In Our Time - The Artist

Episode Date: March 28, 2002

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of the artist. The sculptors who created the statues of ancient Greece were treated with disdain by their contemporaries, who saw the menial task of chipping images out of stone as a low form drudgery. Writing in the 1st century AD the Roman writer Seneca looked at their work and said: "One venerates the divine images, one may pray and sacrifice to them, yet one despises the sculptors who made them". Since antiquity artists have attempted to throw off the slur of manual labour and present themselves as gifted intellectuals on a higher level than mere artisans or craftsmen. By the Romantic period Wordsworth claimed that poets were 'endowed with a greater knowledge of human nature and a more comprehensive soul than are supposed to be common in mankind'. How did the artist become a special kind of human being? What role did aristocratic patronage of the arts play in changing the status of the artist? And how have we constructed the image of the artist? With Emma Barker, Lecturer in Art History, The Open University; Thomas Healy, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck University of London; Tim Blanning, Professor of Modern European History at the University of Cambridge.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the sculptors who created the statues of ancient Greece were treated with disdain by some of their contemporaries who saw the menial task of chipping images out of stone as a low form of drudgery.

Writing in the first century AD, the Roman writer Seneca looked at their work and said, One venerates the divine images, one may pray and sacrifice to them, yet one despises the sculptors who made them. On the other hand, the Romans revered Virgil. Since antiquity, some artists have attempted to throw off the slur, as they saw it, of manual labour, and present themselves as gifted intellectuals on a higher level than mere artisans or craftsmen. Michelangelo said, I was never the kind of painter or sculptor who kept a shop.

Mozart famously bridled at his lowly status in the house of his patron he ate with the footman. But by the romantic period, Wordsworth claimed that poets were, endowed with a greater knowledge of human nature and a more comprehensive soul than are supposed to be common in mankind. How did the artist develop the claim to be a special kind of human being? What role did aristocratic patronage of the arts play in changing the status of the artist, and how have we constructed our image of the artist? With me to discuss the set of the artist is Emma Barker,

a lecturer in art history at the Open University. Thomas Healy, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck University of London, and Tim Blanning, Professor of Modern European History at the University of Cambridge and author of The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture. Tim Blanning, Plato famously wanted to throw poets out of the Republic. Is this because he saw them as subversive to the state? He certainly did see them as subversive to the state, but I think Plato's problem was that, like many intellectuals,

he greatly exaggerated the influence that intellectuals exert on their fellow citizens. And that's one of the reasons why he wanted to get rid of the competition, as it were. The second reason is that he believed that the soul of human psyche was almost infinitely malleable and consequently had to those who had an input into, as it were, molding that soul had to be very strictly controlled. But I suppose most fundamentally, Plato believed that there were certain forms, ideal forms, which existed out of time and space and were perfect. And consequently, all that we could ever approach was some kind of dim shadow on the side of the cave, some dim representation of that.

So if you allowed an artist to create an image of a perfect form, we were already at one removed. So it's a representation of a representation. So they could be, certainly subversive and disturbing people. But there may

also be a psychological problem here. Plato famously said that poetry and philosophy are always hostile to each other, but he was a bit of a poet himself, and I think he may have been worried that there was a poet inside him somewhere that needed to be driven out. But there seems

that the talent have been a parallel body of opinion which we can't necessarily pin on one person as easily as we can that on Plato because artists particularly playwrights, they did have a public role in Greek society. For instance they are facilitators of public debate and there was these great Greek festivals at which they

appeared for which they wrote their plays, the plays that we still perform now. So how did that run alongside Plato's condemnation and expulsion? I don't think they're necessarily mutually exclusive in that there's clearly a hierarchy of Jean, the Greek's esteemed drama and music very highly, but representational visual arts are much less, much less so.

And at the great dramatic festivals, where all the arts were involved, the named dramatists, dramatists of whom we've come down to us, of whom we have heard, did enjoy high status. Sophocles, for example, clearly did. He was a man of high birth and high status. So I think it depends in large measure on which particular branch of the arts we're looking at.

Thomas Healy, artists such as Pygmalion begin to appear in Greek myths. How much does Greek mythology tell us about Greek's attitude to artists? Still rummaging around that same area? Oh, enormously, I think. And one of the things that mythology shows us is that there isn't one single view. And I think we can pick up three myths

that would really give a good example, a range of the way that the Greeks thought about art. The first would be Orpheus, the great original poet. And I think coming back to the point that the artist was not seen to somehow dirty his hands, Orpheus plays this music and build cities, the stones fly into place. He's not actually having to lift or get the labourers to do it at all. And he is divinely inspired. He's seen as a civilising force.

