This essay proposes a new definition of style by thinking it apart from form. It takes the concep... more This essay proposes a new definition of style by thinking it apart from form. It takes the concept of air-a formless substance that exists between artworks and between them and their makers-to what contains style. Some artworks collapse the difference between what exists within their border or frame and the life around them; they redirect the place of style from the material container of the artwork to life itself, more specifically the life of the artist. The essay argues that Caravaggio and his early seventeenth-century critics were instrumental in defining air as that which flows in and out of depiction. Caravaggio's works functioned as a score from which style could be "played" or enacted. But the essay concludes that this interpretation of Caravaggio's art and life gains focus from the perspective of Joseph Beuys, whose scores for performances, too, pointed to the position of style near painting.
White paper was the exception, a challenge to convention. If not in practice, then at least in th... more White paper was the exception, a challenge to convention. If not in practice, then at least in theory. 1 When seventeenth-century Dutch authors discussed the use of paper, they usually mentioned how easily it could be colored. Here is Karel van Mander, writing in the century's opening years: You can do everything: hatching and washes, according to the inclinations of your talent; with fervent dedication, by copying, exercise your hands in the use of charcoal and chalk, on paper, either grey like ash or pale blue, in order to produce heightened or deepened effects. But do not let those highlights or dark accents touch each other: leave the ground [grondt] between them free. 2 Van Mander mentions no white paper. For him, the ground is colored, either grey or blue. Existing in between the added highlights and dark shadows, the ground's color was medial. It was dark enough to afford the addition of white highlights and light enough for the drawn lines-with pen, chalk, or charcoal-to stand out. The ground was meant to look neutral. It chose no sides, neither of black nor white, and not the side of the subject depicted. The ground never pretended to assume the proper colors of the thing depicted. It took no responsibility to depict. Emerging in between the dark and light patches of depiction, it was 1 There is no reliable count of the ratio between white and colored ground in early modern European drawing practice. Translations are my own, unless otherwise attributed. I would like to thank Iris Brahms for her comments on an earlier draft of this paper. 2 Karel van Mander, Het schilder-boeck, Haarlem 1604, fol. 9r.: "Ghy meught van als doen, artseren, en wasschen, nae den lust ws gheests met een vierich pooghen,Te teyckenen op Papier dat grondt heeft, om hoogen en diepen is seer voorderlijck. In het conterfeyten in handen rasschen, Tot Kool' en Crijt, op Papier graeuw als asschen, Oft een bleeckachtich blaeuw, om op te hooghen, En op te diepen: doch wilt niet ghedooghen, Hooghsel, en diepsel malcander t'AenclevenDatmen hooghsel en diepsel nietsal te by malcander brenghen. Wilt grondt tusschen beyden vry plaetse gheven."
A half-dressed model sits by a stove that keeps her warm on a cold winter's day. Her shirt is cru... more A half-dressed model sits by a stove that keeps her warm on a cold winter's day. Her shirt is crumpled behind her on the couch on which she poses for the painter, avoiding eye contact with him ( ). She looks tired, exhausted even, after a long modeling session. She is not there modeling a role. She is herself, depicted as a model, with a body that can get tired and cold. This is a real-life scenario that could have unfolded on the second floor of Rembrandt van Rijn's house in the Breestraat in Amsterdam around 1658, when the artist printed this sheet. Models could pose nude only in summer, unless the artist's studio was heated with a stove. 1 Rembrandt proliferated the depiction of modeling scenarios, depictions of current and past ways in which models struck a pose in the artist's presence. His images of the modeling scenario take the model as her-or himself, stripping the model of her or his role. No other artist before Rembrandt -and hardly any artist after him -had depicted the act of modeling so frequently and with such intensity as Rembrandt. Western artists had been using live models since antiquity with more or less frequency, and stories about models and modeling are spun throughout that long history of art. 2 But Rembrandt was the first artist to depict how it felt to be modeling.
