early uses of photography in the history of art

Early Uses of Photography in the History of ArtAuthor(s): Wolfgang M. FreitagSource: Art Journal, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Winter, 1979-1980), pp. 117-123Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/776397 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 17:26

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.76.45 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 17:26:54 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caa

http://www.jstor.org/stable/776397?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Early Uses of Photography in the

History of Art*

WOLFGANG M. FREITAG

From earliest times, men have wanted to make reproductions of works of art. The motivation for making copies has not always been the same, but it has typically been the desire to enhance either the cult value' or the exhibition value of the originals. Copying was commonly done by apprentices as part of the learning process. Entrepreneurs soon became interested in art reproductions as a commodity, profiting from the sale of multiple copies of accepted and famous works.

The ancients knew only two methods for reproducing works of art mechanically: the casting of sculpture from molds in bronze or terra-cotta and the stamping of coins and medals with the aid of dies. Until about 1400 A.D. most reproductions were replicas, slowly made individual copies of the originals that, exactly in the manner of the originals, were produced by hand. Thus, no two copies of the same original were ever exactly alike; each was a different interpretation of the proto- type.

With the invention in the West of the woodcut, two-dimen- sional pictorial art entered the age of mechanical reproducibil- ity. It became possible to make what William M. Ivins called "exactly repeatable pictorial statements,"2 including statements about works originally executed in another medium. The far- reaching consequences of the invention and perfection of the graphic media for the development of modern man's percep- tion and appreciation of art have been thoroughly examined by Ivins, who was the first to systematize and explain the notion of which others before him had been dimly conscious, namely, that not only verbal but also visual language is subject to the rules of a grammar and that all visual statements must be analyzed according to their syntactic structure. Ivins saw the application of photography to art reproduction as a liberating force of enormous import. Indeed, he claimed that the inven-

tion of photography has had greater significance for art and visual communication than the invention of printing with mov- able type had for verbal communication and literary culture. Ivins and Malraux fully agree in the latter's famous dictum: "For the last hundred years (if we except the activities of specialists) art history has been the history of that which can be photographed."3

In her book Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts (1974) Estelle Jussim put a damper on Mr. Ivins' jubilant tones. With tools from the arsenal of information science and com- munications theory, Ms. Jussim convinces us, after a lengthy investigation of the channels and semantic signal-codes of the visual language spoken by photographs, "that even today's photographs are simply maps of originals, not duplications of originals."4 This issue of presentation cum interpretation versus the absolute fidelity of copies, or the issue of "maps" versus "duplicates," is what is really at the core of the heated contro- versies concerning the use of photographs in research, study and teaching of art and its history that divided the founding fathers of the young discipline of art history in the second half of the 19th century.

In 1853 Henri Delaborde, the curator of the Print Department of the Bibliotheque Nationale, compared contemporary French reproduction prints with those made in Italy during the 15th and 16th centuries.5 In their misguided effort to make exact copies of originals French engravers had reached the lowest level of decline. For Delaborde, as for his equally vocal col- league from the Louvre, Charles Blanc, Marcantonio Raimondi was the unexcelled master of the reproduction print, precisely because he made no attempt to copy the original.

Under the surveillance of Raphael, under the empire of his counsels, Marc Antony conceives engraving as it should be when attempting to repeat the works of great masters. He conceives it as a concise translation that represents the essential ... 6

The modern engraver, because he tries too hard to be objective, produces copies that despite their finished appearance, fail

* This article is an edited version of a paper read at the annual meeting of the College Art Association in 1979 in a session on the uses of photography in the history of art, chaired by David Alan Brown.

WINTER 1979/80 117



utterly to give the "truth" of the originals. For this sad state of affairs the new bourgeois art-loving public, the tastemakers-- critics and publishers-are to blame, and the official guardians of the visual heritage-curators and educators-get repri- manded for not resisting this corruption.

It is not what the artist has felt in the presence of his subject, nay it is the very subject itself that we now wish to see.... what interests us is no longer the likeness of the original that has been faithfully poeticized by a gifted intermediary. No! nothing else satisfies us but the absolute physical identity of the reproduction with the original.'

