Art Museums, Old Paintings-Carrier

Wesleyan University
Art Museums, Old Paintings, and Our Knowledge of the Past Author(s): David Carrier Source: History and Theory, Vol. 40, No. 2 (May, 2001), pp. 170-189 Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2678030 . Accessed: 30/09/2013 05:28
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History and Theoiy 40 (May 2001), 170-189
? Wesleyan University 2001 ISSN: 0018-2656
ART MUSEUMS, OLD PAINTINGS,AND OUR KNOWLEDGEOF THE PAST'
DAVID CARRIER
ABSTRACT Art museumsfrequentlyremove old paintingsfrom their original settings. In the process, the context of these works of art changes dramatically. Do museums then preserveworks of art? To answer this question, I consider an imaginary painting, The Travels and Tribulationsof Piero's Baptism of Christ, depicting the history of display of Piero della Francesca'sBaptism of Christ.This example suggests that how Piero's painting is seen does dependupon its setting.Accordingto the Intentionalist, such changes in context have no real influenceupon the meaningof Piero's painting,and consequentlymuseumscan be said to preserveworksof art.Accordingto the Skeptic, if such changes are drasticenough, we can no longer identify the picture's original meaning, and museums thus fail to preserve works of art. Skepticism deserves attention,for such varied influentialcommentators as Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Hans-Georg Gadamer, MartinHeidegger, Hans Sedlmayr,and Paul Valery hold this pessimistic view of museums. I develop the debate between the Intentionalistand the Skeptic. Ultimately skepticism is indefensible,I argue,because it fails to take accountof the continuitiesin the history of art's display. But Intentionalismis also deficient because it is ahistorical.In presenting the history of Piero's painting,The Travelsand Tribulations of Piero 'sBaptismof Christshows thatwe can re-identifythe original significanceof Piero's work and the recognizable continuitiesthatobtainthroughits changes. It thus makes sense to claim that at least in certaincircumstancesart museums can preserveworks of art. "Some symbolic scheme of orientationsmay be necessary for people to relate to one anotherin time and space." Mary Douglas2
At the start of Analytical Philosophy of Action, Arthur Danto considers this striking case study: In the middle band of six tableaux,on the northwall of the Arena Chapelin Padua,Giotto in six episodes the missionaryperiod in the life of Christ.In each panel, the has narrated is shown with a raised arm.This invariantdispositionof his arm dominatingChrist-figure notwithstanding,a different kind of action is performedby means of it from scene to scene.... Disputingwith the elders, the raised armis admonitory... at the wedding feast of Cana, it . . . has caused water to become wine; at the baptism it is raised as a sign of
1. I thank Paul Barolsky, Bill Berkson, ArthurDanto, Brian Fay, Lydia Goehr, and anonymous readersfor History and Theoryfor critical comments, and the Getty ResearchInstitutefor appointing me a Getty Scholar, 1999-2000. 2. MaryDouglas,NaturalSymbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), 11.
ART MUSEUMS, OLD PAINTINGS,AND OUR KNOWLEDGEOF THE PAST
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acceptance;it commandsLazarus;it blesses the people at the Jerusalemgate; it expels the lenders at the temple. Since the raised armis invariantlypresent,these performativedifferences must be explained throughvariationsin context....3
Danto describes Giotto's spatial dispersion of six raised arms, indiscernible until placed in the context of the narrativestold in those six individual framed images. Christ,young in the firstscene, is dressedin variousgarmentsin the next five scenes, and in the expulsion he holds his hand horizontally.Still, to a good enough approximation,the same hand gesture appears every time. The meaning(s) of that raised hand depend, Danto concludes, upon the contexts in which it is raised. ImitatingGiotto, let us envisage a painting with a sequence of panels depicting the life historyof one work of artdisplayeddifferentlyin variousplaces as it
has changed location over time. Danto's Analytical Philosophy of Action begins
with the description of a real work of art, but in The Transfiguration of the Let and he us elsewhere Commonplace frequentlyemploys imaginarypaintings. emulatehis procedure. First consider some essential backgroundinformationabout the work of art presentedin our imaginarypainting, Piero della Francesca'sBaptism of Christ (1450).4 Piero's paintingwas commissionedfor the chapel of St. Johnthe Baptist in an abbey in Borgo San Sepolcro, his hometown. In 1808 it was moved to the cathedraland set in an elaboratealtarpiececontainingpaintingsby other artists. By 1859 Piero had been forgotten,and so the local authoritieswere happyto sell his paintingto an English merchant.When it left Italy,the frame was left behind, and the paintingbecame partof the collection of the NationalGalleryin London. In the 1970s it was set near the entrance;today,rehung,it is one of the treasures of the new Sainsburywing of thatMuseum.The paintinghas moved many times. For our presentpurposes, considerjust five of its positions: in the chapel of St. John the Baptist;in the Cathedralof San Sepolcro; in the merchant'sstoreroom just before being shippedout of Italy; in the National Gallery,early in the twentieth century;and in the Sainsburywing of the National Gallery in the twentyfirst century. The one physical object, the painting made by Piero, has been in these five
places. (That Piero's painting suffered some relatively minor physical damage
need not concern us.) Suppose, now, that an ingenious artist,the Master of the
London Piero's Travels as he in his modesty prefers to be known, tells that story in a painting, The Travels and Tribulations of Piero's Baptism of Christ. This
work of art,done in a style not unlike the saints'lives paintedso often by Piero's quattrocentro contemporaries,shows the journeys of Piero's picture from San Sepolcro over the Alps to London.A heroicjourney!-like thejourney of a saint, but extendingover a much longer intervalof time. Just as a story of a saint's life
3. ArthurDanto, Analytical Philosophy of Action (Cambridge,Eng.: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1973), ix. 4. My discussion draws on MarilynAronbergLavin, Piero della Francesca's Baptism of Christ (New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 1981), and Erika Langmuir,The National Gallery CompanionGuide (London:National Gallery Publications, 1994), 80-81.
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might show him or her performingdifferentacts at differentages, so Travelsand Tribulations,a five-panel painting, shows one painting at various times in its career.Baptismof Christappearsin every panel, but the settings and the figures near Piero's paintingvary.5 The Master of the London Piero's Travels accompaniesthe exhibition of his paintingwith a short autobiographical catalogue essay. fromDanto's Apart philosophy-anobviousinfluence!-my greatest artistic inspiration has been the story-telling paintings by MarkTansey.6 But whereTanseyhas restricted I focusattention himselfto stories about modernism, on imagesrevealing concerns broad of aesthetic theory. Tansey's pictures arefunny. Minearenot. What a richly revealing history picture The Travelsand Tribulationsof Piero's Baptismof Christwould be! Let us look more closely at it. Panel One shows Piero's paintingjoyously being received by his patronand in an abbey in Borgo San Sepolcro. How proudthey are to show contemporaries off this paintingby a native son famous for the slowness of his production.The Master of the London Piero's Travels has outdone himself, imagining convincingly the appearance of thatgreatartist.Since Piero della Francescanever depicted himself in any of his surviving pictures, the Master of the London Piero's Travelshas had to imagine Piero's appearance. His portraitof this calm detached genius is judged by all to be masterfulin its psychological insight. "It shows," writes one critic, "Pieroas he really must have been-calm, almost inhumanin his detachment." Panel Two presents a forlorn scene depicting the way Baptism of Christ appearedin the Cathedralof Borgo San Sepolcro sometime in the early nineteenth century.Piero has been forgotten,and so in this panel Baptismof Christis a little dusty. Panel Three shows Baptism of Christ removed from its frame, packed in the English merchant'shouse, ready for its transalpineshipping. But just as the darkestmoment in a hero's life may come just before his time of triumph, so the same may be true in the life of a painting.Baptismof Christ,about to leave Italy, soon will enter its time of glory. In Panel Four, the still youngish BernardBerenson is looking at Baptism of Christ early in the twentieth century. In his 1897 essay on the central Italian painters,Berenson, after praising Piero's impersonality,expressed his reservations about Piero's art: "Unfortunately he did not always avail himself of his highest gifts.... Now and again those who are on the outlook for their favourite type of beauty, will receive shocks from certain of Piero's men and women. Othersstill may find him too impersonal,too impassive."7
