Form,' Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and The Problem of Art Historical Description.

"Form," Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art Historical Description
Author(s): David Summers

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Winter, 1989), pp. 372-406
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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"Form," Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics,

and the Problem of Art Historical Description
David Summers
It has seemed to me for some time that a discussion should be begun

concerning the descriptive language of the history of art. The transformation of works into words is of crucial importance and in a certain
sense everything follows from the way it-is done. Some of the language
about works of art is unproblematical because agreement is fairly easily
reached on certain issues. We may easily agree that a painting is a mural,
or a book illumination (even if these things have to be defined), or that
a person or group of persons is depicted. Iconography provides fairly
definite procedures by means of which conventional subject matter may
be restored and deciphered. But things become more difficult when we
approach what is called "form." At this point the history and criticism
of art clearly seem to veer off into their own realm and also into more
difficult problems of description and interpretation. These difficult problems cannot simply be avoided since it is on the "formal" level that we
usually talk about both expression and style in art. The technique of
formal analysis, which grew up with the discipline of art history, seemed
to provide a sturdy bridge between what we see and what we say, a secure
metalanguage applicable to any art whatever. Formal analysis is, however,
open to very serious criticisms, as we shall see. It is also intimately related
to nineteenth-century idealist metaphysics and thus to kinds of historical
inference and generalization running the gamut from quaint to dangerous.
It is no wonder that formal analysis, although it survives as a professional
technique, is used with less and less certainty about its systematic implications, and with a greater and greater sense of its distance from central
CriticalInquiry 15 (Winter 1989)
? 1989 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/89/1502-0008$01.00.
All rights reserved.
372
Critical Inquiry
Winter 1989
373
art historical problems. At the same time, formal analysis remains the
way in which "the work of art itself" is talked about, and if it is simply
abandoned, then the history of art is placed in the paradoxical position
of being unable to speak in significant ways about the objects of its
peculiar concern, which is not even to mention the problems of fashioning
histories of these objects. An art historian's art historian disavows the
speculations of the "methodologians" and prides himself or herself on
going about what needs to be done in the way demanded by the matter
at hand. It is not possible to avoid methodological questions, however,
when they begin to touch the most basic procedural and pedagogical
matters. Moreover, it is precisely because of the specific character of its
own theoretical past that the history of art now finds itself in a situation
in which the discussion of works of art "themselves" is a problem. It is
that problem I will begin to address in this essay. I wish briefly to examine
the notions "form" and "formal analysis," to consider the relation of
these notions to more general issues of idealism and materialism, and to
raise the question of how kinds of description might be devised that
sidestep old alternatives but still make it possible to talk about art as
distinct from other human endeavors in a historically significant way. I
will not, of course, in a single study succeed in completely overhauling
ideas that so thoroughly permeate the conceptual and institutional structure
of the history of art. Still I believe all these problems and questions must
begin to be addressed before it will be possible to consider higher problems
of art historical interpretation or the further, perhaps more elegant problems of the ways in which art historical interpretation relates to interpretation in fields not immediately concerned with saying what we see.
I shall begin with what Michael Podro calls "interpretative vision."'
This is the art theoretical version of the broadly Kantian notion that
consciousness constitutes its world. It is an idea absolutely central to the
modern intellectual discipline of the history of art. According to this idea,
which is now so familiar as to seem truistic (or axiomatic) in many fields
in the humanities, the artist is not just a recorder of appearances but a
shaper and interpreter of them. Heinrich W61fflin begins his Principles
of Art History with the story of four painters who set out to paint exactly
the same thing just as it was and came up with four quite different
1. MichaelPodro, TheCriticalHistoriansof Art (New Haven, Conn., 1982), p. 61.
David Summers is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of the History

of Art at the University of Virginia. The author of Michelangelo
and the
Art
The
and
Sense:
Renaissance
Naturalism
(1981)
Languageof
Judgmentof
and theRiseof Aesthetics
(1987), he is currentlywriting a book to be titled
TheDefectof Distance:Towarda UniversalHistoryof Art.
374
David Summers
Art Historical Description
pictures.2 Two conclusions, one negative, the other positive, may be

drawn from this anecdote. The negative conclusion is that objective vision
is impossible; but the positive one-drawn at length by Wolfflin himself
in the book that follows-is that the nonmimetic component of art,
evident in the very disparity among the paintings, pointed toward another
dimension of reality altogether. "Form," as this nonmimetic component
came to be called, rather than being incidental or superfluous, is essential;
it is the expression of spirit, and, as such, it is also an expression of the
essential freedom of the human spirit, opposed to nature, which is a
realm of resistance and necessity. By the analysis of form in art, the
argument runs, it is possible to investigate the structures of the human
spirit itself. It is possible not just to see the individual character of a
painter even in the drawing of a mere nostril, as W61fflin wrote, it is also
possible to see and characterize "thestyle of the school, the country,the race"
(P, p. 6). Shared nonmimetic features of works of art may be explained
in terms of individual or collective "spirit," which accounts not only for
individual differences but for differences (and similarities) among the
"styles" of periods, nations, and races. In this idealist matrix, "form" thus
took on a vastly important modern connotation; it became the essence
of art, supplanting imitation once and for all. At the same time form
also became essential in a new way to the artist/viewer, whose spirit it
reflected or expressed. It should be evident that Wolfflin's familiar device
of comparing treatments of the same theme from different periods inserted
these assumptions into the technical basis of art historical teaching and
writing.
The notion of interpretative vision might have been carried a step
further to include the critic or historian, the analogy being that just as
the painter interprets what is seen and reveals his or her own spirit in
the forms in which what is seen is expressed, so the historian has a point
of view in the expression of which psychology, ideology, or general culture
and historical predicament are to be discerned. But the complexities of
such a hermeneutic position seem to have been almost entirely ignored
or avoided by art historians, who confidently and even "scientifically" set
about the task of defining the new territory of form. The scientific cast
of this enterprise was very much reinforced by traditional philosophical
meanings of form and by the ancient taxonomic connotations of the idea,
which blended easily with the diachrony of taxonomy, that is, with the
idea of evolution. Taken altogether, form came to provide access to the
"development of spirit," and the notion of form provided the basis for
historical narrative of a sublime grandeur.
An important and deeply transformative consequence of the great
generality of the idea of form was the unprecedented breadth and reach
2. Heinrich W61fflin, Principles of Art History: The Problemof the Developmentof Style in
Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York, n.d.), p. 1; hereafter abbreviated P.
CriticalInquiry
Winter 1989
375
it gave to the idea of art. Form came to be regarded as the universal

common denominator of human things, "fine" and "minor" arts alike,
and the idea of form thus made it possible for the history of art to become
a kind of universal cultural history. It was largely under such auspices
that the history of art came into existence and currency as an intellectual
discipline. The new understanding of the traditional idea of formopposed now not so much to matter as to nature-also gave new meaning
and vastly greater potency to the idea of style (which had always referred
to what was artificial rather than natural about imitative art), and style
became basic to the history of art in a way it could not have been before.
In sum, the newly grasped dimension of "form" in art provided the basis
for "formalist" art history, a term now used somewhat imprecisely to
cover all art history written as if art had a distinct and independent
history, as I shall discuss below in more detail. Consistent with this general
enterprise, the idea of form also fundamentally altered the description
of works of art and finally stands behind current pedagogical practices
of formal analysis, practices that continue even though their intellectual
ancestry may have been forgotten. As Podro points out, even so discerning
a critic as Goethe still described Leonardo's Last Supper mostly in terms
of narrative and verisimilitude. Late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury authors, however, discovered "a way of showing non-literal order
in which the depicted figures of the composition could be reconstituted."3
A modern author may write about the Last Supperin terms of the character
of its symmetry, speak of the figure of Christ as a diamond or triangle,
or of horizontality and axiality, and be understood to be writing not only
about what is legitimately in the work of art but also about what is most
important about it. According to the ideas we are considering, "form" is
the indicator of differences in the interpretation of subject matter, or
nature, and it follows that form is thus not only the means by which
artists (and styles) interpret the historical and natural worlds. It also
follows that form must be the agent through which this interpretation
is expressed. Interpretative vision thus implies a theory of expression.
It also implies a theory of abstraction since form as such may be isolated.
Because form is also expressive and is in a sense primary significance,
subject matter in such a view tends to be superfluous. The rise of abstraction
goes hand in hand with the problem of the relation of "form"and "content"
(the latter of which came to be associated at once with the natural and
the conventional) that has plagued modern criticism. How do the meanings
of form square with manifest subject matter? This problem entails familiar
alternatives: that form is more important than content, or vice versa, or
that there is a unity of form and content, or should be one.
3. Podro, The CriticalHistorians of Art, p. 62. See also Leo Steinberg, "Other Criteria,"
Art (New York, 1972), pp. 64-66. Steinberg
with Twentieth-Century
OtherCriteria:Confrontations
provides a brief but insightful history of formalist criticism beginning with Baudelaire.
376
David Summers
It will be useful to consider briefly how the ideas surrounding "form"

work in practice. Such ideas rapidly developed to a high stage of sophistication, subtlety, and complexity, but they did not, I believe, stray
from the foundations I have tried to indicate for them. Let us consider
the example of Wilhelm Worringer, who, like Alois Riegl, found it preferable to discuss ornament rather than images because ornament is a
purer expression of form and therefore provides a less encumbered view
into form's spiritual meaning. Concerning interlace ornament of the first
millennium in Northern Europe, Worringer wrote that it is "impossible
to mistake the restless life contained in this tangle of lines"; it is "the
decisive formula for the whole medieval North." The "need for empathy
of this inharmonious people" requires the "uncanny pathos which attaches
to the animation of the inorganic"; the "inner disharmony and unclarity
of these peoples ... could have borne no clearer fruit."4 Here formsmostly lines and edges and their relations-are compared to a natural
outgrowth, a fruit, and are interpreted in such a way as to permit the
characterization of all peoples among whom artifacts with such forms
were made and used. The range of formal style becomes coextensive
with the range of the deep principles of the worldview of races, nations,
and epochs.
It is not necessary to follow the ideas of form and expression to
quite the hypertrophied consequences Worringer did, although many
authors have done so and many more have done so less systematically.
The important thing for my purposes is the pattern of inference from
form to historical statement and conclusion.
In general, "form" has a simple meaning, something like "shape,"
and then a higher meaning, something like "essence."In older philosophical
language it made perfect sense to talk about "intelligible form," which
was invisible. The idea underlying this old usage seems to be that "form"
as shape is the means by which things are distinguished and thereby
begin to be understood (they are named on the basis of this prior discrimination, for example), and that because form provides access to the
intelligible, it is in fact fundamentally related to that about things which
is intelligible. Form in this second, higher sense is by definition more or
less abstract and general, and, because it is abstract and general, it is
associated with the spiritual (or mental or intellectual). This ambivalent
notion of form, combining a visual metaphor with a definition of the
intelligible as nonvisual, provided justification for long traditions of both
allegory and idealization. "Form," in the post-Kantian sense in which we
use it, is still "higher" than sensation; it has also become more specifically
"visual," rooted not in sensation but in the determinable structures by
means of which "sense" is made of visual sensation, the properly aesthetic
4. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstractionand Empathy:A Contributionto the Psychologyof Style,
trans. Michael Bullock (Cleveland and New York, 1967), p. 77.
Critical Inquiry
Winter 1989
377
structures of perception standing between sensation and thought. This

