Art and Scholarship (E.H. Gombrich)

Art and Scholarship
Author(s): E. H. Gombrich
Source: College Art Journal, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Summer, 1958), pp. 342-356
Published by: CAA
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The following article is reprinted with the kind permission of the Publications
Officer of University College, London, where it was published as a separate
pamphlet under the same title and is obtainable from H. K. Lewis and Co., Ltd.,
136 Gower Street, London, W.C. 1. (2s. 6d. net.) This was the Inaugural Lecture
which Professor Gombrich delivered at University College, London on 14 Feb-
ruary, 1957, upon succeeding Professor Rudolf Wittkower as Durning-Lawrence
Professor of the History of Art, a chair closely linked with the Slade School of
Art. In granting our request to reprint it in CAJ, Professor Gombrich asks our
readers to bear in mind that it was written for a particular day and place. Since
there was no opportunity for discussion after this lecture, the author feels that if
its appearance here were to start a debate on some of the points raised, a real
purpose would be served.
ART AND SCHOLARSHIP
E. H. Gombrich
This being St. Valentine's Day I should really begin by drawing a large
heart round the two subjects of my title, art and scholarship, and then wri
some pleasing motto underneath. I would suggest, for instance, amant se art
hae ad invicem, a passage from the great Renaissance scholar, Enea Silv
Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II.1 The two arts which he thus proclaimed lov
each other were Painting and Rhetoric, by which he meant that discipline
of verbal mastery which, to the Renaissance, stood right in the centre of
scholarship. But a good deal has changed in the five hundred years since En
Sylvius wrote of the mutual love of art and scholarship. There have been
doubts, I am sorry to say, whether scholarship pursues honest intentions
its professed love for art. A master of rhetoric as well as of painting, Mr
Wyndham Lewis, has recently given vent to these doubts in that provocativ
book of his on the Demon of Progress in the Arts.2
When I see a writer, a word man, among a number of painters, I shake my head
For I know he would not be there, unless he was up to something. And I kno
that he will do them no good . . .
His blast is directed against the critic, or what he calls the pundit-prophe
but we are told that that dangerous suitor has "recently promoted himsel
art historian."
Letter to Niklas von Wyle, July 1452, in Briefu'echsel, ed. R. Wolkan (Vienn
1918), III. Abt., Bd. 1,o100.
2 London, 1954.
CAJ XVI! 4 342
Despite the rhetoric, there is much in Wyndham Lewis's book that de-
serves to be pondered. He is surely right that image-men and word-men live
in different worlds. Michelangelo is said to have spent months in the quarries
of Carrara, unable to tear himself away from the sight of all the marble blocks
in which he saw the shapes of works without number waiting to be liberated.
The scholar's quarries are libraries. His form of indulgence is the reading of
catalogues of second-hand books which, to his mind, conjure up visions of
curious lore and possible clues to the riddles of the past. But there is at
least one thing in common between art and scholarship: both may appear
to be utterly useless; as useless, in fact, as are all dreams and all memories.
'Papa, explique-moi donc a quoi sert l'histoire?' These are the opening
words of Marc Bloch's moving Apologie pour l'histoire,3 which was cut
short when its author was killed by the Nazis. It is a question which would
have scandalized scholars a few generations ago who were brought up on
the Aristotelian prejudice that anything pursued for its own sake is more
noble than something serving an end-whatever noble may mean in that
context. But if we persist in this pose, the time may not be far off when those
in authority will recognize the word scholarship only as what grammarians
call a plurale tantum, they will only care for scholarships, and those, I am
afraid, will be neither for art nor arts.
And yet I think it should not be difficult to answer the question which
the young generation asks with understandable insistence. In fact, I have
given it already. The scholar is the guardian of memories. Not everybody,
of course, need care for memories. I personally would not much like to
live in a world, or even work in an institution, in which all memories of the
past have been blotted out. But that is not the alternative. The choice is not
between knowledge of the past and concern for the future; if it were that,
it would be a hard choice. It is between the search for truth and the acceptance
of falsehood. For every community insists on what Professor G. J. Renier
calls 'the Story that must be told' about its own past,4 and where scholarship
decays, myth will crowd in.
In this respect it has always seemed a cause for real wonder and surprise
to me that the powers of science for good and evil should be on everybody's
lips while the more dire powers of arts subjects should be ignored. Let me
mount the soapbox for a moment and tell you that with all the drive for
higher education ?35,000 per annum cannot be spared to keep the library of
the British Museum open in the evening.5 The greatest power-house of
knowledge must remain inaccessible to all who work in daytime; though one
of the few things which everybody knows about its history is that it was
3 Cahiers des Annales (Paris, 1949).

