Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION
have already seen that uniqueness is not necessary for works to have the character
of authenticity; the case of prints of (to take the most obvious examples)
Rembrandt and Dürer shows that it is not a necessary condition for the possession
of “aura” either. Moreover, aside from prints, Benjamin’s idea is based on a
projection back into the history of art of a relatively modern idea of the work of
art as a unique entity, issued from the sole hand of a master.
Yet the cachet attached to the concept of originality is a relatively
recent phenomenon. What we now consider as the most characteristic
works of the great masters were usually preceded by full-size cartoons
and painted modelli, which might bear more of the master’s own hand
than the “finished” works. These were followed by copies or variations,
sometimes by the artist himself and often, as it were, under license
within his milieu. In such a sequence of collective effort the idea of a
single “original” is hardly relevant. 35
But even with respect to unique artworks to which something like Benjamin’s
conception of “aura” certainly applied before modern times, it does not seem to
be true in general that it was diminished by reproduction. This was understood
by painters such as Mantegna, Raphael, and Rubens, who, realizing “the advantage
of the fame that reproduction of their images brought,” played important
roles in the organization of the reproductive print trade of their time. 36 In the
case of the classical sculptures once felt to constitute the epitome of artistic creation,
it has been observed, “the taking of plaster casts from an original was an
essential step in spreading the world-wide appreciation of the most esteemed
antique statues.” 37 Their “classical” status was created, not just a given.
The “aura” of these originals could be so powerful as to pervade their copies:
a palace inventory made for Philip IV of Spain “valued the casts of the Farnese
Flora and Hercules as each worth more than Velazquez’s ‘Bacchus’ and twice as
much as any of his portraits.” 38 This transmission of “aura” to reproductions was
expressed explicitly in the eighteenth-century idea of “the importance of the
traveler’s report, the engraved copy, the transposition from one instrumental
35 Lambert, Image, p. 13.
36 Ibid., p. 147.
37 Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique (New Haven: Yale, 1981), p. 3; see also
especially pp. 21, 65, 98. Another author has expressed this point, quite possibly with Benjamin’s
argument in mind, by the assertion that “casts and all manner of copies constitute the
visible aura” of antique sculpture’s “elevation to canonical status” (Walter Cahn, Masterpieces:
Chapters in the History of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 110). One must
also not forget that the antique statues elevated to aesthetic sainthood in early modern times
were themselves reproductions, for the most part Roman copies of and variations after Greek
originals.
38 Haskell and Penny, Taste, p. 33.
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