Every artist has to decide for themselves, at some
early stage of their careers, how they see themselves in relationship to the
past. Even the most avant-garde artist makes such a choice, if by negation. For
those interested in engagement with tradition, that choice often falls to some
kind of imitation—whether literal replication, or the pessimism behind presumed
inferiority with respect to the past. Who today, one could ask, would have the
hubris to think they can rival Bernini, or Cortona, or Borromini? Yet that is
how they saw their relationship with each other, and their contemporaries with
them: emulation, rivalry by imitation, or competitive deference are each
different ways of describing the same thing—a critical optimism about the
possibility of exceeding one’s contemporaries or predecessors.
I
had the chance to see the wonderful Guardi show at the Museo Correr in Venice a couple of weeks ago, and learned that
Guardi’s compositions often began with a Canaletto print—which he then
transformed and translated into his own idiom of composition and brushstroke.
It partly explains the often unconvincing perspectives in Guardi’s work that
they are imitative without fully comprehending, but his brushwork comes off
instead as a deliberate challenge to his more successful contemporary’s
increasingly mechanical painting technique. Guardi was not mimicking Canaletto,
he was challenging him—partly on Canaletto’s terms, partly on Guardi’s own. If
their critical fortunes have oscillated vis-à-vis each other, it is only to say
that they can never be confused with each other, that their affinities only
serve to highlight their differences.
In
another way, I saw the opening of a show in which I participated, of foreign
artists working en plein air in Civita Castellana; the work of today’s plein
air painters is a unique case of a living emulative tradition, where every
artist acknowledges in some way or another the achievements of Corot and other
models. The same might also be said of the genre of still life.
Maybe
only a handful of fresco artists plays on the same emulative field; with so
little opportunity there is really no emulative camp of classical figurative
painters; portraiture, but its particular nature, resists comparison with
previous work, except among the most elemental compositions (all the rhetorical
staffage of Old Master portraiture is anathema today). In architecture most
classicists are too timid to be emulative, and the opportunities are not there
in reality to prove them wrong (if we had a culture of paper architecture maybe
the comparison could be made, but I may be the only practicing architect today
who values that).
