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Rediscovering great artists
By Lindsey Shaw-Miller, Wolfson College, Cambridge
‘ It is through the abilities of the curious and very rare chance to which one owes the discovery of good paintings.’
Dézailler D'Argenville, 1727
What causes an artist's work to disappear from view, only to resurface a century or so later, lined with gold? How is it that an artist can be fêted in their lifetime, derided by their successors and then acclaimed as a neglected genius? How can the work of, say, Van Gogh, who sold but one picture - and that to his brother - now command the highest prices on record?
This essay looks at some of the factors that influence the rise and fall of artists' reputations, from notions of 'taste' to the practicalities of paint tubes. It concludes with a consideration of three examples of artists who have been resurrected, to spectacular effect, this century.
A matter of taste?
Some artists seem instinctively to achieve notoriety and success in their lifetime - one thinks today of David Hockney and Damien Hirst - only to fade from the memories of later generations. Plenty of painters hailed by the early academies are now little known to all but scholars: Charles Errard (1606-1689), Noèl Coypel (1628-1707) and Nicolas Loir (1624-1679) are far from household names; even Phillippe de Champaigne, who was hugely successful, fell completely out of fashion until twenty years ago.
More recent examples include the19th-century French painter Bouguereau (1825-1905), whose popular, photo-realist style was later overshadowed by the Impressionists; or Murillo, whose sentimental pictures appealed to nineteenth-century British collectors but, despite their quality, have become outmoded in this century.
One of the most spectacular recent rediscoveries has been Georges de La Tour (1593-1653), who was almost completely forgotten for three centuries after his death, even though he had worked as a successful court artist for most of his career. Little is known of La Tour's life, and his obscurity was preserved partly by his provincial location: he worked in Lunéville, in the independent duchy of Lorraine with its ducal court thirty kilometers away at Nancy. Only for a brief period during the Thirty Years' War, when Lunéville was all but destroyed, did he work in Paris, though he continued to get royal commissions for the rest of his life.
La Tour is an artist whose oeuvre is plagued with controversial attributions. Of seventy known paintings by him, only forty are securely attributed. As was usual in the seventeenth century, he would sign copies and studio versions of his paintings. His own unsigned paintings have been attributed over the years to Caravaggio, Ribera, Zurbaràn and Murillo. His genre and religious subjects, some in dramatic candlelight, are caravaggesque in style - a deliberate choice of realism over classicism - but his compositions have a simplicity and a spirituality that is distinctively his.
La Tour was rescued, like Michael Sweerts, whose case we shall discuss in the final section, by scholarship; a dogged correlation of archival material with known paintings, then the clawing back of paintings given to other artists. This began in 1915, but not until 1974 did La Tour enjoy a major retrospective exhibition in Paris. In 1997 there was another, this time in Paris and Washington, which addressed attribution problems and explored the arresting realism of his work, which, tempered with an abstract quality, appeals to twentieth-century eyes.
The twentieth century has largely been an age of rediscovery. Since the 1970s many of those rediscovered have been women, prolific and respected artists such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Sofonisba Anguissola, Clara Peeters, Judith Leyster, Rachel Ruysch, Angelica Kauffmann and Elisabeth Vigée-Le Brun. All were successful in their day. Sofonisba Anguissola is one of half a dozen or so female artists included by Vasari in his ‘ Lives of the Artists ’ of 1568, but excised from subsequent editions by dismissive (male) editors. Judith Leyster's work has been rescued in recent years from subsumation within the oeuvre of her husband, Jan Miense Molenaer.
Female painters, unfashionable painters, academic painters, many eventually rescued by the onward tide of scholarship, ever striving to make new waves; as knowledge of an artist, style or movement broadens, a different manner, different colour range, different mood and subject matter become accepted. Some aspects of taste remain constant, however: religious paintings, for example, have had a confined market in Britain since the Reformation. Conversely Dutch pictures, with their wide variety of secular subject matter, have always had an enthusiastic market here, although vanitas and allegory, which emphasise the transience of life and the inevitability of death, have not been popular since the nineteenth century, during which skulls, inscriptions, allegorical figures and symbols were frequently painted out. Even here, though, there is change, and recent years have seen a revival of interest in macabre subject matter, including two major exhibitions and several books on the art of death.
