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Beazley’s Connoisseurship: Aesthetics, Natural History, and Artistic Development

L’expertise de Beazley : esthétique, histoire naturelle et développement artistique

Eric Driscoll

Résumé

L’héritage de Beazley, pris dans les scrupules concernant la place de la céramique peinte sur le marché de l’art, a fait l’objet de vives controverses dans les vingt dernières années. Les discussions sur sa méthode tendent à devenir polémiques, mais dans cet article j’adopte un point de vue plus historique pour explorer les tensions intellectuelles inhérentes à son projet et pour expliquer comment il a réconcilié deux pulsions incompatibles concernant les dimensions « esthétiques » et « scientifiques » de la peinture de vases. Beazley a transcendé ce conflit en ayant recours à un récit historique au sujet de l’évolution artistique, faisant passer sa production savante d’articles monographiques à la rédaction d’une encyclopédie portant sur l’histoire naturelle de ce medium. En faisant de ses Peintres des acteurs sur la scène du développement artistique – se fondant en partie sur l’expertise de la peinture de la Renaissance – Beazley a pu mettre en œuvre cette expertise à la fois comme une entreprise scientifique et comme un projet de communion avec le style « sacré » des artistes qu’il faisait émerger de l’argile muette.

Texte intégral

“I have tried to find out who painted each [vase].”
Sir John Beazley

  • 1 Some examples of the former view: Robertson 1976 and 1992, p. 2-7 (both non-polemic, serious engag (...)

1The study of painted Athenian pottery in black- and red-figured styles was set on new footing by Sir John D. Beazley (1885-1970), who oriented the field toward attribution studies and the discussion of individual painters. Contemporary opinions on Beazley’s system of connoisseurship diverge widely – even wildly. To the numerous practitioners of connoisseurship and scholarship in his style, it remains the foundation of any serious work in the field. To do without connoisseurship would be purposefully to ignore things we know to be true. To others, it constitutes, instead, a dangerous misadventure which has, at best, distracted from more serious subjects of research, or, at worst, irrevocably subjugated classical archaeology to the conceptual and financial dictates of the art market by transforming artefacts into artworks – not to mention the unfortunate side effect of that transformation, namely, the encouragement of looting.1

  • 2 Whitley 1997, p. 45.
  • 3 For example, Ernst Langlotz’s work on stylistic synchronisms across media in late Archaic and earl (...)
  • 4 Kurtz 1985a. Kurtz had already published a lengthier methodological study more focused on connoiss (...)
  • 5 Rodriguez Pérez et al. 2016. Also see now Rodríguez Pérez 2018, which unfortunately appeared after (...)
  • 6 Neer 1997, 2000, 2005, 2009, and forthcoming.

2In this situation, it may not be surprising that polemic has led to some overstatements: James Whitley, for example, declares that Beazley’s lists are “the basis for our relative chronology of Archaic and Classical art.”2 This is surely an overstatement of Beazley’s importance for chronology.3 Yet along with the polemic there has been a steady trickle of serious intellectual interest in Beazley’s connoisseurship, its origins, and its importance for the field as a whole. As early as 1985, Donna Kurtz published a study, “Beazley and the Connoisseurship of Greek Vases,” which attempted to determine the intellectual heritage on which Beazley had built his system of attributing vases.4 The Beazley Archive has continued to serve as a nexus for documenting and presenting Beazley’s working methodologies.5 Richard Neer, meanwhile, has been charting very different intellectual terrain, following the fault lines of Beazley’s concepts of style, quality, and artistic individuality.6

  • 7 Robertson 1965.
  • 8 There is a large bibliography on Morelli. For several important and useful discussions, see Wollhe (...)
  • 9 Dyfri Williams points out that Beazley “never once mentioned Morelli’s name in print” despite bein (...)
  • 10 Williams 1996, p. 243; Oakley 2009, p. 606.

3It emerges from these studies, especially those of Kurtz, that Beazley’s method was Morellian. Indeed, Martin Robertson already took this for granted in his review of ARV2, back in 1965.7 To say that his method was Morellian is to say that Beazley attributed pieces to the hands of individual artists by studying in minute detail the “Grundformen” characteristic of those artists’ personal styles.8 Although no one denies that Beazley worked in this way, some of the most acrimonious debate over Beazley’s legacy has been over whether or not this method was owed to Morelli specifically; for some reason, Beazley’s defenders have been suspicious of that claim, seeing in it a subversion of their master’s uniqueness if not an attack on classical archaeology itself.9 Their rebuttals are couched in aggrieved terms: attribution is “frequently trivialized by critics who suggest that only unimportant details are examined,” as Williams has it, while Oakley discerns a “tendency among scholars not trained in attribution to trivialize Beazley’s methodology, reducing it to something as simple as comparing anatomical details.”10

  • 11 The Beazley Archive’s recent digital publication of Beazley’s working notebooks proves that he did (...)
  • 12 Rouet 2001, p. 79-81, established that Beazley was familiar with broadly Morellian connoisseurship (...)
  • 13 It has also been suggested that these German scholars only worked on signed material and did not r (...)
  • 14 Somewhat neglected to date are two extremely important predecessors. First, J.C. Hoppin (1919b), w (...)

