Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

ART AND MONEY
Greeks. 6 Nineteen years later, however, Ottavio Rinuccini stated that the conventional
opinion of the inferiority of modern to ancient music “was wholly
driven from my mind” by Peri’s setting of Dafne. 7 Vasari claimed that the modern
revival of the visual arts went beyond imitation, emphasizing “the excellence that
has made modern art even more glorious than that of the ancient world.” 8
Pessimism was to surface, however, in the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns
carried on by writers in a number of European countries from the later
seventeenth into the start of the eighteenth century, who debated whether the
progress evidently made by the sciences beyond the learning of the ancients
could also be claimed for the arts. (Notable here, in the very terminology used, is
the explicit idea of modernity as an epoch defined by contrast to antiquity.) But
a darker vision was already implicit in the metaphor of rebirth still operative
today in the concept of the Renaissance, for life implies eventual death. It is
important to understand, wrote Vasari, that
from the smallest beginnings art attained the greatest heights, only to
decline from its noble position to the most degraded status. Seeing this,
artists can also realize the nature of the arts we have been discussing:
these, like the other arts and like human beings themselves, are born,
grow up, become old, and die. 9
According to Hume, it is a fundamental maxim of cultural progress that “when
the arts and sciences come to perfection in any state, from that moment they naturally,
or rather necessarily decline, and seldom or never revive in that nation,
where they formerly flourished.” 10 And Winckelmann described his monumental
History of Ancient Art as “intended to show the origin, progress, change, downfall of
art” as it developed ineluctably through the stages of “the necessary,” “beauty,”
and “the superfluous.” Once perfection has been reached, he explained, further
advance being impossible, art “must go backwards, because in it, as in all the
operations of nature, we cannot think of any stationary point.” 11 In Denis
6 See the translation of selections from the Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna in Oliver Strunk
(ed.), Source Readings in Music History (New York: Norton, 1950), pp. 302 ff.
7 Dedication of Euridice (1600), in Strunk, Music History, p. 368.
8 Vasari, Lives of the Artists, p. 249; see also p. 160, for Brunelleschi’s advance over ancient architecture.
Such sentiments had been previously expressed in Alberti’s Della pittura of 1435; see
the translation by John R. Spencer, On Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966),
pp. 31–40, 58.
9 Vasari, Lives of the Artists, p. 46.
10 David Hume, “Of the rise and progress of the arts and sciences” (1742), in Essays Moral, Political,
and Literary, ed. E. F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987), p. 135.
11 Johann J. Winckelmann, History of Ancient Art (1764), tr. G. H. Lodge (New York: Ungar, 1968),
vol. 1, pp. 3, 29; vol. 2, p. 143. For a discussion of Winckelmann’s use of the cycle of progress
and decay as the framework of his history, see Alex Potts, “Winckelmann’s Construction of History,”
Art History 5:4 (1982), pp. 371–407.
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