To describe often requires that we generalize, as when speaking of ‘Venetian painting’, we identify common features of the very varied artworks from Venice, indicating the common qualities of Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione and Tiepolo, And more grandly, we generalize when we talk about ‘art’ to refer to artworks made anywhere, anytime. A treatise on aesthetic theory often presents a definition of art. Philosophers are especially interested in Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, some of Jeff Koons’ works, and Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box because they challenge older definitions of art. A book devoted to Venetian painting is organized very differently. It describes the origin of that tradition, beginning with paintings by the Bellinis or other fifteenth-century masters, and continues with Giorgione, Titian, and later figures, the canonical Venetian painters. Sometimes such a history begins with the influence of icons and the origin of Venetian painting. Frequently it indicates how Giambattista Tiepolo (1696–1770) or his son Giovanni Domenico (1727-1804) mark the end of this tradition. And of course, it is possible to note how artists who didn’t live and work in Venice extended this distinctive tradition.
Philosophers define art in general terms, to identify the necessary and sufficient conditions that make something an artwork. Art historians typically have a different goal: they describe an artistic tradition, such as cubist painting, French Impressionism or Venetian painting, pointing out the common features of works made in some relatively restricted time and place, and discuss the origin, development and conclusion of that tradition. This I call discussion of art as cultural criticism, taking culture in a very broad sense to include the physical as well as intellectual worlds of the artists. Thus the cultural history of Venetian painting needs to discuss the light of the lagoon, as well as the very distinctive political and intellectual concerns of the Venetian Republic.
It may seem, then, as if these philosophers and art historians are doing the same thing, but just with reference to different ranges of examples. Both philosophers and art historians generalize, identifying necessary and sufficient conditions for a group of artifacts. What makes something an artwork?; or, alternatively, what makes a Venetian painting? Philosophers seek general definitions, while art historians focus on particular tradiitions. And presumably their concerns are complementary, for if we conjoined all of the definitions of art historians, we would construct a general, philosophical definition of art. Dutch painting plus Florentine painting plus Venetian painting plus all other painting traditions define painting. We would need, that is, to identify the overlaps of these traditions. Venetian art, Florentine art, Dutch art and so on. And so if we could make this listing of art forms complete, we would have a definition of art. But in fact, philosophers don’t reason in this way; they seek, rather, to identify a single general definition of art.
These different concerns of philosophers and art historians lead them to compose different sorts of books. Venetian painting was created thanks to the birth of the Venetian Republic and the fifteenth- century development of oil paints, and died in 1797 when that state was destroyed by Napoleon. And so it’s natural to present an historical narrative of such a tradition. The history of painting is likely to be complicated, for there are intricate issues about what counts as the first painting and elaborate disputes nowadays about whether painting has died. Beginnings and endings of traditions can be tricky. Of course, a great deal of painting is being made. But maybe the grand traditions of painting are dead. This institutional contrast, between the philosopher’s concern with general conceptual analysis and art historians’ focus on particular visual cultures thus is in the background here. And the fact that the everyday concerns of philosophers and art historians are so different is reason to doubt that this gap will be bridged.
To speak of art as cultural expression, as art historians do, is to relate it to a particular time and place, its nature defined by these local conditions. And so accounts of Venetian art focus on the visual qualities of this place and, also, the intellectual interests of the art world. Venice is a relatively small site, one which before the Venetians colonized it must have looked hopelessly unpromising: a shallow lagoon, inhabited only by birds and fish. Who would have imagined that it be become the home of the richest and most politically successful Christian medieval state, or the homeland of a tradition of painting that subsists on pleasure in visual appearances? And, the cultural historian will ask, why did those ideas about aesthetic pleasures become so popular in Venice?
Venice has a highly distinctive environment, and so it’s natural to expect that its visual art will respond to that setting. This, indeed, is why many histories of Venetian painting begin with discussion of the traveler’s entry to that site. A very influential Ruskinian tradition argues that interpretation of Venetian art needs in this way to consider its setting. In 1909 Henry James, a great Ruskin reader, magnificently summarized this view, asserting that the city is itself an artwork.
Nowhere . . . do art and life seem so interfused and, as it were, so consanguineous. All the splendor of light and color, all the Venetian air and the Venetian history are on the walls and ceilings of the palaces; and all the genius of the masters, all the images and visions they have left upon canvas, seem to tremble in the sunbeams and dance upon the wave. That is the perpetual interest of the place— that you live in a certain sort of knowledge as in a rosy cloud. You don’t go into the churches and galleries by way of change from the streets; you go into them because they offer you an exquisite reproduction of the things that surround you. All Venice was both model and painter, and life was so pictorial that art couldn’t help becoming so. With all diminution’s life is pictorial still, and this fact gives an extraordinary freshness to one’s perception of the great Venetian works. (Italian Hours (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), 48.)
As Patricia Fortini Brown says in her more laconic account, in “educable plays between light, air and substance . . . the observer begins to experience the Venetian aesthetic.” 19
In his Lectures on Aesthetics, delivered in 1828, Hegel resolves this distinction between the general account of art and discussions of painting as cultural criticism. He offers an historical presentation, taking us from Classical to medieval, Renaissance and modern art. In his book, the various artistic traditions thus mark out in historical sequence the emerging general definition of art. And so he effectively erases the distinction between art of the various individual cultures and art as such in general. In our museum culture, however, since these various traditions all exist simultaneously on display, and since they may all in principle inspire working artists, it’s harder to maintain this difference. We want both a general philosophical account of the nature of art, and a discussion of the various visual cultures. And that, in short, means that we need both aesthetics and art writing, for they serve different interests and require distinct skills. It appears nowadays that these two disciplines can develop without the need (or hope) for a synthesis. In that way, Hegel’s Aesthetics is a monument to an early, now intellectually distant early modern art historical and philosophical culture.