4 History: Its Purpose and Method (London, 1950).
5 The Times, 23 March 1956.
343 Gombrich: Art and Scholarship
here that two exiles, Marx and Lenin, concocted that explosive which exceeds
in range even the most astounding devices of science. Apparently it has not
yet struck anyone that where the myth originated it might also be rendered
innocuous through more accurate work in the quarry of books. Not even the
experience of the last war has shaken the conviction of authority that science
is a necessity, scholarship a luxury. Yet it would be easy to show that one
element of the Nazi myth sprang up in the harmless field of comparative
philology. The great Max Muller once ventured the guess that all peoples
speaking the so-called Indo-Germanic languages might derive from the tribe
of Aryans. He soon changed his mind, but the mischief was done,6 and the
ghastly tragedy of those who were idiotically labelled non-Aryans should now
suffice to answer the question of Marc Bloch's son.
I know that many of you will think that I am putting the cart before
the horse. The horse which pulled the cart of perverted scholarship, you will
say, was thirst for power, power which made use of any rags and tatters of
scholarship to hide its true nature. I wish I could believe that. I wish it
could be shown that it was power that perverted learning and not learning
that perverted power. It would be more comforting, in a way, to think that
the streams of adulterated scholarship that poured and pour from the presses
of totalitarian countries were and are just the product of fear-fear of star-
vation, fear of torture even-from which none of us would be free in similar
situations. But I think, in thus exonerating our colleagues, past and present,
we are in danger of making too light of our own responsibility as scholars.
While we preach to the scientist to heed the consequences of his work, we
believe, and make others believe, that we are just indulging in a harmless
game because it is fun or because such leisurely indulgence produces wisdom
where science only produces gadgets. I see no evidence of that. But I hope
we may tell the young that in trying to preserve and recover the memories of
past events, to use Ranke's famous words, 'as they actually happened', we
maintain and extend the dykes of reason in an area which is particularly vul-
nerable to the springtides of myth.
The arts of the past are an important strand in the memories of mankind,
and long may they remain so. Shrines, monuments, and images remain in
front of everybody's eyes when books are forgotten and documents buried in
archives. Great scholars such as Huizinga7 and Ernst Robert Curtius8 have
been aware of the hold which visual records have over the imagination, and
this hold will increase with the spread of travel and of visual aids in educa-
tion. The idea which most of us form of Medicean Florence is coloured,
6Julian S. Huxley and A. C. Haddon, We Europeans (London, 1935).

