The Paragone and The Formation of The Artist Genius Myth Andrew Burroughs

43 The Paragone and the Formation of the Artist-Genius-Myth

Andrew Burroughs

The aftermath of arguments presented in the paragone forged dominant artistic conceptions still present to modern society. Renaissance Italy was the stage for a great upheaval in scholarship. Practitioners of all art forms sought to utilize the malleable public consciousness to have their practice recognized among the seven humanities which represented the pinnacle of human inquiry. The paragone was a debate that compared the arts, as all art forms vied for a place among the seven humanities. 1 Artists composed pieces in writing and in their respective artistic mediums to demonstrate the validity of their craft. These historic arguments were persuasive enough that they led to a reformation of the artists’ role in society. The arguments in the paragone ranged from dissemination of fame, to fostering imaginative processes, to claiming the sheer inimitability of their form of art. A survey of the scholarship and paintings which remain from the paragone can demonstrate how certain contributions helped form what is referred to as the, ‘artist-genius-myth.’ The artist genius myth vaguely portrays the artist as a genius in solitude, who creates from pure inspiration. This essay will posit that the painter’s contributions to the paragone instilled and constructed the artist-genius-myth by emphasizing painting’s ability to create inimitable representations of natural phenomena that mimicked the divine act of creation. This essay will place emphasis on Titian and Bronzino’s works, which portray the reproducibility of poetry as evidence of its inferiority.

Before assessing the role of specific paragone arguments it is necessary to characterize the artist genius myth. The first chapter of Catherine M. Sousloff’s book The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of

The Concept, demystifies the artist-genius, and unpacks the historiography of the mythic figure’s creation. Her main claim is that the artist genius, and every other prevailing concept of the artist, is structured in a historical period. 2 In the second chapter she argues that the artists themselves benefit from the cultural obfuscation of their identity; she makes note of the Renaissance period in particular and how artists would alter the nature of their works to construct a mythos, and embellish audience’s awe surrounding their work’s reception. 3 This particular fact in conjunction with the kind of arguments which painters made in the paragone, that likened their craft to the

creative powers of God, substantiates this essay’s thesis. The artist’s contributions to the paragone helped to construct the artist genius myth because their arguments described painting’s merit by discussing the painter’s divine-like creative powers and their access to unreproducible form which could reproduce not only natural phenomena, but other forms of art. The following passages will unpack a few such seminal contributions.

The two most divergent of all the competing mediums were poetry and painting. A great deal of scholarship was centered around the equality of both mediums to portray the real and suprareal, though there also were also many contentions that one ought to reign over the other.

The revitalization of antiquity during the renaissance also manifested in the paragone. Many arguments concerning the similarity of painting and poetry to convey the natural world were derived from newly translated ancient texts. Aristotle’s Poetics was fondly referred to and used as grounds for the validity of poetic representation alongside other forms of art like painting and music. At the onset of Poetics Aristotle claims,

For as there are persons who, by conscious art or mere habit, imitate and represent various objects through the medium of color and form, or again by the voice; so in the arts above mentioned, taken as a whole, the imitation is produced by rhythm, language, or 'harmony,' ei-

ther singly or combined. 4 This quotation demonstrates how Aristotle sought to compare poetry to painting in form. He articulates that poetry which is based in rhythm, meter and lyric, is similar to the utilization of color to achieve the same thematic representation. Francis Ames-Lewis calls upon the fact that Petrarch referred to Homer as the first painter. 5 Renaissance thinkers called back to antiquity to substantiate their arguments because the ancients revered the poetic tradition of ekphrasis as a mode of representation, which was oral prose that verbally recreated physically present phenomena. Guarino da Verona

believed painting to be weaker than poetry. His argument stipulated that painting was less effectively disseminated across distance, and could affect the lives and spread the fame of the artist less effectively. 6 Leonardo and other artists would use this argument in its inverse, saying that the inimitability of the artists creation, the inability to reproduce a painting and thereby disseminate it, was what made the painter such a powerful creator.

