Duration
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Painting is an art of space, but its products endure in time, and, to the extent that they do, problems arise concerning the various ways in which their being is affected by duration. Considered as an individual, any material object enters a specific relationship to itself from the sole fact that it enjoys a continuous mode of existence. Taken at any two moments of its duration, it can be recognized as being the same individual. This is what is called its identity.
The notion of identity is one more of the primitive concepts that point out fundamental properties of being qua being and that, because they cannot be explained by anterior ones, ultimately escape analysis. There is no difference, for any given thing, between being and being that which it is. To become something other than the kind of thing it is simply amounts, for that very thing, to ceasing to be. If these formulas sound somewhat abstract, let us ask ourselves this simple question: what would it mean to me to be turned into another man? It would mean at least this, that the two words "I" and "me" would completely lose their present meaning. I would have ceased to exist.
This fact has been forcibly stressed by Plato as well as by all the philosophers whose doctrines bear the imprint of Platonism: the notion of being cannot be separated from that of self-sameness in duration, that is, of immutability. In other words, the two notions of change and being are mutually exclusive, not, indeed, in the sense that beings do not change, but at least in the sense that, to the extent that they do change, they do not fully deserve the title of beings. To simplify the problem, let us suppose some material being enduring in time and, nevertheless, enjoying a practically perfect immutability. Its being would then be said to preserve, during the whole duration of its existence, a practically perfect self-sameness or identity. The following remarks will bear upon the extent to which the notion of identity, and its main consequences, are applicable to paintings.
1. Identity
If we consider it in the abstract, the notion of identity does not raise any particular difficulty. It is a notion immediately evident to the mind that, for a painting as well as for any other material object, to be is one and the same thing as to remain identical with itself, or, in other words, it is the same as to preserve its self- identity. Nevertheless, no character is more difficult to establish in the concrete than the identity of an object with itself. It sometimes happens that a famous painting is stolen from an art gallery; most of the time, although not always, stolen paintings are finally returned to their proper places, and the public is solemnly assured that the returned work of art is identically the same as the one that had been stolen. In such cases, however, the same question regularly arises in the mind of the public: is it really the same? Let us hasten to add that, owing to modern methods of identification, answers to such questions can generally be given with a high degree of probability and, in the case of world-famous paintings whose every detail is known, with absolute certainty. Yet this general remark suffices to show that the concrete problem of how to ascertain the identity of a painting is fraught with serious difficulties.
A second notion, distinct from the preceding one and yet closely related to it, is that of authenticity. It often happens that the identity of a certain painting can be traced to a very ancient date, or period, although we do not know who did it. Such is the case with Egyptian, Greek, Roman, or medieval murals whose continuous existence through many centuries is beyond doubt, but whose authors are unknown to us. To know the authenticity of a painting is to be able to trace it to the very artist who painted it.
The distinction between these two notions is clearly seen from the fact that many ancient paintings exhibited in art galleries bear the name of no painter. In some cases, the name of the painting becomes that of the painter. For instance, because we do not know by whom such works have been painted, we speak of the Master of the Moulins Triptych or of the Master of the Avignon Pieta. In other words, the only thing we know about the authors of these masterpieces is that, whatever their names, they did paint this Pieta or that Triptych. Often enough, we see paintings attributed to a certain artist, with this reservation, however, that the attribution is merely probable. A still more careful type of attribution simply relates the origin of a painting to the so-called "school" of a certain painter, that is, to any one of those among his successors who have undergone his influence.
An anecdote clearly illustrates the distinction between the problem of identity and the problem of authenticity. Incidentally, it also shows that these two problems are equally irrelevant to the artistic quality of the painting at stake. Maurice de Vlaminck happened to be in Vollard's shop when a man entered, carrying a picture under his arm, and asked Vollard to give him his opinion of it. "It is good," Vollard said, "I like it very much; it is very good." Whereupon the visitor asked Vollard if he thought that it was a true one. To which Vollard replied: "A true what? How can you ask me to affirm that this painting has been painted by such and such a man, and that it is not a replica or a copy of it done at about the same time? This thing was painted more than three centuries ago. I know absolutely nothing about it. Look here, why don't you go and ask my colleague across the street? It is written on his door: Expert."1 And, indeed, a painting is artistically worth what it is worth in itself, and its value remains identically the same, as long as the picture lasts, irrespective of the name of its author.
And yet, distinct as they are, these two notions cannot be wholly separated. A sign that some relationship obtains between them is the obvious distaste of art galleries for anonymous works. The kinds of labels that have just been mentioned—"Attributed to X," "School of Y," and the like– bear witness to the fact that, in our imagination at least, our knowledge of a painting is not complete so long as we do not know its author.2 The reason for this is probably the same that accounts for the common feeling that the identity of a man is not completely established until we know the place and the date of his birth as well as the names of his parents. If a man's description fits the person whose identity we investigate, there is probability that it is the same person, but if it can be established that this person is the same who was born at a certain date, at a certain place, and of identifiable parents, then indeed, unless there be fraud, all doubt is completely excluded.
A similar feeling prevails about paintings, especially where commercial interests are at stake. If he can help it, no art dealer will content himself with saying: this is a Delacroix, or this is a. Manet. He will do his utmost to trace the painting that he is selling, from owner to owner, to the first person who bought it directly either from the painter himself or from the first art dealer who obtained it from the artist. Especially in the case of modern works of art, efforts are always being made to reconstruct the complete pedigree of each and every painting, but, in many cases, the thing can be done even with works dating from the early Renaissance. When we know for certain that a painting was done by Giorgione for a certain church, or that it was bought from Leonardo himself by King Francis I, no doubt is possible. This attitude seems to rest upon the conviction that, although the identity of a picture is independent from that of its cause, the knowledge of its cause is necessary for its complete identification.
The only conceivable explanation for this paradox is that elements more or less foreign to the nature of paintings are included in common aesthetic experience. The most obvious one is our lack of faith in our own aesthetic judgment. The fame of the great painters of the past rests upon centuries of a practically unquestioned admiration for their works. Art historians and art critics are agreed that Botticelli, Titian, and Veronese are indeed great painters. Such glories now are beyond discussion, and any work attributed to such artists becomes admirable by definition. In fact, many visitors in art galleries look at the name of the painter before looking at the painting. First, they usually are more or less in a hurry; next, and above all, they do not trust themselves. Having been so often caught admiring the wrong thing or, on the contrary, not admiring, or not admiring enough, what they should have known to be a universally recognized masterpiece, they decide to save time. As John Constable so ably put it in a letter to John Fisher, we often go "by the rule of name."3 If a painting has been done by Titian, then it should be good. And indeed, if one looks at it long enough, he will not fail to see how good it is. We are far from saying that the rule of name does not work. Rather, the trouble is that it always works, even when the name is wrong. Here is a mystery that deserves to be investigated.
Let us first eliminate the commercial point of view, not at all as unjustified in itself, but as irrelevant to art. Since there is a market for paintings, and a scale of rates for the works of the most famous among painters, it is normal that fakers should be prosecuted. The question is not: why should anyone care to make sure that the painting he likes was really painted by Manet? The point is that, since most people do care, any painter faking a Manet, or any art dealer who knowingly shares in such a deception, is guilty of fraudulent activities. If he knowingly sells a Trouillebert for the price of a Corot, an art dealer is simply being dishonest. This has nothing to do with art appreciation. It is a plain business proposition: right or wrong, the prices are not the same, and that is all.