7 'Het aesthetische Bestanddeel van geschiedkundige Voorstellingen' in Verzamelde
Werken (Haarlem, 1949), vni, esp. pp. 24-5; and 'Nederland's Beschaving in de
zeventiende Eeuw', ibid., II, pp. 415-16.
s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York, 1953), p. 15.
CAJ XVII 4 344
and how pleasantly coloured, by that splendid cavalcade through a smiling
landscape which Benozzo Gozzoli painted in the Riccardi Palace. Who would
find it easy, after a visit to Ravenna and its solemn mosaics, to think of noisy
children in Byzantium, or who thinks of haggard peasants in the Flanders
of Rubens? Let me call this tendency to see the past in terms of its typical
style 'the physiognomic fallacy'. It would be a harmless fallacy, if it did not
strengthen the illusion that mankind changed as dramatically and thoroughly
as did art. Andre Malraux has recently extolled this very power of art to
transfigure the past into myth.9 And may he not be right, you may say, at
least where the artist is concerned? Why should the artist bother about that
spoilsport the scholar and his past? The brief answer to this question, I fear,-
may sound moralistic. Because truth is better than lies. And a myth which
is extolled as a myth deserves no name more polite than that. But I do not
hold with the terribles simplificateurs who divide our mind into two halves,
one for rationality devoted to science and utility, the other for art and dreams.
Man is one. If there is anyone who is in need of undistorted memories it is
the artist in our world. He needs them and makes use of them whether he
wants to continue tradition or to defy it. His work is like a motif in a
symphony which gains its meaning and its poignancy from what has gone
before and what may follow. And it may well be argued that false memories,
a haunted past, have created neuroses in art no less than in life-whether it
was the academic myth that the Greeks had a special passport to beauty, or
the romantic fairy tale that great artists were always derided and rejected by
their contemporaries.
It seems to me entirely fitting, therefore, that the history of art was
launched upon the world by an artist who was concerned with the memories
of a great past-by Giorgio Vasari. It has always seemed strangely moving
to me that it was Vasari who designed the Uffizi in Florence, where so many
of the works he admired are now enshrined. Vasari was a good architect, but
as a painter his gifts were certainly unequal to the tasks with which he was
confronted during a very successful career. He lacked the systematic training
from childhood which moulded the outlook of the artist-craftsmen of the
Renaissance. He had been brought up as the precocious companion to an
aristocratic child and perhaps it was this element of distance which turned
him into an historian. He could not take art for granted. He relates with
genuine modesty how hard he laboured on one of his first important com-
missions for a portrait to imitate the sheen of the armour worn by his sitter,
till the great Pontormo explained to him, what every artist knows instinctively,
that paint can never be matched directly against the gleam of light.10 Later
in his life, when he had achieved prosperity and decorated his house in
9The Voices of Silence (London, 1954); see my review article in the Burlington
Magazine, December 1954.
10Le Vite, ed. Milanesi (Florence. 1878-85), vII, 657.
Arezzo, Vasari painted a cycle of allegories in praise ot art in tempera, since
he had observed that this ancient technique was falling into oblivion and
he thought it should not get lost altogether.ll
In Vasari this conviction that only tradition and memory can keep art
alive is paramount. He says in so many words that this is the reason which
made him write the lives of the artists.12 For Vasari himself was haunted by
the spectre of a myth, a myth which he did much to propagate. He believed
that the arts have their birth, growth, age, and death, as do our human bodies.
And he felt, though he did not quite dare to say so, that the tremendous
achievement of Michelangelo indicated that the life cycle of art had reached
its climax and was heading for decay.
It would be interesting to speculate what effect this view of the past,
which was no doubt shared by many of Vasari's friends, had on their art,
on that much discussed style we call Mannerism.13 For here we have one
example where a myth of the past may really have created one of those col-
lective neuroses I mentioned. Indeed, the irrational myth of the cycle and the
dread of decline have haunted Western art ever since, sometimes of course in
the form of an exaggerated emphasis on the belief in progress.
You will now see why I think that art history does indeed have a direct
