[All translations are from the Loeb Classical Library unless otherwise specified.]

Tucked away from the courtyard of the Bargello are three statues of David: a marble statue (c. 1409) and a bronze statue (c. 1445) by Donatello, and another bronze statue by Andrea del Verocchio (c. 1475). To the uninitiated, these three are merely different takes on a Biblical figure, aesthetically pleasing, and differing only slightly in form and date. To the art historian, these three statues show how the polis of Florence sought to think of itself as it moved from constitutional rule to a brazen oligarchy to a de facto monarchy (and if we are to believe Piero Soderini, a tyrannical one). Donatello’s marble David is also a potent symbol of how change — the kind that can be appreciated, in any matter — is always a slow, gradual process; it stands on the precipice between the medieval and the modern, the Gothic and the Renaissance, combining with astute skill and genius the slender grace of the figures at Chatres and Reims with the ever-so-slight contrapposto that would prominently feature in yet another marble statue of David, this time by Michelangelo, whose revolutionary republicanism inspired a rather moving image that featured prominently in Florentine imagery. But when did the Gothic end — and when did the Renaissance begin? The tail end of the former and the origins of the latter are almost fungible.

Change is slow, transitions gradual, and ideas important — these are the lessons a good art historian keeps in mind, without forgetting that ever so often, crazes take hold, pandemics happen, and things fall apart: sure signs of the humanity of the men involved in this timeless drama. The polis is where art can articulate itself, where architecture’s aesthetic sensibilities acquire a renewed importance, where sculpture is more than a pleasing figure but an icon. Yet, there is a certain universality in art, and a semblance of empire: the Corinthian capital thrives from the coast of the Pacific to the small islands of the Indian Ocean. Art exists both in time and outside of it.

‘The art historian is curiously and remarkably poised to assume the mantle of political philosopher’ — this is the contention I venture to prove in this essay. It is a markedly niche claim, for there are not very many art historians who seek to move from the bounded, more aesthetically grounded discipline to the vocation of political philosophy, which seeks to transform the inner critic into a honed and astute thinker. The art historian, I hypothesise, is well suited to the pursuit of political philosophy, because: (1) a good art historian is well versed in the essential texts of poetry, prose, and of the particulars of history; (2) art history is an intrinsically interdisciplinary field, which does not find itself constrained by disciplinary boundaries; and, perhaps most importantly,  (3) it fosters a strong preference for custom and tradition and a love for the past, but does not create a disposition favourable for stagnation.

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Look, for a moment, at Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s marble statue, Apollo and Daphne, made for the Borghese family. Who is Apollo? Who is Daphne? Where did Apollo and Daphne come from? Why is Apollo chasing about Daphne? What is happening to Daphne’s hands? These are important questions — questions that can be answered only through a systematic approach to cultural literacy, both of the present and of the periods under consideration. ¹ If one does not know who Apollo and Daphne are, one cannot understand why the two are put in motion in this particular manner; it then becomes a symbol of uncultured lust, of the rendering of a shameless and unfettered desire in marble to provide visual relief or merely to fill up space. Similarly, what does Raphael’s Sea of Galatea have to do with the study of the ancient world? What about the differences between Raphael’s Sea of Galatea and Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne?

The fundamental questions that are posed by looking are those of comprehension, which demands literacy. A work, furthermore, has a history, a provenance, in a way analogous to ideas: like ideas have original meaning, works of art have their birth; ideas take on significance as they retain ground, whilst works of art acquire new ‘significances’ (as distinct from their original meaning). ² The art historian is concerned with both, with how the Pantheon looked when it was built by Agrippa as much as when it was rebuilt by Hadrian and then by its Christianisation and then as a tourist attraction today; of Constantine’s St. Peter’s Basilica as well as Michelangelo’s and Bernini’s, and the ambitions of Pope Julius II — who may have only decided to rebuild the nave and not the entire basilica, by one account. Why this style — and not that one? Why this, why that?

It is only fitting that one starts with the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: ³ Apollo and Daphne. Bernini’s seventeenth century sculpture is endowed with meaning with the help of a text from the early years of the Anno Domini; upon close examination this must be stretched even further to examine its place within the world of Greco-Roman mythology, on the incorporation of the Greek pantheon into ancient Roman religion, and of Apollo’s promise to Daphne (Metamorphoses I.560–65):

“With thee shall Roman generals wreathe their heads, when shouts of joy acclaim their triumph, and long processions climb the Capitol[ine Hill]. Thou at Augustus’ portal shalt stand a trusty guardian, and keep watch over the civic crown of oak which hangs between.”