higher meaning of "visual" was given great authority and currency by
Gestalt psychology. On such a view perception (or the higher "vision"
that unifies simple optical sensation) is a principle awaiting sensation,
becoming actual along with sensation. It is very important, however, that
this new visual "form" retained its association with the higher and with
the general. The general cannot be specific, and that is why when we do
the formal analysis of, say, a Raphael Madonna, the painted surface
becomes a plane, and in general we abstract from three dimensions to
two, from centers of gravity to verticals, from horizons to horizontals,
simplifying as we go; as we do that we presumably approach what is
essentially "visual" about the painting. But the particularity of the formal
relationships in the work thus abstracted never comes close to the simple
particularity of the work itself, many of whose obvious features have
been left aside or suppressed in analysis. Space has been eliminated or
reduced to relations of overlapping; light is eliminated together with all
modeling, except insofar as it can be seen to make shapes. In short, we
ignore at the outset many features and qualities possessed by the painting
and shared with other works of art; more simply still, we ignore what
we may just see before us, a faintly smiling woman seated on the ground,
looking over two children, palpable but distant in a space of considered
clarity, in even and peaceful light, painted in earth and primary colors.
And this is not even to mention the stretched canvas on which the image
is painted, the pigments used, the preparation and sequence of execution,
the facture and finish, all of which have more or less complex and significant
histories, histories leading up to the making of Raphael's painting and
leading away from it, to the survival and career of use of the painting.
These are all things that we see, even if they are not "visual" in a higher
"formal" sense.
The opposition between form and content strongly implies that
whatever can be said in a fairly straightforward sense not to be subject
matter must belong in the realm of form and, as form, must be left to
the free prerogative of the individual artist (or to definition by the larger
stylistic "spirits" with which that freedom is concentric, form expressing
not just the spirit of the artist but the "spirit of the age"). Given the
opposition of form and content implicit in the general idea of form, we
might call a strong formalist position one governed by the assumption
that form in some sense is itself a kind of content, and a weak formalist
position one in which form is simply the vehicle of content. As might be
expected, art historians tend to be strong formalists to the degree that
they are not simply concerned with the chronology of events relating to
works of art. Political historians (and historians who are not art historians
in general) tend to be weak formalists insofar as they concern themselves
with art, since they regard it as illustration of events irrespective of the
significance or historicity of the ways in which these events are represented.
378
David Summers
Against the backdrop of the opposition of form and content, the ideal
of the unity of form and content also provides familiar alternatives.
Iconographers might argue that meaning has priority in works of art
because form serves meaning, and there is a corresponding position that
meaning must be given form. Sometimes efforts are made to combine
these possibilities, as when generalizations about the formal styles of
periods or places are worked into other kinds of history, or, more commonly, when the works of an artist are worked into his or her biography.
At this point I would like to introduce some more general questions
of interpretation that will be seen to be closely related to the idea that
art is essentiallyformal in nature. Rosalind Krauss has characterized what
might be called usual interpretation as based on the "notion that there
is a work, x, behind which there stands a group of meanings, a, b, or c,
which the hermeneutic task of the critic unpacks, reveals, by breaking
through, peeling back the literal surface of the work."5 In such a view
the understanding of how images mean underlying usual interpretation
is very much like the traditional notion of allegory. In fact the metaphorical
language of "surfaces" and "rinds" is the same language of integumentum
and involucrum used to explain allegory in the late Middle Ages, when
allegory provided a major justification for the blandishments of poetry
(and painting). Poetry, as the formula went, is truth (or at least higher
meaning) set out in a fair and fitting garment of fiction. The lies of the
poet lead us by an appeal to sense to meaning higher than the appeal
itself. Botticelli's Primavera really sets forth the realm of the Natural
Venus,6 and if that is not what it sets forth, it shows something like that,
some idea of a similar level of abstractness, unity, and simplicity in comparison to the complexity of the surfaces and appearances of the painting.
The demonstration of such significance at the heart of works of art is
never easy, and the example chosen, Botticelli's Primavera, has provoked
a series of scholarly interpretations. These interpretations do not differ
in the relation assumed to hold between the painting and its own meaning,
however. This explanation of higher, unitary meaning is very deeply
lodged in our expectations (and explanations) of images, and has been
for a long time. A Renaissance portrait was thought to show not just
someone's appearance but the soul through the appearance, and a similar
opposition of higher and lower was also argued to hold for emblems, in
which the image was the "body," the text the "soul."7 Allegory, like
naturalism itself, may be said to depend on a kind of transparency of
5. Rosalind E. Krauss, "Poststructuralism and the Paraliterary," The Originalityof the
Avant-Gardeand OtherModernistMyths (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), p. 293; my emphasis.
6. See Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in WesternArt (New York and
Evanston, Ill., 1969), pp. 188-200.
7. E. H. Gombrich, "IconesSymbolicae:Philosophies of Symbolism and their Bearing
on Art," SymbolicImages: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, II (London, 1972), pp. 12391.
Critical Inquiry
Winter 1989
379
means in the simple sense that, as the metaphorical language of usual

interpretation implies, it is possible to "see through" the surfaces of the
work to its meaning. To be sure, there were (and are) different degrees
of allegory, differing precisely in point of difficulty. Some allegories were
(and are) meant to be easily penetrable, others to demand a "sweet labor"
before understanding is attained, still others to be impenetrable and
therefore exclusive of most of their potential audiences, either because
such concealment was (or is) thought appropriate to sacred subject matter
or because the image was made for a select group.8 But the pattern is
always the same: the opposition between lower appearance and higher
meaning. With modernism all this transparency, both of meaning and
of pictorial means, began to change, and at the same time allegory came
to be thought impossible, or comic. The "usual" allegorical expectation
lives on, however, animating both "usual" reactions to works of art and
their interpretation, or expectation of interpretability. An unsophisticated
viewer might express hostility to a work that seems to block such understanding. Perhaps more frequently, however, this same viewer is intimidated by his or her own puzzlement, and the allegorical expectation
is tacitly exploited to mystify and dignify work, artist, and apparent
cognoscenti, at the same time that it stratifies and classifies them relative
to the viewer, all because it is assumed by the viewer that there must be
some higher meaning he or she is for some reason inadequate to judge.
These remarks about "usual" interpretation suggest that there are alternative but congruent assumptions about the way in which either form
or content must be the essence of a work of art, that its "meaning" must
either be "visual" in a higher sense or conceptual (usually specifically
textual). These assumptions are in my view large and stubborn impediments
to many kinds of art historical understanding and in general terms fundamentally misdirect art historical interpretation.
Having brushed in the genealogy of the notion of form and considered
some of its implications for art historical analysis, I would now like to
continue my argument by considering two major attacks on art historical
essentialism launched by E. H. Gombrich, whose ideas will already have
been glimpsed at several points in the preceding discussion. In an essay
on Raphael's Madonna della Sedia first delivered as a lecture in 1955,
Gombrich criticized the idea of formal analysis and suggested alternatives
to it.9 He had become aware, he writes, of the frequency with which he
used the phrase "organic unity" in reference to works of art he admired,
and he had come to feel that Gestalt psychology had perhaps succeeded
too well in its attempt to teach us to understand perception in terms of
8. David Summers, "Difficultd,"Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton, N.J.,
1981), pp. 177-85.
9. See Gombrich, "Raphael's Madonna della Sedia," Norm and Form: Studies in the Art
of the Renaissance, I (London, 1966), pp. 64-80; hereafter abbreviated "M."
380
David Summers
whole configurations. The criterion of such unity seems too inclusive

and therefore too incapable of making distinctions. Gombrich's target in
these arguments is not really Gestalt psychology but the long tradition
of Aristotelian metaphysics, from which the idea of organic unity descends.
Aristotle's notion of order, or organic unity, is linked to his idea of
entelechy, thus to final cause. There is a higher principle, an essence
that unifies both the structure and the unfolding of the structure of
natural things, and so by analogy a work of art has (or should have) an
essence unifying its parts.
What is the essence by which the work of art is unified and which
corresponds to the entelechy of a natural thing? It is, Gombrich seems
to mean, the putative formal unity of the work itself. Of course every
"composition" of "forms" is unlike every other, but however different
they may be, they must still all be unities; they must all fall under that
one category. Actually, Gombrich argues, the possession of formal unity
does not distinguish a great work of art from lesser or even trivial ones.
Most important, if the Madonna della Sedia is essentially the unified composition it is, how are we to relate its formal essence to the historical
context from which it arose? (This question assumes, of course, that we
wish to do that.) Or how are we even to connect this aspect of the work
with everything that is obvious about it?
It is form in art that expresses what is nontrivial about representation,
and form entails the question of expression, as we have seen. Gombrich
addresses this question in terms of what he calls the "physiognomic
fallacy," which he has defined in a series of essays begun nearly fifty
years ago.1' The adjective "physiognomic" refers to the ancient, now
pseudoscience of physiognomy, according to which it was thought that
the nature of the souls of individuals could be inferred directly from the
characteristics of their appearance, that those who resemble lions are
leonine and those who resemble pigs, porcine. The "physiognomic fallacy"
is the mistaken assumption that in an analogous way we may infer directly
some spiritual reality-the inwardness of artists or the "spirits" of the
ages or places in which works of art were made-from the forms of the
works themselves.
The physiognomic fallacy, Gombrich argues, is rooted in a more
general and neutral "physiognomic perception." This is the first projective
individual encounter with things and as such occupies a central place in
Gombrich's adaptation of Karl Popper's "searchlight theory of perception."" At this projective level we begin to discriminate things, and these
10. See Gombrich, "On Physiognomic Perception," Meditationson a HobbyHorse and
OtherEssays on the Theoryof Art (London and New York, 1963), pp. 45-55.
11. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychologyof Pictorial Representation,The
A. W. Mellon Lecturesin the Fine Arts, 1956, Bollingen Series XXXV (Princeton, N.J., 1969),
p. 28.
Critical Inquiry
Winter 1989
381
discriminations lead to the relatively more "objective" levels of systematic

