Michael Maranda
Article
“Facts”
Michael Maranda
originally published in New Literary History 29:3 (1998)
A statement of fact: “James Jarves, a nineteenth century collector,
sold the Madonna with the Pomegranate (Madonna with Child), a painting
by Sandro Botticelli, to the Yale Art Gallery in 1870.”
In this apparently authoritative art historical assertion, I have
made what could be called a factual error. The painting in question was not
painted by Botticelli, and thus the attribution is not credible (at least, not
in the terms of current art historical scholarship). It is quite clearly indicated,
both on the label to be found in the Yale Art Gallery which accompanies this
painting, as well as in the catalogue where this information was most recently
verified (by myself — although if requested I can show you the catalogue
in person), that it is attributed to “an associate of” Botticelli.
[1] An honest mistake? Perhaps. If I contextualize this statement with a slightly
different argument, I can turn this incorrect fact (of attribution) into a credible
“historical fact.” In the process, I wish to ask implicitly what
it could mean to get a fact wrong.
*
* *
Before considering the implications of “getting the facts
wrong,” I want to direct this discussion to interrogating what exactly
is a fact. A good place to begin would be an essay of Carl Becker, aptly
titled “What are Historical Facts?” [2] Becker writes that, perhaps because
“historians feel safe when dealing with the facts … the facts of history
come in the end to seem something solid … like bricks or scantlings,
so that we can easily picture the historian as he stumbles about in the
past, stubbing his toe on the hard facts if he doesn’t watch out” (WH 42).
One wonders if such an image of the fact as a solid object
with which the historian constructs just as solid an essay ever had much
valence. Nevertheless, while the “linguistic turn” in literary studies
affected greatly the scope and tenor of scholarship in that discipline,
it appears that — despite the great promise of the work of Hayden White — the
practice of writing history has not altered in many significant ways. [3]
Perhaps not for all intents, but apparently for all purposes, the “linguistic
turn” in historiograpy has not been that much of a turn at all. The usefulness
of historiographical studies influenced by literary studies is in the understanding
of a rhetoric that, essentially, has remained the same. If this “turn”
has not aided us directly in the writing of history, it has given us tools
with which to read one.
Becker points out that there is never a simple “fact” — ”[t]hat
is to say, [for example] a thousand and one lesser facts went to make up
the one simple fact that Caesar crossed the Rubicon” (WH 44). A “historical
fact” is the condensation of the innumerable “facts” which constitute it — all
not “historical facts” unless they carry the same symbolic weight
as, to retain Becker’s example for now, the “crossing” itself. Becker continues
by noting that “[w]hen we really get down to the hard facts, what the historian
is always dealing with is an affirmation — an affirmation of the fact
that something is true” (WH 47). What enters into the historian’s realm
is not the event of Caesar crossing the Rubicon. What enters is the affirmation
of the truth of the phrase, “Caesar crossed the Rubicon.” In other words,
a historical fact is not what has happened but what is said to have happened.
[4] This affirmation occurs in conjunction with the textual source either
while being written by the historian or read by the reader.
To restrict our discussion to “historical facts” would beg the question
concerning the status of these lesser facts in a historical narrative.
To aid in understanding the nature of these facts, we can go to the work
of Frank Ankersmit and his discussion of historical reality. The core of
Ankersmit’s argument consists of a claim that historians do not “analyze
a previously given historical reality, but define it first. Historical
reality is not a datum but a convention created by the reality effect.”
[5] The “reality effect,” a term coming from Roland Barthes’s semiological
literary analyses, refers to the tension between predictive and notational
aspects of a text; the predictive providing the frame (in the sense of
an internal armature, such as narrative) upon which the notational is draped
(the details that rely upon the frame for significance). Notational details
come in conflict with the predictive structure of the text because of their
apparent irrelevance concerning the narrative. This tension gives these
details the illusion of being the surfacing of the “real” into the text
and thus they serve to signify the very act of signification. In other
words, they say “I am real” and no more. [6] Similar to naturalist painting,
it is the insignificant notational details, which have no meaning separate
from the predictive armature, that give a historical text the illusion
of truth. The illusion of truth in the historical text is, ultimately,
the illusion of the past, or “the reality of the past is an effect caused
by a tension in and between historical texts” (RE 140).
If, as Ankersmit claims, the reality effect is operative
in the historical text, we must determine what sorts of textual markers
play the constitutive parts of the predictive narrative and the notational
details. [7] The predictive structure is the narrative argument that the
historian makes, what might be summarized in an abstract of the text. The
notational details, however, are less obvious.
The disciplinary justification for the condensation which
forms “historical facts” is described by Dale Porter as follows: “If one
accepts the historian’s belief that immersion in documentary evidence is
the best path to knowledge, one can realize that the shorthand [label (for
example, “historical facts” in Becker’s terminology)] refers to masses
of detail that this historian is well aware of, but prefers not to mention.”
[8] The “historical fact,” then, is a symbol of all the (absent) lesser
facts that constitute it. [9] The lesser facts which constitute the “historical
fact,” if we follow along with Porter’s description, are indexical signs
which point to the research that (we assume) the historian has accomplished.
We can call these lesser facts, then, referential facts as they appear
to be pointing outside the historical text (to either primary or secondary
sources).
Becker’s claim that when writing of “historical facts”
we are writing about words (WH 43) can be applied without much difficulty
to referential facts as well — we are still writing about words, and it is
only through the scrupulous transcription of quotations that we can claim
we have gotten the facts right. We prove this by providing our readers
with the proper references, which they can trace themselves, if they so
desire. The introduction of direct references into the historical text
for this purpose, as both Stephen Bann and Partner point out, can be traced
to Gibbon. [10] The result of the acceptance of and subsequent demand for
direct references is the transference of these references into the most
factual part of the text.
Borrowing from the discourse of the philosophy of science,
in particular the work of Bruno Latour, [11] we can call these referential
facts “black boxes”: “The word black[-]box is used by cyberneticians whenever
a piece of machinery or a set of commands is too complex [to describe or
understand]. In its place they draw a little box about which they need
to know nothing but its input and output” (SA 2-3). Latour extends this
metaphor from the self-conscious use by cyberneticians into a general rhetorical
strategy of scientists. The result is a series of implicit footnotes, where
the references to basic ideas — such as the constitution of water — are subsumed
to an implicit agreement within the discipline to accept these shortcuts.
Thus, any fact that grounds a scientist’s argument will be accepted as
“given” and thus as “true” despite the fact that any of these “black boxes”
can be opened up by critics to reveal that the (lesser) facts that construct
them are not necessarily grounded themselves. The more “black boxes” that
scientists utilize, the more difficult it is to dispute their arguments
(WH 80). [12] The effective scientific argument itself aspires to become
the “black boxes” of future scientific work. Translating this sentence
to the present concern — the “historical fact” of one historian becomes a
referential fact in constructing the next historian’s “historical fact.”
