Anny E. Popp, Art Historian of the Vienna School: Disappeared and Forgotten?
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Anny E.Popp, Art Historian of the Vienna School: Disappeared and Forgotten?* Josef Vojvodík Charles University, Faculty of Arts, Department of Czech and Comparative Literature josef.v[email protected] SYNOPSIS This essay explores the works of art historian Anny Edeltrauth Popp (1891–?). One of the leading experts of the 1920s and 1930s on Michelangelo and the art of the Italian Renaissance, Popp seems to have disappeared without atrace in 1936. In the years 1919–1922, she published several studies with adistinctive and inventive analytical-hermeneutical approach to art history; the studies themselves deal with Cézanne’s style, Ferdinand Hodler’s compositional principles, Donatello’s relief style, and two artistic methods that have come to be known as Steigerung and Akzentuierung (‘gradation’ and ‘accentuation’) in the art of ancient Egypt. KEYWORDS Vienna School of Art History; Anny E.Popp; Italian Renaissance; Paul Cézanne; Ferdinand Hodler; Leonardo da Vinci. DOI https://doi.org/10.14712/23366680.2021.3.4 Among the students of Max Dvořák (1874–1921)— an art historian and celebrated member of the Vienna School of Art History— there is one whose name can be found throughout German and Austrian art history journals of the 1920s and 1930s1: Anny Edeltrauth Popp (1891–?). At that time Popp was at the nexus of scholarly research on Michelangelo and her writings have been frequently cited in discussions on Italian Renaissance art.2 In 1929, fierce public controversy arose between Popp and Erwin Panofsky that drew considerable attention in art history circles, and that would come * This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund project ‘Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World’ (reg. no.:CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734). 1 Namely, Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst, Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorischen Institutes (Vienna), Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, Belvedere, The Burlington Magazine, and others. 2 The more current publications in which the works of Anny E.Popp are discussed include Maurer (2013, s.51–72), Nova— Schreurs (2003), Poeschke (2005, p.145), Fehrenbach (2006, pp.84–113), Schumacher (2007), and Güthner (2010). OPEN ACCESS
66 SLOVO A SMYSL 38 to be considered as ‘probably the most famous debate ever on adrawing by Michelangelo’ (Maurer 2013, p.62). Yet the person of Anny E.Popp seems to have disappeared without atrace. The biographical data on Popp is quite meagre: born in 1891 in Ostrava (in what is today Czech Republic; Tietze-Conrat 2015/III, p.60), she studied art history and classical archaeology at Vienna University, earning her doctorate in 1915 as astudent of Max Dvořák with adissertation on 16th century Florentine sculpture (Tietze-Conrat 2015/II, p.125). In her early twenties, Popp lived in Munich and later moved to Vienna. The last trace of her life story (as an intellectual) brings us to the November 1936 issue of London’s Burlington Magazine, which features her study Two Torsi by Michelangelo. Perhaps we should find it symbolic that the last research published by Popp concerns truncated representations of the human body; it also happens to mark the premature end of both her scholarly career and personal biography (in any case, what we know of it). In 1919, Popp published four studies that demonstrate her distinctive and inventive analytical-hermeneutic approach to art history: on Cézanne’s style, on Ferdinand Hodler’s principles of composition, on Donatello’s relief style, and on the concept of two artistic methods— Steigerung and Akzentuierung (‘gradation’ and ‘accentuation’)— in the art of ancient Egypt. The choice of these topics is characteristic of the Vienna School, which, in the late 19th century, began developing atheory and methodology in dialogue with current developments in modern art. In Popp’s studies, which juxtapose the artistic tradition of ancient Egypt to Renaissance and modern art, we read about ‘vibrating life’ and ‘stream of force’ (‘Kräftestrom’), about ‘pulsating rhythm’, the relative forces of natural elements, and the actuation of psychological and artistic energy in the use of various materials. The parallel between natural forces and artistic creation has its origin in art treatises of the Renaissance (Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). According to Alberti, for example, the painting is imbued with divine forza (Alberti 1877/II, p.89), and Giorgio Vasari considers forza as one of the main criteria for artistic quality. Riegl’s theory of Kunstwollen, influenced by discoveries in physics around the turn of the century, also resonates with the concept of natural forces. In addition to the theories of Henri Bergson, Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel, and other ‘life philosophers’ that permeate Popp’s views of art history, we find aspecial affinity with Helmuth Plessner’s hermeneutics of nature, particularly his theories of human expression and expressiveness from the early 1920s, which coincide strikingly with Popp’s ideas. THE DYNAMISATION OF SPACE BY COLOUR, RHYTHM, AND THE ‘INFINITE ACTUATION OF FORCE’: CÉZANNE AND HODLER In her essay on Cézanne’s style, Popp analyses formal aspects of Cézanne’s work (the dynamics of space as afunction of colour, the colour determination of objects, and the relationship of Cézanne’s art to Impressionism3) in order to reconstruct the art3 Popp’s study on Cézanne raises particular issue with J.Meier-Graefe’s book Cézanne und sein Kreis (‘Cézanne and his circle’; 1918). In afootnote to his essay ‘Zu Cézannes geschichOPEN ACCESS