This being said, the mystery remains whole. Our own contemporaries have seen a Brittany landscape, exhibited as an early Gauguin, turned overnight into an Emile Bernard.4The next morning, although the painting at stake had remained identically the same, it had lost nine tenths of its commercial value. This was not a fake; it simply was a false attribution. But why should there be two so widely different prices for the same painting, depending on whether it is supposed to be an Emile Bernard or a Gauguin? From the point of view of aesthetic appreciation, the fact does not make sense. Let us therefore disregard it as irrelevant, not indeed to art trade, but most certainly to art.
The celebrated case of the pseudo Vermeer was a different one. This time it was not a question of false attribution; the painting was a downright fake. Here again, the problem is not interesting if asked at the level of commercial transactions, but it becomes fascinating if asked at the level of art appreciation. For indeed, a hundred years ago, the commercial value of a Vermeer of Delft was so low that it would not have been worth the trouble of faking it. A Rembrandt then was the thing to fake, and it has often been done. Yet the artistic qualities of the works of Vermeer and of Rembrandt are today exactly what they were a century ago. Today, successfully faking a Vermeer is a highly profitable venture, but when the fraud is detected, what happens to the painting at stake? Strictly nothing. The only question is to know why, if an artist5 can paint as well as Vermeer of Delft [25a, b] in December of a certain year, his work should become a practically worthless fake in January of the following year.
To this question, the ready answer naturally is that competent people suspected from the very beginning that it was a fake. And not only do we not deny this, but, rather, we do believe that it is partially true. Most of the time, when it has become scientifically established that a certain painting is indeed a fake, there first has been somebody to feel that it was a fake, when the fact could not yet have been proved [26, 27]. The painting itself is in no way altered by such a demonstration; yet, as soon as it has been proved to be a fake, even those who, until then, had entertained no suspicion as to its authenticity cease to see it with the same eyes. It then becomes "evident" to them that the painting is not authentic. The "rule of name" dominates the mind of experts almost as much as it influences the judgments of laymen. But there really is no reason it should be so. After all, the proper function of an art gallery is to exhibit works of art, not attributions; what was worth looking at when it was supposed to be the work of one of the great masters of past time should be just as worthy to be admired after experts have proved it to be thirty years old. The explanation of this mystery does not lie in the nature of art; on the contrary, it lies in the fact that paintings fulfill many functions besides that of being works of art.
In this connection, it seems difficult not to quote a curious remark recently made by Malraux, the inventor of the "museum without walls." Fully aware of the deep significance of the problem at stake, this brilliant novelist observes that if, for argument's sake, the Victory of Samothrace were proved to be a fake, "it would be killed." In other words, it would at once cease to interest us. Obviously, such a remark means little from the point of view of art itself. Nobody will consider it at all likely that this perfectly authenticated masterpiece could ever be proved a fake; yet there have been successful fakes boasting of a comparable antiquity,6 and we should not forget that, by definition, the really successful fakes are like the perfect crimes: they never will be detected But since the supposition has been conceived, let us imagine that, in a more or less remote future, the Victory of Samothrace may be proved to be a fake. We then would have to choose between two possible attitudes: either to continue to admire it as we now do, without worrying about its nonauthenticity, or else to forget it, as having ceased to be interesting from the very moment it has been proved a fake. But then we should also recognize the fact that our interest had always been less in art than in archaeology. For, indeed, it is true that a faked document is in no sense of the word a historical document, except in the history of fakes; but it is not true that the intrinsic value of a work of art, taken qua work of art, should be in any way affected by the answer given to the problem of its authenticity.7
To this conclusion, the ready objection is that to speak of experiencing a work of art exclusively qua work of art is to entertain an abstract view of an eminently concrete reality. Like artists themselves, art lovers are men, and they cannot help apprehending works of art as objects loaded with many different qualities each of which is included in aesthetic experience. Rarity, antiquity, historical ties with famous artists or with brilliant periods in the past history of art—in short, the countless associations of ideas, judgments, and emotions infallibly evoked by such names as Athens, Florence, or Rome are undoubtedly at work in our global estimate of a work of art. From this point of view, we have fakes at a disadvantage. Once recognized as the work of van Meegeren, a painting has no right to our admiration beyond what it holds from its own merits. It stands before us in a sort of cold nakedness, having lost the halo of glory with which, as a work of Vermeer, it used to be surrounded. All this is true and nobody would deny it; but far from invalidating our previous conclusions, it sets off the essential fallibility of aesthetic experience. Of those who feel distressed at learning that a famous painting has never been, after all, anything else than a fake, how many ever looked at it as at a work of art?
For the same reason, the unpleasant misadventures of a few archaeologists deserve much less our blame than our sympathy. Their errors are unavoidable and founded in the nature of things. We all feel secretly ashamed at the possibility of such mistakes, not indeed for those who make them, nor for ourselves who are meekly following them in their errors, but, rather, for art itself. What is art worth if it can so easily be mistaken for something else? We would like to think that, like intellectual evidence, beauty shines forth with such unmistakable clarity that no error about it is possible. Obviously, it is not so, but the reason such errors are possible can help us to dispel the same recurring misunderstanding that separates us from the concrete reality of art.
However hard we may fight to overcome it, the illusion still obtains in our mind that painters communicate with us by means of signs, or symbols, which we have only to read to understand. In fact, paintings are the very art of the painters embodied in the matter of their works. Of what went on in the mind of an artist, a few years or many centuries ago, nothing is left for us to know outside this piece of wood or canvas now exhibited in some art gallery, where it is offered to the appreciation of the public. If there is any secret about it—for instance, its date or the probable name of its author—the key to it lies in the painting itself and, in the last analysis, nowhere else.
It is therefore no wonder that a human mind similar to that of the creative artist, and having at its disposal an art and a skill not wholly incomparable with those of its model, should succeed in turning out works of similar appearance. There would be no faked Corots if there were no authentic ones. What deceives us in a fake is the authentic presence of the model from which it derives its existence. It is likewise natural that the proof concerning the authenticity or nonauthenticity of such works should ultimately lie in the material elements of which it consists as well as in their disposition. This is nothing against the eminent dignity of art, since, on the contrary, it emphasizes the very reality in which, if painting is at stake, art itself consists. Why feel scandalized at the thought that the answers to the problems of authenticity lie in the physical structure of paintings? The products of this art are solid material substances; in a word, they are things.
These simple remarks may also help to solve another problem, no less puzzling than the preceding one, although, so far as we know, it has received very little attention. Why does public opinion react differently to pictorial fakes and to musical or poetic deceptions? For, indeed, this seems to be a fact. There have always been writers to attribute their own works to some famous author, or else to present them as the products of some form of popular art, as was the case, for instance, with Prosper Merimee's Theatre de Clara Gazul. Far from feeling indignant about it, we simply see there a practical joke or, at the utmost, an amusing deception practiced upon the simplicity of philologists. The history of music abounds in similar anecdotes. From Berlioz's oratorio, L'Enfance du Christ, to the pseudo-Pugnani or Vivaldi arrangements for violin carried for years and years through countless concerts by a certain contemporary virtuoso, many similar musical fakes could be quoted. Nobody minds it. On the contrary, everyone agrees that if a musician decides to write an a. cappella Mass in the polyphonic style of Palestrina, his only chance to make people listen to it is to present it as a recently discovered masterpiece of sixteenth-century vocal music. Such things have recently been done, and when the deception was graciously acknowledged by its author, public opinion praised him for his cleverness. Yet, when all is said and done, what difference is there between selling a pseudo Vermeer to an art gallery and selling a pseudo Vivaldi to the concert-going public?