Since it is impossible to attain this degree of identity in the traditional print media, which are all subject to the "errors of the hand," photography is introduced because it can make

copies that do not interpret. Note that Delaborde did not say that the fashionable quali-

ties demanded from contemporary reproductions have been stimulated by the availability of photography. The question of which came first, corruption of the eye or photography, is left open. Blanc's judgment shows the same degree of uncertainty. He says that photography, although it is a great invention that will hasten the advancement of science and industry, will do nothing for the advancement of the knowledge of art because

it cannot render "the shape of ideas."8 According to Blanc, Delaborde, and many others of its early detractors, photography is lacking before nature, painting, and all the pictorial arts allied with painting, which are imbued with "sentiment." To do justice to any of the pictorial arts a reproductive medium must be able to "explain" the discrepancy between form and inten- tion that is present in every one of them. This the scholars felt photography could not do. But they were in the minority. The 19th-century public, the people for whom the principal mean- ing of a work of art was still in the subject it represented and who demanded from a "good" painting that it imitate nature closely and express a moral message, thought that photographic reproductions were able to express these essentials quite well.

The branch of the visual arts in which objections against photographic reproductions were not expressed, at least in the beginning, was architecture. Was that because architecture and photography were both closely allied with science and technology and were therefore considered natural partners? Or was there also a philosophical root for the belief that photography was not a threat where the representation of architectural monuments was concerned? One wonders how widely shared was the Hegelian tenet that architecture is of all the arts the most matter-bound, the art that "retains the spiritual as an inward experience over against the external forms of the art, and consequently must refer to what has soul only as to

:-:-::-::::::~--::--:-::::-::--- ::::'-:::i:--- :::- _ i: ii iiiiil iiii-iiiiiiii•-'ii_- i•!i•!•i•:

iiI:

: ::: :: ::::::ii-iiiii::i:i:::-: _:: - :

_Ii ii :::,,::-:::ii:-,:::-_- :i:-ii -:::i:::-~i~ii-- iiiiii -~iiii-::-::-::ii::::_: .i- -ii-: ::iii---i:i::-:_:iii_:ii:-l:i-!-i

:::~i~iiiiiiiiiii~iiiiil

i~ii!,i~ ii~~il~iiiiiiiiiiiiiii~ii~iiiiili•i~i•iii~iiiii:ii

iiiiiii

Fig. 1. Chartres Cathedral: West fagade. Engraving made by B. Winkles after a drawing by R. Garland, 1836. From B. Winkles, French Cathedrals, London, 1837.

i:

I::_: :-:_::::-:-: :::: : : : : : :I~:i :i::

: : ::::: ,ii,:i:::i- :i;iii-;:: ... :i:: --.-; i-:

:: :: : :: --

-::-::

~,-::li:---:: il~- I~::l:'::ililll--~:::I:i:l:i-:: ..:- ::: :-: :(li~iil . :: - :i . . . :: -i : :

.-.

i--i:_i~i:-ii:i-iii __i- ----- - ::--iii- i :_li-lil; i-:::-_::~__ ; ::,

:-i::i-::--:: i--:-iiii~iii::---i~iii-ii~iiiii~i~ _ i: i:- -ii :-- . :--:i-iiii-

i-l:-:::_l:::-ii -~:_-_;!-_r - :-:: : ,_~ii:::::: ;

::-::: ::-::::::::::

_.-ba_:- ----

i6-i-i

:1 : ~ii ii I

D:~: iii~ii~i-

Fig. 2. Chartres Cathedral: West fagade. 19th-century photograph by Giraudon (Giraudon, No. 324).

118 ART JOURNAL, XXXIX/2



something other than its own creation"?9 The early critics seem to concede to photography the capability of representing the material reality of the architectural work of art precisely because "its spirituality does not admit of being realized in its external form."o1

If this was their belief one wonders whether the likes of Blanc and Delaborde would have been as shocked as we are when we look at the distortions of certain 19th-century architectural reproductions and would have preferred photographs. The 1836 engraving (after a lithograph) of Chartres (Fig. 1), which Gombrich discusses in Art and Illusion, is a good exam-

ple." In the Garland rendering all the windows have pointed arches, even those of the west facade, which, as the contem-

porary photograph (Fig. 2) shows clearly, are rounded. Because the artist is a romantic antiquarian for whom the Gothic is the purest and highest expression of medieval spirituality, his inner eye does not acknowledge the earlier Romanesque stylistic elements. He fails to record them because, to him, they are unimportant features. It is quite likely that his fellow late romantics gladly overlooked this inaccuracy and praised him for reproducing the "soul" of the building better than a photographer could.

