Art History Today

A Medic in the Museum

The connection between museums and medicine does not spring to mind, although there is a historical link. Some museums were originally ecclesiastical institutions that ministered to the sick, such as the Hôtel Dieu in Beaune or the Museo di San Marco in Florence. At Beaune, the sick were placed before Rogier van der Weyden’s impressive Last Judgment for solace.

One of the best attempts to fuse the art museum and the medical institution is in Ivan Gaskell’s Vermeer’s Wager in which he says the following:

“Many analogies can be drawn between art museums and hospitals: more, probably, than between art museums and the institutions with which, as sites of scholarship, they are most often compared: universities. One analogy concerns the techniques of education of their staffs. Pierre Bourdieu has described the differences in education conferred by medical facilities of arts and science. He demonstrates that, whereas in the latter the production and reproduction of knowledge are formalized and transmitted rationally, medical education is the acquisition of an internalised set of skills constituting an art. In consequence, the relationships between the teacher-patrons and the pupil-clients differ markedly within the two institutions; Conditions in art museums more closely approximate the medical model than they do those of the arts and science faculties.”[1]

The French sociolinguist Pierre Bourdieu- mentioned in Gaskell’s extract- compared the “great surgeon” to the “supremo” of a hospital department. As Gaskell’s says, we need only substitute “museum director” or “head of curatorial department” for the medical categories. The pupil-clients become interns, or junior members of staff, who follow the teacher-patron on his rounds.

However, I’m now reading about a surgeon who takes his students on walks round the London National Gallery, visiting pictures like patients on morning call. Professor Michael Baum, a cancer expert, brings his diagnostic skills to bear on the problem of interpreting famous works like Piero di Cosimo’s so-called Nymph and Satyr. More generally, Baum stresses the importance of the eye in diagnosis and the art of painting itself.

"Art and medicine have parallel histories: accurate drawings of dissections were crucial for anatomical education, for example, while art therapy has provided patients with powerful cathartic releases. And now when we look with a trained eye, it is clear these artists had considerable medical knowledge and often used it with considerable subtlety."

The quality of perspicacity, not just defined as acuity of vision, but also the act of penetrating beneath the surface is of paramount importance here . As Baum obviously knows, in the early modern period some surgeons and doctors were art admirers and were trained in the analysis of pictures. To them there were parallels between opening up the body to determine the nature of a disease or the cause of death, and stripping back the layers of both paint and meaning in a work in their own collections. It’s true that Baum could be over-interpreting in his artistic/medical exposition of Piero’s painting, but many art historians have been guilty of wielding the scalpel of over-analysis when probing the mysteries of Piero’s work. As for the “waiter’s tip”, I’m in no position to say- not a medical expert. However, I think Baum’s surgical approach is instructive, and  I look forward to more diagnoses from the hospital ward of the National Gallery in the future.

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[1] Ivan Gaskell, Vermeer’s Wager: Speculations on Art History, Theory and Art Museums, Reaktion, 197-8.

Leonardo and the Wild State of Thought.

I’m currently teaching a course on Leonardo da Vinci called “Leonardo, The Artist’s Studio and the Renaissance World.” It therefore seems a good idea to recycle some of the teaching material as the occasional blog post- my aim is always to reach a wider audience.  My first in this series considers Leonardo’s education and scientific investigations in relation to the renaissance context, part of my first lecture on him: “Introducing Leonardo.”

Leonardo’s name has become a byword for bright, shining genius, but those expecting to find an erudite scholar fully conversant in the classics, or even the humanities, might be in for a shock. Leonardo struggled with Latin and Greek, and his minimalist library significantly contained Latin grammars. Like many renaissance artists, Leonardo received a rudimentary renaissance education. He would definitely have attended an abacus school, which as the name suggests was meant to inculcate numerical skills, essential for surviving in the ruthless Florentine commercial world. [Sorry, the nearest image of an abacus I could find is in this German print, which shows Lady Philosophy presiding over mathematical endeavour.] After leaving the abaco- which he attended between 12 and 15-,Leonardo should have gone into a scuole di lettere, attended by pre-university students, but instead the young Leonardo went straight into Andrea del Verrocchio’s studio, a workshop that attracted the cream of quattrocento painters: Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Botticini, Perugino, Lorenzo di Credi, not forgetting Leonardo himself.

By entering Verrocchio’s studio , Leonardo missed the classical education given to many intellectuals and scholars of the period. Leonardo earned the tag, “uomo senza lettere”, an unbookish or unlearned man. In order to combat this, Leonardo had a library of about 200 books, which reflected his education. It certainly was a small library, and wasn’t the kind of resource you would associate with renaissance scholars. Half the books dealt  with the sciences and technical subjects; the other half was probably divided into three groups of unequal importance: 25 works on profane literature; 14 on religious and moral literature; 16 on Latin, grammar and vocabulary. This library was also consistent with Leonardo’s attitude to intellectuals; he stressed the importance of experience, not memory of facts and theories learned from books. To quote Leonardo: “If painters have not described painting and have not turned it into a science, the fault lies not with painting […] Few painters are familiar with the humanities because their life does not enable them to understand them.”

