[xi] Preface
This project began with material external to my dissertation on Federico Barocci, which became my paper “Federico Barocci, Federico Borromeo, and the Oratorian Orbit.” The paper combined documentary research into Barocci and the Oratorians with my interest in historiography and its theorization. Several years have allowed me to reflect on deeper issues on Barocci and the Oratorians, including Oratorian spirituality, the significance of the iconographic program of the Chiesa Nuova, and Barocci’s ill-fated Birth of the Virgin for the church’s high altar.
I am grateful for the hospitality of Padre Alberto Venturoli in the archive of the Chiesa Nuova many years ago, Mons. Marco Maria Navoni of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, and more recently the Archivio di Stato in Florence. In addition, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Costanza Barbieri, Dave Elder-Vass, Jonathan Gilmore, Paul Grendler, Marcia Hall, Pamela Jones, Bram de Klerck, Jonathan Kline, Stuart Lingo, Laura MacCaskey, Giancarla Periti, and Ulrike Tarnow offered their help, information, or encouragement. Hayden Maginnis offered an insight that set chapter 4 off rolling. Ideas for chapter 1 were first presented in the College Art Association session “Muta Poesis: Interpreting and Picturing Silence” at the 2003 meeting.
In particular, I want to single out three people. First, Marcia Hall has been a constant encouragement, and I have been pleased to discuss with her matters relating to Barocci over the years since completing my dissertation under her guidance. Costanza Barbieri first introduced me to the Oratorians in Rome and has been a ready and helpful discussant of matters relating to Filippo Neri and Barocci. Finally, I have had the pleasure to collaborate with John Marciari over the past few years and he has been a precious sounding board for issues dealt with in this book. I thank them all!
[1] Introduction
Barocci and the Oratorians
The national character is not something that can be appealed to as an explanatory historical principle in concrete cases; it is, rather, something which not only demands concrete explanation, but which demands constant reinterpretation in the light of actual events.1
Maurice Mandelbaum, The Problem of Historical Knowledge
In 1586 Federico Barocci, the famous painter from Urbino, delivered his Visitation of the Virgin and Saint Elizabeth (plate 1) to the Chiesa Nuova in Rome, to great applause. Barocci was already well known throughout Italy because of his Deposition (1569) in Perugia and Madonna del Popolo (1579) in Arezzo, but this commission for the fathers of the Congregation of the Oratory would lead to a quarter century of domination of the art scene in Rome. While Barocci was not a resident in the Eternal City, there was no other artist from whom it was harder to get work and no other artist who charged such high prices.2
Yet Barocci’s talents in Rome were almost completely monopolized by the Oratorians. In the early 1590s, the fathers considered having Barocci paint the pendant transept chapels; eventually he only painted the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, which was delivered in 1603. Barocci was bold enough to propose to do the altarpiece for the high altar. Money constraints made this very well-received idea flounder, but Barocci did manage to send one more important work to Rome, his Institution of the Eucharist for the Aldobrandini family chapel in Santa Maria sopra Minerva in 1608.
Scholars have noted the remarkable fact of these four altarpiece projects in one very important Roman church; this is due to the special relationship between the works and the [2] founder of the Oratorians, Filippo Neri (1515–95). We know from contemporary documents that the Visitation was Neri’s favorite painting. He was often in the chapel, where he performed miracles or was seen spending hours lost in rapture.3 No doubt the saint’s interest in the painting was due both to the feminine humility of the two bearers of Saint John the Baptist and Christ, and to the way in which Barocci had painted it so sweetly. From that moment on, Barocci would be a model for capturing what the Oratorians appreciated in an altarpiece and, reflexively, the painter helped the fathers understand just what their aesthetic was.
But perhaps this remarkability has caused us to move too quickly to facile observations, like Barocci’s “Oratorian piety.” Indeed, it has become quite fashionable to debunk various stylistic concepts with reference to an implicit Zeitgeist thinking and uncovering the “Hegelian unconscious.” At least two important surveys of painting in sixteenth-century Italy specifically invoke Jeroen Stumpel’s criticism of the concept of Mannerism, following his recommendation to abandon the usage of the term, and with it a series of important works from the 1960s that clarified its usage for an earlier generation.4 Is this the end of the long winding down of nineteenth-century historicism, or are any of these ideas still workable?
Such doubts are well placed, for a review of the literature shows that attempts to relate artists to various religious bodies have been unsuccessful. Immediate evidence of this fact is that any argument for Barocci’s Oratorian piety would have to contend with Walter Friedländer’s thesis that it was in fact Caravaggio who most exemplified Oratorian values. According to Caravaggio Studies, the humility and earthiness of Filippo Neri’s spirituality—his service to pilgrims and the poor, his unassuming manner, and his impatience with pomp and formality—were an inspiration for Caravaggio’s brutal realism.5 Although Friedländer was sympathetic to Barocci and had written extensively of him in his early work on the Casino of Pius IV, he found it possible to pass over this artist’s demonstrable success with Oratorians, as if his fame alone merely carried him.
