Monday, October 30, 2017

Principle of Sacrifice

Raphael
Madonna with the Fish
ca. 1513
oil on panel
Prado, Madrid

Caravaggio
Madonna of Loreto
ca. 1604
oil on canvas
Basilica of Sant' Agostino, Rome

"I hope I need not stress here that I do not think this highly schematic mental diagram can ever do justice to the richness of historical development.  I have dwelt on it mainly as an example of what I propose to call the principle of sacrifice, in contrast, that is, to what I have called the principle of exclusion.  It will be remembered that the principle of exclusion is a very simple, not to say primitive, principle that denies the value it opposes.  The principle of sacrifice admits and indeed implies the existence of a multiplicity of values.  What is sacrificed is acknowledged to be a value even though it has to yield to another value which commands priority.  But the mature artist will never sacrifice more than is absolutely necessary for the realization of his highest values.  When he has done justice to his supreme norm other norms are allowed to come into their own."

"I think these two principles which I have here contrasted are so often confused because the partisans of movements in art tend to be terribles simplificateurs. Radical exclusion is something everyone can understand.  Relative sacrifice is a more complex and more subtle matter.  For all critics of the past both Beauty and Truth were acknowledged values.  What Caravaggio was accused of  to take up the previous example  was to have sacrificed Beauty to Truth, while the academic tradition was attacked for sacrificing Truth to Beauty.  The true accusation in both cases was perhaps that both sacrificed more of the rival value than was absolutely necessary to do justice to their supreme norm."

Nicolas Poussin
Triumph of David
1630
oil on canvas
Prado, Madrid

Peter Paul Rubens
Adoration of the Magi
1609 & 1629
oil on canvas
Prado, Madrid

"The historian will frequently find that opposing camps of critics have more in common than they admit.  Rubénistes and Poussinistes, Delacroix and Ingres, Wagner and Brahms, shared so much common ground that their differences concerning certain priorities of value loomed all the more largely.  Seen from a distance these differences partly disappear."

Eugène Delacroix
Greece on the ruins of Missolonghi
1826
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Portrait of Madame Moitessier
1851
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

"The same cannot be said of a true principle of exclusion such as the absence of ornament in functionalism or the absence of symmetry from abstract expressionism.  Such extremes may be amenable to a purely neutral morphological description.  They could be noticed by an archaeologist from Mars even when life on this planet was extinct.  Most stylistic changes have more to do with the mutual adjustment of conflicting norms which can perhaps be understood but never measured by any objective formal criterion."

Eugène Delacroix
Mademoiselle Rose
ca. 1820
oil on canvas
Louvre, Paris

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Small Bather
1826
oil on canvas
Phillips Collection, Washington DC

 E.H. Gombrich, from the essay Norm and Form, first delivered as a lecture at Turin University in 1963, reprinted in the author's essay collection Norm and Form (London: Phaidon Press, 1966)