5. One of the artist's models is Hans Memling's Panoraimaof the Passion (Gallery Sabauda, Turin), which shows the events of the passion in one large elaborate pictorial space. See K. B. McFarlane,Hans Memling (Oxford:ClarendonPress, 1971), and, for discussion of this compositional technique,Lee Andrews,Storyand Space in RenaissanceArt: TheRebirthof ContinuousNarrative (Cambridge,Eng.: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1995). 6. See ArthurDanto, Mark Tansey:Visionsand Revisions (New York:Abrams, 1992). 7. Bernhard Berenson, The Italian Painters of the Renaissance (London:Phaidon, 1967), 135.
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But in a late book Berenson expressed unqualifiedapprovalof Piero. In the Master of the London Piero's Travels' scene, Berenson looks as if alreadypreparedto revise his earlierestimateof Piero's achievement.Even critics who complain that the Master of the London Piero's Travels is a merely literarypainter admirePanel Four."Wefind here,"one commentatorwrites,
a remarkablyoriginal visual image revealing an art historian'sinner life, letting us see how an intellectualmay change his mind. When JacquesCallot shows Saul becoming St. Paul, that scene is dramatic.Clouds part,the space aroundthe saint-to-bewho has fallen from his horse is empty, and we see the great struggle.By comparison,Berenson's scrutiny of Baptism of Christ, an inner, intellectualdrama,seems an unpromisingtheme for a painter,but the Masterof the London Piero's Travelshas shown that a broodingconnoisseur may be as dramatican artisticsubject as the process of becoming a saint.
Panel Five of The Travelsand Tribulations of Piero's Baptismof Christshows Baptism of Christ as it appearstoday, familiar to art lovers. It is installed in a place of honor in the new wing of the National Gallery,where even visitors who have so little love of art that they "do"the museum in two hours stop to look at this very famous painting.Some critics find a gentle humorin the juxtaposition of the touristgroup to the left of Piero's paintingwith the good likeness of Paul Barolsky,the tall, slim intense Americanartwriter who standsalone to its right. Travels and Tribulations,a complex painting, received mixed reviews from the critics, who worriedaboutits unity. "Thatthe story of one pictureby Piero is told,"one of them wrote, "is not in itself sufficientto unify a picturetelling such varied incidents: the packing of a painting, its display in London, and this odd episode linking Piero's painting to Berenson." But the best commentatordisagreed.Looking back at Giotto'sArenaChapel,he arguedthatthe scenes picked by the Master of the London Piero's Travels are no more various than the episodes in Christ'slife chosen by Piero. "The belief that Christ'slife is necessarily more dramaticor more unified than the story of a picture,"as he put it, "deservescriticaldiscussion and,I think,rejection." Apartfrom merely parochial about the of narrative what disputes validity painting, really is at stake in this If we see debateare questionsabouthow to understand Travelsand Tribulations. in it merely the same Piero painting, set in five very differentcontexts, then we may find it to be weakly unified. But if Baptismof Christplays almost as active a role in the story of its historyas Christdoes in Giotto's fresco, then Travelsand is a powerful coherentvisual narrative.Christ,God incarnate,causTribulations es miracles acting as a man. "Giotto'simages," Hans Belting says, "do not provide a mirrorof the outer world as much as the stage of a dramawhere actors perform...."8 Baptismof Christ,a mere painting,takes on some of the qualities of a humanagent. Is it surprising,then, that accordingto some aesthetictheories paintingsare not physical objects?
8. Hans Belting, "The New Role of Narrativein Public Painting of the Trecento: Historia and Allegory,"Volume 18. Studies in the History of Art: Pictorial Narrative in Antiquityand the Middle Ages, ed. HerbertL. Kessler and MariannaShreve Simpson (Washington,D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1985), 153.
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The Master of the London Piero's Travels himself has reflected deeply on these conceptual dilemmas, which lie at the heart of his aesthetic theorizing. Paintings, he thinks, are more like persons than is commonly recognized. One inspirationfor the Master of the London Piero's Travels is installation art in which "something could be contributedby the spectator within the structure
established by the artist.... The visitors helped to create the work, to complete
it. The situationprovidedan active experiencefor the viewer."9 "My essential goal," the Master of the London Piero's Travels writes, "is to the old master art displayed in the show how this is the best way to understand museum."Not only a painterbut also a philosopher-a philosopher-painter-he believes that sometimes a philosophicalargumentis best presentedin a picture.10 And as a readerof Danto, he has ideas about the indiscerniblesin Travelsand Tribulations which he will develop in his forthcomingbook AnalyticPhilosophy of the Art Museum,dedicatedto Danto. "My teacher,"he writes in the acknowledgments,"beganhis careeras a philosopherwho also painted,and then he gave illustratingin my art up his careeras an artist.Me, I am a painter-philosopher, in theories studio." the (Dantoesque!) developed my His painting aims to show that the life history of Baptism of Christ has the same structureas Christ's basic action as revealed in Analytical Philosophy of Action. A simple, intuitively plausible parallel-he thinks-but when published his argumentwill prove to be controversial. The Masterjustifies his procedureby producingwhat is, he admits,a pastiche of the Preface to Danto's Analytic Philosophy of Action. In his Preface to Analytic Philosophy of the Art Museumthe Master writes: "It is just my aim in this prologue to wash away the contextualfactors which convert artifactsmade I want to isoby paintersinto works of artand vest paintingswith interpretations. late those bare objects before they are colored by the sorts of meanings they are shown to have in Travelsand Tribulations." This parallel between Danto's account of action and his own discussion of museums can, he notes, be taken further."Justas the philosophy of action subtractsout the rich humanrealities studiedby novelists, and looks to the essential structureof acting, so"-here he writes in a style close to Danto's-"I leave aside all the humanlyattractivefeaturesof museums, to focus on the conceptual puzzles posed by these institutions."Just as Christ'sraised right hand has quite distinctlydifferentmeanings in the scenes showing admonition,blessing, expulsion, and so on, so Piero's Baptismof Christ,appearingin every panel of Travels and Tribulationsbut in each set in a different context, has a different significance. Like Christ'sraisedright hand,Baptismof Christthus is an indiscernible. The lesson the Master of the London Piero's Travels draws is Dantoesque.The same object has very differentmeanings at the various stages of its career.The
9. Julie H. Reiss, From Margin to Center: The Spaces of InstallationArt (Cambridge,Mass. and London:MIT Press, 1999), 14. As she notes, althoughmany installationartistsoriginally were hostile to museums, soon enough their art was incorporated into these institutions. 10. See the "Overture" of my Artwriting (Amherst, Mass.: University of MassachusettsPress, 1987), an accountnot discussed in the literatureon Danto.
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significance of a work of art is determinednot just throughits visual qualities, but by the contexts in which it is placed. A painting by an honored local son; a work of art too obscure to attractattention,and of so little value that it was sold to foreigners;a paintingby young Berenson'suneven artist;and a paintingby the most loved early Renaissanceartist:how differentare they! "Youneed only look
at Travels and Tribulations," he notes, "to see that!"
Having read the academic literatureon museums, the Master of the London Piero's Travels is aware of the debates about whether old works of art are preserved in museums. Indeed, as some commentators have noted, to identify Baptismof Christas a work of art alreadyis to beg some questions. Piero made an altarpiece;the National Gallery owns a work of art. And so, although the object made by Piero is now in London,his altarpieceperhapshas not survived. What has survived is the painted surface Piero created, an artifactwhose function has changed radically.The Master of the London Piero's Travels suggests that thathis representation gives a good visual explanationof how to understand history.Baptismof Christwas an altarpiece;in the National Gallery,it became a work of art. Should this change in identity be puzzling? How, without physically changing, can Piero's artifact cease to be an altarpiece and become a work of art? Asking that question, the Master of the London Piero's Travels argues, is like asking how Christ's one hand gesture can in different contexts be such diverse actions as commanding, blessing, and expelling. As Danto has explained, the raised hand does not have a fixed meaning, but rather a significance which depends upon the context in which it is raised. Exactly the same is true, the Master of the London Piero's Travels argues, of a work of art. "My painting shows," he says,