JOSEF VOJVODík 67 ist’s manner of conveying Welterlebnis, or ‘experience of the world’. In the text on Hodler’s principles of composition, she emphasises the law of parallelism as ‘core of his worldview’ (‘Kern seiner Weltanschauung’; Popp 1919b, p.49), with specific reference to his efforts to depict the elementary force that drives the individual and human society in general. The artist thus depicts characters in his paintings, as Popp demonstrates, in rhythmic sequence. We can see this in anumber of paintings: The Tired of Life (Die Lebensmüden, 1892/1893) at the Neue Pinakothek in Munich; The Day (Der Tag, 1905) at Kunstmuseum Bern; the monumental painting Unanimity4 (1913) at Hanover City Hall; the drawing View to Infinity (Der Blick ins Ewige, 1914), Kunsthaus Zurich etc. For Hodler, the finite individual becomes part of the never-ending circular motion of an infinite rhythm (ibid., p.50). We find here not only acontemporary philosophy of life— the notion of ‘rhythmic pulsation’ for instance, emphasises the vitality of feeling and experience— but also Hodler’s ‘feeling for society’ (‘Gefühl für die Sozietät’, ibid.) against the backdrop of war-torn humanity.5 According to Popp, however, the intention underlying these efforts has to do with expressing the ‘infinite actuation of force’ (‘das unendliche Wirken der Kraft’) as the elemental energy of ahuman being who is aware of being able to turn it to his or her own use, as ameans for conveying shape, as aformative force. Hodler therefore invents symbolic and allegorical figures to express the struggle with and subjugation of this power: in his painting Wilhelm Tell (1897), for instance, The Woodcutter (Der Holzfäller, 1910), and The Mower (Der Mäher, 1910). In The Woodcutter, Popp writes, ‘we see how each individual form submits to this idea: in the arch of acrouched leg, providing abroad base for centring the downward rush of force that breaks the resistance of asharply vertical tree, falling with agroan. It is always simply amatter of clearly showing what is absolutely necessary, the force that created this scene; everything else, by contrast, must recede’ (ibid.).6 It was precisely this artistic metaphor of human energy and willpower as it springs forth that impressed Edmund Husserl, who hung The Woodcutter tlicher Stellung’ (‘On Cézanne’s historical position’), Charles de Tolnay writes that ‘despite the fundamental differences in method, Cézanne’s conception of the world is basically the same as that of the Impressionists, as A.E.Popp alone among all who have written on Cézanne has recognised in her excellent essay (Bild. Künste, Vienna 1919, pp.185 ff.)’ (‘Daß trotz prinzipieller Unterschiede der Gestaltungsmethode Cézannes Weltauffassung im Grunde mit der des Impressionisten übereinstimmt, hat unter allen, die über Cézanne geschrieben haben, bisher allein A.E.Popp in ihrem ausgezeichneten Aufsatz (Bild. Künste, Wien 1919, S.185 ff.) erkannt’; Tolnai 1933, p.93). 4 The painting depicts Dietrich Arnsborg (1475–1558) surrounded by the citizens of Hanover in 1533, as they swear an oath of loyalty to Martin Luther and the Reformation. The painting can be seen online at <https://www.wikiart.org/en/ferdinand-hodler/unity-1911> (accessed 02.09.2021). 5 Ferdinand Hodler died 19May 1918, five months before the end of WWI. 6 ‘Bei dem Holzfäller z. B. sehen wir, wie jede einzelne Form sich diesem Gedanken unterordnet: die auseinandergebogenen Beine, die eine breite Basis für die Zielsicherheit der niedersausenden Kraft gewähren, durch die der Widerstand der steilen Vertikale des ächzend umfallenden Baumes gebrochen wird. Immer handelt es sich nur darum, das knapp Notwendige, die Kraft, die diese Erscheinung schuf, klar vor Augen zu führen; alles andere muss dagegen weichen’. OPEN ACCESS
68 SLOVO A SMYSL 38 (alongside areproduction of Jacob’s Struggle with the Angel by Rembrandt) in his otherwise sparsely decorated study (Thiel 1997, p. 82); and it is precisely this painting by Hodler that Eugen Fink, an assistant to Husserl, describes in his dissertation7 as ‘exemplifying the givenness of the image’ (‘exemplarische Bildgegebenheit’; Fink 1930, p.305) and as an example of the specifics of the ‘world of images’ (‘Bildwelt’; ibid., pp.305–306). Fink must have known The Woodcutter by seeing it in Husserl’s study— as ‘apainting hanging on the wall’ (‘ein Bild, das da an der Wand hangt’; ibid., p.305). It is not uncommon to find the terms ‘force’, ‘natural force’, ‘organism’, and ‘rhythm’, which serve as the semantic cornerstones of Popp’s argument, in the discourse on art theory and history around the turn of the century, in large part as areaction to revolutionary discoveries in the natural sciences, especially in physics (Planck’s quantum theory, for instance) and physiology.8 In his posthumous Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste (‘Historical grammar of the visual arts’), Riegl considers artistic creation (Kunstschaffen) as adriving force (‘treibende Gewalt’) in a‘creative contest with nature’ (‘Wettschaffen mit der Natur’; Riegl 1966, p.23). When writing her study, Popp was undoubtedly familiar with reflections on the power and dynamics of art in the works of Alois Riegl, Heinrich Wölfflin, August Schmarsow, and other leading thinkers of her time. Yet she develops her own interpretations for such concepts as ‘organism’, ‘rhythm’, ‘dynamics’, and ‘power’ (in the sense of German Kraft and Gewalt), especially in her engagement with modern art. Here, Popp’s work strikingly prefigures Deleuze’s conception of ‘painting forces’ in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2003), which render visible what are in the first place ‘invisible forces’, or affects— emotions, aggressions, instincts, passions, fears— by embodying them in forms and colours and transmitting them to the viewer. It is the action of these forces as they ‘deform’ the body that Deleuze, following Cézanne, calls ‘sensation’. Their condition is strength, and the goal of art is to paint forces (Deleuze 2003, p.34) as a‘pathic’ quality, enabling communication between individual sensory experiences: ‘It is in this way that music must render nonsonorous forces sonorous, and painting must render invisible forces visible’ (ibid., p.57). Rhythm meanwhile is the elemental force that ‘appears as music when it invests the auditory level’— yet the very same force will appear as painting when instead ‘it invests the visual level’ (ibid., p.42). In Popp’s treatise on Cézanne’s style, she shows how Daumier’s way of building composition handling colour9 provided Cézanne with his first solution to the spatial dynamics of his paintings as ‘movement of forces in space’, anotion entirely of his own invention which Popp defines as building the ‘dynamics of space through colour’ (‘Dynamik des Raumes durch die Farbe’; Popp 1919a, p.178). This concept of colour is adistinctive feature of Cézanne’s style of his youth and represents something ‘funda7 Vergegenwärtigung und Bild. Beiträge zur Phänomenologie der Unwirklichkeit (‘Representation and image: contributions to the phenomenology of unreality’; 1930). 8 See the introductory study by Fehrenbach, Felfe, and Leonhard on the topic of dynamics in art (2018, pp. IX–XIX). 9 In this context, Popp presents striking contrasts between light and darkness, sharp silhouettes as ameans of dismantling space, and the slapdash application of adense, pasty layer of paint as away of restoring the dimensional forces of space (Popp 1919a, p.178). OPEN ACCESS
JOSEF VOJVODík 69 mentally new’, in which light effects and the sharp movements of objects, rendered with the sweeping curve of his brush strokes— van Gogh too, Popp adds, adopted this method (ibid., p.183)— ‘provokes the eye to move, giving the impression of shifting forces, and always at the same time an impression of the restless intensity of passion: because forces are not in the space in which objects stand; it is the objects themselves that must move’ (ibid.). It is asimilar case with rhythm in Hodler’s compositions, which generates division, intervals— Popp mentions The Tired of Life—, and whose bearers are rendered as characters, each with its own specific meaning. An ‘endless rhythm of the world’ (‘unendlicher Rhythmus der Welt’, Popp 1919b, p.47) seems to extend laterally to infinity, suggested by the ‘eurythmy’ of parallel figures on either side of the painting. In her study Steigerung, Akzentuierung und aphoristische Formensprache als Kunstmittel der Ägypter (‘Gradation, accentuation, and aphoristic morphology as an artistic means of the Egyptians’), published almost simultaneously with Hodler’s treatise, Popp mentions that the motif of rhythmic movement which seems to be moving forward (as in the painting Jena Students Depart for the War of Liberation 1813, 1908), as well as the motif of the opening and closing group of characters, is inspired by the depiction of movement on ancient Egyptian reliefs. In this context, Hodler shows that Egyptian art is closer to him than Greek art (Popp 1919d, p.152). Rhythm connects the movement of individual characters, providing the connections that link together all parts of the composition (as in the final version of Hodler’s monumental painting View to Infinity). The characters themselves are ‘always individual beings, individual organisms’ (‘immer Einzelwesen, Eizelorganismen’, Popp 1919b, p.49). Rhythm is one of the elementary sensations of humankind, common to all people as a‘driving force’ (‘treibende Kraft’, ibid., p.50); Hodler introduces rhythm into his painting experimentally through silhouettes and contrasts (figures appear to have been cut out and glued to the background; ibid., p.54). Rhythm is amanifestation of the vital flow of life and eternal return, as in The Day, where ‘the circular repetition of movement makes [the viewer] feel the infinity of rhythms’ (‘die kreisende Wiederkehr der Bewegung die Unendlichkeit der Rhythmen fühlbar macht’; ibid., p.50). Popp’s way of conceptualising the modalities of sensory qualities in their unity and interplay, as synergies of optical, acoustic, and tactile perception, is remarkably close to Helmuth Plessner’s