The Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition of Sienese painting, which closes on January 25, 2025, has inspired me to recall my reasons for believing that there is no such thing as progress in art.
It needs to be said and said again: not truth but meaning (and, meaning for us as well!). If we go back to Lascaux, it seems pretty clear that human beings have been able to render whatever it was they found meaningful in ways that conveyed that significance. It was never a matter of capability or technique. Similarly, you could ask how Cycladic sculpture could have been done "better." Since the Renaissance, art and history (in the West) have been seen as a ceaseless overcoming, where the past stays that way and the future shines brightly ahead. So everything that has come "before" is necessarily regarded as primitive or prologue. When I was young, Duccio and his Sienese contemporaries were routinely referred as Sienese "primitives." Nobody mentioned the fact that when the Maesta was transported from the workshop to the church, a huge crowd gathered to watch it make the trip, like a Macy's parade. Did they think the work was kind of, you know, limited? Artists themselves, however, don't necessarily subscribe to that view. They tend to take whatever they can from the past with gratitude -- and often with envy.
PS: This superb essay illustrates your approach to meanings in the Visual Arts poignantly through the analysis of the City States portrayed in multiple perspectives of Duccio painting, as though the roving eye of God sees all. This emphasises the comparison with the uniform single individual POV in renaissance perspective that fixes the picture. The comparison points out how such different meanings are carried to the viewer, and enforces your approach that neither is Truer or Better.
Even more so, because it is a fresh comparison that illustrates your significant contribution to thinking about Visual Art.
"art does not give us truths. It gives us meanings.", Thank you, Yes indeed.
One aspect of the Florentine Renaissance perspective is the alignment with a single POV, as you write, but also with the scientific, with the measured, and with the accounting of the visual world. Perhaps, the financiers of Firenzi, the Medici, had some impact on the promotion of this POV.! Certainly, it supported their enterprise in Banking.
But, as you say, it also promoted to this day the judgement that accuracy is "better" in Visual Arts and somehow, other sensibilities and meaning are "charming" and "lovely", as child's play.
This way of seeing does infect the 20th century "progress of abstraction", because those colors are just exactly what they are, those lines are lines ! WOW, that is accurate ! Therefore, it must be True and Valuable. Oddly, the Theological AE Artists turned this about to reveal sensibilities and meanings that continue to evolve.
Our Studio is working to convert the factoids and accurate minutia of the Digital Age into a Revery and Celebration, akin to the TreCento Painting of Sinna, or the Romantics, or Expressionists. If we can achieve these goals, another generation of artists will prove that , indeed, Fine Art is about meanings that transport us, and even across eras in time. The meanings vibrate and echo.
WOW, that sure is an ugly Demon.... lets be done with that thing ! !
Thank you for this wonderful conversation. I've been teaching science for nearly two decades and almost everything I believed and shared with my students since I began, has changed so much so that far better for me to simply say, I teach how to accept change. I love the fact that, as you so eloquently expressed, these rules do not apply to the meaning of art.
Having seen the Siena show, and thinking about this post, I thought:
Giotto was born before Duccio and yet his drapery falls, according to gravity, more naturally.
They both carried the burden of Byzantium while going against religious orthodoxy trying to reinstate the sensual.
I’ve always likened the disjunctive perspective of their architectural backgrounds to Cubism.
Florentine art seems more consciously linear - Drawing in the service of naturalism (whatever that is) - perhaps it led to the linear proscenium stage of Perspective to contain it all.
I mean, what does space feel like on a two dimensional plane?
To me it feels like it disregards the flat plane.
The painters throughout history that I admire seem to make an amalgam of the peripheral field they experience using both eyes. At the same time they relate every part to every other part in the depth of pictorial space. They make what is an essentially a graphic pattern with a soon to solidify fluid, handled so deftly that you admire paint’s materiality. Not many photographs do that for me.
So Florence inevitably became more about looking. Making what they were looking at… look more like what they were looking at - making it feel like the way they felt while looking at it. It also makes us feel good too.
Not that I believe that exactitude is truth, but the paradox to me is how art draws us into its own moment and the present, though a convincing illusion.