inquiry and scrutiny. At the physiognomic level, colors, say, may have
an emotional reach embracing a great variety of sensory data. The sky,
distant mountains, certain music, and the emotional state of depression
might all be united by the color blue, for example. Physiognomic perception
might be said to become the pathetic fallacy before it becomes the physiognomic one when we suppose that projective meanings belong to the
works over which they are projected. "Blue skies smiling on me" may be
blue, but it is wrong to suppose that they are really smiling, or happy,
and that the macrocosm really mirrors our microcosmic mood. If we
further suppose that the form of works of art expresses these projected
meanings, then we have crossed over from the pathetic to the physiognomic
fallacy. The gist of these arguments is that the meanings we simply see
in works of art, although not without their own value, are not historical,
and therefore not explanatory. In order to try to gain such historical
understanding we must actually do history.
Gombrich's arguments are thus part of a systematic attack on expressionism. He again and again rejects the idea that the feelings of the artist
and the feelings of the viewer are symmetrical on either side of the forms
the artist uses. If such symmetry held for all art, then it would follow
that we are simply able to see what is essential about any art. Such an
idea in fact undergirds the modern notion-upon
which the history of
art stakes much of its claim as an intellectual discipline, and not incidentally,
much of its claim to a place in university curricula-that art is a "universal
language" capable of making other cultures available to us as nothing
else can. We could never learn the languages and literature necessary to
understand what we seem to apprehend about the French of the twelfth
century or about the Aztecs by learning to see the forms of their art.
Gombrich is well aware of the attraction and apparent naturalness of
such thinking. He is also aware that his own arguments threaten the
foundations of the modern institutions of the study of art, and further
threaten the laudable idea of art as an important agent of human community. But he nevertheless rejects the arguments supporting this view
because he feels that expressionism implies essentialism. A line does not
or sadness, rather, he
just "mean"-or possess, or express-happiness
wishes to insist, it means whatever it means in relation to other lines and
in general to other forms, and to the reality of the conditions within
which these forms are seen.
Gombrich's idea of the physiognomic fallacy collides head-on with
another of the great critical "fallacies"of our time, the so-called intentional
fallacy, one of the cornerstones of the New Criticism. The intentional
fallacy seems to me to be little more than a corollary of the kind of
expressionism Gombrich wishes to call into question, and perhaps only
became formulatable when the idea of expressive form had made it
thinkable that the work of art (which in the classic essay of W. K. Wimsatt,
382
David Summers
Jr., and M. C. Beardsley is, of course, a work of literature) is, or should

be, an adequate expression of its own meaning, or better, that its meaning
is primarily what its form expresses.12 The argument presupposes both
complete confidence in the expressiveness of the form of the work and
a reader sensitive (or passive) to that expressiveness. This neat symmetry
is merely complicated when it is supposed that either the work or the
reader/viewer or both are determined by deeper structures, psychological
or broadly ideological, and such an assumption, rather than substantially
changing the situation, again throws the interpreter back on the construal
of "forms." It is still assumed that historical reconstruction of intention
is irrelevant or merely ancillary to interpretation.
For Gombrich, there are even more sinister implications of the physiognomic fallacy involving an even more dangerous kind of essentialism.
The forms of art may be imagined not just to express the inwardness of
individual artists, but, as we have seen, the spirits of whole nations, races,
and epochs. Thus baldly phrased, such inferences seem improbable and
daring, but in fact they are everywhere to be found in art historical writing
and teaching. Gombrich traces this habit of thought back to the beginnings
of modern art history, to Johann Winckelmann, who saw in the impassivity
of classical sculpture not just "'noble simplicity and quiet grandeur,' "
but the "'noble simplicity and quiet grandeur' of the Greeksoul."13 Over
the centuries Winckelmann's classical ideal was eclipsed and ceased to
be normative, but the principle of interpretation has remained the same,
and has been incorporated into the great relativistic scheme of universal
art history. Thus at the same time that the idea of form served the positive
purpose of universalizing and therefore relativizing the study of art, this
univeralization was based on kinds of inference and on at least implicit
assumptions of the existence of historical entities and forces that are very
problematic.
Gombrich closely identifies the physiognomic fallacy with the idea
of Weltanschauung, with "the Romantic belief that style expresses the
'worldview' of a civilization." This belief encouraged a conception of the
history of art as the history of some metaphorical "seeing," a history,
that is, of "formal" vision.14 The physiognomic fallacy and its corollary
understanding of form are thus not only Romantic, they are once again
obviously idealist. The history of artistic style in such a view is ancillary
to the history of culture, and looks first of all to the history of spirit for
the primary motive forces behind historical change. The implications of
Gombrich's argument are that, in order to avoid unproductive critical
12. Summers, "Intentions in the History of Art," New LiteraryHistory 17 (Winter 1986):
306-7.
13. Gombrich, "On Physiognomic Perception," p. 51; my emphasis.
14. Gombrich, "Andre Malraux and the Crisis of Expressionism," Meditations on a
HobbyHorse, p. 82.
Critical Inquiry
Winter 1989
383
circularity and essentialism on the one hand, and to avoid being party
to the fabrication of some of the most murderous myths of modern times
on the other, we must avoid such historical inferences altogether. And
if Gombrich's critique of form and expression is taken seriously, then
some very basic art critical and art historical habits must be called into
question. If Gombrich is right and we cannot see through form (or
through all form) to some kind of meaning, then new ways must be
devised for talking about works of art and for making historical inferences
from them.
Gombrich's critique of form and expression is closely linked to his
critique of historicism. Again following Popper, Gombrich has argued
repeatedly that the sort of "spirit of peoples" thinking that has justified
racism and genocide in our time is a brand of essentialism, or pseudoessentialism (if such a term is possible), that seems to make the ends
of history visible, thus to justify the liquidation of groups seen not to
have a place in the scheme of history. The programmatic ideological
skepticism animating Gombrich's arguments unequivocally rejects totalizing
historical schemes of all kinds and dismisses the Hegelian tradition of
historical interpretation, idealist and materialist alike.
The arguments to this point might be summarized to say that art
historical interpretation is often conducted as if directed toward some
essence, formal or thematic or both. What has been called strong formalism
pursues a visual essence, weak formalism pursues a thematic essence,
and the "unity of form and content" really means that essential form
agrees with animating subject matter. As we have also seen, the modern
notion of form has always implied development. This is to say that the
history of art in being formalist is also historicist. In this essay I shall
consider three meanings of the term historicism. The first, just briefly
encountered in Gombrich's arguments against it, arguments he derives
from Popper, is that laws of history are formulatable and that in general
the outcome of history is predictable. The second, which I shall discuss
in the example of Walter Benjamin, is the idea that history is a universal
matrix prior to events, which are simply placed in order within that
matrix by the historian. The third is the idea that a thing is meaningful
insofar as it is a part of a development. The history of art is heavily
involved in all of these arguments. We need only consider the teaching
of history of art surveys, in which periods, styles, and, at least implicitly,
whole cultures "turn into" something else, and in which this "turning
into" is shown to be a more or less necessary development. This assumption
of continuity contains the further assumption that there is one thing that
changes (art) that is always essentially the same (formal); it also makes
series of events or sequences of period styles into "developments" and
makes art historians look for the ways in which one series of works,
regarded either morphologically or physiognomically, changes into another
one. Such radical diachronicity, of course, has the great advantage of
384
David Summers
providing a kind of transcendental thread through the complexity of