bearing on art, and, if you wish to keep the scholar out, remember the al-
ternative is the non-scholar. Let us rather look at that discipline Vasari has
bequeathed to scholarship and see what has become of it. For his questions,
I think, are still our questions, even though our answers must differ from his.
It was not my intention when I undertook to write these Lives, to make a
record of artists and a catalogue, as it were, of their works; nor would I consider
it a worthy aim of my labours, which, if not splendid, have certainly been long and
difficult, to set out their number, their names and places of birth, or where their paint-
ings, statues or buildings are to be found at present. Because this I could have done
by means of a simple tabulation without interposing my own opinion anywhere.14
The real historian, Vasari claims, will pronounce judgements which are
the soul of history; he will discriminate the good from the better and the
better from the best and, most of all, he will investigate the causes and roots
of styles, le cause e radici delle maniere.l5
In these days of fragmentation it has of course become impossible for
one mind to pursue all these aims with equal intensity. The artist who knows
about the painting of light and the technique of tempera is rarely the same
as the connoisseur who, like the first holder of this Chair, Tancred Borenius,
knows the names and whereabouts of countless works of art; he, in his turn,
loc cit., VII, 686.
12 op. cit., I, 243.
" See my "The Renaissance Idea of Artistic Progress and its Consequences" in
Actes du XVIIme Congres International d'. istoire de l'Art, Amsterdam, 23-31 Juillet
1952 (The Hague, 1955), pp. 291-307.
14 op. cit., II, 93.
15 op. cit., In, 94.
CAJ XVII 4 346
will not necessarily aspire to be a critic who, as Vasari puts it so politely,
knows to discriminate between the good and the better. To drive through
history triumphantly with a coach and four, as Vasari did, would no longer
be permitted.
I say 'permitted' because of the widespread conviction that the scholar
should specialize, since his concern is not with generalities but with the in-
dividual and particular. I believe that this opinion rests partly on a confusion
between ends and means. The paradox of the historian's position seems to me
precisely that the cherished particular can only be approached on a spiralling
path through the labyrinth of general theories, and that these theories can
only be mapped out by those who have reached the particular. Think of the
exciting adventure of deciphering an ancient script which is not far from
everybody's mind to-day. The individual inscription is studied for
what we can learn of the secrets of the script, and the script in its turn
for what it will tell us of individual inscriptions. To divorce the one from
the other would not only be foolish, it would be impossible.16
Now art is long and life is short and some degree of specialization is
unavoidable in our field. But it is at best a necessary evil. For in a sense
Vasari even understated his case when he wrote that without criticism and a
theory of style he could only have drawn up lists. He could not even have
done that. The cataloguer does not make lists of painted signboards but of
Raphaels; that is to say, he relies on the critic's evaluations. And how could
he fight his good fight against myth, which blurs and distorts the memory of
great masters by false attributions, if he could not use arguments which appeal
to a theory of style? When he claims that a certain painting cannot be by
Raphael because it looks quite different from all the master's documented
works, the very word 'because' implies the general theory that a master can-
not change his manner of painting beyond a certain range.17 If you were to
question this assumption by pointing out the astounding dissimilarities which
exist between various documented works by Picasso, the connoisseur would
reply, and quite rightly, that such a range may be possible for a twentieth-
century master but would be unthinkable in the sixteenth century. Already
he draws your attention to an unexpected turn in the labyrinth of his work-
ing theory, to the assumption that different possibilities are open to artists in
different conditions. You may ask then what he thinks these conditions might
be, which so restrict the range of a master's manner that we can catalogue
his individual undocumented works with confidence, and unless he has shown
you the door by then, he may remember that there are periods in art when
styles change so rapidly that our assurance in matters of attribution becomes
16E. Panofsky, 'The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline' in Meaning in

