So I hope you're all here for the lecture on artists names and artists lives.
Now, when you go to a library or visit a museum, watch documentary on television or on your computer or track down an image on the Internet.
I bet you, Paul,
we usually pay little or no attention to the fact that all these activities are usually organised under the names of individual artists.
Indeed, much of art history, broadly defined, assumes that focussing on artists by name is a perfectly natural and normal thing to do.
In actual fact, however,
categorising artworks as the products of named individuals is not a universal concept and one that didn't even exist in Western Europe,
let alone anywhere else for many centuries. Between the later classical period and the Renaissance.
Indeed, the norm from a worldwide and trans historical perspective is probably that of the
anonymous craftsmen or group of artisans rather than a single identifiable named artist.
So the very idea of naming artists is not a universal phenomenon, and many cultures,
both past and present, do not even record, let alone reverentially pronounced in hushed tones.
The names of individual artists. In fact, the early 15th century painters seen at work on the right.
And that's a early 15th century relief of the painter working on a canvas or a panel, probably,
or the late 20th century Chinese craftsmen on the left who produced objects, images, buildings, sculptures and what have you.
Things that we might now study in an art history course are often completely unacknowledged or at best
recorded only as names in the payment records or account books of rich patrons and powerful institutions.
But can we actually do art history the way we do it here without reference to artists names as the artists Hindmarch both are proposed in 1915,
an art history without names is what he called for. And if we did, what kind of an art history might this look like?
For instance, maybe we don't really need artists names to write a perfectly respectable history of the diversional
function of altarpiece as a mediaeval Europe or the iconography of Buddha sculpture in Tibet.
But when we do use artist names, as is so often the case, we need to think very carefully about who is doing the naming and why.
Or to quote Shakespeare. What's in a name with that which we call a rose by any other name?
Smells sweet just to shift our references for a moment.
We're talking about artworks in our own day and age.
Things apparently do smell sweeter or at least command a lot more cash depending on how they are named.
In fact, in the case of this 17th century painting showing the destruction of the temple Jerusalem,
the value of having one name rather than another can be put precisely at eight million and 40000 U.S. dollars.
This was a difference in price from when the painting was first sold at auction
at Sotheby's in 1995 as a work by the artist Pietro Testor to its reselling.
Just four years later, under the name of a much better known artist,
initially the heirs of the painting's owner, a man who had made his fortune in hand business.
We're told that the painting under Testa's name should be valued at only seventeen thousand dollars.
Keep bidding in the same room on the day of the 1995 auction. Brought the price up to two hundred and sixty thousand dollars.
But once it had been officially Rio tributed a few years later to the famous baroque painter Nikola Pusan by the art historians,
Sir Dennis, mom and the Loom curator here was in bed.
It was resold for eight point three million dollars. It is not, however, only puissance name that is of interest in this little tale.
Since the words sir, as in Sir Dennis Maun and Loof curator as in LUTH Curator pills and both in front of the names of the two art experts who read,
attributed and effectively renamed this painting are also significant.
The names, titles and proceed status, academic as well as social of those doing the naming can sometimes be equally significant in these two
pages from a 1988 exhibition catalogue of Italian Renaissance drawings at the museum in Florence.
We see, in fact, just how many different names and different kinds of names can be linked to a single sheet of paper,
not much bigger than the one that I'm reading from right now.
But once again, which names are attached to the image and by whom makes a big difference.
First of all, there's the name given to the sheet as a whole. Its title of woman in profile and sketches were the bust of a child.
And for a man with a beard, recto. Various studies versa.
Quite a mouthful, especially in contrast to the earliest name given to the Strong by someone specifically the writer and artist Georgia.
Sorry, but may well have known the artist who originally drew it.
His name for this drawing, which he grew up with two other similar images, was simply three pages of heads.
But there are lots of other names to be seen in the text. I know you probably can't read them.
But, for example, lots and lots of names here and in various ones scattered here into the text,
including the names of places where the drawing has been exhibited in the 20th century.
Those are the impressive number of art historians dating back as far as 1862 who have discussed the image in print and in the main body,
the catalogue entry, which actually continues onto the second page.
From what you see here, the names of collectors and scholars who have owned or assessed the drawing since the 16th century,
including Renaissance figures such as Duke, Grand Duke, Francesco Domenici and Busari, as well as Major 19th,
the 20th century art historians such as Jovani morally Hinglish Bird Flu in your arms builder and Charles to Tony.
In the context of today's focus on artists names,
though perhaps most interesting is of all is how the drawings maker has been named and renamed the catalogue and Trey mentions,
amongst others like Yaka and untaught Romine. And there are others as well as possible authors of the sheet.
Now, even for a specialist Italian renaissance, art by Kafka and Antonio Moeny are not exactly names that trip off the tongue.
