Wolfflin

Wolfflin's article starts with a description of Richter's experiment in which 4 painters looking at the same landscape and trying to paint as realistically as possible, produce 4 different paintings. The conclusion drawn from this is that there is no such thing as objective vision. This seems perfectly obvious, no two people will have an identical experience of anything, not to mention that people have physical differences in the way they perceive color.


Wolfflin goes on to state another obvious - that there are differences in style between artists, but that style is also a product of the "school, the country and the race", as well as the times - "a new zeitgeist introduces a new form". What is mysterious and the question that Wolfflin tries to answer,  is how artists, using the same elements such as line, working in the same time and place, and depicting the same subject, can produce two very different works of art - what in the individual artist produces the distinctive style? Why is a drawing by Michelangelo instantly recognizable as such, or a Leonardo?


Because I am taking Baroque Art, I particularly enjoyed Wolfflin's description of Renaissance artists as seeking clarity, defining form with line, (although he does not mention the Venetian artists who worked with color, and had a much more painterly approach, what he would describe as an open form). He describes Baroque artists by saying of their work that "composition, light, and color no longer serve to merely define form, but have a life of their own....It is not a difference of quality if the Baroque departed from the age of Durer and Raphael, but as we have said, a different attitude to the world." Again, an obvious point, but very nicely put.

Jarzombek’s article points out the argument between the experience of an object and the reading of a text modifiying that experience. In reading Wolfflin’s description of Bottacelli's Venus, my experince of it is altered forever - “the radiant spread of the fingers on the breast” are words that will now at the very least focus my attention on that part of the painting whenever I look at it in the future. Scully argued that one must read about the landscape and look at photographs of it to truly have an aesthete experience. I find this absurd -  reading the a poetic description or even looking at a photo is not in any way parallel to actually experiencing the object. A description of a landscape painting is not a substitute for actually viewing the painting, and the painting cannot begin to compare to being in the actual landscape and physically experiencing it. Furthermore, reading Scully's description of a landscape means that one is experiencing it through his eyes, and as a viewer, I would prefer to have an unmodulated experience, I want to simply have an experience before I am told what it means.  When I go to a museum, I look at the work of art before I read the information on the wall - I guess I want to have that "pure" experience.