EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Art’s Etymology

The successful Germans are not very popular at the moment in France, Italy and Great Britain, all suffering economically. But who do you think understands art better? Well, if language is anything to go by, it's not the Romance languages and English.

Art, short and simple, shares the same origin in English, French and Italian. The word was first used in its modern sense in the 1660's, two centuries after Renaissance masterpieces leave us no doubt that painters and sculptors were among Europe's wisest minds. Yet, as we show on EPPH, these works have rarely been seen for what they are, more likely to be interpreted as illustrations of nature than as poetry. Art originally meant skill or craft adding around 1300 an aptitude for scholarship and learning, as in the Liberal Arts and Bachelor of Arts.¹ Yet Giorgio Vasari in the 16th century still referred to all painters, sculptors and architects as "craftsmen" (artefici) while describing their occupations as arts. He also defined art as mere copying: "I know that our art is all imitation, of nature for the most part..." Yet despite knowing himself (as can be deduced from his pictures) that art copies nature only as a technique of construction and not as an end in itself, he still misleads his readers.² Perhaps he was imitating in his written masterpiece the process of art because Paul Barolsky and others consider Vasari's History a work of poetic fiction despite its title.³ Remarkably, painters' and sculptors' long struggle to be considered thinkers as well as craftsmen did not really gain traction until the formation of Academies of Art in the 18th century. Yet skill is still art's original meaning which, taken together with the historical bias against manual labor, may help explain why artists have rarely been considered the intellectual equal of even the academics who study them.⁴ After all, what most amazes connoisseurs of past art even today is not its wisdom but its imitation of nature. 

Kunst, the German word for art, seems to me to be more accurate. It originally meant "knowledge" from its root kennen, "to know".⁵ Art, as I have long argued, contains true knowledge which is its ultimate purpose and meaning. It is a type of knowledge, higher than intellectual knowledge, which in earlier times only referred to knowledge of God or inner wisdom.⁶ Kunst does not suggest craft, trickery or even, in consequence, an illusion of the world. The latter, after all, is only a compositional method as we can infer from the almost total lack of it in both pre-Renaissance painting and in twentieth-century art too. In fact, out of 40,000 years of human art-making, it is only art from 1,200 of those years - and not even in our own time - that resembles exterior vision.⁷ Kunst, therefore, is a far more apt description of poetic painting and sculpture. It describes art's purpose.  

So Kunst it is! Score 10 to German.



 

1. Oxford English Dictionary of Etymology (Oxford University Press) 1966, p. 52

2. On Vasari's terms for artists and his claim that they imitate nature, see Stephen Parcell, Four Historical Definitions of Architecture (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press) 2012, p.166

3. Barolsky, Giotto’s Father and the Family of Vasari’s Lives (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press) 1992

4. The public have little understanding of how seriously writers, including art historians, belittle the intellectual capacities of visual artists. For example, Jane Mayo Roos, clearly an exception, has noted that the French modernist poet Stéphane Mallarmé was “one of those rare writers willing to credit a visual artist with a degree of perceptiveness.” In 2005 David Smith discussed some prints by Rembrandt and the interest within his social circle in John Donne's poetry. He then suggests Rembrandt's intellect was not equal to the poet's: “For barring a wholly original invention on Rembrandt’s part [in which case my argument still holds] ....he could only have derived the striking dialectic between love and the world in those prints from the poems of John Donne.” Really? In any event it is an age-old prejudice. Zachary Astruc, a well-respected French art critic and Manet's friend, claimed in the nineteenth century that the great masters "compose for the eye, very little for the brain". Roos, “Manet and the Impressionist Moment” in Therese Dolan (ed.), Perspectives on Manet (Farnham, UK: Ashgate) 2012, p. 81; David Smith, “Rembrandt’s metaphysical wit: The Three Trees and The Omval”, Word & Image 21, Jan-Mar 2005, p. 10; Joseph C. Sloane,  French Painting: Artists, Critics, & Traditions from 1848 to 1870 (Princeton University Press) 1973, p. 116.

5. The German kennen also morphed into the English word can.

6. Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism, 1200-1350, vol.3 of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: The Crossroad Publishing) 1998, p. 81 

7. Hellenistic sculpture and then the arts of ancient Rome, from about 300 BC. to 300 AD., resemble our experience of nature. This does not occur again until the early 15th century and continued up until the development of Symbolism in the late 19th century. It was finally put to bed by Cubist abstraction and has not reappeared in any significant form since. 

 

Illustration designed by Simon Abrahams at EPPH (copyright protected)