the Visual Arts (New York, 1955), pp. 1-25, esp. p. 9.
17 K. R. Popper, 'The Poverty of Historicism' in Economica, xi (1944), 86-103,
119-137; xII (1945), 69-89.
notoriously shaky. The famous controversies of art history seem mostly to
centre round such periods of innovation and the pioneers who initiated them;
the problem of Giotto in Assisi may come to your mind, of Masolino and
Masaccio, of Hubert and Jan van Eyck, or perhaps that of the respective shares
of Braque and Picasso in the creation of Cubism. Do we really know
how much the style of one master may vary .under conditions of crisis? Will
we ever know, unless we turn round from the particular and face Vasari's
problem about the causes and roots of style?
What is true of the catalogers is, I believe, also true of the critics. But
here it is not so much the question of the objective validity of their utterances
which is at stake. Great practitioners of this delicate art have overcome this
formidable obstacle by making their own, avowedly subjective, reactions to
paintings and sculptures the theme and raison d'etre of their writings. They
know how to use words to articulate their sensations and make us profit in
our own sensibility by teaching us differentiation.
The word differentiation is decisive here, because without differentiation
there could be no communication. In this College, which is also the seat of
the Communication Research Centre, little more need be said about this
aspect. Symbols do not carry meaning as trucks carry coal, to paraphrase Mr.
Colin Cherry.18 Their function is to select from alternatives within a given
context. You remember the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. The
robber marked one door he wanted to remember with chalk. His fair op-
ponent took chalk and repeated the sign on all other doors, thus destroying
the meaning of the symbol without touching it. You will understand, if you
think of this parable, why Picasso said that his imitators make him sick. A
meaningful distortion is emptied of meaning when it becomes a mannerism,
a convention. It is only because we know the convention, on the other hand,
that the artist's distinctive contribution makes sense to us. With contemporary
works the critic may have little difficulty in responding to the delicate inter-
play between expectation and message which I have compared to the effect
of a modulation within the context of a symphony. But with the messages
which reach us from the past we must often try to replace by a conscious
effort what we must lack in instinctive assurance. Unless the critic, like the
connoisseur, knows how to turn round from the particular to confront the
problem of style, he may never be able to disentangle the message expressed
within the language from the language itself.
This was a problem which was very much in the mind of my teacher
Julius von Schlosser at the time when I was privileged to study under him
in Vienna. He had been much impressed by the demand of his friend Ben-
edetto Croce to treat every work of art as an incommensurable individual
1 'Communication Theory and Human Behavior' in Studies in Communicatiol,

with intr. by B. Ifor Evans (London, 1955), pp. 45-67.
CAJ XVII 4 348
expression; but how could the historian get hold of that elusive insularity of
the work of art if he found it embedded in the artistic idiom?19 To hear him
meditate about these perplexities in front of a lantern slide of the Arch of
Constantine was not always an entertainment, but I hope it was an educa-
tion. For Schlosser, if anyone, was a real scholar, and his living rapport with
the past made it hard for him to accept the claims of a younger generation to
have fulfilled Vasari's third and most difficult demand in explaining the
causes and roots of style through a 'science of art', a new Kunstwissenschaft.
My sympathies, at that time, were divided, but today I think that Schlosser's
mellow scepticism was justified. For surely it is not scientific to take the
signs, those marks on the doors, out of context, and investigate their 'struc-
ture' for what it may tell us about their makers? Too often this procedure
only leads back to the physiognomic fallacy, the myth that the system of signs,
the style, is not a language but an utterance of the collective, in which a
nation or an age speaks to us. A great linguist, Edward Sapir, has explicitly
warned us against this confusion in what he calls the most difficult problem
of social psychology:
It is impossible to show that the form of a language has the slightest connection
with national temperament. Its line of variation, its drift, runs inexorably in the channel
ordained for it by its historic antecedents.20
I think these warnings of the linguist might be confirmed by the an-

thropologist. In a recent study of Eskimo art, Hans Himmelheber describes
the habit of Eskimo girls, in certain regions of Alaska, of accompanying the
stories they tell each other by drawing little pictures in the snow.21 They
carry special tools to have this means of enlivening their tales always at hand.
but according to my authority this custom exists only in one area; on the
neighbouring island of Nunivak girls do not draw in the snow. Clearly it
would be rash to jump to the conclusion that this difference in habit reveals
a radical difference in tribal character and outlook. And even if it did, who
is to tell whether the snow-drawing habit influences the mentality of the
tribe, or the mentality causes the different habits? The example is not as far-
fetched as it may sound, for we art historians are often confronted with
puzzles of a similar nature though of a different order. Venice has a glorious
tradition in painting; Genoa much less so. It is easy to see that at any given
moment tradition had a good deal to do with this difference. Without Bellini
and Giorgione there would have been no Titian, and without Titian, Tintoretto
19 Julius von Schlosser, ' "Stilgeschichte" und "Sprachgeschichte" der bildenden