how to identify the transformations of Baptismof Christ.We see how a sacredwork turns into a masterpiece,viewing a transformation like those describeddiscursively in Danto's Analytic Philosophy of History. When Danto writes, "To speak of a change is implicitly he says what my picture to suppose some continuousidentity in the subjectof change,""1 shows.
A painting'ssignificanceis not fixed but dependsupon the context in which it is displayed. "Danto,"he adds with an understandable touch of boasting, "has envisaged the possibility of overcomingthe division between artand philosophy, exactly what I now have accomplished." The Masterof the London Piero's Travels also has anotherinteresting,deeply originalidea abouthow to write arthistory.At present,the familiarformatsof art history writing are monographson individual artists, and volumes studying the visual culture of a period-Holland's Golden Age, the baroque, and so on. Travels and Tribulations suggests a different way to organize art-historical books. The Master of the London Piero's Travels titles one section of his book In this he is influencedby the cataloguingsystem "Paintingsand TheirCareers."
11. ArthurC. Danto, Narration and Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 235.
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of the Getty Research Institute,which groups some books-catalogues raisonnes, historiesof collections, and the variousIndexes of paintingpublishedby the Getty-in a special section, the ProvenanceIndex.12 Just as people may be categorized according to whether they be stay-at-homes or adventurers,monogamous or promiscuous, early-morningor late-night writers, so pictures can be describedaccordingto their careers.Unlike Baptismof Christ,the Arezzo Piero frescoes are stay-at-homes.Even though they are by the same artistthey do not appearin the same chapterof the Master's book as Baptism of Christ. Some paintingshave always been famous. Others,famous once, have lost their from sight, have seen theirrepreputation. Some works of art, afterdisappearing utationsrevived.And of course most paintings,like averagepeople, never having much of a worldly career,at most achieve a private reputation."Paintingsand Their Careers"will study all of these situations.13 A painting'scareerconsists of how much it is seen and writtenabout.The informationneeded by the Masterof the LondonPiero'sTravelsis given in museumcatalogues,which tracethe history of paintingsin orderto establishattributions. The connoisseurneeds to traceout thathistoryin orderto attribute a painting.But becausenormallythe historyof collecting is only a specialist concern among art historians,informationabout the location of paintings has not traditionallybeen gatheredsystematically.Almost every famous artisthas a catalogueraisonne;an artist'soeuvreis a familiarunit of discourse.But to find how worksof artwere displayed,one needs to art-historical search, for art historiansdo not usually keep systematic records showing how paintingswere displayed.Knowingthe historyof displayof a paintingpermitsone to know how its significancehas changedover time. Justas Chinesecollectorsput visual recordsof theirhisseals on paintingsthey admired,thus addingpermanent tory to admiredscrolls, so museum settings leave traceswhich can be recovered For the Chinese connoisseur"the aesin a picturelike Travelsand Tribulations. theticqualityof the painting... is enhancedby handsomelydesigned,well-placed seals.... Throughthe commentsof formerowners, greatcritics,or formerstatesmen, he senses keenly his own continuitywith the past."14"So shouldit also be," the Masterof the LondonPiero'sTravelsargues,with Europeanart.
II
But when the Master of the London Piero's Travelspublishes this argument,he meets with resistance.The Intentionalist,as his intellectualprotagonistidentifies
12. See Corpus of Paintings Sold in The Netherlandsduring the Nineteenth Century,ed. Burton B. Fredericksenwith archival contributionsby Ruud Priem assisted by Julia I. Armstrong (Los Angeles: ProvenanceIndex of the Getty InformationInstitute, 1998-), and The Index of Paintings Sold in the British Isles during the NineteenthCentury,ed. BurtonB. Fredericksenassisted by Julia I. Armstrongand Doris A. Mendenhall(SantaBarbara,Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 1988-), 4 vols. 13. One precedentfor "Paintingsand their Careers"is BernardBerenson, Homeless Paintings of the Renaissance, ed. Hanna Kiel (London:Thames and Hudson, 1969), a book about paintings that have disappeared. Chinese Calligraphy and Painting in the Collection of 14. Lawrence Sickman, "Introduction," John M. Crawford,Jr (New York:PierpontMorganLibrary,1962), 27.
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herself, arguesthatthis parallelbetween Christ'sbasic actions and the identityof Piero's Baptismof Christis both contraryto the spiritof Danto's whole analysis and intrinsicallyimplausible. "My view," she opines, "is that a painting means what the artistintends that it mean. Nothing that happensto a paintingafterit is completed can change its meaning. How indeed could that be possible? This is but good common sense. How can my claim be controversial?" Respondingto Travelsand Tribulations,the Intentionalistdevelops an argument aboutthe essential deep differencebetween works of art and persons:
we see a mere physical object, Piero's panel, at five moments In Travelsand Tribulations in its history.All the actions shown are performedby people. The paintingis a mere thing manipulated by these people who are depicted.The paintingitself doesn't do anything;it isn't an agent. This is why the parallel between Travels and Tribulationsand Giotto's panel is only a (marvelous!) literaryconceit. The Master of the London Piero's Travels has read too much about metonymy.All that fantasticaltalk about mere things acting has caused him to lose his sense of reality.
Danto's discussion of actions displayed in the Arena chapel involves genuine indiscernibles:it is the same raised hand in each of the six differentpictures,but in each instancethe handperformsa distinctaction. The Travelsand Tribulations of Piero's Baptismof Christdoes not show indiscernibles,but merely recordsthe appearanceof the very same thing at different times. To launch Danto's argument, you need two things which look similarbut turnout to be different.To cite his classic case in aesthetics,Brillo Box is indiscerniblefrom the physically identical object in the grocery.Danto needs two things, in each case, because he must explain how they are different.He tells a storyin which at firstthose things seem to be identical,but then we learnthatthey are in fact different.Prisingthem apart Every takesphilosophy.If you have but one thing, therecan be no such narrative. to a cannot be thing-what is more obvious?-is entirely identical itself; thing its own discernible.15 But mightn't the Masterreply "How many people are Lydia? Two, counting her as one today and another tomorrow."But this answer is sophistical, the Intentionalistmight retort.If we count the day after tomorrow,Lydia would be three people; if we count her every twelve hours, six people; and so on. By as we need. choosing how to count, we may find as many Lydia-indiscernibles But this procedureis philosophicallymuddled.It confuses person-stageswith a person.Lydia,one person,is constitutedby numerous(infinitelymany?)personstages. But this last claim may have less power than the Intentionalistbelieves. As soon as we pick out the same thing at two differenttimes, we have indiscernibles. The raised hand of Christblessing, and the raised hand of Christ expelling, are nothing but that same hand picked out at two differenttimes acting differently.
15. Whatmay give supportto this confused way of thinkingis a misleadingformulationof Danto's argument. Insteadof startingwith two distinctthings, and explaininghow they are different,someone might rather imagine that one thing had two very different origins. I discuss this issue in my and the Essence of Art:The HegelianTurnin ArthurDanto'sAestheticTheory,"forth"Indiscernibles coming in the Libraryof Living Philosophers volume devoted to Danto.
