Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper

LEO STEINBERG

Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper

novel York: Zone Books, 2001. 317 pp; 1 color ill., 203 b/w $4600

"But it's sole an interpretation; two years from now someone will draw near up with another interpretation, and then what have you got" (1) That is Leo Steinberg's impression of the rejoinder his work elicited from the profession's graybeards in the late 1950 Interpretations, through their account, were ephemeral, returned obsolete in the time it took to write a doctoral thesis. Easily hatched, they were easily dispatched, being bare opinions whose career depended entirely upon occasion and rhetoric. Impermanence reached a verdict upon their verity. It indicted them as vain, illusory, and deceptive and put them off against their permanent opposite, the hard fact.

From its beginning as an academic discipline, art history patterned its pursuits and pedagogy upon the natural sciences. Following this type foundational work was "done one time and for all" in the form of an accepted theory. futurity research--what Thomas Kuhn termed "normal science"--constituted mop-up work, facts meticulously gathered to articulate a paradigm established in the past. (2) Hence the resistance, puzzling to outsiders, of scientists to scientific discoveries. Steinberg reminds us what, by the agency of the paradigm of the period, a particular art historical "finding" was generally look uponed to be: a hypothesis about an artwork's meaning that written evidence (treatises, alphabetic characters contracts, wills, and so on) could establish had been the intended significance. Of course, empirical art history accomplished and accomplishes far more than verifying intentions. It discovers, examines, and identifies the realitys available to interpreters in the first place. similar primary fact collecting, however, will have been preced through value judgments, the criteria for which are impossible to establish empirically. individual could gather, say, all one's neighbor's extant potato prints and question their maker personally about their intended meaning. similar labor would probably be forgotten, however, not because one's interpretations lacked essay but because the objects had no public champions besides oneself In the realm of nature, a fact is a fact no matter in what manner small; in the artistic domain, facts, in order to survive, must pertain to things believeed significant, or else rhetoric (suspect to the scientific enterprise) must be enlisted to speak for--and in a faculty of perception fabricate--that significance. The longevity of scholarship be pendents as much on the estimation of its realitys as on the solidity of its findings. single old standard for the small on the contrary truly long-lived contribution in the humanities would be an accepted emendation of single word in the Iliad. For as drawn out as Homer remains culturally vital, each correct philological finding, incorporated (along with an attribution) into the apparatus criticus of his body s will stay alive.

Steinberg imagined the reaction of his mentors in 1977 in the preface to the republication of his 1960 PhD thesis, "Borromini's San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane." through that time, his analysis of this monument's overlapping geometry and Trinitarian symbolism had outlasted whatever skepticism it originally had received. More generally, Steinberg's management perceived as renegade at the time of the dissertation, of deriving and verifying pictorial meaning from the visual evidence alone, gained acceptance as an analytic routine. below the influence of structuralism and semiotics, and [i]or[/i] part of to the other a critical renascence of speculative work by means of the discipline's own founders, art history by means of the 1980s learned to "read" images as if they were still another type of text, while in the meantime written documents, hitherto treated as the material of proof, came to strike one as being as semantically open-ended as images. And with this expanded conception of reading came a novel historicism, which, locating the visual arts in a wider, nontextual tillage of their time, was beginning to alter preconceptions about what a verbally articulated intention might be. What previously would have been dismissed as "wild" analysis became acceptable and expectable, given these of recent origin models of image, text, and tillage University faculty search committees today are more likely to complain, in the absence of an original and methodologically self-reflective interpretation upon the part of an applicant, "But it's sole a fact."

The longevity of Steinberg's interpretations derives partly from their audacity. Steinberg is the quintessential "agonist" of his profession. (3) He look afters less to contribute to a developing understanding of the external realitys he studies than to revise for a like reason fundamentally what these objects are perceived to be that the critical literature will look to begin with him. Permanently at war against received ideas, his scholarship annihilates more than it accumulates. Steinberg displays a competitive personality in each turn of phrase. In Leonardo's Incessant Last evening meal gnomic expressions (such as the "jinks of like nimbleness," "the van of his forwardness"), a hypertrophied vocabulary ("septemfluous," "minishing," "complexionally propense") solemnizing anastrophes (the "body eschatological," "a jiffy unborn"), and histrionic exhortations ("You non-painters!") excrete intelligence and enthusiasm; drawing attention to the meditation and the emotion of the author, like a style contrasts with the a little cold rhetorically impersonal prose of greatest in quantity old and new art history. While all scholarship tacitly involves a certain number of private quest for power, Steinberg makes his bid cheerfully manifest. This ostentation of critical puissance has, in fact, a higher scholarly design Interpretative audacity, an elevated rhetoric, and unabashed professional pride contribute to a pragmatic self-reliance that links Steinberg to the original creations he studies.