Dickens in Italy
Charles Dickens, in his Italy travel memoir, confronts artists of the classic epochs of painting for the sin of putting Church prelates' heads on heroes' bodies in the paintings he viewed. The implication that the commission process was corrupt comes as no surprise. It was as banal then as now. He smells a rat.
Blaming The Church was not on Dickens's itinerary. Dickens arrived in Italy as a keen observer of humanity. It must have come as a delightful surprise to the worldly Dickens, who had seen pretty much every scam London had to offer—plus a few of his own imagining.
It was in the matter of taste in art which, to Dickens, was fair game. He leveled at connoisseurship because it is cosmopolitan, snooty, deserves satire, and Dickens felt morally justified as just the one to call it out as such. As he declares early in the memoir, he knows nothing of art-hates it-to be honest. Art is for aristocrats, while Dickens is a man of the people, but it was a golden opportunity for him to burnish his Commoner credentials.
Dickens's signature imposture is to play the Philistine. He knows perfectly well what he likes. To his credit, he makes it known without being obvious. What he hates is pretension. Dickens finds the matter of art pretentious. He cannot be faulted for modesty. It is his signature virtue.
He'd make a better scientist than connoisseur of art. Dickens, and compatriot Darwin, would have got on famously. See Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1859). If not as methodical as might be desired of a scientist, Dicken's allusion to the physiognomy of prelates' heads as inferior to that of the heroic type is worthy of a Schopenhauer, or even Winkelmann, Idealists, all.
Physiognomy is a species of morphology. Morphology never was scientific, impossible to test, paradoxical, amorphous. Two witnesses can independently identify the same suspect. That's corroboration. One witness cannot identify a suspect because, so he says, the suspect looks the suspicious type. What does a Quattrocento prelate look like—an imbecile? It would have been smashing of Dickens to give us a clue, describe the heads, both comparing features to actual Prelates seen in person.
I may be pursuing the wrong suspect myself. What's important is what an authentic hero's physiognomy looks like, given that so many statuary representations of the classical ideal have come down to us from antiquity broken, headless, armless—everything but the torso missing. Taste is so subjective as to be pathological, as Stendahl argues in his quote about bad taste leading to crime. The problem is not pathology. The problem is criminal pathology.
Because of its rejection as scientific—being therefore free of objectivity—the real culprit, physiognomy, none-the-less serves art criticism. Taste in art is entirely subjective, as subjective as fingerprints, which are indispensable to crime investigation. Classical criminology classifies a person as a criminal by physiognomy. It is now considered unscientific, of course, but it's not totally irrelevant scientifically. It may be the driving force behind natural selection, for example, in choice of mate.
Fingerprints are different in twins who are otherwise genetically identical. The twins—and their prints—look the same to everyone but investigators. Unlike DNA, it is subjective pattern recognition valid as empirical data. And the dilemma remains that DNA, alone, is not 100% beyond doubt. Conviction is holistic.
Consistency in the collection of art, or any collection for that matter, identifies the collector. Art shows consistency, some recurring motif, which can identify two or more paintings by the same artist. Both artists and art collectors could be said to exhibit patterns of behavior. It is expert testimony. Pattern recognition is an opinion—that is all.
And, yet, some wonder how Nietzsche could identify the artist as a criminal! My own opinion is that he was deploying his typical rhetorical bombast intended to one-up Plato (who considered the poets liars). As an ethical matter, this quirk of human nature should be considered analogous to Aristotle's comments about the quest for honor leading to dishonor. Ethics, however, is another classical notion which does not comport with the scientific study of criminology.
Incidentally, I'm not referring to the scientific detection of forgers, tomb robbers, or smugglers of national treasures—deviations from the critical theory of art. That is literally a criminal matter. It is to justify the assertion of the pattern nature of the pathological behavior of both individual artists, criminals, and, yes, collectors—idiosyncratic subjects, all.
Methodology is the complement to pathology. Let's not forget it's formal basis in taxonomy. The factor—for artistic purposes—which seems to withstand the test both conceptually, as well as empirically (as Stendahl remarked), is that of taste.
The graphic art of Brian Higgins can be viewed at: https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/8-brian-higgins