* * *
To see the insignificance of these sorts of fact in action, I use an example
from Michael Holly’s Past Looking: “As Theodor Mommsen predicted,
Burckhardt’s studies would still ring true ‘though every sentence in them should
stand in need of correction by advancing research.’” [13] On a literal level,
reading this assertion of Mommsen in an aggressive manner appears to support
Ankersmit’s thesis. On a pragmatic level, reading this assertion as an assertion
of Holly does so as well. Looking to the indicated source of this quotation
that appears to be attributed to Mommsen, however, we find the following words
of James Nichols: “As the years have passed, however, the work of the specialists
[philological contemporaries of Burckhardt who were more concerned about getting
the facts right] has been rendered obsolete by more specialists, whereas Burckhardt
has himself demonstrated Mommsen’s prediction that his works would still be
read and still be true though every sentence in them should stand in need of
correction by advancing research.” [l4] Holly’s use of this statement, which
if Nichols had offered a citation we should be able to trace to Mommsen, is
not in the least lessened by the “true source” of the quotation she uses. It
is the interpretation of Burckhardt, not the fact of who interpreted him in
this manner first, that should be considered relevant.
Nevertheless, in a manner consistent with Holly’s reading
of the metaleptic rhetoric of Burckhardt, we can ask whether Mommsen could
be considered as the originary source of this statement. Specifically,
we can look to Burckhardt himself to find him claiming, with regards to
Machiavelli’s Storie Fiorentine, that “[w]e might find something
to say against every line …, and yet the great and unique value of
the whole would remain unaffected.” [l5]
While quoting Burckhardt in this manner might seem to
be guilty of the classical argument to authority fallacy, Latour notes
that this fallacy is, in a certain sense, the very (pragmatic) basis of
any scholarly discipline when speaking of such facts (SA 31-32). [l6] The
very repetition of this statement (whether claiming to quote Mommsen directly
or not) in a multitude of sources is its own proof. I could have used the
following quotation from Ankersmit in its place: “We tend to regard a text
consisting of true but irrelevant statements as ‘less true’ than a relevant
text which contain some factual errors” (RE 136). As a “historical fact”
(the “unreliability” of Burckhardt, on the effectiveness of an argument
despite factual unreliability), the marshaling of these facts (the quotations
and references that I have given) are useful only insofar as they make
the necessity of my arguing this point less pressing. They give my argument
authority by presenting my reader with a series of “black boxes” that are
also, conveniently, “present-able.” What is even more convenient is that
I have no responsibility to present them other than in this literary fashion.
[l7]
The claim I am making is that the notational details that
are implicated in the reality effect in historical writing are not, as
in literary works, descriptive details such as the barometer in Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary. [18] Instead, they are the referential facts that
are used to ground the “historical facts.” These references, while pointing
to texts outside the present one, only do so through a subterfuge of false
referentiality — it is as if the presence of a reference is used as a self-justification
for the statement to which it is tied.
I might have misquoted one of the sources in my Burckhardt
example, or perhaps my use of them is even a misrepresentation of the argument
that could be found in the source. I might have, that is, gotten one of
these facts wrong. Readers could return to these sources, and dispute me
on the level of facts. As soon as they offer their own reading of any of
these references, however, they are opening up the black box of “historical
facts,” at which point not only is the relevance of my misrepresenting
the source severely restricted, but the very act of disputing my argument
will also serve to legitimate my account as being worthy of recognition
(as the next paragraph will discuss). The considered (and intentional)
misrepresentation of sources (in moderation) might very well be one of
the most useful tools that critical historians have at their discretion.
Used indiscriminately, however, it can lead to an attribution of the entire
argument to an unreliable narrator. Note that it is not one mistaken fact
that puts the account at risk but many such mistakes — the status of the
singular fact is not so relevant as the general impression of incompetence
that a plethora of such “errors” would give. A rejection of this sort would
be as likely to occur (if not more so) if the text being considered were
rife with orthographic and grammatical mistakes.
Fortunately, the significance of a historical account
is not a series of facts. The facts that are used in a historical account
must be arrayed in a narrative which is “something more” than a series
of sentences. Ankersmit calls this “something more” narrative substance.
[19] This narrative substance draws in and coheres a group of facts together,
implicating them within a whole. More properly, it is the drawing in and
cohering of a group of facts that is the narrative substance — in other words,
interpretation; the modalizing and contextualizing of the facts. The relationship,
or, more properly, the nonrelationship of facts to interpretations, is
quite clear. “Facts only (dis)prove statements about the past. Only interpretations
can (dis)prove interpretations.” [20] Through this quotation we can see
that the ability to defend or reject facts will not have much direct relevance
for the manner in which a historical narrative discusses and elucidates
the past. This ability is not irrelevant, but neither is it particularly
significant.
If this explains where the tension of the reality effect
exists within a singular historical text, it does not address the tension
that Ankersmit claims exists between historical texts. Where this tension
between texts might lie is suggested in his “Six Theses on Narrativist
Philosophy of History.” In one of his theses he again brings up this notion
of the space between historical texts in claiming that “[h]istorical insight
… is only born in the space between rival interpretations and
cannot be identified with any specific (set of) interpretations” (41).
Historical insight, then, is being attributed here to the discipline and
not to the individual text. Extending the implications of this quotation,
we could even claim that a singular historical text cannot be understood
as a history! It is only at the point when (at least) two conflicting accounts
of the same historical event, epoch, era, or period are given can we even
begin to speak of a historical argument. If there were merely one account
available, there is no basis from which to dispute the narrative (nor the
“facts” contained therein), and thus there would be no historical insight
offered.
Such a possibility of a singular historical account not
being a history might seem to be absurd unless we understand that every
historical text carries within it a metacommentary concerning the nature
of the historical project. Imbedded within any scholarly composition is
a critical framework that enables the very possibility of the project.
This framework consists of assumptions concerning how a particular discipline
functions and what truths it can legitimate at the same time that it is,
if only implicitly, an argument for a particular approach toward that discipline.
This argument can take the form of an overt polemic that challenges or
defends the status quo or it can be submerged beneath the surface of what
might be considered “art history in practice.” This is the basis from which
James Elkins argues against the (mistaken) interpretation of “traditional”
art histories as being somehow devoid of theoretical concerns. [21] It
would be difficult to argue the contrary unless one assumes that there
is an ahistorical a priori “History” to which all historians unconsciously
aspire in their writing — in which case my argument would be bankrupt and
a singular historical text, sans metacommentary, could indeed contain
“historical insight.” Considering the existence of this metacommentary
in all historical texts, however, it is possible to see how this interaction
between (at least) two historical texts can (and must) occur no matter
how disparate the “objects” of study.
To see if there really is such a thing as a disciplinary
reality effect functioning in art historical discourse, I would like to
return to the concrete example with which I began this essay, namely the
Madonna with the Pomegranate (Madonna with Child). In “Botticelli
Recovered,” Frank Kermode describes how, in the early nineteenth century,
the work of Botticelli was reevaluated by painters, collectors, amateurs,
and dealers from a lesser painter of little note into a major figure of
the fifteenth century. [22] According to Kermode, Botticelli was used to
construct a legitimate lineage to ground contemporaneous (for example,
nineteenth-century) practices opposed to academic art, which, of course,
were all based on more “classical” Renaissance artists. In the process
of this (contingent) reevaluation, many of the works of his “school” were
misattributed to the “master” himself and thus, ironically, his resurrection
was enacted on what are now considered, for the most part, fakes and misattributed
paintings.
