The Books That Shaped Art History: review

‘O Lord, how bored I am with it!’ cried Roger Fry as he pored over the draft of his book on Cézanne. ‘It seems to me poor formless stuff and I should like to begin it all over again’. Good on Virginia Woolf for including this episode in her biography of the art historian. Scholars spend so much time analysing the great critics’ works that they easily forget the doubts which bred them, as The Books That Shaped Art History shows.

Art historians find it difficult to dodge the lofty lineage of earlier scholarship. As a case in point, here I find myself reviewing a book of 16 reviews of books which shaped art history in the 20th century. Among the 16 art historian authors of Shone and Stonard’s volume are the professors who imparted to me the knowledge they took from the movers and shakers of 20th-criticism, the Gombrich and Greenberg to Alpers and Krauss of this book’s subtitle.

The Books That Shaped Art History hammers home that point with subtle force: Art History is little else than received wisdom. It’s as much about theorizing and re-theorising other theorists’ theories about art, these days, as it is about looking at pictures.

It wasn’t always this way. As Paul Hills says in this volume of Michael Baxandall’s book, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (1972), ‘Unlike the practice that has become dominant in subsequent decades, there is no proliferation of footnotes, no scholarly namedropping, no parading of scholarly allegiances’.

The books of Roger Fry, Bernard Berenson, Kenneth Clark, E.H. Gombrich, and all the other famous art historians discussed in this collection of essays certainly shaped Art History today, but one can’t help thinking that in doing so they might also have zapped it of its own voice.

In a point Courtauld Professor Susie Nash puts particularly well in her essay on German scholar Erwin Panofsky, for 20th-century criticism to be great it didn’t always have to be right.

Many of his arguments were ill-conceived, some of them glaringly so, since he was frequently hindered from accessing primary material. But it was Panofsky’s vibrant, big-guns approach to his discipline that makes his work so engaging, and therefore so enduringly important. Above all, what continues to make Panofsky’s ‘big Flemish book’, Early Netherlandish Painting (1953) such a fun read is the unexpectedness of the allusions; Hans Memling, perhaps best known for his exquisite altarpieces, is compared to Mendelssohn and characterised as ‘the very model of a major minor master’, a formula as Nash notes he borrowed from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance.

Panofsky was equally unabashed (one feels he did so consciously) about allowing contemporary politics to infiltrate his descriptions of art. So Flanders and Italy were dubbed the ‘Great Powers’ of European painting. All of which appeals as much to the browsing reader today as it did to the post-War American audience that first experienced Panofsky’s book as a series of lectures at Harvard.

In general, in fact, the art historians who have found a worthy place in Shone and Stonard’s volume were all ambitious risk takers. Take Nikolaus Pevsner, the great architectural historian. The aim of his Pioneers…(1936), as Colin Amery explains in his excellent essay, was to show that the Modern Movement, ‘the genuine and adequate style of our century, was achieved by 1914’ and sprung from William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, Art Nouveau, and Victorian engineering. Few today would couch a hypothesis in such staunch terms, but it is partly this confident approach that marks Pevsner’s book out as influential.

The Books That Shaped Art History is a thought-provoking reflection on a century of brilliant Art Historical scholarship. To the Art Historian it offers still more. Praising the masters while accepting and assessing their errors, this volume sets the bar for the next generation. It heralds a bold approach.

The Books That Shaped Art History, Richard Shone and John-Paul Stonard (editors). Thames & Hudson. £24.95.

• Daisy Dunn is a trustee of the Joint Association of Classical Teachers, which promotes the study of Greek and Latin in schools across the UK. She writes widely about the Renaissance and the ancient world.

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Treasures of the Royal Courts: Tudors, Stuarts, and the Russian Tsars, V&A, review

The title of this exhibition is deceptive – what if we’ve already seen the Royal Palaces, and the Holbeins and Van Dycks on display year round? The subtitle, ‘Tudors, Stuarts, and the Russian Tsars,’ is baffling and vague. The trouble is that the real theme of the show is: the ceremony of diplomatic gift giving during the first century of trade between our two nations. A prospect as inviting as the Arctic seas that provided passage for the courtship.

In fact, though obscure and scholarly, the show is revelatory, not only illuminating a neglected slice of material and political history – but also bringing a rare and important example of British Renaissance art to our shores.

The most common gift sent by the Courts of England to Moscow was expensive silverware, nearly all of which was melted down in this country during the English Civil War. Luckily, every time a piece of silver was shipped to Moscow, it was carefully weighed and inscribed in Slavonic letters with their weight and the source of the gift: an effective way of knowing at a glance which house was in good favour. The gifts have been preserved in the Kremlin Armory Museum and this is the first time the entire collection has been spotlighted like this over here.

Before we reach the silver, the V&A curators have laid an excellent red carpet of four rooms setting the scene, and showing how Henry VIII’s extravagant eye and taste for heraldry would shape the identity of the succeeding Stuart courts (who would woo the Tsars proper), and how they liked to be represented abroad. This extended to jewellery, armour, coats of arms, sculpted beasts, and paintings.

The largest space is painted a deep regal red and is, thankfully, low-lit. In the centre of the room is the tiered “buffet” of Sixteenth and early Seventeenth century British silver, as the Tsar himself would have displayed them. It’s a blinding show of riches so extraordinarily lavish that it feels almost embarrassing to look. Shape was generally considered more important than ornament in Renaissance silver, and as a collection they have an impressive, almost muscular sculptural presence: the cups are gourd shaped and font shaped, and there’s a Leopard ewer bearing his ribs and showing his teeth.

The faces on the walls that look in on the silver, including a wonderful recently discovered portrait of Elizabeth I, reveal how complex the politics was and how many personalities were involved in the relationship-building process. Among them is merchant Thomas Smith, James I’s special ambassador the Tsar, who was in charge of gifting him a lavish chariot from the King, and there’s an excellent three minute film about the significance of this act.

All in all, it was an expensive custom, but perhaps cheaper than war – and one likes to think not money wasted. We still enjoy the fruits of the courtship today. Anyone, for instance, who has seen the pelicans in St James Park may not know that they are the direct descendants of a 1622 gift from the Russian ambassador to Charles II.

Until July 14. Free entry; vam.ac.uk

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