But I suspect that what such a drawing might fetch at auction,
or indeed the amount of time and attention a visitor would give to the sheet when displayed in an exhibition would
be measurably increased by the presence of yet another name at the head of the wall label or the catalogue entry,
that of Michelangelo Rutti. However,
the very fact that it could be given Michaelangelo's name in this exhibition and catalogue rather than back
yaka or until your moeny or indeed simply labelled an anonymous copy of a lost Michelangelo original,
as some earlier scholars had in fact suggested,
was very much a function of the academic status and institutional positions held by the curators of the exhibition.
One, the director, the office museum itself.
The other professor of art history at the University of Michigan, curators who in turn were themselves named on the front cover of the catalogue.
However, for better or worse, artists names are a fact of life in much art historical scholarship.
But this just makes it all the more important to understand the origins and implications of the very concept of the artist itself.
In fact, our present day view of artists has been very much shaped by 19th century attitudes.
It was in this period that the emphasis decisively shifted from an artist's ars that is
his or her skill or art with a sense of ability to his or her individual creativity.
In other words, there was a clear shift from valuing the art object as carefully crafted object to value most highly an artist's concept or idea,
and inevitably the related personal, biographical and even psychological traits that were believed to shape this idea.
So true artists and I'm sure you hear actually, I'll talk to me in a minute,
but it's a kind of 19th century romantic poet who's kind of literally dead in a garret,
which is kind of the romantic idea of the artist and the kind of creative genius.
So true artists were now most often prised for their imagination, inventiveness, spontaneity and creative self-expression,
even if or perhaps they perhaps especially if these traits led to artists living unconventional lives,
often touched by a kind of creative madness or genius that led them to being inevitably misunderstood,
ignored and maltreated by most of their comparatively dull, unimaginative, conventional and bourgeois contemporaries.
This is, in short, the starving artist in a garret model of being an artist,
a stereotype perfectly embodied in this mid 19th century painting depicting the death of the romantic poet Thomas Chatterton,
who committed suicide in 1770, aged only 18, penniless, misunderstood and literally living in a garret.
If Henry Wallace is painting is to be believed. Vincent Van Gogh was put self portrait you see here.
Likewise conforms to the stereotype,
having apparently sold almost not a single painting during his lifetime to his rather baffled and implicitly narrow minded bourgeois contemporaries,
as well as being mentally unstable to the point of cutting off his own here in a fit of madness.
In 1889, and in an echo of Chesterton's death, also committing suicide a year later.
I think you probably all heard this kind of story.
Not that it's not true, but it becomes a kind of almost a cliche of a certain kind of view of the artist.
The assertion that are true or proper artists is inevitably an eccentric genius continues to be very much in evidence in our own time,
as seen in the strange and enigmatic figure of Andy Warhol.
You've seen a self-portrait on the left or the gossip column antics of England's own Tracey Emin seen on the right.
In another self-portrait, however,
some aspects of this notion of the artist and implicitly of the nature of artistic genius can be dated back much earlier than the 19th century.
Indeed, it was in the 15th and especially the 16th century. That one begins to see the emergence of what has been called a super artist as genius.
In the case of a very small and must remember that this is an exception even in this period or certainly in this period.
But this very small number of so-called super artists such as Durer, Leonardo, Michelangelo.
Some of the characteristics associated with a 19th century artist is genius, can already be seen.
So, for example, Michaelangelo's temper and brooding melancholic fits which led to his nose being broken and a youthful fight with a fellow artist.
His astonishing creativity and artistic innovation, even his eccentric personal habits,
such as wearing his leather boots for so long that they literally had to be cut off of his festering skin.
All these kind of stories feature in contemporary biographies and depictions, such as, for example,
in brooding portraits like the one on the left, where you can also see his broken nose,
which is kind of his one of the signature features of his image or the possible portrait in the famous painting,
which Amino Rafael School of Athens, where this is sometimes said to be a portrait of Michelangelo and his brooding.
He's in the classic pose of the melancholic with his head resting on his arm.
He's got possibly that broken nose and potentially even those festering boots,
that kind of, again, one of those stories where, you know, they're not festering yet.
So, you know, these kind of images of the kind of brooding, eccentric artist.
Likewise, both Michelangelo and the Northern Renaissance, his most famous super artist,
always sure happily encouraged a view of their creative powers, is being divine and godlike.
Michelangelo was even known in his own lifetime as Divino Vino or the Divine One.
And repeatedly reminded his contemporaries through his poems and through images like his very famous Creation album,
that he, as a godlike artist, was able to give life itself to the figures he portrayed.
Was sorry when writing about Michaelangelo's iconic statue of David even explicitly stated that the
artist's transformation of an old botched piece of marble into an incredibly expressive figure was the,
quote, revival of a dead thing and a veritable miracle. So, again,
a repeated theme of Michelangelo and other artists of this particular group of these super artists are to be able to give life to their material.
In the case of Durer, the point was made perhaps even more explicitly in his famous self-portrait, a 50 100 left,
which in its physiognomy and full frontal pose was clearly meant to echo well-known iconic images of Christ, such as the one seen in the print,
also by juror on the right, in which Christ's face is literally what is likewise from frontally and wearing the crown of thorns
on a fluttering cloth known as the Vaira icon or true image helpfully held aloft here by two angels.