But of course the Caravaggio industry has not rested content with the Oratorian interpretation, going on to produce Augustinian and Franciscan interpretations.6 Such exercises [3] will continue indefinitely until we think about the units under consideration. Although such interpretations are conducted through source material, such that expressed spiritual goals (or imagery) are matched to similar pictorial strategies in some artist, what is at the base of such readings is a formal similarity.
Because of the apparent fruitlessness of this endeavor, most have given up as naïve those gestures of art historians like Friedländer, Panofsky, and others that presume some kind of essential historical entities. While the transgressions of unbridled stylistic history have been many, this study upholds some kind of Oratorian aesthetic, which Barocci satisfied so well. By reflecting on the nature of social collectivity and styles, it will be possible to make a reasonable case for limited social distinctions and style concepts with limited purchase. With this new understanding as background, one may uphold the traditional assertion of an affinity between Barocci and the Oratorians based on a reconsideration of new and previously known data about the theology, iconography, and practices of the Oratory.
The relationship can be affirmed more positively, furthermore, by looking at different patrons and artists. For example, looking at Oratorian commissions outside Rome and commissions by Oratorians for other benefices expands our view. Inserting Barocci’s relationships with Federico Borromeo (1564–1631), cardinal and archbishop of Milan, and with Pope Clement VIII (1535–1605) into the Oratorian ambience helps specify what we mean by Oratorian piety.7 Borromeo, the disciple of Neri and benefactor of the Chiesa Nuova, oversaw four concurrent commissions to Barocci that substantially enlarge the Oratorian picture. Clement VIII’s commission was also conceived within the Oratorian sphere. Similarly, by looking at what was being done by students Barocci trained and those he influenced, we are able to see the larger coordination of aesthetic outcomes. Viewing all these forces in a unified context shows the give and take in Barocci’s very busy career, where different bodies did their best to deal with Barocci’s popularity. In this way, the true force of Oratorian interest emerges.
Historiographic Nominalism
One could say that the current situation in historiography is a conflation of libertarian and postmodern philosophies that has brought art history to a point where historical difference has been leveled out. The libertarian contribution was the reductive, commonsense reaction to High German art history by E. H. Gombrich.8 Following on the disasters of World War II, Gombrich responded with a libertarian approach to history that banished all reference to collectivist concepts—style, nation—and was content to remain at the level of the individual artist. Gombrich’s art historical position was widely shared in history, by his friend Karl Popper and by others like Pieter Geyl and Karl Löwith.9
[4] This commonsense approach was shared by a number of authors and is reflected, for example, in the shrinking importance of the notion of “style” in successive discussions. For example, departing from Meyer Schapiro’s exhaustive “Style” from the 1953 collection Anthropology Today, we can see that each author that followed Schapiro, including James Ackerman and Gombrich himself, continued to limn the concept down in application and importance.10
This ground was well prepared when from another angle disenchanted Marxists found the master narratives of class struggle and emancipation lacking in the 1970s. The way was open for post-structuralist theories in art history that stressed the constructedness of discourses about art and artists. Naming schools was a political act, and the best we could do, as Foucault reasoned, was to mark out the genealogies of ideas. Jean-François Lyotard gave a name to this new tendency: the suspension of “metanarratives.”
In addition, the way histories were constructed was seen as a poetic act, which added something to the inert historical material. Thus Hayden White suggested that historians come to historical material with a fictional sense of how the work should be “emplotted.” So, far from letting the material determine the form of the work, it was moral or aesthetic ideas that led the historian toward the final form of his work.
As a result, a kind of post-structuralist nominalism reinforced that which Gombrich had already supported. What was forbidden in both the Anglo-Saxon and Continental cases was roughly what Popper had found objectionable in what he called “historicism,” that is, holism and teleology. When young art historians began to be weary of inherited style concepts like “the Zeitgeist,” “the Baroque,” or various unexamined truisms about artists, national schools, or styles, they had at least two sources to support a return to contextualistic studies.