anthopological-philosophical theory of the unity of the senses in Die Einheit der Sinne. Grundlinien einer Ästhesiologie des Geistes (‘The unity of the senses: elements of an aesthesiology of spirit’; 1923). In her reflections on, and formulations of, the relationship between colour and space, dynamisation of space by colour, rhythmisation of composition in painting (as well as sculpture and architecture)— by placing these relationships in the context of ‘melody’—, Popp returns again and again to the notions of ‘reality of the world’ (‘Wirklichkeit der Welt’), ‘understanding of the world’ (‘Weltauffassung’), ‘rhythm of the world’ (‘Rhythmus der Welt’), etc. Through these concepts, Popp introduces aspecific isomorphism between sensory phenomena and objects with their specifically artistic representation, materialisation (whether truly or seemingly) of immaterial phenomena, and realities of the world. Popp considers Cézanne’s observation of colour phenomena, for example, as the starting point for his painterly grasp of the world (‘Weltauffassung’), OPEN ACCESS
70 SLOVO A SMYSL 38 as well as his efforts, knowledge, and experience of the world realised immediately by transforming the object into a‘colour phenomenon’ (‘Farberscheinung’). That is why Cézanne constantly honed the sensitivity of the eye, ‘intensified observation’ and ‘raised the culture of the eye to all other functions of life’ (Popp 1919a, p.186). The subtitle of Plessner’s 1923 work on the ‘unity of the senses’ already indicates that he will elaborate his theory within the context of an ‘aesthesiology of spirit’ (‘Ästhesiologie des Geistes’), thus clearly distinguishing his work from other studies founded on empirical (psychological, physiological) observation (Plessner 1980, p 32). Plessner proceeds to examine specific functions of the intellect, defining three basic areas where it functions in consistent cooperation with sensory factors, namely, art, speech and science. These are also the areas in which Plessner sees the basic forms of human relationship to the world, and the human individual to himor herself. Sensory perception together with its modalities and qualities represent a‘proper archetypal phenomenon’ (‘das wahre Urphänomen’; ibid., p.33), which connects nature to culture. He also elaborates his aesthesiology of the senses, on the basis of acorrelation between feeling and meaning, as an inquiry into aesthetics. Plessner shows, for instance, the correlation between sensory perception, bodily experience, and the reception of awork of art using the example of architecture: ‘Close contact, reciprocating movement, tactility, volume, athousand ways to live in and through attitudes that give the silent image of spaces and surfaces adirect relationship to oneself. This is how to understand architecture. We still have to feel such an image on our own body and in its ideal form of expression in order to appreciate the meaning of abuilding’ (ibid., p.267).10 When Popp writes about the ‘movement of forces in space’, the dynamics of which— in Cézanne’s paintings— is made up of colour, or about feeling rhythm as one of the ‘elemental sensations’ (in Hodler), or when she explains how Cézanne’s use of colour provokes the eye to move, giving the impression of shifting forces on the surface of the image, she draws our attention to the interplay of kinaesthetic modes: sight, movement, body posture, rhythm, etc. Popp here anticipates Henri Maldiney’s ‘aesthetics of rhythm’— and as with Popp (not coincidentally), Maldiney also bases his ideas on the works of Cézanne. ‘Art is the truth of feeling,’ he writes, ‘for rhythm is the truth of aisthesis’11 (Maldiney 1973, p.153). Maldiney, who studied philosophy and art history, was strongly influenced by the phenomenologicalanthropological philosophy and psychology of Erwin Straus, Eugène Minkowski, and Ludwig Binswanger. His emphasis on ‘pathic’ communication with phenomena on the basis of feeling echoes Plessner’s aesthetics. Building on the phenomenology of Erwin Straus— and based on the reception of Cézanne’s paintings— Maldiney emphasises: ‘Rather, feeling has its own truth. Seeing, hearing, and other forms of sense perception not only convey sense impressions with imaginative value, but the 10 ‘Einschmiegung, Mitgehen, Abtasten, Ausgefülltsein, die tausend Arten, in Haltungen zu leben und durch Haltungen dem schweigenden Bild der Räume und Flächen eine unmittelbare Beziehung zu mir zu geben, sind die Wege, Architektur zu verstehen. Stets müssen wir solche Abbildung auf den eigenen Leib und sein ideales Ausdruckssystem empfinden, um den Sinn eines Gebäudes auszukosten’. 11 ‘L’art est la vérité du sentir, parce que le rythme est la vérité de l’aisthesis’. OPEN ACCESS