history, permitting us to say what was "really" baroque as opposed to
what simply happened in the seventeenth century. The same principles
are fundamental to art criticism and the art market. "Modernism" has
always meant the "really" modern, not just what has happened in the
late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and modernist criticism consists
not so much of simple judgments about contemporary works as in justifications of judgments in historicist terms, or even in the shaping of
judgments to historicist arguments (which last makes problematical judgments of "quality" unnecessary). A formalist critic explicitly or implicitly
asserts not only that "formal" art is better, but also that only such art is
historically authentic and fashions a narrative to show that this is so. In
the case of criticism as opposed to history, historicism provides a means
by which a thin line may be selected from the vast production of artists
of all kinds and defended as in some sense necessary, thus at least providing
an absolute criterion for the selection of works of art, a criterion at least
incidentally necessary to the optimal functioning of the art market. Postmodernism, which as a general intellectual tendency arises from currents
deeply at odds with the historicist habits of thought of the last two centuries,
still takes much of its authority as the unwieldy style term it is from its
supposed developmental relation to modernism. Postmodernism, that is
to say, takes much of its authority and vitality from the very historicist
scheme it would reject in its own terms.
As an essentialist and historicist idea, form provides a link between
this part of the argument and the next, in which I would like to examine
formalism in relation to idealism and materialism as they bear on the
history of art. Art historians are now sometimes classified as idealist in
professional judgments and communications of one sort or another, and
I would like to consider the question of just what this categorization
means and how it affects what seems to me to be one of the simplest
and most basic problems of art historical interpretation, the explanation
of why works of art look the way they look.
At a recent conference a paper on the early modern theory of abstraction was introduced with an apology for its being a "formalist"subject.
The enterprise in which the writer of the paper was engaged could be
justified, however, the introducer explained, because the formal motif
under examination had "ideological" import. Everyone in the room
understood that the apology was necessary and desirable, or at least
understood why it was made, and in fact it points to many of the interpretative issues I have tried to raise in the first part of this paper.
In the history of art the term "formalist" has come to refer to a
number of paths of interpretation proceeding on the assumption that
art is in important respects historically autonomous, and that therefore
a meaningful history can be written about art without reference to other
historical factors. On such a view the very term "history of art" would
seem to be formalist and therefore idealist in that it implicitly states the
CriticalInquiry
Winter 1989
385
assumption that art itself has or is some kind of history. The opposite
of formalism is "contextualism," a set of methods based on the idea that
art is in a very real sense made by historical situations. One setting out
to do formalist history will be concerned with works of art "in themselves";
one setting out to do contextualist art history will be concerned with the
circumstances in which art was made. If these options were to be carried
into practice as they stand, it would mean that formalists would not be
interested in circumstances and contextualists would not be interested
in works of art themselves. Very few art historians really occupy either
of these extremes, which are probably impracticable. The possibility of
the logical purity of either extreme clearly exerts a pull over art historical
writing, however, and this pull is reinforced by the relation of these ideas
to other intellectual issues.
The term "context"is of course a broad one, and art may be interpreted
in relation to a number of external factors. One of the most powerful
contextualist methods has been Erwin Panofsky's iconology. The context
in question here is predominantly cultural and intellectual historical,
however, and for that reason such investigations may be said to belong
to the idealist tradition of art history. (Iconography, the technique preliminary to iconological interpretation according to Panofsky, may also
be used for the purposes of political interpretation, which may point to
a very different general definition of context.) Even though it is not
formalist, such art history is consistent with the formalist and idealist
version of art history as the history of the spirit. This leads to what I
think is the real force of the category of "idealist art history," which is
only understandable if "idealist" means not materialist. "Materialist art
history" points to another definition of context, not as cultural historical
but as social, political, and economic historical. And to return to the story
with which I began, it is now clear why it was necessary to apologize for
a "formalist"paper topic, to justify it by indicating its ideological dimension.
Although ideology is also a complex term-especially in relation to the
question of historical idealism or materialism-its use has at least the
rhetorical effect of transforming an apparently idealist topic into a materialist one.
In the next section I am going to examine materialist art history,
argue that it also is ultimately unsatisfactory as a kind of essentialism,
and close by offering some alternatives outside the bounds of these nineteenth-century metaphysical categories.
I wish to begin by examining certain arguments from Benjamin's
brief "Theses on the Philosophy of History," which seem to me to provide a paradigmatic and influential treatment of what Benjamin himself
calls "materialistichistoriography."'5 His arguments are set in terms closely
related in one or another aspect to those we have been considering.
15. See Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Illuminations, ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1969), pp. 253-64.
386
David Summers
Benjamin also wrote about "historicism," but used the term in a special
sense, as we have seen. Benjamin understood the word to refer to the
presumption of a kind of Newtonian continuous time into which all
events can be placed. The method of historicist history is "additive,"
which is to say that what we call "contributions" can be assumed all to
have a place in the same great but abstract narrative. The historicist
historian need not worry about more than setting events in their proper
order, and so, beyond the presumption of underlying time, what Benjamin
calls "universal"(that is, historicist) history "has no theoretical armature."16
Benjamin opposes all of this to his "materialistic historiography." He
considers it imperative that historicist history be rejected because historicism, by making the present seem to be the cumulative progressive
consequence of what has gone before, can be seen to justify the status
quo. Human history, Benjamin wants to say, is neither neutral nor is it
positive progress; it is instead endless carnage and suffering, Hegel's
slaughterbench. The very assumption of the absolute continuity of history
is acquiescence in oppression and murder.
"Materialistic historiography," in short, sees the terrible confluence
of history with momentary victory, and Benjamin wants to eliminate the
political and moral anesthesia of historicism once and for all by denying
its assumption of underlying continuity. Events are not continuous with
one another, they are disjunctive; and materialistichistoriography embraces
this disjunctiveness, making it a part of the historian's own procedure,
which cannot simply be justified by what needs to be done in some
subscientific sense. The past may inevitably be at hand, but if it is alive
it is made alive in the present. The rejection of continuity thus implies
a willfully violent hermeneutics in which the past is appropriated to the
purposes of the present. The historian, Benjamin says, seizes the past
with virile force in a revolutionary transformative act. I linger over these
ideas because such ideas are widely diffused; but to keep to Benjamin's
arguments, they are based on an extreme dichotomy corresponding to
extreme circumstances. Benjamin was trying to cut away the intellectual
underpinnings of fascism and to do so rejected the entire tradition of
what he called universal history. To do that he juxtaposed absolute continuity and absolute discontinuity.
Both Benjamin and Gombrich formulated their arguments under
the immediate pressure of the cataclysmic threat of the rise of Nazism
and both rejected what they called "historicism." However different their
understanding of this word may have been, for both writers the rejection
of historicism meant the rejection of negative principles of continuity
that had to be given up not least because of their horrible moral and
political consequences. The solutions to the problem of discontinuity
16. Ibid., p. 262.
CriticalInquiry
Winter 1989
387
offered by the two writers point in two quite different directions, raising
an alternative that will guide much of the remainder of this essay.
If discontinuity is materialist, then continuity is (at least by implication)
idealist. If Benjamin does not in fact say this, it is a tack taken by other
"materialist" writers and has a place among the issues of this discussion.
Historicism as Benjamin understood it is essentialist if not idealist because
it implies that time itself is a progressive principle of change. As such it
misplaces the locus of significant historical transformation from class
conflict to a metaphysical (or physical) principle.
Since it is based on the rejection of continuity, practitioners of materialistic historiography might be expected to favor synchronic over
diachronic explanation. This again gives a more specific definition to
"context," which is not only economic and political, but is structurally
rather than causally related to whatever is to be interpreted. Art is not
to be explained primarily in relation to previous art, and this position
may easily be translated into terms of the earlier argument. "Form" was
said to be a principle of continuity, expressive of the culture to which it
belonged. Form thus had a kind of built-in historical cogency, but at the
same time it made it difficult (if not impossible) to explain anything but
evolutionary change and relations to broader "spiritual" factors. This
difficulty was acknowledged in the conclusion of one of the greatest and
best-known formalist essays in the literature of the history of art. At the
end of his Principles of Art History W61fflin acknowledged that his formal
principles, which had been used to describe a development from Renaissance through baroque art, could not explain why the same development
should end and begin again. He regarded this recommencement (that
is, the return to a linear style in art around 1800) as "unnatural" and
attributed it to "profound changes in the spiritual world," to "a revaluation
of being in all spheres" (P, p. 233). Meyer Schapiro defined a similar
problem in more general terms in his essay on style, this time suggesting
social rather than spiritual historical context as a solution.
The principles by which are explained the broad similarities in
development are of a different order from those by which the
singular facts are explained. The normal motion and the motion
due to supposedly perturbing factors belong to different worlds;
the first is inherent in the morphology of styles, the second has a
psychological or social origin. It is as if mechanics had two different
sets of laws.17
This paradoxical state of affairs has by no means ended; rather the
pendulum has swung now to one, now to the other side. The availability
17. Meyer Schapiro, "Style," in AestheticsToday, ed. Morris Philipson (Cleveland and
New York, 1961), p. 97.
388
David Summers
of the distinction between the synchronic and the diachronic (which

Ferdinand de Saussure formulated in reaction to a developmental linguistics) has only served to harden the opposition, as we have seen; but
again, this opposition is perfectly consistent with the general distinction
between materialist discontinuity and idealist continuity.
To the degree that it can be called formalist at all, materialist art
history might be expected to take a weak formalist posture, that is, to
assume that the means of representation are vehicles of content and are
historical only insofar as they are vehicles of content, which is determined
by social and economic context. I now wish to discuss some of the writings
of T. J. Clark, which are of interest because they depart from this pattern
and address the question of the nonidealist description of works of art.
Clark's writings are explicitly materialist (and Marxist) and at the same
time they are very seriously concerned with the problem of how the work
of art is to be brought as evidence into art historical argument. In the
introduction to his Image of thePeople: GustaveCourbetand theSecondFrench
Republic, 1848-1851, Clark, as might be expected, rejects the formalist
idea that art is an autonomous tradition, and further rejects the idea that
art "reflects"ideologies, or that history is the "background" of art, wishing
instead to write a history of "mediations."He also wishes to avoid "intuitive
analogies" between form and ideological content. He would reject, for
example, the argument that lack of compositional focus in the Burial at
Ornans expresses Courbet's egalitarianism. The "strange and disturbing
construction" of this painting, Clark says, must rather be explained "in
contact and conflict with other kinds of historical explanation."'18
Again as might be expected, many of the techniques Clark uses for
getting at a work have more to do with reception than with any kind of
inference from its characteristics. If we want to know what the work
meant (as opposed to what it "means") then we ought to consider how
it was received. This is not a simple thing to do. Clark examines criticism
with great care, but only certain criticism, that in which there are tears
and ruptures in normal discourse (IP, p. 12). Visible through these various
ruptures is what Clark calls the "public"(as opposed to the actual audience
of art), which he compares to the Lacanian unconscious. The public is
the imagined audience of artistic utterance, verbal or pictorial, which
exerts pressure on the whole of discourse. It is visible not so much in
figure as in ground, not so much in statement as in pause, intonation,
outburst, non sequitur, in all the inflections of real speech.
This way of reading sources is integral with the project of a history
of real transformations, and the multiform interested reactions, avoidances,
ambiguities, and evasions very much enrich the discussion of "influences"
and "sources" upon which art historical argument has long centered. If
such "formalist" devices are rejected outright, however, the relation of
18. T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbetand the Second French Republic,
1848-1851 (Greenwich, Conn., 1973), pp. 10-11; hereafter abbreviated IP.
Critical Inquiry
Winter 1989
389
historical complexity of the kind Clark describes to the actual characterization of the paintings that make up the backbone of his history is more
subtle and perhaps problematical. Despite his disavowal of such things,
Clark does seem to draw analogies between the formal/visual structure
of the work and its meaning. The Burial at Ornans is simple and straightforward in "structure"; there is "no single focus of attention, no climax
towards which the forms and faces turn." In general, the image is impossible
to characterize as a sum of its parts. Clark seems to wish to say that these
characteristics are not formally expressive so much as semiotic; it is a
"lack of open, declared significance which offended most of all" (IP, p.
83). The painting is, so to speak, objectively evasive; the contradictory
responses of the critics are therefore appropriate, and the reasons for
them are visible to us in the painting. In another painting, the Peasants
of Flagey, "colour is at war with form," and in terms of form, Courbet
has "broken the whole surface into a mosaic of distinct and clashing
shapes" (IP, p. 84). This was "perfectly deliberate," and the painting is
disjunctive and powerfully ununified.
Taken altogether, these arguments combine observations about the
intrinsic expressiveness of disjunctive pictorial forms with an insistence
on semiotic disjunction or ambivalence. It is not clear to me that these
two things are really compatible, a question to which I shall return shortly.
For the present, however, it is enough to observe that if the latter semiotic
alternative were generalized into a program for the history of art and
extended beyond a few years in Courbet's career as a painter (that is,
beyond the reach of basically synchronic explanation), then the history
of art might be written not as a history of form but as a complex history of codes. Such a method would depend on the historical reconstruction
of the likely meaning of any instance of the many codes discernible in
a work of art, and all higher interpretation would have to be based on
this reconstruction. If, for example, composition itself involved hierarchy
(as many have argued that it does), then it might be argued to have
ideological significance, and it might further be argued that a painter's
avoidance of such visual order within that tradition of meaning was
therefore also ideologically significant. Such a historical argument could
be made without recourse to intuitive inference from the expressive
nature of form. But to keep to the matter at hand, if a history were to
be written in which formal and/or semiotic discontinuities evident in
works of art were connected to contradictions in society, it is not clear
what kind of visual continuities might be accounted for. As we have seen,
idealist art history had the advantage of built-in formal/visual continuity,
and the outright rejection of formalism is a rejection of that advantage.
But if there are evident continuities in the history of art, why should
they be ignored as a problem? And how are they to be explained?
Clark addresses this question in his more recent book, The Painting
of Modern Life. In the first place, he accepts the idea that there is a
continuity, which he might not have done, and he further accepts the
390
David Summers
characterization of this continuity given by earlier formalist writers.