There's prints and paintings also highlight another aspect of the status of artists and artists names and the Renaissance.
Whereas in past centuries,
artists names have generally not been recorded for posterity and had almost never appeared on the individual works that produced by the 16th century.
Artists, especially super artists like Dürer, seeking to distinguish themselves from their artisan or craftsman brethren,
began to sign their paintings, sculptures, prints and sometimes even drawings.
Significantly, jurors famous A.D. Bush juror monogram appears both in his self-portrait and in the print on the right.
See the lady here again. In the latter case of the print, in fact, directly beneath the face of Christ himself,
thereby implying yet another link between artistic and divine creation.
Similarly, in this well known in grading by juror Adam, the first human made by God holds in his hand a sign very clearly stating,
quote, made Vucevic in the Latin made by Elbridge Jr. of Nurnberg.
But whether it was a print or Adam himself, it had been made by the implicitly godlike artist is left somewhat ambiguous and perhaps intentionally so.
Absolutely unambiguous. Is the role played by juror's name? Or rather has monogram in one of the first ever instances of artists copyright violation?
In this case, the Italian renaissance artist Marcantonio Mundi, who was a pupil and a student of Rafael's Mundi copied.
Or perhaps we should say forged some of jurors prints,
including the woodcut you see here with the A.D. monogram visible under the seated figure of Christ
as a man of stars you see here is carved into this print by during the legal scuffle that ensued,
resulted in a decision allowing Mark Antonios copies to continue being printed, but only if they appeared without the A.D. monogram.
And I think you can see here that this is the kind of approved after this a legal fight because
it wasn't copyright law where we know at this point it's just sort of beginning to develop.
You can't see where he's kind of scratched out the A.D. here, putting in it.
You can't have branded with the death because you know, that's not allowed.
So it was the presence or absence of the artist's name that seems to have been the key point of contention for a Renaissance super artist like JR.
His monogram was like McDonald's Golden Arches or Chanel's Double C today and Ambiga,
an unambiguous guarantee of artistic quality through what we might call name branding.
It was also precisely to eliminate any ambiguity about authorship that Michelangelo
decided belatedly to sign his name on one of his most important early sculptures,
the famous model Piazza in the Vatican. The Sorry in his life of Michelangelo describes the young artists anger upon hearing a loud mouth,
Lomborg claim that the work had been made by Howard Gobbo of Milan.
No idea what that supposed to be. But it clearly wasn't Michelangelo.
So later that night, at least according to the sorry, Michelangelo rapidly chiselled his name on the sash across the Virgin's chest,
thereby giving very prominently and very permanently proof of his authorship.
And that he could never again be denied. The very idea of signing one's name is a reflection of a new understanding of the status of the artist,
a concept that began to be articulated in the 15th century by the sculptor and writer Lorenzo Ghiberti
and was fully expounded in perhaps the most influential history of art at the Western art ever written.
The Stars Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, first published in Fifteen Fifty and again in a revised edition in fifteen sixty eight.
I say the most influential because so many of the approaches first codified in FACA,
whose lives have been and still continue to be the basis for how much art history is written.
For instance, it is only very recently that scholars have seriously begun to question the notion of artistic progress
of art apparently progressing to the illogically towards some sort of unstated but implicit goal.
First of naturalism, and then especially after the emergence of photography, a formal and iconographic innovation for its own sake.
Although Ghiberti had already begun to develop his own preliminary model of artistic progress in the May 15th century,
it was of a story slightly later grand narrative arts history that became a key
source of inspiration for the following five centuries of writing about art.
Something progressive and defined through a succession of increasingly innovative and inventive named artists.
I'm seeing here on two fronts pieces, two illustrated pages from the second edition of the stories Lives of fifty sixty eight edition.
But the Sari's model is a complex one, which raises as many questions as it answers.
First of all, by reading the prefaces to each of the three sections of his lords of the artists,
one realises that the visual arts can go down as well as up in terms of their quality, style and innovation.
So Vassar describes the history of ancient art as being like the human life cycle in
which youth is followed first by maturity and then inevitably by decline and death.
Or invest Vassar his own words. The arts, like human beings themselves, are born, grow up, become old and die.
A similar trajectory is applied to the art of his own epic, broadly defined,
which begins with what he calls the artists of the first period, such as Joto.
His portrait you see on the left in the 15th 68 edition of his lies.
As the story says, this first wave of wave of artists, quote, fell a long way short of perfection.
But all the same, that did mark a new beginning. That is a new beginning.
After what he felt had been centuries of post classical decadence and decay,
effectively the story was giving the artists of this first age who were primarily in the 14th century the equivalent of a best newcomer award,
even stating explicitly that they shouldn't be judged by the highest standards of art, but rather only.
Comparison to the mediæval or in his words, barbaric art that immediately preceded it.
And I say this is all the sorrows point of view. I don't think it's actually a right description of a mediaeval period.
But there you go. That's how he's trying to set up the difference between that and the Renaissance for sorry.
Second period covers most of the 15th century.