In both the Anglo-Saxon and Continental cases, moreover, great energy was devoted to uncovering the “Hegelian” biases of earlier historians. Thus, interestingly, there was a double Oedipal critique of founding figures of the discipline like Erwin Panofsky. Gombrich criticized him for his latent Hegelianism that took for granted the workings of the Zeitgeist and reliance on national characterizations. Reviewing both Panofsky’s newly translated Perspective as Symbolic Form and group of essays edited by Irving Lavin, Three Essays on Style, Gombrich was slightly shocked by some of the sloppy recourses to period style and national character that Panofsky fell back upon. The discussion of the Baroque, for example, mentions “the experience of so many conflicts and dualisms between emotion and reflection, lust and pain, devoutness and voluptuousness [which] had led to a kind of awakening, and thus endowed the European mind with a new consciousness.”11 Similarly, a post-structuralist such as Keith Moxey in quite a different way could criticize the smuggled nationalistic and teleological assumptions in Panofsky’s accounts of Dürer or early Netherlandish naturalism.12
[5] According to this viewpoint, anything valid about groups is restricted to their individual materiality. There are just people, not groups, races, or nations. In addition, individual cultures and cultures in general do not progress. What is especially interesting here are the strict dualities. Either one is a full-blown Hegelian or one is a legitimate nominalist. Especially in the post-structuralist case, however, to be nominalist has a progressive political valence attached to it. To uncover tacit reliance on notions of group or nation, or their development, is an act uncovering the deep historical biases in the Western historical tradition.
There are indications that we need to reconsider the case for historical collectives and their styles. For both postmodern and libertarian politics, the absence of a dichotomy of agent and social structure has been disastrous. Libertarianism is unable to understand the structural positioning of resources that constitutes the material conditions of society, let alone the rules that keep it going. On the other hand, by conflating the agent and the structure, postmodernism has forestalled any possibility of analytic clarification of the categories of social life. The same is true for history. In an era of aggressive worldviews and fundamentalism, we need to be able to catch as much of the complexity of the world in theory as possible in order to fight over precisely those slightest gradations between where reality leaves off and trickery begins.13
A Cautionary Tale: The Jesuit Style
The major cautionary tale for such an enterprise involving Barocci and the Oratorians is the now almost debunked notion of a “Jesuit style,” which has its origins in nineteenth-century German historiography. The consequences of imputing overarching stylistic ideas to the Oratorian may not seem such a big deal, but when transposing this problematic to the Jesuits, the stakes become quite clear.
In an important historical reconstruction, Evonne Levy has shown how “Jesuit” served in primarily German historical writing as a forerunner for the Catholic Baroque.14 As the Jesuits were perceived as being in lockstep with the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century papacy, all of the products of Catholic pomp could be gathered under the concept of the Jesuitenstil. Thus, shortly after Bismarck evicted the Jesuits from Germany in 1872, we find the emergence of the concept of the Barock containing many of the same concepts: degeneration from the Renaissance, rhetorical insincerity, and manipulation of the masses.
In the early twentieth century, works on Counter-Reformation art carried over the concepts but not necessarily the framework inherited from the previous century. Work became more limited to painting or architecture. Yet the easy elision of the corporate body (Jesuits) and their products was increasingly under scrutiny, finally giving way to suspicion after the horrors of World War II. An increasing number of works emerged that put to rest the [6] notion of the Jesuit style.15 Representing the same kind of Anglo-Saxon commonsense approach as Gombrich, but without the explicit ideological component, is Gauvin Bailey’s contemporary position.16
Against the cliché that all Jesuit churches were modeled after the mother church of the Gesù, and that Jesuits in different parts of the world proceeded according to noster modus procedendi, Bailey’s scholarship instead emphasizes the variety, flexibility, and adaptability of the Jesuit aesthetic. As for emulation of the Gesù in particular, he illustrates the sheer difference between built Jesuit edifices, noting that “anything beyond a basic emulation of its plan was rare,” and concludes that the noster modus is “not a product but a process.”17 Against this nominalist approach, Evonne Levy argues that the Jesuits had to at least “express affiliation” among themselves, and stresses that their buildings in foreign lands, while not looking directly like the mother church, nevertheless “looked like the architectural embodiment of a foreign occupation.”18 She seems to be suggesting that one should not be limited to an overly literal idea of formal similarity.
Yet she specifically distinguished rhetoric from propaganda. While the former is attached to ordinary communication, the latter is largely irrational and exceeds the rules of rhetorical analysis. According to Levy, then, the Jesuits did have a style to the degree that they pioneered an extrarhetorical appeal to the religious public. It is a kind of “style” but one that is sublime and beyond analysis. I find that Levy’s approach is a legitimate attempt to get at what exactly lay at the base of Jesuit building strategies. Her link of propaganda to contemporary concerns is admirable in tracing the origins of modern techniques of manipulation. However, this volume is precisely aimed at analyzing how a style or aesthetic can emerge from the actors and the values and social organism they share. Furthermore, I heartily agree that a restricted idea of style based on overt similarity is too limiting.