4It is important, therefore, to note that there should really be no serious question about the origins of Beazley’s methodology.11 He inherited and then was able to refine the methods and goals of his immediate predecessors in the study of Attic vase-painting – Hartwig, Hauser, and Furtwängler, among others – exactly because he was also familiar with developments in the connoisseurship of Renaissance painting.12 Beazley was not the first to apply broadly Morellian methods to the study of vases, but it is quite wrong to suggest that his work was insulated from any influence outside German classical archaeology.13 In the future, I would like to retrace these pathways and discover the exact intellectual genealogy of the Beazleyan project of attribution, to bring greater precision to our vision of the lineaments of its practice in the period before Beazley – that is, to see exactly what he got from his German (and American) predecessors and how he improved it.14

5At present, however, no great detail about that background is needed. Beazley had predecessors and contemporaries. They are often overlooked for an excellent reason: Beazley did everything they did, but better. Doing so, he emerged as their unquestionable leader. This essay is about exactly what that meant and why it happened. It is, in short, about the rhetoric of Beazley’s connoisseurship: how this famously laconic scholar constructed an argument for, or rather a vision of, his ideas about Athenian painted pottery, over the first few decades of his career. I begin by exploring two antithetical conceptions of the connoisseurial project: as a technique or system for the production of quasi-scientific knowledge, or as a highly subjective means of personal interaction with the discrete personalities of the individual artists reconstituted and accessed through connoisseurship. These visions are in tension if not open conflict, but Beazley was able to dissipate some of the contradictions by moving beyond the individual-genius model of traditional connoisseurship and, without abandoning that model, inscribing his Painters within a narrative of artistic development that left a historical place for indistinct stylistic groupings and artists Beazley detested, as well as the Masters of his early publications.

The Rhetoric of Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters: Connoisseurship as Natural History

  • 15 Kurtz 1985a, p. 240; Neer 2009, p. 40.
  • 16 Another issue on which it would be impossible to give a full bibliography; suffice to say that thi (...)
  • 17 Rembrandt connoisseurship is a most illuminating instance of the theoretical issues at stake, part (...)
  • 18 Tummers 2011, p. 39-50, provides a history of the RRP.
  • 19 Quote from Alpers 1988, p. 2.

6Donna Kurtz and especially Richard Neer have drawn attention to the irony that connoisseurship, today widely seen as the ultimate bastion of snobbish aestheticism, was viewed in the late nineteenth century and in Beazley’s day as an inappropriate intrusion of philistine scientism into the domain of the study of art; it may be the aftershocks of this debate that reverberate through the more modern one sketched above.15 Today, however, connoisseurship is intimately linked to ideas of artistic genius now widely seen as problematic.16 This is true not only of connoisseurship broadly understood (the knowledgeable appreciation of art, especially of masterpieces) but also of attribution specifically. Consider the Rembrandt Research Project (RRP), the long-lasting multidisciplinary research group dedicated to the thorny question of sorting out which paintings are by Rembrandt and which by his numerous pupils.17 For more than four decades, the RRP set out to systematically define the oeuvre of Rembrandt, excising works erroneously attributed to his hand and adding in those that had wrongly been given to his pupils.18 It is perhaps difficult to imagine such a project being undertaken for very many artists other than Rembrandt – who “has come to be synonymous with value itself,” in the words of Svetlana Alpers – and certainly not for some insignificant, nameless artisan identifiable only through, say, his funny way of drawing clavicles or ankle bones.19

  • 20 Tummers 2011, p. 40, surveys the arsenal of analytic methods employed by the RRP, which are primar (...)
  • 21 For commentary on the opposition between connoisseurship as scientific and connoisseurship as intu (...)

7And yet the RRP also points up how connoisseurship can diverge, in fact, from the snobbish aestheticism with which it is associated in many circles. It is a group project, taking on the characteristics of a scientific laboratory, in which connoisseurial judgment is not exercised in the brief flash of intuitive man-to-man contact leaping across the centuries (“style…as the man himself”), but by committee, in the light of evidence and data slowly accumulated, much of it scientific in nature (canvases x-rayed, pigments chemically analyzed, oak panels examined dendrochronologically).20 The dream is the production of an irrefutable body of facts using self-verifying forensic methods, which are rule-like (as guaranteed by their committee-based application, which enables them to outstrip the charge of mere subjectivity) and therefore scientific, culminating in a definitive corpus of works by Rembrandt. In short, attribution has become the aim of a science, connoisseurship the set of its experimental techniques.21

  • 22 As they are called. In fact, of course, Beazley’s “lists” are much, much more than mere lists: Bea (...)

8The ambition, too, is very much like that of Beazley’s most durable product, his “lists.”22 Attic Red-figure Vase-painters (ARV) illustrates the impulse toward completeness. The idea behind the book was, first, that a reader could look up any vase, anywhere in the world, and find out who had painted it (per Beazley) and learn a small set of other basic facts that would enable one to pursue further research. Second, ARV is a history, of a very attenuated sort, of red-figure vase-painting; it proceeds chronologically (within other subdivisions) and artist-by-artist, and attempts not so much to reconstruct workshop structure or pedagogical relationships as to display those things as the fruit of scientific observation. Third, its generous indexing enabled uses not perhaps envisioned by Beazley. In short, ARV is a kind of encyclopedia, or – better – a natural history of the medium.

  • 23 See Neer forthcoming, as well as Neer 1997 and 2009. François Lissarrague points out to me that an (...)
  • 24 Robertson 1965, p. 91.

9In principle, each vase has but one hand: it is by Euphronios or Onesimos, by the Painter of Agora P24327 or the Painter of Louvre G 539. Yet there is a revealing imperfection in the system, for there are also a great many vases “in the manner of,” “near,” “close to,” and so forth, the various named painters. Furthermore, Beazley was unable to do without disturbing entities such as “Group E,” composed of works somewhat like those of Exekias but not given by Beazley to Exekias’ hand, and the “Douris Sequence.”23 Although Beazley utters barely a word on his method or aims in ARV, the format and monumentality of the volumes speak for him. The aim is to include, in theory, every vase. Martin Robertson thus speaks rightfully of “the all-embracing character… [which is] a fundamental element in Beazley’s extraordinary achievement.”24 This thorough taxonomy of red-figure vases suggests Beazley’s ambitious reconfiguration of their study as a form of natural history, tracing out the evolutionary pathways and dead-ends of the class as it sprouted, bloomed, and decayed. Each pot has its notional painter, each painter his family, each family its phylum.

  • 25 Quote from Beazley 1989, p. 9. Later he attributes appreciation of Nikosthenes to a “lack of discr (...)
  • 26 Kurtz 1985a, p. 245-246 (quoting Beazley 1918, p. v-vi).