And although Vassar admits that, quote, there was clearly a considerable improvement in invention and execution with more design,
better style and a more careful finish. Even so, there was no one artist perfect in everything.
So to continue our school prise giving metaphore, then this age would have been given maybe the most improved award.
But there are no qualifications needed for the third grade, which encompass FACA, his own 16th century contemporaries such as well Sophia and Tina,
whose portrait in the lives you see on the right and who was part of an age that the story's eyes clearly merited the most valuable player award,
or maybe even an Olympic gold medal for by the 16th century,
according to the sorry art had, quote, achieved everything possible in the imitation of nature and has progressed so far that it has more reason
to fear slipping back than to expect ever to make further advances by sticking to his biological model,
even when discussing the art of his own day. The sorry implicitly admitted that having reached a peak,
the visual arts would presumably and unavoidably soon fall into a period of decline and decay.
But for the time being, the story avoided musing on this sad fact and instead focus his attention on constructing his
lives so as to culminate in an over-the-top celebration of the most super of the super artists,
namely the divine Michelangelo, whose work in painting,
sculpture and architecture not only reached but actually surpassed the sorrows to measures of perfection, nature and the antique.
It is life of Michelangelo. The sorrow displayed both the strengths and weaknesses of his approach.
Having introduced each of his three sections with grand overviews of the period in question, he then states that it was not his intention,
quote, to compile a list of artists and their works, but by using the individual artistic biography as his basic unit of organisation.
In practise, it was the individual artist who became the focus of attention,
a strategy that has remained at the heart of much art historical writing until really quite recently.
But this approach does allow him to make one of his key points, namely that proper intellectual respect,
high social status and generous financial awards should be accorded to artists,
a category that, not coincidentally also included the sorry himself as a practising artist.
And if I'm showing you here, one of the story's own paintings, which you can also argue again,
shows him and others well, that's within plaiting or be eager to inflate the size of the artist.
Obviously, what happened here with this was an image of one painting who might be painting.
OK. It's a good story, you know. It's the story, apocryphal story of St. Luke.
So one of the evangelists who supposedly is an artist and is supposedly visited in his studio by none other than the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus.
And then he paints the sort of perfect portrait of her. And I guess that's what this symbol is.
Is the bull. So he's the patron saint of artists, at least in the European tradition.
And so here's a painting by the story of kind of the ultimate kind of divine artist who literally has contact with God and mother of God.
And then he's his perfect painting of her.
And it becomes actually the story, just like the very icon I showed you, that sort of fluttering image of Christ.
The whole story that's based on the story, the crucifixion in.
Veronica Vera icon puts the cloth to Christ face when he's on his way to being crucified.
And the imprint in his face then becomes this idea that he becomes a model for a whole series of paintings.
And similarly, the supposed Saint Louis portrait of the virgin and child becomes a model for a lot of the paintings.
And so you get a lot of Byzantium and sort of mediaeval icons that then get into these stories that they are actually painting painted by lugu,
or that this is actually either the paint, the cloth of Christ's face impression based directly on that.
So there's a whole sort of interesting story there about that kind of contact with the divinity through art that continues to then be reproduced,
if not the actual painting itself. Anyway, the point here is,
is that the story is showing us in his own work the kind of high status that's that's accorded
to artists or even to the point of directly communing with with God and with the Saints,
the ever more lofty status of the divine, or at least Semien, divine artist who was sorry,
was eager to distinguish from what he saw as lowly artisans and mere craftsmen.
He's also suggested in the life of Michelangelo by the Super Artists Association from an early age with the great and the good of his time.
As Busari tells us, we're just a boy. Michelangelo was invited to join the great Lorenzo Domenici a table while as a young man, sort of a table,
while as a young man who had by this point carved his famous marble, David,
he was willing and able to engage with nobleman, cardinals and even popes as a zikos.
So. Right, as a boy, he's already having kind of dinner and lunch. Lorenzo Mataji.
And that as he gets older, he starts to, you know, basically beyond on equal social terms with aristocrats and even popes.
But it is also in this important respect that early modern artists like Michelangelo differ from their romantic and post romantic successors.
That is, while the latter's biographies are often characterised by a constant and consistent rejection by the mainstream and elite of the day,
we simply can't understand their other gardeners.
And that's kind of the point of being on guard, right, is that, you know, bourgeois society doesn't understand.
You end up in a garret and only famous after your death. But this is quite different in the case of Rennison Super Artist,
because it was precisely by interacting with the contemporary elite as equals and by being
rewarded by the elite financially and socially that is often being given titles and so forth,
that artists such as JR and Michelangelo could avoid starving in Garretts is outcast from bourgeois society.
In fact, there's a recent book by the artist Lloyd Rapp. Hadfield has proved in great detail just how rich Michelangelo was.
By the time he died, the early modern artists could, however, adapt many of the same moody eccentricities,
though perhaps not the stigma of social exclusion associated with the stereotypical romantic, modern and to some extent, postmodern artists.