Kunst', Sitzungsberichte der Bayrischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil-Hist. Abt., I
(1935), 3-39; and 0. Kurz, 'Julius von Schlosser; Personalita-Metodo-Lavoro' in
Critica d' Arte, xi/xii (1955), 402-19.
20Language, An Introduction to the Study of Speech (London, 1921), p. 232.
21 Eskimokiinstler (Eisenach, 1953).
might not have risen much higher in Venice than Luca Cambiaso did in
Genoa-though reflections of this kind are inevitably futile. But what about
the start of the tradition ?
Strangely enough Vasari himself was confronted with that very problem.
Nobody knew better than he did, how much tradition counts in art. His whole
framework of organic growth rests on the conviction that one artist learns
from another and can add to his achievements and discoveries. The destruc-
tion of the first tradition could be explained through the barbarians, who put
an end to classical art; but why and how did it start again where it did, in
Tuscany in the thirteenth century? The answer he gives in an incidental re-
mark is portentous of things to come:
The spirits of those who were born, aided in some places by the subtlety of the
air, were so purged that in the year 1250 the heavens were moved to have compassion
with the fine minds whch the Tuscan soil brings forth every day and returned them to
pristine form.22
Those of you who are familiar with writings on art and archaeology
know that this type of incidental nonsense has by no means disappeared from
our books. But in Vasari it was more excusable. To him, to seek for the
cause of something was to seek for some agency, a substance or a will in-
herent in the air, the soil or the movements of the heavens. After all, his
book was published fourteen years before that other great Tuscan was born
who put an end to this idea of explanation; I mean Galileo Galilei. It was
Galilei who fought the type of explanation by verbal trick in his attack on
Aristotelian habits of thought, and judged it better for people 'to pronounce
that wise, ingenious and modest sentence "I know not" '23 It became the word
of power that created the modern world. Two generations later, Moliere could
already make fun of the Aristotelian type of explanation in his immortal skit
on the medical examination that forms part of Le Malade Imaginaire, where
the candidate is asked why opium causes sleep and replies in his beautiful dog-
Latin:
Mihi a docto doctore
Domandatur causam et rationem quare
Opium facit dormire.
A quoi respondeo,
Quia est in eo
Virtus dormitiva,
Cujus est natura
Sensus assoupire.
'Bene, Bene, Bene . .' Moliere's examiners react with enthusiasm to this
22 op. cit., I, 241.
23 E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (New
York, 1954), pp. 102-3. But see also K. R. Popper, 'Three Views concerning Human
Knowledge' in Contemporary British Philosophy, ed. H. D. Lewis (London, 1956),
pp. 357-88.
CAJ XVII 4 350
explanation that opium sends you to sleep because of its sleep-inducing
nature. And that puts an end to their questioning, not only of the candidate
but of nature. Herein, of course, lies the great danger in this type of explana-
tion by essences. They are not only empty in themselves, they put a full stop
to further enquiry.
I have asked a colleague from the Department of Pharmacology Moliere's
question, and, not quite unexpectedly. I received the Galileian answer. We
do not know why opium induces sleep, but a good deal of research is going
on on what happens when opium, or rather the morphium it contains, enters
the bloodstream and how it affects the actions of certain nerve cells. I take
it that there are at present a number of rival hypotheses about the reactions
involved which scientists are busy testing and discussing, extending the
frontiers of knowledge because they have given up the idea of a full-stop
explanation.
I think if we are ever to have a more promising science of the causes
and roots of style, we shall have to catch up with the Galileian revolution.
This is a point on which I can afford to be brief, since the links between
Aristotelian Essentialism and the Hegelian myth of Historicism have been so
clearly laid bare by Professor K. R. Popper.24 Let me just give you one ex-
ample from our own field. There was a much debated concept in Kunstwissen-
schaft which derived from an interesting book by Alois Riegl on the history
of patterns in art.25 It was called das Kunstwollen, the will-to-form. It turned
out that the reason why the style of ornamentation changed in history was that
the inherent will-to-form had changed. Now I do not want to give you the
impression that Alois Riegl was a fool. He was not. He had originally coined
the term Kunstwollen in a polemic against the explanation prevalent in his
time that patterns are always the result of techniques such as those of weaving
or basketry. It made, of course, sense to emphasize the importance of artistic
intentions against this purely mechanical explanation. But he, too, fell victim
to what Marc Bloch calls the fetishism of the single cause, and ultimately
failed to see that what he produced was not an alternative explanation, but
a form of words which soon assumed the character of a mythology. For where
there is a will there must also be a wilier, and this he found in those Hegelian
collectives, the spirit of the age and the spirit of the race.26 I have explained,
before, why I believe that it is in these unswept corners of our intellectual
universe that the germs of epidemics are often bred. But you now see, I hope,
that this type of explanation is not only hostile to reason; it is also hostile to
24 op. cit., and The Open Society and its Enemies (London, 1945).
25 Stilfragen (Vienna, 1893).
26 Julius von Schlosser, 'Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte' in Mitteilungen
des Osterreichischen Instituts fiir Geschichtsforschung, Erginzungs-Band xnII, Heft 2
(1934), esp. pp. 186-90; Meyer Schapiro, 'Style' in Anthropology Today, ed. Kroeber
(Chicago, 1953), esp. p. 302; and my chapter 'Kunstwissenschaft' in Das Atlantisbuch
der Kunst, ed. M. Hiirlimann (Ziirich, 1952), esp. pp. 658-61.
scholarship because it produces that simulacrum of an explanation which puts
an end to further search.
There is no better testing ground for the relative merits of rival ap-
proaches than the field of Renaissance studies. As you may know, I really
resemble the favourite hero of Hollywood films. I boast of a split personality.
Before you honoured me by appointing me to this Chair, I was proud to hold
the position of a Reader in History at the Warburg Institute, where I still
hold a special lectureship. Now the historian of the Renaissance developed
a rather ambivalent attitude towards my present activities. Historians feel, I
believe, that art history since Vasari has tended to mislead rather than to
enlighten them. We have often been told by students of style that a new
epoch began for mankind when Giotto first painted tangible bodies, and that
this epoch came to an end when these solid forms gave way to the flaming
apparitions of Tintoretto or Greco. The very success of the concept of the
Renaissance and its delimitation in time owes a great deal to these visible
testimonies of a change.27 But change of what? The nineteenth century, as
you know, had no doubts on that score. Change of the philosophy of life,
of the world-view of those men who produced and commissioned such works.
How else could you explain their profound difference from all that came
before and after? To quote that persuasive historian of the Renaissance, A. J.
Symonds:
The first step in the emancipation of the modern mind was taken thus by art,
proclaiming to men the glad tidings of their goodliness and greatness in a world of
manifold enjoyment . . . Whatever painting touched became by that touch human; piety,
at the lure of art, folded her soaring wings and rested on the genial earth. This the
Church had not foreseen.2
It is the view which, I think, ultimately goes back to Hegel, according

