The Quattro Cento, and Stones of Rimini

ADRIAN STOKES

The Quattro Cento, and Stones of Rimini

University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. 536 pp.; 112 b/w ills. $38.00

RICHARD READ

Art and Its Discontents: The Early Life of Adrian Stokes

Hants, UK: Ashgate, 2002. 260 pp.; 30 b/w ills. [pounds sterling]45.00

Exploring one of the paths not taken in the history of art can be most seductive. Adrian Stokes--British critic, art historian, painter, ballet aficionado, psychoanalytic soothsayer--has beckoned us his way for nearly three-quarters of a century. Granted, a few of the most formidable scholars at the end of the twentieth century--Richard Wollheim, Stephen Bann, and David Carrier--have signaled their colleagues in Stokes's direction, but for the most part art historians have not heeded the call. Perhaps matters will change now that a hefty new edition from Pennsylvania State University Press brings together Stokes's The Quattro Cento of 1932 and his Stones of Rimini of 1934, prefaced with thoughtful introductions by Bann, Carrier, and Stephen Kite. In addition, an anthology, edited by Bann, of interpretative essays about Stokes by a number of well-known scholars is in the works. And if the reader becomes genuinely converted to this unusual critic's writings, he or she (if strong of heart) might just dare to dip into Richard Read's Art and Its Discontents: The Early Life of Adrian Stokes of 2002.

What makes Stokes's early position distinctive in his two lengthy essays on architectural sculpture in the early Italian Renaissance is his fierce and poetic commitment to the material medium itself, specifically, limestone--not what stands behind the work of art (social realities, iconographic programs, religious sentiments, and so on), and certainly not what stands before it (spectators, interpretations, reception theory, and so on), but the actual ancient stone itself, even before it comes to life in the carver's hands:

  ... in all stonework typically Mediterranean there is somewhere
  expressed the identification or mutual consummation of limestone and
  water, there is expressed water made solid, permanent, glowing instead
  of glassy, set in space and brightened by the dripping rains.... then
  we may understand how mere marble men and women could be works of art
  and could be deities, why the waters of springs were gathered deep and
  clear in marble shrines.... the external thing, the objective,
  concrete, thing in its form of the glowing limestone, became for
  Mediterranean man the symbol of realized expression. Time or
  succession appeared to be summed in stone form as homogeneous concrete
  matter. (Stones of Rimini, p. 87)

So often in the history of art its practitioners pass through the medium as though it had no felt substance, as though it were there merely to support the stories or to lend corporeal embodiment to the artist's skill. The looking glass through which Alice in Wonderland as art historian passes from one side to the other remains invisible in so much aesthetic writing, from Immanuel Kant onward. Stokes refuses to let it be so. "Limestone ... is the link between the organic and inorganic worlds.... [Its] very substance suggests concreted time ... the spectacular translation of time into space [is] implicit in Quattro Cento limestone architecture" (ibid., pp. 40-41). To cause "to bloom in [the] Quattro Cento manner" is "to be encrusted with the life of both sea and shore, with saltiness and dry fertility" (The Quattro Cento, p. 33). The beauty of Venetian sculpture is that it possesses no rhythm, is not caught up in temporal constraints, as is music. "Stone is the greatest instrument of ... instant revelation: nonrhythmic, for the flux of life has passed into objective forms" (ibid., p. 15). To what can we compare it except for "the steadfast face of the rose" (ibid., p. 172)?

For those who have a taste for the excesses and elaborations of Victorian aesthetic criticism and travel writing (think John Ruskin and Walter Pater), this kind of prose comes as a welcome reprieve from the high seriousness of scholarly exposition. This does not mean that Stokes was not a serious student and keen observer of Renaissance monuments. Instead, it emphasizes that Stokes offers a different route to understanding, one that resides in the evocative language (what Carrier calls his "magical prose" [ibid., p. 1]) he employs rather than in the empirical and historical deductions that others practice. In a review several decades old--"The Case for Stokes (and Pater)"--Bann asks, "Should we see Stokes as a theorist, a contributor to the scientific study of art, or as a writer? What, exactly, is involved if we decide, quite firmly, for the latter alternative?" (1) Among the elements involved is the readerly interaction with Stokes's writerly commitments. Ironically, it is the much maligned "rhythm" of his own account that comes most forcefully to the surface. The reader experiences little order to Stokes's remarks on individual monuments, almost no help from footnotes, a frustrating lack of clarity in the photographs, not to mention repetitiveness coursing through many tangled thoughts. Nevertheless, the reader gradually, soothingly, comes to understand without being able to say exactly why. Listening, as we read, to the waves gently lapping at the base of Venetian buildings, we are lulled into "an eternal present into which the past has gathered." (2) Practicing his own art, Stokes leads us quietly away from the distance that spectatorship instills into an intimate participation with the geologic life of limestone, as well as with the sculptor's love of the density of his medium.