The success story of the documentary architectural photograph, from the first "light picture" that Nicephore Niepce made of the courtyard of his house in Chalon sur-Sa6ne (1826), to the photographic archaeological campaigns, to historic building surveys and attempted photo inventories of many public and private collections, has been told so often that we need not repeat it here; it forms a long chapter in the early history of photography. This vogue for photography of inani- mate objects was caused by the popular antiquarianism of the time, still inspired by the romantic fascination with relics, as well as by the technical limitations of early photographic apparatus. But the open approval of the official guardians of culture was also very important.

One of these guardians, who had embraced photography with almost religious fervor in the beginning, began to have doubts. John Ruskin, although he continued to take daguerreo- types and never denied photography the role of a teaching aid in draftsmanship, became increasingly convinced that the long- term effect of photography upon the course of art scholarship could be only a pernicious one. While in 1845 he could still write: "Amongst all the mechanical poison that this terrible nineteenth century has poured upon men, it has given us at any rate one antidote-the Daguerreotype,"12 by the 1870s he realized that this antidote was itself a poison. Then he wrote:

"... neither in the photographed scene, nor photographed drawing, will you see any true good, though they seem so. They are merely spoiled nature."13 They are, to him, also spoiled art. From then on Ruskin's frequent references to photography have but one goal: containment. He wants to limit its function in art scholarship to that of an initial recording device, one suitable for transmitting only the cruder, purely archaeological aspects of the work of art, and he is convinced that graphic artists are and always will remain superior to the camera.

Actually, Ruskin's doubts had already been bothering him in 1854 and had become stronger, interestingly enough, not in connection with a pictorial work but with an architectural monument. The story is told in the fourth volume of Modern Painters (1856). Ruskin was making a study of the medieval town walls of Fribourg in Switzerland. After close examination and comparison of the daguerreotype he had made (Fig. 3)

with two of his own drawings, one done in what he called the "Blottesque" (acquatinta or chiaroscuro) manner (Fig. 4) which at the time was very popular-a popularity that was influenced by blotchy photogravures that began to appear as book illus- trations-and the other in a pure linear manner of rendering

which he calls the "Diireresque" (Fig. 5), he concludes that the

"D~ireresque" sketch is the illustration which has the greatest veracity.

The details, lost in the lightest and darkest areas of the photograph, are best accounted for in this sketch ... the wall going up behind the main tower is seen in my drawing to bend very distinctly, following the different slopes of the hill. In the daguerreotype the bend is hardly perceptible. And yet, the nota- blest thing in the town of Fribourg is, that all its walls have flexible spines, and creep up and down the precipices more in the manner of cats than walls.14

A third Ruskin drawing (Fig. 6) attempted to combine the

expressive qualities of the "Diireresque" style with the tonality of early photographs.

While many of the 19th-century art critics who, like Ruskin, took their mission as educators seriously and felt responsible not only for the aesthetic values that future generations would hold but also for the course that art itself would take in the future, were divided in their judgment of photography, its advent was greeted with nearly unanimous enthusiasm by antiquarians and by the practitioners of connoisseurship.

Bernard Berenson (1865-1959) began his career at just the moment when photography had developed the capacity to

reproduce those tactile values in paintings that were important for his method in determining authenticity. Before him Giov- anni Morelli (1816-1891) had already used photographs to

study the unintentional "signatures" that appear in the nonex-

pressive elements of paintings-hands, ears, garment folds, the treatment of landscape-as aids in his attributions, but now

photographs could also be used as a basis for making judgments on the technical properties of a panel or canvas such as impasto and state of preservation. On October 14, 1893 Berenson made the following entry in his notebook:

Of the writer on art today we all expect not only that intimate acquaintance with his subject which modern means of convey- ance have made possible, but also that patient comparison of a given work with all the others by the same master which photography has rendered easy. It is not at all difficult to see at any rate nine tenths of a great master's works (Titian's or Tintoretto's, for instance) in such rapid succession that the memory of them will be fresh enough to enable the critic to determine the place and the value of any picture. And when this continuous study of originals is supplemented by isochromatic photographs, such comparison attains almost the accuracy of the physical science.15

Reactions to the new tool from Kunst-Philologen, the new professional academic art historians who did not have the background of connoisseurs and were not primarily critics and public educators, were mixed. Jakob Burckhardt (1818-1897) appreciated and used photographs. The little man carrying a big portfolio on his way to class was a familiar sight in the streets of Basel. On his Italian travels he made great efforts to find the best sources for photographs everyplace he visited. "Since we have photography," he writes to Heinrich Wolfflin in a letter dated September 24, 1896, "1 cannot believe that what is great in art shall ever perish or lose its power."'"16

WINTER 1979/80 119



-:i:i- _i:iiii?- :-:iiiiii:_

i, •iiii:siii-iiiii7-i:-?,_

Fig. 3. The Towers of Fribourg. Daguerreotype taken by John Ruskin. Engraving by J. H. Le Keux. Plate 25, J. Ruskin, Modern Painters, Vol. IV, London, 1856.

W61fflin could not have disagreed more, as can be seen from the correspondence with his revered teacher during the period when he was writing his great Classic Art (Die Klassische Kunst, 1899). "To illustrate your book with good photographs in a sensible format-I know-is not your thing," writes Burckhardt on August 29, 1896.17 And W61fflin, who had a great horror of

misrepresentation and who recognized that danger in all reproductions and especially in photographs-so much so that he had originally planned to publish his work without any illustra- tions at all-replies on May 23, 1897 from Italy, after looking at art in situ:

From day to day I become more convinced that it is absolutely futile to try to understand monumental art on the basis of what we can learn from photographs. I have to strike out more and more of the notes I made in Basel. But, of course, nobody will in the least appreciate my struggle and what I am trying to do, because today people want to have only the photographs ex- plained.'"

Regarding the lack of veracity in photographic reproductions, W61fflin held convictions that were as strong as Ruskin's and, like Blanc and Delaborde, he denied that photographs could ever replace drawings and engravings in the study of pictorial art. What position he took on architectural photography was never made explicit. (However, we should recall that until well into the 1920s the ability to draw was a requirement for students

seeking admission to W61fflin's seminar.) W61fflin is convinced that photography could aid in the

study of sculpture if employed in the correct manner. In a long two-part article which appeared in the Zeitschrift fijr Bildende

rr:: 1

,i ~a~- II

:: -f~

: :

'"~ "~-:i~ i ~: i

a-:~ i::: :: rx

i:

:~:: E:

