In a brilliant and accessible study, Gert-Rudolf Flick unveils a succession of 18 artists - masters and pupils, stretching over five centuries from Perugino to Manet, by way of Raphael and David. Brian Sewell applauds a fascinating account of the how and what, the when and why of art
The line of beauty
Masters and Pupils: the Artistic Succession from Perugino to Manet (1480-1880), Gert-Rudolf Flick, Hogarth Arts, 392pp, £50
Dr Gert-Rudolf Flick is that rare thing in his discipline - an art historian untrammelled by the shackles of academe and the need to teach within the constraints of an examination syllabus. Not for him the brief sabbatical in which disjointed lectures must be strung together as a book, but the freedom to pursue at his own pace whatever lateral will-o'-the-wisps occur to him. Few could be more lateral than his notion of an apostolic succession among painters, a laying-on of hands from master to pupil that runs unbroken through five centuries from Perugino, the late-quattrocento master of the saintly upturned eye, to Manet, a master too outrageous to have pupils. This Mornington Crescent of the visual arts would make a splendid parlour game for art historians. What if Flick had started with Verrocchio? - could we make Hodler the last of his succession? Could we get from Konrad Witz to Caspar David Friedrich, from the Master of Flémalle to Ingres, from the Griselda Master to Francisco Goya? And if we turned the game about, could we reach from Leighton to Dürer or from Cézanne to Giotto?
I fancy that Flick's particular succession is a trifle whimsical and that once he had rooted this family tree he had to splice a twig or two to it to reinforce a tenuous link. But this does not matter, for the tree itself is not, beyond our astonishment at its convolutions, important; what takes the book far beyond amusing coincidence is that Flick writes not for art historians, but for the interested general reader, who will never need or read a catalogue raisonné, but for whom some solid knowledge of the how and what, the when and why of art may prove both fascinating and invaluable.
Flick's is a continuous text discreetly ordered so that it reads as a series of self-contained essays of the kind that Max Jakob Friedländer and Kenneth Clark once wrote on landscape, portraiture and the nude - ruminative observations that prove to be the wellspring of ideas that, in turn, disrupt and tangle the smooth thread spun by so many scholars of the first-this-then-that schools of art history. The difference between Flick and these august predecessors is that he is better informed. With Friedländer we have a slight sense of danger, in that he felt his relationship with a work of art to be that of the pianist to the composer - in his interpretation and understanding there is always an ekphrastic element. With Clark we have the certainty that God has spoken. With Flick, on the other hand, we invariably have the sense that work has been done, evidence examined and proofs discovered before he began to share his delight in his ideas.
His essays, far from the written drudgery of the diligent ferret, have the character of conversation and debate, the language informal. And if from time to time they echo the tutorial, it is not ex cathedra but in the "first among equals" style of Anthony Blunt and Michael Kitson in the great days of the Courtauld Institute, when a tutorial could be for a single pupil by a master open to that pupil's responses and ideas. Flick is delightfully devil-may-care with the ancient structures of art history. Within the very first paragraph of the first chapter, having set up a pair of opposing ninepins in the early life of Perugino, he asks four questions, the first of which is: Was Perugino in some way a pupil of Piero della Fran cesca? To which the reader's response is surely: "Good Lord, I never thought of that." Did he then transfer to Verrocchio? In his employment to assistants, can the different hands be identified and (with a touch of scepticism) is this a worthwhile exercise to undertake? What is the nature of collaboration between a master and his pupil when that pupil is himself capable of mastery?
In these, Flick is not the professor guiding the student into his next essay, but the well-informed inquirer taking his reader by the hand as a companion in the inquiry "let us find out together", as Dante and Virgil did. Within moments, we begin to learn of the dependence of pupils and assistants on the master's drawings and pattern-books for the variants and replicas produced in his workshop, and on the purpose and techniques of the cartoon (the final preparatory drawing or blueprint for a painting, the same size). We also learn of the age at which apprenticeship began in the Renaissance - Andrea del Sarto at seven, Mantegna at ten. We discover that, often enough, great masters learned their craft from painters comparatively incompetent - and that when they were evenly matched it is no simple matter to determine who did what - and that the survival of a document does not necessarily prove the named artist to have been the painting's painter.
In discussing Perugino, Flick makes it clear that we shall learn a great deal that applies to other painters, and that if, in discussing his workshop practices, the more varied practices of Verrocchio - carving marble, casting bronze, modelling in terracotta - are germane, then these, too, he will outline. Thus we are diverted into considering facial and physical types, and into the Morellian business of the characteristic hand, or limb, or attitude. And then we turn the page and suddenly see a Perugino that is not by Perugino, but indubitably by a young Raphael: a hey presto! moment from Flick the conjurer.
With the pattern and the pace established, Flick rightly disputes with Vasari - art's first political propagandist as well as its first historian - the unimportance of Raphael's father, Giovan ni Santi, as a fundamental influence, as all who have seen his Sacra Conversazione with the Resurrection, at the Chiesa di San Domenico in Cagli, must agree (the guarding soldiers are worthy of Signorelli and anticipate ideas developed by Michelangelo). Flick convincingly proposes that after Santi's death, Raphael, aged only 11, took over the workshop under the tutelage of his father's senior assistants, and then asks: "And so, who was Raphael's master?" The answer is Perugino only in the informal sense of a young painter absorbing the influence of the most powerful figures around him; it is thus that the influence of Leonardo and Michelangelo, too, became apparent in his work.
Thus, very early in the book, Flick himself breaks the chain of direct master-pupil succession at the first link - but it does not matter, for we are immediately engaged in the clearest exposition ever of Raphael's dependence on his workshop and army of assistants. Raphael sent far more than 12 apostles across Europe to disseminate (and degrade) his gospel, among them Perino del Vaga, and on this short-lived painter Flick's chapter is a book in small, the only "book" of such length and depth in English, and a minor masterpiece. Again and again we have such "books" within the book - on Prospero Fontana, Horace Le Blanc, the two Boullognes, Louis Galloche and Joseph-Marie Vien, minor and forgotten, all, but part of the thread that enables Flick to examine the development of the academy, the drawn study of sculpture and the nude from life, copying as instruction, and, eventually, the exhibition.
It is a magisterial progress, Flick always in command of his theme and purpose, yet deftly slipping away from them to offer some stray insight or examine some intriguing lateral event or notion, one foot in the painter's workshop with its inspired drudgery, the other anchored in the tide of history. On David - predictable, violent and fearsome - no more revealing essay has been written, its last subheading "Making sense of David". Concluding with Manet, the beneficiary of six years of academic training under Thomas Couture, and yet "the herald of modern painting" that cannot be taught, Flick opines that with him, training in any technical or academic sense began to go out of fashion and that the values that made training worthwhile were no longer valued. Flick ends on the hopeful note that the traditions of representation and technical sophistication "will be hard or impossible to escape" and that one set of rules will eventually be replaced by another. Only on this point do I disagree with him: into the fourth generation of mayhem and indiscipline, there are now no masters to teach mastery, even if there were pupils willing to be taught.
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