James Jarves, the collector, was apparently of the class
of amateurs who were invested in this turn toward what were, at the time,
nonclassical artists of the early Renaissance. [23] In the 1860s it would
be highly likely that this particular painting would have been thought
of as an “original” Botticelli. Jarves most likely purchased what he thought,
[24] and what accepted authorities of the time thought, [25] was a Botticelli
and sold it in this spirit. My attributing this painting, in light of the
protestations of the current collection handbook and label to the contrary,
might very well be a factual error. On the other hand, my “historical fact,”
that Jarves sold a “Botticelli,” is not. I am not making a claim based
upon who painted the panel, but rather on what name the panel is given.
Whether this painting was indeed painted by Botticelli or not is particularly
irrelevant as — as counterintuitive as this may sound — his actually painting
it is insufficient to make it a “Botticelli.” To give it his name requires
the affirmation of a proper authority, and I hardly qualify on that level.
As such, this (unknowable) fact has no bearing upon the name which it carries.
The actual facts that I served up in the previous two
paragraphs, the facts that I can “get wrong,” are indicated by the references
themselves. In making reference to Jarves’s public beliefs concerning this
panel, I was making a statement of fact — a statement that includes within
it an internal caveat through the indication of the source. The fact is
that a claim was made on the status of this painting, and the existence
of this claim can be verified.
Concerning the Botticelli panel itself, however, we are
faced with another level of referential objects — those that are usually
assumed to be the facts, of which I intend to show are really the “facts,”
of an art historical work. In stating that any reference to this panel
directs the viewer to previous textual references, I am sure that a literalist
reading of this narrative would counter that, despite (or perhaps as a
result of the textual web of references, there is still the material object,
the Madonna with the Pomegranate (Madonna with Child) to which all
these references ultimately return. In response to this accusation I would
admit that indeed there is such a panel, one that, after all, I myself
have seen and even surreptitiously touched (when the conservator who was
showing it to me turned his head)! I have no doubt that the panel currently
on display at the Yale University Art Gallery consists, for the most part,
of the same material substance as the one that Jarves sold in 1870, that
Mignaty of Florence (a painter and close friend of Jarves’s), probably
overpainted some time in the 1850s, [26] that Hammond Smith of New York
restored in 1915 (EI xxv, 128), that Charles Durham of the Fogg Museum
cradled in 1930 (EI xxv, 128), that Andrew Petryn of the Yale Art Gallery
cleaned and in the process removed the work of the previous three in 1952,
[27] and that, ultimately, I touched in 1994. I am going to argue, however,
that all these references do not return us to this panel. Rather,
as I now intend to argue, they lead us to it in a complete reversal
of the causal chain.
Its existence as a panel, as a painting, and indeed as
a material object is a hard fact to deny. It would not even be possible
to apply Joan Scott’s argument against the “experiential fallacy” to deny
its existence. [28] And yet, on at least two levels, I can deny it.
First, as the list of actions performed on this painting
indicates, the object has not remained constant. In each case, there have
been additions and subtractions from the surfaces of the panel — most notably
in the tempera and varnish which, if this work is significant, it is significant
for. Its value is not based on the wood that it is painted on! To follow
through on this question would require engaging the question of when an
object ceases to be that object. If I replace the leg on a table, is it
the same table? If I then replace the other three legs, is it still the
same table, and finally, if I then replace the top to the table, is it
the same table? This question lends itself, without too much alteration,
to a consideration of the practices of conservation — a consideration that
is beyond the scope of this essay.
Second, and more relevant to the argument at hand, “it”
(the panel) exists not despite but as a direct result of the textual web
of references which appear to refer to it. [29] The attribution similarly
shifted throughout this period, from an “original,” [30] to the work of
“an apprentice,” [31] to a “pupil of,” [32] to a “follower of,” [33] to
the “school of,” [34] to the work of the “studio of,” [35] to a “close
follower of” (EI 128), and even to the slightly awkward suggestion, after
the restoration of 1952 (which, incidentally, Seymour mistakenly dates
to 1954 [EI 128]), that “it is … possible that in it the hand of the
pupil merges with that of the master” (RI 35), and finally, as already
mentioned, in the most recent handbook of the collection as an “associate
of” Sandro Botticelli. Is this, or is this not, the same panel? Each of
these attributions has very different implications for the status of this
particular, supposedly constant, panel.
For rhetorical purposes we should focus on the most radical
shift in its attribution — from an original Botticelli to an apprentice.
Obviously, when William Rankin (the first to publish specific doubts concerning
the veracity of the Botticellian attribution) claimed in 1895 that it is
not an original Botticelli, he was not claiming that until his review of
the panel it was a Botticelli, and ceased being so at his discretion. In
fact (but not in “fact”) this is exactly what happened. His claim that
it was the work of a “poor apprentice” (SE 148) is a “historical fact,”
not a fact. It is not self-evident who painted this panel — there is nothing
to present to the viewer other than the painting itself and without a reasoned
argument as to why it should or should not be accepted as an authentic
Botticelli it will remain a mute object. To state the obvious, if it were
self-evident, there would have been no need for the continuous reattribution
of the panel.
Nevertheless, it seems obvious to Rankin that this “second-rate”
panel, ipso facto, could not be by the hand of Botticelli (SE 147). His
judgment is not in any way altered by the amount of overpainting that this
collection received at the hand of Mignaty, as Rankin is not adverse to
pointing out the cases where the overpainting rendered a painting unidentifiable — although,
more often than not, overpainting appears to indicate to him that the panel
was originally made by an “imitator” rather than a “master.”
One exception to this demotion of severely overpainted
panels in the Jarves collection is more indicative of where the authority
of Rankin’s adjudications come from: “Ascribed to Giorgione is a small
‘Circumcision’ (no. 77), in which there is probably not a square millimeter
of the original color remaining. It strongly recalls the Louvre ‘Holy Family’
attributed to Giorgione … but is abler in composition, and was perhaps
once a Giorgione” (SE 150). If it is not already (logically) apparent,
we can see here more clearly that the case for attribution cannot rest
on an immanent reading of a singular work for the same reasons that an
isolated text cannot constitute a historical argument. An attribution can
only come through comparison with other works which, for the moment, are
accepted as unproblematic.
All references (not only Rankin’s) which presume to refer
directly to the Botticellian or Giorgionesque panels do so only obliquely,
working through already established textual descriptions of what would
constitute a painting as an original Botticelli or Giorgione. The demotion
by Rankin of the Madonna with the Pomegranate (Madonna with Child)
to the work of an apprentice is based upon previous literary (for lack
of a better word) descriptions of what counts as a Botticelli — previous
descriptions that are not referenced in this particular text, but we must
assume that Rankin is familiar with the literature of attribution. This
is merely another case where the reader is asked to accept the “masses
of detail that this historian is well aware of, but prefers not to mention”
(EP 7).
Should we delve into the presumed authority of Giorgione’s Holy
Family at the Louvre, we would see that that too rests upon other attributions
based on Giorgione’s “style” and so on. This process is not at all stable,
on a hermeneutic level, for should it transpire that the Holy Family
be itself not a Giorgione [36] this would not in any way put into doubt
Rankin’s estimation of the Circumcision, as the relevant comparison
is to textual descriptions of the work. Tracing the web far enough, it
will eventually be seen that there can be constructed a basic textual description
of a Giorgione which is fairly stable, no matter which panels are
accepted as being authentically “his.”
