Pustovit A.V. History of European culture

No amount of preface makes a book better, especially when it's a success. A preface is needed not for a book, but only for readers, or rather, those of them who assume that understanding art can be learned according to some universal scheme.

Times change. We are beginning to wean ourselves from the idea that complex moral and cultural problems have only one, and moreover, the right solution. On the other hand, our art history still retains, unfortunately, a reputation not so much for science as for entertaining short stories about artists, paintings, and how to “learn to understand” art.

For too long, lectures and popular pamphlets have posited a naive system of "how to look at pictures" recommendations. It was probably useful at the time. Art history, as it were, led a tour of centuries and countries, rather enlightening the viewer than forcing him to think.

Unfortunately, art history in its lofty and true sense, art history as a science, is not yet very familiar to the lover of painting. The book of a scientist - historian or art theorist - is still perceived as a guide to the entertaining labyrinths of artistic life, and not as a work that has a value completely independent.

Meanwhile - I am deeply convinced of this - only communication with a person who thinks seriously and independently, who is not inclined to flirt with the reader, but speaks with him on an equal footing, can help in understanding art. And speaking not general truths, but what he himself thinks.

Of course, every science, including ours, has its own methodology, its own system of terms, its own theoretical foundation. But in the present century, even the exact sciences take into account in their results the nature of the researcher's personality. Displays mathematical formulas or a living person looking through a microscope. At the same time, of course, he tries to reduce his individuality to a minimum, striving for high objectivity.

The science of art, of course, also seeks objectivity. But its paradox is that without a pronounced subjective point of view, it ceases to be a science. For the personal experience of an object of art is a necessary component of its study. The researcher of art is also obliged to analyze his own emotional attitude towards it.

That is why for the reader of the book, who really wants to seriously understand the structure of the picture, the principles of its perception, it is so important that the author be a specific person, that he guess behind every judgment, so that the level of his thoughts is also quite high. It is in this that respect for the reader, for the reader who is tired of common truths and impersonal recipes, lies.

The artist, as you know, sometimes paints a picture for more than one year, but he prepares for this all his previous life. The viewer in the museum rarely spends more than ten minutes on it. Of course, a thoughtful viewer, endowed with a heart and mind, will return to the picture more than once, but still, you will agree: how little time we find to communicate with a work of art. How much did the artist give us! And how much have we tasted from his generous gift, from his hard labor?

Art requires inhuman courage. Hundreds of artists live their lives in obscurity and work, and only a few create truly immortal works. Many paintings that once delighted the audience have not stood the test of time and now arouse at best only condescending curiosity. The secret of high artistry is not immediately revealed, it does not immediately become clear what truly eternal life is destined for in art. But any process has its own logic, its own - albeit still not quite clear - laws, its own points of reference, its own criteria of value.

And if from the very beginning we do not recognize the obvious idea that the comprehension of these problems is extremely difficult, requiring patience, curiosity and seriousness, we should not hope that art will reveal its innermost secrets to us and bring the joy that we expect from it.

We are accustomed to the idea that good, real art is understandable to people. Of course, Shakespeare's "Hamlet" captivates even the not very sophisticated reader (especially the audience in the theater) even at the first reading. What a gripping plot, what passions, what painful doubts, what a tangle of opposing forces, what a mournful and proud ending! But this is only the very top layer of the tragedy. Everyone who re-read Hamlet at different periods of his life, re-read it in different translations, and even touching the original, correlating the tragedy with his own moral experience, plunged deeper and deeper into this endless world, embracing, it seems, all human pains and joys. And in the end he asked himself the question: how was this miracle created? Because see external essence works of art and even to admire it does not mean to understand it. All the more so to understand in the most serious sense, combining penetration into the subtleties of thought with a lively, intuitive, even subconscious comprehension of the secrets of art, which turn a meeting with art into that very “holiday that is always with you.”

Communication with art is first of all a new communication with oneself. Music imperiously bursts into our spiritual life, and it is not for nothing that there is a common expression about “sounding strings of the soul” - banality, as you know, if not the sister of truth, still retains a certain closeness to it. deeds literary heroes other people measure their own actions, and adult people look for distant and subtle consonances in prose and poetry with their thoughts, emotions, rejoice at associative coincidences, psychological discoveries, knowing themselves, and through themselves - the world in the past, past and present.

