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directly and for being "the first writer to give to published criticism of
the old masters the spontaneous personal character of this hitherto pri–
vate, yet highly objective, discernment of art which must have been prac–
ticed by many artists." Particularly in his discussions of Rubens and Ruis–
dael, Fromentin makes his readers see that "everything in the work of art
- the attitude toward the subject, the execution, palette, and forms -
belongs then to the individual and is an expressive end as well as a
means." Schapiro reminds us that the "unity of sensation and feeling"
basic to Fromentin's critical method was also basic to imaginative litera–
ture of the period, and that the writer-painter commands our attention,
in part, because he was "among the first to introduce into art criticism
the standards of observation and of expression of sentiment developed by
the French novelists and poets - the requirement of a direct encounter
with the object, nuanced statement of feeling, and a rapid, flexible prose
with a syntax and rich sensory language that could evoke the observed
and the observer together, without dissolving the object in the sensation
or mood . .. Painters also shared this aim."
Schapiro's development of this idea exemplifies the kind of informed
synthesis that had us struggling to take
complete
notes, during his
Columbia lectures. "Since the visual was the highest example of direct
experience of the outer world and in this directness was affirmed the free
activity of the self, modern painting took on a new charm for the poet
as an art in which the subjective and the external were fused."
Perhaps the most entertaining essays in
Theory and Philosophy oj Art
are those devoted to Freud's and Heidegger's attempts to deal with
works of art. Quite simply Schapiro elegantly and politely demonstrates
that where visual art is concerned, the opinions (and methodology) of
these acclaimed thinkers was wholly, devastatingly
wrong .
The piece on
Freud departs from the analyst's famous essay,
A Childhood Reminiscence oj
Leonardo da Vinci
-
the one that begins with Leonardo's remembered
childhood dream about a vulture, speculates on the illegitimate young
man's relationship with his parents, and sees the apparent fusion of Mary
and her mother in the Louvre's
Virgin and Child with St. Anne, (1510)
and their similar appearance, despite Mary's having been born, miracu–
lously, in St. Anne's old age, as manifestations of the personality pro–
jected from the evidence of the dream. Further confirmation came from
the "discovery," soon after the publication of Freud's essay, by one of his
disciples of a disguised image of a vulture in the Virgin's robe. Schapiro
neatly demolishes Freud's construction by presenting facts: the bird men–
tioned in Leonardo's memoir - "nibbio" in Italian - is a kite, not a
vulture; there is ample art historical and theological precedent for the