To complicate this scenario more, in looking for a confirmation
of this attribution to the Holy Family, one can find that in 1905 its attribution
was far from clear. Although the Louvre maintained that it was a Giorgione,
Mary Knight Potter states that “a pretty general opinion exists that it
is not [Giorgione’s].” [37]
In light of this, we could express doubt in Rankin’s familiarity
with the literature of attribution. Although the Potter was published ten
years after Rankin’s article, as a guidebook for the general public, one
should assume that her ascription is based upon prevailing opinions of
the previous decades. For example, at around this time, Paul Konody and
Maurice Brockwell ascribe it to Cariani. [38] One could put Rankin’s, Potter’s,
and/or Konody and Brockwell’s competence with regard to the existing literature
in question. Nevertheless, to ask who, in this case, is right is to miss
the point. As with many of the assertions being made in this essay, these
facts are not as important as the illusion that an article gives of its
author’s competence.
Describing the process of naming thusly is to inscribe
within this argument concerns about the very status of names. It would
be useful, then, to return to the example of the reconsideration of Botticelli
in the nineteenth century, but to look at it through Saul Kripke’s analysis
of naming practices. [39] In doing so, I have to clarify one very important
point. When Kripke analyzes the proper name, he assumes that the name “Nixon”
(his example) refers to a specific individual (Nixon) and not to a socially
constructed representation that is, only contingently anchored to a specific
being (“Nixon” just happening to be correlated to Nixon). In contrast,
within the discipline of art history, the name Botticelli does not refer
to a specific individual of flesh and blood but, rather, to a body of work
that is attributed to a literary figure — the author-effect of Foucault or
implied author of reception theory. [40] In other words, because the disciplinary
definition of what constitutes a Botticelli panel precedes the art historian
who looks at his work, the description of a Botticelli leads to the painter,
and not the reverse. As what we are interested in is this literary figure,
it would make more sense to utilize Kripke’s analysis of species names
and not proper names. Although the example of a species name which Kripke
uses is gold, I will be substituting “Botticelli” where appropriate.
The reevaluation of Botticelli in the nineteenth century
should be considered as the source of our contemporary, canonized Botticelli — the
origin of the name as we understand it, then, is in the nineteenth century.
A description of a particular, unique, and valued painting style was used
in the construction of the referent “Botticelli,” but the description is
not interchangeable with the name. To schematize this process, we should
imagine a scene with some of these early nineteenth-century proponents
of Botticelli (including, more than likely, Pater) pointing to a body of
work, and saying, “[Botticelli] is the substance instantiated by the items
over there, or at any rate, by almost all of them” (NN 135). [41] The assumption
of this scene is that the group of works attributed to Botticelli were,
somehow, of the “same kind.” The need for a precise definition of what
made them such was not necessary in the creation of the idea of Botticelli.
“To the extent that the notion ‘same kind’ is vague, so is the original
notion of [Botticelli]” (NN 136). What works were then considered part
of this corpus was contingent and yet, in a very literal as well as the
more technical senses, a priori. [42] That all these works were not to
be found in a single collection, this pointing to the work was accomplished
through a condensation of the corpus into a general textual description.
Once the description establishes a fixed reference (Botticelli the painter),
the particulars of that description (the various works themselves) are
no longer necessary (again, in both the literal and technical sense). The
textual definition, on the other hand, is analytic and thus necessary — but
not a priori. [43] With this description, “[m]any who have seen little
or no [Botticellis] can still use the term [properly]. Their reference
is determined by a causal (historical) chain, not by [seeing any specific
panels]” (NN 139). [44]
At this point in Kripke’s analysis, however, the difference
between gold and Botticelli becomes apparent. Kripke points out that after
the category “gold” is established, “[s]cientific investigation generally
discovers characteristics of gold which are far better than the original
set” (NN 138). For gold, this would be its atomic structure, number 79
on the periodic table. With Botticelli, however, it is the original description
correlated with “his” name that is used to purge that very corpus of some
(according to Horne, most) [45] of the work that was constitutive of that
very description. Rankin’s demotion of this panel, for instance, is based
upon the “fact” that “Botticelli never did such hard outlines or such feeble
hands” (SE 148). The name “Botticelli” comes retroactively to constitute
that to which it only appeared to refer (BM 210). The content of
this name is not, then, representational of what a Botticelli panel should
be — it performatively establishes what can be accepted as a Botticelli a
posteriori (SO 99).
Zizek writes the following in his psychoanalytic revision
of Kripke’s account: “ [I] t is the element which represents the agency
of the signifier within the field of the signified…. [I]ts role is purely
structural, its nature is purely performative — its signification coincides
with its own act of enunciation; in short, it is a ‘signifier without a
signified’” (SO 99). [46]
If this description sounds somewhat familiar, it should.
It is a restating of the role of the notational detail, the reference which
refers to signification. The names of the art historical text are the notational
details, and the insignificant aspect of any reference (to either a primary
or secondary source) is a reference to a name. That the name is insignificant
is also indicated in Jacques Ranciére’s description of the general
structure of the historical text — and its relation to the content which
fills that structure: “[T]he materials are nothing without the architecture….
What we avoid considering is simply this: history is, in the final analysis,
susceptible to only one type of architecture, always the same one — a series
of events happens to such and such a subject…. We are [inevitably] confronted
by the leap into the void, against which no auxiliary discipline’s rigors
offer a guarantee: we must name subjects.” [47]
The implication of Ranciére’s analysis is that
what is always interchangeable is the main “subject” of a historical narrative.
Whether our historian is dealing with historical persons, objects, or events,
the predictive structure remains the same — at its most basic, something
happened. The base narrative supersedes the naming of the subjects involved.
To whom (or what) it happened is irrelevant as far as this basic structural
claim of the discipline is concerned. The naming of a subject does not
bring that subject into being, and so we can take Ranciére’s structure
of history and the previous analysis of names and conclude that in the
historical text that which is not significant is which names are used.
* * *
In order not to mislead my reader into thinking that this unstable process
of attribution is in any way alleviated by contemporary attribution studies
under the influence of much more technologically complicated apparatus,
we need only look again at the “Rembrandt Project” — one of the more celebrated
projects of contemporary connoisseurship. As steeped as this project is
in scientific analysis, it still requires an authoritative countersignature
to perform the attribution. [48] Svetlana Alpers has written that “ [i]t
is clear within the volumes [of the Rembrandt project] themselves …
scientific or technological means … assist, but do not replace, connoisseurship
or the judgment of the trained eye.” [49] Seen in this light, it appears
that the situation has not changed much, aside from a need for more instrumental
supports to make the claim being made appear reasonable. [50] Ultimately,
there has to be a voice that speaks, a voice authorized through the acknowledgment
of being associated with an “eye,” and names the work under consideration.
In the final instance (which is never really final) the call comes down
to a performative “act of connoisseurship.” Contrary to the standard cliché,
saying does seem to make it so.
