Commentary on “The Rise and Fall of the Autochthonous Self…” Did Art Really Start in Italy?

As is usual with the work of Richard Chessick, we find erudition, a strong investment in the researches of scholars, and an immense range of ideas that are creatively used to elucidate his powerful arguments. I would be hard-pressed to add any great new notions other than those proceeding from my experience as a creator of art and music in the style of the era mentioned in his article and discussions over many years with several prominent Medieval Art-Historians. There is danger in art-historical pronouncements of a later time that regard the panorama of earlier artistic currents—including, as Chessick does, the conception of the Self—in the light of subsequent developments. This is somewhat akin to using psychoanalytic interpretations to “understand” personages long dead from social settings very different from our own and certainly not available for therapeutic undertakings.

It is a commonly held belief since Vasari in the 16th century that the culture of the Italian city-states was the initial rebirth of the true awareness of a Classical Aesthetic, an aesthetic placed into a state of hibernation by the Medieval Church and feudal decentralization. Yet, if we follow the paths of trade, education, and creativity, we find great cross-currents from North to South and East to West. For example, the wool grown and sheared in England was taken via the traders and weavers of Bruges and Antwerp to be sold to the emerging class of highly wealthy Italians, often in the banking industry, who loaned money to the merchants and nobles of Europe to afford the very art they wanted. It is interesting to note that the finest manuscript in all Venice, possibly all Europe, was the Grimani Breviary, painted not in Italy but in Flanders. The famous “Tres Riches Heures” was painted for the brother of King Charles of France by the Limburg brothers from Dutch Flanders. The Hours of the Genoese Spinola family, for a time the most expensive manuscript ever sold, was painted by a Flemish team