to which Renaissance naturalism must be linked with geographical discoveries
as harbingers of the greatest change of all, the Reformation.29 Think of the
Prior in Browning's 'Fra Filippo Lippi' who is scandalized by the painter's
naturalism:
Make them forget there's such a thing as flesh ...
Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms.
Rub all out, try at it a second time.
We have no evidence that there ever was such a prior. But to the nine-
teenth century, with its choice between Etty and Rossetti, the only possible
explanation of naturalism was sensuality. Since art, moreover, must reveal the
essence of the age, such sensuality, when found, was listed as a confirmation
of the original explanation. Where it was absent or less marked, you had to
27 J. Huizinga, 'Het Probleem der Renaissance', ed. cit., IV, 231, and 'Renaissance
en Realisme', ibid., 276; W. K. Fergusson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought
(Cambridge, Mass., 1948).
28 Renaissance in Italy; The Fine Arts (London, 1901), p. 23.
29 Vorlesungen iiber die Philosophie der Geschichte, ed. Gans (Berlin, 1840),
p. 493.
CAJ XVII 4 352
make excuses for features which were obviously a mere survival of the middle
ages. The technique worked as well as all such techniques will work. You
got in the end what you set out to find, a colourful Renaissance teeming with
supermen who said 'yea' to life, contrasting impressively with the ethereal
Age of Faith, populated with monks who were busy denying the body-
though the word populated is perhaps already stressing an inessential aspect
of these spiritualized centuries.
I believe Aby Warburg was one of the first students of the Renaissance
to break through this magic circle of the self-reinforcing historical cliche,
when he was led by his researches to question the basic assumption that
naturalism in art betrayed a lack of interest in religion. Not that he had set
out to do so when he began his studies in the 1880s. His enthusiasm for the
circle of Lorenzo il Magnifico was fed by the same predilections for a secular
culture which had also inspired Burckhardt and Symonds. Like Ruskin and
Taine he was fascinated by the fresco cycles of Ghirlandaio, which depict this
society with such fidelity that it seems that the sacred subjects are really no
more than a pretext for the glorification of the life of this world. Nowhere
was this apparent contrast between the subject and the treatment more striking
than in Ghirlandaio's life of the St. Francis in Santa Trinita in Florence. In
trying to investigate this cycle which had been commissioned by one of
Lorenzo's elder business partners, Francesco Sassetti, Warburg came across a
series of documents which strangely contradicted this assumption of carefree
worldliness.30 He found that Sassetti had been the wealthy patron of one of
the most splendid churches of Florence, Santa Maria Novella. It was there
that he wished Ghirlandaio to paint the life of his patron saint, St. Francis.
But the monks of Santa Maria Novella objected to this plan. They were
Dominicans and firmly refused to have the founder of the rival order glorified
in so prominent a place in their church. Sassetti did not say: 'one saint to me
is as good as another'. He insisted, and when he failed, he transferred his
patronage to the more accommodating Vallombrosan foundation of Santa
Trinita, where he lies buried, with his wife, surrounded by the images of his
patron saint. It was this dogged allegiance by a prominent member of the
Medici circle to his saint which made Warburg wonder whether these men
could have been all that indifferent to the world beyond the grave? Was
naturalism really a sign of such indifference? Did not documents exist to
show that another church in Florence was crowded with life-size wax images
in natural clothes portraying donors from the same circle?
The explanations which Warburg sought in the peculiar mental make-up
of these individual people need not convince us in themselves. What matters
is that the vicious circle was broken at last and that new types of evidence
became admissible to the scholar. The subject-matter of Renaissance paint-
ings, for instance, which had so often been looked upon as carefree pageantry,
30'Domenico Ghirlandajo in Santa Trinita' and 'Francesco Sassettis letztwillige
Verfiigung' Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin, 1932), pp. 95-158.
turned out to be concerned with dark astrological superstitions or philo-
sophical perplexities. A whole new field of problems was opened up in the
study of iconology, which searches for the texts and contexts to restore the
original meaning of works of art. Both admirers and critics have spoken in
this connection of 'the Warburg method', but I believe that the only method
which would deserve this name is that willing suspension of belief which
found its finest flower in the mind of Warburg's successor, the late Professor
Saxl. For without such willingness to distrust one's own assumptions, iconol-
ogy is subject to the same dangers to which the interpretation of styles had
been so prone, the danger of circularity. It matters little that the vicious circle
now often runs the other way round. The fashion now is to take it for granted
that the appearance of carefee sensuality in works of Renaissance art can never
reveal the essence, and that there must always be some hidden spiritual mean-
ing behind the deceptive form. If we were confronted with the tomb which
Browning's Bishop ordered in Santa Prassede with
The Saviour at his sermon on the mount,
Saint Praxed in a glory, and one Pan
Ready to twitch the Nymph's last garment off
we would assume without question that there must be some spiritual meaning
behind the image of Nymph and Pan to confirm our new cliche of the Renais-
sance. Pan, of course, signifies the Universe, and the stripping of the Nymph's
last garment symbolizes the liberation of the soul from the fetters of flesh.
Only recently Professor Momigliano has uttered a timely warning against
the pitfalls of circular interpretations of images.31 The only escape from this
danger lies in that outward spiralling movement I have describbed, the attempt
to draw in new evidence in ever-widening circles which may offer new vistas
of the particular. Unless iconology is to become barren it will have to find
new contact with the ever present problem of style in art.
I am proud to be able, in this context, to pay a more than formal tribute
to my predecessor in this Chair, Professor Rudolf Wittkower, who has brought
about this contact and thereby revolutionized the study of architecture.32 Here,
too, the accepted way of looking at Renaissance buildings was, he reminds us,
to stress their worldliness. Wittkower distrusted the cliche. He is a scholar
who likes books, as anyone who has even seen him leaving a library with
piles of folio volumes under both arms will testify. I think we all envy New
York this sight. Wittkower actually reads these long treatises in Latin and
can extract from their abstruse reasonings a clear conception of the modes of
thought and, what is more, of the modus operandi of these architects. Thanks
to him, we can now picture much more clearly what happened when a church
was commissioned in the Renaissance or when a patron had a villa built by
3'Promlemi di metodo nella interpretaxione dei simboli Giudeo-Ellenistici' in
Athenaeum, n.s., xxxiv, fasc. III-Iv (Pavia, 1956), 239-48.