I think it might be interesting to think about how contemporary superstar to something people like while Tracey
Ullman or Damien Hirst or sort of the big names or in some ways maybe closer to the Renaissance model of,
you know, hobnobbing with the rich and famous, getting very wealthy and all that.
And it's kind of the romantic artist idea is maybe something that's had its day or, you know.
That certainly is isn't being played with by more recent artists who in some ways have the kind of eccentricities
and innovativeness and sexual inventiveness associated with Renaissance artists and romantic artists,
but perhaps socially, financially closer to the Renaissance them to the romantic and modernist stories.
And he gets something to think about. It is like a Michelangelo,
the deploys many of the tools that still form the basis for much present day art historical scholarship by considering issues such as provenance,
patronage, iconography, artistic antecedents and stylistic analysis.
So, for instance, he tells us how fragments of what had Michelangelo's cartoons ended up in the collection of a man to a nobleman.
While the artists often stormy interaction with his elite patrons is a topic returned to again and again throughout the life.
Similarly, the story describes Michelangelo copying the works of two of the heroes of the first and second sections of his book,
namely Joto and Mus'ab Show. And amazingly, drawings by the young Michelangelo after both of these predecessors still survived,
including the sketch on the left drawn by Michelangelo when he was only about
14 years old and which he had copied from figures in one of dropoffs frescoes.
And subsecretary in Florence, which you see on the right. So it's this pair copied from the fresco here in Florence.
But the account also highlights some of the potential problems of focussing so relentlessly on the artist as an individual,
the very survival of such fairly awkward sketches like the one by Michelangelo on the left.
Confirm the Sari's claims that such scraps and fragments were treated almost like precious and
holy relics and thus again inevitably serves to elevate the artist to reveal godlike figure,
you know, whose relics like the bones of a saint are being collected and sort of venerated because it's not a bad drawing, but it's not true.
Amazing. So it's being kept because it's by Michelangelo more than anything else.
And although the story's intention in elevating Michelangelo to the status of a divinity was clearly to raise the status of all artists,
including himself. The result is that such figures eventually started to beget believe their own PR.
Indeed, in the case of Michelangelo, he even hired a spin doctor named Con D.V. to write what we would call today a fully
authorised biography that tried to gloss over claims made in the first edition of the
Sari's lives that seemed to undermine Michaelangelo's carefully constructed image as
an artistic superhero and a divinely inspired and completely self-taught genius.
Specifically,
Michaelangelo wanted to deny the Soros claim in his first edition of The Lives that rather than having literally been God's gift to mankind.
A claim fundamental to the evolving notion of artistic genius as being something innate and unteachable.
Michelangelo actually had a bit of training in the painter Dominico Gillanders workshop,
and it even copied some of his drawings, one of which you see here on the right. That's a guillain diagram.
But this kind of thing, the Michelangelo copy. The result is for the sorry, without a doubt, completely in all of the right.
Michelangelo was nevertheless forced to provide archival evidence in the second edition of his life of Michelangelo to support his claims.
And what might well be the first ever use of documentary evidence in art historical scholarship.
The sorry second edition quotes at length from a contract signed by Michaelangelo's father,
a document that clearly refutes Michaelangelo's claim to have never had a teacher.
According to the Sorry Code, Davie's authorised biography and asserted that Guillain Dyer had, quote, never assisted Michelangelo.
But this is clearly false, as may be seen by the writing in the hand of Ludovico, Michelangelo's father that runs thus,
and the stories that quoting the document in the second edition of Lives 14
Eighty-eight know that this 1st of April that I Ludovico winner of The Apprentice,
my son Michelangelo to Dominico Guillain Deyo and his brother David for the next three years with the following agreements
that they said Michaelangelo's shall remain with them that time to learn to paint and practise his art significantly.
Vassar's excursion into archival art history ends with the following phrase.
I have made this digression in the interests of truth and this of let this suffice for the rest of the life.
We will now return to the story. And this is precisely one of the great problems of the story,
is text that in general it is often more a collection of stories that have documented facts, with perhaps this exception or few other exceptions.
But a lot of it's about a kind of narrative structure,
as much as about kind of the truth that although many of students and art historians continue to
assume that the stories text to be used with competence as evidence for what really happened,
in many instances it is clear that the lives are as much an accumulation of hopes,
desires, myths and constructed ideologies as any work explicitly labelled fiction.
Now, obviously, the story had an agenda on writing the lives and agenda about raising the status of the artist and about the aims of yourself,
namely to imitate and ideally surpass both nature and antiquity.
And it is this agenda that underlies some of the most obviously constructed elements of the lives.
And and Otto Kurtz. I think a list of them on on your handout, the former a noted psychoanalyst and the latter,
a cultural historian who worked at the Warburg Institute in London,
wrote a very insightful book in 1934 exploring the notion of artists lives as myths or better as fictional constructs.
So, for instance, in a motif that can be traced back to classical writers such as Pliny the Star,
he repeatedly claims that artists account is discovered by chance in childhood,
a strategy that supports his general assertion that artistic talent is something fundamentally innate rather than learnt.