10Yet vases “in the manner of…” or in the “group of…” reveal a basic problem in Beazley’s approach: not every piece is easily attributable to a painter. Put differently, not every painter possesses analytically sufficient individuality. In Beazley’s understanding of artistic quality, this meant that many surviving pieces of Athenian vase-painting were of dubious artistic importance, yet he was determined to include them in the system: hence “groups of…” By disregarding quality – even though he was far more alive to artistic quality than contemporary classical archaeologists, his or ours, as evidenced just for example by his famous dismissal of those who like Nikosthenes: “…the love of garbage is something from which very few of us are absolutely immune” – Beazley gave his project the nature of a scientific enterprise, and, indeed, thought of himself as establishing knowledge from the very beginning of his career.25 Kurtz, for example, draws attention to scientific language in early Beazley: “…drawing a conclusion from observation…comparing… the artist cannot escape detection if only sufficiently delicate tests be applied.”26

  • 27 Just for example, Hoppin praised Beazley’s work for its care and rigor (above, n. 14).
  • 28 Letter from Beazley to Martin Robertson’s parents, of May 1911, quoted by Robertson 1976, p. 32-33 (...)
  • 29 ARV2 18.3 (Beazley 1963, p. 18).
  • 30 See Neer 1997 on attribution as a process of implicit comparison against the whole of red-figure.
  • 31 The latter, obviously, contributed to the creation and reproduction of Beazley’s authority. Also s (...)
  • 32 Indeed, reviews of Beazley’s lists, written by fellow specialists such as Martin Robertson (Robert (...)

11It is certainly this appearance of scientific knowledge that allowed Beazley so completely to triumph.27 Nowhere in ARV or ABV does one find arguments or interpretations: one finds facts. As Beazley himself put it, “one must have facts… Kleophrades is a fact.”28 And each vase’s entry in ARV is a carefully curated display of factual information. Take Louvre G 106, for example, a neck amphora placed by Beazley in the “manner of Euphronios.”29 Reading its entry, one learns that plates are available in Geffroy, Pottier, and CVA (abbreviations and arcane references being an important signifier of scientific community in addition to being an essential space-saving technique), that the vase’s subject matter is Amazons, that the vase has at least three inscriptions (ΑΝΤΟ+ΣΕΝΟΣ on A, ΕΥ[Φ]ΡΟΝΙΟΣ[?] and [--]ΥΣ on B), and that von Bothmer had recently looked at it and published some notes. Yet the placement of the entry within the book is at least as important as any of its factual content: the amphora is, as mentioned, judged to be “in the manner of Euphronios,” a set placed within Beazley’s broader grouping, the “Pioneer Group,” itself within “early red-figure pot-painters,” contextualizing this specific pot by arranging it within and against specimens at several different levels of specificity.30 Louvre G 106 is representative of the way ARV works as a whole: knowledge which was in fact created by Beazley’s working theories and methods (the attributions and groupings) is juxtaposed to knowledge that is straightforward in its empirical derivation from observation (where one might find G 106 illustrated, for example). Yet the reader is – or ought to be apt –to be very confused: the vase appears to be inscribed with Euphronios’ own name, and Beazley even notes that there may have been more (to the inscription for example, one supposes, ἔγραφσεν, “Euphronios painted [me]”), yet the vase is not attributed to Euphronios but merely placed in his manner. Nor is there anywhere to turn for further information to justify this fact. Louvre G 106 is thus not merely representative but symptomatic. In one sense, the entire book is an argument for its own conception, challenging the reader to go forth and figure out for herself Beazley’s working principles. In another sense, though, it evades any challenge precisely by presenting Beazley’s researches as plain facts, “conclusions drawn from observation,” as he had it in the preface to Attic Red-figure Vases in American Museums (VA, p. v). In the event, it was largely this latter vision that prevailed outside the circle of connoisseurs: readers have not tended to be confused by what the entry for Louvre G 106 represents, but, instead, have accepted Beazley as an authority except for the few scholars to retrace his own footsteps and come largely to the same conclusions.31 Indeed, the very format of the lists insulates, to a certain extent, their content from critical scrutiny: it would be like wondering whether the LSJ gave the right definition of a word. The question only really occurs to fellow specialists.32

  • 33 Emphasis added to Beazley 1956, p. x.

12Thus, the format and the self-evidently unparalleled range of knowledge concretized in ABV and ARV gave them the status of encyclopedic sources of knowledge. The natural history of red-figure so beautifully traced out established Beazley as the master technician of attribution. The laboratory of his eye had developed ever more delicate tests. At the same time, to understand Beazley in these terms, no matter how inviting his own works render them, amounts to a serious misrepresentation of his own deepest principles. In ABV, he complains that the first edition of ARV had in fact been thus misunderstood. Readers did not always follow the fine distinctions he made in describing and disentangling hands, and, even more important, they certainly did not always share his aesthetic philosophy. He attempted to set the record straight in ABV, writing that others had used the phrase “in the style of” where he prefers “’in the manner of’: [their usage] has warrant, but I was brought up to think of ‘style’ as a sacred thing, as the man himself.”33 The second half of this line is oft quoted, but the first half is rarely appreciated: Beazley here distinguishes between the terms or notions “style” and “manner.” But both refer to the visual evidence of the objects themselves: his distinction is not that “style” and “manner” are different concepts, exactly – one can use them synonymously, he seems to acknowledge, but it is something like a spiritual error to do so. But if attribution is a science, and the appearance of artefacts the evidence from which it works, what possible difference could there be?

Narrative and Connoisseurship

  • 34 The emphasis on drawing after pots is ubiquitous in discussions of Beazley’s method, from his own (...)
  • 35 Quotes from Beazley 1922, p. 81, 84, and 90.
  • 36 Neer 1997, p. 19-20.