In fact, there is at least one. Even apart from the difference in commercial value between the genuine work of an old master and the cleverest of recognized fakes, let us remember what has already been said concerning the unique relationship between a painting and the hand of the painter. Painters, Delacroix told us, are to themselves their own virtuosos. There is therefore a great difference between selling us the fleeting enjoyment of sounds caused by a performer, which nobody expects to take home at the end of a concert, and selling us the permanent ownership of a unique work immediately produced by the hand of a certain painter. If his hand has had no part in the making of a certain painting, to sell it under his name constitutes a tangible deception on the part of the faker. In this sense, the physical mode of existence proper to plastic works of art seems to account, at least in part, for the good-natured indulgence with which the public lends itself to a pleasant musical hoax and for the severity with which the law strives to discourage modern Rembrandts.
2. Authenticity
There is only one case in which the notion of authenticity is simple. It then means that a certain painting has been done by the hand of a certain painter whose name is known to us with absolute certainty. When, on the contrary, "authenticity" means a sort of spiritual quality owing to the fact that a work of art is born of the personal genius of an artist, not of any kind of imitation, the term means "genuine" rather than "authentic." Its meaning then becomes so vague that its analysis is hardly possible. But even taking it in its first and material acceptation, this term is far from signifying an absolutely simple notion.
Let us first mention an extreme case, which, infrequent as it is, cannot be considered impossible. In point of fact, we know that the thing did happen. Some painters have found themselves confronted with clever fakes done in their own manner. Most of the time, they simply refused to recognize such paintings as their own works, but there have also been cases in which, for various reasons, artists contented themselves with touching up the picture here and there and, finally, signing it.8 Is such a painting authentic? No, since most of it has not been done by the painter himself. Yes, since, after being done in his own manner, this work of art has been completed by the painter himself and finally acknowledged by him as his own work.
Many famous works of art were born of such a collaboration, with the sole difference that, this time, it was a collaboration intended and organized by the artist himself. It is not believable that such painters as Rubens, Veronese, and Tintoretto were alone the authors of the great compositions that justly bear their names. They certainly needed, and received, material help in order to cover such wide surfaces with paint. In the case of Rubens, for instance, we know that the master had fellow workers, some of whom were his pupils and were destined to become, in time, more or less famous masters. Art historians have spent a great deal of ingenuity in determining, in some compositions of Rubens, which parts are due to his own hand and which to the hands of assistants. In modern times, precise information is available concerning the origin of such composite works. The diary of Louis de Planet, who helped Delacroix with some of his murals, tells us which parts of these compositions were executed by Delacroix himself and which were done by his various collaborators. But the compositions are really the work of Delacroix, and, even in the order of execution, he had to teach each and every one of his assistants how to paint so as not to break the unity of his own style.9 In such cases, the collaborators are simply hired hands.
Copies done by artists other than the author of the original cannot be considered authentic, but when such copies are done by good artists, familiar with the style proper to the author of the original, fully informed of his techniques, and using similar materials, it is not always easy to tell copies from originals. Vasari has related the imbroglio created by the exact copy, done by Andrea del Sarto, of Raphael's portrait of Pope Leo X. For some time, two distinct persons felt equally certain that they were owning the original, and even Giulio Romano, who had worked with Raphael, and under his direction, on the first portrait, was so thoroughly deceived that he pretended to recognize his own brushwork in the copy.10 In our own times, we have seen two versions of La Belle Ferronniere [28, 29], both considered authentic works of Leonardo da Vinci, the one in Kansas, the other in the Louvre. There was a long and severe dispute.11 At present (December 1956), the painting exhibited in the Louvre is modestly "attributed to" Leonardo da Vinci. But it remains the same painting.
After downright fakes and ancient copies come the false attributions, of which it can be said that public art galleries, as well as private collections, contain quite a few specimens. These false attributions are hardly less frequent in the case of modern paintings than in that of ancient ones. It often happens that a group of young artists, whose later works will reveal marked differences in style, exhibit a remarkable similarity. Among the Fauves, for example, an early Derain can recall a late van Gogh [30a, b], while an early Dufy sometimes resembles early works by Braque or by Marquet[31-36].12 Among the so-called Nabis and the Pont-Aven group, early Gauguins sometimes resemble early works by Emile Bernard, Serusier, or even Bonnard. Since such problems of authenticity arise in connection with modern paintings, they are still more frequent in the case of works several centuries old. There is no end to this kind of controversy, not so much among artists as among the excitable tribe of connoisseurs and the learned company of art historians.
This takes us back to the question asked by Vollard: how is it possible to establish the fact that a certain painting was done, several centuries or several years ago, by a certain artist rather than by another one? The two main methods followed by experts consist either in resorting to aesthetic intuition or in applying more or less scientific tests by means of which the personal style of an artist can be identified.
These two methods can be successfully applied, at least up to a point. Concerning the first one, it cannot be denied that, after devoting a long time to the study of certain schools, certain periods, or certain masters, some art historians, art critics, or even connoisseurs develop a sort of flair enabling them to recognize the hand of certain masters. It would be absurd to deny the fact, the more so as, in doubtful cases, any man responsible for a decision would ultimately take the judgment of such experts into consideration. On the other hand, these experts are far from infallible in their decisions. On the contrary, no judge is less reliable than the famous "sixth sense" in virtue of which some experts feel qualified to give oracular decisions in matters of authenticity. Some of their errors are justly famous, but this is no reason they should be rashly judged. Experts simply attempt an impossible task. In our own lifetime, we remember having seen the Concert champetre first attributed to Sebastiano del Piombo, then to Giorgione, then to Titian, then to Giorgione again. Now, both Louis Hourticq, who attributes the work to Titian, and Victor Basch, who maintains the authorship of Giorgione, honestly recognize that they cannot prove their respective conclusions. "Titian, such as I have seen and felt him," says Victor Basch, "cannot possibly be the author of this work." In short, it is all a matter of intuition. When two intuitions disagree, all hope of reaching any sort of agreement should be abandoned.
This is the less surprising as, contrary to what candid art lovers are likely to believe, painters themselves are not always infallible in identifying their own works. If caution were not indicated in these delicate matters, recent trials could be quoted during which famous painters have denounced as so many fakes works whose authenticity they themselves have later on been obliged to recognize. Nor are painters alone in this plight. The justly famous story of the sculptor Rodin suing an art dealer who had offered a perfectly authentic statue for sale should make us indulgent on this point.13 No one is more dogmatic than some experts, but nothing is less safe than their conclusions. Nor should this fact disturb us in the least, for, indeed, the personal, historical, or commercial interests that poison such controversies are radically irrelevant to art.
The so-called "objective" methods of investigation aim to redress this uncertainty of subjective intuition. Generally speaking, their desire to eliminate purely subjective judgments makes experts resort to scientific and historical methods foreign to the order of aesthetics properly so called.
