conditions, or ascribing a value to it on that basis.
And yet even this much appeal to “external” factors is often avoided. Until recently it was not
customary in books like this. That is because the historiography of art in the West has long been dominated
by a view of art that arose in the wake of the social emancipation (or, perhaps, the social abandonment) of
the artist in the nineteenth century. The concept of “the emancipated and abandoned artist,” the artist-loner,
is thus the product of nineteenth-century aesthetics—in a word, of Romanticism. Since the nineteenth
century it has been, and still often is, the custom to view art romantically, which means viewing it as
being autonomous. An autonomous entity is one that follows an independent course and a self-determined
one. To regard art as autonomous is to regard its history as being determined solely by those who produce
it.
Yet the “autonomist” position, as already implied, was itself called forth by social and economic
conditions. It does a poor job of explaining the work even of its own adherents, let alone that of much
earlier artists who functioned in harmony with their society (indeed, at the very top of it) at a time when
all art served a well-defined social purpose. To regard the art of the troubadours or the Meistersinger—
however it may still delight or move us, and however we may still treasure it—as if it were no different
from the autonomous output of the emancipated and abandoned artists of our own time, and therefore
subject to similar “laws of evolution,” is the very height of anachronism.
That may seem obvious enough, but the view of history that arises from that basic anachronism is still
the prevailing one. The only model of change the autonomist view of art history can recognize is strictly
linear stylistic evolution, often described using biological or otherwise “organic” metaphors (styles being
born, reaching maturity, declining, dying). Art history is viewed as a procession of styles in a single file,
along which different artists occupy positions either ahead or behind one another, depending on the style
they employ.
From such a vantage point an artist’s style defines the artist in essential terms. (Recall the old French
saying, Le style, c’est l’homme—“the style is the man.”) Depending on his or her style, an artist is judged
either “advanced” (“forward-looking,” “progressive”) or “regressive” (“backward-looking,”
“conservative”). To make such a judgment, of course, is unwittingly to turn style into politics, for politics
is the primary point of reference for terms like “progressive” or “conservative.” And these terms, whether
in politics or in style-politics, are never value-free, though the valuation will vary depending on the
evaluator’s political outlook.
In any case, style-politics engendered by autonomist esthetics, paradoxically enough, turns out to be an
especially deterministic view of history. It is from that standpoint, especially when concepts of style are
allowed to congeal into hard-and-fast categories of “period style” (“medieval,” “Renaissance”), that one
is most apt to regard artists and whole artistic movements as “ahead of their time” or as “lagging behind”
it. These are invidious judgments, and (except as historical events in their own right) irrelevant to history.
Everything possible will be done in this book to avoid them.
Which, alas, makes our story even harder to tell, since it militates against the construction of a single
linear narrative. If all times are plural even within a single ostensible tradition (just think of the European
scene in the twelfth century, when sacred chants and Latin versus and courtly song in three vernaculars
were all being composed side by side, not to mention the massive, unprecedented cultivation of written
polyphony that will be the subject of the next chapter), then so are all histories. Our story will have to
keep moving back and forth, tracing beginnings and endings, showing not only how beginnings lead to
endings, but also how endings lead to beginnings. Having in this chapter traced one strand—or rather, one
complex of strands—from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries (with many glances backward as far as
antiquity and forward as far as the present), we will now return to square one and trace another.