We spent a good part of today at the monthly meeting of the regional Italian Circle.* As you might expect from an occasion related to Italy, there is food and wine. There is (to lend respectability) also a talk relating to something Italian. The subjects of these can range very widely indeed. We’ve had contributions dealing with Italian cycling and banditry, not to mention the more readily-anticipated ones about cultural history. Today’s talk was on the painter and art historian Giorgio Vasari–he of the Lives of the Artists fame.
The presentation was very amusing, with the speaker focussing attention on the more scandalous anecdotes Vasari gave us about his colleagues and predecessors. Even so, it did set me thinking.
I studied art in Grammar School up to the age of sixteen. Reflecting on today’s presentation it struck me that the course (in the 1950s) was still basically structured around Vasari’s ideas about progressive development in European art, enunciated in the mid-1500s. Certainly nobody would teach art history in that way any more, and I fell to thinking when it might have been that Vasari was finally abandoned, as providing a framework for understanding the history of art.
The converse of this, of course, is the question of whether school teachers of art these days have any sense at all of the coherence of art history. Or is it just a matter of “one damn thing after another”? Current ways of looking at, and evaluating, artists seem to me to focus on individual innovation (pushing the boundaries). With this in mind, what else can one make of the concept of there history of art?
*Of which, incidentally, I am the President. I think that El Presidente sounds better.
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