"Something decisive happened in the history of art around Manet which
set painting and the other arts upon a new course."19 Clark also regards
"flatness" as the salient diagnostic feature of characteristically modernist
painting. Perhaps he accepts these formulations precisely in order to
invert modernism, to show that as a whole its acknowledged deep features
are negative rather than positive. I have noted before that Clark tends
to treat as signs what were previously regarded as forms, and, he says,
flatness can only have been so compelling and fruitful in avant-garde
painting "because it was made to stand for something: some particular
and substantial set of qualities which took their place in a picture of the
world." The avant-garde between 1860 and 1918 exploited the significant
values of flatness, "values which necessarily derived from elsewhere than
art" (PML, p. 13). Flatness could signify several things (the popular, the
modern), but it was also an assertion of the presence of art itself; more
deeply, flatness was a barrier against dreams (as Clark varies one of
Mallarme's themes), that is, a barrier against virtuality or transparency
erected by modernist painters by insistence on the very fact of pictorial
representation. At first flatness was its early meanings, but then it became
a sign of modernity itself; rather than having a historical relation to its
origins, it seemed to express the modern. It becomes clear, however, that
flatness is more than a sign for modernity flaunted ever more insistently
and aggressively by avant-garde painters through the 1970s; it is according
to Clark also an indication of something essentialabout modernity itself.
At this level of generality, a level of generality felt to be necessary in
order to account for the presumed unity of modernism, the distinction
between expressive form and sign collapses and the argument swerves
toward the old habits of inference of idealist art history. There is, Clark
writes in a detailed analysis of Pissarro's splendid Coin de village of 1877,
a necessary distance between painting and representing. Rather than
allowing "normal habits of representation" to rule, and thus to paint the
already known, Pissarro searched in painting for equivalents that were
not representations, always running the risk of dissolution into sheer
matter. Although there are "Realist intentions" evident in impressionist
painting, and although it still has to do with light, these things cannot
explain the "elaborate indirectness" of its technique, the fundamental
dissociation of painting and representation. "And did not all this ambiguity
have to do at bottom with the character of modern life?" Clark asks
(PML, pp. 20, 21). Later on, Clark returns to these themes in reference
to the paintings of Manet. His paintings of Parisian life show "places ...
for display but also for equivocation," where gestures are unconvincing,
objects and actions are hard to make out. In this ambiguity, "the city can
19. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers(New
York, 1984), p. 10; hereafter abbreviated PML.
CriticalInquiry
Winter 1989
391
be seen most sharply"; it "inflects the new painting's account of seeing in

general: the visible comes to be the illegible, and the new city is thus the
perfect place for the painter who trusts appearances" (PML, p. 48; my
emphasis). Impressionism (or the new painting-for all its landscapes)
is thus an urban style and a style that at its formal/semiotic base states
"the essential myth of modern life." The city is "ambiguity, it is a mixture
of classes and classifications, it is anomie and improvisation, it is the reign
of generalized illusion" (PML, p. 49). The semiotic ambiguity of modern
painting is like life in the modern city, where "spectacle" is the principle
of social cohesion of consumer capitalism. The history recounted in the
book is a kind of real allegory of the modern period, and it must be
presumed that the unity and continuity of modernism now rests in the
deep social historical continuities of the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Haussmann's Paris is the prototype for later Babylons (New
York), monuments to apparent social unity in the consumption of manufactured goods, with class difference as a principle of city planning,
where something like theatricality is the norm, the hallmark of modernity.
In an article published three years before The Painting of ModernLife
Clark set forth closely parallel arguments. The differences between the
book and the earlier article are instructive. Again Clark wishes to dismiss
the formalist idea that art has its own values. He first attacks the question
historically, not just to provide an example but to make the point that
values are always part of a "real cultural dialectic," that, as visible in
criticism, they are always subject to the presence of ruling-class ideology.20
The patron-capitalist speculator Dupuy bought landscapes from Seurat,
whose paintings "tried to be tight, discreet, and uniform, done with a
disabused orderliness, seemingly scientific, certainly analytic," and all of
these characteristics were signs of art's "detachment," which is to say its
evidence of independent value. Dupuy's liking for these paintings "was
founded in a sense he had of some play between those qualities occurring
in art and the same occurring in life" ("CG," p. 150). That is, capital in
the 1890s was confident, scrupulous, scientific, still trusting rationality,
observation, and control. If I understand the argument, the charge of
"crude" Marxism is avoided because Dupuy did not simply buy paintings
of the stock exchange, as he might have, but instead may be connected
to his purchases by deeper structural and more nearly unconscious relations
between his economic historical self and the aesthetic (not to say formal)
character of Seurat's painting.
But Clark's central argument again centers around the notion of
flatness. Again he argues that flatness "in its heyday" was a sign of the
popular, the modern, for pure seeing, for willful nontransparency, so
that the literality we have come to admire was realizable only through
20. Clark, "Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art," CriticalInquiry 9 (Sept. 1982): 151;
hereafter abbreviated "CG."
392
David Summers
the mediation of these metaphors ("CG,"p. 152). Here again, the argument
is evidently intended to make a jump between particular instances (why
a stock speculator as a stock speculator might have been drawn to the
paintings of Seurat) to a level of generality covered by the formalist idea
of modernism (why flatness should be a continuous issue in the dominant
tradition of modern art making). It is evident that to concede autonomy
to the issue of medium is also to concede the possibility of a history of
art not reducible to fairly direct historical parallels of the kind made at
the microeconomic level of patronage. In order to avoid this concession,
Clark identifies all evidence of medium-that
is to say, "flatness," the
of
characteristic
modernist
identifying
painting-as "negation and esThis
him
to
trangement."
permits
say relatively few things about modern
art (since its essence in all its instances has already been defined), but it
allows him to say things about modern society he wishes to say. By
denying the "ordinary consistency" of medium in favor of all kinds of
gaps and silences, modernist art becomes an expression of the "negativity"
of modern life ("CG," pp. 152, 154). Modernist art is "the black square,
the hardly differentiated field of sound, the infinitely flimsy skein of
spectral colour, speech stuttering and petering out into etceteras or excuses." It is an art "in which ambiguity becomes infinite, . . . a mere
mysticism of sight" ("CG," p. 154). What concerns us here is once again
the nature of inference from works of art to historical generalization,
the way in which flatness/surface/medium becomes the relation of the
modernist artist to historical circumstances. It is once again very difficult
to separate a statement such as "negation is the sign inside art of this
wider decomposition; it is an attempt to capture the lack of consistent
and repeatable meanings in the culture-to capture the lack and make
it over into form" ("CG," p. 154) from the old idealist statements based
on the assumption that we may see through formal essences to historical
essences. Such formulations to my mind run exactly counter to Clark's
admirable insistence on real historical connection and on the role of art
as a possible (and perhaps inevitable) agent of social change.
Why do such contradictory patterns of explanation occur? I believe
it is because both "idealism"and "materialism"as a priori bases of historical
investigation demand the suppression of one or another kind of historical
evidence. Idealism and materialism are alternative principles of the highest
generality. This is not to say that they are simply different ways of describing
the same thing since each involves the relative deepness or priority of
one or another principle, that is, the generality means that one kind of
thing is always able to be explained in terms of the other ("mind is the
highest form of matter"; "matter is something about mind"). The whole
question thus revolves around the point of which principle is explanatory
relative to the other, and if we turn these distinctions to history, it means
that some kinds of evidence are always explanatory relative to others. I
observed above that a most basic task of the history of art is the explanation
CriticalInquiry
Winter 1989
393
of why works of art look the way they look. This is not a trivial statement;
it provides a criterion according to which both idealist and materialist
art history are of limited explanatory usefulness. Either alternative must
exclude kinds of evidence that bear on the explanation of the appearance
and change in the appearance of series of works of art. Idealist art
historians tend to be unconcerned with the patronage, use, and reception
of images, which are manifestly part of their legitimate history, and
materialist art historians tend to avoid any reference to cultural history
or the technical history of art traditions themselves because they are
assumed to bear merely a "superstructural" relationship to a deeper,
"truer" historical principle.
How is this dilemma to be resolved? We might consider the following.
When Marx inverted Hegel's scheme of history, he retained one essential
thing, namely its absolute totality. This totality followed inevitably from
the continued reduction of all historical process to a single metaphysical
principle, but it also retained a vision of something like overarching
providential purpose in history and in human action. In the terms of
this argument, however, totality is based on a most general kind of essentialism, which is finally disenabling for historical interpretation.
At this point it is necessary to distinguish carefully between idealism
If idealism is essentialism then materialism is its opposite;
essentialism.
and
if
but both idealism and materialism are kinds of essentialism, as I have
argued they are, then both may have another opposite, which I shall call
functionalist. A functionalist history of art is not a history of how art has
changed, or even in a simple sense of what art "means." It is rather a
history of what art has done, or to put two goals together, it is a history
that explains why works of art look the way they look in terms of what
art has been meant to do. Such an enterprise might embrace and continue
earlier forms of investigation and interpretation, but it must also give
them a new orientation and encourage study in new directions.
I am aware that the term "functional" is not unproblematical, and
I wish to use the term in a way related to what I understand Gombrich
to have meant by it in the essay on Raphael's Madonna della Sedia I
considered earlier ("M,"p. 76). Function must be given a special definition
in order to be a solution to the problem it purports to solve. The slogan
"form follows function," for example, simply makes a telos of function
and demands that interpretation proceed in the "usual" allegorical mode
discussed above; that is, we see through the forms to the function (or
we should be able to do that) just as there should be a unity of form and
content. This difficulty is only displaced if we define art in terms of its
social function, since this also implies that we have adequately understood
art when we have done that. Functionalist art history would not proceed
from the work "essentially" understood in any way to context; rather it
would be based on the assumption that works of art are radically cultural
or historical and that they are therefore always meaningful in the cir-
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David Summers
cumstances in which they are made and that they continue to be meaningful
in new circumstances into which they survive. This definition and the
definition of the interrelations of these multiform meanings are the beginning (but not the end) of art historical understanding.
Before returning to Gombrich's essay, I wish quickly to establish a
few general principles. The problem with which I am concerned is art
historical description, and the first part of the paper was concerned with
an argument to the effect that "formal analysis" is a method of description
that raises more problems than it solves, that by its very definition does
not allow us to ask or answer many questions we might like to ask or
answer, and that therefore puts an undesirable stop to both explanation
and interpretation.
I am going to begin by following a lead offered by Michael Baxandall
and develop the idea that the language of art history is basicallyostensive,21
that when we make art historical arguments involving works of art (as
opposed, say, to documentary arguments about them) we in effect indicate
their characteristics to our audience as we write or talk about them, just
as we usually lecture with some sort of a pointer in one hand.
Ostensivity is a principle of basic aesthetic significance. When Alexander Baumgarten began to stake out the field of modern aesthetics, he
distinguished between what he called "intensive"language, which is general
and analytic, and "extensive" language, which is particularizing, sensate,
and "poetic."22 Beginning from this division, language is used by the
philosopher and the poet in different ways, the latter favoring the metaphors and figures shunned by the former. The poet on such a view
fashions an artificial reality, and does this precisely by avoiding analytic,
logical language, which would at once catapult the matter into the nonpoetic
condition of the general. So in a perhaps more modest way does the art
historian, with the difference that the reality to which the language refers
is not the imagined or constructed particular but the work of art itself.
Some descriptions of the work may be straightforward- size, support,
medium, condition, for example-which are always specific to the work
under discussion. But there are also more complex modes of particularity
related to more complex kinds of interpretation. Baxandall, taking as his
text a paragraph by W61fflin, has argued that, in addition to personal
reactions to works (ugly, chilling), we use a variety of metaphorical language,
some of it formal ("a thicket of lines"), and also language from which
agency can be inferred. This last category points to what Baxandall calls
"inferential criticism," which I shall discuss in detail later on. It is clear
21. See Michael Baxandall, "The Language of Art History," New LiteraryHistory 10
(Spring 1979): 453-65; hereafter abbreviated "LAH."
22. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Reflectionson Poetry,ed. Karl Aschenbrenner and
W. B. Holtner (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1954), p. 43. Extensive and intensive language
correspond to confused and distinct ideas; more extensive language is clearer and more
poetic.
CriticalInquiry
Winter 1989
395
that the second category, metaphorical characterization, is inexhaustible,

