Central panel (detail), Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1480–1505, oil on panel, 220 x 390 cm (Museo del Prado, Madrid)
Society’s expectation that the scholar deliver explanations creates a predicament for the art historian, because a work of art is not the effect of any cause, and is not easily lodged in a linear history. Christopher Wood, A History of Art History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), p. 6.
Standing in front of an unfamiliar work of art, especially one from a distant time and place, can be a serious challenge. Questions quickly arise if we want to move beyond the visual appeal of the work. When and where was it made? Who made it? For what reason? Why does it look the way it does? How do we explain what we see? If we are in a museum, most of these questions are cursorily answered by a quick glance at the label placed next to the art (like the caption below the images in this essay), but these data points very rarely suffice.
Top left mandala (detail), Wangguli and five additional Newar artists, Four Mandalas of the Vajravali Cycle (Ewam Choden Monastery, Tsang Province, Central Tibet), 1429–56, pigments on cloth, 88.9 x 73.7 cm (Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art, New York)
From the familiar to the confounding
Art historians do their best to recreate the historical context that made the work meaningful when it was made. Often (but not always) this context can speak to us personally (even across time and space) by touching something we have in common, such as the desire to connect with the divine, to be part of a community, or to reflect on what gives life meaning and how to confront death. But sometimes the work of art and its cultural context are so unfamiliar that—even though the art historian fills in much of the context—we are simply awed that human beings like us in so many ways could have made something that can utterly confound us.
Richard Serra, Sequence, 2006, steel, 388.62 x 1240.47 x 1986.76 cm (The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection currently at Stanford University) © Richard Serra
Explaining art
It’s tempting to want the work of art “explained,” but that term implies that we have solved all the complexities and contradictions inherent in the work of art and come to some final “answer” about what it means. Works of art, like all things that emerge from the human imagination, don’t work like that. One reason for this is that “the work of art emerges at once out of a collectivity and out of an individual consciousness,” and grappling with just one of those—the individual or the collective at a particular moment in history—is a herculean task, and to understand both, well, that is a significant challenge. [1]
Beadwork (detail), unrecorded Yorùbá artists, Ceremonial robe (agbádá ìlèkè), late 19th–early 20th centuries (Akúré, Ondo region, Nigeria), velvet, cotton, glass beads, 50 x 104-1/2 inches (Newark Museum of Art; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC 2.0)
Though we may wish otherwise, art history does not “explain” a work of art the way the Pythagorean theorem explains the relationship between the sides of right triangles. Instead, it exposes what human beings have done with, for, and against images in order to communicate ideas that are important to them and to their society. We don’t often acknowledge the central role that images have played, and continue to play, in shaping both our collective culture and the individual human psyche, but the impact of images is profound.
Figure beheaded during the iconoclasm of the English Reformation, Lady Chapel, completed 1349, Ely Cathedral, Cambridgeshire, England (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The power of images
Art historians are fascinated by moments in history when people destroyed, defaced, or buried works of art, since the destruction of an image is an implicit acknowledgement of its tremendous power and meaning. Art history uncovers just how significant we understand and feel images to be now and through history. Sometimes art historians address this issue directly. For example, here is David Freedberg, from the beginning of his book, The Power of Images:
People are sexually aroused by pictures and sculptures; they break pictures and sculptures; they mutilate them, kiss them, cry before them, and go on journeys to them; they are calmed by them, stirred by them, and incited to revolt. They give thanks by means of them, expect to be elevated by them, and are moved to the highest levels of empathy and fear. David Freedberg, The Power of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 1.
Master H.L., The Breisach Altarpiece, c. 1523–26, limewood (Saint Stephan’s Cathedral, Breisach; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
On the pages of Smarthistory, you will encounter works of art that have had these powerful effects and still do. Given the tremendous power of images and the ways images shape our understanding, it is unfortunate that art history is not a part of the core curriculum in more high schools and colleges. Art history offers tools that many people would find immensely valuable as they navigate our image-saturated culture.
Doubly at a loss
The physical nature of what we study in art history classes can be challenging since these objects are rarely present in the classroom and we have to rely on image technologies to reproduce them (historically: prints, slides, and today, digital images). In addition, throughout history, most works of art were made for a specific purpose, to address a specific audience, and often for a particular location. They may not have even been understood as art until they were isolated from that original context. When we encounter a work of art in an art history class, we are missing not only this rich historical context, but also the physical work itself. In other words, we are doubly at a loss. In the museum, or when we travel to see a work in the place for which it was made, “the objects from the past stand before us, but the worlds from which they came are long gone.” [2]
Haniwa, 6th century (Kofun Period), terracotta, excavated at Kamishiba Tumulus, Takasaki-shi, Gunma, Japan (Tokyo National Museum; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Art history helps objects that have largely fallen mute to speak again and reminds us that the way we see the world around us—at a particular place and time—is just one way to see. When we try to “explain” art, to find a single, narrow meaning, we risk closing down possibilities for empathy with others and with the past, and with aspects of our own humanity. In the Humanities, we seek out multiplicity, complexity, and ambiguity, as difficult as that can be.