13The answer to this rhetorical question could be pursued in several ways. Others have emphasized the embodied aspects of Beazley’s connoisseurial practice – highlighting his inheritance from aesthetes such as Walter Pater – and in particular the use of drawing as a bridge to the minds of the ancient artists: thus, “style” is not just “the way something looks,” a piece of evidence, but a coherent system which one can only understand intuitively, by grasping the mind from which it originated.34 Hence, Beazley’s “coherent and comprehensive system of renderings” through which “a certain conception of the human form found expression,” originating from an artistic “personality as distinct as that of Douris, or Epiktetos, or… any other vase-painter whose name has been preserved,” can in fact only be “intelligible as a personal system,” for it is too “definite, coherent, distinct, and in some respects so wilful” for any other conclusion.35 Drawing after the vases helped Beazley to grasp these distinct personalities through his keen aesthetic intuition. Paradoxically, however, as Neer has shown, “style is the one thing a tracing cannot show,” if Beazley’s dedication to “artisanal wholeness and originality” is followed to extremes.36 On this account, Beazley emerges as torn between incompatible definitions of his project: the totalizing, quasi-scientific aspirations of ARV and his actual connoisseurial method on the one hand, and a sensibility of aesthetic encounter across the millennia on the other. The problem of indistinct artistic personalities (the “Group of E,” for example) is the ineluctable outcome of this reevaluation of the connoisseurial project in which the clashing demands and parameters of the two approaches come to rest in an uneasy stalemate.

  • 37 As will become clear shortly, the claim is different from and stronger than Kurtz’s point (Kurtz 1 (...)
  • 38 Here I am drawing loosely on theorists such as Hayden White, who argues that history is only const (...)

14I wholeheartedly agree with these arguments. Yet Beazley is not only torn between the encyclopedic and aesthetic ambitions of his connoisseurship, but also dominated by a “metanarrative” of artistic change that he inherited from the study of Renaissance art.37 This is an important feature of his work not least because it actually went some way to accommodating the incommensurability of the two accounts just sketched out. As he comes to employ this narrative structure, Beazley historicizes the painters in a way his earlier work did not. This move sets up a dialectic between his facts and his stories, that is between his individual attributions and the overall structure and development of the system of red-figure painting, such that cognition of the one shapes cognition of the other.38 The clearest illustration of these contentions is provided by the case of the group of painters Beazley dubbed the “Mannerists”: the Pan Painter, the Pig Painter, the Perseus Painter, and others. Like their namesake, these vase-painters have not been ranked among the masters of the craft (save the Pan Painter).

  • 39 Miedema 1978-1979, p. 19. See also Smyth [1963] 1992 on the concept of Mannerism.

15Beazley’s name for this group is derived ultimately from the Italian word maniera, cognate with English “manner,” capable of meaning both “manner” or “way” (i.e., of doing something) as well as “style” (in a specifically artistic sense). It even includes the idea of being “overstylized” – that is, imbued with “style” as opposed to “nature.” Usually, “Mannerism” refers to the period around the middle of the 16th century, toward the end of the Renaissance, when schools of painting characterized by certain stylistic features such as “artificiality, unnatural poses, excessive ornamentation, and disjunction between form and content” arose.39 As such, it is simultaneously a term of opprobrium or praise (e.g., Vasari’s “bella maniera” and “maniera moderna”) for a particular way of doing things artistically, a way of denoting a certain relationship of artistic and cultural traditions, and finally also a description of the kinds of things people painted. In essence, when someone uses the term “Mannerist,” they might be making a claim that the object being described has a particular style or look (e.g. the way certain people were painting in Rome in the 1530s) or that it stands in a certain relationship to a preceding period, by definition “Classic” in some sense.

  • 40 Beazley [1931] 1947, p. 9 (“…what I had in mind when I first used the term was the Antwerp manneri (...)
  • 41 Quote from Friedlander 1965, p. 98.
  • 42 Beazley [1931] 1947, p. 9.
  • 43 Ibid., p. 9.

16To make matters even more confusing, however, the term came to be applied to painted Attic pottery not as an allusion to Italian Mannerism, but to its distant cousin, so-called Antwerp Mannerism.40 Antwerp Mannerism is itself a loosely-defined movement or period within Netherlandish painting, including within its compass works mostly by anonymous masters, but also some panels by a few famous ones as well – including Jan Gossaert, “the first mannerist and corrupter of art.”41 For Beazley’s analogical denomination of the Attic Mannerists, the relevant features of Antwerp Mannerism were its practitioners’ “incongruous mixture of old forms and new, and their reduction of both to a pretentious calligraphy.”42 He goes on to make it even more clear that his use of “Mannerist” is not meant as a stylistic description, but relational, by adding the further clarification that “as those [Antwerp Mannerists] stood to late Gothic and to Renaissance, these [early Attic Mannerists] stood to late archaic art and to early classical. Whether the new ingredients or the old predominated in the mixture I did not ask myself. If ‘archaizing’ or ‘sub-archaizing mannerists’ would express my meaning better, I should be willing to add the adjective.”43

17For Beazley, then, the Perseus Painter, the Pan Painter, and their colleagues can plausibly be referred to as “Mannerist” because they, too, are largely anonymous craftsmen who unsuccessfully mix old and new stylistic elements: it is not that they draw in a way somehow similar to their Renaissance eponyms, but rather that they stand in an identical relationship to the artistic tradition which they inherited and misused: inept archaizing in the service of “pretentious calligraphy.”

  • 44 Ibid., p. 9.
  • 45 Beazley 1989, p. 8.