even if we may regard some characterizations as better than others. This
is so both because the particular characteristics of works of art cannot
be definitively named and because attempts to do so are always made by
individuals. This does not mean that anything can be said about a work
of art, or that everything said is equivalent to everything else. It may not
be agreed that the Mona Lisa has "traffickedfor strange webs with Eastern
merchants," as Walter Pater wrote of her,23 even if we might be able to
"see"why he might say a thing like that, but there is much less disagreement
that her figure is modeled in virtual light and that in itself is of great
historical interest. The most important thing, however, is the primacy
of the nonabstractive and ostensive description of the work, that we are
(or are not) able to see what Pater is talking about. Art history in such
a view is an ongoing discussion about works of art by people who continually
indicate and try to explain to others what they see either in works of art
or series of them and what is significant about what they see. Such
description, seriation, and explanation are by nature consensual and
open to the works themselves.
What is possible in addition to accounts of the physical condition of
works of art, personal reaction to them, or metaphorical characterization
of them? How do we get from works of art to historically specific context?
To answer that question let us now turn to Baxandall's third class of
descriptive terms, those that imply agency. "Words inferential as to cause
are the main vehicle of demonstrative precision in art criticism" ("LAH,"
p. 461). He cites as an example the words of Adrian Stokes on Donatello:
"'The bottom of the angels' robes is gouged and undercut so as to provide
a contrastto the openplanes of Christ'snude torso. ... In brief the composition
is not so much founded upon the interrelationship of adjoining surfaces,
as upon the broaderprinciples of chiaroscuro'" ("LAH," p. 465 n.9; my emphasis). What all the italicized terms have in common is the implication
that Donatello's relief is the result of deliberate action. It is first of all to
be remembered that Stokes' language is ostensive; it indicates Donatello's
relief and could in principle be reformulated in the face of it. Discussion
is always open to the particularity of the work. Look here, we might say,
the angels' robes are not undercut, or we are looking at this in the wrong
light, and therefore there is no contrast, or these surfaces are continuous
and therefore this composition is based on the interrelationships of surfaces.
These technical and critical questions would have to be sorted out, and
the conclusion of the argument might have to be adjusted accordingly.
But if such problems might arise (and do arise all the time), what Baxandall
calls "inferential criticism" proceeds by assuming that a work of art is in
fundamental respects a product of deliberate agency, by describing the
23. Walter Pater, The Renaissance:Studiesin Art and Poetry,ed. Kenneth Clark (London
and Glasgow, 1961), p. 123.
396
David Summers
"work" (not a neutral term in this context) in line with that assumption,
then asking why such a thing might have been done. In the case of
Donatello, we might try to explain the general conclusion of the description,
that his relief is based on the "principlesof chiaroscuro," by trying to find
evidence outside the work for such an implicit course of action. We would
quickly ascertain that Donatello really only left his sculpture to speak for
itself, but that focus on light and dark as the elements of representation
is to be found in early fifteenth-century Florentine writing about painting,
and that Donatello's "pictorialrelief" (as every textbook calls it) considerably
antedated both the discussion and the realization of similar optical effects
in painting. We might, in short, come to a provisional but defensible
understanding of why Donatello's relief might have been given the appearance it has. And we might go a step further. If we compare Donatello's
sculpture to that of others, then we begin to understand how novel his
relief style was, and if we pursue the question of why and how, for what
purposes and for whom it came to be desirable in the late Middle Ages
and the Renaissance to make such optical art, then we may become
involved in very complex and basic historical questions indeed. The explanation of its evident optical character might prove to be consistent
with the values given to it by its novelty and by its manifest virtuosity,
values that would continue to inform the art of the modern era at the
beginning of which Donatello stood.
Inferential criticism points partly in the direction of the sort of proximity to the work of art familiar in connoisseurship and conservation.
The same characterization of material, facture, and quality of facture
used to establish the historical relations of the work might also be used
to attribute it to Donatello. The technical studies necessary to conservation
may show the making of the work of art-its own internal historywith a kind of stratigraphic clarity not otherwise evident. Such matters
are of course not cut and dried, but still works of art are in many cases
as distinguishable technically as they are "stylistically" (which is to say
that certain techniques and operations underlie certain appearances;
Riegl's opticality develops together with the ever more prevalent use of
the sculptor's drill). The pigments used in a painting are in themselves
linked to local geology, botany, or patterns of commerce; they are products
of extracting, gathering, burning, and precipitation. Materials themselves
are also of relative status and meaning, as are jade, gold, ultramarine,
and bronze.
Before turning to issues of material and facture, I would like to
examine further my major theme, the notion of form. In Western philosophy the distinction between "form" and "matter" has always been a
deeply and simply gendered one, and this durable and pervasive opposition,
rooted in equally durable and pervasive patriarchal social institutions,
has had the deepest formative consequences for our notions of artistic
making, of imagination ("conception"), and, in its latter-day form, of
CriticalInquiry
Winter 1989
397
"creation." According to this view, form has always been an active, "male"
principle opposed to passive, "female" matter, which was of course considered necessary (or a necessary evil) but was also considered lower than
form and relatively nonexistent.24 The prime example of the relation
between form and matter was always art, usually sculpture. Bronze (matter)
may be poured into any shape, and the shape (form) is determined by
the imagination of the craftsman. The bronze may become any form
whatever, as the craftsman wishes.25 In real historical terms it is hard to
imagine what might correspond to such passive "matter," and yet the
history of art as the history of imagination tends to be written as the
history of imagined forms corresponding to this infinitely malleable stuff.
If we think of works of art in terms of their facture as I have begun
to suggest, that is, if we think of them as indexes of all the purposeful
processes of their making, most of them were clearly collaborative efforts.26
If we think of a statue of the pharaoh simply as an expression of "the
genius of the individual artist" or of the "Egyptian imagination," then
we may be little concerned with the stone "formed" in making it, since
that form (except perhaps as a "block" in its own right) is incidental in
the terms of the argument. But the stone was quarried, that is, cut
squared from the earth, and moved with great expense of labor before
being made into an image. Both the power to command stone to be
quarried and moved and the power to command skilled craftsmen to
fashion it in the pharaoh's image as pharaoh are visible in the work, not
in the sense that the forms of the work express meanings to us, but in
the sense that the work was squared, is of hard stone, is closely similar
to the images of other pharaohs, and those features can be indicated
and explained. They are explained by a process of "contextualization,"
that is, by the explanation of why those people then and there did what
they evidently did do. This example is sufficient to suggest that fairly
obvious characteristics of works of art may-one might rather say mustlead to more or less specific social historical understanding.
24. Aristotle, in Physics 192a, called matter a "mother" of what comes to be, "a joint
cause, with the form.... The truth is that what desires the form is matter, as the female
desires the male" (The Basic Worksof Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon [New York, 1941], p.
235). Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York, 1986), pp. 205-11, provides a
discussion of the pervasive form-matter distinction in Aristotle's philosophy.
25. Aristotle, Metaphysics,1032a- 1038b.
26. On such "actor-orientation," see "LAH," p. 463, where Baxandall cites Clifford
Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," The Interpretation
of Cultures:SelectedEssays (New York, 1973), pp. 3-30. Baxandall's ideas seem to me to be
an adaptation of Geertz's (and finally Gilbert Ryle's) notion of "thick description," in which
case other kinds of description, the physical state of the work, personal and metaphorical
language, would drop into the category of the "thin." "The thing to ask ... is not what
... ontological status is. It is the same as that of rocks on the one hand and dreams on
the other-they are things of this world. The thing to ask is what their import is: what it
is, ridicule or challenge, irony or anger, snobbery or pride, that, in their occurrence and
through their agency, is getting said" (Geertz, The Interpretationof Cultures, p. 10).
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David Summers
To take another example, the language centering around facture