It needs to be said and said again: not truth but meaning (and, meaning for us as well!). If we go back to Lascaux, it seems pretty clear that human beings have been able to render whatever it was they found meaningful in ways that conveyed that significance. It was never a matter of capability or technique. Similarly, you could ask how Cycladic sculpture could have been done "better." Since the Renaissance, art and history (in the West) have been seen as a ceaseless overcoming, where the past stays that way and the future shines brightly ahead. So everything that has come "before" is necessarily regarded as primitive or prologue. When I was young, Duccio and his Sienese contemporaries were routinely referred as Sienese "primitives." Nobody mentioned the fact that when the Maesta was transported from the workshop to the church, a huge crowd gathered to watch it make the trip, like a Macy's parade. Did they think the work was kind of, you know, limited? Artists themselves, however, don't necessarily subscribe to that view. They tend to take whatever they can from the past with gratitude -- and often with envy.
PS: This superb essay illustrates your approach to meanings in the Visual Arts poignantly through the analysis of the City States portrayed in multiple perspectives of Duccio painting, as though the roving eye of God sees all. This emphasises the comparison with the uniform single individual POV in renaissance perspective that fixes the picture. The comparison points out how such different meanings are carried to the viewer, and enforces your approach that neither is Truer or Better.
Even more so, because it is a fresh comparison that illustrates your significant contribution to thinking about Visual Art.
"art does not give us truths. It gives us meanings.", Thank you, Yes indeed.
One aspect of the Florentine Renaissance perspective is the alignment with a single POV, as you write, but also with the scientific, with the measured, and with the accounting of the visual world. Perhaps, the financiers of Firenzi, the Medici, had some impact on the promotion of this POV.! Certainly, it supported their enterprise in Banking.
But, as you say, it also promoted to this day the judgement that accuracy is "better" in Visual Arts and somehow, other sensibilities and meaning are "charming" and "lovely", as child's play.
This way of seeing does infect the 20th century "progress of abstraction", because those colors are just exactly what they are, those lines are lines ! WOW, that is accurate ! Therefore, it must be True and Valuable. Oddly, the Theological AE Artists turned this about to reveal sensibilities and meanings that continue to evolve.
Our Studio is working to convert the factoids and accurate minutia of the Digital Age into a Revery and Celebration, akin to the TreCento Painting of Sinna, or the Romantics, or Expressionists. If we can achieve these goals, another generation of artists will prove that , indeed, Fine Art is about meanings that transport us, and even across eras in time. The meanings vibrate and echo.
WOW, that sure is an ugly Demon.... lets be done with that thing ! !
Thank you, Mr. Ratcliff
Thank you for this wonderful conversation. I've been teaching science for nearly two decades and almost everything I believed and shared with my students since I began, has changed so much so that far better for me to simply say, I teach how to accept change. I love the fact that, as you so eloquently expressed, these rules do not apply to the meaning of art.
Having seen the Siena show, and thinking about this post, I thought:
Giotto was born before Duccio and yet his drapery falls, according to gravity, more naturally.
They both carried the burden of Byzantium while going against religious orthodoxy trying to reinstate the sensual.
I’ve always likened the disjunctive perspective of their architectural backgrounds to Cubism.
Florentine art seems more consciously linear - Drawing in the service of naturalism (whatever that is) - perhaps it led to the linear proscenium stage of Perspective to contain it all.
I mean, what does space feel like on a two dimensional plane?
To me it feels like it disregards the flat plane.
The painters throughout history that I admire seem to make an amalgam of the peripheral field they experience using both eyes. At the same time they relate every part to every other part in the depth of pictorial space. They make what is an essentially a graphic pattern with a soon to solidify fluid, handled so deftly that you admire paint’s materiality. Not many photographs do that for me.
So Florence inevitably became more about looking. Making what they were looking at… look more like what they were looking at - making it feel like the way they felt while looking at it. It also makes us feel good too.
Not that I believe that exactitude is truth, but the paradox to me is how art draws us into its own moment and the present, though a convincing illusion.
Excellent response to the wonderful Sienese show. Thank you!