18But there are two other categories of Athenian vase-painters who are at times referred to as Mannerists by Beazley and, more frequently, by others. These are, first, the black-figure painters Elbows Out and the Affecter, and, second, the late classical Meidias Painter and others of his ilk. Beazley traces the lineage of the early red-figure Mannerist workshop from Phintias to Myson and on to the Mannerists proprement dits; but that group, the black-figure group, and the Meidian group do not necessarily have any workshop lineage or didactic connections to one another. Indeed, Beazley specifically denies that the black- and red-figure mannerists are historically connected; they are mere “analogous phenomena: but no more.”44 The black-figure painters are Mannerists because they “cleave to the traditional style, and glory in just these features which were beginning to seem old-fashioned.”45 The case of the Meidias Painter, active ca. 420 and on, is very different. He was the very first Greek vase-painter to be described as “Mannerist” – by Georges Nicole’s 1908 Meidias et le style fleuri dans la céramique attique and in his case it is not a reference to his putative archaizing tendencies but to his florid, expressionistic, and stylized manner of painting.

19So, to sum up, the black-figure Mannerists are so called on the basis of their rather precious love for the archaic; the early red-figure Mannerist workshop is so called on the basis of a relational analogy to the Renaissance movement; and the Meidias Painter and his circle have received the appellation from one of the other senses of maniera, viz. extreme stylization at the expense of the naturalism supposedly on offer with the high classical painters.

  • 46 Beazley 1963, p. 562.

20Note how we have veered into heavily evaluative, value-laden terminology: the Mannerists’ drawing is a “pretentious calligraphy”; theirs is an “incongruous mixture” of old and new; they specialized in “third-rate column-kraters.”46 Beazley did not think much of either the Attic or the Antwerp Mannerists. Yet the latter served as a cognitive resource for Beazley as he distinguished the former. Indeed, his language suggests that he saw the history of stylistic development as composed of pieces of only a few shapes: the black- and early red-figure Mannerists are “analogous phenomena,” for example; and they are analogous not only with one another but with the sixteenth-century group of Antwerp Mannerists as well.

  • 47 Ibid., p. 550.
  • 48 Ibid., p. 562, 567.

21In short, we have come very far from the scientific air of ARV I emphasized above. Under the surface, aesthetics is too powerful to be tamed. Beazley actually separates out the Pan Painter in a different chapter from the early Mannerists solely because he is “far above them: an exquisite artist.”47 He thereby sacrifices classificatory precision in order to express his taste. Yet we have also come very far from the aesthetic sensibilities of “Citharoedus.” Does the Pig Painter, for example, or the Leningrad Painter, have a “coherent and comprehensive system of renderings,” is he a “personality as distinct as Douris, or Epiktetos”? Beazley’s answer, I think, can only be no. According to Beazley, the former “continues the style of Myson” (this is the whole of his stylistic analysis), while the latter is a “‘brother’ of the Pig Painter, but less Mysonian.”48

  • 49 Michael Padgett objects to me (per epistulam) that the Leningrad and Pig Painters “were individual (...)

22The first two of the early red-figure Mannerists are defined, then, by their continuation of a different artist’s style – despite Beazley’s protestations that style is “a sacred thing, the man himself.” He should really have written the “the manner of Myson,” surely.49 Yet the Pig Painter and his ilk can be included within Beazley’s system, despite their lack of their own individual, spiritual, and artistic individuality, because they are essential features of a narrative universe in which style overpowers human agency – as it must for a history of art. The Mannerists are important because they reveal, not only that Beazley was (of course) perfectly capable of incorporating low-quality work within his scheme, but more importantly that he was able to do so in part by accommodating such work and such artists within a narrative of artistic change understood as the timeless repetition of “analogous phenomena,” the same stories over again. Beazley could simply have called the Pig Painter a poor artist and grudgingly included his work in ARV. Instead, he placed him within an artistic movement, Mannerism, cognitively patterned on and derived from Renaissance art history. This move enabled Beazley to inscribe low-quality artists within a metanarrative of a great artistic tradition and to ascribe to them a certain amount of meaning. No longer is the Pig Painter simply bad; instead, he is a Mannerist; not as good as being an “exquisite artist,” one supposes, but it is better to play a small role in a grand story than to be booted offstage.

Conclusion

  • 50 The quotation is from Neer forthcoming; I thank Richard Neer for sharing an early version of this (...)

23It is not that there was a continuum, from awful to good or from un-prestigious to genius, and that the label “Mannerist” enabled Beazley to inch a few artists slightly to the right on the scale, thereby salvaging his connoisseurship from the problems of quality and artistic individuality. My argument is different. Beazley never acknowledged those issues, even though the indistinctness of many of his groups and artists was a “lever that threatens to tumble the whole edifice.”50 Nor, again, am I following Neer’s account, that Beazley simply wishes away the contradictions between the different ways of conceiving authorship within the connoisseurial project. Rather, I am suggesting that Beazley was able radically to transform the conception of connoisseurship he inherited – one focused around masterpieces and individual artists imbued with genius – and arrive at the all-embracing classificatory impulse behind ARV not just by dismissing any contradictions, but by re-valuing the values of connoisseurship. In place of artistic quality, Beazley installed a narrative ethics: the individual works of most painters might still be shoddy work – “third-rate column-kraters” – but that would no longer mean that those painters are unworthy of appreciation or study, but that they are to be appreciated on different grounds, now furnished by a broader narrative of artistic evolution and change. In this way, Beazley was actually able to discard the problematic he had faced earlier in his career and which Neer highlights. The existence of poor artists and the existence of “sequences” and “groups of…” are totally different issues – the former is unfortunate if natural, while the latter ought to be epistemologically unsettling– but Beazley somehow collapsed them into one and the same.

  • 51 Beazley 1910, 1911, 1912a, b, and c, 1918, and 1914, respectively.
  • 52 Beazley 1910, p. 38 (referring of course to Hartwig 1893).
  • 53 Beazley 1910, p. 39.
  • 54 On the latter process, see Neer 1997. The Beazley publications of greatest methodological interest (...)