Another thing is the painting. It is not so easy to relate to inner world person. Of course, she (I'm talking about a classic, so to speak, traditional picture, which is mainly in question in the book by S. M. Daniel) to a large extent reflects the visible world in which a person lives. And this ability of her to create a convincing semblance of reality has a completely bewitching effect. From antiquity to the present day, the viewer stops in front of the image, admiring the ability of the artist to create an illusion of the world on a plane - either a tiny fragment of it, or a royally vast space.

But this naive admiration is understandable. Firstly, to write quite professionally what surrounds us is not an easy task, requiring skill and skill. Secondly, the vast majority of viewers begin their discovery of painting precisely with ingenuous admiration, comprehending the beauty of the world through its harmonious reproduction on the canvas. Something else is sad, sad that most often here the relationship between the viewer and the picture, in fact, ends. And the penetration into its secrets is replaced by superficial erudition, that is, knowledge of the events of art history, even sometimes the evolution of styles. In fact, it is not so difficult to learn to distinguish the stormy pathos of the Baroque masters from the strict and balanced linearity of the classicists. But this is the path to the accumulation of knowledge, and not to understanding, not to the improvement of visual-intellectual perception, which alone can make the viewer and the picture happy interlocutors who speak and "can't talk enough."

The author quite accurately defined the theme of the book: "how the perception of art turns into the art of perception." Of course, one cannot hope that every significant work of art finds an audience as gifted as its creator. But if the history of art did not have talented "spectators (including sensitive amateurs, and writers, and artists deprived of a genuine gift, but able to discern this gift from their fellows, and professional art historians), art would simply suffocate. And educating in ourselves respect for it and the desire to understand its true, and not superficially banal values, we thereby create an atmosphere in which it is able to live and breathe.

The picture can play an insidious game with a lazy and incurious viewer: having opened a simple drama, arouse sympathy for the characters, delight with beautiful and harmonious combinations of colors, and then, as it were, slam the doors in front of a tired look.

Other arts are not static, they give new impressions every moment. Even the most complex music, which has completely tired the listener, leaves hope that the next chord will bring the desired variety to the overly complex and seemingly monotonous sound stream. Seemingly boring at first, the novel can give an unexpected plot twist on the next page. The whole picture is in front of you. She does not change, even if the viewer sits in front of her for weeks and months. The viewer needs to change, in him, and only in him a process takes place that, enriching his eyes and soul, allows him to see everything in the same canvas as something completely unfamiliar; this “unfamiliar” enters the consciousness of a grateful viewer, and a dialogue arises when it’s a pity to leave the picture, and you really want to “talk” with other pictures in the same acquired language. Believe me, this is a great spiritual work. And awareness of the seriousness of “his is a prerequisite for reading the book of S. M. Daniel.

Today, the usual structure of the canonical history of art is being swayed by stormy winds of reassessment, the names erased from history are being revived, the dogmatic negation of the avant-garde is leaving, the twentieth century is opening up to the viewer in all the diversity of its culture. Now it's too easy to get carried away with new things if you don't know what most of of this new one is simply an unknown old one or - which is quite sad - an elementary and simplified repetition of the past. Passion for re-evaluations sometimes makes you forget that the main advantage thinking person- "have your own opinion." There is only one cure here - knowledge. Tyutchev has an amazing trophy: “Blessed is he who in our days wins // He won not with blood, but with his mind, // Blessed is he who is the point of Archimedes // Managed to find in himself.” It is in a slow and serious penetration into the essence and structure of time-honored artistic values ​​that a modern person can find a moral and intellectual foundation for his own independent judgments, find the "Archimedes point" in the kaleidoscope of today's culture, both dramatic and vain, where the true is so often obscured by the imaginary.

