The Holy Family, oil painting by Giorgione, c. 1508; in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Samuel H. Kress Collection
Art historians have taken a variety of approaches. Such eminent figures as Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001) stoutly defended the establishment of a canon of indubitably great paintings, whereas Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945) treated “categories of beholding,” which reveal the ways in which paintings create their effects. Paintings and works of sculpture also can have an intellectual content. One school of art historians, most prominently identified with Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), studied iconology, or iconography, which consists of the formal analysis of visual motifs used to express thematic content or to identify important figures (thus, a skull or hourglass indicated death, and a figure carrying his skin over his shoulder referred to St. Bartholomew, who according to legend was flayed). To understand such paintings, knowledge of iconology is necessary but not sufficient. Iconologists have tried to move beyond providing simple lists of motifs to developing treatments of how motifs change and of what these changes indicate regarding the cultural and intellectual context of the painting.
Painting has not escaped the conceptual issue besetting most of the arts: how to identify an object as a work of art. Several developments challenge historians of contemporary art: the presentation of ordinary objects as “art”—such as the urinal that Marcel Duchamp submitted to a gallery as The Fountain; the rise of abstract painting; and portraits of soup cans by Andy Warhol. In Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), the American philosopher of art Arthur Danto argued that art is at an end, since there is now no way to distinguish between works of art and urinals and no distinct mode in which works of art can convey their intellectual content. Concurrently with this proclamation of the end of art came the question of whether art history has also come to an end. This is a typical postmodern provocation, of a piece with the claim that history as a whole has ended. Biography and psychohistory
Ancient biography, especially the entire genre of hagiography, subordinated any treatment of individual character to the profuse repetition of edifying examples. They were generally about eminent men, but women could qualify as subjects by being martyred. Although biographies written in the Italian Renaissance, such as that of Giorgio Vasari, began to resemble modern biographies, those written in the Northern Renaissance were still of great public figures, by someone who knew them. They were almost totally lacking in psychological insight, personality being swathed in thick layers of virtue. For example, the life of Thomas More, written by his son-in-law, does not even mention that More was the author of Utopia (1516). In the 17th century, however, Izaak Walton (better known today for his classic treatise on angling) wrote some lives of literary figures, adding heroes of culture to those of war and politics as appropriate subjects. The renowned Samuel Johnson (1709–84) has the distinction of being both a biographer (of English poets) and the subject of the biography by James Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791), which was roughly as important for biography as Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) was for historiography.
Biographers of contemporaries are often faced with one of two unique challenges. They sometimes discover that the letters, diaries, and other personal documents of the subject that are most necessary for writing the biography have been destroyed, sometimes precisely to prevent a biography from being written. Writers of authorized biographies, however, are often granted privileged access to these materials but are somewhat constrained by the commission. Even when the biographer is not dependent on the subject (or literary executor) for the necessary sources, the relationship between the two persons can be intense. There is likely to be some—perhaps overriding—emotional attraction on the part of the biographer to the person he wishes to write about. Some writers believe that the biographer must become intimately acquainted with the mind and emotions of the subject. This requirement is obviously easier to meet if the two are close friends, but biographers can also generate deep empathy with people long dead. However, it seems to be fascination, not admiration, that is essential, since good biographies have been written by authors who came to despise their subjects. Otherwise there presumably could never have been good biographies of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin.
Writing the life of a major writer or artist presents different problems—and opportunities—from those presented in writing the life of a statesman. It also makes a vast difference whether or not one is writing about a contemporary. Biographers face the problem of access to private collections as well as the problem of the quality of those collections, which vary enormously in size and informativeness. For example, whereas only about 300 often terse letters by the American novelist Herman Melville survive, there are about 15,000 extant letters by the American writer Henry James—this after James had burned all his copies of his letters and everything else that might have been useful to a biographer.
Although at times faced with the willful destruction of the personal papers of their subjects, almost every biographer of a contemporary figure faces an embarrassment of documents and must at times envy the biographer of such sparsely documented figures as William Shakespeare. Victorian biographers generally surrendered to a plethora of sources by writing extremely long accounts of the life and times of statesmen, larded with extensive verbatim quotations from their correspondence and speeches. The English critic Lytton Strachey (1880–1932) ridiculed these multivolume monuments piled on the bones of the dead, and in his Eminent Victorians (1918) he completely changed the course of biography as a literary genre. In four short and witty sketches of Florence Nightingale, Henry Cardinal Manning, Gen. Charles George Gordon, and Thomas Arnold, Strachey gave vent to all that a modernist generation that had survived World War I felt for its pious and overbearing predecessors. Strachey was particularly adept at pouncing upon and pointing out instances of unconscious hypocrisy. Although his brother James Strachey was the first translator of Sigmund Freud in England, it is not clear that Lytton Strachey had read anything by him, but Freud’s ideas were in the air and could not fail to interest a biographer imbued with “the hermeneutics of suspicion.”
Those seeking a balanced account of these four great Victorians will not find it in Strachey’s pages. Yet though he was sometimes unfair and sacrificed judiciousness to witticisms, Strachey became a model for future biographers who wanted to escape from the thousand-page tomes that monumentalized great statesmen and authors. This meant touching subjects that had previously been passed over, either through prudery or respect for privacy. Thus, the poet Robert Southey’s life of Horatio Nelson, the English naval hero, denied that there was any “crudity” (sexual intercourse) in his relationship with Lady Hamilton. As late as 1951 Roy Harrod published a biography of the influential economist John Maynard Keynes that did not mention homosexuality. By contrast, many biographers in the later 20th century considered their primary task to be the interpretation of their subject’s psychosexual development.
For this enterprise there are, of course, psychological theories. Unfortunately, there are all too many of them. Even if the biographer decides on depth psychology—and there are alternatives—the choice is not much simplified. Although Freudian psychoanalysis has pretty much swept the field in the United States, there are still European scholars influenced by Carl Jung. Furthermore, there are a bewildering variety of alternative Freudian theories—not a few of them propounded by the master himself. So it is not altogether clear what orthodox Freudianism is, but it would emphasize the importance of instinctual drives and of experiences in early childhood.