24To illustrate how this process worked, consider Beazley’s very earliest publications: “Kleophrades”; “The Master of the Berlin Amphora”; “The Master of the Troilus-hydria in the British Museum”; “The Master of the Boston Pan-krater”; “The Master of the Villa Giulia Calyx-crater”; and so on, until he began to work instead on Attische Vasenmaler. These earlier articles are not minor pieces; “Kleophrades” is thirty pages, a 1914 article on the Achilles Painter was forty-seven.51 In “Kleophrades,” Beazley writes of an “important painter” who had appeared in a book called Meisterschalen – the very title assimilating its contents to Renaissance masters.52 The article proceeds to trace a story of this artistic personality’s development, which “like other artists” he did not “attain… all at once,” although he does force his “new and strong personality” into view in his earliest works.53 This article is also precious evidence for Beazley’s working method; it is one of maybe four or five to really go into details about the minute evidence Beazley examined in the course of distinguishing an artist’s style and disentangling his oeuvre from the rest of Attic vase-painting.54 Despite this concern with technique, its primary focus is on the individual artistic personality of ‘Kleophrades’ (not yet the Kleophrades Painter), with Beazley’s stylistic comments perhaps more effusive and luxurious than he offers anywhere else, excepting Vases in America and “Citharoedus.”

  • 55 Compare it, for example, with the German stylistic chronology of pre-Beazley times, as discussed i (...)
  • 56 Beazley 1918, p. 113 (“there is no finer vase anywhere, than the bell-krater with Pan pursuing a s (...)

25After the 1920s, however, Beazley no longer wrote articles of this kind. By writing Vases in America, I believe, he had discovered the value of narrativizing his study of vase-painting. Unlike his early articles, which took shape around individual painters, that book presented a history of red-figure painting from the Andokides to the Meidias Painter. In this way, he combined his own attributional connoisseurship with the broader stylistic developmental story told by earlier scholars.55 This narrative frame forced him to include “minor” artists instead of focusing solely on the Berlin Painters of the world. Thus, for example, the Leningrad Painter – at this point called the See-Saw Painter – is treated immediately alongside the Pan Painter, despite the latter painting a bell-krater inferior, in Beazley’s estimation, to no other Greek vase anywhere.56 The historical orientation of the book likewise enabled Beazley to reflect more deeply on artistic tradition and the place that minor artists, “groups of…” and “sequences” might play in it. Clearly, the process of Beazley’s own development, like the Kleophrades Painter’s, did not occur all at once, but Vases in America furnishes an indispensable link between the earlier studies of individual artists and the later monumental lists.

  • 57 A shorter version of this article was presented at the AIA Annual Meeting in January 2015. I would (...)

26And as the Mannerists show, it is not just a narrative frame, any narrative frame, that allowed Beazley to reconcile the competing demands of aesthetics and encyclopaedism, but specifically one that attached meaning even to artistically unappealing movements and workshops. Beazley took stylistic developments in Attic painted pottery to be “phenomena analogous’ to stylistic development in Renaissance art. Individual masters could coexist with indistinct “groups of…” and shoddy painters, because stylistic evolution had become more important than individual genius in Beazley’s newly conceived narrative ethics. It is a masterpiece of rhetoric: Beazley defined and used his terms in such a way that apparent contradictions were in fact dissolved into an uneasy synthesis of science and art.57

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Notes

1 Some examples of the former view: Robertson 1976 and 1992, p. 2-7 (both non-polemic, serious engagements with Beazley); Williams 1996 (reasserting the importance of connoisseurship in general against Vickers and Gill); Oakley 1998. Of the latter: Beard 1986; Shanks 1996; Whitley 1997. Many of the more recently critiques of Beazley’s method, or, rather, of its implications, were prefigured by Edmond Pottier: see Rouet 2001 and Kurtz 2004. One of the best overviews at a distance – sympathetic yet balanced – of Beazleyan connoisseurship is in Sparkes 1996, p. 90-113. Finally, Gill, Chippendale 1993 (on Cycladic figurines) remains among the best expositions of the conceptual issues involved in the relationship between the art market and looting. There is of course a large bibliography on individual cases of allegedly looted Attic vases and related issues (one recent journalistic treatment of looting and the art market discusses many such cases: Watson, Todeschini 2006).

2 Whitley 1997, p. 45.

3 For example, Ernst Langlotz’s work on stylistic synchronisms across media in late Archaic and early Classical art is surely more important (Langlotz 1920); Whitley’s comment also overlooks the importance of independent stylistic chronologies in other media and that so many canonical Greek artworks lack archaeological context (including the ceramics by which stratigraphic units could be dated using Beazley’s work).

4 Kurtz 1985a. Kurtz had already published a lengthier methodological study more focused on connoisseurial practice than on its intellectual history (Kurtz 1983). Additionally, important remarks on the topic had already been made by Ashmole (see his contribution to Kurtz 1985b, p. 65-66, and Williams 1996, p. 241, n. 55) and by Robertson 1965.

5 Rodriguez Pérez et al. 2016. Also see now Rodríguez Pérez 2018, which unfortunately appeared after this article had been accepted and could not be taken fully into account.

6 Neer 1997, 2000, 2005, 2009, and forthcoming.

7 Robertson 1965.

8 There is a large bibliography on Morelli. For several important and useful discussions, see Wollheim 1973; Zerner 1978; Ginzberg 1980; Anderson 1987; finally, see Elsner 1990 for the idea of Beazley as Morellian.

9 Dyfri Williams points out that Beazley “never once mentioned Morelli’s name in print” despite being “always punctilious in his writings to acknowledge a debt” (Williams 1996, 241). On the other hand, Williams is also eager to emphasize the autonomous tradition of attribution studies within classical archaeology, beginning (he says) with Winckelmann, and learned by Beazley from Hartwig, Hauser, and Furtwängler. Likewise, Oakley 1998 and 2009, p. 605-606, reject any relationship between Beazley and Morelli.

10 Williams 1996, p. 243; Oakley 2009, p. 606.

11 The Beazley Archive’s recent digital publication of Beazley’s working notebooks proves that he did work in large part by comparing the manner of rendering specific details of human anatomy, as was always clear. These notebooks are available online at http://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/tools/beazley/. Controversy over Morelli seems to have dropped out of Beazley-related discussions in recent years.

