‘Great Pictures or Great Men? Reynolds, Male Portraiture, and the Power of Art’
‘Great Pictures or Great Men? Reynolds, Male Portraiture, and the Power of Art’
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“伟大的图片还是伟大的人物？雷诺兹、男性肖像画和艺术的力量”
DOI：
10.1093/oxartj/9.2.42
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发表时间：
1986
影响因子：
0.1
通讯作者：
David H. Solkin
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
David H. Solkin
个人展示需要并得到统治18世纪英国的人的认真关注。对于一个更多地依赖文化而不是武力作为社会控制手段的统治阶级来说，外表是一个不可避免的政治意义问题，在艺术中也是如此，在生活中也是如此。1除了其他任何考虑之外，坐在那里为自己画像的英国人希望被展示为绅士，但尽管这一意识形态要求保持不变，实现绘画的手段可能会发生变化。到了1750年，这种变化的步伐突然加快；几十年来几乎没有受到挑战的连贯的代表制，在短短几年内完全崩溃了。在很长一段时间里，英国贵族根据一套既定的规则，在塑造自己的绘画形象方面发挥了积极作用，但现在他们似乎已经失去了任何明确的意识，不知道自己想要如何被描绘。没有哪一位画家比西尔约书亚·雷诺兹更善于利用这种不确定性为自己谋利。本世纪中叶的绘画信心危机源于雷诺兹决心抵抗的某些历史压力；但在这里，我要争辩说，正是这些力量使雷诺兹将肖像画提升到一种严肃而雄心勃勃的艺术水平，并促使他将肖像画提高到严肃而雄心勃勃的水平。首先，我想就戈弗雷·内勒爵士最初编纂的那个古老的男性肖像体系提出几点简短的评论，然后他的无数追随者只是表面上改变了这一传统，约书亚爵士经常(但不准确地)被认为破坏了这一传统。一般来说，所谓的“克内勒面具”展示的是男性受试者在戏剧性地、含蓄地公开展示良好的教养；这种表现的主要目的是赋予绅士最好的所谓“礼貌”的品格。在18世纪早期，“礼貌”的概念在英国高级文化中获得了前所未有的重要性，这首先要归功于某些辉格党人作家的努力，他们急于促进一种社会行为规范，能够在道德基础上证明新兴的商业社会是正当的。2在沙夫茨伯里、艾迪生、斯蒂尔和其他人的文章中，我们发现了一系列不同的论点，大意是在真正礼貌的基础上，通过城市公共空间中有教养的人之间的社交互动，可以产生一个良好的社会。这种道德世界性的意识形态处方与保守党或国家发言人为更古老的公民人文主义思想传统所信奉的文化原始主义形成了鲜明对比。此外，在他们看来，真正的美德与对外表的巧妙管理无关；相反，公民美德的人首先是由他的独立性定义的，而独立性最终是建立在土地所有权的基础上的。除了给予他研究社会运行所需的自由外，拥有大量的房地产也确保了房东的关切与总体上的公共利益是一致的。3尽管这样的人必须代表他人行事，但他并不以他人为自己存在的参照点。他的道德品质从他的地位中转移出来，因此脱离了任何互动的过程而存在。另一方面，“礼貌”的捍卫者成功地在现代礼仪和古典道德之间建立了一个连续统一体；正如劳伦斯·克莱因所观察到的，“礼貌”在高雅的文化层面上重塑了商业，并确保了它的美德。4克内勒和他的追随者们将这种意识形态改造成了一种非常有弹性的图画形式，这种形式在英国男性肖像画中占据了半个世纪或更长的时间。但只有在继续满足两个基本条件的情况下，“克内勒面具”才能继续顺利地发挥作用。首先，礼貌的表演形式必须保持其作为社会区别的标志的有效性。由于注重公众形象，“礼貌”将身份变成了一种可以在公开市场上买卖的东西。这种开放非常有利于寻找订阅者的散文家，或者急于吸引尽可能多的赞助人的肖像家，以及确实许多渴望绅士风度的商人和专业人士，但总是存在这样的危险，即礼貌的外部习俗可能被如此大规模地挪用，以至于完全摧毁它们的生存能力。危险在于阶级竞争和竞争的步伐加快：日益繁荣和城市化的必然副产品--
Personal display demanded and received serious attention from the men who governed eighteenthcentury Britain. For a ruling class which depended more on culture than on force as a means of social control, appearances were a matter of inescapably political significance, no less so in art than in life.1 Above and beyond any other considerations, the Englishman who sat for his portrait expected to be shown as a gentleman but while this ideological requirement remained constant, the means of pictorial fulfilment were subject to change. Towards 1750, the pace of that change suddenly accelerated; a coherent system of representation, one which had reigned virtually unchallenged for decades, broke down completely within a few short years. After a long period when English patricians had played an active part in shaping their own pictorial imagery according to a set of well established rules, they now seem to have lost any clear sense of how they wanted to be portrayed. No single painter proved better at exploiting this uncertainty to his own advantage than SirJoshua Reynolds. The mid-century crisis of pictorial confidence stemmed from certain historical pressures which Reynolds was determined to resist; but here I shall argue that those very forces both enabled and informed his celebrated bid to raise portraiture to the level of a serious and ambitious art. I would like to start by offering a few brief comments about that older system of masculine portraiture initially