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And exactly the same point can be made aboutphysical things like paintings.As soon as we compareand contrastPiero'sBaptismof Christat two differenttimes, we have indiscernibles.In one significant way, Danto's use of Giotto's fresco acknowledgesjust that point. Christ'sright hand at any one moment cannot be an indiscernible,for at any one time there is but one such entity. But when represented repeatedly,Christ's right hand is an indiscernible.The Master of the London Piero's Travels proposes that we think of Piero's Baptism of Christ in exactly the same way. Danto's other favorite examples-dreams and waking experience; conduct conforming to moral experience and conduct not so conforming;identical universes, one deterministic,the other a world of pure chance; a computerindistinguishable from a Turingmachine;and, of course, Brillo Box and a Brillo boxinvolve two distinct things that exist, or could be imagined to exist, at the same time.16 They look similarbut turnout to be entirelydifferent.In the ArenaChapel Giotto shows six representationsof one thing at different times. Insofar as Danto's usual presentationinvolves two things existing at the same time, appeal to those images of Christmay confuse matters.Christperformedhis six actions at six distincttimes. We can only see his six indiscernibleraisedhandsall at once in Giotto's representation. To this the Intentionalist might respond by undercutting the comparison between the Arena Chapel fresco and Travels and Tribulations. The basic actions, Christblessing someone by raising his arm,or commandingLazarusby raising his arm, and so on, are what Christdoes. "Clearlythere is no event distinct from the raising of the arm in which the blessing [or the command, or the of expelling, .. .] consists...."17 In the Arena Chapel, we see representations variousbasic actions performedby Christ.His hand gesture thus cannot be subtractedfrom the context that makes sense of it; the context is constitutiveof the identity of the act. Only because bottles of wine are laid out can Christ'sraising of his hand constitute the action of changing water into wine; similarly in the other five panels. But in Piero's case the situationis different:the identity of the paintingis not constitutedeven in partby the circumstancesof its viewing. Piero made the artifactBaptismof Christ.This artifactcertainlycan be placed in contexts he did not envisage. But since the meaning of an artifactis determinedby its creator,puttinghis paintingin a new context cannot change its meaning. We value Baptismof Christbecause we value what Piero made. Suppose thatthe significanceof this work of artdid change in each new context, as the Masterof the London Piero's Travelsclaims. Then the paintingwould not have been preserved as it was moved fromplace to place. The object we see in London,were the argument of the Master of the London Piero's Travels correct, would be something quite distinct from the painting shown in the firstpanel. To this the Master of the London Piero's Travels might reply that the Intentionalisthas missed the point of his argument.We value the London work
16. ArthurC. Danto, Connectionsto the World:The Basic Conceptsof Philosophy (Berkeley,Los Angeles, and London:University of CaliforniaPress, 1989), 6-8. 17. Danto, Analytic Philosophy of Action, 29.
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of artBaptism of Christbecause it looks very much like the altarpiecemade by Piero. But this is compatible with thinking that the identity of the painting has changed with time. We talk about the painting Piero made differently than did Piero's and Sir Charles Eastlake's and Berenson's contemporariesbecause a great deal of time has gone by, because new ways of talking about arthave been invented,because much otherarthas been made, and because we have new institutions like art history and the museum. The painting we see looks roughly the same as what Piero made, but because of its historythis object has come to have a differentsignificance.This way of speakingboth acknowledgesthatbecause of its history we now see the paintingdifferentlysuch that it is thereforea different painting,but that we value it because its original appearance has been preserved. "Perhapsmy critics will better understandmy theory," the Master of the London Piero's Travels adds, "if they consider how I have been influenced by Duchamp." The ready-mades causedme to rethink how to describe the traditional divisionof labor between artist andspectator. Pieromakesa painting-andthe viewersees whattheartist did.So peoplethought! Thatway of understanding artwas undermined when,by seemallowedthe spectator ing to do less, Duchamp to do more.He selected theready-mades, leavingit to the viewersto determine themeaning of theseobjects. Travelsand Tribulations projectsthis Duchampianway of thinkingback into the past. Piero paintedBaptism of Christ,but how that artifacthas been viewed depends upon a long traditionof commentaryon it. "Projectionof our ways of thinkingonto the past,"he notes, "is an inevitableresultof our museumculture." The Master of the London Piero's Travels is inspiredby Philip Fisher's beautifully condensed phrase, which summarizesFisher's account of museums: "The life of Things is in reality many lives."18
III
Thus far the debate has been between two parties, the Master of the London Piero's Travels and the Intentionalist.But now a third position must be introduced, the viewpoint of the Skeptic about museums. In the presentdebate about museums, skepticismopens up the discussion aboutthe identity of artworksand the role of museums in a way that reveals deep philosophicalissues. The Travels and Tribulationsof Piero's Baptism of Christ purportsto show that the meaning of Piero's Baptism of Christ changes accordingto its context. The Skeptic makes a strongerclaim. This claim is so drasticthat if it is true the original significanceof old paintingswould be utterlylost in the museum.Using the evidence assembledby the Masterof the London Piero's Travels,the Skeptic arguesas follows: Thisassembled usedso amusingly in Travels evidence, andTribulations, to mymindsugmuchless optimistic conclusion thanthatdrawn gests a quitedifferent, by the Master.
18. Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Cultureof Museums (New York and Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1991), 3.
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DAVID CARRIER
Given that the setting of Piero's Baptism of Christ has changed so dramatically-and repeatedly!-what reason have we to think that its original significance has been preserved at all? That the appearance of the object has not changed shows nothing, not once we allow that the significance of Piero's paintingis not given by its appearance. My view is but good common sense. No one not blinded by the need of museums to claim that they preserveart of the past would seriously hold any other opinion.
How can old works of art be preserved when everything around them has changed? This question takes on special urgency once we consider how museums originated.In the late eighteenth century,"museumcuratorswould take a work of art and by framingit-either literally or metaphorically-strip it of its local, historical, and worldly origins, even its human origins. In the museum, 19 only its aestheticpropertieswould metaphoricallyremain." Can any artworksurvive this radical transformation? Maybe the work of art exists as such only in relationto its local, historical, worldly, or humanorigins. Perhapswhen these origins are strippedaway, nothing remains of the original work of art. One way to understand these worries about museums, the Skeptic might suggest, is to analyze change of otherkinds of things.20 Buildings are renovatedand used for new purposes;nations expand and make new laws; persons age, learn, and travel. In some cases the same building, the same nation, and the same person continue to exist even as their propertieschange. In the past 220-some years the United States has bannedslavery,establishedwomen's suffrage,and extended its territorydramatically. But it is the same countryas that nation established in 1776 because thereis continuitythroughthese gradualchanges. In othercases, however, this continuityis absent, and the changes result in changes of identity. Hagia Sophia, built as a Byzantine church, was converted by the Muslim conquerorsof Istanbulinto a mosque in 1453. After the end of the OttomanEmpire, in the 1920s Ataturk turned Hagia Sophia into a museum preserving both Christianmosaics and signs of its Islamic past. The building has been so much modified that there is not enough continuity in these changes for Hagia Sophia to survive being, in turn,a church,a mosque, and a museum. "WhatI propose,"the Skeptic would say, "is to take a view of artworksin museumslike thattaken by those who deny that the same building survives radical change."Although no one doubts that museums preserve physical objects, that is no reason to reject skepticism.Since the work of artis not identicalto the physical object, preservingthe object in the museumdoes not mean thatthe work of arthas survived.For thatto be so theremust be sufficientcontinuityin the different settings, social as well as natural, such that the conditions for identity obtain.
19. Lydia Goehr,The ImaginaryMuseumof Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford:ClarendonPress, 1992), 173. Describingmusical works, she is noting how the modernconcept of the musical work of art was created at the same time as the museum devoted to visual works of art. 20. The best known accountof these issues, David Wiggins, Samenessand Substance(Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1980) has only brief remarksabout art.
