Every day, thousands of tourists throng the Vatican Museums, its wonders to enjoy. They pour into the ancient sculpture collection in the Belvedere Palace, cell cameras at the ready, and make their way to the Hellenistic statue of Laocoön, who presides over the sea of screens while his neighbor, the Classical effigy of Apollo, languishes lonely nearby. But 200 years earlier, in that same space, Apollo drew public adulation while Laocoön writhed in vain for attention.
What makes the popularity of a work of art wax and wane is one of the most intriguing questions in the history of aesthetic preferences, and Rochelle Gurstein’s book, Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of Classic in Art, offers a fascinating exploration of a field that may appear as academically restrained as the Apollo, but, in reality, is a Hellenistic tale of revolutionaries and reactionaries as well as spirituality and solipsism.
Written in Water takes readers through currents of the history of artistic taste that are intertwined with a complexity rivaling that of Venice’s canals, yet Gurstein’s expert navigation of the theme offers new perspectives on how styles ebb and flow, how artists rise and fall from favor, and how viewers’ aesthetic appetites were swayed over the past four centuries.
The adventure opens with an anecdote of an Englishman and a Yankee commenting on the renowned Medici Venus in Florence. Where the former is effusive in his adulation of the statue, the latter dismisses it as a “stone gal.” Whereas the anecdote was once meant to mock the crass American approach to art appreciation, throughout the book Gurstein reveals that one era’s masterpiece might be another’s “stone gal.” The compelling forces at work that determine these transformations are slowly unfurled as Gurstein sails through the history of art criticism from sixteenth-century Giorgio Vasari to twentieth-century Harold Rosenberg. Written in Water is like a net thrown into the deep, pulling up a rich catch of myriad species. Gliding away from the narrow straits of our modern culture wars, the reader is invited to see the “here and now” as part of a much larger historical arc.
Start your day with Public Discourse
Sign up and get our daily essays sent straight to your inbox.Gurstein embarked upon this book project ten years ago in an attempt to define the “classic” in art, something “that transcends its time and place and speaks to us as if it were made for us.” The journey, however, was fraught with shoals as she discovered how many artists and artistic styles had been elevated to the highest pedestals before plunging into the oubliettes of history. Once the coxswain of the Renaissance regatta, Raphael inspired the high art of the early Baroque and then eased into the leader of the Neo-Classical. Even into the twentieth century Heinrich Wölfflin and Bernard Berenson ensured that Raphael remained at the top of the “must-see” list of every Italian tour; yet today, few can name even one of his masterpieces in the Vatican Museums.
Much the same occurs between the reception of Greek sculpture and Roman, the appreciation of drawing skill over virtuosity with color, and the raging Romantics breaking against the dam of the Academics. These tidal shifts, however, are triggered by external factors from geopolitical events to the disproportionate influence of a single critic.
The evocative title, Written in Water, was inspired by the epitaph on the tombstone of John Keats in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery. Dictated by the twenty-five-year-old poet on his deathbed, it reads, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” a mournful reflection on the ephemeral appreciation of his work (he was wrong). Gurstein’s 438-page text demonstrates that while time may erode an artist’s fame, it also has been known to regurgitate a name from the deep.
The highlights of the journey are in the people and places that the author presents along the way. Her extraordinary research leaves few coves unexplored: her excursus into the discovery, purchase, and reception of the Elgin marbles is both eye-opening and thought-provoking, as is her dispassionate analysis of the effect of Napoleon’s looting of Italian institutions to fill his Musée Napoléon (The Louvre) on the aesthetic criteria of the following decades.
Along the way, the author reveals the source of many modern tropes in art. Thus the reader encounters Joshua Reynolds and his “sublime” versus “ideal,” which is still the staple of art historical studies today, and learns the remarkable story of Benjamin Robert Haydon, “apostle and martyr of history painting” (1786-1846). The narrative of this painter’s rise and fall, befriended by many of the most famous names of his age—Goethe, Wordsworth, Keats—is not only documented through numerous articles but also through one of the first anglophone memoirs of an artist. His frank, raw, proud, and passionate writings articulated an image of artists that would return in living color in the person of Vincent Van Gogh, suffering “the agony of ungratified ambition.”