Admittedly, this argument so far has concentrated on the
level of attribution and, as surely as the situation when a historical
project is limited to the stringing together of facts, if the art historical
discipline is limited merely to attribution studies, its relevance for
cultural history (or, indeed, history) would certainly be suspect. The
implications of this process, however, reach over and beyond the mere act
of attribution. If we think of attribution as the action of identifying
an object, this process would also include the more generally useful project
of identifying the age, the period, the style, and the provenance of a
work. Naming the work is merely a special case of the necessary step of
knowing what one is writing on — as basic to the discipline as the ability
to cite texts properly. It also is the basic strategy for distancing the
object, of placing it into the past, as what is effectively of concern
is not the “present state” of the object but its (fictional) original state.
This “original state” is thought to be extrapolated from the material of
the archive.
* * *
This description is not to discount the rather important factor in the
methodology of attribution, the implicit (although at times overtly explicit)
valuation of the work under consideration. The estimation of the Madonna
with the Pomegranate (Madonna with Child) by Rankin is an example of
a rather explicit case. The attribution of a work for the purposes of the
study of a historic era, on the other hand, must by necessity value a work
implicitly — is this work “relevant” for the period under discussion, will
it advance my argument? If the answer to both of these questions is yes,
it becomes a “significant” work. The main example that I have been using,
the Botticelli panel, is extremely useful for my argument, and thus I am
valuing it as a significant work for the purposes at hand. Its very insignificance
for “art history,” as the work of an unknown associate of Botticelli, makes
it that much more relevant and significant for my purposes. Similarly,
to use a rather tortured description, Rankin’s Giorgione’s Holy Family
became useful for my line of argument, and thus I valued it as an exemplary
attribution. As valuation plays such a role in all attributions (either
as primary sources or as objects of study) then Kermode’s analysis, which
focuses on the relation of the canon (as structure) to art historical writing
and thus on valuation in general, can play a significant role in my argument.
I want, then, to quote Kermode who is quoting Gombrich
who is quoting Warburg, who, through this labyrinth of quotations, notes
that “what is made of [historic artifacts] … depends upon the subjective
make-up of the late-born rather than on the objective character of the
classical heritage” (BR 26). The implication of Kermode’s analysis is that
ultimately even the most archivally based argument is based upon present
concerns … a matter of “opinion.” What is found (or not found) in the
archive is not so much the “truth” of the panel but the historical legitimacy
for it, its attribution, and its significance.
Kermode describes the relation between the work and its
subsequent criticism in the following manner: “The success of interpretive
argument as a means of conferring or endorsing value is, accordingly, not
to be measured by the survival of the comment but by the survival of its
object. Of course, an interpretation or evaluation may live on in the tradition
on which later comment is formed, either by acceptance or reaction; but
its primary purpose is to provide the medium in which its object survives”
(BR 67). He seems to view the role of criticism as regaining (or activating)
the relevance of significant works of art. The flow is from work to text
in order to get back to the work in the final instance. This flow of significance
might be likened to some form of alchemy, whereby the base material of
wood, pigment, damar varnish, and egg white (in the particular case of
the Botticelli panel) is alternately made into gold (as a “Botticelli”)
or lead (as an “associate of Botticelli”) — suggesting that, perhaps, my
substitution of Botticelli for gold in the Kripke quotations above was
not such an arbitrary decision. [51]
While Kermode’s quotation seems in agreement with the argument
I am attempting to make, a closer look illustrates otherwise. “[A]n interpretation[’s]
or evaluation[’s] … primary purpose is to provide the medium in
which its object survives.” What seems most significant in this phrase is the
role that a canon-defending argument is granted. On the surface, Kermode appears
to give to the object primacy, yet at a deeper level he suggests a fragility
of the work of art so described. What a canon defending argument does is the
necessary work to naturalize the “master-work” at the same time that it creates
it through naming it. The work as such, as a manifestation of the object that
is more properly its medium, has to disappear in order to reappear as an effect
of the text.
In this manner, the art work appears located both in the
“past” and in the present. It is in the past by virtue of its material
existence; for example, it was made before the now. It is in the present
as an object that must promise the possibility of being presented. This
present-ness of the art object, however, ultimately is caught in the rhetoric
of the historical explanation. That is, its present-ness is as a
historical object. The undertaking of art history places any work (even
a contemporary work) in the past.
To look at the Madonna with the Pomegranate (Madonna
with Child) as an exemplary archival object, by which I mean all primary
sources — the names of the hermetic text — we see that they only gain
significance through their reference in referenced texts. It is in those
cases where they have been “black boxed” most proficiently that they masquerade
most effectively as facts (whereas they are truly “facts”). [52] When a
painting is used in the furtherance of other arguments (as opposed to being
the focal point of an argument), its status must be unproblematically established
either through referencing other, authoritative works (such as with the
case of Giorgione’s Holy Family above) or through a digression that
usually takes place within the footnotes of the text. [53] Its own contested
status cannot be acknowledged as such a concession would throw the validity
of the main argument into doubt in a manner related to, but not identical
with, the risk of being caught with erroneous facts.
On the level of the discipline, what occurs is a rather
strange affair, whereby the further the referenced object is from the argument,
the more apparent authority the referential act carries with it. It is
in the externally directed (and displaced) facts (and I am not sure in
this case whether /facts/ should be in scare quotes or not) that external
artifacts become notational themselves. In the discipline as a whole, then
(Ankersmit’s “between historical texts”), present (and, one might add,
presentable) artifacts (and not just their names) could be considered as
the notational details, insignificant without the predictive framework
of the discipline. It is the alternately necessary present-ness of the
archival material — necessary for the discipline to exist as a whole — in the
face of the simultaneous distancing of this same material within the predictive
narratives of individual texts which is the source of the tension which
real-izes the discipline. Perhaps the most effective example I have given
of the tension between the distancing and presenting of an object can be
seen in Rankin’s qualified attribution of the Giorgione which “was perhaps
once” an authentic work which now no longer apparently “exists.”
My use of Botticelli’s Madonna with the Pomegranate
(Madonna with Child) does not present the reader with that specific
panel — and any included reproductions are merely attempts to hide the absence
of the panel. At best, any form of reference to the panel will refer the
reader to the other textual sources which also reference it. In conjunction
with understanding “historical facts” as consisting of (affirmative) statements
which are themselves dependent upon other historical interpretations, we
can see how it is that this initial nonreferentiality is shifted from the
name to the objects themselves while retaining the emptiness of the referential
act. My “historical fact” that Jarves sold a Botticelli is not, in the
end, wrong — he did indeed sell a Botticelli. That the Botticelli that he
sold no longer exists (for reasons directly opposed to the reasons that
the Giorgione no longer exists) does not in any way deflect this “historical
fact.”
* * *
Surely the reader will realize that the status of this once-existing
panel and its relation to the presently existing panel at Yale was merely
a foil for a much broader issue — the issue of what it is that an art historian
does. The strategy of the historian is to find in the “objects” of the
“past” precedents that are useful for arguing for a specific view of the
present. These objects are brought to the present only by being presented
as evidence. In order for the rhetoric to be effective, however, these
precedents have to remain as part of the past. To illustrate them as contemporary
constructions would be to degrade their usefulness. What Norman Bryson
describes as the “super-Hirschean indignation” (AC 77) of art historians
in the face of postcontemporaneous readings of works of art could be considered
as symptomatic of a dis-ease in the presence of works of art. The attempt
to “explain” conclusively works of art would be, then, an attempt to control
them. The implication of this indignation is that “significance” is thought
of being fixed at the time of execution of the work. “Significance” could
be understood as an additional ingredient in the varnish that makes up
the finish — another alchemical formulation. This placing of significance
at the time of execution might help to explain the tremendous amount of
anxiety that the restoration of such canon-fodder as Michelangelo’s Sistine
Chapel or Leonardo’s Last Supper can occasion — the fear being
that the “significance” of the work will be stripped along with one of
the layers of discolored, and therefore ironically no longer transparent,
varnish. [54]
A discourse that purports to deal with an artifact engages,
more often than not, previous exegetical accounts of the work rather than
the works themselves. To return to an idea from the beginning of this essay,
as Michael Baxandall has noted, the history of art history is ultimately
the history of writings about art — art which only is presumed to remain
the same object throughout its history.