::"~" Q-

i

~~~I

sj.

I: :::-::-

:i

:

ii

: ::- : : " -, :: :::

Fig. 4. The Towers of Fribourg. Sketch by John Ruskin executed in the "blottesque" style, in imitation of photographs. Engraving by J. H. Le Keux. Plate 25, J. Ruskin, Modern Painters, Vol. IV, London, 1856.

Kunst in 1896 and 189719 he sets out to show "How Sculptures Should Be Photographed." He castigates the contemporary practitioners of photography as a band of clever and presump- tuous tradespeople who, by arbitrarily choosing the point of view from which to photograph sculptural works, have the

audacity to interpret them-most often incorrectly. By inter-

preting the work of art they usurp a role that should be reserved for the scholar. (The thought that photographers might be trained art historians who would "take" [aufnehmen] sculpture correctly seems not to have entered his mind.) The most dire

consequences can be expected to result from this practice because of the speed and ease with which false photographic statements are being disseminated by the picture agencies and

by the printing press. Mass-produced and spread in lavishly illustrated albums before an ever-growing picture-hungry public as a visual feast, such photographs are a sugar-coated "poison for the eyes." "The good people in their innocence buy these images because they trust that in a mechanical medium

nothing essential can get lost from the original."20 Their trust is, of course, misplaced.

W61fflin proceeds to analyze several photographs of sculptures that grossly misrepresent the originals. The Apollo of Belvedere in an Alinari photo (Fig. 7) is only one example of "the brutalized visual standards of our time."21 The manner in which the picture reproduces the sculptural work is a falsification that is absolutely unacceptable. "To my knowledge the

Apollo has been correctly reproduced only once since its res- urrection; and that was still during Raphael's lifetime, in the

engraving by Marcantonio" (Fig. 8).22 "In the Vatican the Apollo is placed so that the viewer has to press hard against the wall in order to see it from the original point of view."23




i -I :

,~ii~6 :v::x* ~*&t. . +r?l ~' ;" :I *~g ~

$ -`" *r. I?:?iu?~?"""

I ~ia :B:

.S *: a--ll:" x" i :"" :g a

~~"II ~Bs~ :::~~: ?~" iiB ~ " ;

Ii i i'

a f?::i?r ?? .r B 1

r? ? f B ~x~bl ,? "-:

f i 1 ;I ir -, ?t?i_ -i r sr- % ?-

" I % * ~ i' -I

-i F - -t~p

P-

1

b, I: rl I:-

,x "li :"

*s :; B

%

i~ti g 5 1

B -e

Fig. 5. The Towers of Fribourg. Sketch by John Rus- kin in the linear "Direresque" style. Engraving by J. H. Le Keux. Plate 25, J. Ruskin, Modern Painters, Vol. IV, London, 1856.

. .. .......

M'.

/0,0 - ionto-al

v ?v

AM, ,00

IN Is pow:

Fig. 7. Apollo Belvedere. Rome, Vatican Museum. The photograph which Wolfflin believed to be by Alinari is actually taken from H. Brunn and F. Bruckmann, Denkmaler griechischer und

romischer Skulptur, No. 419 (Tafel 344). Munich, 1888- .

ir:

o-:..

Fig. 6. The Towers of Fribourg. Idealized drawing by John Ruskin. Engraving by J. C. Armytage. Plate 24, Modern Painters, Vol. IV, London, 1856.

ii D

: : I I&:f

:-I-

-... : ~-i- __i :7... .:. : :

: :: :- ::-:i::~i ::

.:. . :

:: : :li iii~ii:- ... i!ri:i ii: _:i -li- ---i~ii:i:~i-i-i:~i:_:ili::

:::: :::: :-: -:: :-:: -:

:::

-::::

:::

Fig. 8. Apollo Belvedere. Engraving by Marcanto- nio Raimondi (ca. 1480-ca. 1530). From H. Dela- borde, Marc-Antoine Raimondi. Paris, 1888.

WINTER 1979/80 121



Obviously, Marcantonio's engraving derives part of its success from the fact that the ground plane disappears. Unfortunately, the photograph cannot compete in this respect because a view from below would distort the proportions terribly. This is one of the gravest limitations of photography which, again and again, makes drawing a superior medium.24

Among our photographers "it seems to be an article of faith that plastic works can be shot arbitrarily from any angle what- soever that will result in a pretty picture... and that they must always make sure that their own artistic temperament is expressed; this they do by avoiding the frontal view at all cost."25 Ignorant as they are of the history of art, "they do not know that all sculpture in the round is meant to be seen from only one principal point of view and that, if they want to be honest, they must photograph it from this point of view."26

Ruskin's friend Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908), the first occupant of a chair in the history of art at Harvard, is remem- bered (in the inscription on the pedestal of his bust in the vestibule of Norton Lecture Hall in the Fogg Art Museum) as one "who taught an unseeing age to see." But he very rarely showed pictures in his classes. He had acquired for the Fogg a sizable collection of illustrative materials, including photographs, but he found it ineffective and cumbersome to handle them in the classroom and abandoned them. Not until 1896, two years before his retirement, did he occasionally show slides. Relying instead on his considerable oratorical powers, he im- mersed his students in the poetry and written documents of the period, endeavoring to instill through literature the right receptive attitudes so that the originals which they would all eventually see in situ would have a predictable impact on their impressionable young minds.