12 Rouet 2001, p. 79-81, established that Beazley was familiar with broadly Morellian connoisseurship while at Oxford; his knowledge of Berenson’s work can be documented (Berenson being the main figure responsible for popularizing and adapting Morelli’s writings; see Berenson 1927 and [1894-1902] 1962). While at Oxford, Beazley and his circle were very invested in all manner of aesthetic pursuits, from painting to poetry (Rouet 2001, p. 75-92, esp. p. 81-87). For a biography of James Elroy Flecker, a poet with whom Beazley was extremely close – and who wrote for Beazley a poem entitled “Invitation to a young but learned friend to abandon archaeology for a moment, and play once more with his neglected Muse” – see Sherwood 1973. According to the online Dictionary of Art Historians, Boardman speculated that Andrew Gow could have been the one to introduce Morellian techniques to Beazley: Sorensen n.d.

13 It has also been suggested that these German scholars only worked on signed material and did not really understand the possibility of attributing vases beyond those known from signatures. In fact, Hartwig, Hauser, Furtwängler, and even Pottier all identified painters solely on style, in the same general way as did Beazley – who often took over and renamed their discoveries. The Foundry Painter, for example, was originally Hartwig’s Diogenes Painter. At the same time, objections to the idea that Beazley drew on intellectual currents outside classical archaeology continue to perplex; Williams himself acknowledges that Morelli’s writing would have been well known within German scholarly circles when Beazley began to publish (Williams 1996, p. 241), and while it is true that Beazley never cited Morelli or Berenson, the ease with which Beazley slipped into metaphors (and “metanarratives”) derived from Renaissance art history (such as the workshop terminology, “Mannerism,” the idea of school-pieces, and so forth) suggests that he was familiar with developments in that field. Most importantly of all, Furtwängler engages with Morellian techniques in Meisterwerke der griechischen Plastik (Furtwängler 1893) so Beazley was certainly indirectly familiar with Morelli’s techniques (for a different view on the connection between Furtwängler and Morelli, see Beard 2002 with the review by Boardman 2005).

14 Somewhat neglected to date are two extremely important predecessors. First, J.C. Hoppin (1919b), whose Handbook of Attic Red-figured Vases Signed by or Attributed to the Various Masters of the Sixth and Fifth Centuries B.C. came out in 1919 (six years before Beazley’s first such publication : Beazley 1925), was an important peer of Beazley’s (they reviewed one another’s books – see Beazley 1917 and Hoppin 1919a – and Hoppin was instrumental in the appearance of Attic Red-figured Vases in American Museums), even if he did not, in retrospect, have anything like the latter’s scope or vision. Second, Richard Norton quite precisely presages Beazley and even prefigures some of his dicta. Beazley, for example, famously declared that “the name of an artist is the least important thing about him” (Beazley 1918, p. v). Norton wrote that “the name of the [painter] is not of the slightest value….an algebraic equation would do quite as well” (Norton 1896, p. 4). Indeed, this was a rather prescient comment, as the barrage of “Group of Agora P24327” and the like reinforce the superficially scientific nature of the enterprise, just as does the phrase “algebraic equation.”

15 Kurtz 1985a, p. 240; Neer 2009, p. 40.

16 Another issue on which it would be impossible to give a full bibliography; suffice to say that this line of thought often descends from Barthes’ infamous proclamation of the “death of the author” and from Foucault’s ruminations on the “author function” (Barthes 1967; Foucault [1969] 1977) and, perhaps more crucially, often occurs in conjunction with objections against the art market and collection as such (see above, n. 1).

17 Rembrandt connoisseurship is a most illuminating instance of the theoretical issues at stake, partly because his workshop arrangements were unlike most of his contemporaries in that he did not merely use his students as assistants on his own work, but instead ran a more open and informal studio in which his pupils fluidly collaborated with one another, and with Rembrandt himself, on their own work, which he often permitted them to sell under his name. Thus, purely technical issues of attribution become caught up in historical questions about the pedagogical and institutional structure of the workshop itself. Many pieces can only tentatively be assigned to a particular hand. On Rembrandt’s pedagogy and workshop, see Haverkamp-Begemann 1969 and Alpers 1988, ch. 3-4. On Rembrandt’s pedagogy more broadly, and specifically its origins in his own training with Lastman, see Tümpel, Tümpel 1974 and Tümpel 1991. The flagship publication of the Rembrandt Research Project itself is its Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, published in five volumes from 1982 to 2011 (and thereafter discontinued). For overviews, see Tummers 2011, which is the most recent major discussion of the connoisseurship of the RRP and of seventeenth century painting in general, and White 2015; I owe the former reference to Richard Neer. Finally, Bevers et al. 2009 is a handbook of sorts of the connoisseurship of drawings by Rembrandt and his pupils.

18 Tummers 2011, p. 39-50, provides a history of the RRP.

19 Quote from Alpers 1988, p. 2.

20 Tummers 2011, p. 40, surveys the arsenal of analytic methods employed by the RRP, which are primarily effective for ruling a work in or out of the seventeenth century rather than assisting in the discrimination between hands.

21 For commentary on the opposition between connoisseurship as scientific and connoisseurship as intuitive and “purely subjective,” and so not only unscientific but also unacademic (on this account), see Tummers 2011, p. 50-53.

22 As they are called. In fact, of course, Beazley’s “lists” are much, much more than mere lists: Beazley 1942, 1956, 1963, and 1971 (plus Carpenter et al. 1989).

23 See Neer forthcoming, as well as Neer 1997 and 2009. François Lissarrague points out to me that an important distinction between Beazley’s connoisseurship of black- and red-figure is his inability to match in black-figure the success he had in individuating the corpus of red-figure. The problem of the groups and sequences is discussed as a straightforward methodological issue by Hubert Giroux in his review of Paralipomena (Giroux 1975, p. 294-95): “La notion de groupe recouvre des affinités de style, soit trop peu nombreuses pour permettre d’affirmer qu’il s’agit d’un seul homme, soit très larges et englobant les manières de plusieurs peintres… il ne faut pas oublier que la manière d’un artiste évolue.”