In retrospect, the impossibility of a workable notion of Jesuit style was quite predictable. First, the style referred originally to the Jesuits themselves as a unified way of life, which is much more difficult to defend than a more precise style of architecture. Second, the very political and aggressive aims of the Society itself meant that its efforts were flung across the globe, multiplying the number of instances that would have to be brought under the same umbrella. Furthermore, the Society exercised a practice of tolerance for local customs, meaning its rites and buildings would be modified locally, once again making it difficult to discern any unity in its products. In a sense, the Jesuits are the worst corporate body within which to look for unity.
Nevertheless, a broader idea of style based on causal links and problem solving around common values can bear fruit. Indeed, it is possible to broaden the notion of style away from simple perceived similarities, and to also downplay the unconscious inexorability that typically accompanies older formalistic ideas of style. By being more specific and steering [7] clear of the presupposition of the holistic interpenetration of ideas, a workable idea of style can be developed, which can parallel and mutually reinforce the idea of a distinct collectivity.
The Emergent Power of Religious Bodies…
There is a strong tendency today to historicize these past efforts, which we approach not with a principle of charity but with skepticism. Rather than assume that these past art historians may have been searching for a concept they may have known by another name, we assume they were beholden to completely erroneous ideas. This tendency is especially pronounced in discussions of period and style concept in art and aesthetics, where an industry of finding Hegelian undergirding and influences exists.19 This industry was introduced by E. H. Gombrich, whom we can forgive because he felt so strongly about it. But we may still lament that he relinquished primary witness to the complexity of the German-language tradition in which he was trained.20
Too often we assume that these theorists are wrong because they use Hegel when we should be asking what Hegel was trying to accomplish by introducing his concepts. This assumption is unfortunate, because it makes us develop lazy habits, expecting a neat distinction between commonsense historical ideas and highly speculative, theoretical concepts, when in reality we need to be able to discern the difference between the slightest gradations of the two. More particularly, Gombrich’s empiricist and antimetaphysical leanings have been underscored by postmodern trends in scholarship, so that nominalism is in its ascendancy. Frédéric Vandenberghe’s words about sociology are just as applicable to art history:
Weberian by conviction, Durkheimian by convention, sociological theory privileges the epistemological vector over the ontological one and typically proposes the following compromise formation as a “third way” … between the Scylla of reification and the Charybdis of reduction: Ontological individualism (Weber) + methodological collectivism (Durkheim).21
Of course, this strategy is evasive. It pretends that methodological collectivism can somehow get over the presumption of “real” being in groups without dealing with it forthrightly.
German Romanticism hatched a number of ideas—Weltanschauung, Zeitgeist—that have apparently been superseded. Yet, one can study Hegel’s concept of the “objektiven Geist” and find its use well into the twentieth century as modern sociology was being formed. Not only was it a part of the transitional generation of Dilthey and Simmel, it continues to be used [8] to this day.22 It has metaphysical baggage, to be sure, but interpreted charitably is also an approximation of the objectivity, formality, and externality of thought that goes beyond individual psychology. In the interest of workable ideas of style and worldview, I want to review some basic metaphysical ideas that are quite clear-cut and workable, and demonstrate their applicability to concrete historical problems. Far from being in the dustbin of history, they are required for intelligent discussion of history. The sooner we admit this, the better.
To make a start into the problem, it is first of all important to recognize that the ontology and methodology presupposed by both libertarian and postmodern nominalism is positivist. In other words, it takes the pronouncements against which it reacts—sociological prediction (Popper) or structuralist “meaning” (Lyotard)—and inverts it. What is taken for granted is that explanation is symmetrical with prediction and that laws of history and society, because subsumptive, are completely deterministic.
Stepping out of the positivist shadow, we can see that if society is an open system (unlike a controlled natural science experiment) we should scarcely expect strict determinism. Each constituent part of an event will make its contribution in an unpredictable way. The parts, treated singly, have their own dispositions and powers. Yet having a power and exercising a power are two different things. To retrospectively explain the working of that power is not identical to making a prediction.
Here I follow the recent work of Dave Elder-Vass, whose fundamental question is, What is society and does it have causal power?23 If so, what kind? Coming from the critical realist school with sympathies for anti-individualism, he seeks to put the now-canonical writings of Roy Bhaskar and Margaret Archer to general ontological scrutiny.24 His method of proceeding can be summarized in this way. Societies or institutions are not material things. Yet societies and institutions have a causal criterion of existence; they have effects and so, like magnetic fields, have some form of being. Simply put, what Elder-Vass prefers to call a “norm circle” is a group of people bound to a standard practice or normative standard, which they endorse and enforce.
The people composing a norm circle are the parts of that social whole. They have their own emergent powers as a consequence of who they are and how they are constituted. But the social whole of the normative community also has new, emergent powers as a consequence of the way it is constituted. This is the emergent, causal power of the social structure.25 Structure, in this view, is a combination of the parts and the relations that make up the social whole.