An attempt has recently been made to submit to certain rules the analysis of the personal style of any painter. This would lead to a sort of "pictology" that, once fully constituted, would find itself with respect to painting in about the same relation as graphology is to handwriting. Now, precisely, graphology is one of those disciplines in which absolute accuracy is hard to achieve and whose experts have been known to make mistakes. In the case of pictology14 the solidity of the conclusions rests upon that of one of its presuppositions—namely, that the style of a painter exhibits constant features recognizable from the beginning of his career to its end. This may be true of certain artists, but there is no proof that it is true of all painters. At first sight, it does not seem probable that, if he did not know beforehand that they are the works of one and the same painter, a pictologist could demonstratively establish that the author of the early works of Titian is the same as the author of his last paintings. There is no great painter whose style did not undergo some measure of transformation during the course of his career. Nor is this all. For even while he finds himself right in the middle of one of his successive manners, a painter may well yield to the sudden urge of trying something different. To repeat, these remarks do not mean that all attributions are equally uncertain; they simply mean that, although they are not the rule, false attributions cannot be said to be rare exceptions.15
If this conclusion seems unduly pessimistic, it will prove useful to observe that even if it implies a measure of historical skepticism, it also expresses a decided aesthetical optimism. There are such things as practically safe historical demonstrations. For instance, when a certain city has commissioned a sixteenth-century artist to paint an altarpiece, whose description is given in the deed, and which is still visible in the same city, above the same altar for which it was first painted, little hesitation is possible. The point we are enforcing is a different one. It is that this is historical evidence, and that while such evidence should be welcome wherever available, there is no aesthetic reason to worry in the countless cases where it is not available. From the point of view of art taken precisely qua art, there is nothing to lose in considering all paintings anonymous.
It is easy to foresee that these remarks will be construed as a glorification of ignorance and as a denial of the usefulness of art history in general. They are nothing .of the sort. One should never hesitate to learn all that it is possible to know. The only question is: what is it to know art? More precisely: is the knowledge of art history, in any sense of the term, a knowledge of art? It certainly is a knowledge about art, but its object is not art, it only is its history. In the case of painting, as in that of poetry, it is entirely possible to know everything about their history without knowing much, if anything, about painting and poetry themselves. To limit ourselves to painting, it is not rare to see parents of good will undertake the artistic education of their children as early as possible, dragging them to art galleries, making them look at art books and at art postcards, forcibly stuffing their little heads with as many images of famous paintings and as many names of famous painters as possible (including even dates)—all this on the presupposition that it never is too soon to begin an artistic education. This is not the beginning of an artistic education; it is the beginning of a historical education. The fact that some children like it does not prove that they are gifted for aesthetic experience; neither does the fact that some children hate it prove that they are not gifted for the enjoyment of painting. Simply, it is a question of not confusing two distinct orders and of the perils that follow from their confusion. It is certainly better to like both art and its history, but it is quite possible to feel indifferent to art history while ardently loving art. The present tendency to confuse these two issues can do a great deal of harm. It can discourage artistic vocations without always encouraging historical ones. In short, this is one more example of the widely spread misunderstanding of the true relationship of intelligence and art.
What is wrong with this tendency is not that it attributes too much importance to the human intellect in the genesis of works of art. In all arts, and especially in painting, the intellect is at work everywhere, even in the painter's brush. The error that we wish to point out consists in letting cognitive activities foreign to its essence invade the art of painting and corrupt its notion in the minds of men.16 It is natural for an art lover to take an interest in the lives of artists, in the history of painting, in the development of the various schools of painters, in the aesthetic problems connected with art in general and with painting in particular. All this is natural, but none of it is necessary. Above all, none of it should be allowed to take precedence over the very substance of the art. This is the ultimate reason why we suggested that, as regards art itself, the problems of authenticity are secondary in importance and should be relegated to their proper place. They are purely incidental to the substantial reality of painting.
3. Life and Death of Paintings
Paintings are perishable, as are all material objects. There would be no point in reviewing all the accidents that can bring paintings to an untimely end. Earthquakes, floods, fires, wars, and vandalism are not causes of destruction proper to works of art and still less particularly to paintings. On the other hand, even leaving aside the painter himself, whose relationship to his work is unique in kind, paintings have enemies of their own, among whom, before any other one, we should list the customer.
The customer's behavior is a curious one. There is something mysterious in the gesture of the man who, rather than buying a car or a piece of furniture, buys one of those unnecessary things which we call paintings. On the other hand, it is only too true that, having paid for a picture, some buyers feel that they own it and that they can do with it what they please. Incidentally, no law in the world prevents the buyer of a masterpiece from destroying it at once or even, which is worse, from repainting it. Without going to such extremes, the owners of paintings sometimes do curious things to them to improve their quality. The story of what Mr. John Allnutt did to a landscape by Constable should not be held against him. For indeed, if he himself had not told the story, we would not know it, but it deserves to be preserved as a perfect illustration of our problem. From this point of view, it is a classic.
Mr. John Allnutt had bought a Constable when very few people were interested in his work. In point of fact, during the year 1814, when this incident took place, John Constable sold only two paintings, and Mr. John Allnutt bought one of them. He must therefore have been a man of taste. Yet he wrote many years later to C. R. Leslie: "As I did not quite like the effect of the sky, I was foolish enough to have that obliterated, and a new one put in by another artist which, though extremely beautiful, did not harmonize with the other parts of the picture. Some years after, I got a friend of Mr. Constable to ask him if he would be kind enough to restore the picture to its original state, to which he readily assented. Having a very beautiful painting by Mr. (now Sir Augustus) Callcott, which was nearly of the same size, but not quite so high, I sent it to Mr. Constable together with his own, and expressed a wish that, if he could do it without injury to the picture, he would reduce the size of it in height, by lowering the sky, so as to make it nearer the size of Mr. Callcott's, to which I wished it to hang as a companion." To make a long story short, let us say that this refreshing candor on the part of the customer was fully rewarded by the painter's angelic patience. When Constable told Allnutt that the work had been done and could be collected, Allnutt had two surprises in store.. First, Constable refused to be paid; on the contrary, he declared himself under a great obligation to Allnutt, who had been the first stranger to buy one of his paintings when his own friends were still questioning his chances of success. Next, Constable, "wishing to make the picture as acceptable to me as possible . . . had, instead of reducing the height of the old picture, painted an entirely new one of the same subject."17 Allnutt does not seem to have asked himself why Constable had preferred to do a new painting rather than to mutilate the old one. In this case, the painting was saved by the painter himself. In other cases, like Manet's portrait of Abbe Hurel, the mutilation was performed by the owner of the painting.18 Nobody can say how many paintings have perished in this way.
Man, then, constitutes a serious threat to the survival of paintings, but even apart from natural accidents and from human intervention, paintings begin to change and to disintegrate almost as soon as they have left the painter's hand. Even stones get sick and ultimately perish; canvases, wood panels, and colors cannot be expected to endure indefinitely. During the first years of their lives, paintings do not always suffer from the effects of time. For a period of twenty years or more, especially if the media used by the painter have been well chosen and cleverly handled, oil slowly permeates the colored pigments, unifies the matter, and imparts to the work a mellowness that new paintings cannot possibly have.19 Some painters strive to achieve this art-gallery effect by a series of artifices, but it is rather dangerous to do paintings that look already old in their youth. At any rate, young paintings are so different from old ones that it is not easy to exhibit works of the sixteenth century in the same room as twentieth-century paintings. Even to pass from a room to another one requires a few moments of adaptation when it makes us go from Jan van Eyck to Paul Cezanne, Matisse, and Renoir.
This common experience raises a rather disturbing question. What did the great masterpieces of the past look like when they had just been painted? What will the masterpieces of today look like three centuries from now? Above all, since philosophical problems are here at stake, what kind of being can we attribute to paintings if their so-called being is, in fact, a slow but irrevocable becoming? These speculative questions cannot be answered by philosophy, but, rather, by chemistry. Despite the rarefied atmosphere in which aesthetic discussions usually take place, the future of paintings is inseparable from that of the pigments used by painters. No masterpiece will ever survive the material elements that enter its structure. From this point of view, there is a sort of life and death of pictures. Each and every one of them unfolds its own history during a space of time whose duration is determined by that of its constituent elements.