JOSEF VOJVODík 71 same colours and tones that the objects themselves reveal to us […] We communicate with phenomena in apathic way, the legitimacy of which at this moment pervades the phenomenal character of the whole world’12 (Maldiney 1966, pp.221–222). In The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze elaborates aconcept of rhythm, forces, opposition of diastole and systole that follows Maldiney’s aesthetics and phenomenology of rhythms (Deleuze 2003, pp.74–83). Already for Popp, Cézanne’s basic rendering of form is not afunction of varying light or dark values (‘Helligkeitsund Dunkelheitswert’) but of varying hues— or as Popp writes, ‘colour contents’ (‘Farbgehalt’). Cézanne himself distinguishes between these two techniques, as Popp recalls, using the term ‘modelling’ to describe the variation of light and dark values and ‘modulation’ for the variation of hues that make up the base colour (Popp 1919a, p.183). Considering the analogy between Cézanne and Bacon in The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze writes: ‘And perhaps this modulation of color is Cézanne’s principal operation’ (Deleuze 2003, p.118). GRADATION OF PLASTICITY AS THE MANIFEST FORM OF SPIRITUAL LIFE: DONATELLO’S ‘AFFECTIVE’ RELIEFS AND TECHNIQUE OF VERTICAL AND OBLIQUE HATCH MARKS In her study ‘Eine Alterszeichnung Donatellos?’ (‘ADrawing of Donatello’s Age?’), Popp uses such terms as ‘expressive form’, ‘stream of force’ (‘Kräftestrom’), ‘rhythmic vibrations in space’ (‘rhythmisches Schwingen im Raum’), ‘impression of vibrating life’ (‘Eindruck vibrierenden Lebens’) to describe asketch of the Pietà (British Museum London) believed to be one of Donatello’s later works. The study was published (like her essay on Cézanne and Hodler) in a1919 issue of the Viennese journal Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorischen Institutes, edited by Max Dvořák. Popp first considers Donatello’s relief style, emphasising that while there is not sufficient evidence to claim with certainty that the sketch is Donatello’s, it still presents us with the peculiarities of Donatello’s style, especially in works of his late period (Popp 1919c, p.61). But this is not her main point; what Popp proceeds to demonstrate, rather, is that while Donatello’s relief style is fairly consistent between his early and middle periods, the style of his later period (she gives the example of the Passion Pulpit in Florence’s Basilica di San Lorenzo) is strikingly different. Here, we see asignificant gradation of plasticity: images that make up the background (‘Fernbild’) are layered in low relief and with little variance of depth, with the effect that they reflect only very subtle surface differences; by contrast, figures in the foreground are drawn in high relief (‘Hochrelief’), so that they stand out conspicuously. It is as if Donatello had cut the figures on each individual layer out of cardboard, as Popp writes, and then arranged them one behind the other (ibid., p.50). Furthermore, to exaggerate the depth of the foreground figures, Donatello tends to use sloping rather than vertical surfaces (ibid., p.51). 12 ‘Das Empfinden hat vielmehr seine eigene Wahrheit. Das Sehen, das Hören, die anderen Sinne vermitteln uns nicht bloß sinnliche Eindrücke mit Vorstellungswert, sondern die gleichen Farben und die gleichen Töne, welche uns die Gegenstände erschließen […]. Wir kommunizieren mit den Phänomenen auf eine pathische Weise, deren Gesetzlichkeit in diesem Augenblick den phänomenalen Charakter der ganzen Welt durchdringt’. OPEN ACCESS
72 SLOVO A SMYSL 38 Popp goes on to demonstrate how Donatello transferred the technique of vertical hatches to his drawing style: the result is a‘vivid rhythmic alternation of form elements’ (‘Formelemente’), in which the ‘impression of vibrating life’ and ‘active force to the highest power’ crystallises in front of the viewer’s eyes (‘Eindruck vibrierenden Lebens’, ‘die Wirkungskraft zu höchster Potenz’; ibid., p.52). It is at this point that Popp turns her attention to adeeper internal relationship between the sketch and compositional elements of his reliefs (mainly the Pietà and Deposition and Burial of Christ from the pulpit of San Lorenzo). What characterises Donatello’s late works is the ‘system of forces’ (‘Kräftsystem’) and ‘stream of force’ (‘Kräftestrom’) that permeate the relief, connecting its individual elements into an organic whole (ibid., p.55). It is asimilar case with the sketch of the Pietà attributed to Donatello: the tangled lines (‘Liniengewirr’) in which the stream of force is manifest have their analogue in the elemental forces of nature that produce vortices (the impact of water on stone, for instance). According to Popp, however, the significance of this flow of forces can be found above all in its analogy to the ‘psychological flow of forces’ (‘psychischer Kräfteverlauf’): the agonising pain of the Madonna, the collapsed figure of St John, and ‘faith in despair’ (‘Wirbel der Verzweiflung’) of St Magdalene (ibid., p.56). Donatello thus transcends the specific naturalism of the 15th century, characterised by the congruence between unconscious (‘unbewußte’) plastic principles and fundamental mechanical laws that can be observed in the outside world (ibid., p.57). The innovation that appears in Donatello’s late work is aparallelism between psychic phenomena and spiritual content, which results in awealth of ‘variations of expressive forms’ (‘Reichtum der Variationen der expressiven Formen’) that are pushed to their limit (ibid.). What Donatello sought to portray in his works was acertain kind of spiritual life (‘bestimmte Art des geistigen Lebens’) with agreat diversity of affects and characters, in this way anticipating the spirit of the Cinquecento. It is, as Popp argues, anew way of seeing the world, consisting in adetailed way of observing external phenomena and their connections, from the general