The combined effect is that historians, or critics, cannot
speak of any work that they might find in front of them presently. It must
be distanced by its placement in the museum, the archive, or the library —
all of which denote the storage of artifacts no longer current. As such,
as notational in the rhetorical strategy of writing history and thus “insignificant”
by virtue of its place within the rhetoric, an existent work of art poses
a threat to the argument as presented by the historian. Part and parcel
of the notion of canonical works is that they are not exhausted by any
one — or any series — of interpretations. As Kermode puts it, “[i]nterpretations
may be regarded not as modern increments, but rather as discoveries of
original meanings hitherto hidden” (BR 75). It would be hard to prove this
wealth, if not excess, of significance of which the work is considered
capable but, in light of the number and history of interpretations of “canonical”
works, it might be even more difficult to disprove this potential. Like
Burckhardt’s Renaissance, it appears to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The source of these significances, however, is not necessarily the work
itself, although the object is offered as (unproblematic) source. The continued
existence of the work as a presence, then, is a threat to any reading of
it that claims any sort of authority. The reception of a work, the possible
readings after the fact, might be to a certain extent limited by a “master-reading,”
but the materiality of the work — unaffected aside from certain extenuating
circumstances to be discussed — may return to contradict the reading offered.
In this sense it could become embarrassingly unruly to the point of countering
the textual arguments made “on its behalf.”
* * *
As a preliminary conclusion for this essay, I should offer some sort
of simplified graph of the role that the “fact” (and by now I will use
this term to refer to all those empty references that the historian can
use, references to absent texts, absent documents, absent objects) plays
in the writing of history.
If we think of the art historian working in the library
or the archive, we would see her working on material objects of various
sorts — objects photographs, illustrations, as well as archival documents
and facsimiles those things usually called “primary sources.” We would
also see her working with other sorts of material objects — although these
are less often considered as material objects — the secondary sources of
existing books, articles, photographs, and illustrations. In other words,
at this point she is conducting research. If we have tracked her progress,
we would see that she began in the present and worked her way backwards
through time, attempting to access farther and farther into the past of
her subject while leaving its present state.
During the course of this process, we would also see her
conducting a rather strange ritual — transcribing notes, phrases, descriptions
onto index cards. This process, seemingly innocuous, is the process of
creating the referential facts from which she will later weave her narrative.
[55] At a certain point (and here I must confess that I am idealizing the
activity somewhat), having reached her destination in the archive, she
returns the books and objects to their rightful place in the archive or
library, gathers her note cards, and returns to her study.
She began in the present, researching backwards, and now
in writing she writes from the most distant toward the present where she
began — thus “prescribing for beginnings what is in reality a point of arrival”
(86). These index cards are now the raw material with which she works.
She orders these cards, links them together with the help of conjunctions
and some narrative substance, and produces a text which contains the content
of these index cards as newly fashioned referential facts and “historical
facts” which might later be recycled as referential facts for future historians.
As referential facts, they now have a life and meaning of their own, separate
from the material objects which we might think of as their source. The
significance of these facts is made in the text, not in the objects themselves.
The story might have ended here, but this historian’s
text is published and it is taken up into the preexisting discourse concerning
her subject. In the reception of this text by other historians, these referential
facts meet up with other referential facts which appear to be similar in
content (for instance, Madonna with the Pomegranate (Madonna with Child)).
At this point, these referential facts meet up with the material object
to which this name refers. This panel, for whatever reason, is thought
significant. The significance of this panel, however, comes from the discourse
that surrounds it. It might receive more attention, it might even be submitted
to the attention of a conservator and thus be directly affected, or it
might become the centerpiece of a blockbuster exhibition. None of this
is a result of the significance of the panel itself, however, as any significance
it might be granted comes from the discourse which props it up. [56]
* * *
It is vital to assert one clarification in this formulation. As I have
already indicated, for illustrations of my argument I have used for the
most part those forms of art history which are most susceptible to these
strategies — specifically attribution studies. I have already noted that
the act of attribution is not limited to straightforward exercises in connoisseurship,
and that the same action of distance occurs (if not more forcefully) in
what we might think of as traditional art history (which we might typify
as monographs which purport to deal exclusively with the “objects” of art
history in past contexts).
In recent years, art history has undergone its own form
of the “linguistic turn” in the formation of what has come to be called
the “new art history” [57] and, even more recently, a trend towards (for
lack of a better phrase) a “newer art history” — of which one of the best
indicators is the proliferation of graduate programs with various permutations
of visual studies and cultural studies as names. [58] If the “linguistic
turn” in historiography can only be pinpointed as having occurred in the
years between the establishment of the journals History and Theory
and New Literary History, [59] its parallel in art history can be
also only described as happening over a range of time. Beginning with the
Winter 1982 issue of The Art Journal and, more importantly, echoed
in an editorial in The Art Bulletin in March of 1986, the discipline
announced to itself that it was in crisis. [60] The influence of this announcement
might have been negligible (self-proclaimed crises are usually easily solved)
if it had not been followed by a continuing series of self-referential
essays in The Art Bulletin. [61] This development was probably also
aided and influenced by the institutionalization of poststructuralist-friendly
criticism in contemporary art since the late 1970s as exemplified by the
journal October, [62] and the “invasion” of the subject of art history
by literary theorists in search of new material in the early to mid 1980s.
[63]
It might be thought by some of the participants of these
new and newer art histories that the subterfuges hidden in the use of “historical
facts” may have been superseded by the self-reflexivity that they practice.
To look at Kermode’s Forms of Attention as an example in seeing
if the applicability of my analysis extends to such self-referential projects,
I am led to the inevitable conclusion that — as far as the use of “facts”
goes — nothing much has changed. This claim is not a condemnation of either
traditional or more recent, theory-informed practices. It is merely to
face the inevitability that even a text wishing to illustrate the construction
of history needs to utilize the same strategies of more traditional historical
accounts. Examples of constructions of the “past” from past historical
texts are inevitably placed within “past” historical contexts. In their
present-ing they are distanced. At the same time that Kermode is describing
what equates to an opportunism (if unconscious) on the part of the nineteenth-century
supporters of Botticelli, he cannot question too closely his own opportunism
in using the recovery of Botticelli to help illuminate debates about the
role of the canon in 1985. His placing of Botticelli firrnly in the canon
is based upon the “merits” of these panels as masterworks, as being worthy
of consideration. He does not consider the possibility that his own valuation
of Botticelli (or Shakespeare, the other example he uses) as worthwhile
might be only because they are useful in defending the legitimacy of a
certain history of art based upon the logic of the canon. His argument
is performed as a defense of the notion of canon in the face of the admission
of the contingent construction of that notion. To extend this argument
even closer to home, neither can I question too closely my use of Kermode
in making an argument about the contradictions of writing history.