The long life lived by works of art does not in itself guarantee their high, absolute artistic quality. There have always been mediocre works. But a picture that has existed for centuries acquires a very special value - the history of its perception. The public taste of different times reacted to it differently. Daniel's book discusses in detail and precisely the evolution of the perception of an image (for example, an icon). The most carefully restored habitat of the icon - in the temple, in the mind of man, in the entire structure of medieval thinking - gives the reader an idea of ​​the amazing polysemy of the work of art. Losing some functions over time, it acquires new ones, but for an enlightened person, the old qualities of an icon remain in its, so to speak, “genetic code”; and, looking at a medieval image, he will see it in a peculiar aura of former perception, hear the silent echo of old emotions, compare them with his own emotions. And this is just one way to “enter” art, by the way, not only medieval art.

The point is the fundamental historicism of the look and the picture. Knowing how it was seen at the time of its appearance, how the attitude towards it changed, equips the viewer with a beneficial confidence that his vision is not at all final, that knowledge continues, that knowledge entails doubt and that this is not at all bad.

The reader - perhaps with some surprise - learns from the book that the picture is much younger than painting. This very important judgment is not accidentally emphasized by the author. The painting appeared at a certain historical stage, more precisely, at a certain stage in the formation of personality, when the need and opportunity arose for a direct and intimate dialogue between the personality of the artist and the personality of the viewer (at the time of the Renaissance). I think this is a significant historical lesson: even then, five hundred years ago, the viewer's communication with the picture required a certain moral maturity. This dialogue has been going on for five hundred years. And can we conduct it today without knowing how it has changed over the centuries?

Of course, there is no detailed history of public taste in the book. But it makes you constantly remember that the art of seeing a picture has evolved along with the art of creating it. Both of these arts were essentially inseparable. Having ceased to be an inseparable part of the artistic structure of the temple, having acquired autonomy, self-sufficient value, the ability to enter into a dialogue with the viewer, the picture entered palaces, mansions, even the same temples in a completely new - independent artistic - quality. The life of a painting among people, for people, in dispute and harmony with them is not an easy process. And the author is absolutely right in giving him Special attention. Without knowing the history of this process, at least in the most general terms, the current viewer will not be able to appreciate the courage of some and the timidity of other painters, the drama of misunderstanding or - sometimes even worse - misunderstanding by contemporaries of the great masters. The socio-moral habitat of a painting in its historical movement is a phenomenon that has not been considered by our art history. And the viewer will undoubtedly be grateful to the author who made him think about these problems. Thus, even today, looking at old canvases, we will be able to reflect on our own responsibility both to them and to new, contemporary paintings that will someday also become history.

It seems to me very important that in a book about our profession - art history - it is said with dignity and seriousness. We often consider it good form to talk about art as if impersonally, as if the art historian acts as a prompter, inaudibly prompting the viewer his own thoughts. But how can a specialist who does not honor his profession fully fulfill his task?

I have already said that the history of art owes a great deal to gifted spectators. There is a popular belief that art, they say, is good in itself, talk about it, even the most enticing ones, will not add anything. A deep and dangerous delusion, dangerous because it crosses out the most important link from our spiritual life - the ability to be aware of the movement of our own emotions. Let us remember how many times, admiring (or indignant) at a work of art, we painfully look for words to express our feelings, we are depressing by the approximateness, ambiguity, some kind of reticence of our judgments. Then we hear it right word, we read it, it happens that we find it ourselves, and this brings a strange relief, joy: something necessary has taken place. What?

A happy or disturbing emotion, a sharp impression that deeply touches our consciousness, an intuitive guess beats in our consciousness, trying to acquire, so to speak, a form tangible by thought, in order to remain in this form in memory. Thought wants to put on words, because it is words that we remember, and only in words does thought become fully thought. Spiritualized and meaningful emotion, in turn, turns into that golden reserve that provides on a new, more high level human ability to look and see.

The process of professional art criticism in a book 6t The reader is not hidden, and this is very valuable. Penetrating into the secrets of painting, he clearly sees what kind of work underlies art history professionalism, as well as the centuries-old history of art comprehension by mankind. Art history slowly became a science; it was preceded by a long period that could be called enlightened connoisseurship. The experience, intuition, sense of style and quality possessed by people in love with art did not yet have their own established methodology, their own professional language, but their diligence created an “environment of understanding” around art. The reflective artists who left us written or oral judgments about art, and even entire aesthetic treatises, for their part, helped the viewer and each other. The process was not simple: it was the artists who often declared one thing, but did something else, because their intuition came into conflict with theoretical fantasies. But even these paradoxes were invariably instructive. Suffice it to recall W. Hogarth, whose artistic practice did not at all correspond to his theoretical treatise "Analysis of Beauty".