to the unique, from great holistic composition to individual details, where the world becomes the subject of analysis and the artist approaches it with a‘keen focus on detail’ (‘Einstellung auf die scharfe Einzelbeobachtung’; ibid., p.59). From this point of view, the sketch of the Pietà does indeed reveal the hand of the artist, as he penetrates ever deeper, analytically, into every detail. Behind these formal elements, however, one detects the effect of aspiritual element, as if every line and feature were indication of ahidden psychic event. Donatello’s manner of artistic expression, style, and composition, as Popp shows, were later adopted by Botticelli, best exemplified by his paintings of the Pietà: Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c.1490–1495) at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, and Lamentation over the Dead Christ with the saints Girolamo, Pietro and Paolo (c.1490–1492), at the Museo Poldi-Pezzoli in Milan.13 The paintings are characterised by acentral composition, with flanking figures curving outward from acentral vertical axis. This compositional scheme spread from Florence to other Italian centres of artistic activ13 Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c.1490–1495) <https://www.wikiart.org/en/sandrobotticelli/lamentation-over-the-dead-christ-1490> (accessed 02.09.2021); Lamentation over the Dead Christ with the saints Girolamo, Pietro and Paolo (c.1490–1492) <https:// www.wikiart.org/en/sandro-botticelli/pity-1490> (accessed 02.09.2021). OPEN ACCESS
JOSEF VOJVODík 73 ity, including Venice. With the Venetians, however, we see an important difference in the way it is applied. With the Florentines, the movement takes place from aclosed centre, from which the ‘compact matter’ splits into smaller parts, as if by centrifugal force (as we see in Botticelli and Bronzino). Popp focuses on the example of Lorenzo Lotto, who worked with the expression of mental states, such as fervour or devotion, as ameans of depicting space (ibid., p.64); but his use of central composition in the Florentine manner can best be seen in his Pietà (c.1538–1545),14 at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan. With the Venetians, by contrast, movement passes instead through the whole composition towards acentre that is empty, or that contains very little mass; Popp mentions two paintings by Tintoretto: Ecce Homo (c.1565–1567)15 at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, and The Last Supper (c.1592–1594)16 at the Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore. Here, it is as if the space depicted in the painting were permeated by arhythmic vibration, acentripetal force, with figures concentrated not around the vertical axis but intersecting in rhythmic alternation (‘im rhythmischen Wechsel’; ibid.). The general tendency to tilt the flanking figures to the sides (‘seitliche Neigung’), together with the effect of contrasting movement that activated the pictorial space, was thus anew concept in composition that began with Donatello and spread during the Cinquecento from Florence to Venice and Rome (ibid., p.65). If Popp’s writings on Donatello focus on his innovative manner of looking at the world, consisting namely in his analytical penetration into individual details, this could also be said of Popp herself— or, more precisely, of her formal-analytical and hermeneutic method. In this sense, her study of Donatello is aparadigmatic text, one that combines analysis, on the one hand, of the artist’s stylistic, material, compositional, and formal peculiarities, with ahermeneutics, on the other, of the noetic aspects of the aesthetic-artistic process and ontological status of the work. It is precisely this ‘keen focus on detail’ that characterises Popp’s approach to understanding the work of art by way of art history and art hermeneutics, focusing not only on the formal aspects of the painting, not only on the plastic and expressive means and techniques, but also on the stylistic formations and transformations (in the work or period of aparticular artist) that Popp seeks to uncover. The term ‘Einstellung’ (in the sense of ‘intention’), which plays an important role in the theory of Russian formalism (Hansen-Löve 1978, pp.212–226), seems here to coincide in some measure with Riegl’s notion of ‘Kunstwollen’. Indeed, Popp mentions Riegl’s Spätrömische Kunst industrie (‘Late Roman art industry’; 1901) in her study on Donatello (Popp 1919c, p.49), stating that he was astudent of the Vienna School, and furthermore that Max Dvořák had ahand in shaping his notion of formalism in connection to art history and hermeneutics. Popp emphasises how Donatello, in his later works, uses realistic means to clarify and intensify the parallelism between external phenomena and mental contents. The physical manifestation of death in the figure of Christ (in the drawing of the Pietà, for 14 Pietà (c.1538–1545) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet%C3%A0_(Lotto)> (accessed 02.09.2021). 15 Ecce Homo (c.1565–1567) <https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_(Tintoretto)> (accessed 02.09.2021). 16 The Last Supper (c.1592–1594) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Supper_(Tintoretto)> (accessed 02.09.2021). OPEN ACCESS