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The Skeptic might cite RichardWollheim'sArt and Its Objects,whose claims can be nicely summarizedin his phrase:"Art,and its objects, come indissolubly linked."21 She might go on to observe that Danto also says some things which may supporther position.
So much of what is contemporaryart is so internallyrelated to aspects of contemporary culturethat the meanings of objects, intendedas vehicles of our culturalidentity,will be lost if knowledge of their references and allusions are unknown.It is as though we must transmitthe whole of our cultureif any partof it-any work-is to be more than a pickled object....22
What could a cultureunfamiliarwith bottle racks and white porcelainurinals his transferof utilitarmake of Marcel Duchamp'sready-mades?To understand ian objects into the art world, one needs to recognize that the ready-madesare bottle racks and white porcelainurinals,and this means thatone needs to be able to identify the originals.Art commenting upon everyday cultureby appropriating utilitarianartifactsloses its meaning when those artifactsare unfamiliar. Danto is describing contemporaryart, but it may be plausible to extend his account to all works of art.A Greek sculptureis carved for a temple; a Persian carpetwoven for ceremonialuse; a sacredRenaissancepaintingmade for a high altar.Such works of art are partand parcel of living ways of life. Someone who knew nothing aboutGreekreligion, Islamic culture,or Christianitywould not be these objects. When works of art are separatedfrom the way able to understand of life associated with them, they lose their function.A museum is the place for displaying objects that have lost their original function.Turningsculptures,carpets, and paintings into objects we appreciateaesthetically,the museum might preservethe physical artifacts,but doing this, the Skeptic would assert,"does not preservethe works of art." Suppose that the skeptical analysis of museums were to be generally accepted. Then we might cease to build and maintainthese expensive institutions.True, few people who go to museums, apartfrom academics, are likely to take these skepticalconcernsseriously.But perhapsthis only shows that most museumvisitors are too uncritical.Who has the will to critically examine these institutions? Certainly not the curators who work there-or the art historians, who often dependclosely upon museums. Many importantthinkershave offered skeptical argumentsabout the powers of museums, and aboutthe meaning and identity of the artworksthey supposedly preserve.Paul Valerydescribedhis experience of entering
this wax-flooredsolitude, savoringof temple and drawingroom, of cemetery and school. ... I am ... weirdly beset with beauties, distractedat every moment by masterpiecesto the right or left compelling me to walk like a drunkman between counters....
21. RichardWollheim, "Preface,"Art and Its Objects:An Introductionto Aesthetics (New York: Harper& Row, 1968). Wollheimdoes not take a skeptical view of museums. The Legacy of 22. "Lookingat the FutureLooking at the Presentas Past,"MortalityImmortality?: 20th-CenturyArt, ed. Miguel Angel Corzo (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 1999), 9. Danto does not share the Skeptic's view of museums.
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DAVID CARRIER
Only an irrationalcivilization, and one devoid of the taste for pleasure, could have devised such a domain of incoherence.This juxtapositionof dead visions has something insane about it, with each thingjealously competingfor the glance that will give it life.23
Valery's museum was a mausoleum, the art it contained dead. I once had a similarexperience. Sitting in the sculpturegallery of the MetropolitanMuseum, tired from too much looking, I saw nothing but a mass of fragments. Bits of Islamic ceramics, tribal masks from Oceania, pieces of Romanesquechurches: all this elegantly displayedloot looked like the contentsof an upscale thriftshop. These fragmentsdid not tell the story of art. Maurice Blanchot offers a similar
view:
One has but to enter any place in which works of art are put togetherin great numberto experiencethis museum sickness, analogousto mountainsickness, which is made up of a in feeling of vertigo and suffocation.... Surely there is somethinginsuperablybarbarous the custom of museums.24
In his commentaryon Valery'sessay, TheodorAdorno also takes such a position: works of "Thenatural-history collections of the spirithave actually transformed art into the hieroglyphics of history and broughtthem a new content while the old one shriveledup."25 MartinHeidegger,similarly,held a skepticalview of the museum'spower to preserveart.
The works themselves standand hang in collections and exhibitions.But are they here in themselves as the works they themselves are, or are they not ratherhere as objects of the art industry?... Even when we make an effort to cancel or avoid such displacementof works . . . the world of the work that standsthere has perished.26
The museum supposedly kills art by removing it from the life of the community. Oswald Spengler's Decline of the Westtakes up this idea when it prophesizes, "one day Rembrandt'slast portraitwill cease to exist, even though the painted canvas will still be intact; because the eye that can apprehendthis lanFor Rembrandt'spainting to exist, guage of forms will have disappeared."27 it. Merely preservingRembrandt's viewers must understand paintedcanvas is not enough to preserve his work of art. Hans Sedlmayr, a figure of the far right, expressedthis idea when he explained how from
23. Paul Val6ry,"The Problemof Museums"in Degas, Manet, Morisot, transl.David Paul (New York:Pantheon,1960), 203. 24. Maurice Blanchot, Friendship, transl. Elizabeth Rottenberg(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 45. 25. TheodorAdorno, "Val6ryProust Museum,"in his Prisms, transl. Samuel and ShierryWeber (London: N. Spearman, 1967), 185. Lambert Zuidervaartgives a useful gloss on Adorno's word "hieroglyphic": "Adornouses 'hieroglyphic script' to describe how, as humanly producedaesthetic objects, artworkshint at more thancan be pinned down in their organizedsensuousness,even though they make their suggestions only in their sensuousness and organization."(Adornos Aesthetic Theory:The Redemptionof Illusion [Cambridge,Mass. and London:MIT Press, 1991], 188.) 26. Quoted in Didier Maleuvre,MuseumMemories:History, Technology, Art (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1999), 47. This book offers a good commentaryon this worry. 27. Quoted in T. J. Clark, Farewell to An Idea (New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 1999), 237.
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the old churches,castles and palaces there issues from the end of the eighteenth century onward an endless stream of works of art, each separateand isolated from its context, fragments of what once had been a coherent whole. Torn from their mother soil, they wander,like forlornrefugees, to take shelterin the art-dealer'smarketor into the soulless institutionalmagnificence of public or privateart galleries. In the museum ... things which were originally integralparts of a single whole are as exhibits.... 28 shown forth afterthis heartlessprocess of dismemberment Writing from a committed extreme leftist point of view, Walter Benjamin made similar claims: The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparablefrom its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition.... An ancient statueof Venus,for example, stood in a differenttraditionalcontext with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration,than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confrontedwith its uniqueness,that is, its aura.29 Like Heidegger, Benjamin thinks that old works of art cannot survive into an age of mechanical reproduction. The physical object survives, but the work of art does not. Sometimes skeptics claim that museums are essentially paradoxical because they both preserve historical records of the past and aim to be outside of time. As Maleuvre put this point: A monumentis an object taken out of history,by history.Yet it stands for history,and is pervadedwith historical spirit.A monument'shistorical characteris our knowledge that the object no longer belongs immanentlyto history:being a monumentis, paradoxically, being separatedfrom history.Were the monumentto be truly immanentin its historical it would vanish back into it. On the contrast,in becoming a historicalmonubackground ment, the object is removed from its native groundin history.30 In envisaging a dispute between those commentators who assert, and those who deny, that museums preserve works of art, a third possible position also deserves consideration.31 Perhaps museums are important not because they preserve art but because they emancipate it, permitting us to see aspects of paintings and sculptures that were hidden or under-appreciated when they were in their original settings. For Hans-Georg Gadamer, the argument about whether museums do, or do not, permit us to know the work of art as it originally appeared mistakenly presupposes that the best we can do is see a painting or sculpture as it appeared to its creator. But why should that be the whole story? "As soon as the concept of art took on those features to which we have become accustomed and the work of art began to stand on its own, divorced from its original context