So the artist as in a sense the civilising force is one thing that the mythology picks up on, very, very strongly. Of course, there's also then the fact that Orpheus is ultimately destroyed, in a sense destroyed by counterart, torn apart by Dionysian women who despise the fact that after the death of Eurydice that he turned his back on women and would have nothing else to do with them. And so there's a counterart, a sort of clanging, uproarious, disorderly art that comes in and destroys this high Apollonian art, what eventually Nietzsche distinguished between the Apollonian and the Dionysiac. So there are the two forms there. Then the second is Pygmalion. The artist who is phenomenally gifted, but who ultimately becomes very self-indulgent, who becomes in effect hypocritical as well.

He creates this image because he believes that no woman is pure enough. And the moment that he creates it, and so perfectly that it actually becomes real, she becomes a real woman, he rapes her. He falls in love with her and rapes her. So the artist, in a sense, is creating art which is self-indulgent, the artist slightly out of control. The third, and in many ways,

I think one of my favorite examples of the artist in antiquity is Arakne. Arakne is a figure who denies that she has been gifted by the gods. The artist is divinely inspired. This is one of the pinnacles of, for great things. Iraqney says that her artistry, and she is very much

a technical producer, she's a weaver. Arachny claims that her art is her own, and Athena famously challenges her to a contest and then turns her into a spider. Now, the wonderful thing, I think, the way that Alvid writes this up is that

he suggests that the reason that Athena turns her into the spider is not because the God demonstrates her superiority, but rather that Arachne wins the contest. And she wins, on two counts. One is that not only does Athena's skill, her actual technical ability, not match Iraqne's, but Athena presents a range of tapestries which show

the gods giving justice to the Greeks, bringing civilisation again. Iraqne demonstrates them as rather unruly adolescents, their emotions out of control, showing them as constantly involved in rape. And so in effect, one gets a clash of cultures that's going on there. So we can see in a sense of variety of views. The artist is in a sense in a sense in tune with nature,

improving nature, going beyond nature with Orpheus. The artist is in a sense self-indulgent with Pygmalion. The artist, in a sense, as a critic, as a figure who is unwilling to accept the status quo and wishes to change it. That's a terrific round-up there.

So we know exactly where we are. So now let's move smartly onto the Romans. Virgil, how far was he conscripted to be in effect their national poet laureate? He was. I mean, there's no doubt that his relations with... So the state's using the artist in this state? Indeed, yes. Virgil presents a vision which is very much in sympathy with Augustus's aspiring to imperial rule, the need for imperial rule.

He creates a vision of a Roman identity which is based on civic responsibility. But the interesting thing I think here is that art was seen and Virgil was seen as not merely propagandist. The artistic vision was leading, as it were, or seen to be leading, partly because of, again, the skill of performance, the execution of the poem that Virgil brings about. But I think very importantly, that the state, as it were, has something which it can present as full,

and not immediate to just Augustus' own self-glory. Emma Barker, when we talk about Pliny's natural history, it contains a lot of entries on Greek artists praising their talents. What is Pliny doing there? Is that a text that we can rely on? And why does it appear then? Well, it is very anomalous in a way because Pliny is celebrating these artists

and their names are still famous, Appellis, Vidius, Zuxis, although none of their work survive. Pliny has given us these names that are still famous, but it's quite hard to square with the fact that, as you said, artists were despised at the time for being manual labourers. And this is always a problem with the visual arts, again, right up to the romantic era,

because visual artists, painters and sculptors, are producing objects in the sense that many painters painted pots, objects for use. The other thing that seems to have been a bit of a problem with the visual arts, particularly, is this idea that there is a challenge to God here in terms of making imitations of the human form. And I'd add to Thomas' list of myths,

that of Prometheus, who creates man and creates man by creating little clay sculptures, which he then steals fire to bring to life. And Prometheus is, you know, transgressive. He's defying the authority of the gods. And then in the romantic era, he does become a figure of the creative artist. So is the sense,

of danger and transgression. Pliny's descriptions and the idea of the artist gaining status by becoming a learned person played a big part in the Renaissance's idea of, in one of the strands of Renaissance's idea of what the artist was, didn't it? Oh, absolutely, crucially. And these stories become incredibly famous.