Renaissance painters generated a slough of new painting techniques to generate unprecedented realist images. There many renaissance theorists and artists who were less inclined to believe in the equal representative capacity of painting and poetry. Though Alberti’s work On Painting asserts that painters ought to be educated in poetry, he also makes claims about certain functions of a painting which poets could not achieve. The fact that he advocated for painters to be read in poetry can also be understood in another way: that he wanted painters to be privy to the university training that poets were, and that he understood painting as one of the superior humanities. Alberti’s arguments in support of painting can be largely mapped on to the theories of Leonardo, who thought that painting was the nearest man could come to creation, which is a divine quality. Alberti writes, “The virtues of painting, therefore, are that its masters see their works admired and feel themselves almost to be like the creator.” 7 This quotation demonstrates the hubris of renaissance painters. New techniques allowed for hyper realist presenta-

tion that captivated masses of admirers. This reception led painters to feel as though their creative powers were nearly divine. The painter was able to create works which were truly singular in their production, while the work of the poet could be recreated in print by any literate person.

The argument around the reproducibility of poetry, and thereby its inferiority to painting, was taken up by painters, who used the comparison as a motif commonly to make their point. It’s logical that the painter would advocate for the expressive and representative qualities of their art through its practice. Anglo Bronzino’s paintings from the mid-16th century portray his attitude toward poetry in relation to painting. His work often portrayed subjects with mystic looks against colorful backdrops, with works of literature either in-hand or in the foreground. His Portrait of a Young Man conveys his sentiment regarding painting. In it a man in his early 20s holds a book whose letters are indistinguishable. The background of the work is full of a lush pink tapestry and just behind it is a small sculpture. Bronzino’s use of color and the other artistic representations present in the painting seem to insinuate that Bronzino fancied painting not only to be the art form which best reproduced natural phenomena, but also was fully able to reproduce the other reproductions of nature; painting could recreate sculpture and poetry within a painting. Bronzino’s work could be classified as a metaimage insofar as it comments on the nature of representation, and the supremacy of painting to represent over other forms of art, because within a painting he could portray accurate representations of those forms. 8 The relation of painting to poetry exposes the painter’s hubris toward reproduction. The painter’s argument against poetry was mainly that the poet’s work could be reproduced easily, by them especially. Lewis acknowledges this argument present in Fillipino Villani who says, “since [poets] may learn by means of study and instruction written rules of their arts while the painters derive such rules as they find only from a profound natural talent.” 9 Villani’s perspective is perfectly representative of the kind of sentiment

47 which leads to the artist genius myth: the painter is the truest artist because their gift comes from god and not from labor. The painter thus represents a kind of godliness on earth in their ability to create, which creates the fetishization of the singular-artist cliche in society which knows artists as solitary and mysterious who create with skills that were bestowed and not learned.

Bronzino’s portrait juxtaposes his realist rendition of a book with the inscrutable air of the subject in the foreground, and the bright pink of the tapestry with the dull brown of the sculpture. The debate between painters and sculptors raged mostly around the use

of color and the ability to create a scene. Relief sculpture offers the most direct comparative point between painting and sculpture, and is perhaps (apart from drawing) the closest of Painting’s correlates. Relief sculpture could capture scenes like painting but with depth. Leonardo refuted the argument that this midway between painting and sculpture was somehow better than painting because it turned painting’s three dimensional illusion of a scene into a semi three dimensional portrayal of a scene. Leonardo writes, “As far as light and shade are concerned low relief fails both as sculpture and as painting, because the shadows correspond to the low nature of the relief…which will not exhibit the depth of those in painting.” 10 Leonardo’s quotation demonstrates his view that the relief sculpture’s imitation which exists half between the illusory methods of perspective painting and the three dimensional reality of sculpture, fails in both regards, and that the illusion of painting best represents natural phenomena to the eye.

Titian’s painting, La Schiavona, 11 best captures the painter’s attitude toward relief sculpture and sculpture itself. Titan’s work reproduces the relief painting, further entrenching the sentiment that what makes an art good is its ability to reproduce other naturalistic art in an asymmetrical relationship. Luba Freedman’s piece “The Schiavona: Titian’s response to The Paragone Between Painting and Sculpture,” posits that the painting, “reflects Titian’s attitude on the then-popular theme on the subject of comparing the two arts of

painting and sculpture.” 12 Freedman argues that the relief captured in the painting represents the status of Venetian sculpture in the early 16th century, which makes the painting available to be encountered entirely as an addition to the paragone. She also notes that Titian did not contribute written pieces to the debate, which also legitimates the analysis of La Schiavona as an argument itself. 13