A religious order is comprised of a number of priests. Priests have powers that they exercise as individuals, but when they take part in their devotions they have new powers that they exercise qua priests or the faithful of the order. At the end of the day, the order itself [9] has causal power because it does things that otherwise would not be done by those individuals. Looked at through Aristotle’s lens, the people are the material cause, the relations among them (enforced through a norm circle) are the formal cause, and their combination is the efficient cause.26 In this way, a social whole—which of course is different from a totality or organic whole (and Elder-Vass avoids speaking of “society” in general)—is a powerful particular with the ability to exercise powers. The individualism/holism debate in social theory is long and complex, but the simplicity of Elder-Vass’s account should impress us. So long as there are objects that have different properties when brought together than they have in isolation, emergence is occurring. People are no different—in social contexts we are justified in attributing causal efficacy to groups.
In the following chapters, I will be exploring the function of the Oratorians, the norm to which they devoted themselves, the structures they adopted, the actions they sought out within their institutional roles. The emergent power they exercised individually and collectively has a distinctive physiognomy in comparison to other groups and, as suggested in Mandelbaum’s quote at the outset of this chapter, is itself not a generative entity in its own right. It is not a totality with a group mind, but it is a collective agency with a kind of subjectivity. The power of Oratorian ideas and patronage is only always individuals-plus-relations, not individuals. This quality is “not given as finished entities, but as social products that are always socially and locally constructed in concrete situations of action; [they] are not things, but processes; not reifications, but realizations and concretizations of abstract categories.”27
The collective values shared by members of the Congregation of the Oratory, and those they inspired, are devotion to the Virgin Mary, the importance of personal prayer, the need for secular priests to organize in a relatively informal way, and an affirmative, affective religiosity of Christian “optimism.” In endorsing their “Oratorian” norms (that can overlap any way with others, hence “circle”), they understand that they are engaging in collective intentionality and collective action.
The power of the Oratory, in spite of its unassuming form, was a combination of the individuals that composed it and those who were influenced by it and the norm had a causal effect on their personal actions, mediating them. The Oratorian orbit comprised the Oratorians themselves: Filippo Neri, Cardinal Francesco Maria Tarugi (1525–1608; archbishop of Siena, 1597), Cardinal Cesare Baronio (1538–1607), Antonio Gallonio (1556–1605), Antonio Bosio (1575/76–1629), and others. It included also powerful cardinals and bishops who were penitents of Filippo Neri like Archbishop of Bologna Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti (1522–97), Bishop of Verona Cardinal Agostino Valier (1531–1606), Archbishop of Milan Cardinal Federico Borromeo (1564–1631), and Bishop of Cremona Cardinal Paolo Emilio Sfondrato (1560–1618), or penitents of Baronio like Pope Clement VIII.28 All these men exercised their charges through an adherence to the (overlapping) Oratorian norm. This circle linked Rome to Milan, Naples, and Siena.
[10] These individuals, particularly the prelates (as one cannot belong to more than one religious order at a time), had overlapping commitments in the landscape of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Italian religion. The idea of a norm circle suggests these overlapping commitments. The circle is not a community, not a totality. The actions of the individuals, while they have emergent effects, are firmly rooted in the concrete actions of those same individuals. Thus, there is never any suggestion that these same individuals are oversocialized into one mentality or another. All that is important is that the structure of the institution and its resulting actions differ in some way from another institution. Indeed, as we shall see, it is necessary for a group to offset its identity against other groups. In the case of the Oratorians, the primary other group was the Jesuits. That constitutes its “Oratorian” element.
The really important fact about institutional realism is the work it can do. Beyond social differentiation, institutional realism is the only way to theorize capitalism or other classic “modes of production.” It is how we understand that we are not the only ones acting (voluntarism), but social structures also act on us. Social structures are not sentient with consciousness, but they do possess causal powers. To sum up, social categories always exist as potential groups, even if they may turn out not to be them. Emergent qualities of groups are essential to productive social science and historical investigation. Extreme atomism and nominalism is the abdication of the scientific ambitions of art history.
…and the Resultant Unity of Their Style
The art historical parallel to the previous discussion is finding a consistent style in the products patronized by the Oratorians, or those produced by a single artist like Barocci. I have already noted the reducing fortunes of the idea of “style” in the methodological landscape of art history and here some comments may be made. “Style” suffers from many of the same misunderstandings and presumptions as did “social group.” If normally the social group is understood in a totalizing way as a group for whom actions must proceed deterministically, style is thought to be something produced essentially and necessarily by that self-same totalizing group.
