Revival of classical mythology

Enemies defeated and women ravished... it’s no wonder classical mythology

has always appealed to power-hungry kings and emperors

The Guardian

London

Something strange happened in the Renaissance. The deities of Greece and Rome had been proper gods with temples, rituals, priests and worshippers to go with them. They had disappeared only when Christianity took their place. Yet in the Renaissance, when the gods and goddesses of the ancient world re-emerged, they were no longer part of a religion, they were something else. What exactly? It is tempting to suppose that the revival of classical mythology was the result of humanist scholarship and the rediscovery of ancient texts. Yet this is not really true, because the most important literary sources for artists were not classical works but vernacular romances and reprints of medieval paraphrases of Ovid that often have little relation to the original text. Even in the mid-16th century when mythographical handbooks of various kinds start to appear, they are often written for, and sometimes by, artists themselves.

Although the revival of interest in antiquity took many forms, the reanimation of pagan mythology is something that took place within the sphere of the arts. And there mythologies emerge first in minor decorative forms — wedding chests and jewellery boxes, the painted plates used in country villas — in the statues for fountains and gardens, and in the decoration of bathrooms and bedrooms. In literature, mythological themes are more common in occasional verse than longer poems; in the theatre, they initially appear as intermezzi, musical diversions staged between the acts of the play, rather than in the drama itself. Mythology did not demand sustained attention and it was not considered suitable for serious public contexts; if it served as more than a filler, it belonged in the private, often female sphere, where people sought undemanding relaxation.

The success of classical mythology in early modern Europe had as much to do with politics as art. Mythological imagery spread after the artistic and intellectual renaissance was well established: from the second quarter of the 16th century in Italy, and later still in northern Europe. When Michelangelo presented to his young friend Tommaso de’ Cavalieri a drawing of Ganymede carried off to Olympus by Jupiter’s eagle, it was a private image inspired by his love for the young man and the lofty ideals he hoped they would share. He certainly was not thinking about contemporary Italian politics. Yet a few years later, his image of Ganymede was used by a later artist as an allegory of the Battle of Montemurlo, where Charles V (represented by the eagle) helped Duke Cosimo de’ Medici (represented by Ganymede) achieve victory against his enemies.

It would be easy to think that Michelangelo’s composition had just been appropriated as political propaganda. But it is not as simple as that. The themes of Michelangelo’s presentation drawings for Cavalieri are drawn from the loves and punishments of Jupiter — subjects that had suddenly become popular with Charles V’s ascendancy in Italy.

It makes you wonder whether there is an elective affinity between fantasy and imperialism — both represent dreams of omnipotence, and licensing the imagination can condemn it to rehearsing fantasies of power. Mythological imagery lasted a lot longer than other fashions that were current in the Renaissance period (though it has fared less well than the Protestant Christianity which developed at about the same time) and it finally disappeared only in the middle of the 20th century, along with the imperial pretensions of the European states that had first adopted it four centuries earlier.

Modern masters

The Guardian

You have to work at it a bit. You won’t get much from it if you don’t already know something. But that’s what art always calls for. If you only want to absorb a few received ideas so you can have something to spout at dinner parties, well, that’s the level you’ll always be at. If you want to push a bit harder, you should turn off The Culture Show and Late Review, put down Time Out and read this book instead. It has a good clear structure, providing a year-by-year account of what happened. It provides facts and dates but also philosophy. It attempts to bring the past into the present.

The book’s strength is the way it forces you to think about all three categories in the subtitle in relation to each other.

Look up Abstract Expressionism in New York in the 1940s and 50s, and you will find not only an account of how form works (what makes an abstract painting possess significance even if it doesn’t have literal or narrative meaning), but also a critical distance from the promotional rhetoric for this kind of art, a distance informed by awareness of the anti-traditions that run alongside the traditions of Modernism.

There is a lot of rhetorical self-examination in the book: a lot of “I”, as Rosalind Krauss et al question how meaning is made and how society constructs our economic desires, and how their intellectual make-up as critics is constructed. But this somehow goes with retaining absolute schoolmasterish authority.

The book’s main weakness is blindness to anything purely visual. This kicks in when it gets to our own times: it believes art can’t be about anything enjoyably visual any more. From this blindness, of which the authors seem proud but which I see simply as philistinism, arise all sorts of problems. There is a queasy slide into hyperbole. Any art that is promoted by the artist’s gallery as liberal and progressive is taken at face value to be exactly that. But art that delights, or is supposed to delight, in apolitical hedonism is shunned.

One example can stand for this whole problem. In the section covering the period 1990-2003, politically correct art by Fred Wilson, the African-American installationist who represented the US in the Venice Biennale a few years ago, gets an illustration, a long respectful passage of description, and several other name checks.

In the meantime, the paintings of Chris Ofili, which won the Turner Prize in 1998 and are funny rather than ponderously angry, and aesthetically electric rather than numb, are not illustrated. In fact Ofili’s only appearance is in a list of black artists dealing with issues of identity.

But when they get to contemporary art they simply lose all critical fizz. The density is there but now it’s a slog to get through. You feel you’re reading only theory, whereas earlier, theory was only one strand. The writers carry from the past into the present an aura of authority, but not the creative imagination that in the earlier sections earned them authority, as far as the reader was concerned.

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