This fact has given rise to new disciplines and techniques whose natural tendency is to subdivide and to multiply. There now exist a picture pathology, itself attended by an art of preventing picture ailments; a science of the way in which paintings are aging, either normally or abnormally; an art of restoring sick paintings; and other such disciplines or techniques that require laboratories, trained artisans, and, generally speaking, institutions and a specialized staff that are, with respect to paintings, in the same relationship as hospitals and physicians are to human beings.20 The way specialists describe the qualities required of a good restorer of paintings closely resembles the description of a qualified surgeon.21 The only difference is that, while surgery is a regulated profession, there is no law to prevent anybody from doing anything he pleases to any painting. This situation may change with time, but there is too much uncertainty concerning methods and techniques to justify prescriptions and interdictions in such matters. We are still far from being able to implement the decisions made by certain international organizations to ensure the protection of painted works of art.
By and large, the main element responsible for the disintegration of paintings is color. The history of color-making is long and complex, full of suppositions and clever guesses that are not always supported by facts. With respect to our own problem, it is often said that modern colors, mostly chemical in nature and factory-made, are far from equaling the old homemade colors, often vegetal in origin and less likely to fade than the chemical ones. Hence the kind of research work, already mentioned, that aims to recapture the secret formulas of the old technicians. And such efforts are certainly most useful, provided only that they do not make us believe in the existence of a golden age when color pigments were not reacting chemically and when paintings used to change but little after leaving the painter's easel.22
As far back in the past as our records can take us, painters have always been less interested in making colors than in using them. The bills paid by the painters who decorated the walls of the Palace of the Popes, at Avignon, are still extant. We know exactly what colors they bought from the local dealer and what price they paid for them. It is likewise certain that those colors, as well as those used by other artists during the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, have never ceased to change during the course of centuries. In some well-known cases, paintings done by such great artists as Leonardo da Vinci have totally disintegrated during their own lifetime. In other cases—for instance, that of Titian—the underpainting has so completely eaten up the colors that practically nothing of them is now visible.23 When it is only a question of removing accumulated dust or successive layers of varnish, a carefully conducted cleaning can restore a painting to something more like its original condition. The operation carries its own risks, but it has often been successfully performed. When the color itself is the trouble, as it usually is, little or nothing can be done about it. Today, as in older times, and perhaps a little faster today but not noticeably so, some paintings become unrecognizable, as to color, during the lifetime of the artist. At any rate, what we now admire in the works of the old masters, and what their copyists are striving to imitate, is chiefly the damage caused to them by the passing of years and centuries. If he came back to life and revisited the Scuola di San Rocco, in Venice, Tintoretto would probably not recognize his own work!24
In almost desperate cases, that is, when it becomes a question of life and death, restorers are called in to help. Owing to the discoveries of modern physics, sick canvases can be Xrayed, an operation that may lead to disturbing revelations. The painting we see sometimes covers the original work of the artist; additions, by unknown hands, have been made at unknown dates; ancient colors have been covered with entirely different ones. The reports on the work done on The Mystic Lamb of van Eyck eloquently tell us of the countless problems that restorers have to face. Far from blaming their efforts, which are often guided by a great love for art and for the works they are attempting to save from utter destruction, we should feel grateful to them for saving what can still be saved of so many masterpieces that, were it not for their skill, would soon cease to exist.
Yet, when all is said and done, the fact remains that the restoration of paintings is one of the surest methods scientifically to substitute new paintings for the old ones. The first harm can be done, not only during the lifetime of the artist, but even under his very eyes. An ill-advised application of varnish by another hand, a well-intentioned piece of repair work done to stop a hole—all degrees of intervention are possible until, because the color "is gone," another painter, resorting to pigments different from those in use in Raphael's day and trusting his own eye as if it were that of the old master, proceeds to cover the loggias of the Vatican with acid greens and canary yellows the like of which Raphael himself probably never used on any one of his own paintings.
To repeat, no blame is intended in these remarks: without such restorations, nothing of Raphael's murals would still be left for us to see. The only point at stake is that, from the moment a painting has been touched by another hand than that of the painter, it becomes another painting.25 A world-famous picture such as Millet's Angelus has first been celebrated as an extraordinary masterpiece; the present tendency is to consider it an honorable piece of work that does not even compare with the best of what Millet has left us; in point of fact, what we now see may well be little more than the shadow of what it used to be in its pristine novelty.26 Some restorations of works by Veronese and other great painters have been denounced by highly competent witnesses as amounting to pure and simple destructions.27 Yet we have forgotten these restorations, and we now trustfully accept as authentic some paintings that their authors would not always recognize as their own works. There are two ways for a painting to perish: the one is for it to be restored; the other is for it not to be restored.28 Opposite answers to the problem of what to do are always dialectically justifiable, but such discussions are of little help when it comes to practical decisions. Even if it were true that, in the future, paintings would be protected against inevitable death,29 nothing could be done about past destructions. There are good reasons to hope that the average span of life promised to paintings will progressively lengthen. The difficulty that will never be removed, so far as one can see, is to decide in good time which paintings deserve to be protected and which ones can be allowed to perish.
Here again, a summary comparison with music will no doubt help us to realize how deeply such problems are rooted in the physical nature of these two classes of works of art. A painter leaves behind him works completely defined in their structure. Painters are so truly the total causes of their works that these cannot be modified in any way without undergoing a change in their individuality and suffering a loss of authenticity. Every decision made in such matters is irrevocable: a restored picture will never again be quite the same picture it used to be before its restoration. It even will begin to change again, following another rhythm and in a new way. This is so true that, as has been said, certain restorations practically amount to downright destructions.
On the side of music, things are rather different. Since each and every musical composition requires a mediator to exist, the intervention of artists other than the author himself is not only not scandalous, or sacrilegious, it is even natural, beneficial, and necessary to the work. When Artur Schnabel was performing one of Beethoven's piano sonatas, he was not proceeding to a restoration of some original but, rather, to the original creation of one of its possible interpretations. Let us buy four recordings of this same sonata by four different artists; the result will be four different renderings of the same musical work, and nobody will ever be able to prove that one of them is the ideal and absolute self-subsisting sonata No. 32 in C minor, Opus 111. The poverty-stricken mode of subsistence that is proper to music ensures its indestructibility. A painter can say: this is my painting. A musician is seldom able to say: this is exactly my music. Interpreting a musical composition is not an absolutely free matter, but it allows a great deal of liberty for which there is no ground in painting.
For the same reason, musicians can take many liberties with written music that it would be criminal for painters to take with paintings. True enough, all musicians and all music lovers do not react in the same way on this point. Some of them vigorously object to any kind of change inflicted upon the work of a musician by other musicians, but it is impossible to maintain that the problem is the same in the case of music and in the case of painting. The reason for the difference is that, in these two cases, the consequences are entirely different. When a painter modifies the painting done by another artist, the original work of this artist is forever altered. The new picture may perhaps be better than the old one, but it will certainly be different. Hence the scruples that any painter should experience when asked to restore a mural by Giotto, Raphael, or Leonardo da Vinci. Not so in the case of music. First of all, musicians themselves have often rewritten their own compositions, to say nothing of those written by others, in order to reduce orchestral scores for the piano, or to turn cello concertos into violin concertos, or to orchestrate compositions written for organ, for piano, or even for human voices. Since Wagner himself did this with certain scenes of Tristan and Parsifal, why should not similar "arrangements" be perpetrated by other musicians? The result is what counts. If the result is good, its author is justified.