80 SLOVO A SMYSL 38 (‘Urweltnatur’) without atrace of humanity (‘ohne menschliche Spuren’, ibid.)— that da Vinci shares with Cézanne. This claim anticipates both Fritz Novotny’s thesis on the ‘Außermeschlichkeit’ of Cézanne’s landscapes and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s well-known 1945 essay on Cézanne (which also refers to Novotny’s thesis), where he writes: Cézanne wanted to paint this primordial world, and his pictures therefore seem to show nature pure, while photographs of the same landscapes suggest man’s works, conveniences, and imminent presence. […] The painter recaptures and converts into visible objects what would, without him, remain walled up in the separate life of each consciousness: the vibration of appearances which is the cradle of things. Only one emotion is possible for this painter— the feeling of strangeness— and only one lyricism— that of the continual rebirth of existence (Merleau-Ponty 1992, pp.13–14, 17–18). It is the atmosphere itself, acting as afluid between things, that da Vinci wanted to depict, an aim that compelled him to develop an artistic means for portraying atmospheric phenomena. As Popp shows, this means was sfumato, occluding the radiant brilliance of neighbouring colour and contours. Da Vinci wanted to capture the hue of acolour as if it were smouldering and flashing from the depths, made possible through the use of ‘tenebrism’ (an especially pronounced chiaroscuro) to model the contours of bodies and forms. Leonardo’s sfumato seems to be amedium for conveying the weight of the air (‘gravitas æris’) as something at once tangible and intangible, as it was later viewed by 17th-century thinkers and physicists (Descartes, Boyle, Spinoza, Pascal, Leibniz, Newton, Burchard de Volder, Otto von Guericke, etc.). This was based on the idea that the air that surrounds the earth is amedium endowed with special weights, capable of causing movement and transmitting light. In the 17th century it was common to conflate pneumatics with hydrostatics— that is to think of air as afluid (Descartes, like Pascal, considered air to be aparticularly rarefied fluid).32 Da Vinci developed and perfected ahatching technique that allowed him to model the surface of objects and produce the illusion of the three-dimensionality, plasticity, and volume of bodies, thus evoking their elusive, fleeting ‘presence’. According to Popp, da Vinci began experimenting with combined techniques to express the interaction of different forces starting in 1500. It was only later (around 1508) that he began developing his ‘cosmic thinking’ (‘kosmisches Denken’): ‘He combined everything: chalk, pen, brush, and sometimes even gouache’ (Popp 1928, p.26) in order to produce the expression (‘Ausdruck’) of ‘the most extreme’ (‘das Äußerste’) method for modelling form. Then, in 1508, da Vinci began developing acompletely new technique for enhancing the spatial effect of the body: on ablack chalk base, which he spread to form agray mist, da Vinci drew adetail with apen, the plastic roundness of which he then ‘pulled’ from this nebulous mass and its marginal contour using asoft, 32 The topic of gravitas æris in the physical-mathematical and philosophical discourses of the 17th century is addressed in Wim Klever (ed.), Die Schwere der Luft in der Diskussion des 17.Jahrhundert (‘The heaviness of air in the discourses of the 17th century’; 1997). OPEN ACCESS
JOSEF VOJVODík 81 wide stroke of the brush (ibid., p.27). As Popp writes, looking at the result from afar, without focusing on aparticular detail of the contour, the eye may catch any one of anumber of possible images (aspecial physical-optical effect of spatial vision). According to Popp, da Vinci considered drawing as aunique medium, independent of other works of art. It allowed him to convey what painting still could not (its significance was similar, in this respect, to copperplate and woodcut for German and Dutch artists; ibid.), namely, to create series: plants, mountain landscapes, costume studies, and above all, the ‘most exquisite’ series of rainy landscapes (‘Regenlandschaften’; ibid., p.28). In this conception of drawing as an autonomous art form, Michelangelo— especially in his drawings of Tommasa Cavalieri— would follow da Vinci. The emphasis that Popp places on expressiveness and ‘expression’ (‘Ausdruck’) in her study of da Vinci’s drawings can be understood in relation to Helmuth Plessner’s theory of these topics, especially as he writes about them in his major work in philosophical anthropology Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology, published in 1928— the same year as Popp’s study on da Vinci. This coincidence is all the more interesting because both Plessner and Popp put ‘expression’ and ‘expressive possibilities’ (‘Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten’) in relation to the conceptual pair ‘content’ and ‘form’. As early as 1918, shortly after his doctoral dissertation with Paul Hensel in Erlangen, Plessner published his study Zur Geschichtsphilosophie der bildenden Kunst seit Renaissance und Reformation (‘On the philosophy of history of the fine arts since the Renaissance and Reformation’).33 Here, Plessner thinks of artistic-historical styles as specific ‘expressive types’ (‘Ausdruckstypen’; Plessner 1918, p.161), characterising them as ‘aesthetic formulas of