There's the story, particularly the stories about Appellees, as how he was celebrated, he was admired by Alexander the Great, how Alexander the Great admired him so much that he would only have his portrait painted by Appellis, that Appellis fell for Alexander's mistress, Campaspe, and Alexander gave them at the Campaspe. These are wonderful stories for artists,

and there are many paintings of Alexander and Appellis and Campaspe, and the stories get repeated, and clearly artists in their Renaissance seize on these stories, and they in fact erroneously assume that it was, on the basis of Pliny, that it was standard for artists in the ancient world to have this great status. So it's a misunderstanding of the status of the artist in the ancient world

that is hugely influential in the Renaissance. And the other aspect is this idea of the artist as a liberal artist. There's been a long period in art, if we stretch it back over, say, five or six thousand years, of the great art being done in the service of something else. And great art being done largely, not entirely, but largely by people's name. We do not know and will never know you think of Egyptian art. And also moving, keeping it within the West European context of the Middle Ages. We look at the cathedrals, and we know some of it.

other people involved, but not many, and we look at the high level of craft stroke art, we now think of it entirely as art. Was that tug, Tim Blanning, was that Paul, that the service of the divine, that you were at the service of divine inspiration? Was that, did that take over very powerfully as the Christian era developed from the early Middle Ages onwards? Yes, I think it does, that what we call art may well not have been regarded as art by the creators.

So the monks who sat down to create the Book of Kells, let's say. I mean, have no idea who they were, or indeed whether it was created mainly in Iona, whether it was created in Ireland or wherever, very little has known about it. When those monks sat down to create that, what we regard as being one of the great achievements of Western European art, were they engaged in an act of worship, or were they self-consciously creating art, in inverted commas? No, I think they're primarily, it's the former, isn't it? They're worshipping God through the best means that they have at their disposal, through their skills as illustrated. I was going to say that I think one of the interesting things during the Renaissance

is that the role of the artist changes. And ironically, part of the reason that the artist can now claim divine inspiration is that they bring back Plato. That they now, instead of seeing themselves as not simply creating the imitation of the imitation, as Tim has said, the artist now claims, through the Christian tradition, to be able to have intimation of the lost world, of the unfallen world. I mean, as Philip Sidney has the phrase, that our erected wit of the artist allows us to discover what our infected will no longer is able for us to see.

And this is really, in a sense, on a type of platonic idea that the ideal is out there, and now that the inspired artist has a means of somehow getting at it and bringing us into the realm of the divine. But nevertheless, the artist is trying to firm himself up in the Renaissance in very many different ways. Socially, Dura goes to Venice and says at home, I'm a parasite in Venice. I'm a gentleman.

Mike Lange, Leonardo doesn't, says it's sculptors are not like dusty bakers. They want to get rid of all that. But they also want to build up their status as learned people, don't they? In humanism, they want to know the trivia. So can you give us some fix on that, please, Emma? Well, clearly humanism, however you try and define it, is very, very important in the terms of it being a revival of interest, this revival of interest in classical literature, but clearly not just, you know, literature as we would understand it, clearly a whole moral and political vision and the sense that, again, all these things about the art is making a contribution to society as part of this. And certainly so far as the visual arts are concerned, this is very much involved with a notion of a particular kind of. of painting, which is moral and improving.

It's famously defined by Alberti in his depictura, the kind of painting that's called an Historia, a history painting, which is based, its connection with literature is that it's very much related to rhetoric. And insofar as rhetoric is about the use of language for effect, a rhetorical idea of painting. It has a literary subject. It's very dramatic.

It's very emotive. It seeks to have an effect on the viewer and that effect is a moral and uplifting one, and it is through creating this kind of art and the kinds of skills and learning that is needed to create this kind of art. You have a centralised perspective for which you need to know mathematics, you need to have a knowledge of classical literature

in order to know the kinds of literary subjects that these kinds of paintings produce, so that you have the artist serving society and at the same time being a gentleman because he's learned and cultivated at the same time, and these are crucial. I agree with that, but I think there's another dimension too, and that has to do with the artist's view of himself.

And one effect of humanism was to enhance individualism, to make it easier for artists to have a high self-regard, to have self-confidence. Can you give us an example at her? Well, Michelangelo, I think, is a classic case of a real mould-breaker. I mean, he knew he was a genius. He thought he was wonderful, and he imposed his will on the Pope, as Leonardo did.

And I think that this is the psychological dimension, is the most important, and anything which feeds into that self-regard, that self-confidence, which makes an individual say, I am just the greatest, and the world must be bent to my will and not the other way. And by bringing in the Pope with Michelangelo, you're taking to the point about the patron and the relationship there. Michelangelo, as it were, payment for doing this great work, was to be allowed to stand in front of the Pope. I mean, he wanted to be the Pope's equal.

