Page 72 - Studio International - July August 1972

neither is it in any reliable sense a study of his curiously, in Miss Lilly's conclusion, it is not examples and beautiful periods, which
life, but rather a record of those occasions when Sickert who is immortalized by his painting, orchestrate the idea of knowledge as a gift from
Sickert and some of his circle came in contact nor that painting whose virtues will endure on high.' In fact the difference lies between
with the author, contact which only began in through time, but rather the place (bombed allegory and symbol. The allegorical approach
1917 when his best work was behind him. Miss during the 'Hitler war') where Sickert and the of Perugino relies on restating an accepted
Lilly writes lovingly and well about the studios author had their studios and their good times, is method of representation by an inscription or
in Fitzroy Street where she and Sickert were preserved by the works : 'I gazed at the attribute learned by rote; the symbolic
neighbours for a time; she describes the halls desolation around me, cold, bleak and approach of Raphael creates a new way of seeing
and the basement and the gloom in which they indifferent in the December dusk and wondered things dependent on the extent of the
all seemed to work. She is very good at evoking that so much laughter and wit and kindness onlooker's knowledge and experience. The
nostalgia for foggy streets of Islington and should be stilled forever... All, all lost! And power of a true symbol therefore is to plumb
Camden Town, and for the poverty and then I remembered, the pictures were still the mind's capacity to bring together disparate
pressures of the artist's life, the pleasures of there ...The ghosts of Fitzroy Street had things, either to give new meanings to old
study at the Slade and the joys and absurdities triumphed after all.' concepts, or to create concepts entirely new.
of being an artist during the First World War. Perhaps. But my argument with this book An understanding of the visual and intellectual
Her stories are witty and acute, and she is shrewd is that the painter is still buried under this experience which formed the background of
about many of the famous men in the Sickert rubble. q Raphael's achievement is necessary in order to
background, but her reminiscences are JANET HOBHOUSE grasp its meaning more clearly. The attempt to
permeated with that particular brand of establish the contemporary terms of reference
nostalgie de la bone in which the shabby is for a work of art is called by Gombrich,
inseparable from the genteel. There is no overt following Panofsky and others, Iconology. The
snobbery on the part of the author, but it is other essays which make up this book are
hard to be comfortable with her references to Icons and myths mainly devoted to this type of analysis. All the
the 'humble people' at Sickert's parties, or with essays have appeared before and may be
descriptions of art school where 'there was Symbolic Images by E. H. Gombrich. 352 pp, familiar to some readers, but Professor
little of the class consciousness which is so 174 illustrations. Phaidon. 5. Gombrich has revised and sometimes extended
tiresome today'. them according to subsequent research and has
This gentility also makes for some curious The essay 'Icones Symbolicae', which is the brought them together within a consistent
interpretations of the work itself. With reference longest and most discursive in Professor theme.
to the famous painting Ennui, a painting as Gombrich's book, is concerned mainly with Perhaps the best known is that concerning
feeling and unsentimental as The Wasteland in the distinction between allegory and symbol. the mythologies of Botticelli, and here
its depiction of lower middle-class life, Marjorie Professor Gombrich discusses the character of Professor Gombrich has seen fit to stand by
Lilly relates a chance remark as though it were the perception which originates in the human most of the opinions he originally expressed in
a priggish and county rebuke, and offers it as an tendency to visualize concepts and ideas. He sees 1945. Many of the points regarding the
insight into the picture: 'And boredom is a two types of understanding existing in the Primavera still seem valid, especially the role
great theme; one that Sickert had much at heart. visual and linguistic culture of the West, played by Ficino in its conception. The link
Nothing shocked him more. Once, when one analytical, relying on the structure of with the description of the Judgement of Paris
someone confessed to frequent attacks of `discursive speech', the other intuitive, in Apuleius Golden Ass seems to this reviewer
boredom, he was distressed beyond measure. attempting to discover the 'immediacy of more tenuous, particularly in the association of
"But it's so stupid to be bored."' There can experience which language could never offer'. the young Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco with Paris,
hardly be a connection between this impatience The former he finds in the continuity of the ingenious though this suggestion is, as the figure
and the ennui of the painting. aristotelian, the latter in that of the platonic of Mercury, which is likened to the Baptist
If Sickert's work is sometimes ill-treated by tradition. In the visual arts these polarities figure in many fifteenth-century altar-pieces
this very personal reminiscing, so is the man can be seen in the difference between the does not look out of the picture and beckon the
himself. Though there was not much in his life explicit representation of an abstraction (say, onlooker, but rather seems preoccupied within
that would excite Irving Stone, for example, an allegorical figure of Opportunity) and a the picture space. Certainly, however, the
and though already fifty-seven when the author synthetic image made as an equivalent to an compositional links with religious art are there
first met him, this portrait leaves little of his abstraction (say, Botticelli's Birth of Venus as and the ease with which a mind familiar with
manhood intact. The painter becomes for us an the 'suprasensible principle of love or beauty'). religious symbolism could transfer to a secular
endearing old bunny, given to curiously This difference is stated most clearly in subject is admirably discussed. The distinct
ineffectual maxims (`Conjure up magic with his essay on Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura. revival of interest in platonic thought in the
your brush' Win a victory on each canvas') and His comparison of the nearly contemporary latter part of the fifteenth century in Florence
to quirks and jokes that suffer by the obvious frescoes of Perugino in the Cambio at Perugia would have emphasized how steeped in that
though implicit comparison with Whistler. The with those in the Stanza gives us an insight into tradition Christianity itself is. Even after 1500,
half-light in which his memory is cast makes it that animation of thought which is the most a letter of 1502 tells us that Botticelli was willing
difficult to imagine Sickert as the tough and powerful feature of Raphael's art. Both schemes to undertake a painting for Isabella d'Este which
serious painter that he was, and belies the very deal with abstractions, but whereas the enthroned would probably have been 'something ancient
unsentimental attitude he had about his art, figures at Perugia are identified by exemplars and of a pretty meaning'.
which he looked upon as a craft and about bearing inscriptions, those in Raphael's Stanza This brings in the vexed question of the
which he could say 'One's pictures are like one's are set above animated scenes. As Professor programmes which seem to have been prepared
toenails. They're one's own and that's all there Gombrich writes : 'In asking an artist to celebrate for painters during the Renaissance. The most
is to it.' Justice and the Knowledge of Things Divine, the famous that has come down to us is that given
The danger of this sort of reminiscing Search for Causes and the Divine Afflatus in a to Perugino by Isabella d'Este in 1503. The
lies in its misplaced idolatry — by depicting the room of the Papal apartments one would not `Parnassus' of Mantegna, also for Isabella, is
places and circumstances in which art was have thought in terms of emblems and discussed by Professor Gombrich in this
served, books such as this render the work epigrams so much as in terms of "amplificatio", context. With regard to the Primavera, no one
subordinate to the trivia surrounding it. Thus, the restatement of the meaning in ornate has yet found a completely satisfactory
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