points in various ways to attitudes toward the work of art as work. In
the Italian Renaissance the rise of naturalism was accompanied by the
rise of a variant of the idea that mental and imaginative work is higher
than manual work, and realization of such "creation" (it was in the Renaissance that this metaphor first appeared) was increasingly praised in
terms of aristocratic (as opposed to simply aesthetic) virtues of grazia,
maniera, leggierezza di mano. This happened at the same time that the
artist, rather than simply improving in social standing, came to be regarded
as a kind of aristocrat by election, a status fundamental to the modern
myth of the artist and to the modern notions of selfhood and fulfillment
for which this myth is the paradigm. It is consequently again of great
historical significance that such ideals had very much to do with the
characteristic appearance of a great many works of art in the Renaissance,
and comparable connections could no doubt be made for the art of other
periods as well. We should not avoid the effort necessary to understand
these terms simply because we consider "ideas" to be "idealist." Ideas,
after all, are culturally and traditionally specific and are bound to equally
specific modes of action, some of which are the fashioning of works of
art in certain ways.
Facture as I have defined it provides a principle of continuity, which
has been an important function of the idea of style. The history of art
as the history of imagination tends to neglect the simple fact that art is
always taught. This fact is neglected because the history of imagination
is concerned first of all with novelty, and schools are by definition places
where the simply and obviously traditional is passed from one generation
to another. If we want to explain continuity as well as change (both of
which history seems to me to demand), then such a basic element as the
teaching of art can hardly be overlooked. It is as apprentice or student
that procedures and values are learned that will shape the artist, even if
that shaping means an attempt to overthrow everything that is learned.
I say "procedures and values" because the practical, pedagogical language
of art must be assumed to be a central point at which the values of a
society at large come to bear on making, and shape it in specific ways,
before an artist has ever had a commission, before a traditional theme
has ever been interpreted. It is important to insist on such simple principles
of stylistic continuity because it is easy to find ourselves positing collective
spirits to fill the same gap.
As noted in passing, we do not usually think of any history as either
absolutely continuous or discontinuous, and one of the problems to be
solved is the devising of a way of talking about it as both. This may be
done by rejecting the idea of absolute time (as Benjamin wished to do),
without, however, replacing it by its absolute opposite, discontinuity.
There is also the alternative of the more Kublerian notion of "shapes of
time," of time fundamentally defined by series of related artifacts or
Critical Inquiry
Winter 1989
399
distinguishable features of artifacts, without the presupposition of an

underlying and homogenizing duration.27 This seems to me to avoid the
problem of historicism as both Benjamin and Gombrich have defined
and criticized it. In order to develop this argument it is necessary to
return yet again to analyze the Aristotelian notion of form. In Aristotle,
as we have seen, form is at least that by which a kind of thing is recognized.
Thus, because the soul takes the form of things from the sensation of
them, it is possible to experience other things as things of the same kind.
In seeing apples we apprehend the form "apple"and are able subsequently
to fit this template to other apples. Form in this sense became closely
identified with essence, nature, or definition. Even if we do not think of
classes in such absolute terms (the biological notion of species having
undergone significant change since Aristotle), it is useful to draw a distinction between class and series. Series clearly belong to art rather than
nature (which Aristotle habitually compared or even identified) and are
always culturally specific in the first instance (that is, comparable patterns
may be found in different cultures, but they must be shown to be comparable rather than simply assumed to be related to some common higher
term). Series are defined by the resemblance of their members and by
the diachronic relations of members. This distinction between class and
series has extremely important implications. If we think of the class of
painting then we are inevitably pushed in essentialist directions, toward
ideas of painting as such according to which many kinds of things may
be said to be painting: European canvases, Maya murals, Chinese scrolls.
If we think of the same things as series, however, we are urged in other
directions, toward definition in terms of culturally specific usages and
language, and the term "painting" becomes a provisional means of
grouping, a point from which we can come to understand that the "painting" of other cultures is not just painting as we understand it.
The members of series are not formal in the sense rejected above,
although there may be series of forms in a more usual sense of the word.
Series, although by definition diachronic, may not be developmental or
progressive (although they also may be), and the idea is sufficiently broad
to cover all cultural forms, language, and genres of literature as well as
tools, motifs, and formats. Although some series may be simple repliare more or less complex
cations-of plain bowls, for example-most
combinations of other series.
This brings us back to Gombrich's essay on the Madonna della Sedia,
in which he began to define a kind of unity more complex and more
stratified than formal order, which he calls "polycentric order" ("M, p.
77). This is an awkward term, but it introduces a principle that may be
developed in very useful ways. According to this idea, the work of art is
27. See George Kubler, The Shape of Time:Remarkson the Historyof Things (New Haven,
Conn., 1962).
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David Summers
to be understood as doing a number of things at once, things that may

be in themselves quite disparate. Format, theme, medium, light, dark,
and color, certain notions of what art is or ought to be, understandings
of what institutional purposes art serves, of how it is made and soldall of these bear on the making of a work. All of them also have complex
historical, and not justformal historical, affiliations. We may briefly consider
the example of format. In general, it may be stated that all formats are
conventional in that they come into existence as a result of historically
determinate social practices to which they are shaped.28 This has important
implications. A new format may be a significant artistic invention in the
first instance, but it is neverjust that, and formats are always subordinate
to broader purposes. Format thus in most cases comes to hand as a
problem demanding resolution, together with an open-ended number
of other elements and conditions, some readily apparent, others not.
As it bears on the practice of art historical interpretation, the idea
of polycentric order implies both analysis and synthesis. It implies analysis
because it requires that any work be resolved into some of the series to
which it is seen to belong. But after such seriation is completed, it is also
necessary to reevaluate and characterize the work as a performance in
its place and time, as a unique transformation of its precedent elements
at the new level of understanding achieved by analysis. This higher level
of synthesis, a view of the work through a glass of historical analysis, is
inescapably critical, involving a kind of judgment different from that
involved in seriation, its justifications and explanation.
The interpretation of works of art thus proceeds from initial interest
through analysis to a new synthesis that in its turn implicitly or explicitly
relates works to some characterization of the broader history to which
they belong. The analytical phase-central to my mind to the kind of
understanding we call historical-entails a certain understanding of intention. The reclamation of intention cannot be understood to be the
reclamation of a putative subjective concept existing in the imagination
of any artist before any work of art was made (an essentialist idea clearly
related to the usual allegorical expectations of interpretation discussed
above); rather what is being reclaimed in a more or less incomplete way
28. When we say that format is conventional, we mean that many formats are possible
or that many exist in many times and places. This may conceal a formalist assumption,
namely that "painting" is being made on supports of different shapes and sizes in different
times and places, and that these shapes and sizes are "conventional" or "arbitrary"because
they are formally interchangeable or are all variants of a higher absolute format, the
"picture plane." "Arbitrariness" raises the metaphor of language, which in turn brings with
it the principle of the arbitrariness of the signifier. This metaphor, however, will not do,
and actually points to important differences between words and images. Formats are not
radically arbitrary; rather they are shaped to culturally specific circumstances and practices,
to which their formal definition--their characteristic shape-is subject. See Summers,
"Conventions in the History of Art," New LiteraryHistory 13 (Autumn 1981): 103-25.
CriticalInquiry
Winter 1989
401
by historical means is an understanding of what any work might have

meant in the situation in which it was made. This can only be done by
careful and arguable historical seriation and reconstruction. This reconto analysis as discussed above-is finally based
struction-consequent
on a functionalist understanding of works of art according to which
"meaning" is necessarily a much more open-ended issue.29 One must
caricature the idea of intention in order to suppose that concern with it
closes off possibilities of interpretation. On the contrary, I would argue
that the outright rejection of intention closes off innumerable paths of
historical reconstruction and therefore of art historical interpretation,
and that concern with intention as I have defined it is indispensable to
the more or less complex contextualization we do all the time when we
actually do art history. If we read contemporaries writing about some
Renaissance art as "difficult," this may mean little to us, or might easily
be skewed into some category of our own understanding. But when we
begin to establish what it meant to write in this way in the Renaissance,
we not only find ourselves looking at Renaissance art differently, we also
find ourselves thinking about how art worked in Renaissance society in
new ways, or about how art works in society in general in new ways, ways
that simply would not have been thinkable without the effort to establish
what might have been "meant" by a word and the features of works of
art to which it referred.
It was argued earlier that the opposition of form and content has
the bad effect of pushing everything that might be regarded as the vehicle
of content in the direction of the nonconventional and therefore of the
historically unreconstructable. I wish now to examine this idea more
carefully in the example of Panofsky's remarks on iconography. In his
later writing-and especially in the very influential introductions to Studies
in Iconologyand Meaning in the VisualArts, which have had such an impact
on American art history--Panofsky presents a streamlined scheme opposing form and content.30 He ridicules the strong formalist idea that
works of art may be understood in any very important way by just looking
at them and insists on the indispensability to art historical interpretation
of the reconstruction of conventional meaning that has become established
as the art historical technique of iconography. The weight Panofsky gives
to "content" and his corresponding dismissal of "form" has the effect of
severely circumscribing form, making it the medium of content. The
more closely form is hemmed in, however, the more anomalous the split
between form and content becomes. Panofsky recognized that we could
not just "see" even the simplest subject matter, that the "practicalexperience"
29. See Summers, "Intentions in the History of Art," pp. 305-21.
30. See Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Garden City,
N.Y., 1955), and Studies in Iconology:Humanistic Themesin the Art of the Renaissance (New
York and Evanston, Ill., 1962).
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David Summers
necessary for "pre-iconographicaldescription"(our recognition that an Annunciation, before we know it is an Annunciation,is a winged man alighting
in the room of a reading woman) has to be supplemented by the "controlling
principle" of the "history of style," which is "insight into the manner in
which, under varying historical conditions, objectsand eventswere expressed
byforms."3'Obviously this opens up a whole system of possibilities covered
neither by iconography nor by the definition of form as the neutral
substratum of recognizable images. What it suggests is that, like themes,
the means of representation (as these elements of the "history of style"
might be called) are themselves members of series; they are not just
formal series but are culturally specific configurations changing at rates
different from those of iconographic motifs. This in turn suggests some
of Panofsky's own earlier essays, "The History of the Theory of Human
Proportions as a Reflection of the History of Styles," or "Perspective as
Symbolic Form," where basic organizing devices, rather than being consigned to the realm of noncontent, are treated as historical subjects in
their own right, as subjects for historical explanation."2
Let us consider the further example of modeling. Modeling is something that falls into the category of form, that is, into the category of the
arbitrary, the configurations of which are determined by the style and
judgment of the artist. But as Gombrich has pointed out in several places,
modeling does not appear in the history of art with the kind of randomness
such an explanation might lead us to expect. The overwhelming majority
of examples of modeling are in Western art, and in certain periods of
Western art, classical antiquity and the naturalistic and neoclassical styles
begun in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance.33 If we consider
what modeling is and does, then it becomes much more than one of the
ways in which content happens to get presented. Modeling may be defined
as the systematic transition from light to dark or from one hue to another
(usually the former) within a shape. When it is modeled, a shape becomes
an apparent three-dimensional form, and the area surrounding the shape
becomes a virtual space. Modeling is thus an integral part of the Western
project of the imitation of appearances of physical things, but it is a part
the examination of which adds a rich dimension of meaning to the more
general notion of mimesis. Modeling not only puts a form in space, it
places it in light and in implicit relation to a viewer. Moreover, it puts
the language of painting in relation to the psychology of perception and
to the science of optics, both of which began at about the same time and
in the same place as modeling began in painting. (Such connections only
31. Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, pp. 40-41, and Studies in Iconology,p. 15.
32. See Panofsky, "The History of the Theory of Human Proportions as a Reflection
of the History of Styles," Meaning in the Visual Arts, pp. 55-107, and "Die Perspektive als
'Symbolische Form,' " V6rtrageder BibliothekWarburg4 (1924-25): 258-330.
33. See the introduction to Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism
and the Rise of Aesthetics(Cambridge, 1987), pp. 1-31, for a fuller treatment of this issue.
Critical Inquiry
Winter 1989
403
seem farfetched if the cultural specificity of modeling itself is ignored