Titian’s work portrays a woman holding a relief sculpture before the viewer. The relief is a profile view of the woman holding the sculpture. Like many other such pieces which compare sculpture or poetry to painting within painting, La Schiavona creates a juxtapo

sition between what the painter is capable of and what the sculptor is capable of. Titian juxtaposes the drab gray of the relief against the brilliant color of the woman holding it, similar to the Bronzione discussed earlier. Titian juxtaposes mediums and their ability to portray the same object within those mediums while recreating the sculptors work in his own hand. He also makes use of depth. The woman’s hand is merely propping the relief upright but away from her body, which demonstrates another tool the painter had unique access to. The difference in facial expressions is perhaps Titian’s bluntest claim represented in the painting. The painted woman in the back is dressed in a coy smile while the woman represented in relief is has a stony face, literally. Freedman writes, “[the smile] is the smile of a painter who feels his own superiority over his rival.” 14 Titian’s greatest victory in this painting over sculpture is to refute the argument that a painting can only cover one angle of a scene. The sculptor’s work can be walked around, taken in from all angles, and thus has an infinite number of viewing points. La Schiavona shows the same face in portrait and profile, to argue that the painter can represent all that which the sculptor can. Freedman states, “Titian’s demonstration of the duality of the figure’s aspects, which can be observed at a single glance, is expounded through his juxtaposition of the subject’s frontal view with her profile.” 15 This quotation exposes Titan’s potential agreement with Leonardo, who argued that part of what made a painting supreme was it’s ability to render phenomena in-

49 stantaneously to the eye. 16 Titian’s work represents a figure from two angles yet the viewer doesn’t need to move anything but the eye to be exposed to the montage. La Schiavona is the representation of Titian’s work for painting in the paragone. In the interest of this argument, La Schiavona contributes another rung in the ladder toward the artist genius myth because it further entrenches the notion that the artist-proper is the painter, and that the painter is the artist-proper because they are able to recreate inimitable scapes and even other recreations of art.

Sousloff’s work which deconstructed the common conception

of the artist closely aligns with the characteristics that renaissance artists used to differentiate their work from other popular forms. Alberti’s claims in Di Pictura situate the painter’s skill next to godlycreation. Artists like Bronzino and Titian express Alberti’s sentiment in their works, by showing how the painter works in the best medium to portray natural phenomena by presenting other mediums as natural phenomena themselves. Titian and Bronzino invoke superiority over other creative forms by representing those forms within their own, alongside realist portrayals of subjects. Their works use juxtaposition to show divergences between the forms in shape, color, scope and depth. The painter’s contribution to the paragone helped to construct the artist-genius-myth because each argument put forth by painters describes their work as possible only through their hand, via divine inspiration and not training. The painter’s mystique was built up through cultural history via scholarship which aggrandized their particular role in production and their creative processes.

1 Claire Farago, “The Paragone,” The Dictionary of Art, Vol. 24, pg. 90-91. 2 Catherine Soussloff, “Introduction," The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept, 3-18. 3 Soussloff, ”The Artist in Nature: Renaissance Biography,” 43-72. 4 Aristotle, Poetics, 49. 5 Francis, Ames-Lewis, “Image and Text: The Paragone,” The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist, 163. 6 Ibid.

7 Alberti, Leon Battista, On Painting, 61. 8 Figure 1. 9 Lewis, 164. 10 Ibid, 147. 11 Figure 2. 12 Luba, Freedman, “The Schiavona: Titian’s Response to the Paragone between Painting and Sculpture,” 31. 13 Freedman, “The Schiavona,” 34. 14 Ibid, 36. 15 Ibid, 37. 16 Lewis, 167.

Figure 1: Angolo Bronzino, 1503-72, Portrait of a Young Man, 1531, Oil on Canvas, 75x57 cm, National Gallery, London.

Figure 2: Titian, 1488-1576, La Schiavona, 1510- 1512, Oil Paint, 1.2m x 1m, National Gallery, London.

Bibliography Alberti, Leon Battista, On Painting, (New York, Penguin Books 1956). Ames-Lewis, Francis: “The Paragone, Painting and Poetry,” in The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). Aristotle, George Whalley, Aristotle’s Poetics, (Montreal & Kingston: McGillQueens University Press, 1997). Farago, Claire, “The Paragone,” The Dictionary of Art, Vol. 24, pg. 90-91, (New York, Macmillan Publishers Limited, 1996). Freedman, Luba, “The Schiavona: Titian’s Response to the Paragone between Painting and Sculpture,” (Arte Veneta vol. 41, 1987). Soussloff, Catherine M. "Introduction." In The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept, 3-18, (University of Minnesota Press, 1997). http:// www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttt2fz.4. Soussloff, Catherine M. "The Artist in Nature: Renaissance Biography,” In The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept, 43-72, (University of Minnesota Press, 1997). http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttt2fz.6.