University of Rochester
* * *
ENDNOTES
1 Yale University Art Gallery, Handbook of the Collections (New
Haven, 1992), p. 135.
2 Carl L. Becker, “What are Historical Facts?” in Detachment and
the Writing of History: Essays and Letters of Carl L. Becker, ed. Phil
L. Snyder (Ithaca, 1958), pp. 41-64; hereafter cited in text as WH.
3 See Nancy F. Partner, “Historicity in the Age of Reality-Fictions,”
in A New Philosophy of History (Chicago, 1995), pp. 21-39. See esp.
pp. 21-22.
4 Similarly, Michael Baxandall’s claim that art historians “do not explain
pictures: [they] explain remarks about pictures,” can be read to say that
art historians do not study art, they study art history. To make my intentions
as clear as possible, I ask that this last sentence be read in the strictest
possible sense (Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical
Explanation of Pictures [New Haven, 1985], p. 1) .
5 Frank Ankersmit, “The Reality Effect in the Writing of History: The
Dynamics of Historiographical Topology,” in History and Tropology: The
Rise and Fall of Metaphor (Berkeley, 1994), p. 145; hereafter cited
in text as RE.
6 Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in French Literary Theory
Today: A Reader, ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Cambridge, 1982), p. 17.
7 Barthes, it is true, does use an example of a historical text of Michelet’s;
however, he treats this text purely as a literary artifact. While considering
a historical text as anything other than a literary artifact would be wrong,
I am working under the assumption that to treat it as only a literary artifact
would be a mistake. My argument, as well as my discipline, is predicted
on there being a difference between “pure” fiction and history, no matter
how constructed history turns out to be.
8 Dale H. Porter, The Emergence of the Past: A Theory of Historical
Explanation (Chicago, 1981), p. 7; hereafter cited in text as EP.
9 Becker does refer to the historical fact as a symbol. Whether we are
to take his usage as being identical with the present usage is moot. See
Becker, “What are Historical Facts?” p.44.
10 Stephen Bann, “Analysing the Discourse of History,” in The Inventions
of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past (Manchester, 1990),
pp. 33-63, esp. p. 38, and Partner, “Historicity in the Age of Reality-Fictions,”
p. 24.
11 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and
Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1987); hereafter cited
in text as SA.
12 Although Latour’s argument is directed toward the “hard” sciences,
his discussion of the rhetoric of the scientific fact is easily translated
to the discourse of history,
13 Michael Holly, Past Looking (Ithaca, 1996), p. 48.
14 James Nichols, “Introduction,” in Jacob Burckhardt, Force and
Freedom: Reflections on History (New York, 1943), p. 54.
15 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy,
An Essay, tr. S. G. C. Middlemore (London, 1960), p. 53. For Holly’s
analysis of Burckhardt, see her “Burckhardt and the Ideology of the Past,”
History of the Human Sciences, 1, no. 1 (1988), 47-74 and “Cultural
History as a Work of Art: Jacob Burckhardt and Henry Adams,” Style,
22, no. 2 (1988), 209-18.
16 Admittedly, Latour is speaking of science, but the argument is easily
expanded, as I indicate in my discussion above.
17 That is, I doubt that anyone would seriously take me up on my previous
offer of showing the Yale catalogue to them personally.
18 Barthes’s main example in “The Reality Effect.”
19 He uses this term as a logical entity, one that cannot necessarily
be distilled out into test tubes, but which names a function that can be
found in the structure of the text much like the reality effect itself
(Frank Ankersmit, “Historical Representation,” in History and Tropology,
pp. 97-124, esp. p. 113).
20 Frank Ankersmit, “Six Theses on Narrativist Philosophy of History,”
in History and Tropology, p. 38; hereafter cited in text.
21 James Elkins, “Art History without Theory,” Critical Inquiry,
14 (1988), 354-78. This argument is a more nuanced version of Baxandall’s
claim in n. 4 above. For a more materialist (in the literal sense) account,
see Keith Moxey’s description of the relationship of art historians and
“their” library shelves as used in the introduction to his investigation
of the ideological underpinnings of (the canon of) art history (Keith Moxey,
“Motivating History,” The Art Bulletin, 77, no. 4 [1995], 392-401).
22 Frank Kermode, “Botticelli Recovered,” in his Forms of Attention
(Chicago, 1985), pp. 3-31; hereafter cited in text as BR.
23 See Francis Steegmuller, The Two Lives of James Jackson Jarves
(New Haven, 1951).
24 See, for instance, the attribution of plate 30 (Madonna with the
Pomegranate) as a Botticelli in James Jarves, Art Studies: The ‘Old
Masters’ of Italy: Painting (New York, 1861), and Steegmuller, The
Two Lives of James Jackson Jarves, p. 173.
25 For an example, see Russell Sturgis, Jr., Manual of the Jarves
Collection in Early Italian Pictures, deposited in the Gallery of the Yale
School of the Fine Arts (New Haven, 1868). That Sturgis was obviously
commissioned to write this manual, and thus his “intentions” could be suspect,
does not discount his “status” as “authority.” That he was chosen to be
commissioned in the first place is indicative of his authority. That Berenson’s,
indeed Vasari’s, intentions in attributions are suspect does not discount
the very real effect that their writings have had on the discipline.
26 Charles Seymour, Jr., Early Italian Paintings in the Yale University
Art Gallery (New Haven, 1970), p. xxiv; hereafter cited in text as
EI.
27 Yale University Art Gallery, Rediscovered Italian Paintings: An
Exhibition, March 25 through May 18, 1952, of fourteen recently cleaned
paintings from the Jarves Collection (New Haven, 1952), pp. 10-11;
hereafter cited in text as RI.
28 Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry,
17 (1991), 773-97.
29 I am working under the assumption that illustrations, such as to
be found in any of the texts I am referencing, are part of the textual
web. The importance of the captions, which anchor these illustrations to
a particular interpretation (a more accurate term than attribution) of
the work thus referenced, cannot be downplayed. The caption can be considered
to work in a similar manner to the argument concerning photographic captions
in Roland Barthes, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image-Music-Text
(New York, 1977). After all, these illustrations are (for the most
part) photographs of the work itself.
30 Jarves, Art Studies, p. 130; Sturgis, Manual of the Jarves
Collection of Early Italian Pictures, p.68.
31 William Rankin, “Some Early Italian Pictures in the Jarves Collection
of the Yale School of Fine Arts at New Haven,” American Journal of Archaeology,
10, no. 2 (1895), 137-51, esp. 148; hereafter cited in text as SE.
32 Osvald Siren, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Pictures in the Jarves
Collection belonging to Yale University (New Haven, 1916), p. 135.
33 Richard Offner, Italian Primitives at Yale University (New
Haven, 1927), p.6.
34 H. P. Horne, Alessandro Filipepi, commonly called Sandro Botticelli,
Painter of Florence (London, 1908), p. 118, and Raymond van Marle,
The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting (The Hague, 1931),
pp.238-39.
35 Bernard Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A List
of Principal Artists and their Works with an Index of Places (Oxford,
1953), p. 104.