or the importance of this specificity underestimated.)
I do not wish to pursue these arguments beyond what is necessary
to make the point that characteristics of works of art so obvious as hardly
to seem worthy of interpretation are in fact of primary historical importance, and that much of their apparent historical insignificance owes to
their absorption and homogenization under the category of form. If
"formal structures" are seen as culturally specific configurations, then it
becomes possible to plot changes in meaning that unquestionably bear
on questions of change and continuity among series of art objects and
at the same time relate them to other contexts. When it appeared again
in the late Middle Ages, modeling, which entailed the opticality of painting,
involved from the start the notion of painting as made up of "natural
signs" and therefore functioned as a kind of universal language, a major
theme in the discussion of painting to the present day. Chiaroscuro is of
course a variant of modeling, and in that form modeling was involved
in a new conception of pictorial organization and in the whole question
of the rhetorical power and use of images. This discussion provides a
context of significance for the tradition of chiaroscuro in painting from
Leonardo and Caravaggio to Courbet, Manet, and the end of tonal painting.
The context of significance is not simply "formal" because chiaroscuro
always had concrete historical affiliations. Some of these affiliations are
in social history, some in intellectual history, some in the history of science
(which is not to say that these histories can be entirely separated). Chiaroscuro, which presupposes the priority of value to hue (a priority preserved
in the techniques of tonal painting itself), made painting subject to the
revisions of the definition of color that finally contributed to the transformation of European painting at the end of the nineteenth century.
Color itself is another "formal element" with deep culturally specific
meanings. The association of color with "accident"and with the superficial
and feminine is an important habit of Western thought with all kinds of
ramifications (in rhetoric, for example) from Plato through the critical
reaction to impressionism and beyond. When Georges Braque remarked
that he began to put color in his synthetic cubist paintings when he
realized that color was a substance, his simple statement was as opposed
to this long tradition of the significance of color as his painting was a
departure from the painting of the whole earlier neoclassical tradition.
And this simple remark presupposes a basic change in the understanding
of the significance of the art of painting, and points forward to a period
in which painting would explore new and different regions of meaning.
I would finally like to touch on two questions I feel are raised by

the arguments I have made. Both of these questions demand studies of
their own, but it will still be useful to indicate what kind of solutions
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David Summers
might be given to them. The first of these questions concerns the relation
of the analysis and reconstruction I have described to other kinds of
interpretation. The position I am trying to set out might be summarized
to say that it is necessary to understand as best we can what was meant
in order to try to figure out what was not meant in any specific instance,
to understand the lines in order to read between them. I have been
concerned with the problem of description and its relation to the historical
reconstruction of what was meant, or what might have been meant, but
the further question of what more is revealed in the actual combination
of meaningful elements in any work of art points to other interpretive
measures.
The works from which we begin are particular, and we begin to try
to understand them by considering them aesthetically in the sense of
assessing them precisely in their particularity. When we analyze them by
placing their constituent parts in series, that is, by trying to establish
what they might have meant, we necessarily treat them both partially
and in general. Although such seriation may be highly significant in itself
(we might write the history of altarpieces, perspective, the theme of
Judith and Holofernes, the trade in paintings), none of these is sufficient
for the historical interpretation of the works from which we began. As
mentioned above, we must go beyond analysis and make synthetic judgments. Thesejudgments are double in the sense that they are ourjudgments
and that they are also judgments about the character of the particular
synthesis of elements in the work. They are, in other words, judgments
about the historicalparticularity of the work that elucidate our experience
of the work as it stands before us, usually in spaces (museum spaces)
which, as machines for formalist looking, are fundamentally incompatible
with the kind of historical imagination I am trying to describe. Analysis
and reconstruction, which bring the work into view as historical, that is,
which contextualize it in any number of possible dimensions, thus heighten
both the past and present particularity of the work. Since works of art
are almost always decontextualized, either because they have been removed
from their original spaces of use or because we who are writing their
history do not belong to the spaces and times for which they were made,
this historical particularity is always more or less imaginary (thoseother
spaces of use, times, purposes, audiences). This imaginary particularity
informs our understanding of the work, that is, it changes our judgment
of it in the present. This brings us back to the work as it stands before
us. The synthesis consequent to analysis is the historian's judgment,
shaped by the initial judgment of the work, which the new judgment
then modifies. These judgments should not be regarded merely as supplements to the inherent limitations of analysis and reconstruction; rather
they are integral with the particularity of the work to be explained.
contribute
take that example-may
Psychoanalytic interpretation-to
significantly to the explanation of the particular character of a work of
Critical Inquiry
Winter 1989
405
art as it stands and to the understanding of specific ways in which meaningful elements were treated or related when it was made. Such interpretation, like the synthesis of the historically particular work in imagination, on which it also depends, is informed by reconstruction but is
finally rooted in the specific relation between interpreter and work.
As for social and economic interpretation, it seems to me that much
might be accomplished simply by taking seriously material and facture
and the various contexts of production and use to which they point,
rather than trying to construe "style" in a way that links it to social or
economic circumstances, which is to my mind clearly an old idealist habit
turned to new purposes.
The second issue I wish to raise briefly is that of uniformities among
works of art in unrelated cultures. Formalism involved interpretive procedures that assumed uniformities and then explained them. But if formalism is rejected and all art is assumed to be bound to different contexts,
how are formal uniformities to be explained? How, for example, are we
to account for the practical universality of the appearance of hierarchical
images based on bilateral symmetry and other kinds of planar order? I
believe such uniformities arise because images are always embodied and
share real space with those who see and use them. This real space (as
opposed to the virtual space we see in the kinds of images to which we
are most accustomed) may be constructed in ways that exploit the significant
values of our own spatiality. The meaning of some images is stated more
in these terms, others less. This real spatiality means that what we call
art possesses kinds of significance irreducibly different from the significance
of texts. Works of art must be understood in terms of the real spatial
conditions of presentation that assume any number of conventional forms,
that is, any number of culturally specific forms.34
Art historians seldom examine the implications of their own habits
of interpretation, preferring instead to limit themselves to the application
of these professional habits to individual problems or to borrow "approaches" from other more self-critical fields. In this essay I have tried,
by examining some of the major categories of the history of art as it has
been discussed in this century, not only to revise old patterns of description
and inference but also to argue against all kinds of interpretation I have
called allegorical and against both idealism and materialism as sufficient
principles of art historical explanation. Such nonmetaphysical art history,
everywhere intersecting with other kinds of history but reducible to none
of them, implies that art itself, rather than being an inclusive (or exclusive)
category is defined by the historyof art, by all that which we call art has
done. It also implies a future potential history of art that is all the things
34. See Summers, "The 'Visual Arts' and the Problem of Art Historical Description,"
ArtJournal 42 (Winter 1982): 301-10; Summers, "This Is Not a Sign: Some Remarks on
Art and Semiotics," Art Criticism3 (1986): 30-45; and Schapiro, "On Some Problems in
the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs," Semiotica 1 (1969): 236.
406
David Summers
that what might be called art might do. I have also tried to argue for a
kind of historical discourse based on the assumption that any work of
art was made by people in real circumstances and that in those circimstances
it was a meaningful thing to have done. Such an assumption is consistent
with the history of the changing uses to which works of art are put after
they are first made. Both the meanings art had and the meanings it has
subsequent to its making are analyzable and reconstructable (which is
not to say recoverable) by the same means. Beneath the level of aesthetic
characterization of the whole work a high degree of unanimity about
aspects of works that may seem unimportant is possible and at this same
level much fundamentally significant history is possible. At the same
time, these arguments mean that art history will always be at least explicitly
critical because both analysis and synthesis involve judgments about the
work at hand. But it is perhaps most important to insist on the possibility
and the necessity of preserving the ostensive and consensual discourse,
the reconstructive discourse, by means of which richer contextualization
and therefore richer historical criticism are possible.

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"Form," Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art Historical Description

Author(s): David Summers

"Form," Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics,

It has seemed to me for some time that a discussion should be begun

All rights reserved.

1. MichaelPodro, TheCriticalHistoriansof Art (New Haven, Conn., 1982), p. 61.

David Summers is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of the History

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pictures.2 Two conclusions, one negative, the other positive, may be

it gave to the idea of art. Form came to be regarded as the universal

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It will be useful to consider briefly how the ideas surrounding "form"

structures of perception standing between sensation and thought. This

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means in the simple sense that, as the metaphorical language of usual

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whole configurations. The criterion of such unity seems too inclusive

discriminations lead to the relatively more "objective" levels of systematic

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Jr., and M. C. Beardsley is, of course, a work of literature) is, or should

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providing a kind of transcendental thread through the complexity of

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of the distinction between the synchronic and the diachronic (which

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characterization of this continuity given by earlier formalist writers.

be seen most sharply"; it "inflects the new painting's account of seeing in

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that the second category, metaphorical characterization, is inexhaustible,

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To take another example, the language centering around facture

distinguishable features of artifacts, without the presupposition of an

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to be understood as doing a number of things at once, things that may

by historical means is an understanding of what any work might have

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seem farfetched if the cultural specificity of modeling itself is ignored

I would finally like to touch on two questions I feel are raised by

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