If groups are overlapping circles and not totalizing institutions, and if the individuals comprising them and the social structure binding them are merely co-contributors to social action, and if this group is not a unified thing but has an intentionality as a collective, then style can be rehabilitated as well. As noted in the example above before the Jesuit style, some form of style is necessary. Indeed, as pointed out by Marcia Hall in her work on the sixteenth century, it is impossible to go beyond stylistic labels.29
The following remarks are intended to provide a rigorous defense of an Oratorian style, within new ontological limits. Just as a set of endorsed and enforced norms define the norm circle of Oratorians in the late sixteenth century, so too artists seeking to respond to the Oratorians’ [11] patronage have what can be called a “brief.” As explicated by Michael Baxandall, the brief is a set of literal instructions and tacit expectations, which include “local conditions in the special case.”30 In this way, the brief is a shared intentional object that is more or less successfully approached and mastered, much like the group norm itself. Oratorian painted patronage began in the late 1570s and early 1580s with the establishment of their church, the Chiesa Nuova. The pauperistic and humble elements in the works of Giovan Battista Guerra and Durante Alberti appealed initially to the Oratorian sensibility. However, the arrival of Barocci’s Visitation modified and cemented these ideas into what can be considered the mature Oratorian brief.
The brief is not an essential and deterministic idea. Rather, different works are causally related to the degree that they too share in the brief. The unity is discovered ex post facto. Jonathan Gilmore has expounded this idea of style in a remarkably rigorous way in his book The Life of a Style, which articulated a convincing causal theory of style.31 Gilmore’s approach to style is also emergentist but focuses on works of art rather than individuals. Styles, like institutions, are special wholes, but unlike individuals bound within a normative community, works are causally bound by a common brief or problem that they presume and try to solve. Although works of art require individuals to make them, each artist responds to works of art and so it is the works of art, requiring human workers, which create the superindividual group. An institution is both constituted by people and causally effected by people, continually. Styles, on the other hand, can be likened to events—singular groups of works bound in space and time.
When two artists work on essentially the same problem they become causally linked and the work they produce belongs to the same style. In Gilmore’s example, Impressionism is a historical event and individual Impressionist artists are parts of that event. Once the style has finished, to paint in that same style does not mean that one is an “Impressionist.” The causal links, analogous to the genetic links tying a population together, have been severed. This biological analogy introduces an interesting extension to the style concept that Gilmore has introduced. If biological groups can be likened to singular individuals (in effect, events), in the manner of David Hull and others, so too could works of art: “a style is a historical particular, a thing that exists over a certain period of time, but not a type of thing of which there can be instances.”32 This is the very definition of nonessentialism.
In the same way that the group allows Elder-Vass to escape from the vagaries of totalizing holism, Gilmore’s use of the historical individual relaxes demands for style as a natural kind. The theory of species as historical individuals is realist, although not essentialist. Without claiming species as natural kinds, its realist definition permits speculation about an analogy to causal powers. Here, a brief ontological clarification is necessary. An artist [12] working within a particular style can be said to be subject to that style as a powerful particular. Yet, our previous discussion of social wholes alerted us to the fact that causal power is always a product of both individuals and their relationships to other individuals. So the causal power derives partly from the artist and his or her relation to other artists working under the same brief (norm group), and partly from the works themselves.
Pressing the analogy between works of art and people, it is possible that the works of art and their relationship to one another have a causal effect on one another. They form a constellation of previous accomplishment and possibilities for someone working according to that artistic brief. But it could be argued that these works remain just groups of intelligibilia with varying degrees of compatibility and contradiction (e.g., mysticism and empiricism), awaiting mobilization through individual social agency (and hence merely contributing to the formal cause). As artists worked for the Oratorians, the brief evolved and was clarified. With Barocci, we have an example of works that have iconic solidity, but insubstantial, evanescent figures. The stories are humble and the treatment of the figures is ineffably indirect; we tangibly understand the weakness and humility of the Virgin Mary.
In any case, it is immediately clear that analogous to a social structure, a style is not the same as a group mind. As with social structures and individuals, it would be a mistake to make an analogy between the effect of artist + relations and the properties of the work itself. But practitioners of that style can participate in collective subjectivity; in fact, the group to which the artists belong is just a normative group. Social holism is to society what the Zeitgeist is to culture. By tethering style to the practitioners of that style, we ensure (as with the case of society) again that styles are social products; they are locally constructed, are processes not things; and are not reifications but abstract categories. By affirming the reality of styles with a strong ontology, we are able to accomplish things similar to what we could with a robust notion of social structure. Not only does this approach enable us to understand the historical and geographic spread of artistic traditions and how they hang together, we can also better understand the community of artists, working on the same problem, and the way in which they are compelled by a Gesamtwillens within a particular intersubjective community.