28. Hans Sedlmayr,Art in Crisis: The Lost Center, transl. Brian Battershaw(London: Hollis & Carter,1957), 88-89. Illuminations, 29. WalterBenjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," transl.HarryZohn (New York:Schocken Books, 1969), 225. 30. Maleuvre,MuseumMemories, 58. 31. I owe the suggestion that there is such a thirdposition, and some of my phrasesdescribingit, Is There Progress in to Brian Fay. The present analysis builds upon my "Piero and His Interpreters: Art History?,"History and Theory26 (1987), 150-165.
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DAVID CARRIER
of life, only then did art become simply 'art' in the 'museum without walls' of Malraux."32 Museums liberateart,revealingmore of a paintingor sculpturethan was availablein its originalculture."Thework of artis the expression of a truth that cannot be reducedto what its creatoractuallythoughtin it."33 Gadamer'sargumentis abstract,and so what is requiredfor our purposes are examples of such would-be liberation.When Baptism of Christwas moved to a museum, good lighting permittedus to see the paintingbetterthan was possible in its original site. Because the painting is now near other paintings of its time, comparisons with other fourteenth-century altarpieces is easier. And since in LondonBaptismof Christis physically close to earlierand laterpaintings,understandingof Piero in historicalperspectiveis facilitated.In those three ways, the physical placement of the picture is liberating.And in other, broaderways, the cultureof museumsenhancesour appreciation. Because Baptismof Christis discussed in easily accessible, fully illustratedbooks and essays, viewers are aware of its multifacetedsignificance. Recent political historianslike Carlo Ginzburg have placed Piero's paintings in political context; social historianslike Michael Baxandall have linked Baptism to fourteenth-century mathematicsand capitalism; and arthistorianslike MarilynAronbergLavin have discussed its iconography. The developmentof such sophisticatedinterpretations is inevitably closely linked with the art museum, which secularizes sacredpaintings. However, whateverthe general interest of Gadamer'sclaims, or the value of his hermeneutics,in the presentcontext the thesis thatmuseumsliberateworks of art,ratherthanpreserve(or fail to preserve)them, is irrelevantto the concernsof the art historian.What would it mean to claim that we understandBaptism of ChristbetterthanPiero's contemporaries, or Piero himself, did? Piero, not knowing most of the paintings of his Flemish contemporaries,could not have comparedhis altarpieceto theirs.And of coursehe could not have comparedhis painting to laterworksof art.So certainlywe can see Baptismof Christin ways impossible for fourteenth-century viewers. But this does not reveal something new aboutPiero's painting;it only providesnovel accountsof its relationshipto other works of art. Here it is easy to give a reductioad absurdumof Gadamer'sargument. Piero's paintingmay be comparedwith Chinese scrolls, Duchamp'sreadymades, and FrankStella's 1960s abstractions.That these comparisonsget us to see Baptismof Christin new ways does not show that new meanings of Piero's paintingare being actualized.When set in novel contexts, Baptismof Christcan
32. Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, transl. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge,Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 19. In his sympathetic summary, David Couzens Hoy speaks of how Gadamer'sposition "can be called contextualism,for according to it, the interpretation is dependentupon, or 'relative to,' the circumstancesin which it occurs.... Since no context is absolute, differentlines of interpretation are possible. But this is not radicalrelativism, since not all contexts are equally appropriate or justifiable."(The Critical Circle: Literature, History, and Philosophical Hermeneutics [Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of CaliforniaPress, 1978], 69.) 33. Hans-Georg Gadamer,Philosophical Hermeneutics, transl. David E. Linge (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London:University of CaliforniaPress, 1976), 101-102.
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be comparedwith any work of artwhatsoever.Such comparisons,however interesting, do not tell us anythingnew aboutthe meaningof Piero's painting. Ginzburg,Baxandall, and Lavin disagree about how to understandPiero, but as best as possible, Baptismof Christ's they agree thattheirgoal is to reconstruct, Did not agree about that, then there would they significance. original historical be no point to their projects,for then they would not need to assemble so much evidence showing that their ways of thinking about political history, the social historyof art,and iconographywere presentin Piero's culture.Art historyclaims Thereis nothing wrong with askoriginalhistoricalsignificance.34 to reconstruct ing a differentquestion ("leavingaside its historicalsignificance, what does this work of artmean to us?") so long as we recognize thatthis is not the questionart historianscustomarilyask. his idea that Moreover,the theory of meaning Gadameremploys to undergird museumsliberateis in factjust anothervariantof the skepticalposition. Consider these remarksby Gadamerin his masterwork: underis a pointless like all restoration, circumstances, of theoriginal Thereconstruction a life brought back of ourbeing.Whatis reconstructed, in view of the historicity taking and takenfromthe museum fromthelost past,is notthe original.... Eventhe painting arenotwhatthey condition restored to its original in thechurch, orthebuilding replaced attractions.35 oncewere-they becomesimplytourist The discovery of the true meaningof a text or a work of art,he argues,"is never finished;it is in fact an infiniteprocess"because the "truehistoricalobject is not an object at all," but a projectof the creative encounterbetween the artifactcreIn interpretation, always prointerpreters ated by the artist and its interpreter.36 therebychangingthe ject somethingof themselves into the artbeing interpreted, artworkitself. There is no "inherentmeaning"in an artworkand thus no single artworkwhose identity may (or may not) be preservedthroughtime. Gadamer's position thus reduces to a version of skepticism, offering no argumentbeyond those we have alreadyconsidered.
IV
This is not to say, obviously, that skepticism can be ignored. It presents a clear challenge to both the Intentionalistand to the Master.How might they respond to the Skeptic? In respondingto skepticism,the Masterof the LondonPiero's Travelsand the Intentionalistwould find themselves in complete agreement.Radical skepticism defeats itself, they would say; they might suggest an analogy with epistemology
34. All writers about visual art do not agree that this is their goal. To cite a very distinguished Opposition(Cambridge,Eng. Cambridge example, in Reading Rembrandt:Beyond the Word-Image in not a historical recreUniversity Press, 1991), Mieke Bal clearly indicates that her interpretation ation in this sense. 35. Hans-GeorgGadamer,Truthand Method, transl. GarrettBarden and John Cumming (New York:Continuum,1975), 149. 36. Ibid., 265, 267.
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DAVID CARRIER
to see why. If one sets the standardsfor knowledge too high, then one will be forced to conclude thatwe know nothing.Suppose, analogously,thatthe changes occurringwhen works of artare moved were so drasticthat the originalmeaning of these pictures was lost. Then how could we know that their meaning had changed?All we would know would be the new meaningof the pictures.In order to speak of a change of meaning, one needs to compareoriginal and presentsettings. We know that Piero's paintings look different in museums than in their original settings because we know both how the picturesappeartoday and how they appearedin their original settings. Of course, our informationabout original settings is incomplete. But we know enough to estimate how much the appearanceof the pictureshas changed. Skeptics offer a dreadfullyahistoricalpictureof tradition.To suppose thatpictures and sculpturesonly began to change settings in the late eighteenthcentury, when public art museums were created,is mistaken.Once objects become highly valued, they are often sold or readily become loot. Long before there were art museums, Greek art went to ImperialRome, Chinese masterworkstraveledfrequently, and famous Renaissance altarpieceswere removed from their original churches.Too much fuss is made, the Masterof the London Piero's Travels and the Intentionalistcorrectlysay, aboutthe claim that only the museum permitsus to respondaestheticallyto the artit exhibits. If we believe