Thus, although Vasari tries to prove that Michelangelo was trained by Gillham die,
he also emphasises that Michaelangelo's innate genius was already evident long before his apprenticeship began and that once in the Masters workshop,
he soon surpassed his teacher. And again, this is something that's repeated again and again in stories.
About autists, even more common is the leitmotif of the artist who is discovered while tending sheep
by a passer by who notices his untutored but nevertheless impressive sketches.
We see this narrative in the star's life of job hope, whose portrait is always good to see again.
On the left, quote, Choctaw, the son of a simple peasant, tended his father's flock and drew pictures of the animals on stones and in the sand.
The older artist Chimbu, who happened to come along, recognise the shepherds great talent,
took him along and saw to the training of the boy destined to become one of
Italy's greatest artists and quote and show you a kind of random sheet pictures.
I haven't got other pictures, not certainly the one that was being drawn on stones and in the sand by Joto.
Now, I think we could just about believe the story of one artistically gifted Shepherd boy.
But in a later section of the lives, the story tells the story.
And again, I use the word story advisedly of the CND page. Rebecca Fumi, who is once again described as the son of a peasant,
discovered this time by a scene as nobleman while making drawings in the sand of the sheep.
He was tending, and the story gives nearly identical accounts about the early life and discovery
of artistic talent in the cases of Andreas and Savino and Andrea Castano as well.
And I'm sorry, but for sketching Shepherd boards, IT boys is just a bit too much of a coincidence.
But I don't think it's a case of Asari being lazy.
Rather, he uses such reoccurring motifs to step forward his agenda about the innate nature of artistic talent and genius.
And incidentally, after Vassar's life by other writers, the very same motif appears again and much later biographies of the Spanish throat painters.
Zubaan, whose painting Balaam, in fact, is the one I see on the right, and the early 19th century artist Goya,
which both focus on the chance discovery of their artistic talent while sketching animals as young Shepherd boys.
Kristin Kurts, who argued that such tales had an underlying psychological basis.
Even the site, the story of a Japanese painter named Moriyama Oakhill,
whose talent was discovered when a passing samurai saw a paper sack Okja had painted stuck up on a tree.
Whether he painted she it or not. We are told in a somewhat more subtle way.
The story also allows certain motifs to echo from one super artist's biography to the next.
So he tells the tale of the young Michaelangelo while studying this print by St. Anthony, attacked by devils, by the German artist Martin Changa.
Someone that you're also very much looked up to so hadn't seen and studied this print.
Miguel Angel went out and bought strange looking fish with curiously coloured scales to
help him draw the monstrous spirits in a kind of similar echo in the life of Leonardo.
The story claims that, again, as a young boy, the artist painted a horrible and terrible monster after gathering lizards,
newts, Maggette snakes, butterflies, locust bats and other such animals.
So you saw it again, makes a kind of fantasy of a kind of monster using kind of natural fauna.
So according to the story, both artists use local fauna to produce monstrous images as boys.
And in Leonardo's case, the story even provides a pungent additional detail by telling us that Leonardo became so engrossed in drawing from his
creepy crawly models that he didn't even notice the disgusting stench that developed as their corpses started to rot.
So I guess the point of that is that you need to get a little detail that makes it seem that, well, that must be true.
Then again, you get these sort of echoes and you think, well, really, are they all. I mean, maybe they all do.
The point of this is being kind of highlighted across different artist biographies.
Again, the kind of young artists going out, searching for inspiration and so forth, and competing motifs with slight variations.
And given just enough kind of local detail to make them seem convincing or perhaps to to to remind us of the differences,
as well as some areas across the art as the always lives shape many debates about art and artists in the following centuries.
But for sorry in turn, owed much of his agenda and his strategy of focussing on individual artist biographies to his own predecessors,
especially plenty the elder of the 1st century Roman writer who produced one of the earliest surviving accounts of individual painters,
sculptors and architects. Unlike Fusari, however, put his lives of classical artists did not form a stand alone history of art,
but rather were a slightly eccentric excuses within a multiple volume description and analysis of the natural world in general.
But since one of the principal aims of art for Pliny, as it would later be for the story,
was to imitate or even surpass nature is perhaps not that surprising to find a discussion
of artists who sought to do precisely this in a book about the natural world.
Perhaps one of the most important anecdotes related by Pliny to support this underlying agenda is the famous tale of Zwick's US and ferocious.
According to Pliny quote Pirozzi as it is recorded, entered into a competition with Stokes's,
who produced a picture of grapes so successfully represented that bird flew up to try to eat them.
And I'm afraid this is not process's painting, but rather one by a 19th century American artist.
But it's a good picture of grapes, I think. So that's kind of, you know, it's so realistic.
It's so naturalistic that the computer, even birds are under the illusion that these are real grapes.
And now the continued. Can you finish the story? Quoting from Pliny again, where Pope Francis himself produced.
Oh, sorry. So Zook's is the phrase the grapes.
So we're composters himself produced such a realistic picture of a curtain that zakes us proud, proud of the verdict of the birds upon his painting,
Grapes requested that the curtain scene and process this painting should be now drawn back and the picture itself displayed.