Yes. And so we're talking about a relationship that starts as being a dependent relationship. of the artist, you know, the artist is very pleased to have this commission and ends almost as like Wagner welcoming royalty to my right. The artist is doing the Pope a favour. Yeah, that I think is an extremely interesting comparison, incidentally. And that is what surely every creative artist strives for. That is to seek material reward.

We don't despise that, do we? Material reward, high status, high patronage, but on the artist's own terms. So it isn't Wagner who goes to the Emperor in Berlin, as the Emperor who comes from Berlin to Beirite to the artist, similarly with Michelangelo and the Pope. Michaelangelo still thought, though, that he was doing the work of God.

Yes. He didn't think, I am painting this. He thought he is Michelangelo, but he thought he was Michelangelo in the way he was Michelangelo because God was inspiring to do this. And when people went to see the Sistine ceiling, they went to see God's work as expressed through Michelangelo.

Yes, in that respect, Michelangelo and Wagner are, of course, different. Michelangelo is a pre-romantic artist. Wagner is the contestant of the romantic artist who does it all. I was going to say, I think, though, that we're in danger, as it were, of using our largely romantic-based categories of the artist and pushing them backwards. I think in the case of Michelangelo, yes, I mean, he wants certainly to build up his own status because that is also the way that he can build up his economic position within the society, his general position, in the society. Is this where the idea of the individual genius comes in, Hammond,

you want to address that? Yeah, absolutely. And maybe bring it into context of Vasari's lives of the artist. That was written in the mid-16th century, just in case people have forgotten. And Vasari himself was an artist, and he was writing about the artist of the day, and Michelangelo is his hero. Well, Thomas is obviously quite right, and there is this whole relationship between with the patron and the artist is important.

But clearly, you know, Vizari writes his lives of the artist, and it culminates in Michelangelo. Michaelo is the greatest, and clearly Vizari is, promoting Michelangelo, in part because he wants to promote the status of artists generally. Michelangelo, the divine Michelangelo, as he's called, is clearly important. And there is this clear emphasis in Vasari on Michelangelo as what we would now call a genius. And he says of the famous figure of God creating Adam in the Sistine ceiling that it's so beautiful. It seems to have been fashioned by the first and supreme creator rather than a mortal man.

But the thing is that Vizari does not use the word genius. you look at the current, you know, readily available penguin translation of Vassari, the word genius is all over the place. But it's not there in the original. What Vizari talks about is Ingenio, or in Latin, Ingenium, which means inventiveness, a skill, talent, certainly because it's something that's seen to be innate, but it's not a unique... God-given. Yeah. Certainly it can be God-given, but it's not a particular kind of personality. Genius at that time means something quite different. And we still have the old a notion of genius, but it's something that's unique to a person. I mean, it's like, you know, genetic

genes, it's the particular, it's the spirit of a person, it's what makes them unique, it's bound up with their fertility and all these things. And these are two distinct categories in the Renaissance, and it's only later in the 17th century and increasingly in the 18th that these two terms ingenio and genius get confused. And then we get out of this confusion. The whole idea of the genius as a very, very special kind of person. Can I do, Tim Blanning, when Reid wanted to make, there's the delacua painting of Michelangelo in torment, when Carol Reid wanted to make a film about Michael Ansela,

he said he wanted to see this man in torment, and genius became associated with torment, and great artistry became associated with mental anguish. Is that going on at the time, or is it something we've beamed back onto it? Well, I would agree entirely with Emma about Omah, her disposition on the meaning of the word genius. This is, of course, a post-erantic view,

and the tortured genius, that kind of image, which is then read back into Michelangelo and lots of others before him, is certainly a subsequent development. And that, I think, can only come with the developments of the 18th century, when

the emphasis is all on the inner light, on authenticity, on originality, on in other words, when we're moving, from a mimetic aesthetic to an expressive aesthetic, where the emphasis is now all on the expression from what is inside the individual artist. And when that happens, then I think there's a change

to the artist's outsider, as tortured genius, as someone who is misunderstood by his contemporaries. And then that image, of course, one looks back into the past to find similar figures and finds them even if, as in the case of Michelangelo, he wasn't really quite like that. Although even in the case of Michelangelo, I come back to this, I think, all-important question

of self-confidence. The crucial difference really from Michael, in institutional terms, from the time of Michelangelo to the romantic era, so far as the visual arts are concerned, is the rise of the public exhibition, which creates a public for art.