Perhaps the well-known prejudice against the verbal interpretation of art (and, therefore, against art history) is rooted in the fact that genetically this science is connected precisely with amateurism, that is, with something extremely subjective and emotional. Indeed, this is the case when strict knowledge was born out of ardent love: people collected only what was kind to their hearts, they only admired it. Knowledge of the laws of being, nature (that is, natural and exact sciences) is not complicated and not inspired by love for the subjects studied, they bear the seal of rigor and primordial objectivity. Of course, there are people in art history who replace professionalism with enthusiastic emotions, and this, of course, greatly undermines the reputation of the profession. But we must remember that tearing art apart, dissecting it, “checking harmony with algebra” without love for this harmony is an empty thing. And let the reader, carefully and seriously entering the difficult world of this book, pay attention to the fact that really professional art history is capable of operating with quite accurate scientific categories while preserving the traditional “knowledge of love”.

And it turns out that for a serious perception of art, it is absolutely necessary to take a fresh look at a number of familiar concepts: the system of communication between people - language, the general structure of different types of culture, space and time. With all these categories, art is in complex, but quite certain - although not always stable, stable - relations.

Daniel's book constantly reminds us that the world of the picture plane, so small next to the huge, dynamic world extended in time and space, is connected with it by many not only direct (resemblance to reality, for example), but also indirect connections. The world of the picture, it turns out, reflects the relationship of our consciousness with the universe, organizes them, even partially forms them, depending on them endlessly, it matures and becomes more complex along with humanity, gives it lessons and concentrates human wisdom in the pictorial visual language inherent only to it.

There is no doubt that the reader will also find in the book basic, supporting judgments about space, rhythm, color, genres, and the main plastic techniques of artists. This gives Daniel's work the necessary versatility: even the most "top" layer of her text will be useful even with a fairly cursory reading. But the main meaning of the book is still different - the author's persistent desire to introduce the reader into the holy of holies of spectator professionalism, into the process of conscious emotional perception, enriched with knowledge, the ability to constantly compare the familiar with the new, when the subconscious memory resonates with all shades of the pictorial language, simultaneously experiencing, understanding and feeling him, combining logic and poetry in communication with art.

Many of the books that have come out in our country before on similar topics were usually distinguished by excessive certainty, they to a certain extent claimed to be "ultimate truth." S. M. Daniel offers a concept that is also quite consistent, he is convinced of it and excellently argues his judgments. In fact, he is not inclined to the subjunctive. He relies on many authoritative judgments, and his own logical constructions are quite authoritative. However professional culture The author leaves to the reader - amateur or professional - the natural right to dialogue. The very path to truth is analyzed on the pages of the book so dramatically that it becomes quite obvious: the truth can be different. But already within the framework of a different system of ideas and concepts.

I would say that the author himself helps his opponents, if only because he gives lessons in professional art history logic and tolerance, he does not hide the movement of his own thought, opens this movement, thereby making him more vulnerable. But Daniel is not afraid of a dispute, primarily because he knows its inevitability and fruitfulness. Convinced of his own rightness, he admits another conviction.

Highly appreciating his book, I do not want to say that I agree with it in everything. The author and I - we look at art as if from different angles, rather, even from different emotional positions. The logical judgments of S. M. Daniel are characterized by a somewhat detached epic, which, however, does not exclude enthusiasm. Probably, I would write about the same, more often trusting intuition, less strictly. Someone else is different. Of course, the difference is not only in the style of perception. The author has such an active personality that he simply cannot have absolute like-minded people - any very personal judgment, no matter how brilliantly proven, is debatable.

However, this debate is not empty. The whole course of Daniel's reasoning convinces that without a serious knowledge of the whole complex of problems of history, culture, and art, it is not only pointless to engage in discussion, but simply uninteresting.