And when he realised his mistake, that is when he realised that the curtain was actually only a painted fiction with a modesty did him honour.
He yielded up the prise, saying that whereas he had received the bird's Parousia said, deceived him an artist.
And it's a kind of an interesting story. This is actually a painting tribute to Vermeer, which has a fictional curtain in front of it.
I'm sure that is almost impossible to imagine that Revere didn't know this famous story that you can see birds.
One thing that you can make an artist or a human you think I must for this province is not really a curtain that would be of a higher prise.
And of course, this might look like a slightly odd painting.
But we know that in a period in the rare songs in the book period, artworks on Slate were often covered by Detective Curtain.
So would it be particularly the stories of an ancient one?
Would have had a resonance with people like Vermeer and other artists because they would have this
idea of a fictional person playing off the idea that there might be a real curtain there as well.
Now, perhaps not surprisingly, given what we see in the stories lives.
Similar anecdotes are related about artists working in the Renaissance and later about deception.
So, for instance, the Italian writer added, Teno describes a mother, you bleeding joyfully when she sees a lamb in a painting by Titian.
No, it's the sheep again. Likewise, a writer claimed that a dog barked at a portrait of its master painted by.
Europe. And just to prove that it's not animals alone.
But also like Zwick's as people who could be fooled by such strong paintings.
Bizarre describes a passer by paying homage to what they thought was the pope himself,
but actually was just a portrait by Titian left to dry in a window.
While, according to the writer Zucchetto, a cardinal once tried to hand a pen to Rafael's portrait of Pope Leo,
the tenth scene here, in order to obtain the pontiff's signature before realising his mistake.
Text such as Pliny is also influenced later works of art like those showing curtains in front of paintings or images like this one.
A late 15th century portrait of an artist and his wife with a fly painted on the woman's head piece.
See, there are other examples of this as well. The flyer painted on the headpiece,
which is presumably meant to trick the viewer to trying to swatted away before realising that he or she had been fooled by the artist.
And I think the fact that it's a portrait of an artist who's playing with his idea that, you know,
my art is so good that I can make you fool you into thinking that it's a real flaw here is obviously part of the game.
And I think, again, probably quite subconsciously thinking about stories like those from plenty.
Pliny the Art historian Ernst Gombrich in his book Art and Illusion,
says that the best tromped boy painting he ever saw was a very recent work depicting what seemed to be broken glass in front of a painting,
as if the protective glass had been shattered, which suggests just how ongoing such leitmotifs can be and how persistent the goal
evolutionism and of imitating and even outdoing nature seems to remain to millennia.
But all this is getting a slightly off track form focus on the artist here, too.
However, the legacy of Pliny transmitted through the stories lives in other biographically
oriented writers continues to be felt since it was a classical author's
descriptions of painters such as the famous Capello's and sculptors such as the famous
Pele's who felt free to talk back to powerful rulers like Alexander the Great,
could have inspired Renaissance artists such as Michelangelo and those who wrote
about him to consider themselves likewise the equals of popes and princes.
Other tales about a Pele's and Alexander, including one in which a Pele's uses the emperor's mistress as a model.
When a palace falls in love with his beautiful suder, Alexander very graciously hands her over to the painter.
Although, needless to say, whether the model mistress thought what she thought about being swapped between
an emperor being through sent off to an artist hasn't really been recorded.
Once again, however, an artist's status is affirmed by being treated as an equal by the most powerful man of his day.
In this case, Alexander the Great Equal.
Revealing, though, is Penneys closing sentence and relating this anecdote.
Quote, Some believe that Alexander's mistress was the model for his painting of Aphrodite rate rising from the sea.
Here we see an action with a literary scholars. Rousset and Beardslee called in 1946 the intentional FLC.
Although many associated with the rise of romanticism, the fallacy they refer to is already implicit in plenty story,
since an assumption is being made about how an artist's life experiences in this case falling in love with the emperor's beautiful mistress,
who is also his model. How such life experiences are inevitably reflected in an artist's works.
In this case, the beautiful Aphrodite depicted in a palace is painting,
and this ultimately is a key problem facing anyone who chooses to focus on artists and artistic biographies in art historical scholarship.
The phenomenon was well alive in the case of the 19th and 20th century writers on Rafael, for example, whose every unknown female portrait,
including the one you see on the right, has, it seems, been at one time or another said to depict his mistress.
The star is enigmatic. References to a beloved mistress also inspired the early 19th century painter
Angra to paint the charmingly a historical portrait of Rothfeld on the left,
with his left alleged mistress perched prettily on his knee, looking at a canvas of the so-called for an arena or Baker's daughter on the right,
a painting that was at the time believed to depict Ruffels mysterious lover.
So I don't know if you'd call that. So here we have one of the many unknown images of a woman that apparently lives visited
with a Baraquio associate with this kind of famous faces through the baker's daughter.
As I mentioned, the thing is, there's just no reason to think that that's who she is, angry.
