TOWARDS A NEWER LAOCOON
297
I.
There can be, I believe, such a thing as a dominant art form;
this was what literature had becon·c in Europe by the 17th century.
(Not that the ascendancy of a pal .:icular art always coincides with
its greatest productions. In point of achievement, music was the
greatest art of this period.) By the middle of the 17th century the
pictorial arts had been relegated almost everywhere into the hands
of the courts, where they eventualfy degenerated into relatively
trivial interior decoration. The most creative class in society, the
rising mercantile bourgeoisie, impelled perhaps by the iconoclasm
of the Reformation (Pascal's Jansenist contempt for painting is a
symptom) and by the relative cheapness and mobility of the physi–
cal medium after the invention of printing, had turned most of its
creative and acquisitive energy towards literature.
Now, when it happens that a single art is given the dominant
role, it becomes the prototype of all art: the others try to shed their
proper characters and imitate its effects. The dominant art in turn
tries itself to absorb the functions of the others. A confusion of
the arts results, by which the subservient ones are perverted and
distorted; they are forced to deny their own nature in an effort to
attain the effects of the dominant art. However, the subservient
arts can only be mishandled in this way when they have reached
such a degree of technical facility as to enable them to pretend to
conceal their
mediums.
In other words, the artist must have gained
such power over his material as to annihilate it seemingly in favor
of
illusion.
Music was saved from the fate of the pictorial arts in
the 17th and 18th centuries by its comparatively rudimentary
technique and the relative shortness of its development as a formal
art. Aside from the fact that in its nature it is the art furthest
removed from imitation, the possibilities of music had not been
explored sufficiently to enable it to strive for illusionist effects.
But painting and sculpture, the arts of illusion par excellence,
had by that time achieved such facility as to make them infinitely
susceptible to the temptation to emulate the effects, not only of
illusion, but of other arts. Not only could painting imitate sculp–
ture, and sculpture, painting, but both could attempt to reproduce
the effects of literature. And it was for the effects of literature that
17th and 18th century painting strained most of all. Literature,
for a number of reasons, had won the upper hand, and the plastic
