Features > Michelangelo

An introduction by Richard Wollheim

In his lifetime Adrian Stokes achieved the kind of fame that has nothing to do with success. No book of his sold more than five hundred copies, but his prose, fiercely difficult by the standards of the time, seized the imagination of some of the most interesting and creative minds of his age. They included sculptors, painters, poets, architects, critics of the arts: Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Henry Reed, Colin StJohn Wilson, William Coldstream, Elizabeth Bishop, Lawrence Gowing, Andrew Forge; the list could go on. Since Stokes's death in 1972, at the age of seventy, this has changed. His name is much more widely known, but there has been little effort to keep his books in print, and in consequence they are known mostly by hearsay. They have become as reclusive as their author was in life. They are 'rare items' in booksellers' catalogues.

Michelangelo is one of the least-known of Stokes's books. Yet it is at once innovatory in Michelangelo criticism, and, as its history of publication reveals, a turning-point in Stokes's work. It was the first of his 'Tavistock books'.

In the autumn of 1926 Stokes was on holiday in Rapallo. He had behind him two youthful books on the prospects for civilization, and he was now living in Italy, having succumbed to its spell on New Year's Eve, 1921/2, as he crossed the Alps for the first time. He had chosen to live in Venice, and he had spent the summer of 1926 travelling in northern and central Italy, in the course of which he had discovered the magic of the Tempio Malatestiano at Rimini.

In Rapallo he found recreation in playing tennis with the tennis coach, until, wanting to extend his game, he asked if there was anyone amongst the local inhabitants who spoke English and liked to play tennis. Yes, he was told, there was a man living in the hills called Pound. And who was Pound? The coach chose his words carefully, and, whether or not he thought of the phrase, it stuck in Stokes's mind. Pound, he was told, was - note, not is, but was - a has-been. Stokes liked the idea. When Stokes and Pound met, Pound was forty, something of an exile from literary worlds he had once dominated, but still a force to be reckoned with, and Stokes was twenty-three, with striking looks, something of a visionary, and irresistibly shy. A powerful bond grew up between the two men, cemented by a common fascination with the Tempio, with its architecture, its sculpture, and -though this was later to be the point on which they parted ways - the dark personality of its creator, the tyrant Sigismondo Malatesta. To seal their friendship, Pound told Stokes that he had a friend in London called Eliot; Eliot was a publisher, and he would write to Eliot and tell him that he should publish ten books by this young man who had evidently something to say. Though Stokes was always a slow writer, and was not someone to be hurried on by the fact that he had an interested publisher, this chance happening was the origin of his first lot of books, his 'Faber books'. Eliot must have kept his promise, for there were in fact ten of them, starting in 1932 with The Quattro Cento, and terminating in 1951 with Smooth and Rough: two more picture books followed in the Faber Gallery series. The Faber books are the works of an aesthete de pur sang. There is, of course, much variety within them. The earlier books are, for the most part, grounded in careful observations of works of art, and go on to present broad and arresting ideas about the place of art in our lives, the later books use autobiographical fragments to show how various aspects of art reverberate with early experience. And the scope of the argument enlarges. If, in the first two books, Stokes confined himself to sculpture and architecture, subsequent books discuss painting, as well as his new enthusiasm: the ballet as he had got to know it through the great Diaghilev seasons of the late 1920s. A careful reader of the present book will observe a footnote to Part II, in which Stokes talks of 'classical ballet, sole inheritor in our time of Renaissance art'.

However, there is a theme that runs through the Faber books and holds them together. It is the distinction between two modes in which visual works of art can be executed. Though Stokes had explicitly rejected the terminology in The Quattro Cento, by the time he came to write The Stones of Rimini he referred to the two modes as carving and modelling. In the case of each mode, the external relations in which the work of art stands to the spectator and the internal relations in which the constituents of the work stand to one another are mirror images of each other. Or should I say 'appear to stand'? For both sets of relations are ultimately a matter of an effect that the work establishes in the mind of someone who looks at it attentively.

A work in the carving mode exhibits a distinctive 'out-therenesss', or independence from the spectator, while the forms of which it is composed blend into an unassertive, an uncompetitive, harmony. By contrast, a work in the modelling mode tends to envelop, or merge with, the spectator, while the forms that make it up are set over against one another, and can be reconciled only in an arbitrary, or what Stokes calls a 'masterful', way.