crystallisation’ (‘ästhetische Kristallisationsformel’; ibid., p.164) in which the specific material properties of individual art media together with the techniques for shaping them, their ‘force effects’ (‘Wirkungskraft’) and so on, meet and permeate. For Plessner, the analysis of style is therefore only possible on the basis of a‘critical analogy’ of the material properties of the work. However, Plessner is primarily concerned with the problem of the autonomy of modern art (and the sense of the modern world), so that his thinking about ‘expressive types’ of historical styles it limited to the art of his time, especially cubism and expressionism. Modern art continues and further develops the process that was set in motion during the Renaissance, and which led to the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere and artistic creation. We should also find Plessner’s early study interesting because it is one of the first treatises he wrote on his anthropology-based aesthetics and theory of human expression. Expression is ‘objectification of the spirit’ (‘Objektivierung des Geistes’; Plessner 1928, p.337), in the complementary interconnection of form and content: ‘The expressivity of the human thus makes him abeing who even in the case of continuously sustained intention continues to push for ever new realisations and in this way leaves behind ahistory. Expressivity is the only internal reason for the historical 33 Michael Hog mentions this early treatise in Die anthropologische Ästhetik Arnold Gehlens und Helmuth Plessners. Entlastung der Kunst und Kunst der Entlastung (‘The anthropological aesthetics of Arnold Gehlen and Helmuth Plessner. The relief of art and the art of relief’; 2015, pp.146–152). OPEN ACCESS
82 SLOVO A SMYSL 38 character of his existence’ (Plessner 2019, p.314).34 Ahuman being is subject to the law of ‘natural artificiality’ (ibid., p.314), and lives through aprocess of discontinuous and emerging events rather than alinear development of history in pursuit of asingle goal. By his actions and creations, in his ‘excentric positionality’, man brings about acertain balance: The true motor of the specifically historical dynamism of human life is to be found in expressivity. With his deeds and works, which are meant to give the human the balance nature refused him— and actually do give him this balance— he is at the same time also thrown off balance again, only to try once more with luck and yet in vain. The law of mediated immediacy constantly knocks him out of the position of rest to which he wants to return. It is this basic movement that brings forth history. Its meaning is the recovery of what was lost with new means, the creation of balance through radical change, preservation of the old by turning toward the future (ibid., p.315). In his 1918 study, Plessner argues that the work of art is at once the result of individual ‘expressive possibilities’ (‘Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten’) and amanifestation of something that transcends the individual (similar to the ‘Kunstwollen’, in Riegl’s conception, that belongs to acertain epoch, society, etc.). Plessner’s study is remarkable in relation to Popp’s work in art history for the fact that it contains arelatively extensive passage on the works of Michelangelo, where form becomes an expression of the artist’s state of mind to the ‘highest possible degree of affect’ (‘bis in das Höchstmaß des Affekts’; Plessner 1918, p.170). Plessner writes of a‘volcanic eruptive force’ (‘vulkanischer Eruptionsdrang’) that brought about the greatest intensification of artistic will the West had ever experienced (ibid.). As aconsequence, Michelangelo’s works seem as if they had been created from within (‘wie von innen ausgebildet’), and with acertain plasticity. The creative force which runs through all of Michelangelo’s works passes into bodies, into architecture, whose surfaces and contours thus acquire ‘the full force, the full tension of existence’ (‘die volle Wucht, die volle Spannung der Existenz’; ibid., p.171). For Plessner, Michelangelo is not only an artist who radically crossed over from the Renaissance to the Baroque, but aprototype of the modern artist avant la lettre, who invented the paradox of the work of art by incessantly crossing the boundaries between individual artistic disciplines and their expressive forms (Plessner mentions the vestibule and staircase of the Laurentian Library). In this sense, Michelangelo deliberately participated in what Oskar Walzel called the ‘Mutual Enlightenment of the Arts’ (1917)35— which is why Michelangelo is the originator of the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ (Plessner 1918, p.171).36 34 ‘Durch seine Expressivität ist er also ein Wesen, das selbst bei kontinuierlich sich erhaltender Intention nach immer anderer Verwirklichung drängt und so eine Geschichte hinter sich zurücklässt. Nur in der Expressivität liegt der innere Grund für den historischen Charakter seiner Existenz’. 35 Plessner also emphasises the importance of this pioneering work by Walzel in his book Die Einheit der Sinne (‘The unity of the senses’; Plessner 1980, p.122). 36 The text is achapter in alarger study on Popp’s work in art history in the broader context. OPEN ACCESS
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