36 For what it is worth, present art historical research suggests it
and the Yale panel are not the work of Giorgione. The Louvre Holy Family
is thought to be a Sebastiano del Piombo (Laurence Gowing, Paintings
in the Louvre [New York, 1987], p. 219), while the Yale Circumcision
is attributed, with some reservation, to Titian (Seymour, Early Italian
Paintings, p. 275).
37 Mary Knight Potter, The Art of the Louvre: Containing a Brief
History of the Palace and of its Collection of Paintings, as well as Descriptions
and Criticisms of Many of the Principle Pictures and Their Artists
(Boston, 1905), p. 94.
38 Paul G. Konody and Maurice W. Brockwell, The Louvre: 50 Plates
in Colour, ed. T. Leman Hare (New York, nd. [ca. 1900]), p. 68.
39 Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, Mass., 1980);
hereafter cited in text as NN.
40 On the author-effect, see Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in
Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-structuralist Criticism,
ed. J. Harari (London, 1980). On implied author, see Genette who suggests
that the term is redundant in that all authors are only implied (Gerard
Genette, “Implied Author, Implied Reader,” in Narrative Discourse Revisited
[Ithaca, 1988]).
41 I am, of course, not suggesting that such a scene ever transpired — merely
that this is the logic of the naming process. I am also not suggesting
that the work of Botticelli was completely unknown before his popularization,
but it makes the scene easier to visualize if we bar Vasari and others
at the door.
42 See Kripke’s first chapter on this seemingly contradictory combination
(Kripke, Naming and Necessity, pp. 22-70).
43 With regard to the textual definition, these two terms (“a priori”
and “necessary”) should only be read in the technical sense.
44 The insertion of “properly” into this scheme is owed to Judith Butler’s
analysis of Slavoj Zizek’s analysis of Kripke. See Judith Butler, Bodies
that Matter (New York, 1993), esp. ch. 7, “Arguing with the Real,”
pp. 187-222, and p. 217 in particular; hereafter cited in text as BM. Her
analysis is of ch. 3, “Che Vuoi?” in Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object
of Ideology (London, 1989), pp. 87-130; hereafter cited in text as
SO.
45 See Horne, Alessandro Filipepi, p. 118.
46 Admittedly, Zizek is writing on the use of names in political ideologies.
I do not think it a stretch to consider the “names” of art history being
any less ideologically motivated. His analysis leads toward the Lacanian
notion of the truth-effect, which could be considered another name for
the effect of the reality effect.
47 Jacques Ranciere, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge,
tr. Hassan Melehey (Minneapolis, 1994), p. 2.
48 It would be useful to think of this process of attribution as an
example of the countersignature as described in Jacques Derrida, “Signature,
Event, Context,” in his Margins of Philosophy, tr. Alan Bass (Chicago,
1982), pp. 307-30.
49 Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market
(Chicago, 1988), p. 125.
50 See Latour, Science in Action, ch. 2, “Laboratories,” esp.
pp. 79-94.
51 Using the work of Michael Taussig as a model, I would rather that
this reference not be taken as only a metaphor. See esp. his Mimesis
and Alterity (New York, 1993).
52 The whole tenor of this argument should strike familiar with the
reader familiar with Norman Bryson and Jonathan Culler’s discussions of
context. See Norman Bryson, “Art in Context,” in Studies in Historical
Change, ed Ralph Cohen (Charlottesville, 1992), pp. 1842, and Jonathan
Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and its Institutions (Norman,
Okla., 1988).
53 Note 36 could be considered an example of this very practice.
54 Michael Holly has suggested to me that perhaps one should think of
history writing as the final layer of varnish.
55 “In history, everything begins with the gesture of setting aside,
of putting together, of transforming certain classified objects into documents.
This new cultural distribution is the first task. In reality it consists
in producing such documents by dint of copying, transcribing, or photographing
these objects, simultaneously changing their locus and their status. This
gesture consists in ‘isolating a body as in physics and ‘denaturing’ things
in order to turn them into parts which will fill the lacunae inside an
a priori totality. It forms the collection of ‘documents…. Far from accepting
‘data,’ this gesture forms them” (Michael de Certeau, The Writing of
History [New York, 1988], pp.72-73; hereafter cited in text).
56 This formulation echoes Jacques Derrida, “The Parergon,” in The
Truth in Painting, tr. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago, 1987),
pp.15-148.
57 For examples of the “new art history,” I refer the reader to the
collection of articles that goes by that name, The New Art History,
ed. A. L. Rees and Frances Borzello (London, 1986).
58 And I hope that I have the proper ironical tone in the text at this
point, considering the program that I am presently affiliated with. This
essay, and my educational history, is an example of this shift to these
“newer art histories.” For discussions concerning this shift to “visual
studies,” I refer the reader to October, 77 (1996).
59 See Richard T. Vann, “Turning Linguistic,” in A New Philosophy
of History, ed. Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner (Chicago, 1995), pp.
40-69. See esp. pp. 56-61.
60 “The Crisis in the Discipline,” Art Journal, 49, no. 4 (1982),
guest editor Henri Zerner; and Richard E. Spear, “From the Editor,” The
Art Bulletin, 68, no. 1 (1986), 6. This is not to suggest that Zerner
and Spear are uniquely to be blamed (or lauded) for the instigation of
this crisis, but with the Art Journal and The Art Bulletin
playing the roles of “the voice” of the discipline in the United States,
the announcement of this crisis in these journals is particularly significant
for the development of the discipline.
61 An informal survey of graduate students identified with “visual studies”
shows that these series of articles are often the only essays read in The
Art Bulletin. This probably is significant. The series include the
“State of the Art,” the “Views and Overviews,” and the “Range of Critical
Perspectives” essays. Initiated under the editorship of Richard E. Spear,
the “State of the Art” articles can be found in issues 68, no. 1 (1986);
68, no. 4 (1986); 69, nos. 1 - (1987); and 70, nos. 1-2 (1988). The “Views
and Overviews” articles, under the editorship of Walter Cahn, can be found
in issues 71, no. 4 (1989); 72, no. 4 (1990); and 73, no. 2 (1991). The
editorship of Richard Brilliant offers nothing comparable to these collections,
although he does offer a consistent editorial voice — the only structural
problem is that his is the only voice offered. As editor, Nancy J. Troy
instituted the “Range of Critical Perspectives,” which are found in each
issue since 74, no. 3 (1992).
62 In many ways October merely took the place that was held by
Artforum in the 1970s. The difference between the two is the shift
from being primarily image driven (or, more correctly, artwork driven)
to being theory driven and textually based. As far as I know, Artforum
has never had an issue not published in color, whereas October has
never published in color.
63 The most visible of these “poachers,” who then became absorbed by
the discipline, being Norman Bryson, with his Vision and Painting
(New Haven, 1983), and Mieke Bal, with her Reading Rembrandt (Cambridge,
1991). I would also, however, consider that Frank Kermode’s Forms of
Attention is another example of a literary theorist who appropriated
an art historical project the nineteenth-century recovery of Botticelli
to his own purposes. Although he has not been “absorbed” into the discipline
as Bryson and Bal have, this text can be assumed as an art historical one
(an assumption that I have already made in my use of him as a primary and
secondary source).