It hasn’t escaped my attention that since restarting this diary five months ago I haven’t written anything in it about art writing (unless you count my reading of a novel preoccupied with art, Maria Gainza’s Optic Nerve). Maybe it’s that not much art writing needs reading, just scanning. Roberto Longhi’s is the exception. I’ve dabbled in my long-held copy of his collected writing in the Meridiani edition (a sort of Italian equivalent of the Pleiades in France), but really my Italian hardly measures up to the task. Luckily, a couple of his books have been translated. I’d long meant to read, finally, his study of Piero della Francesca. Writing an essay on Pier Paolo Pasolini, who lifelong counted himself Longhi’s student, gave me impetus, as did my involvement in the protest against the postponement of the planned retrospective Philip Guston—Piero was Guston’s favorite painter. But what really made reading this book unavoidable was an anecdote in Anthony Rudolf’s Silent Conversations, the one in which he mentions meeting Stanley Moss at the Savoy Hotel and finding the poet, publisher (of the two Longhi translations, among other good books), and art dealer, in his dressing gown, happily announcing, “Anthony, I have just sold the last remaining Piero della Francesca in private hands.” Did that sale underwrite this publication? Poetico-economic justice. But reading Longhi is nothing like reading the kind of art history that’s written today, or for that matter almost any art history that’s been written since the rise to prominence of iconology right around the time that Longhi’s book was first published in 1927. Longhi belonged to an earlier tradition of aesthetic reflection, connoisseurship, and the history of style, even as he foreshadowed a future that looked beyond the walls of the Warburg Institute—and he embodied style in his writing, which could be highhanded in judgement (his superciliousness toward Fra Angelico infuriates me) and extravagant in construction. Noteworthy that the Meridiani edition, in the “critical anthology” with which it introduces Longhi’s own writings, includes Emilio Cecchi on “Roberto Longhi, Writer” and “Roberto Longhi’s Style,” Gianfranco Contini on “Longhi as Prose Writer,” Giuseppe de Robertis on “Longhi the Writer,” and Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo’s “Note on the Critical Language of Roberto Longhi.” Reading Piero della Francesca is more like reading a novel than reading a work of art history—as long as one understands that I mean, not a “readerly” nineteenth century novel but a “writerly” modernist one, ironic, self-reflective, and self-questioning, put together out of parts (here conceived of as “art,” “life,” and “reputation,” very much in that order—three halves that don’t add up to a whole) that are not meant to match entirely but to leave gaps among them. It’s both the assertions and the gaps that can open into the unforeseen. Here’s a remarkable passage from Longhi’s description of a small panel of St. Jerome with a Donor—he dates it “sometime between 1440 and 1450” whereas the Galleria dell’Accademia di Venezia, which houses it, considers the early 1460s more likely—in which
Man…not only loses the ability to serve as the measure of the world conferred upon him by the terribly anthropomorphic Florentine ideas of the period, but even his very identifying traits. For example, the donor is always described as being in profile. And yet this view of him, at this moment, expands and expresses itself fully against the spotted landscape, so that were we to try to respect the concept of a “profile,” which really has value only in the context of a linear art, we should have to describe the tree as being in profile as well! Our consequent incapacity to distinguish between what is “in profile” and what is, instead, “full face” must lead us to recognize that the stylistic unity of Piero’s painting lies precisely in his continual showing forth of everything straight on, “full face,” with all things composed on the picture plane like colored clods of earth, juxtaposed in the quivering dazzle of full sunlight.
In this “continual showing forth” (prospettata evidenza) one notices in passing a premonition of the “outwardness” that an even more eccentric art writer, Adrian Stokes, was about to start preaching, not to mention the “facingness” that was much later to become important for Michael Fried—all, I think, ways of articulating how the visibility associated with painting might be thematized within the painting and reflected back on its viewer, an exchange that might be implicitly ethical in import. Suddenly I get a better glimpse of the reason for Longhi’s “ontological” import for Pasolini. But I notice too that Longhi’s prose does not imitate this full-face stance; full of twists and side glances, it faces the reader straight-on only in moments of rare impact, and soon turns its curious and judgmental gaze in other directions. But who’s going to publish, at long last, an English translation of the celebrated book in which Longhi chronicled what he saw as the "absolutely monstrous fruits" of Piero's influence on the art of Ferrara, Officina Ferrarese (1934)?
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Roberto Longhi, Piero della Francesca, translated by David Tabbat with an introduction by Keith Christiansen, was published by Stanley Moss – Sheep Meadow Book, Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York, 2002.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.