Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION
setting into another, which bring the work to a wider public and at the same
time make manifest its claim to universality.” 39
This is to say, of course, that Benjamin’s idea of “tradition” as a given context
for experience represents a degree of mystification of the pre- and early modern
past: tradition in any society must be constructed, and continually reconstructed.
And, with respect to the phenomenon under discussion here, the mechanical
reproduction of artworks played a considerable role in the creation of the prerequisites
for the experience of aesthetic “aura.” What we call “art” exists within
the structure of a social institution, a system of practices of production (by independent
producers for the luxury trade), appropriation (market-based collecting),
and appreciation (based on concepts of aesthetic autonomy of the work and of
the original genius of the artist). It must be remembered, as I have stressed in
earlier chapters, that this institution—what Benjamin in his sketch of its historical
development called “the secular cult of beauty” 40 —is itself a modern
phenomenon. Like all social transformations, the creation of the modern practice
of art involved the development of new modes of theory and criticism. It
also made significant use of the mechanical reproduction of images, invented in
Europe at about the same time as the mechanical reproduction of text.
The earliest datable (woodcut) prints of precisely identifiable objects are,
according to W. M. Ivins, Jr., representations of paintings, the decorations of the
church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva made at the command of Cardinal
Torquemada. 41 Since the rapid expansion of the printmaking industry in the sixteenth
century, “most of the printed pictures that were made and collected were
reproductions of paintings and drawings.” 42 These were not collateral but essential
to the way in which the production of “originals” developed:
The great influence of Italy on the north, and later that of Paris on the
rest of Europe, was exerted through reproductive prints which carried
the news of the new styles. If we would understand those influences and
the forms they took, we must look not at the Italian and Parisian originals
but at what for us are the stupid prints which the publishers
produced and sold in such vast quantities. 43
39 Cahn, Masterpieces, p. 123. Cahn mentions the interesting remarks of travelers that, given the
sorry state of repair of Leonardo’s Last Supper in Milan, “it could be seen to better advantage
through copies elsewhere” (p. 127). For this case, see Emil Moller, Das Abendmahl des Lionardo da
Vinci (Baden-Baden: Verlag für Kunst und Wissenschaft, 1952), pp. 78, 144, and the account in
S. Lambert, Image, pp. 191–206.
40 Benjamin, “Work of art,” p. 224.
41 These images illustrate the Cardinal’s Meditations on the Passion of Our Lord of 1467. See William
M. Ivins, Jr., Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969), p. 31.
42 William M. Ivins, Jr., How Prints Look (Boston: Beacon Press), p. 146.
43 Ivins, Prints, p. 69.
98