However each of us may feel about the Passacaglia and the Preludes and Fugues of Bach orchestrated by famous maestros or, on the contrary, transcribed for the piano by well-known virtuosos, the fact remains that no harm has been done by the authors of these transcriptions. Bach himself subjected the works of many other musicians to similar alterations, but this has not destroyed them. In like manner, it will always be possible to perform Boris Godunov either in its original orchestration or in its highly popular version by Rimsky-Korsakov. Those who prefer Bach's prelude for harpsichord to its metamorphosis into Gounod's Ave Maria are perfectly justified in sticking to their own aesthetic judgment, the more so as, in this case too, to remove the Ave Maria is all there is to do to recover the original prelude. Even then, some will prefer to have it performed on the harpsichord rather than on the piano, but if there is no harpsichord and if the pianist is good, the piano will have to do, the more so as Bach is no longer here to tell us which way he himself would prefer to have it performed.
These considerations should not make us lose sight of the fundamental fact that painting is an art of space. As has already been said, a painting is entirely given to us at once, and our first apprehension of it is practically instantaneous. No doubt, this initial experience can be protracted, but even while it is enduring in time, it remains a global and simultaneous apprehension. The onlooker is not being shown first a certain part of a picture, then another one. He has not to keep the whole structure of the work in his mind by an effort of memory similar to that which one spontaneously makes while listening to music. The same remark can be worded differently: a certain amount of musical memory is required for the enjoyment of a musical composition, whereas little visual memory, if any, is necessary for the enjoyment of a picture. If the work is a small one, memory is not required at all.
A painting is experienced as a given whole at any one of the moments of its duration, but not necessarily as identically the same whole, unless we call it the same as we say that an old man is the same man as the child that he once was. Some artists are so fully aware of the fact that they enlist time as their best collaborator. Time, Ingres used to say, will finish my work. For all painters, however, time ultimately proves an interfering collaborator, and, here again, the materiality of painted works of art is inscribed in their aesthetic existence. Many Greek and medieval marbles, or carved stones, used to be covered with bright colors under which, should these coats of paint still exist, we would today refuse to recognize what we hold to be exceptional masterpieces of ancient art. What is true of painted sculptures is no less true of paintings.30 If some frolicsome genii decided overnight to restore to their pristine condition all the paintings in the Louvre, it would probably become necessary to rewrite the whole history of art, and many of us would pray the same genii promptly to turn again these bright young things, pleasing to see but a bit loud for our soberer taste, into the respectable masterpieces we used to know and love. We all admire the best van Goyen landscapes and seascapes, but what did they look like when they were new? This is a question nobody can answer. To be sure, we like them as they are; what we do not know is in what measure the paintings we now like are really those done by this master of the seas and the plains. There would perhaps be some truth in saying that the only paintings that can give us a fair notion of what the works of Tintoretto looked like in their primitive novelty are the most recent paintings done by those among our contemporaries who do not have the ambition to turn out modern museum pieces. Any youth resembles any other youth more than he resembles the old man he will someday have to be. If we want to enjoy the old masters as they once really were, let us first cherish contemporary painting.
Endnotes
1. Vlaminck, Portraits avant deces, p. 88. Like so many other "good stories," this one may be, to some extent, a work of art.
2. In the fine arts, the word "school" signifies a group of artists whose works are similar in style owing to the common influence of the style of a certain master (school of Giotto) or local traditions (Umbrian school). The relation of this notion to those of identity and authenticity is obvious. A painting attributable to the school of Raphael is, up to a point and indirectly, a work bearing the imprint of Raphael's personality. When, without Raphael, it would not be what it is, a painting can be said to be, in a certain sense, his work. — On successes and failures in identifying such "pupils of," see the amusing anecdote concerning Amico di Sandro, one of the creatures of Bernard Berenson: S. N. Behrman, Duveen, pp. 156-58. After inventing him, B. B. finally redistributed his alleged works among Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, and Ghirlandaio. On the Botticelli that was not a Botticelli, p. 179. On the Giorgione that was a Titian, pp. 179-81 (but a "Giorgionesque" Titian, p. 183), which now hangs as a Giorgione in the National Gallery in Washington, pp. 184-85.
3. "______ is annoyed by your designating his old masters trash. He goes by the rule of name." (Constable to Fisher, April 13, 1822; in Leslie, p. 90.)
4. This incident, which we witnessed, took place in 1937. The real story was a much more complex one. When he learned the true origin of the picture, its owner reproached the art dealer with having sold him a pseudo Gauguin; to which the art dealer replied that, given the price he had asked for it, a man had to be out of his senses to believe that he was buying an authentic Gauguin. The combination (for there was a clever calculation behind the incident) would have worked without the accidental presence of Emile Bernard. After being exhibited several times under the name of a painter, a picture acquires a pedigree; it progressively becomes authentic. — On the painter Bernard, see Bernard Dorival, Les Etapes de la peinture francaise contemporaine, I, 99-102. We shall quote from Bernard's irreplaceable Souvenirs sur Paul Cezanne, et lettres.
5. On the Vermeer incident, Malraux (The Voices of Silence, p. 369) shows the pseudo Vermeer forged by van Meegeren. Another faked Vermeer is shown in True or False?, p. 36 (see n. 14, below, p. 89). — The art of faking can boast of a very honorable ancestry. The engraver Marcantonio (1480?—?1534) is said to have counterfeited, on copper, the thirty-six woodcuts by Durer on the Passion of Christ "with the A. D. with which Albert signed his works"; "Marcantonio succeeded in making them so like that no one could tell the difference who did not know, and they were sold and bought as Albert's works" (Vasari, Lives, III, 71-72). Michelangelo himself "made copies of various old masters, making them look old with smoke and other things so that they could not be distinguished from the originals. He did this to obtain the originals in exchange for the copies, as he wanted the former and sought to surpass them, thereby acquiring a great name" (ibid., IV, 110-11). On the life-size sleeping Cupid done in marble by Michelangelo and sold as an antique by Baldassare del Milanese, see IV, 113-14. — These anecdotes may themselves be contrived; the point is that Vasari, who related them, does not seem to have felt indignant at these slight irregularities.
6. Malraux, Le Musee imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale, p. 52. The opposite plate, p. 53, reproduces one of the Greek archaic fakes by Dossena. Malraux admits that these fakes are admirable; he also admits that the fact that they are fakes does not change the statues: "it only changes the feeling they cause in us"; finally, Malraux admits that this "is the most irritating of points in our relationship with art." The complete discussion of this attitude would entail an analysis of a new meaning given to the notion of "authenticity." It then means the reverse of imitation. Is "authentic" that which springs from the personality of the artist himself? In this sense, it can be said of Dossena that, had he exhibited his statues under his own name, "the multiplicity of the styles that he was imitating would have revealed the inauthenticity of his art" (Malraux, p. 52). This may be true, but it should not be taken for granted. Once more, it is a literary point of view on art: if it has no value as a historical document, a statue (or a painting) can have no value as a work of art. Nothing is less evident. Artists often take pleasure in creating in different styles; there is, at least, no contradiction in the notion of an artist's doing creative and "authentic" work in styles both different and dating from different historical periods. Critics have no patience with artists returning to one of their earlier styles, or to the style of an earlier historical period, but painters themselves love to do so. Andre Derain, Chirico, and, of course, Picasso have found no fault with the use of this perfect artistic freedom.