that museums impose alien ways of thinking upon their collections, then we are likely to doubt that works of art survive the transitioninto the museum. But that belief is mistaken. The Maori of New Zealand did not have museums, but after learning that the intended response to their carving contains an element of awe and fear-"the spine tingles, one's body hair may straightenup, and the whole body trembles with excitement,"as Sidney Mead so vividly put it37-we see close connections to Europeansculpture.Like many Europeanartists,the Maori carvers intended that their works of art would inspire a sense of awe. Until very recently, the Chinese did not have art museums,but Tsung Ping (375-443) describes aesthetic pleasurein termsrecognizableto Westernartlovers: "As I unrollpaintingsand face them in solitude, while seated I plumb the ends of the earth.Withoutresisting a multitudeof naturaldangers, I simply respond to the uninhabitedwilderness, where grottoedpeaks tower on high and cloudy forests mass in depth."38 Nor did the Persians have museums. But the miniatureKsjanderJudges the Greek and Chinese Painting (1449-1450), illustratingthe rivalry between the Greekartistwho painteda scene andhis Chineserivalwho polisheda wall reflecting the Greekpaintinglike a mirror, tells a highly subtle story aboutthe natureof art.39 Any numberof Chelsea galleries would be proudto show this installation.
37. Sidney Moko Mead, "TheEbb and Flow of Mana Maori and the ChangingContext of Maori Art," Te Maori: Maori Art from New Zealand Collections, ed. Sidney Moko Mead (New York: Abramsin association with the AmericanFederationof Arts, 1984), 24. 38. Susan Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting (Cambridge,Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1971), 146. 39. See Priscilla P. Soucek, "Nizami on Painters and Painting,"Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museumof Art, ed. RichardEttinghausen(New York:MetropolitanMuseum of Art, 1972), 12-13.
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Imagine that space explorersdiscover stones that look like sculptures.Maybe these objects were carved by intelligentaliens, but perhapsthey were made only by naturalforces. The explorers would have no way of knowing if they understood them properly.But the artifactsfrom New Zealand,China,or PersiaI have just mentionedare not like that,for we know a greatdeal aboutthe intentionsof the peoples who made them, and we know that in many ways these people were not so unlike us museum-goers.It can be too easy to think of museums as breaking with the past in overly dramatic ways. Some writers (such as Valery, Sedlmayr,or Benjamin quoted above) lament the loss of art's function in the museum,looking back nostalgicallyto societies in which works of art had some non-aestheticfunction. Otherslike Gadamerthink the developmentof the museum a good thing, liberatingart from serving religious needs so that it can be a source of aestheticpleasure.These otherwiseopposed ways of thinkingsharethe belief thatthe creationof museumsinvolves a dramatichistoricalbreak.But this belief deserves critical questioning. Failing to offer a well-developed argument,the Skeptic tends to rely upon noting the shock felt when artworks are uprooted and their setting significantly changed. But if one attendsto the continuitiesin these changes, the psychological roots of skepticism are undercut.We know that there always have been aesthetic responsesto works of art, not only because there is much relevantempirical evidence to this effect, but also because our eyes tell us that what we call art was made to be seen aesthetically.Museums help us to see the alreadyexisting aesthetic qualities of art. When Benjamin identifies the loss of the painting's aura, or the influentialrecent commentatorCarol Duncan describes the rituals associatedwith museumart,they imply thatthere was recently a complete break with the past.40 This claim is mistaken. Photographyand the museum are new, there were engraved but not unprecedented developments.Before photography, of paintings.And thereare some significantanalogiesbetween visreproductions its to museums and the ritualsassociated with premodernreligious life. In a famous letterAlbrechtDurerdescribedpre-Columbian art:
I saw ... a sun entirely of gold ... a moon, entirely of silver ... very odd clothing, bedding, and all sorts of strangearticlesfor humanuse.... I saw ... amazingartisticobjects, and I marveledover the subtle ingenuity of the men in these distantlands. Indeed I cannot say enough aboutthe things which were there before me.41
He was able to recognize the skill of these artists.The Aztecs used "beautifully chipped flint knives" for ritualhuman sacrifice. Theirknives are decoratedwith demon faces, "a kind of personification of the fearsome instrument ritually employed to dispatchthe victims whose hearts and blood nourishedthe sun on which the survivalof the universe depended."42
40. See Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). 41. Quoted in Mary Ellen Miller, TheArt of Mesoamerica: From Olmec to Aztec, rev. ed. (New York:Thames and Hudson, 1996), 202. 42. H. B. Nicholson with Eloise Quinones Keber,Art of Aztec Mexico. Treasuresof Tenochtitlan (Washington,D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1983), 40.
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Because we know the intendeduse of these Aztec artifacts,taking an aesthetic attitude towards them requires bracketing our knowledge of their original function. Like medieval Europeanarmoror Persian carpets,Aztec daggers can then be appreciatedas works of art when set in an art museum or when viewed by a sixteenth-century painter.A continuityruns among the Aztec artists,Dfirer, and contemporary museum-goers. A museum of art seeks to preserve the original painting as well as possible. But in setting thatpaintingin a novel context, unavoidablythe museumchanges how we see the work of art. The Travelsand Tribulationsof Piero's Baptism of Christ suggests that how we see works of art changes with the setting. But this imaginarypicturedoes not justify skepticism,for in seeing how Piero's painting was viewed in differing ways, we can still imagine how it looked in its original setting, and we can see continuities among the various settings in which it was placed. Indeed,thepoint of the Master'swork is to show just this continuity.Just as the United States of 2001 is the same country as the US of 1801 despite the changes during these 200 years precisely because of the recognizable continuities between them, so is Baptism's identity preservedthroughthe recognizable continuitiesthat obtain throughits changes. Having recognized this we are now in a position to see a certain symmetryin the positions of the Intentionalistand the Skeptic. The Intentionalistargues that moving the paintinghas no effect in how it is viewed, while the Skeptic claims that such movements make it impossible to identify the painting as the same painting. The truthis in between. Were it obvious, as the Intentionalistclaims, that paintings in museums are preserved,then the worries of skeptics would be pointless. Were we, conversely, to find the skeptics' argumentsconvincing, then museumscould not preserveworks of art.What,rather, our discussionhas shown is thatmoving paintingsdoes change how we thinkaboutthem, and thatthis does in fact change them. Nevertheless, these changes are not radicalchanges resulting in deep discontinuity-on the contrary,continuitiesrooted in sharedhuman capacitiesand the relativechangelessnessof the physical paintingitself preserve the identity of the paintingover time. In offering a pictorial expression of that tension between the claims of Intentionalistsand Skeptics, The Travelsand Tribulationsof Piero's Baptism of Christ provides a nicely condensed image of the philosophical issues raised by the art museum. But an image is not an argument.As suggestive as The Travels and Tribulations of Piero's Baptismof Christis, it cannotby itself tell us how to understand museums or the identities of the artworksthey contain. But in identifying the philosophical issues at stake, and giving reason to reject skepticism, our account of this imaginarypicture suggests how to develop a philosophical how we can identify the changes produced argument.In orderto fully understand when paintings are set in museums, what is requiredis not a bare, ahistorical analysis, but study of the history of the way artworkshave been viewed in different times and places, including the art museum. We would need in particular to amplify in detail the claim merely sketched in this article, that there is a sig-
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nificant overlap between the ways museum-goers appreciateworks of art and how they were viewed before there were art museums. The complete development of such an analysis must be the task for anotheroccasion. But for now, if this article has demonstratedthat museums raise serious philosophical and arthistorical problems, and shown that skepticism is indefensible, then we have made a very satisfactorybeginning. CarnegieMellon University