In the 19th century takes up this crazy little detail of another Rockwell painting.
Here supposedly is a painting of reconstruction in his mind of Rafael with his mistress on his knee, who he is just painting.
You see the outline of her knew there. So there's a whole play there.
Maybe you can provide extra, all of you, about sort of gender and gender issues in art.
But, you know, the whole fact about kind of possessing the mistress is like possessing the art object.
As a whole place for the artist, possessing those that they paint. And also, of course, the owner of the art object kind of owning the painting,
but also what's depicted in it so that you could think about it a bit more.
But any guesses about this idea of the kind of that art must somehow reflect the biography of the artist?
So it's an unknown woman. Donorship, as we know that there's some vague reference in Vasari to kind of a mistress who's the baker's daughter.
Oh, must be the baker's daughter.
Now, having been rather sceptical about this, there is a kind of counterpoint to be made because in this particular case by Rafael,
maybe it's a little bit less fanciful than in most cases because he does sign the painting on a band wrapped tightly around the sitter's bare arm,
thereby laying claim not only to the authority to the authorship of the painting, but also a kind of ownership of the female model herself as well.
So maybe it is his model or maybe it's just about a general idea that the artist possesses kind of any model, at least artistically, if not literally.
But like the stories of sketching Shepherd Boys, search links or rather too frequent for comfort,
since artists almost inevitably seem to be sleeping with all of their unidentified female singers,
something that, strangely enough, is almost never suggested in the case of their own identified male sitters.
But we won't go into detail.
But the point is, the biographical models of art history inevitably encourage this type of identification between artists and their art,
between artist lives and biographies and how their works should be interpreted.
And was precisely this, that would stop an beardslee saw as a fallacy, namely trying to read a work of art, whether it be a poem or a painting.
And they're coming out at this actually as literary scholars,
as though these kind of artistic productions were really only or even mainly the product of an artist's biography or more abstractly,
his or her intentions or individual psychology. This critique of traditional biographically based,
an artist centred modes of interpretation was further developed in the later 1960s by the French
theorist Lambert and Michelle Fuko in Fuegos influential essay entitled What Is an Author?
He quoted the playwright Samuel Beckett, who asked What matter?
Who's speaking? Someone said, What matter? Who's speaking? I think that's the famous closing lines of Waiting for Godot.
Somebody must have started something. Anyway, the point is, who cares who's saying who's the author?
According to both Google and Bard, it apparently really doesn't matter who says it,
since they claimed that not only in an artist's or author's intentions unrecoverable.
How do we know what Rafael did or didn't really feel or mean when he was painting this painting,
but also that they are actually completely irrelevant.
The meaning of a work of art, according to Bufton, fuko, should never reside in the biography or alleged intentions of its maker,
but rather should be located in us as readers, viewers and beholders.
In other words, once an artwork exists, it is as though its maker ceases to exist and instead is those who receive it.
Encounter it, bring it to their own life experiences who give it meaning.
To paraphrase. But the birth of the beholder must be the cost of the death of the artist.
So this is saying basically we shouldn't worry about what the artist did or didn't intend.
How do we read this in terms of biography? This should be about perception.
It should be about how we remake the work of art, obviously, in how we interpret it.
And that's where meaning and significance lies. But as another scholar writing on this kind of subject, David Summers, has pointed out more recently,
it may be a mistake to try to eliminate biography in internationality. However problematic they may be.
Indeed, the concept of the author or artist completely, since the problem isn't that intentions and artists don't actually exist after all.
For a work of art to exist, it must by definition have been made or selected intentionally by someone at some point in time and in some place.
But rather, the problem lies in how and whether we can recover these intentions, including those of the artist.
Him or herself may not even be aware of a subject of great interest to scholars.
Adopting a psychoanalytic approaches. In other words, according to Summers quote,
The real question is how intentions are made visible and whether they are ever fully or even partially recoverable,
not whether they actually exist in the first place.
I think the problem of intentionality and the related issue of how and even whether one should use an
artist's biography to try to interpret his or her own is well demonstrated by these two landscapes.
Bye bye. Well, as I mentioned earlier than golf's biography has fascinated novelists, songwriters, film producers and playwrights for over a century.
As I've already discussed,
his persona and life experience have seemed to conform to many romantic stereotypes of a misunderstood and mad artist genius stereotype.
And certain aspects can be traced back to the story.
And even earlier, we have, however, seen why it pays to be of accepting such biographies at face value,
especially when they fit into pre-existing models a little too neatly for comfort.
But on the other hand, can we ever completely ignore the artists in his life in the case of such?
Yes, of course we can talk about their colours.
The formal elements of the composition, maybe even the culturally specific implications of landscape as agile in the late 19th century.
But doesn't our understanding of these works? Change is a subtle but profound and irreversible way.
If we realise that there were amongst the last works painted by Ben Gough before he committed suicide in 1890.
And if this is the case but the recovery of artistic intentionality remains problematic, what can we as artists do?
In other words, if we can never fully or even partially see the paintings through Von Gough's own eyes?