Subject matter has always affected value. For three centuries history painting dominated as the most elevated subject matter. G.V. Hoet the Elder's Catalogue or List of Paintings, with the Prices thereof, of 1752, a collection of auction catalogues, with prices, covering seventy years from 1684-1752, demonstrates the gulf in value between that and more domestic subjects such as landscape, still life and genre. Only the work of the Leiden fijnschilders rivalled the history painters in value, for there the premium was on skill. Dou's tiny paintings were always expensive and tales abound of the number of days he spent perfecting one square inch of canvas. In 1705 van Hoet records a sale in which Dou's Young lady with a baby on her lap fetched an incredible 6,000 guilders. Compare this with a sale of 1713 in which landscapes, still life's, townscapes and marine paintings (all of which now sell well in Europe and America) rarely fetched more that 100 guilders, yet a painting by Willem van Mieris, Dou's most famous pupil, fetched 680.
Some painters are always sufficiently sought after to command high prices. This is demonstrated in Van Hoet by Rembrandt and Van Dyck whose works, two years after the sale mentioned above, fetched 2,010 guilders (The adoration of the magi ) and an astonishing 12,050 (Rest on the flight into Egypt) respectively. Van Dyck's picture combined, in exemplary fashion, all the requirements of a desirable eighteenth-century painting: famous artist, history subject, very large scale (216 x 287cm).
'Taste' is also controlled by availability. In seventeenth-century England, continental wars left foreign paintings in short supply. To compensate, foreign artists were persuaded to settle here whenever possible, Van Dyck (1599-1641) being the most successful example, and lots of copies came into collections. In the 1790s, by which time the Academy was firmly established, Italian pictures were suddenly more available through the dispersal of aristocratic collections in France. Hazlitt's recollection of the effect upon him of seeing the Orléans collection in 1799 (the French and Italian pictures had been bought by a syndicate of three British noblemen) is testimony enough to the magnificent change in awareness that could be wrought by sheer exposure:
‘ I was staggered when I saw the works there collected and looked at them with wondering and with longing eyes. A mist passed away from my sight: the scales fell off. A new sense came upon me, a new heaven and a new earth stood before me... We had heard the names of Titian, Raphael, Guido, Domenichino, the Carracci - but to see them face to face, to be in the same room with their deathless productions, was like breaking some mighty spell - was almost an effect of necromancy... it was there that I formed my taste, such as it is: so that I am irreclaimably of the old school in painting.’
Hazlitt, 'On the Pleasures of Painting' in Works, vol. VIII, p.14
Hand-in-hand with availability goes price. John Michael Montias's study of the art market in seventeenth-century Delft shows that, although history painting carried the greatest status and the highest prices, landscape was the uncontested best-seller of the century. In the early years it accounted for a quarter of all paintings sold, rising to a spectacular 40.9% between 1670 and 1679. In the 1620s and 30s war was a factor in its popularity: the Dutch war with the Spanish caused a depression in the Netherlands from 1621 to the early 1640s, so paintings had to become smaller and cheaper in order to sell. Less expensive (and so less vivid) pigments were used and works were painted quickly as time, too, was expensive.
A small monochrome landscape by van Goyen was quickly painted and could be acquired for the equivalent of a week's wages by a skilled worker. A history painting, requiring a larger scale, more figures, a wider range of pigments as well as the abstract value of intellectual content, could easily cost ten times as much. This was still cheap, however, compared with the eighteenth-century English market: in 1779 the Empress Catherine bought Sir Robert Walpole's Guido Reni, The doctors of the church, for a stunning £3,500, the equivalent of a year's wages for more than five hundred workers.
Finally, technical advance does more than any stylistic influence to alter taste, because it makes permanent alteration to what is possible. We take tubes of paint for granted, but in the late nineteenth century they were new. The lighter palette of Impressionism was made possible by the availability of a range of colours in ready, portable form. Painting from direct observation was easy in a greater range of situations and the process of recording became part of the subject itself - an expectation made possible by familiarity with another technical innovation: photography.