The main advantage of advancing an emergent, institutional theory of society is that it can explain how—even if people are the same—they do much different things in different societies. By rejecting individualism, it is possible to show the structuredness of social life and the way in which different communities differ. By affirming the reality of styles, we likewise learn why art has a history and why different traditions produce work that is different. The greatest example of an individualist theory of art history was that of Gombrich. As important as it is, especially for avoiding self-contradictory holist arguments, that theory does not cut ice. Attention falls back squarely on the individuals in each culture and we lose a sense of the structuring factors present in some historical culture.
It should be clear from the foregoing analysis that institutionalism need not suffer from the usual errors of holism/Zeitgeist thinking. Structures become, in a sense, pegs on which life’s events hang. Individuals bring to situations their biological makeup and [13] natural propensities or artistic work, but these are met by the prevailing traditions and practices. Fortunately, social life has its own patterns and trends, which complement those on the individual level. We need an understanding of both in order to make sense of general and artistic history.
Barocci as a Corporate Style
From what has been said it is obvious that there was nothing inevitable about the way in which Barocci and the Oratorians found their affinity and how it evolved. Marcia Hall has nicely written that “It was fortunate for both Barocci and for Filippo Neri that they found each other, for they were well suited.”33 The channeling of Barocci’s talents toward new subjects and their treatment had an unintended consequence, which was the “Barocci” style.
In order to make clear what claims are being made on being half of Barocci, the Oratorians, and their collaboration, I want to stress a few themes that clarify this style in order to overcome the predictable misunderstanding that, in spite of my clarifications, would suggest that Barocci’s individual works had an irresistible (i.e., deterministic) pull on its audiences. To the contrary, I believe the following.
The effect of the picture is not entirely compositional. It is interesting that when the Visitation arrived at the Chiesa Nuova in 1586, the duke’s ambassador recorded the opinion of a prominent Roman artist (perhaps Scipione Pulzone) that he expected more of Barocci. That is partly the point. The work is not a tour de force, or not in an obvious sense. The work, indeed, has power because it does not attempt to do everything within its confines. As a vision, it requires the viewer to complete the picture and yet at the same time feel slightly estranged or inadequate in light of what is offered. There is a corollary to this.
The effect of the picture is not entirely orthodox. It is not the case that a painting like the Visitation or the Presentation of the Virgin presents works in a new, orthodox manner consistent with the new demands of art after Trent. There is indeed a new scrupulousness in studied details, but adherence to this spirit is not a recipe for a successful painting. The Presentation of the Virgin, for example, is an apocryphal story, its depiction subject to partisan, Marian politics. Barocci is able to present apocryphal stories (e.g., The Rest on the Return from Egypt, Pinacoteca, Vatican; Madonna del Gatto, National Gallery, London) because of his earnest and respectful presentation of the subjects, his rhetoric of address.34 Of the Penitent Saint Jerome in the Borghese collection, Marcia Hall writes that Barocci “was so successful in this aim that no one in the Church took up a Gilio-style attack on Barocci for his ‘error’ in depicting Jerome in the desert with glowing flesh and a red satin robe.”35 Each of these two observations leads to a final point.
[14] Barocci’s person informs the effect of his work: A part of the effect of Barocci’s art is its reference precisely to him, his success, distance, and aloofness, his inaccessibility and his self-sufficiency, and above all, his piety. When one sees the picture, it does not have its effect like a crude, pious work of the past, but like a thoroughly modern work appropriate to a modern creator. Yet without the knowledge that Barocci was an aristocratic bachelor in Urbino, devoted to the local Franciscans and Capuchins, the resultant effect of his altarpieces might be different.
Together, the corporate body of the Oratorians and the refined work of Barocci produced their own emergent effect. Before Barocci began to work for the Oratorians, much of his work addressed Christological themes; under the influence of the Oratorians, his earlier works of private devotion, like the Rest on the Return from Egypt and the Madonna del Gatto, were adapted to monumental altarpieces. The Oratorians pressed Barocci’s style to reach new Marian heights.