What, then, does Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, which, at first sight is a potentially titivating and licentious sculpture, tell us? Did Bernini seek to emphasise the importance of civic religion, of a publicly declared and supported theology — or did he seek to merely tell a story for the pleasure of those assembled in the Borghese family’s casino? The failure to recall or draw inferences a never ending pit of sources, of rabbit holes, of forms of cultural knowledge that stretch over two millennia is to fail in one’s task as an art historian. The array of knowledge is ceaseless, almost infinite, and requires effort in mastery and recall. More importantly, it shows that what is on the surface is not always the case, that form and matter are both important, and that the pursuit of the ideal of beauty is, along with truth, an importance spectre of the human condition. If the morning’s edition of the New York Times “makes reference to more than 2,000 facts and concepts which the reader is expected to know,” ⁴ the art historian must be able to make these references without hesitation from the Illiad and the Odyssey to Pliny’s Natural History to obscure lines and medieval myths such as the general Belisarius to the obscure Joachim of Fiore, ⁵ all of which play an intrinsic part in understanding what one is looking at. The study of the history of art is the study of culture.

Why, one may ask, is cultural literacy important to the political philosopher? The political philosopher is, in part, a historian of ideas, particularly of political ideas. While he is not enslaved to tradition, he is part of it, and the history of political ideas is instrumental not only as a guide to the discipline, but also as the chronicle of ideas themselves. An appreciation of Machiavelli’s work is made possible by the ability to put oneself into his shoes in the Palazzo Vecchio, haggling with Leonardo da Vinci for a contract for the Battle of Anghiari — or with Michelangelo, whose David was to adorn the other side; of the difficulties faced by the Florentines, despite having had their best days behind them in the century prior, still thought of themselves as the rising economic star of Italy, under which the entire ‘boot’ would unite, or of the radically popular (and, as it turns out, heretical) politics of Fra Savonarola, best known for coining the phrase ‘the bonfire of the vanities’ and convincing Sandro Botticelli to burn his work.

Or even more directly, of the portly figure in Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Sacra Conversazione di Monticelli (originally in the Florentine Servite Church of Santissima Annunziata), holding a codex open toward the viewer. Is it the Summa Theologica? Is it his Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, or his Summa contra Gentiles? What difference would it make if the figure were merely an unnamed ‘dumb ox’, to borrow from G.K. Chesterton, or St. Thomas Aquinas, especially before the Reformation? The study of iconography — of symbols — of what symbols mean in context and in isolation, in particular usage as well as general usage, cannnot be restricted to a single ‘field’ of study, to a single disciplinary boundary. The recognition of the complexity of art’s task is a recognition of the intricacies of its study, which refuse to be bounded any more than art itself does. Even math — math, the dreaded system of numbers most aesthetes find themselves deeply uncomfortable with — and retail trade, which both Plato and Aristotle decry in their respective dialogues and treatises, are important for understanding art and aesthetic experience, even that of an altarpiece ⁶.

Similarly, what was Machiavelli’s revolt — what was he rebelling against? And what does St. Thomas Aquinas have to do with Quattrocento and Cinquecento Florence? As it turns out, a surprising lot, as Jacob Burckhardt notes: Pietro Boscoli, facing imprisonment and sure death after a failed sedition against the Medici in 1513, receives comfort from Aquinas’ political teachings: “A friend and the confessor both had to assure him that St. Thomas Aquinas condemned conspirators absolutely; but the confessor afterwards admitted to the same friend that St. Thomas drew a distinction and permitted conspiracies against a tyrant who had forced himself on a people against their will.” ⁷ Perhaps it is only fitting that the first chapter of Burckhardt’s landmark study is entitled ‘The State as a Work of Art’, a political statement as much as a study of the different forms of political organisation in late medieval and early modern Europe.

This brings me to my last point, which is the most important: it fosters a strong preference for custom and tradition and a love for the past, but does not create a disposition favourable for stagnation. Philosophy, properly understood, exists at the extremes, at the complete accession or the total negation of a concept. The desire to create a world from a ‘veil of ignorance’ á la John Rawls or to make differing and rather nonsensical ‘states of nature’ á la Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau is only possible when one cannot find beauty and harmony in the works of civilisation. The desire to create the world anew, or to think it to be a tabula rasa which we inhabit without any prior thought is dangerous, too, but it is impossible to think it so when one is enchanted with the world and understands what is worth preserving.