One of the more intriguing sections of the book begins as aesthetic debates shift from the salons and academies into the halls of religious revivals. The reader is introduced to Alexis-François Rio, author of Poetry of Christian Art, translated into English in 1854, who ironically laid the cornerstone of our present understanding of the High Renaissance as a fundamentally secular art movement. While entranced by the mystical scenes of thirteenth and fourteenth-century painters, Rio saw Michelangelo’s and Masaccio’s introduction of Classical Antiquity into the Renaissance canon as a sign of “paganism.” Gurstein drives home that this represented “a stunning devaluation of the moment of the rebirth of arts . . . of everything that had been encompassed by the Classical ideal.”
Here, Gurstein claims that before Rio, no one had ever “questioned the moral propriety of using contemporaries in paintings of apostles or saints” or the inclusion of the profane into the sacred, an assertion that provoked my lone quibble with the book. This type of question was addressed by post-Reformation Catholic writers such as Gabriele Paleotti, whose Discourses on Sacred and Profane Images was devoted to such concerns. Gurstein puts a dazzling amount of thought into what nineteenth-century critics thought of Catholicism in art, but a voice or two from the Catholic Church, patron of many of these works, would have been interesting.
The long-term effects of Rio’s thesis play out in the modern assumption that Raphael’s School of Athens is more representative of its age than is his Disputation, or that Michelangelo’s ceiling was animated by solely worldly considerations. Rio opened the door to a distrust of beauty, in which, in the words of Pope Benedict XVI, “the message of beauty is thrown into complete doubt by the power of falsehood, seduction, violence and evil. Can the beautiful be genuine, or, in the end, is it only an illusion?”
The final blow to the Classical tradition comes in the chapter entitled “Art as a Substitute for Religion” and the thought of Walter Pater, a name well-known to art historians. Pater is the father of the “art for art’s sake” school of appreciation, and the belief that the value of a work is its ability to transport or “move” the viewer. It is the dawn of subjective art criticism, what Pater will call the “aesthetic critic,” whose sole concern is “the pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar kind” produced by “all works of art and fairer forms of life and nature.” Here are the seedlings of the present era, which relishes the sensuality of art, most famously in Charles Saatchi’s 1997 exhibition “Sensations” that introduced the Young British Artists and created a standard of contemporary art to provoke primal responses such as “shock, vomiting, confusion, panic, euphoria and anxiety.” The nineteenth century taught people to be “deeply moved” by art; the twentieth century added the element of outrage.
The still surface of the paintings and sculptures docked in museums or harbored behind ticket booths and turnstiles runs quite deep indeed.
Some readers will be surprised by the minimal mention of the Impressionists, but Gurstein subsumes them into the bigger battle between line vs color already in progress during the epoch of Ingres versus Delacroix. As the author is quick to point out, this is not a history of art, but a record of “an inner history of the practice of art and inner experience” as lived by the people of the age, in their own words. It challenges our modern prism that relates art, artists, and styles according to our present-day moral, political, or economic criteria, and focuses attention on the primordial swamp whence they first emerged. It is a formidable piece of reading, especially in our ahistorical age, but the reward is the revelation of how many forgotten characters of the past have shaped our ideas in the present.
Gurstein’s chapters on the postmodern era increasingly confront the reader with the changing nature of the classic, but in them, Gurstein crystalizes her thesis. The eras that respected the practice of art—how it is made, what standards it should meet, what it is compared to, what it draws on—allowed for an authoritative standard of taste. The practice of art protected painting, sculpture, and poetry from relativism, as it connected both artist and audience to an “intellectual continuum” so that they could “confidently judge works of art.”
The book closes with a plea to “imaginatively enter the competing standpoints of these many artists and writers . . . not to bow to relativism, but to share in the plurality of their humanity.” This approach would remove the glib, superficial engagement we so often see as people consume art today, and though it requires more effort and attention, would allow the art, artists, and their society to “come alive.” The still surface of the paintings and sculptures docked in museums or harbored behind ticket booths and turnstiles runs quite deep indeed.
Written in Water spans a vast and dense period of the history of art that certainly doesn’t make it a light introduction to art appreciation. It would better serve as the subject of a book club, where the plurality of readers could shed light on the different currents. What this book really cries out for, however, is a course, in which students of art, history, literature, philosophy, and theology could pool their knowledge to plumb the depths of the author’s scholarship.
Image by Andrey Khusnutdinov and licensed via Adobe Stock.