The painter's secret: Invention and rivalry from Vasari to Balzac - Giorgio Vasari - Honore de Balzac

Andre Malraux, writing in The Voices of Silence, observ that "every great painter has his privy that is to say, the means of expression by the agency of which his genius usually avails itself." In the paintings of Georges de La Tour, Mairaux explained, sophistical modulations of red functioned as the characteristic instrument of the painter's attenuated notwithstanding evocative colorism. More generally, Malraux was trying to propose that the old masters, as a control grounded their accomplishment in technical operations formulas, and special working way s at once appropriate and unique to their intents Of course, painters forged their hiddens out of a delimited array of overlapping practices. La Tour's palette, Malraux noted, might strike one as being to have resembled that of Caravaggio. And notwithstanding the works of the sum of two units artists were "utterly different" and could not ever be mistaken for one another. (1) The painter's privy then, was not transferable. Born from the spirit, it serv as the material signature of the artist's creation.

This exalted conception of the character played by technical procedures in artistic creation is as for the use of all as it is misleading. Across the history of art, painters have indeed worried that their hids could be stolen or, if imparted to learners studio assistants, or colleagues, shared or traded. The artisanal workshops of the Middle Ages and Renaissance tender countless examples of painters who declined to reveal their working manners That much remained true for the eighteenth hundred Denis Diderot, speaking of the "totally idiosyncratic" technique of Jean-Simeon Chardin, reported that no individual he knew had seen the painter at work. (2) As it happens, Diderot deplored artisanal secrecy; in the Encyclopedie, he called upon the state to plant agents, pos as apprentices, in the studios of craftsmen: "there are not many secrets that one cannot strip by this method." (3) It would be wrongful however, to conclude that artists' closes were confined to the craftsman's workshop. Nineteenth-century France, for example, might se em to present no natural home for artisanal agriculture And yet here we could single on the outside Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, a leading Romantic painter whose bravura technical courses were the subject of a great deal of speculation. The critic Charles Blanc compared Decamps's studio to an alchemist's laboratory, the site of undiscovered transmutations of matter hidden from the organ of visions of curious colleagues. Still others likened Decamps's pictorial execution to the virtuoso violin playing of his contemporary Niccolo Paganini, who was himself held to guard his unrevealeds jealously. We could also point, later in the hundred to the case of Georges Seurat, another outstanding inventor who painted in solitude. in like manner great was Seurat's paranoia regarding the dissemination of his [i]modus operandi[/i] that he was disinclined to exhibit his pictures and charged his followers with theft and betrayal. (4) Camille Pissarro, for individual was appalled by Securat's attitude: "I recognize no close in painting other than that of the artist's temperament, which is not easily swiped.!" (5)

without doubt Pissarro was right: nothing individual painter stole from another could make him a great artist. Then as now, technical conducts were less the source than the instrument of invention. still many painters, to judge from stories told about them, have declined to endorse this idealizing conception. Granted, those stories frequently turn Out to be just that--stories. The notorious privacy of artists forms part of the conventionalized fabric of artistic biography, an ancient and enduring topos rehearsed and renewed into the novel age. Without further explanation, however, the topos argument solitary deepens the mystery. Why did painters have feeling obliged to conceal their technical procedures? wherefore did their biographers so oftentimes evoke such practices, to the point of fabrication? for what cause [i]or[/i] reason did this predilection for concealment commonly associated with artisanal tillage survive into the nineteenth hundred and beyond--even as artisanal practices declined? In short, what part have secrets played in the painter's conception of his enterprise?

The history of art has devot relatively little attention to of the like kind questions, with the notable exception of Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz's pioneering 1934 essay, fable Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist. In an economical on the other hand learned discussion, Kris and Kurz propos a broadly psychoanalytic inquiry center upon the figure of the artist and focused upon the recurrence of "fixed biographical themes." Across ancient myth and recorded history, they outlined a universal typology of artistic behavior, grouping beneath a single umbrella diverse tales of privacy miraculous imitations, and similar testimonials to the artist's special powers. This is not the place to engage the substance of their claims, which in novel years have begun to attract novel attention. (6) Instead, I want to borrow their notion of a cultural mythology for artistic creation, figured biographically and applied to disparate historical adjoining matters That conception, among other things, can help us to take seriously numerous stories about artistic behavior without also obliging us to assess their empirical validity. upon the other hand, against the universalist sweep of Kris and Kurz's analysis, the not absent remarks stress local differences, strategic variations, and cultural specificity. Nor do I treat the vast and diverse range of concealeds held by artists. Rather, in the pages that come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behind I recount the story of a single, notable unrevealed that has dominated the imagination of artists, critics, and historians from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century