7. After saying that, if we learned that the Victory of Samothrace is a fake, that would kill it, Malraux adds with perfect candor: "But here is something that set us adreaming: were we to learn that it is a sixteenth-century fake, it would not be completely killed" (Le Musee imaginaire, p. 52). This remark implies that, in the complex of impressions caused in us by a work of art, a small number only are traceable to art.
8. In his catalogue for the Corot exhibition at the Lyon Art Gallery, 1936, Paul Jamot explained that Corot had probably carried charity to the point of touching up daubings done by some poor devils in order to turn them into something salable. Renoir is said to have pushed good nature still further than Corot, since he once touched up and signed a pseudo Renoir brought to him by a desolate amateur. Albert Andre had quoted this incident in his Preface to an album of reproductions of Renoir's pictures, but the art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who had read the galley proofs, was given assurance that Renoir would ask Albert Andre to suppress all allusion to possible fakes. And, indeed, it is bad business to let it be known that there are fakes. See Leon Werth, La Peinture et la mode, p. 114. — Cf. Rene Huyghe, "Simple Histoire de 2414 faux Corots," L'Amour de l'art, XI (Feb., 1936), 73-76. On the same problem concerning Manet, see Adolphe Tabarant, Manet et ses ceuvres, pp. 96-98; on the many pseudo Manets, pp. 518-24. — Our modern scruples would have surprised such an artist as Rubens. He had different prices for the paintings entirely by his own hand and for those simply retouched by his own hand. But he had subtler distinctions. For instance: "1,200 florins. A Last Judgment, begun by one of my pupils, after one which I did in a much larger size for the Most Serene Prince of Neuburg, who paid me three thousand five hundred florins cash for it; but this, not being finished, would be entirely retouched by my own hand, and by this means will pass as original. 13 x 9 ft" (Jakob Burckhardt, Recollections of Rubens, Appendix, "Selected Letters of Rubens," p. 207). He does not want his customers to mistake for mere copies pictures so well retouched by his own hand "that it would be hard to distinguish them from originals" (p. 208). Yet, Rubens adds, these retouched pictures "are assigned a much lower price." Similar remarks, p. 209. In some cases, Rubens thinks that the pictures under discussion will become authentic: "I doubt not in the least that the 'Hunt' and the `Suzanna' will appear amongst my originals" (p. 211).
9. See L. de Planet, Souvenirs de travaux de peinture avec M. Delacroix. Cf. Journal de Eugene Delacroix, I, 182, n. 4.
10. See Vasari, Lives, II, 317-18. — On the history of this comedy of errors: Jean Alazard, Essai sur revolution du portrait peint a Florence de Botticelli a Bronzino, especially pp. 121-22; bibliography of the incident, p. 122, n. 2. — Those who consider themselves practically infallible experts should remember that painters themselves are fallible. Constable called "a noble N. Poussin" what seems to be a copy done after one of Poussin's landscapes: "A man washing his feet at a fountain" (Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, p. 84).
11. Harry Hahn, The Rape of La Belle.
12. Speaking of some early pictures done by Derain: "I was going to write: these are Derain. But reflection convinces me that they are not yet true Derains. If they were mixed with pictures by Vlaminck, Dufy, and Braque dating from the same season, one would often hesitate on how to place the right signatures on all these canvases. Now that years have gone by, these fauves look terribly alike. Sagot, Vollard, and Bernheim [i.e., art dealers] may well have been able to identify them at first sight. Today, they leave us as puzzled as we are before certain cages in the zoo: jaguar or puma? One has to read the label to make sure." (Pascal Pia, "Derain au musee," Arts, XDXCIII [Dec. 814, 1954], 14.)
13. On errors committed by experts, see above, n. 5, and Hahn, ch. 9, pp. 99-106. —On the attribution of the Concert champetre to Titian, see Louis Hourticq, La Jeunesse de Titien. On the rejection of this conclusion, see Victor Basch, Titien, p. 271. — On Rodin, see Vollard, pp. 281-82. After telling the story of a bronze by Rodin that was authentic and yet a fake, at one and the same time, Vollard relates that Rodin himself boasted that he was mistaken about the authenticity of one of his works only once in a lifetime. Even then he had an excuse. An art dealer was showing him a bronze called Chaos, whereas Rodin himself had listed it, in his own catalogue, under the title L'Envolee. Are we wrong in finding the excuse rather more distressing than the mistake?
14. M. M. van Dantzig, in True or False?, pp. 6-10. This book is based on an exhibition organized by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (Holland) and circulated in the United States by the Corning Museum of Glass, Corning Glass Center, 195354 season. This pictological approach to the problem of authenticity is exemplified by an analysis of two Picassos (Mother and Child, 1905; Composition, 1924). The analysis aims to establish by objective observation that these two works are by the same painter. However confident in the value of his method, the author first declares (p. 7) : "An absolutely reliable method for the unmasking of forgeries does not exist—even the best experts can, and do make mistakes."
15. See, in True or False?, p. 41, under the title "Principles of Pictology," a table of the elements whose comparison enables us to tell original works from imitations. It is enough to glance at this table to see that it compares creative artists with poor imitators. When El Greco imitates Tintoretto, or, generally speaking, when an artist tests the manner of another one, the result is more difficult to appreciate. A continuous scale extends from downright fakes to original works influenced by the style and manner of another master. Since art historians sometimes hesitate between a mature Giorgione or a young Titian, intermediate categories should be introduced between authentic works and mere fakes.
16. "Art is not a thought; it is a fact. For the painter, the solution of his problem is in his color box just as it is in his ink bottle for the writer. Do not cultivate your personality; rather, draw closer to the rank and file. Originality is a monstrosity." (Raoul Dufy, in "Raoul Dufy," L'Amour de l'art (Paris), LXXVI—LXXVIII [1953], 48.)
17. Leslie, p. 47.
18. Tabarant, p. 27. — The portrait of Manet's friend Abbe Hurel was framed and given by Mme Manet to the model after the death of her husband. When it was given to Abbe Hurel, this portrait was 811/2 x 72 centimeters; Abbe Hurel reduced to it 47 x 37 centimeters. On this point, artists are as dangerous as art lovers. See above, ch. 2, n. 1.
19. "A constant communion with pictures the tints of which are subdued by time no doubt tends to unfit the eye for the enjoyment of freshness; and Sir George [Beaumont] thought Constable too daring in the modes he adopted to obtain this quality; while Constable saw that Sir George often allowed himself to be deceived by the effects of time, of accident, and by the tricks that are, far oftener than is generally supposed, played by dealers, to give mellowness to pictures; and, in these matters, each was disposed to set the other right." Leslie, pp. 113-14. — Cf. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 83 (June 5, 1711).
20. On these problems, see M. C. Bradley, Jr., The Treatment of Pictures; Unesco, "The Care of Paintings," Museum, III (1950), 2, 3; IV (1951), 1. An excellent introduction is found in Caroline K. Keck, How to Take Care of Your Pictures (Bibliography, p. 54). On picture pathology, elementary information is found in A. P. de Mirimonde, Pour mieux comprendre la peinture, pp. 30-34.
21. See, in Keck (pp. 36-40), the instructions concerning "first aid." Cf. p. 43: "Not every operation or medicine leaves a human being better off than he was before. Doctors and restorers both aim to preserve when they treat and not to destroy." — The destructive character of restoration work finds its explanation in the fact that the source of unity, without which a painting is not, lies in the mind of the artist by whom it has been conceived and by whom alone it can be executed. Speaking of the practice that consists in employing artists to finish pictures left incomplete by their predecessors, Leslie observes (p. 279): "The best painters know that a work of any value can only be carried through by the head and hand of him who planned it, and consequently, those only undertake to complete unfinished pictures who are the least capable of divining the intentions of their authors. Some of Constable's sketches have thus been finished into worthlessness, and what is a still greater injury to his reputation, entire forgeries have been made of his works. Multitudes of these I have seen, and with astonishment that their wretchedness should impose upon purchasers."