32 Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. Studies of the Warburg In-
stitute, xIx (London, 1949).
CAJ XVII 4 354
Palladio; we can guess at the type of argument that was used in favour of one
solution rather than another. The individual and particular has been brought
to life and in the process Wittkower has churned up a host of new problems
which can be brought to bear on future research and will keep generations
of scholars busy.
We have not reached this stage in our research on the causes and roots of
style in Renaissance painting and sculpture. Indeed, we have no theory of
style which might account for its stability or its changes.33 After I have tried
to convince you that we would need such a theory, you may find this a dis-
couraging conclusion. I take the opposite view. I could imagine nothing more
discouraging for a student than the dreary notion that the past is all taped,
and that his task consists only in swotting up the facts which are listed in
books. Scholarship is an activity; and teaching, as I see it, consists in rousing
the student's spirit of adventure by telling him of the blank patches which
still exist on the map of knowledge.
For me, at least, the enigma of style is wrapped in a thrilling mystery.
The more I become aware of our profound ignorance in this field, the more
exciting do I find it. Even to frame the right questions would seem to me
eminently worth while; for I believe that in these matters Riegl's idea that
all style is intentional has obscured rather than illuminated the problem. We
may have to retrace our steps to Vasari and acknowledge the role of skill, of
the learning process which is involved. Vasari knew, because he was himself
an artist who had struggled with representation. We, I think, should again
turn to the working artist to learn what actually happens when somebody
makes an image. What use does he make of tradition, what difficulties does
he encounter? I once asked one of my present colleagues, who wishes to be
nameless, the shockingly naive question how he explained the startling fact
that many an untutored new arrival at the School can produce a reasonable
likeness of nature which appears to have eluded the genius of Giotto. His
answer was immensely enlightening to me. These students, he thought, have
been surrounded throughout their lives by books, photographs, and posters
which show the three-dimensional world already translated into a flat image;
it was from them that they must have learned that difficult trick. Word-man
that I am, I am just engaged on a lengthy book which attempts to test this
explanation against psychological evidence. But you will see that psychology
alone can never suffice to explain the riddle of history, the riddle of particular
changes. Why were artists really only concerned with these discoveries in the
two brief isolated periods and centres which figure in Vasari's story-classical
Greece and Renaissance Italy? I do not think that we can ever hope to pro-
duce a final explanation of this type of problem, but I do not see why any
question should be barred in history if it may direct attention to new and
possibly neglected aspects of the past. Was there, perhaps, a change of func-
3Meyer Schapiro, op. cit., p. 311; E. Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art
(New York, 1952), p. 21.
tion in the image? Did it play a different role in these astounding societies
of exploring minds?
Scholarship, as I see it, can only profit by such wild questions being
asked; for without them it is always in danger of submitting to a self-
perpetuating routine-the refining of techniques for their own sake. It is
true that the older one gets the less is one inclined to dismiss technique in
either scholarship or art as unworthy of respect. The expertise of a classical
scholar who can edit a Greek papyrus, or the skill of a painter who can draw
a blade of grass, will arouse our increasing admiration the more we approach
reactionary old age and realize how many things we missed learning while
there was still time. Perhaps this melancholy process will be somewhat ar-
rested by a new contact with a world in which the term academic is not
always a word of praise. For in that world of art nobody doubts that what
counts is the search, the constant probing, the taking of risks in experimenta-
tion. Indeed, I believe that in this respect scholarship can always profit from
the spirit of art to venture into the unknown rather than to apply and repeat
what has already been done.
But is there anything academic scholarship can give the artist in return ?
I think and hope there is. It can show, by its example, that boldness alone
is not yet exploration unless it is coupled with a critical sense. In clarifying
the memory of the past it can pin down and render innocuous those catch-
words which buzz around the artist's ears. For, personalities apart, Mr.
Wyndham Lewis may not have been altogether wrong when he blamed the
demon of progress on the demon of historicism. The art historian who sees
the styles of the past merely as an expression of the age, the race or the class-
situation, will torment the living artist with the empty demand that he should
go and do likewise and express the essence and spirit of his time, race, class
or, worst of all, of the self. The more we exorcize those spirits which still
haunt the history of art, the more we learn to look at the individual and
particular work of art as the work of skilled hands and great minds in re-
sponse to concrete demands, the more will we teach authority that what the
artist needs is not more myth or more propaganda, but simply more oppor-
tunities, opportunities for experiments, for trial and error, which alone can
lead to the emergence of those skills which can meet the ever changing
challenge of the here and now.
I suggest, Mr. Provost, that we make a beginning by having this hall
decorated by the staff and students of the Slade. There are very good prece-
dents in the history of art for the employment of great masters by departments
of Anatomy. If I may ask a favour, let the Durning-Lawrence Professor,
assisted perhaps by the Special Lecturer in the History of the Renaissance at
the Warburg Institute, work out what is called the programme of these deco-
rations. Maybe, after all, its centrepiece might be a Valentine which could
then display, with greater conviction, the motto from Enea Silvio Piccolomini:
Amant se artes hae ad invicem.
CAJ XVII 4 356

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Art and Scholarship

ART AND SCHOLARSHIP

CAJ XVI! 4 342

3 Cahiers des Annales (Paris, 1949).

343 Gombrich: Art and Scholarship

6Julian S. Huxley and A. C. Haddon, We Europeans (London, 1935).

CAJ XVII 4 344

345 Gombrich: Art and Scholarship

16E. Panofsky, 'The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline' in Meaning in

347 Gombrich: Art and Scholarship

1 'Communication Theory and Human Behavior' in Studies in Communicatiol,

CAJ XVII 4 348

I think these warnings of the linguist might be confirmed by the an-

19 Julius von Schlosser, ' "Stilgeschichte" und "Sprachgeschichte" der bildenden

349 Gombrich: Art and Scholarship

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351 Gombrich: Art and Scholarship

It is the view which, I think, ultimately goes back to Hegel, according

CAJ XVII 4 352

353 Gombrich: Art and Scholarship

355 Gombrich: Art and Scholarship

CAJ XVII 4 356

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