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Wesleyan University

History and Theoiy 40 (May 2001), 170-189

? Wesleyan University 2001 ISSN: 0018-2656

ART MUSEUMS, OLD PAINTINGS,AND OUR KNOWLEDGEOF THE PAST'

ART MUSEUMS, OLD PAINTINGS,AND OUR KNOWLEDGEOF THE PAST

ART MUSEUMS, OLD PAINTINGS,AND OUR KNOWLEDGEOF THE PAST

ART MUSEUMS, OLD PAINTINGS,AND OUR KNOWLEDGEOF THE PAST

ART MUSEUMS, OLD PAINTINGS,AND OUR KNOWLEDGEOF THE PAST

ART MUSEUMS, OLD PAINTINGS,AND OUR KNOWLEDGEOF THE PAST

ART MUSEUMS, OLD PAINTINGS,AND OUR KNOWLEDGEOF THE PAST

ART MUSEUMS, OLD PAINTINGS,AND OUR KNOWLEDGEOF THE PAST

ART MUSEUMS, OLD PAINTINGS,AND OUR KNOWLEDGEOF THE PAST

ART MUSEUMS, OLD PAINTINGS,AND OUR KNOWLEDGEOF THE PAST

ART MUSEUMS, OLD PAINTINGS,AND OUR KNOWLEDGEOF THE PAST

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