22. Jacques Maroger, The Secret Formulas and Techniques of the Masters. The object of the book is clearly defined in the introduction (p. 7). The author expresses a widely spread notion in saying that, for the last two centuries or more, "certain qualities of color and modelling and brilliance of surface which seem to have been the common possession of earlier schools of painting" are now inaccessible to modern artists "with the resources currently at their disposal." This may well be an illusion: who knows what certain modern paintings will look like two centuries from now? Moreover, when a modern painter succeeds in recapturing some of the qualities, not at all of the old masters, but of their works as they now are, he is accused of aping the style of museum pieces.
23. Titian's Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, in the church of the Gesuiti, Venice, has become wholly undecipherable because, in it, all the colors have been eaten up by the bitumens. Yet, in his Titian (pp. 241-42), Victor Basch has devoted two pages to the study of what, when we last visited it at least, exhibited to our eyes little more than the ruins of a painting.
24. A fragment of a frieze painted by Tintoretto in the Scuola di San Rocco, Venice, has accidentally retained its primitive freshness of colors. This enables us to measure the progressive darkening of the great murals done by Tintoretto for the same institution. This phenomenon has been noted and explained by Delacroix in his Journal, p. 238 (July 29, 1854) : "When we copy a Titian or a Rembrandt we believe that we are keeping the same relationship between lights and shadows as the master's, but actually we are piously reproducing the work of time, or rather its ravages. The great artists would be most painfully surprised if they could see the smoke-blackened daubs that the pictures which they originally painted have become. The background of Rubens's Descent from the Cross, for example, must always have had a very dark sky, although one which the artist could imagine when he represented the scene, but it has now become so dark that one cannot distinguish a single detail." — See the similar remark (in Leslie, p. 114) made by John Constable to Sir George Beaumont, who was matching the colors of a small Gaspar Poussin so as to be "sure to be right": " 'But suppose, Sir George,' replied Constable, 'Gaspar could rise from his grave, do you think he would know his own picture in its present state? or if he did, should we not find it difficult to persuade him that somebody had not smeared tar or cart grease over its surface, and then wiped it imperfectly off ?' "
25. Contrariwise to what some seem to believe, the problem is not a new one: "A numerous class of men have risen up in this country [Great Britain], and indeed in all countries where the pictures by old masters are in demand, who, though unable to either draw or paint, assume a knowledge superior to the artists whose province it is to produce tints, and tones of colour of a corresponding quality. It is in vain to tell these men, that 'deep-toned brightness is produced only by repeated glazings, and that these glazings are composed of little more than varnish and transparent colour.' Many deny that such a thing as glazing existed, and consequently in removing what they consider 'dirt and varnish,' they remove every particle of richness of tint. What spirits will not reach, they follow into every crevice with the point of a lancer: until the picture becomes, not fresh and bright as it is termed, but raw and crude in the highest degree; as a judgment on Sir Joshua Reynolds, who had simply deplored the darkening of old paintings, no works have suffered more in this respect than his own, many of which have been cleaned down to the preparation for glazing, and when pointed out as examples of this destructive course, it is impudently asserted that his colours have fled." (Note of the painter John Burnet to Reynolds, Discourses, p. 24.)
26. The present opinion about Millet's Angelus is well enough expressed by Vlaminck, in his Portraits avant deces, where he says (p. 178) that, famous as it is for its subject, "the qualities of this painting are indifferent." But few people know that, in its present condition, this work of art differs from what it used to be before undergoing a severe restoration.
27. "Mme Villot returned in the evening. Perhaps rather imprudently, I said something about regretting the restorations to the pictures in the Louvre; but when I saw how warmly she defended her husband's skill I did not dwell too long on the subject of the large Veronese which that miserable Villot has destroyed by his attentions." (The Journal of Eugene Delacroix, p. 194 [Wednesday, October 12, 1853].) — See the entry, July 29, 1854 (pp. 238-39) : "We are sometimes astonished that nothing remains of the painting of antiquity. We ought, rather, to be surprised at finding a few traces of it in the third-rate scrawls that still decorate walls at Herculaneum. . . . We should be even less surprised at their destruction if we reflected that most of the pictures produced since the Renaissance—that is to say, comparatively recently—are already unrecognizable. . . . Clumsy restorations only finish the work of destruction. Many people imagine that they do a great deal for paintings when they have them restored. . . . Each so-called restoration is an injury far more to be regretted than the ravages of time, for the result is not a restored picture, but a different picture by the hand of the miserable dauber who substitutes himself for the author of the original who has disappeared under his retouching. Restorations to sculpture are less destructive."
28. On this point, perfectly balanced remarks are found in Keck, pp. 52-53: "Some curators feel that except in study rooms the public must not be asked to look at stripped down, time ravaged creations because they are mere ghosts of their original greatness. Others feel that even skillful restorations of a ruined masterpiece to make it whole again will destroy that faint but inspiring quality ever-present in the true original. At best, what a restorer impaints approximates the work of the original artist; it can never duplicate it. But both sides have good arguments. Which procedure is the wisest has not yet been settled, either between the public and curators or among individual owners." —See George Sand's answer (July 27, 1855) to Delacroix's letter of July 19, 1855: "The loggie are only seen with the eyes of faith; everything is in tatters; the stanze are so black that one can see there all that one pleases" (Nouvelle nouvelle revue francaise, I [1953], 573). See a recent article in favor of restoration work by Fernanda Wittgens, "Leonardo's Last Supper Resurrected," Art News Annual, XXIV (1955), 28-52, introduction by Bernard Berenson. One could not possibly disapprove of the heroic effort made to save what little was left of such a masterpiece; the question, however, remains to know what relation there is between the ruin that has been saved and the original work by Leonardo. Compare the copy of the original done c. 1500 by Marco d'Oggiono, pupil and companion of Leonardo, with the present mural. The differences are not only in details of architecture, but also in the relationship between the heads of Christ and St. John, on the one hand, and their background, on the other hand. Besides, in his Lives (II, 161), Vasari assures us that Leonardo had left the head of Christ unfinished (and also that of Judas), and he adds that, in his own time, the picture was becoming undecipherable. —Another simple experience is to compare the description of Mona Lisa given by Vasari (II, 164) with whatever of the original painting is now left in the Louvre. If the description of the colors given by Vasari was correct, what we now see is the portrait of a ghost, or the ghost of a portrait.
29. Delacroix felt sure that the causes of destruction, so manifold since the Renaissance, would still multiply in the future "thanks to the increase in sharp practice and knavery in every branch of the art, whether it be adulteration of the materials that go to make up the colours, oils and varnishes, or substitution by the manufacturers of cotton for hemp in canvases and of poor quality boards for the well-seasoned wood formerly used for panels" (Journal, p. 238 [July 29, 1854]). — Much more optimistic is the point of view of the restorers, at least at first sight, but if we read the conclusions of one of them as carefully as they were written, we shall entertain very few illusions: see Keck, pp. 52-53.
30. On what happened to Greek and medieval sculpture, see Bernard Berenson, Aesthetics and History, pp. 58-59 (refers to Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, p. 235).
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