The notion that art has a role in rebalancing us emotionally promises to answer the vexed question of why people differ so much in their aesthetic
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A borne to rebalance a nervous soul.
17. Ludwig Mies van dcr Rohc, Farnsworth Mouse. Piano. Illinois. 1951
Art to rebalance a Norwegian civil servant.
IK. Caiedral de Santa Prisca у San Sebastian. Taxco. Mexico. 1751-8
tastes. Why are some people drawn to minimalist architecture and others to the Baroque? Why arc some people excited by bare concrete walls and others by William Morriss floral patterns? Our tastes will depend on what spectrum of our emotional make-up lies in shadow and is hence in need of stimulation and emphasis. Every work of art is imbued with a particular psychological and moral atmosphere: a painting may be either serene or restless, courageous or careful, modest or confident, masculine or feminine, bourgeois or aristocratic, and our preferences for one kind over another reflects our varied psychological gaps. We hunger for artworks that will compensate for our inner fragilities and help return us to a viable mean. We call a work beautiful when it supplies the virtues we are missing, and we dismiss as ugly one that forces on us moods or motifs that we feel either threatened or already overwhelmed by. Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
It is not only individuals who can use art to supply what is missing from life. Groups of people, and even whole societies, might look to art to balance out existence. The German poet, playwright and philosopher Friedrich Schiller developed this idea in an essay, 'On Naive and Sentimental Poetry', published in 1796. He was curious about the fact that in ancient Greece, artists and dramatists had paid little attention to landscape. Schiller argued that this made sense because of the way they lived. They spent their days outside, they lived in small cities with seas and mountains close by. He said, 'the Greeks had not lost nature in themselves/ Therefore, he surmised, kthey had no great desire to create objects external to them in which they could recover it/ It follows from this that art that pays a great deal of attention to the natural world would be prized only when there was some special need for it. 'As nature begins gradually to vanish from human life as a direct experience, so we see it emerge in the world of the poet as an idea/ As life becomes more complex and artificial, as life is lived more indoors, the longing for a compensating natural simplicity gets stronger. Schiller concludes, kWe can expect that the nation which has gone the farthest towards unnaturalness would have to be touched most strongly by the phenomenon of the naive. This nation is France/ As if to confirm Schiller's hypothesis, Marie Antoinette, the late French queen, had a few years earlier constructed a mock farm near the palace of Versailles so she could enjoy watching the milking of cows (19).
We can understand the particular imbalances of a historical period by considering which artworks have achieved new popularity within it. It is a sign that the contemporary developed world is exceptionally busy and
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A cot rage to correct the excesses of a palace.
19. Richard Miquc and Hubert Robert. The Queen's Hamlet. Petit Trianon. Versailles, 1785
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The art we love is a guide to wlyat is missingfrom our societies.
20. Thomas Jones, A Wall m Naples. .,1782
21. Cloister, Labbaye du Thoronet, Provcncc, late 12th- carly 13th ccntury
materially satiated when there is renewed interest in the Italian paintings of Thomas Jones (20), which are attentive to noble decay and endurance, or in the quiet, austere colonnades once walked by the monks of the abbey of Le Thoronet (21).
A grasp of the psychological mechanism behind taste will not necessarily change our sense of what we find beautiful, but it can prevent us from reacting to what we don't like with simple disparagement. We should know to ask at once what people lack in order to see a given object as beautiful, and can come to appreciate their choices, even if we cannot muster any personal enthusiasm for them.
Not only does art have a role in rebalancing our characters, but it may also help us to be more moral. The word 'morality' has become hugely troublesome for the modern age. We don't tend to respond well to recommendations of how we should behave in order to be 'good'. We're terrified of being interfered with. People who readily accept the need to go to a gym will bristle at the suggestion that they might also work on their character and aspire to virtue as they might to physical fitness. A key assumption of modern democratic political thinking is that we should be left to live as we choose without being nagged, without fear of moral judgement and without being subject to the whims of authority. The impulse to probe at ethics trembles before the incensed question of who anyone might be to dare to tell anyone else how to live.
It is evident, though, that a lot of the best art produced throughout history has been concerned with an explicitly moralistic mission: an attempt to encourage our better selves through encoded messages of exhortation and admonition. We might think of works of art that exhort as both bossy and unnecessary, but this would assume that an encouragement to virtue would always be contrary to our own desires. However, in reality, when we are calm and not under fire, most of us long to be good and wouldn't mind the odd reminder to be so; we simply can't find the motivation day to day. In relation to our aspirations to goodness, we suffer from what Aristotle called akrasia, or weakness of will. We want to behave well in our relationships, but slip up under pressure. We want to make more of ourselves, but lose motivation at a critical juncture. In these circumstances, we can derive enormous benefit from works of art that encourage us to be the best versions of ourselves, something that we would only resent if we had a manic fear of outside intervention, or thought of ourselves as perfect already.
A painting that understands how easily one can get interested in the wrong things - and wljat the consequences can be.
11. Robert Braithxvaite Marti neau, The I-jsi Day in Ott Old Home. 1862
Change your ways, while there is still time.
23. I ra Angelico, •The Pains of Hell' from The Last Judgement (detail. <".1431
The best kind of cautionary art - art that is moral without being 'moralistic' - understands how easy it is to be attracted to the wrong things (22). It is alive to the fact that quite good people end up making big mistakes, and do so unwittingly. In Martineau's picture, we can pick up that the husband's problems stem from gambling and drinking (there are clues in the racehorse image propped sideways on the floor and in the dccantcr behind him). This man is now inducting his son into these gentlemanly vices. But he is not a monster; his charming and carefree smile is not forced. We imagine that he wants to make everyone happy - he is just unreliable and easily carried away. We can suppose how an accumulation of little follies has led eventually to the sale of his property. The home that had belonged to his family for generations (as the archaic fireplace, armour and portraits attest) has been lost on his watch. The whole power of the artist has gone into making us feel the shame and sadness of this in a way that might impact our own behaviour, because many of us harbour a few of this man's tendencies in our own psyches.