Perhaps this is one of the most serious and useful conclusions that anyone who reads this book can draw for himself: looking at a picture with an untrained eye, with an indifferent soul and a sluggish thought is not interesting. Little is interesting to know. Another thing is that fate sometimes does not give a person the opportunity to learn a lot from childhood. But the point is not in the amount of knowledge, but in whether a person feels their insufficiency. If he feels, he is already rich, no matter what level of knowledge he is at. It is possible, having accumulated extensive erudition, one day to stop. And become ignorant. After all, ignorance is not so much a small knowledge as knowledge stopped, self-satisfied.

In relation to art, this is all the more unforgivable. Communication with him is primarily a moral problem. And what to say about morality, if it has stopped?

The meeting with this book is not an easy event. I read it with enthusiasm, realizing that I myself would have written about many things differently, but that the author wrote it exactly as he could and should have written it. The viewer - I repeat once again - is invited to talk on an equal footing. And the question may arise - so, after reading this book, everyone will master the art of seeing? Of course not. But everyone will know what art is. And that it is possible and worth approaching it, even if it is during the whole life.

Mikhail German, Doctor of Arts

To my mother - Lyudmila Borisovna Daniel We clearly know that vision is one of the fastest actions that exist; at one point it sees infinitely many forms, and yet it understands only one thing at once. Let us suppose the case that you, the reader, cast one glance over this entire written page, and you immediately express the judgment that it is full different letters, but you don’t know during this time, neither what kind of letters they are, nor what they want to say; so you need to follow word by word; line by line, if you want to gain knowledge of these letters, just as if you want to climb to the height of a building, you will have to climb from rung to rung, otherwise it would be impossible to reach its height. And so I say to you, whom nature turns to this art. If you want to have knowledge of the forms of things, then start with their individual parts, and do not go on to the second, if you have not previously mastered the first well in memory and in practice. If you do otherwise, you will lose time, or, indeed, you will greatly extend the training. And I remind you - learn diligence before speed. Leonardo da Vinci

S. M. Daniel
THE ART OF SEEING
(fragment)

The task of the image is to sensually signify the supersensible. The image acts as a mediator that leads the viewer beyond the limits of subjective sensibility and from images to prototypes. In the rivalry between hearing and sight that has continued throughout history, the Middle Ages favored the former.

Researchers have offered various explanations. In this regard, perhaps the most important factor is the connection between the sensory experience of medieval man and the Christian cult of the living, oral Word. If it is true that, according to the ideas of this era, the world is a book inscribed by the hand of the Most High, then we must not forget that the words of the written gospels acquired meaning for the vast illiterate majority only when they became spoken and heard.

To characterize the audience of the Middle Ages, the word “audience” is quite applicable, because the viewer does not so much contemplate as he listens. We find images and models of such a viewer in the images themselves, primarily in those that embody the iconographic formula of “transmitting the good news”, marked by two specific gestures: the “speaking” hand and the “listening” hand. “At the same time, the transmitting and receiving did not have to be within the same composition. Since spiritual truth is invisible and imperceptible, its communication does not require direct contact - it is like broadcasting on the air, which can be received not only by those to whom it is directly directed, but also by anyone who wants to hear: “He who has an ear, let him hear!” (John the Theologian). In other words, this message, broadcast through the image, is directed to a potentially limitless audience.

In this regard, it is useful to note the comparisons between an icon painter and a priest, which are found in Russian icon painting “originals” (that is, special manuals for icon painters); the icon painter is like a priest who revives the flesh with the divine word. Hence follows the ban on the abuse of the ability to “revive the flesh”, so that the image does not pass into an alien, purely sensual sphere of perception. In addition, it is important to note the similarity in relation to the icon and to the holy book: for example, kissing the icon is like kissing the Gospel.

From all that has been said, it follows that the interpretation of a medieval image from a purely visual standpoint can greatly distort the actual state of things; visual experience is only one of the components of medieval representation, and far from being the main one. The data of visual experience (as well as sensory experience in general) were used by the medieval painter insofar as they corresponded to the embodiment of intelligible images; in other words, these data served only building material. Therefore, any attempt to shift the medieval image in a purely visual way turns into a contradiction to the very spirit of this culture, as if we, say, set out to present an angel in full size (!). In this respect, antiquity and the Middle Ages diverge fundamentally.