Leo Steinberg
THE EYE IS A PART OF THE MIND
We begin with the interrogation of witnesses. Two men
are called to defend the reversal of aesthetic values in their time.
The first is Giorgio Vasari, the tireless biographer to whose
Lives of
the Painters .
..
we owe half the facts and most of the figments cur–
rent on the artists of the Renaissance. The other, Vasari's junior by
four centuries, is Andre Malraux, whose
Psychology of Art
forms a
brilliant brief for the moot values of the modern, neo-mystic taste
in art.
Speaking of Masaccio, the great initiator of the naturalist trend
in Western art, Vasari states: "The things made before his time
may
be
termed paintings merely, and by comparison his (Masaccio's)
creations are real."
And Malraux, hailing Manet as the initiator of the modern
trend in
art,
asks: "What then was painting becoming, now it no
longer imitated or transfigured?" And his answer: "Simply–
painting."
A startling consonance this, between the "painting merely" of
Vasari and the "simply painting" of Malraux. Strange also that the
self-same epithet should denote scorn in one man's mouth and high
praise in the other's, and yet for both bear the same connotation.
For what exactly did Vasari have in mind? That Masaccio's
work, and that which flowed from his influence to make the main–
stream of the Renaissance, was a true representation of the external
world; whereas the earlier Byzantine mosaics were pictorial patterns
whose forms were not determined by reality. Being undetermined by
nature, he called them "paintings merely"-just as he might have
called scholastic metaphysics "thinking merely," since it too formed
a speculative system adrift from the experience of life. Vasari's point
was that medieval pictures implied no referent outside themselves.
