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9
Adaptive Historicism in the Visual Arts
Jacques-Louis David - The Oath of the Horatii and Neoclassicism
At first sight, it might appear that in his Oath of the Horatii (1784), Jacques-Louis David was simply revisiting ancient Roman history in the virtuosic painterly style of the late eighteenth century (appendix 1, no. 9).
But David acknowledged Poussin for the form of this immense painting (cf. Rape of the Sabines and several other works by the earlier master), and attributed its subject matter to Corneille's Horace. In this light, it is equally correct to speak of The Oath of the Horatii as a derivative historicist tableau, although David's overall composition does not reveal its debt to preexisting models in an overly obvious manner.
There is still more to this painting than meets the eye. David actually reinvented his subject, focussing not on the condemnation of Horace for murdering his sister and killing her lover in battle, but on the moment that, in David's imagination, must have preceded the fray, when Horace exacts an oath from his son to conquer or die.1 By thus manipulating history to reinforce a sense of loyalty to popular political ideologies brewing in late eighteenth-century France, David created one of the great propagandistic icons of the Age of Revolution.
The revival of Greek and Roman themes in the visual arts and design, which received its first great impetus during the Renaissance, reached a high point by the second half of the eighteenth century with the emergence of several neoclassical styles in interior design, including Louis XVI, Sheraton, and Hepplewhite. Napoleon's military campaigns in the Middle East would be commemorated by the monumental Empire style, with its potent admixture of ancient Egyptian, Classical, and military motifs. The visual vocabulary established by these styles would be variously reinterpreted throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (appendix 1, no. 10).
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres - Raphael and the Fornarina
Even as Egypt, Greece, Rome, and Gothic Europe continued to exert powerful influences, the art and artists of other historic periods were taken up with equal enthusiasm. In Raphael and the Fornarina (1814), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres paid homage to the eponymous renaissance painter whose artistic lineage he embraced as his own (appendix 1, no. 11).2
But like David, Ingres drew on a knowledge of history that could be imaginatively adapted to his own aesthetic ends.
The young Sienese baker's daughter (now identified as Margherita Luti) who purportedly modeled for Raphael's Madonna della Sedia (Galleria Pitti), the canvas shown in shadow in the right background, is here represented as the painter's lover. She sits on his knees as her unfinished semi-nude portrait—completed and now housed at the Galleria nazionale di arte antica in Rome—rests on the easel in the right foreground, waiting for the master's next brushstroke (see appendix 1, no. 12).
Raphael's Fornarina has been the subject of many a romantic legend. She is mentioned by name in innumerable works of poetry and fiction, including Honoré de Balzac's Scenes from a Courtesan's Life, and was depicted with her supposed lover Raphael in a series of explicitly erotic prints by Pablo Picasso (Suite 347) in 1968 (appendix 1, no. 13).
Wassily Kandinsky - Jocular Sounds
Although there is certain evidence that the previous two examples of adaptive historicism are also to some extent derivative, it might come as a surprise that such an ostensibly modern picture as Wassily Kandinsky's Jocular Sounds (1929) is just as strongly indebted to tradition (appendix 1, no. 14).
This work dates from the artist's Bauhaus years—one of the most seminal periods in the development of modernism. But virtually every element in the painting is adapted from traditional music notation, a fact that many art historians have evidently overlooked.
To the right the staccato dot, tenuto, slur (or tie), and two kinds of accent symbols are ingeniously transformed and combined into the abstract representation of a human figure, birds in flight, and the sun. The geometrized forms to the left are not obviously figurative in intent, but despite the use of color and the distortion of familiar shapes, they are clearly derived from the down-bow (or bracket); double-whole, whole, and half rests; and tenuto symbols. Kandinsky's work, which cannily avoids the most obvious forms of music notation (e.g., notes and clefs) in favor of more purely geometric symbols, demonstrates how the traditional often lurks beneath the surface of even the most contemporary forms of artistic expression.
