16 The New York Review
Who Decides What’s Beautiful?
Susan Tallman
A History of Art History
by Christopher S. Wood.
Princeton University Press,
461 pp., $35.
The Barbarian Invasions :
A Genealogy of the History of Art
by Éric Michaud, translated
from the French by Nicholas Huckle.
MIT Press, 270 pp., $35.
In recent months dozens of artworks
have been defaced, damaged, or
pushed into the drink during the pro-
tests initially set off by the murder of
George Floyd. Directed at first toward
monuments to the Confederacy, the
rage expanded to encompass a swath
of imperialist or genocidal Europeans,
from Christopher Columbus to Juni-
pero Serra. The response of local au-
thorities has frequently been pragmatic
and accommodating. The response of
the Trump administration has been
a bellicose (and perhaps unconstitu-
tional) executive order and aggressive
intimidation of those who would “im-
pede the purpose or function of the
MMS” (monuments, memorials, stat-
ues). The response of the art historical
establishment—beyond a flurry of now
standard expressions of solidarity with
Black Lives Matter—has been almost
inaudible.
This might seem strange, given that
art history serves to preserve and elu-
cidate art objects, and that neither
museum people nor academics are
averse to a good public scrap. Where is
the fury that greeted, for example, the
Taliban’s destruction of the Bamyan
Buddhas in 2001? Of course, there is
a world of difference between Bamyan
and Birmingham—to begin with, most
of the “impeded” statues are being
moved indoors, not blown up. They are
also, from an art historical standpoint,
fairly expendable. While the Buddhas
were ancient, colossal, aesthetically
sophisticated masterpieces, the mon-
uments that spread like a rash across
the South at the turn of the last century
were largely undistinguished and some-
times mail- ordered from factories like
the Monumental Bronze Company in
Connecticut, which supplied the same
standing soldier to towns on both sides
of the Mason- Dixon Line, changing
only the engraving on the belt buckle.
Even works by name- brand artists,
such as Providence’s emphatic Colum-
bus by Frédéric Bartholdi (of Statue of
Liberty fame), belong to a Beaux- Arts
costume- drama mode of sculpture that
leaves most contemporary art histori-
ans cold.
For the people who erected them
and for those who continue to vener-
ate them, the message of these statues
is delivered by whom they represent,
not how they do that representing. Art
history, on the other hand, is all about
the how—about style and form and the
shaping of perceptions beyond obvious
subject matter. Divorcing content from
presentation is what art history does.
The social consequences of this way
of thinking are at the heart of two re-
cent books: Christopher Wood’s A His-
tory of Art History and Éric Michaud’s
The Barbarian Invasions: A Geneal-
ogy of the History of Art (originally
published in French in 2015). Neither is
a history of art; what concerns the au-
thors are the flurries of ideas and value
systems that blow around and settle on
art in the Western world. (Wood’s oc-
casional nods to non- Westerners such
as Dong Qichang, 1555–1636, and Dust
Muhammad, active circa 1510–1564,
remind us that Europeans were not the
only or the first people to write histo-
ries of art.) Wood’s ambitious survey
whisks us through centuries of multiva-
lent theorizing and advocating by art-
ists, poets, connoisseurs, philosophers,
and, eventually, people calling them-
selves “art historians.” Michaud’s more
focused volume is an exposé of how
certain tools, originally developed to
distinguish one batch of European art
from another, have lent themselves to
unhelpful and sometimes catastrophic
visions of “race.”There is an old saw that if you want
to sound smart in the social sciences or
humanities, just ask, “But isn’t it differ-
ent in the south?,” because it’s always
different in the south, whether the sub-
ject is global economy or religious affil-
iation in the Netherlands. The gambit
works not just because human behavior
differs from place to place, but because
accounts of behavior assume a default,
a geographic norm against which other
ways of being are identified by devia-
tion. The default gets taught first, the
deviations later.
Actually, it’s not always different in
the south. In art history, it’s different in
the north, thanks to the tenacious leg-
acy of what happened in Southern Eu-
rope a thousand years after the fall of
Rome. We all know about the Renais-
sance: heroic Italian artists leading Eu-
rope out of smoky medieval piety and
crude credulousness into the light of
rational space and human- interest sto-ries. We know this tale so well because
writers at the time perceived the art
being made around them as evidence of
change—there was a before that looked
one way, and an after that looked differ-
ent, better. Most of the predecessors of
the Tuscan painter Giotto (1267–1337)
had toiled anonymously, copying im-
ages of Christ and the Virgin putatively
painted by Saint Paul. But Giotto inno-
vated, and it made him famous. Dante
gave him a shout- out in the Purgatorio,
and two centuries later Giorgio Vasari
wrote in The Lives of the Most Eminent
Painters, Sculptors, and Architects that
Giotto had “alone succeeded in resus-
citating art, and restoring her to a path
that may be called the true one.”
This stress on resuscitating and re-
storing affirms the “true” path as the
old, long- lost road of Greco- Roman
Classicism. The fall of Rome, com-
monly blamed on barbarians from the
north, had meant the end of art, in the
view of Vasari and his peers. Nothing
made in the intervening centuries—not
the enormous cathedrals, gilded icons,
illuminated manuscripts, intricately
carved saints or crucifixes—counted.
Wood begins his account in the year
800, not because people were writing
art history then—they weren’t—but
in order to explain Christian Europe’s
long aversion to the lovely pagan arti-
facts littering its backyard: it was only
in the late Middle Ages, when Christi-
anity was finally secure in its hegemony,
that it could adopt a stance of “hate
the sin, love the sinner,” or at least her
statue. Mary could start to look like
Demeter. Severing pagan forms from
pagan content was the critical maneu-
ver that made Renaissance art—and all
that followed from it—possible.
Va sa r i’s Lives is celebrated as the
start of European art historical writ-
ing, but the text reads less like historythan like a collection of unusually
well- researched Yelp reviews—you
learn who is good at what, in what loca-
tions, and which neighborhood is best
overall. (Spoiler alert: it’s Florence.)
Vasari’s descriptions of artworks are
cursory, his analysis almost nonex-
istent. But he established a canon—
Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo,
et al.—and through it a sense of what
makes good art: naturalism (making
things look like real life) and disegno,
a principle that Wood neatly defines as
“the correct ratio between the real and
the true.”
Vasari acknowledged some art made
on the other side of the Alps: Jan van
Eyck got a pat on the head for invent-
ing oil painting, rather in the manner
of an offscreen technical- achievement
Oscar,^1 and Albrecht Dürer moved
Vasari to muse on the greatness that
might have been attained if only Dürer
“had been a native of Tuscany instead
of Flanders [sic].” The canon was
clearly Italian.
By the seventeenth century, however,
writers outside Italy were writing local
equivalents of the Lives, such as Karel
van Mander’s Schilder- Boeck (1604)
and Joachim von Sandrart’s Te u t s c h e
Academie (1675–1679). In France,
Roger de Piles sought to cultivate the
taste and ambition of native- born art-
ists in hopes they might come to rival
the Italians. He instructed readers in
what was good and bad, and made a
new case for the looser, more expres-
sive manner of painters like Rubens or
Rembrandt. But the necessity of learn-
ing from ancient Rome and Greece re-
mained axiomatic. Five hundred years
on, this Alpine divide still burrows
deep into our language, manifest in theWillem van Haecht: Apelles Painting Campaspe, circa 1630Mauritshuis, The Hague(^1) We now know that oil painting pre-
dated Jan van Eyck.