erhaps no art is more tightly tethered to history than sculpture. Sculpture is memorable, able to... more erhaps no art is more tightly tethered to history than sculpture. Sculpture is memorable, able to stand outside without being destroyed immediately by the sun, the rain, the wind. More durable than paintings and works on paper, sculptures are messengers of historical information in the present. The author and courtier Baldassare Castiglione summarized fifteenth-century theories of sculpture when he wrote early in the sixteenth century that, "being made to preserve memory, sculptures fulfill this function better than painting." 1 The faces of Roman emperors, their gestures, and costumes all came down to the fifteenth century in hard stone busts and cold bronze coins. This is not an exclusively fifteenth-century phenomenon. Modern scholars and archaeologists continue to use statuary as sources for their histories of past cultures. But the idea that sculpture carried historical information was first developed in the fifteenth century, at the moment when Italian scholars started to mine ancient objects for information about the Roman Empire and Republic, including the way that ancients dressed and kept their hair. This essay offers a range of examples of artifacts in stone and bronze that were considered, in fifteenth-century Italy, as deposits of historical rituals and customs. These examples show that, in the minds of certain viewers, such objects were able to tell the truth, even that you could trust sculpture more than text. This had something to do with the durability of sculpture: more resistant to wear and tear than painting, prints, and drawings, sculpture was believed to deliver history unchanged, as it was. But sculpture was also conceptually closer to nature and the unvarnished truth. With its possibility of life casting and other imprinting
Between 1514 and 1515, Albrecht Dürer finished forty-five drawings in the margins of a printed bo... more Between 1514 and 1515, Albrecht Dürer finished forty-five drawings in the margins of a printed book of hours for Emperor Maximilian I. 1 The drawings illustrate the first ten quires of the book; the other quires were completed by a team of talented German artists, among them Lucas Cranach, Hans Burgkmair, Hans Baldung Grien, Jörg Breu, and Albrecht Altdorfer. The quires are now dispersed over collections in Munich and Besançon, with the pages decorated by Dürer all in Munich. They are drawn with pen and ink, not only in black ink but also in red, olive-green, and violet.
Pressed against the right edge of the picture, a donor stands in the presence of the Virgin and c... more Pressed against the right edge of the picture, a donor stands in the presence of the Virgin and child and the infant Saint John the Baptist (plate 1). The donor -an old man, almost completely bald -is undressed for the grave. 1 By the time the Italian painter Luca Signorelli made this painting, probably in the late 1480s, the man was dead. Signorelli indicated this not only by depicting the man in a state of undress. The colour of his arms is grey and the man's face seems painted after a death-mask had been made from the corpse. The weight of the plaster has caused the man's cheeks and eye-sockets to sink into his face; and this is also why his nose bridge and jaws protrude remarkably. Signorelli has opened the man's eyes and has made him stand upright, but he amended little more. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the man's portrait is the folded ear. There is no physical cause for the ear to fold so dramatically; there is no cap or hat.
This essay proposes a new definition of style by thinking it apart from form. It takes the concep... more This essay proposes a new definition of style by thinking it apart from form. It takes the concept of air-a formless substance that exists between artworks and between them and their makers-to what contains style. Some artworks collapse the difference between what exists within their border or frame and the life around them; they redirect the place of style from the material container of the artwork to life itself, more specifically the life of the artist. The essay argues that Caravaggio and his early seventeenth-century critics were instrumental in defining air as that which flows in and out of depiction. Caravaggio's works functioned as a score from which style could be "played" or enacted. But the essay concludes that this interpretation of Caravaggio's art and life gains focus from the perspective of Joseph Beuys, whose scores for performances, too, pointed to the position of style near painting.
White paper was the exception, a challenge to convention. If not in practice, then at least in th... more White paper was the exception, a challenge to convention. If not in practice, then at least in theory. 1 When seventeenth-century Dutch authors discussed the use of paper, they usually mentioned how easily it could be colored. Here is Karel van Mander, writing in the century's opening years: You can do everything: hatching and washes, according to the inclinations of your talent; with fervent dedication, by copying, exercise your hands in the use of charcoal and chalk, on paper, either grey like ash or pale blue, in order to produce heightened or deepened effects. But do not let those highlights or dark accents touch each other: leave the ground [grondt] between them free. 2 Van Mander mentions no white paper. For him, the ground is colored, either grey or blue. Existing in between the added highlights and dark shadows, the ground's color was medial. It was dark enough to afford the addition of white highlights and light enough for the drawn lines-with pen, chalk, or charcoal-to stand out. The ground was meant to look neutral. It chose no sides, neither of black nor white, and not the side of the subject depicted. The ground never pretended to assume the proper colors of the thing depicted. It took no responsibility to depict. Emerging in between the dark and light patches of depiction, it was 1 There is no reliable count of the ratio between white and colored ground in early modern European drawing practice. Translations are my own, unless otherwise attributed. I would like to thank Iris Brahms for her comments on an earlier draft of this paper. 2 Karel van Mander, Het schilder-boeck, Haarlem 1604, fol. 9r.: "Ghy meught van als doen, artseren, en wasschen, nae den lust ws gheests met een vierich pooghen,Te teyckenen op Papier dat grondt heeft, om hoogen en diepen is seer voorderlijck. In het conterfeyten in handen rasschen, Tot Kool' en Crijt, op Papier graeuw als asschen, Oft een bleeckachtich blaeuw, om op te hooghen, En op te diepen: doch wilt niet ghedooghen, Hooghsel, en diepsel malcander t'AenclevenDatmen hooghsel en diepsel nietsal te by malcander brenghen. Wilt grondt tusschen beyden vry plaetse gheven."