Michael Oakeshott’s discussion of the voice of poetry is important because it includes both contemplation as study of ‘poetry’, which is loosely defined as the arts, and the arts themselves in their finest incarnation. Oakeshott posits that “disenchantment, or the more permanent detachment which belongs to a practical attitude of ‘fatalism’, commonly induce (or perhaps are only other names for) lethargy in practice which contains an intimation of the leisureness which belongs to contemplation.” ⁸ What Oakeshott means when he suggests that “poetry appears when imagining is contemplative imagining,” ⁹ I think, can be amended without difficulty whilst simultaneously pushing its boundaries to suggest that it does not end in the most part in “larger patterns which are themselves only more complex images and not conclusions” ¹⁰ but it also means engaging in the process of contemplative creation of the sort that seeks to understand ‘things’ such as Donatello’s David which “offer resistance to being read symbolically.” ¹¹ The art historian does not merely mine documentary evidence and develop a level of sympathy and attachment with his predecessors and persons and objects of study, but also reads symbolically, iconographically, and finds ways to decipher the meaning of things which are not always so clear. It is a contemplative activity of the Platonic sort, of “activity as copying ideal models,” ¹² one where the world of forms (in a somewhat different sense) is never too far away.

This manifests itself in some important aspects, namely the love for tradition. Anyone who has spent any time in Rome’s Centro Storico will without doubt have been enchanted by the magical sunrise over the Forum and the wondrous cowpaths that seem to wind itself through the streets of the hills, sometimes throwing one up outside the massive Santa Maria Maggiore. But this is a fleeting infatuation, a sentiment that can leave almost as quickly as it comes into being. Studying it with a certain reverence and deference is to guarantee its lasting effect, and engenders a love for the ancient and treats the modern as a corrective reaction to the excessive emphasis of matter over form of medieval brutality in commonplace aesthetic experience. But by studying the early modern, the present seems somewhat forlorn and sterile, and the mind is set upon the question: Why did we revolt against the ancients in such radical a manner? This discussion is a discussion of politics inasmuch as it is a discussion of aesthetic preferences and sensibilities, and it is here that the study of Sigismondo Malatesta and Nicholas de Cusa and of the forms of politics in general is put into profitable use. Tyranny is never too far away for the Florentine; neither can it be denied that the same Dante that gave expression to the cold and torturous depths of Hell, the nothingness of Purgatory, and the grace of Heaven, also gave expression to a political philosophy so wondrous and advanced in scope that it is without doubt the source of Machiavelli’s cry for the unification of Italy under the Florentines. Familiar faces, names, and events are everywhere — and these figures, despite their faults, are treated with a certain reverence, if only because they are involved in the pursuit of the ideal of the beautiful, within the bounds of custom and tradition.

The study of the beautiful is not beautiful — it is sublime — which means that those who succeed in actualising its potential exhibit an inner strength that is remarkable. The immensity of the visual stimuli — of what is art — is constantly on one’s mind, and for Burke this produces a “visual object of great dimensions,” which is, in turn, sublime. ¹³ It produces a sentiment that is unlike any other — it is terrifying, yet it produces a sentiment of delight, of a certain unity that is “requisite to vastness”. ¹⁴ “Custom,” Burke points out, “reconciles us to everything.” ¹⁵ One finds unity that stretches through over two millennia of human civilisation, of the highest sort of intellectual and aesthetic inquiry, and of the change without which artistic production is reduced to the act of copying. It inculcates an acute sense and appreciation of harmony. That which is beautiful is necessarily harmonious; without harmony there can be no beauty. Proportion, from the smallest egg-and-dart pattern to the apartment-bloc-dwarfing columns of the Pantheon, is as essential to the harmony of the polis as it is to the pursuit of beauty and its study. The hallmark of great art, as Johann Winckelmann put it, was ‘noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’. It does not scream, but it pulls the sinews of the heart and lodges itself into the deepest crevices of the mind, until a life without it and more than two millennia of its development and articulation seems nigh impossible. It is this very love for the past that renders shallow Utopianism and a general disregard for our collective inheritance unimaginable.

However, the vastness, the sublimity of this schema of beauty, is terrifying. It requires a certain inner strength to constantly reaffirm its importance and mediate with our paltry existence and the grandeur of the past. It is all too easy to wipe the past clean and start with a blank slate, like the radical modernist Le Corbusier tried to do, creating an architecture of negation and sterility that had in human life only one suitable analogy: death. To accept the radicalism of solely sensuous, formless beauty like Matisse or Cezzane or Mondrian is, in effect, a denial of the skill and care of Michelangelo and Praxiteles. For the art historian, a world without the Aphrodite of Knidos makes little sense, for it negates the endless references it produced along the way: the mind is attuned not to destroy history, but to affirm it. However, it is in those art historians whose mental faculties are of a lower sort, that the ills of constructivism, relativism, and other postmodern afflictions of the fatalist kind come into play, for they are either unable to remember the past or truly understand it, which is why they seek to negate it.

The good art historian does not do this: the good art historian is an aesthetician as much as a student of history; the art historian Heinrich Wöllflin points out that “every art historical monograph should also be a contribution to aesthetics.” ¹⁶ Already, the good art historian is a philosopher; to jump from the art to the polis is not a large leap but a small step.