codified by Sir Godfrey Kneller, and only superficially altered by his innumerable followers a tradition which Sir Joshua is often (but inaccurately) credited with having destroyed. As a general rule, the so-called 'Kneller mask' shows its male subject engaged in a theatrical and implicitly public display of goodbreeding; the main purpose of such a representation is to endow the gentleman with what might best be termed the character of 'politeness'. The notion of 'politeness' acquired an unprecedented degree of importance in English high culture during the early eighteenth century, thanks above all to the efforts of certain Whiggish writers, who were anxious to promote a norm of social behaviour capable ofjustifying an emerging commercial society on moral grounds.2 In the essays of Shaftesbury, Addison, Steele, and others, we find a range of different arguments to the effect that a virtuous society can be produced on the basis of true politeness, by sociable interactions between well-bred men in public urban spaces. This ideological prescription for moral worldliness stands in sharp contrast to the cultural primitivism espoused by Tory or Country spokesmen for the much older tradition of civic humanist thought. From their point of view, moreover, true virtue had nothing to do with the skilful management of appearances; on the contrary, the man of civic virtue was defined first and foremost by his independence, which ultimately was founded on the ownership of land. Aside from giving him the freedom necessary to study the workings of society, the possession of a substantial amount of real estate also ensured that the landlord's concerns would be identical to the public interest at large.3 Though such a man was bound to act on behalf of others, he did not make others the reference-point for his own being. His moral character devolved from his status, and as such existed apart from any interactive processes. The defenders of 'politeness', on the other hand, managed to establish a continuum between modern manners and classical morality; as Lawrence Klein has observed, ' "politeness" reformulated commerce on a high cultural plane and secured virtue to it.'4 Kneller and his followers reworked this ideology into a remarkably resilient pictorial form, one which dominated English male portraiture for half a century or more. But the 'Kneller mask' could keep on functioning smoothly only as long as two fundamental conditions continued to be met. First of all, the forms of polite theatrics had to retain their effectiveness as signs of social distinction. Because of the emphasis it placed on matters of public appearance, 'politeness' made status into something which could virtually be bought and sold on the open market. This openness worked very much to the benefit of essayists in search of subscribers, or of portraitists who were anxious to attract the largest possible number of patrons, and indeed of many tradesmen and professionals who aspired to gentility but there was always the danger that the external conventions of politeness might be appropriated on so large a scale as to destroy their viability altogether. The danger lay in the quickening pace of class emulation and competition: the inevitable byproduct of an increasingly prosperous and urban-