A half-dressed model sits by a stove that keeps her warm on a cold winter's day. Her shirt is cru... more A half-dressed model sits by a stove that keeps her warm on a cold winter's day. Her shirt is crumpled behind her on the couch on which she poses for the painter, avoiding eye contact with him ( ). She looks tired, exhausted even, after a long modeling session. She is not there modeling a role. She is herself, depicted as a model, with a body that can get tired and cold. This is a real-life scenario that could have unfolded on the second floor of Rembrandt van Rijn's house in the Breestraat in Amsterdam around 1658, when the artist printed this sheet. Models could pose nude only in summer, unless the artist's studio was heated with a stove. 1 Rembrandt proliferated the depiction of modeling scenarios, depictions of current and past ways in which models struck a pose in the artist's presence. His images of the modeling scenario take the model as her-or himself, stripping the model of her or his role. No other artist before Rembrandt -and hardly any artist after him -had depicted the act of modeling so frequently and with such intensity as Rembrandt. Western artists had been using live models since antiquity with more or less frequency, and stories about models and modeling are spun throughout that long history of art. 2 But Rembrandt was the first artist to depict how it felt to be modeling.
erhaps no art is more tightly tethered to history than sculpture. Sculpture is memorable, able to... more erhaps no art is more tightly tethered to history than sculpture. Sculpture is memorable, able to stand outside without being destroyed immediately by the sun, the rain, the wind. More durable than paintings and works on paper, sculptures are messengers of historical information in the present. The author and courtier Baldassare Castiglione summarized fifteenth-century theories of sculpture when he wrote early in the sixteenth century that, "being made to preserve memory, sculptures fulfill this function better than painting." 1 The faces of Roman emperors, their gestures, and costumes all came down to the fifteenth century in hard stone busts and cold bronze coins. This is not an exclusively fifteenth-century phenomenon. Modern scholars and archaeologists continue to use statuary as sources for their histories of past cultures. But the idea that sculpture carried historical information was first developed in the fifteenth century, at the moment when Italian scholars started to mine ancient objects for information about the Roman Empire and Republic, including the way that ancients dressed and kept their hair. This essay offers a range of examples of artifacts in stone and bronze that were considered, in fifteenth-century Italy, as deposits of historical rituals and customs. These examples show that, in the minds of certain viewers, such objects were able to tell the truth, even that you could trust sculpture more than text. This had something to do with the durability of sculpture: more resistant to wear and tear than painting, prints, and drawings, sculpture was believed to deliver history unchanged, as it was. But sculpture was also conceptually closer to nature and the unvarnished truth. With its possibility of life casting and other imprinting
Between 1514 and 1515, Albrecht Dürer finished forty-five drawings in the margins of a printed bo... more Between 1514 and 1515, Albrecht Dürer finished forty-five drawings in the margins of a printed book of hours for Emperor Maximilian I. 1 The drawings illustrate the first ten quires of the book; the other quires were completed by a team of talented German artists, among them Lucas Cranach, Hans Burgkmair, Hans Baldung Grien, Jörg Breu, and Albrecht Altdorfer. The quires are now dispersed over collections in Munich and Besançon, with the pages decorated by Dürer all in Munich. They are drawn with pen and ink, not only in black ink but also in red, olive-green, and violet.
Pressed against the right edge of the picture, a donor stands in the presence of the Virgin and c... more Pressed against the right edge of the picture, a donor stands in the presence of the Virgin and child and the infant Saint John the Baptist (plate 1). The donor -an old man, almost completely bald -is undressed for the grave. 1 By the time the Italian painter Luca Signorelli made this painting, probably in the late 1480s, the man was dead. Signorelli indicated this not only by depicting the man in a state of undress. The colour of his arms is grey and the man's face seems painted after a death-mask had been made from the corpse. The weight of the plaster has caused the man's cheeks and eye-sockets to sink into his face; and this is also why his nose bridge and jaws protrude remarkably. Signorelli has opened the man's eyes and has made him stand upright, but he amended little more. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the man's portrait is the folded ear. There is no physical cause for the ear to fold so dramatically; there is no cap or hat.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Uploads
Books by Joost Keizer
Papers by Joost Keizer