This library isn’t that of someone interested in the humanities (little philosophy, history, literature and poetry), but obviously scientific and technical subjects are well represented. The only books that Leonardo owned by a contemporary humanist was Leon Battista Alberti’s volumes on architecture and mathematics. Those 16 books on Latin are significant too; Leonardo could not read classical languages like Greek or Latin- a sine qua non for self-respecting renaissance intellectuals- and instead used the Italian vernacular to structure his investigations. This meant that Leonardo could only discover philosophical and scientific ideas through intermediaries, such as Ristoro d’Arezzo who developed the analogy between the human body and the world, something that Leonardo was to exploit to the full.   Another example is Luca Pacioli, a mathematician and Franciscan prior, as well as an expert on accounting. You’re not likely to find an abacus in this portrait of the scientist-cleric, attributed to Jacopo di Barbari; the instruments reveal Pacioli’s abstract thought, far beyond the practical commercial sphere of Florentine accountancy and the renaissance bottom line.

One of the finest discussions of Leonardo’s intelligence and education is by the late Daniel Arasse, the French renaissance scholar, pictured here.[1] For him, Leonardo should not be considered a systematic scientist, but more of an artist-engineer characterized by what the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss called “wild thought.” This is a term that Levi-Strauss applied to indigenous cultures, where he detected a kind of intellectual bricolage, a difficult concept, but one which could be defined as an improvisatory attitude towards fact-finding and data gathering.   There’s a nice summary of the idea here. Yet Arasse is careful to point out that unlike Levi-Strauss’s primitive Islanders and Indians, Leonardo didn’t (a) believe in magic, “even though the crisis of Aristotelisanism in general brought the renaissance to an ontology of magic” (Arasse, 94); (b) Leonardo was an engineer, the “first technologist” (Arasse, 94). Arasse quotes Levi-Strauss’s words that the engineer “interrogates the universe, while the handyman addresses a residue of human works, that is to say a subset of culture”, (Arasse, 94-5). Despite being wayward and strange, Leonardo searches for conceptual breakthrough while the handyman maps out a limited area of exploration, chiefly for survival. We can see here the modern paradigm of the specialist verses the universalist emerging, a conflict which surely was inaugurated by Leonardo as he’s considered the epitome of the uomo universale, the man interested in everything but not able to finish and follow through; the man who was more interested in the beginning than the end to quote Leo’ X’s memorable assessment of Da Vinci.

  Despite his keen interest in science, Leonardo was not really part of the scientific community but existed on the fringes, a kind of Leonardo fringe science if you like. Some of those Faustian scientists who appear in the wonderful show Fringe have something of the Leonardo blueprint about them.However unlike Dr Walter Bishop, Leonardo is not an institutionally trained scientist. Instead it might be helpful to view Leonardo as a homemade intellectual, a peculiarity of the self-taught. Leonardo was not a trained scientist, but an artist-intellectual driven by curiosity to know more, to make sight and its associations with painting part of a new way of experiencing the visible world of the renaissance. In the words of Daniel Arasse, “the science of Leonardo is founded on the strength and sharpness of his capacity for observation, but at the same time these contribute to the fact that he remains attached to observation as a stage in the development of knowledge”, (Arasse, 93).

The phrase “hero of the mind” is sometimes used to describe Leonardo as in the iconic and much reproduced Turin Self-Portrait, of which more in another post.  It is the face of a man cogent in thought and skilful in reasoning, as noted by Vasari. “This mind endowed by God with such innate grace possessed such strong reasoning power, further supported by intelligence and memory […] that he dominated and confounded the greatest minds with his line of argument […]. The splendour which shone from his wonderful features influenced the most obdurate minds. His power tamed the most violent furies.” In this context I’m tempted to see the renaissance furies as a metaphor for the wild thought of our artist-scientist. As Daniel Arasse put it, Leonardo developed thought “in the wild state” (Arasse, 95).

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[1] Daniel Arasse, Leonardo da Vinci, 1998.

Normal Service will be resumed as soon as possible

My apologies for the long gap of time since the last post. I didn’t intend to stay away from the blog that long, but circumstances intervened: problems with my computer, issues with Typepad, and a whole load of non-art history stuff over the last six weeks which put blogging well and truly out of the picture. I’ll tell you about it sometime. I’ll be  resuming blogging soon, probably with a review of a new book on connoisseurship, both traditional and scientific, sent to me recently. There’ll also be posts on Leonardo- I’m teaching a course on him- and possibly more research- generated  material on the subject of art and the body.

I can’t resist commenting on the sad news that Poussin’s Ordination will leave the U.K. for the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. The Kimbell was hiding in the wings waiting for the chance to snap up this canonical masterpiece. This they did- for $24.5 million. I couldn’t care less about the money, but I do care about the fact that the first set of Sacraments have been fragmented even more. Perhaps I’ll never see Ordination again, unless the Kimbell organises a conference on Poussin and religion, or something like that.

I have no idea who designed the image for this post, but many thanks for it.