An interesting contrast to this approach is the attitude of one of Norton's celebrated European confreres, Herman Grimm (1828-1901), who taught art history in Berlin and who, brought up in the ambience of German Idealism by his famous father Wilhelm Grimm, had much in common with Norton and his New England Transcendentalist background. (They were also linked through their friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson.) Although Norton and Grimm were worlds apart in their eval- uation of Raphael, they were in agreement on the importance of Michelangelo and-most important in our context-they shared the conviction that art has a moral message, that for that

message to be understood it must be experienced emotionally as well as aesthetically, and that the experience of great poetry and epic literature is the most powerful conditioner toward that end. Grimm, however, did not eschew reproductions. He used slides early and extensively in his lectures (and paid for the equipment from his own pocket, since the Controller of the University of Berlin refused to allocate money for such public amusements). He also wrote several articles in which he warmly endorsed the use of slides and correctly predicted the revolutionary impact they would have upon the study and teaching of art history. Grimm used reproductions to prepare his students for the quasi-religious experience of receiving the true message of the work of art, an effect that Norton sought to induce by his nonvisual approach. "The slide projection apparatus," he wrote in an 1892 issue of the Nationalzeitung, "enables us to make a clear distinction between that in art which moves the soul and that which is merely of interest from the aspect of art history."27 Grimm was interested in the aesthetic and even more in the ethical message of the great work

of art and believed that slides were capable of sending those messages.

In clear contrast to moralists like Grimm and Norton, the historian Jakob Burckhardt, although he shared their view that art is the visual expression of the moral temper of an age, had a much more sensuous approach. Because of his greater sensi- tivity to the individual work, Burckhardt, who considered photography a valuable helpmate in its study, was one of photography's most sympathetic critics. He wanted to retain this valuable tool for art history, but he was well aware that either photographing or engraving the work of art means the inter- position of an active human intelligence between the object and its viewer. Long before the dangers inherent in photographs that enlarge and thereby falsify were discussed again by writers such as Ivins and jussim, Burckhardt had asked himself perti- nent questions about the effects that such distorted scale values

might have upon the student. Like Hans Tietze (1880-1954), who belonged to the generation that followed his, Burckhardt thought that reproductions that presented the original in re- duced format injured veracity much less than enlargements.

Tietze dealt with the problem of reproductions in his Meth- ode der Kunstgeschichte (1913).28

The change of scale relationships is only one of the many changes caused by photography. But, obviously, the choice of the viewpoint is also of the greatest importance. Anyone who has ever photographed a building has consciously and deliber- ately influenced the psychological impact of the object of study, be it through a foreshortening of some unsightly lines, through a loss of depth and the apparent crossing of architectural lines or through the inclusion of 'mood inducing' elements such as foreground detail, etc. Clearly, our innate artistic preferences often get the upper hand when we have set out to take a documentary picture of a piece of architecture. These interpre- tive manipulations can, if worst comes to worst, result in a complete falsification of the artistic message of the original. A work of sculpture photographed from a wrong angle can become distorted beyond recognition, and the photograph of a painting which has been darkened or lightened too much in the process of developing and printing and in which all the tonal values have been altered, certainly is one kind of source that we must approach with the utmost caution.29

Clarence Kennedy, whose 1924 Harvard Ph.D. dissertation30

appears to have been the first doctoral thesis dealing with the

problems of photographing art and who spent much of his long career as an art historian/photographer trying to overcome the dichotomy between objective versus subjective values in interpretation, had become well aware that photographing a work of sculpture can mean explanation, criticism, interpretation. The photographer of any work of art has several choices. He can try to photograph in the best possible objective way or he can use the work of art as a motif or a light-modulating device and create images in which he expresses himself crea- tively as an artist.

