REVIEW: Written in Water

In her study of ‘the classic’ in art, Rochelle Gurstein summons us back to a common world

Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art by Rochelle Gurstein. Yale University Press, 2024. 520 pp., $40.00

When Rochelle Gurstein embarked on the project that became Written in Water many years ago, she had an agenda. She wanted to secure historical warrant for the idea of the “classic” work of art. As an intellectual historian, Gurstein was well aware that “ideas emerge out of a particular time and place and are embedded in an ongoing argument.” Even so, she wanted to “write a history of the idea of taste in order to demonstrate that something outside of history, beyond relativism—the timeless classic—nonetheless existed.” 

The research undermined the plan. But instead of simply revising her thesis—or writing a different book—Gurstein did something remarkable. She wrote a book centered on the very friction between her expectations and her findings. She wanted to understand how her expectations arose and where they went wrong. Written in Water thus treats Gurstein’s own sense of the powers of art as a case study in the history of taste. This dual focus—on the surprises in the history of taste and on her own effort to assimilate the challenges they pose to her ideals—is a great strength of the book. 

One surprise was the variability of ostensibly unimpeachable artistic reputations—Leonardo and Raphael, for example. Another was the image of antiquity implicit in “the classic practice of art.” Gurstein argues that the “classical” standard was ironically undermined by the recovery of the very art on which it was modeled. The Elgin Marbles—the Parthenon sculptures named after the English aristocrat who (controversially) brought them to England at the turn of the nineteenth century—precipitated an aesthetic crisis. 

Many critics felt that the actual character of Greek and Roman art belied the aesthetic ideals founded on the notion of that art. The classical tradition had drawn a distinction between “general nature” and “particular nature,” but the Elgin Marbles suggested that the ancients attended to both. 

A century before Leopold Bloom wondered, in Joyce’s Ulysses, whether the Venus Callipyge had an anus (“Bend down let something fall see if she”), the Marbles led a sculptor to remark, “the ancients did put veins on their gods.” Yet even as the Elgin Marbles facilitated a more authentic, extendable vision of the classical tradition, efforts to renew it fell flat. 

When Antonio Canova’s highly anticipated statue of Napoleon appeared, viewers could not abide the “jarring incongruity” between the head’s “particular nature” (the face was unmistakably Napoleon’s) and the body’s “idealized, nude flesh.” Today, Gurstein notes, Canova, perhaps the most admired sculptor in Europe in 1800 and one of the last great exponents of the “classical practice of art,” hardly musters a footnote in our art histories. 

Most importantly, Gurstein discovered that the qualities she associated with the “timeless classic” were anachronistic. She argues that “classical art,” the ideals of which were epitomized in the writing of Sir Joshua Reynolds, had no concept of the “timeless.” The term names, rather, a tradition of practice, the origin of which was the ancient or Renaissance “exemplar” worthy of imitation. The exemplar was “timeless” only in the sense that critics assumed a universal, unchanging human nature that all art, ancient and contemporary, aspired to represent. But the idea of the classic as “self-contained” or “autonomous”—and therefore capable of speaking across disparate historical moments—would have been unintelligible to artists and critics before the turn of the twentieth century. No one before the early nineteenth century conceived of the “aesthetic” as a special dimension of experience, sharply distinguishable from the social, moral, or religious domains. And no one before the early twentieth century maintained that the virtues in which an artwork’s “greatness” consists could be specified by reference to the purely “aesthetic” elements of its form. 

Yet it would be a mistake to tell a simple story of artistic “progress” in which naïve didacticism gave way to the sophistications of aesthetic autonomy. The modernization of art, Gurstein maintains, was actually a moralization of art. It is surprising to realize, for instance, that Giorgio Vasari, who invented art history in the sixteenth century and set the terms by which we understand the Renaissance, favored beauty and accuracy of representation and spoke little of religious communication. By contrast, the nineteenth-century critics who revolutionized taste—John Ruskin and Alexis-François Rio—were indefatigable moralists. While classicists like Reynolds believed that the cultivation of sensibility was a form of moral education, Ruskin viewed great painting as testimony about the truth of God and His creation. Ruskin ushered in an ethos in which one’s aesthetic sensitivity became an index of one’s moral character: The “failure to appreciate a painting” could tar someone as a “base criminal.”  

As with the moral, so with the religious. While one might be tempted to characterize the development of modern painting—say, its maturing “naturalism”—as a steady secularization of purpose, Gurstein traces a far more complex and dialectical history. In the sixteenth century Vasari was full of praise for Renaissance advances in verisimilitude—for painting’s capacity to represent the “real world.” Three hundred years later, however, we find a school of “mystical” German painters elevating the “primitive” Christian work of Giotto and Fra Angelico above the “affectations” and artificial “correctness” of a Raphael. 

Against a view of religious painting as “otherworldly” and Renaissance humanist painting as “worldly,” the nineteenth-century “Nazarene” painter Peter von Cornelius blamed the “academic” humanist tradition for estranging painting from the world of experience. His rehabilitation of pre-Renaissance Christian painting was motivated precisely by “the desire to show the world that art can now enter gloriously into life, as it did before . . . with no other adornment than love, purity, and the power of faith as the true patent of its divine origin.” Art was not a rarefied domain of sensibility, requiring extensive cultivation to appreciate, but rather the intensification and externalization of deep but everyday feeling—in this case, religious piety. The primitive Christian painters became paradigms, not of “otherworldliness,” but of the intimacy between “life” and “art.” 

