What then? Shall I not follow in the footsteps of my predecessors? I shall indeed use the old road, but if I find one that makes a shorter cut and is smoother to travel, I shall open the new road. Men who have made these discoveries before us are not our masters, but our guides. Truth lies open for all; it has not yet been monopolized. And there is plenty of it left even for posterity to discover.
—Seneca, Letters, XXXIII
Tradition is the worst argument for wanting to be a classical artist or architect. To do it as if being part of some larger thing, as if self-abnegation is a moral good, out of reverence for the past bordering on pathology, is simply not why or how any great classical artist or architect of the past did what they did. They wanted to be good, or more often, great. Learning from the great was the clearest way to become great. But venerating the great to the point of idolatry makes those heroes poor teachers. You literally can’t relate: they weren’t human, they were always perfect, they were from a time we cannot access. You can’t be Superman. You can dress like him, you can act like him, but you can’t fly.
Traditionalists like to believe there was a golden age when everyone was taught everything they needed to know in some sort of “academy” (a misnomer, as they really mean an atelier, since academies were places of dialogue, not didactics). Most modern classical architects long for the days of the Ecole. They don’t realize the Ecole was for people who were already extremely able, since entry was competitive; so was progress through the system. One competed upward, or left. It was not the Ecole’s job to give you the skills and tools to be successful. They decided whether you were good enough or not, but they didn’t make you good. That was your job.
Tradition is a modern idea. It was invented as an antidote to change—to regicide (the French Revolution), to secularism, to the Industrial Revolution. The paradox of wanting to be “traditional” is that the tradition’s heroes themselves were not traditional. They explored, pushed boundaries, invented, and sometimes failed. Mimicking them is to do them dishonor, to fetishize them without actually being them.
I recently saw the impressive show of Guercino’s early work at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome. The show focuses in part on his work while still in his native Cento, but especially on the relatively brief period he spent in Rome under Ludovisi patronage. Born Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, he acquired the nickname Guercino, or squint-eyed, which hardly indicated any problems of vision. On the contrary, he was one of the most powerful painters of reality in history, and he preferred to be considered self-taught. While he apprenticed with some minor painters in his hometown, and may have spent time in the Carracci’s academy in Bologna, he himself credited his painterly approach to a work by Ludovico Carracci in a local church, which was his silent model for emulation.
Since emulation means to rival by imitation, that he set out to do. And, to many people of his time, he succeeded. When Ludovico himself saw the young man’s work he described him as a “freak of Nature” (mostro della natura). Guercino had the ability, and the ambition, to process the relatively few exemplars he had into something of his own, a synthesis of those models but also profoundly personal.
Framing oneself as part of a tradition is a resignation to mediocrity. Artists once believed in progress. And in decline. And, again, in rebirth. There was no real continuity in the so-called classical tradition, but a tempestuous struggle for mastery and achievement. The comfort of tradition is that it defines itself by what it rejects. The alternative is culture, which prizes the hopeful possibility of progress, but offers no guarantees.
Commenti