The carving/modelling distinction works in Stokes's thinking in much the same way as the linear/painterly distinction in Wölfflin's famous system. In the first place, each polar term collects to itself a number of what are held to be integrally related characteristics. So, just as the linear in Wölfflin is associated with the cultivation of what he calls the plane, closed form, and absolute clarity, so carving in Stokes is associated with what he calls - and sometimes the terms are used idiosyncratically - the love of stone; mass or mass-effect (as opposed to massiveness, which is a characteristic of modelling); immediacy, or what can be taken up with the 'quickness of the perceiving eye'; and, hardest of all to grasp, the emblematic, by which is meant something like the expressive. Secondly, despite the use of the term 'linear' by one writer, 'carving' by the other, and their natural connotations, both contrasts are taken to apply across the range of the visual arts.

If all this is effected by the completion of the Faber books, two new developments occur with the change of publishers to Tavistock.

In The Quattro Cento and The Stones of Rimini, the carving/modelling distinction is used in a highly normative fashion. Carving is the true path of visual art, and the greatest artists of our canon are to be found amongst those who are rightly, if not always literally, thought of as carvers: Piero, Agostino di Duccio, most but not all of Donatello, Bellini, Giorgione, Brueghel, Vermeer, Chardin, Cézanne. But gradually this insistence upon one tradition modifies, and virtue is also found in a form of art that lures the spectator into its ambience. However, as Michelangelo makes clear, it would be some time before Stokes was ready to announce these as independent or alternative ways of making art. In the present study, modelling is no more than ancillary to carving. Michelangelo, in winning the figure from the stone, allows the stone to intimate the block from which it has emerged. Stokes describes Michelangelo's achievement thus: 'As well as contriving so that a markedly individual shape should emerge, a near and loved thing such as the fifteenth century conducted to the light from a rich medieval soil, he partly re-interred the new-won finite world, no less than the antique, just dug from the Roman ground, in the homogeneous block.' 'Oneness', or the merging with the work, is a value, but it is a value that is envisaged solely as an accompaniment to that of the free-standing object, or what Stokes calls 'individuality'.

Along with this gradual transvaluation of the modelling mode vis-à-vis the carving mode went the attempt to deepen the account thus far offered of the psychological significance of the two modes. The background to this new move is the psychoanalysis that Stokes entered into with Melanie Klein, which ran through the 1930s, and was briefly revived after the war at the time of his remarriage. This represented an old interest. Stokes told me that his interest in Freud was first aroused by a fellow schoolboy, called William Robson Scott, who was later a distinguished historian of German culture, and Stokes read widely in the literature of psychoanalysis in the 1920s. However, while in analysis, Stokes refrained from writing about psychoanalysis, even though he might be suspected of keeping a place warm for it at the heart of his aesthetic theory. Then, in the semi-autobiographical writings, Inside Out of 1947 and Smooth and Rough of 1951, the topic creeps in.

The form that the new project took was the linkage of the two modes with the two earliest phases of life as these were reconstructed more specifically by Klein than by Freud. The modelling mode was thought to parallel the earliest phase when the infant still feels itself to be symbiotically related to the mother, and its world is constituted by part-objects, some of which are benign, and some deeply persecutory. The carving phase was thought to parallel the next phase when the infant gains awareness of the mother as an independent object, which persists through time, and is not dissoluble into elements extravagantly good or extravagantly bad. What comes with this awareness is a new sense that the figure so often attacked is the same as the figure so deeply loved, and a desire to repair the damage makes itself felt within the infant.

But, if these linkages are accepted, how do, or should, they enter into our experience of art, or explain its power?

Initially Stokes invoked these linkages only to account for the perennial appeal that certain works of art hold for us. They trigger, he suggests, powerful memories of an archaic past, which in itself is no longer fully intelligible to us, but how they are in a position to do this is something of a mystery. However, by the time we arrive at Michelangelo, the theory is emboldened, and now it is proposed that the aura of infancy that the greatest works of art carry with them can be attributed to the deposits of early experience left in the artist's psychology, upon which he is able to draw in the moment of creation.

No one who had completed a lengthy personal analysis would be likely to underestimate the complexity of trying to pair off adult manifestations with infantile experience in such a way that one could be thought to explain the other. At the beginning of Part III of the present study, Stokes confronts the issue with engaging frankness. He reminds us that we are, in the case of Michelangelo, fortunate enough to have, in the contemporary biographies, and also in his letters and poems, something that suggests the emergent armature of his personality. But he also reminds us that works of art are not silent about their makers. Stokes listens carefully to the sweep of Michelangelo's brush.

One of the fascinating aspects of the present work is the delineation, embedded, like a Rembrandt portrait, in deep chiaroscuro, of this uneasy depressive genius: the grown son who is obliged to mother the father whom he resents, the young orphan who desires nothing more than to usurp the place of the dead mother whom he loves, the great creator who writes, 'I live on my death,' and again, 'I tell you there is no better approach to sanity and balance than to be mad.'