Notes
1. Mandelbaum, Problem of Historical Knowledge, 286.
2. On Filippo Neri and the Oratorians, see Capecelatro, La vita di s. Filippo Neri; Cistellini, San Filippo Neri.
3. Incisa della Rochetta and Vian, Il Primo Processo per San Filippo Neri, 1:273, 330, 337, 340, 2:113, 125. Federico Borromeo also contributed his testimony (3:420–25) although he does not mention the anecdote. Bacci, Vita di San Filippo Neri, 221: “stava...nella Cappella della Visitazione dove si tratteneva volentieri piacendogli assai quell’immagine del Barocci”; Bacci, Life of St. Philip Neri, ed. Antrobus, 1:339 (note that the story does not appear in the first edition in 1622, and first appears in the 1636 edition); Baglione, Le vite de’ pittori scultori et architetti, 134: “egli staua in quella cappella a far le sue orationi”; Bellori, “Life of Federico Barocci,” ed. Pillsbury and Richards, 18; and Bellori, “Vita di Federico Barocci,” ed. Borea, 190: “Dicesi che San Filippo si compiaceva molto di questa imagine, e spesso si ritirava nella cappella alle sue divote contemplazioni.” The story does not appear in the first, unillustrated, life of Neri by Gallonio, Vita di San Filippo Neri; however, another episode, of a demon in the guise of a boy taunting Filippo, happened in the same chapel (211).
4. Franklin, Painting in Renaissance Florence; and Bailey, Between Renaissance and Baroque; both citing Stumpel, “Speaking of Manner.” See further Franklin, Review of After Raphael, by Marcia B. Hall.
5. Friedländer, Caravaggio Studies. As a further amplification of Friedländer’s thesis, see Graeve, “Stone of Unction in Caravaggio’s Painting for the Chiesa Nuova.” For overviews, see Cropper and Dempsey, “State of Research in Italian Painting of the Seventeenth Century”; and Toscano, “History of Art and the Forms of Religious Life.”
6. For the Augustinian, see Calvesi, “Caravaggio o la ricerca della salvazione.” For the Franciscan, see Alloisi, “Panigarola e Caravaggio”; and Pupillo, “Pauperismo e iconografia francescana.”
7. On Borromeo, see Gabrieli, “Federico Borromeo a Roma”; Agosti, Collezionismo e archeologia cristiana nel seicento; Jones, Federico Borromeo and the Ambrosiana.
8. See especially Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History. Cf. Gombrich, “Father of Art History.”
9. Popper, Poverty of Historicism; Geyl, Toynbee, and Sorokin, Pattern of the Past; Löwith, Meaning in History; Nisbet, Social Change and History.
10. See Schapiro, “Style”; Ackerman, “Theory of Style”; and Gombrich, “Style.”
11. Panofsky, Three Essays on Style, 75; Gombrich, “Icon” [review of Panofsky, Three Essays on Style].
12. Moxey, “Perspective, Panofsky, and the Philosophy of History,” in Practice of Persuasion.
13. For a political critique of “weak ontology,” see Dean, “Politics of Avoidance.”
14. Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque.
15. See the references in Bailey, “’Le style jésuite n’existe pas,’” 73n2.
16. Bailey, “Le style jésuite n’existe pas”; Bailey, Between Renaissance and Baroque.
17. Bailey, “Le style jésuite n’existe pas,” 45, 73.
18. Levy, “International Jesuit Style”; Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque.
19. Moxey, “Art History’s Hegelian Unconscious,” in Practice of Persuasion; Wyss, Hegel’s Art History and the Critique of Modernity. Perhaps wisest is James Elkins’s admission that Hegelianism is fundamental to art history as conceived (Stories of Art, 55).
20. Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History.
21. Vandenberghe, “Avatars of the Collective,” 295.
22. For a deeper discussion, see my article “Second Vienna School as Social Science.”
23. Elder-Vass, Causal Power of Social Structures, 122; Elder-Vass, Reality of Social Construction.
24. See, e.g., Bhaskar, Possibility of Naturalism; Archer, Realist Social Theory; and Archer, Culture and Agency.
25. This power, if it is to be likened to extensive parts, would be a non-extensive part of the whole, a moment; see Smith and Mulligan, “Pieces of a Theory.”
26. Groff, Critical Realism; Kurki, Causation in International Relations.
27. Vandenberghe, “Avatars of the Collective,” 301.
28. Before Baronio, Clement VIII’s confessor had been the Oratorian Giovan Francesco Bordini.
29. Hall, “A Note on Style Labels,” in After Raphael.
30. Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, 30. See further the discussion of the Auftrag (“brief”) in Pächt, which Baxandall perhaps knew; Methodisches zur Kunsthistorischen Praxis.
31. Gilmore, Life of a Style.
32. Ibid., 105. Cf. Hull, “A Matter of Individuality”; and Mishler and Brandon, “Individuality, Pluralism and the Phylogenetic Species Concept.”
33. Hall, After Raphael, 274.
34. For the Rest on the Return from Egypt and Madonna del Gatto, respectively, see Emiliani, Federico Barocci, 1:78–85; Mann, Federico Barocci, 109–19; and Emiliani, Federico Barocci, 2:93–103; Mann, Federico Barocci, 145–57.
35. Hall, After Raphael, 272. Cf. on this point Stoenescu, “Annibale Carracci and the Modern Reform of Altar Painting.”