24 Robertson 1965, p. 91.

25 Quote from Beazley 1989, p. 9. Later he attributes appreciation of Nikosthenes to a “lack of discrimination” (ibid., p. 67).

26 Kurtz 1985a, p. 245-246 (quoting Beazley 1918, p. v-vi).

27 Just for example, Hoppin praised Beazley’s work for its care and rigor (above, n. 14).

28 Letter from Beazley to Martin Robertson’s parents, of May 1911, quoted by Robertson 1976, p. 32-33 (emphasis in original).

29 ARV2 18.3 (Beazley 1963, p. 18).

30 See Neer 1997 on attribution as a process of implicit comparison against the whole of red-figure.

31 The latter, obviously, contributed to the creation and reproduction of Beazley’s authority. Also see following note.

32 Indeed, reviews of Beazley’s lists, written by fellow specialists such as Martin Robertson (Robertson 1965) and Hubert Giroux (Giroux 1975), tend to take the form of lists supplementing or modifying Beazley’s own, and of extremely technical comments on Beazley’s judgments. As early as 1919, Hoppin 1919a, reviewing Beazley 1918, criticized Beazley for not justifying some “debatable” attributions, discusses which scholars have agreed or disagreed with this or that attribution, and closes his review with a list of errata.

33 Emphasis added to Beazley 1956, p. x.

34 The emphasis on drawing after pots is ubiquitous in discussions of Beazley’s method, from his own (Beazley 1989, p. 98-102 – material delivered in lectures in 1943 and 1956) on to Kurtz 1985a and Neer 2009 and Neer forthcoming, where the connoisseurial tradition and Pater’s importance are also discussed. See Beazley 1929 for a rare “late” publication to make heavy use of his drawings (including of black-figure).

35 Quotes from Beazley 1922, p. 81, 84, and 90.

36 Neer 1997, p. 19-20.

37 As will become clear shortly, the claim is different from and stronger than Kurtz’s point (Kurtz 1985a, p. 246-247) that Beazley uses Renaissance-art terminology (workshops, school-pieces, etc.).

38 Here I am drawing loosely on theorists such as Hayden White, who argues that history is only constituted as such through a process of literary emplotment (the transformation of discrete “facts” into a narrative, such that even the most objective, scientific history commonly employs literary plot devices). See, in particular, White 1973 and 1978.

39 Miedema 1978-1979, p. 19. See also Smyth [1963] 1992 on the concept of Mannerism.

40 Beazley [1931] 1947, p. 9 (“…what I had in mind when I first used the term was the Antwerp mannerists of the early sixteenth century…”); Mannack 2001, p. 4.

41 Quote from Friedlander 1965, p. 98.

42 Beazley [1931] 1947, p. 9.

43 Ibid., p. 9.

44 Ibid., p. 9.

45 Beazley 1989, p. 8.

46 Beazley 1963, p. 562.

47 Ibid., p. 550.

48 Ibid., p. 562, 567.

49 Michael Padgett objects to me (per epistulam) that the Leningrad and Pig Painters “were individual human beings, rescued from obscurity by the recognition of their unique ‘hands’, hands no harder to distinguish than those of the Kleophrades Painter and the Berlin Painter.” I, however, would maintain that what Beazley does in separating them out is not so different from attributing vases to “near” or “in the manner of” Myson. The difference would seem to lie in the fact that Beazley felt he could group together a certain subset of pieces in a Mysonian style under the rubric “Pig Painter,” while leaving others defined solely by being close-to-but-not-by Myson. Beazley, and other connoisseurs, may be very certain that the Pig Painter is a discrete human artist, but the way Beazley discusses this painter shows that he is exclusively understood vis-à-vis his relationship to Myson. To draw an analogy, painters like Myson and the Berlin Painter are planets surrounded by debris clouds: vases that have accreted about them under the gravitational pull of stylistic similarity. The Pig Painter is a moon that has coalesced out of such debris; he is a unified entity. But he is Myson’s satellite, not another planet altogether separate in the way that the Berlin Painter is.

50 The quotation is from Neer forthcoming; I thank Richard Neer for sharing an early version of this work with me in advance of its publication. As he argues, “skepticism about attribution generalizes very quickly, and the school-pieces are a lever that threatens to tumble the whole edifice. That Beazley never addressed this question – that he went right up the edge of it, without actually taking the plunge – suggests that he did not see it as an issue…. Beazley’s notion of a school as a collection of men who are essentially conduits, creations of the master, is flatly incongruous with the premise that every person has an individual style that is potentially recognizable in connoisseurship.”

51 Beazley 1910, 1911, 1912a, b, and c, 1918, and 1914, respectively.

52 Beazley 1910, p. 38 (referring of course to Hartwig 1893).

53 Beazley 1910, p. 39.

54 On the latter process, see Neer 1997. The Beazley publications of greatest methodological interest are Beazley 1911, 1922, and 1927.

55 Compare it, for example, with the German stylistic chronology of pre-Beazley times, as discussed in the references given by Langlotz 1920, passim, but especially p. 3-5.

56 Beazley 1918, p. 113 (“there is no finer vase anywhere, than the bell-krater with Pan pursuing a shepherd…”).

57 A shorter version of this article was presented at the AIA Annual Meeting in January 2015. I would like to thank François Lissarrague, Richard Neer, Michael Padgett, and Andrew Stewart for conversations, challenges, and comments in 2014 as well as more recently. I am additionally very grateful to Richard Neer for showing me the forthcoming work to which I have referred above. In thanks for his inspirational teaching and mentorship when I was an undergraduate student, this essay is dedicated to Richard.

Auteur

American School of Classical Studies at Athens

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