Free Selected Essays of John Berger by John Berger Page A

tactile values of Renaissance art. The Renaissance painter limited himself to an exclusive concern with what the spectator could see, as opposed to what he might infer. Compare Titian’s
presented
Venus of Urbino of 1538 with his elusive Shepherd and Nymph of thirty years later.
    This attitude had several important results. It forbade any attempt at literal naturalism because the only appeal of naturalism is the inference that it’s ‘just life like’: it obviously isn’t, in fact, like life because the picture is only a static image. It prevented all merely subjective suggestibility. It forced the artist, as far as his knowledge allowed him, to deal simultaneously with all the visual aspects of his subject – colour, light, mass, line, movement, structure, and not, as has increasingly happened since, to concentrate only on one aspect and to infer the others. It allowed him to combine more richly than any later artists have done realism and decoration, observation and formalization. The idea thatthey are incompatible is only based on today’s assumption that their inferences are incompatible; visually an embroidered surface or drapery,
invented
as the most beautiful mobile architecture ever, can combine with realistic anatomical analysis as naturally as the courtly and physical combine in Shakespeare.
    But, above all, the Renaissance artist’s attitude made him use to its maximum the most expressive visual form in the world – the human body. Later the nude became an idea – Arcadia or Bohemia. But during the Renaissance every eyelid, breast, wrist, baby’s foot, nostril, was a double celebration of fact: the fact of the miraculous structure of the human body and the fact that only through the senses of this body can we apprehend the rest of the visible, tangible world.
    This lack of ambiguity is the Renaissance, and its superb combination of sensuousness and nobility stemmed from a confidence which cannot be artificially re-created. But when we eventually achieve a confident society again, its art may well have more to do with the Renaissance than with any of the moral or political artistic theories of the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, it is a salutary reminder for us even today that, as Berenson has said so often and so wisely, the vitality of European art lies in its ‘tactile values and movement’ which are the result of the observation of the ‘corporeal significance of objects’.
    1955

The Calculations of Piero
    After reading Brecht’s
Galileo
I was thinking about the scientist’s social predicament. And it struck me then how different the artist’s predicament is. The scientist can either reveal or hide the facts which, supporting his new hypothesis, take him nearer to the truth. If he has to fight, he can fight with his back to the evidence. But for the artist the truth is variable. He deals only with the particular version, the particular way of looking that he has selected. The artist has nothing to put his back against – except his own decisions.
    It is this arbitrary and personal element in art which makes it so difficult for us to be certain that we are accurately following the artist’s own calculations or fully understanding the sequence of his reasoning. Before most works of art, as with trees, we can see and assess only a section of the whole: the roots are invisible. Today this mysterious element is exploited and abused. Many contemporary works are almost entirely subterranean. And so it is refreshing and encouraging to look at the work of the man who probably hid less than any other artist ever: Piero della Francesca.
    Berenson praises ‘the ineloquence’ of Piero’s paintings:
    In the long run, the most satisfactory creations are those which, like Piero’s and Cézanne’s, remain ineloquent, mute, with no urgent communication to make, and no thought of rousing us with look or gesture.
    This ineloquence is true so far as Piero’s protagonists are concerned. But in inverse ratio