And you do get this whole wider audience who can, and the artist can become a much more of a celebrity because there is a wide audience. And I think also at the same time, and as part of this, and the whole development of not just the exhibition, but of the theatre for the public,

the whole creation of a public for art, is very, very crucial to the whole idea that there is such a thing as the arts. You can't really have the idea of the artist until we have a notion of the arts, which isn't just individually, painting, sculpture, music, literature, but that they come together as something called the arts. And that perceived unity of the arts

is something that isn't really going to come out of the individual practice, but it's the perception of the public that sees that they have this in common. I agree entirely with that. I think it's an extremely important development. And, of course, simultaneously as part and parcel of the same movement and the emergence of a public sphere in a broad cultural sense, as well as just relating to the visual arts and public exhibitions, there also develops the art critic for the first time,

who mediates, but who tells us what we ought to think about great paintings and not so great paintings, art periodicals, art associations, voluntary associations of all kinds, a whole several layers of mediation, as it were, between the individual creator and what is now definitely a public we're now talking about the 18th century has emerged and that's a very important development.

And the individual artist's position can be summarised by Haydn at Estahasi who started as a liverid musician and Estabasi had this chap down the bottom of the table and ended up by Estahazi being the place where you went to see the Great Haydn. Haydn is a perfect example of a really important transition here when Hayden first went to work for Prince Estahe

The contract stated that the music he created was the possession of the Prince, and Hayden could not have it published. Subsequently, he renegotiated his contract, and that was one way of escape. If that's not quite the right word, but it's close to the right word, a means of escape for Hayden was to escape into the public sphere by publishing his music, having it printed and distributed across Europe, and he thereby acquired an enormous reputation, made concert journeys to London in the 1790s, and earned huge sums of money.

And so there's a neat reversal of roles. is that when Hayden first goes to work for the Estahazes in the 1760s, he's famous because he's the Capellemeister director of music to Prince Esterhazy. By 1809, when he dies, the Estahazes are famous because Hayden is their composer. Emma Barker, do you think that the romantic notion of what it was like to be an artist? At the very beginning of the programme, I spoke about what words have said, if we know what Shelley said, and the claims they made for themselves,

as extraordinary human beings, with extraordinary inspiration, and quite uncommon talents yet, but just of an uncommon kind. How soon did that grip the imagination of artists and become the way artists wanted to be represented and sort of in society? Well, certainly the sense of the artist as a unique person is fairly well established by the late 18th century, particularly this idea of the uncommon person who is not appreciated by the wider society,

the whole kind of martyrology of the romantic movement. But it is very much to do with the idea of the market, which, as Thomas says, produces all these new opportunities for artists, but it also promotes insecurity. And because the great distance between the artists and the public, there's no obvious use for the art, there's always the possibility that they can sell their art, but they might not find a seller.

Tim referred to the art critic, and of course there's always the fear that you'll get bad reviews, the terror of the bad... judgment. So all these things are that the specialness of the artist is in a sense a kind of compensation for this. But then of course it really appeals to the wider audience and then people actually love the romance of the great artist, clearly. Is there a sense of full circle here Tim that we started with artists wanting to get away from being artisans,

wanting to disassociate themselves from work which as artisans as everybody knows here and everybody listening those has produced wonderful, wonderful work, may be greater than named artists. But the romantic movement one of the drives inside the Romantic movements enabled people to make works of art without acknowledging craft because they themselves, declaring themselves to be and being accepted as being inspired,

could do this, do that, do the other, and that would be the art. And so the hold and the grip it had in craft in artisanship was broken off by that. Is that one of the consequences? Yes, I think it was. And of course, for every great romantic artist whom we know and admire,

there were many more who were speaking their own language, but it was a language which was either incomprehensible or was expressed so clumsily that they've been forgotten, waiting there to be rediscovered by generations of PhD students. But I take a point. I think it's a very sound one. We have in that sense come full circle. So there must be, if there is to be an inner voice,

which is to be heard as the artist would like by all mankind, all humankind, then it has to be expressed in a way which is not to be expressed, individual but which is comprehensible. I think that one of the things the artist does is to try to redefine what, as it were, the technical artistry involves. And I'm thinking here of the famous court case between Whistler and Ruskin, where Ruskin, I mean, accused Whistler of really just, you know, putting a few dabs on a canvas, doing it very quickly, didn't need any skill at all.

And I mean, in a sense, Whistler took him to court about this and proved, as it were, that, you know, his training, his imagination, his vision, as it were, resulted in what might appear to be a very of limited technical ability. And I think we still share some of the arguments and, in a sense, misgivings over that whole relation between how skill and artistry and execution in a sense are performed in the artable market today. Yeah, there's another program. And thank you all very much, Thomas Hedy. Thank you, Tim Planning.

Thank you, Emma Parker. Next week I'll be discussing extraterrestials. So there you go. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.