Indeed, Gurstein’s history reveals that the boundaries between the religious and secular were often blurry and shifting. From the Renaissance until the mid-nineteenth century, there was little felt tension between the “spiritual” dimension of art and artists’ ambition to represent the “natural” texture of life with increasing virtuosity. It “seems exceedingly odd,” she writes, “that it occurred to no one before Rio to question the emergence of naturalism.” The very characterization of “naturalism” as the fruit of a “secular” disposition, she observes, was the work of a modern, self-consciously Christian art criticism. Similarly, “pagan” antiquity and biblical tradition co-existed fairly peaceably until Ruskin began to insist that in the “theory of beauty,” a “short coming” is “visible in every pagan conception, when set beside Christian.”

That distinction was then transvalued by Walter Pater, for whom the face of the Mona Lisa is, Gurstein explains, a “condition of consciousness at the originating moment of the Renaissance, when the pagan, sensual worldliness of the ancients and the spiritual otherworldliness of the Christians first came into contact.” For Pater, the incommensurability of the pagan and the Christian tilts in favor of the pagan, construed now as a whole way of life called “aestheticism.” 

These debates are consequential for Gurstein. Our contemporary sense of the existential gravity of art—where it still exists—is a legacy of art’s relation to the sacred. Gurstein worries about the prospects for meaning and depth in our “weightless secular world.” The work of art offers a secular version of “transcendence”; “beauty,” she writes, is “our shorthand for the quality that allows these always-fragile things to transcend their moment, grant secular afterlife to their maker and create a world that outlasts us all.” But as her research advanced, Gurstein noticed that the concepts late-modern art used to preserve its relation to “religious emotion” threatened to evacuate the very content of that emotion.

Reynolds considered the pleasures of art analogous to the pleasures of conversation. The existential dignity of modern art, by contrast, is founded on its “autonomy.” Indeed, for Gurstein, the concept of “aesthetic autonomy” is “merely a different name” for the concept of the “timeless classic.” Like the sacred, art’s value is self-authenticating. But Gurstein detects a number of unsettling ambiguities attending that status. If, as Roger Fry proposed, art’s meaning is fully self-contained, it no longer discloses anything beyond itself; it no longer attunes us to some deeper reality or shared meaning. For Ruskin, the aim of painterly virtuosity was to represent the “truth” of God’s creation and to express “holy feeling.” Ruskin wrote—severely—that “the picture which is looked to for an interpretation of nature is invaluable, but the picture which is taken as a substitute for nature had better be burned.” For Fry, the artwork is that substitute. If art preserves a “religious” emotion, it’s found in the high, nearly “mystical” pleasures of “significant form.”

For Gurstein, however, this new valuation entails an abandonment of the world as a locus of common meaning. Historically, art deepened or even transfigured the practices of life—the hunt, marriage, ritual. But in Gurstein’s eyes, a “necessary condition for the appearance of aesthetic autonomy—or the timeless classic” is paradoxically “the viewer’s remoteness from or active indifference to an object’s original purpose and uses.” Art became isolated from broader structures of meaning. When Roger Fry describes the virtuosity of Raphael’s Transfiguration, he asks us explicitly to bracket the painting’s manifest religious content. Is that gesture the fruit of heightened aesthetic awareness? Or is it a compensation for the collapse of shared metaphysical and moral structures? 

There is “yet another irony.” The more we plumb “new depths of interiority that come with the enlargement of aesthetic experience, the less we share of the common world.” The idea of aesthetic autonomy required the coalescence of Pater’s aesthetic impressionism—an interest in the “effects” the artwork “produces on me”—with a more scientific account. To write “aesthetic criticism,” said Pater, was to register the “effects” the artwork “produces on me”—with a more scientific account of the work’s internal relations. We are caught, Gurstein suggests, between a view of art’s value as a set of merely formal properties, and a view in which its meaningfulness has no other standard than the self’s idiosyncratic responses. 

When Gurstein began her research, she imagined that the “classic” could communicate without any “need” for “prior knowledge or interpretation” precisely because it “transcends its time and place and speaks to us as if it were made for us, self-contained, autonomous.” But now, she worries that this ostensibly democratic power is a recipe for subjectivism and a failure of historical imagination. We can forget, she notes, that even Pater’s descriptions of the intense, fugitive moments of aesthetic feeling were not spontaneously self-generating, but “grew out of deep learning acquired over time.”  

Our culture, Gurstein laments, is in the grips of a “historical amnesia” that silos us in a flattened present moment. We have lost the thread of conversation with previous generations, and because our instinctual relativism deprives us of common standards, we are, she writes, “thrown back on our own meager personal resources.” The “classic” work of art seemed to her the last, best agent for resisting this congenital presentism and subjectivism, the only remaining promise of self-transcendence. A few centuries ago, to recognize a “classic” was to inhabit a tradition of practice. It was supported not only by principles of representation but by a shared metaphysics and anthropology. That tradition cannot be rehabilitated. At the same time, the contemporary ideal of the “classic” is underwritten by a motley patchwork of properties derived from incommensurable frameworks. 

It’s unclear, at the end of Gurstein’s outstanding book, whether that ideal survives her critical scrutiny. She eloquently exhorts us to cultivate an awareness of historical difference—to understand why and how art mattered to viewers before its spiritual resonances were flattened by the rise of aesthetic autonomy. She does not tell us, however, whether such art can matter to us in the same way it mattered to them. 

Matthew Mutter is Associate Professor of Literature and Chair of Division of Languages and Literature at Bard College. He is the author of Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance (Yale University Press, 2017). His current book project explores the resistance of twentieth-century American novelists and poets to the burgeoning cultural authority of the social sciences.

^{Image: Wikimedia Commons}