The scepticism with which a Wolfflin regarded all photographs, the warning note sounded by Burckhardt-to be on the alert for possible distortions caused by changes of scale and choice of point of view-is still echoed by contemporary art historians who mistrust color reproductions. As with distortions of scale, slides have a great potential for transmitting misinfor-




mation on color. Even the best color slides, even when they are

projected from a correct distance so that the image on the screen is neither larger nor smaller than the original, must corrupt the message of the original simply because they are transparent and the light that passes through them during projection adds the luminosity of a stained-glass window in- discriminately to a fresco, a panel, or a canvas. Such intensifi- cation can have the serious consequence of making the original appear unexciting and "flat" to the student who has learned about art chiefly from slides. Edgar Wind, in a footnote to his essay "The Mechanization of Art," compares a good black-and- white photo of an oil painting to a well-made piano reduction of an orchestral score in which all the instrumental sounds of the full symphony orchestra are given their correct equivalents on the "grey scale" of the keyboard. Color reproductions of any quality he likens to the sounds made by so-called "salon" orchestras (small ensembles of three or four instruments that used to play classical music in the lobbies and palm courts of old-fashioned European hotels). In their renditions important voices are left out, all tonal values are wrongly translated, and they also play out of tune!31

From this sampler of historical opinions it appears that for teaching, study, and serious scholarship in most fields of art there is still no better reproductive medium than the carefully printed black-and-white photograph, taken of course by an art- historian/photographer from the correct point of view and under the best lighting conditions.

This review also makes us ponder the question of whether sketching, which in comparison with photography is still the superior tool for many tasks, should not be encouraged more and whether bringing it back into the curriculum might not have a rather refreshing effect upon the general practice of art history-just as some training in the skillful excerpting of texts might improve the mnemonic faculties of the "Xerox" generation! E

1. Walter Benjamin, "The Works of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc- tion," in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn, New York, 1969, p. 224.

2. William M. Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication, Cambridge, Mass., 1953, p. 3.

3. Andr6 Malraux, Museum Without Walls, trans. by S. Stuart and F. Price. Garden City, N.Y., 1967, p. 30.

4. Estelle Jussim, Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts, New York, 1974, p. 274.

5. Henri Delaborde, Melanges sur I'art contemporain, Paris, 1866, pp. 296- 333.

6. Charles Blanc, The Grammar of Painting and Engraving (Grammaire des arts du dessin), trans. by K.N. Dogget. New York and Cambridge, 1874, p. 256.

7. Delaborde, op. cit., p. 326. 8. Blanc, op. cit., p. 312. 9. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of

Fine Art, trans. with notes and prefatory essay by Bernard Bosanquet, London, 1886, p. 162.

10. Ibid., pp. 160-61. 11. Ernst H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion; a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial

Representation, Princeton, N.J., 1972, pp. 72-73. 12. John Ruskin in a letter to his father on October 8, 1845, as quoted by Aaron

Scharf in Art and Photography. London, 1968, p. 70. 13. From Ruskin's inaugural lectures as Slade Professor at Oxford, quoted by

Scharf, op. cit., p. 73. 14. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Vol. IV, London, 1856, pp. 32-33. 15. Hanna Kiel (ed.), The Berenson Treasury; A Selection from the Works,

Unpublished Writings, Letters, Diaries, and Journals: 1887-1958, London, 1964, pp. 69-70.

16. Joseph Gantner (ed.), Jakob Burckhardt und Heinrich Wolfflin: Briefwechsel und andere Dokumente ihrer Begegnung 1882-1897, Basel, 1948, p. 114.

17. Ibid., p. 111. 18. Ibid., p. 122. 19. Heinrich W61fflin, "Wie man Skulpturen aufnehmen soil," Zeitschrift fur

Bildende Kunst, N.F. VII (1896), pp. 224-28; N.F. VIII (1897), pp. 294-97. 20. Op. cit., p. 224. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., p. 296. 23. Ibid., p. 297. 24. Ibid., p. 296. 25. Ibid., p. 224. 26. Ibid. 27. Herman Grimm, "Die Umgestaltung der Universitatsvorlesungen uber neuere

Kunstgeschichte durch das Skioptikon," (Berlin) Nationalzeitung, 1892. 28. Hans Tietze, Die Methode der Kunstgeschichte. Ein Versuch, Leipzig, 1913. 29. Ibid., p. 303. 30. Clarence Kennedy, Light and Shade and the Point of View in the Study of

Greek Sculpture (unpublished dissertation, Harvard University, 1924). 31. Edgar Wind, "The Mechanization of Art," in Art and Anarchy, London, 1963,

fn. 131, p. 165.

Wolfgang M. Freitag is Librarian of the Fine Arts Library, Harvard University, Fogg Art Museum.

WINTER 1979/80 123



early uses of photography in the history of art

Documents