Around six hundred years ago, the Florentine sculptor Donatello made a marble statue, almost two meters tall, of the Jewish prophet Habakkuk. The statue was commissioned for a niche on the Campanile which stands adjacent to the Duomo in the centre of Florence. Habakkuk’s large, distinctive bald head looked down on the people below with a stern gaze and disconcerting intensity. As the authors of my history of Florentine art note, not even the enormous drapery folds, falling with such energy and grandness of scale, distract attention from the head of this prophetic orator, who appears to serve as conduit between the unfathomable and the human. He looks a true prophet and there appears nothing ‘minor’ about his strength of his thoughts or character.
A century later, in the Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari told a story that while Donatello was making this statue he became so affected by its likeness to life that he used to curse it, saying, Speak, damn you, speak! Today, I suspect this behaviour is more likely to be read as a sign of Donatello’s eccentricity than his artistic genius, for we would think it implausible that he might seriously have believed that the stone figure he was carving could ever talk back to him, however impressive his achievement. However, the art critic Peter Schjeldahl made an interesting observation about this story, drawing attention to the book of Habakkuk in the Old Testament, which includes God’s rebuke to those who worship idols: Woe to him who says to wood, “Come to life!”, Or to lifeless stone, “Wake up!” (Habakkuk 2: 19). Has Vasari conflated the sculptor’s behaviour towards the statue with the warning against sin given by the prophet on whom the statue is based? Alternatively, as Schjeldahl suggests, is there a more intriguing explanation, namely that Donatello, an artist of unfathomable intelligence, was inspired, or somehow driven, to play out in stone a spiritual danger intrinsic to art.
Vasari was not the first Italian to tell a tale about a sculptor who desired communion with a statue. In Book Ten of Metamorphoses, written two thousand years ago, Ovid relates the story of Pygmalion, who had long lived on his own / without a wife and shared his bed with no-one (translation by Stephanie McCarter). Pygmalion carved a beautiful statue of a woman from white ivory and fell in love with his own creation. He dressed her in clothes, adorned her with jewellery, brought her presents, kissed her, spoke with her, and worried that he might bruise her arms when he held her. He was very besotted and not a little deluded. At a festival to celebrate Venus, the goddess of love, Pygmalion made an offering and then prayed that he might be given a wife who looked just like his statue. When he returned home and kissed the ivory lips and body, they seemed to him soft and warm. His prayer had been answered and nine months later, a baby was born to the happy couple.
Ovid’s idea that a man might ‘make” for himself the perfect companion has had a lasting resonance within Western culture. As McCarter notes, there is Mary Shelley’s Gothic horror story, Frankenstein (1818), involving a scientist who brought to life a collection of inanimate body parts through bioelectricity, and came to regret his experiment, and there is also Carlo Collodi’s story of Pinocchio (1883), involving a father who made himself a son out of wood. Just over a century ago, George Bernard Shaw reworked Ovid’s myth in his play Pygmalion (1913), that later became the film My Fair Lady (1964), and more recently the film Pretty Woman (1990) repeated this trick. Finally, Alex Garland’s movie Ex Machina (2014) blended the Pygmalion and Frankenstein stories together and added a new technological twist. Given the persistence of this theme, perhaps we should concede that Donatello’s desire to converse with his creation was not so unusual. But, I wonder, if the statue of Habakkuk had spoken back to him, what would he have said?
According to Vernon Lee, If men have been in love with statues, it is because they have substituted for them the flesh and blood images of their memory (Gallery Diaries, 1901-04). Vernon Lee was the authorial name of Violet Paget, born in France in 1856 to English parents, who lived as a child in France, Germany, and Switzerland, before settling in Florence where she wrote on art, psychology, music, gardens, travel, and feminism, and in addition published some fictional stories. Lee was a regular visitor to galleries, looking repeatedly at art works she knew well, and in her diaries she documented the way that her emotional and psychological states affected what she saw. She also wrote about the way the art works she saw affected her moral sensibilities, and while recently reading excerpts from the Gallery Diaries (published by David Zwirner Books) I came across her insightful account of how different art forms exert their influence in different ways.
Lee writes that when we see an artistic form – whether a statue or a painted figure – that is recognisably human, it can awaken in us the same feelings that are normally prompted by our observations of real people. We might feel sympathy, or desire, or pain, for example, because the artistic form prompts us to refer to memories that were laid down in our minds following our experience of similar observations of lived human experience. Thus, when we look at a painting of the Madonna and Child, our response to the image will in part be determined by the sorts of memories that we have made when we have previously observed mothers with their babies. The form points us to the memory and, Lee says, it does so in proportion as we dwell little on the work of art and much on the memory impression. This last point is important, because Lee thinks that the longer our attention lingers on the form, the less our moral feelings will be aroused.
If we think about literature – assuming we read books made up only of words and without pictures – there are no visual forms to detain us, so the writing, if it is well done, can immediately awaken our moral response. To the extent that the details of the story resonate with certain elements of our previous experience, we move directly from text to memory. As Lee says, literature … therefore has a “moral power” quite different from that of art. By contrast, the more a painting or a statue holds our attention owing to its formal features – the details of its presentation, through the creative work of the artist – the slower is our progress towards moral feelings as a consequence. Formal strength makes for weaker ethical impact.
Lee makes a further important claim. She thinks that art has the power to purify and elevate the contents of our consciousness because it can reverse this process. As well as the artistic form prompting recall of our moral feelings, the study of art can also provide us with images and experiences that we are able to retrieve and draw upon when confronted directly with human experience. We can learn appropriate moral responses from art and literature and later have recourse to them when faced with real moral challenges: that is, we can also translate reality into form. It is not that looking at great art makes us good, rather that learning from our experience of great art provides us with the resources to do good. (Lee thought this was also true about listening to great music, about which she also wrote.)
Reading Vernon Lee’s diaries prompted three thoughts. First, she wrote at a time when almost all painting and sculpture was figurative, and the close resemblance of artistic images to human forms would therefore act as a visual prompt to the awakening of moral feeling. In our time, when many art works are abstract in form, how might her analysis apply? Part of the attraction of good abstract painting is that it invites the gaze to linger over colour and gesture without the distraction of figuration, which suggests an extended attentiveness to form and correspondingly a reduced moral impact. But, to the contrary, the lack of figuration also allows abstract works to direct us towards more universal moral feelings, which are not constrained by the particular and limited ways in which specific human forms resonate with specific memories of moral feeling.
Second, where art has been created with the specific intention of promoting a moral or political response, does the work have the same power to connect with our moral sensitivities, or do we, in some way, resist the pressure to follow where the artist attempts to lead us? I think this depends significantly on the quality of the work. At its best – say, Aleksandr Deineka – Soviet Realist art can stimulate a sense of our duties to others and the importance of the project of building a better collective future. So too, the work of Käthe Kollwitz, despite the many didactic uses to which she applied her artistic gifts, can be a prompt to feelings of solidarity, and of deep sympathy for those who grieve. The better the art work, the more willing we might be to engage with the moral values that inspired it.
Third, paradoxically, since it is the greatest artists whose work is likely to detain our eyes the longest on the formal properties of their work, these artists might also be less stimulative of our moral feelings. A mediocre painting of the Good Samaritan might direct us quickly to the thought that we ought to do more to help victims of crime and ethnic violence, whereas a brilliant picture might keep our attention firmly on the presentation of victim and benefactor before us. Likewise, while an average statue of David, the Jewish shepherd boy, might prompt us to take renewed courage in our battles with the Goliaths of the present age, Donatello’s David simply encourages us to stare in wonder, and then to say, Speak David, speak!