’t have fitted into the boxes if I’d left them whole.”⁴ So much for paranoia—Cold War or homophobic.

I rest my case.

Notes

Jasper Johns, quoted in “His Heart Belongs to Dada,” Time, May 4, 1959, 58. Johns added: “A picture ought to be looked at the same way you look at a radiator.” ↩
Jasper Johns, quoted in Selden Rodman, The Insiders: Rejection and Rediscovery of Man in the Arts of our Time (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960), Ch. 6. ↩
Jasper Johns, quoted from Milwaukee Journal (June 19, 1960) in Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, ed. by Kirk Varnedoe (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 82. ↩
Leo Steinberg, “Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 35, 37, 32. ↩

Jasper Johns, Leo Steinberg, meaningless "art", Robert Hughes

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

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