Practical and environmental factors, availability, price and technology are all concrete contributions to shifts in popularity. Just as circumstances can dictate the kind of art that is produced, so they can interfere with what is bought and sold and with fluctuations of value. We shall shortly consider three artists whose erratic critiques since their deaths illustrate all these factors in operation. First we shall appraise the dramatis personae who animate the art market and its operations.
Wheelers, dealers and scholars
‘ Connoisseurs cause beautiful things to be appreciated wherever they are found. They dig them up... and sometimes succeed in giving fame to a picture which had been accessible for more than 60 years without anyone bothering to look at it.’
(Roger de Piles, Conversations sur la Connaissance de la Peinture, et sur le Jugements qu'on doit faire des Tableaux, Paris, 1677)
The development of history of art as a discipline and the expansion of the market for pictures have always depended upon the interaction of scholars, dealers and connoisseurs. In the early days of British collecting, scouts were necessary to rove around continental Europe, seeking out paintings, commissioning copies, and acquiring fragments even as excavations were being carried out. It could be a dangerously competitive occupation - in the 1620s the agents of the Dukes of Arundel and Buckingham were as famously rivalrous as their employers - and it was often essential to have the help and confidence of artists for intelligence and authentication.
As more middle-class, professional people began collecting, the commercial market for paintings evolved, auction houses were established and theoretical principles were recognised and sustained. Scholars, often trained for other disciplines such as medicine, the church and the law, were drawn to the more exciting, alternative worlds of painting and poetry. They perpetrated energetic discourses on aesthetic value in art, debating the constituency of 'good' and 'bad' pictures. Scholarship and commerce informed one another, and continue to do, though the diversity of participants is now greater and the dynamics of interaction have a faster pulse.
Among seventeenth- and eighteenth-century commentators there were occasional rebels who worked to resist or subvert the prevailing taste. Sometimes - as in Bellori's refusal in his Lives of the modern painters, sculptors and architects (1672) to admit Bernini (1598-1660), or any other baroque artist, to his very selective canon - this is conservatism, an insistence upon proven, even purified classical values; an inability to countenance the present (a problem of Bellori's which did little to inhibit Bernini's success).
Conversely there are cases of theorists championing the dubious. Roger de Piles (1635-1709), in his Dialogue on Colour (1673), though a classicist himself, was not so intimidated by Bellori's doctrinaire standards that he could not include a vigorous defence of Rubens (1577-1640), whose work he came to see as surpassingly fine despite its baroque manner.
In the case of Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun (1748-1813), we have a critic who would leap into the unknown with amazing flair. Husband of the artist Elisabeth Vigée-Le Brun (1755-1842), he was a dynamic and astute dealer-connoisseur who was the first to alert the public to Vermeer, the unrivalled star of his three-volume Galérie des Peintres Flamands, Hollandais et Allemands. Le Brun placed emphasis on rarity and unfamiliarity. He worked to identify and illuminate new masters, rather than trying to attribute more and more pictures to great names. He invented what Haskell calls 'a snobbery of the unknown', extending possibilities rather than closing them down. A century had yet to pass, however, before Vermeer entered the international spotlight.
Knocking down and putting up
The nineteenth century was one of firmly held and widely expressed opinions and judgements, and the discourse of aesthetic value enjoyed a long stint of 'knocking down and putting up', a phrase beloved of William Blake. He, along with other ubiquitous figures such as John Ruskin, arbitrated energetically for the public taste. Ruskin famously championed Turner (although he could not come to terms with the late work), but also had the confidence, even as young man in his mid-twenties, to dismiss whole schools of painting with breathtaking generalities: 'There is no entirely sincere or great art in the seventeenth century'.
Monuments erected to celebrate the artistic élite of history, such as the Albert Memorial in London, or the façade of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, happily omitted such figures as Botticelli, Piero della Francesca, El Greco and Frans Hals. Francis Haskell, in his book Rediscoveries in Art, (1976) recounts a story from C.R. Leslie of a lecture by John Constable, in which he denounced the Dutch Italianate painters Jan Both and Nicolaes Berchem, 'who, by an incongruous mixture of Dutch and Italianate taste, produced a bastard style of landscape, destitute of the real excellence of either.' After the lecture a well-known collector approached him saying 'I suppose I had better sell all my Berchems', to which Constable replied 'No sir, that would only continue the mischief. Burn them'.
In spite of this story, it has often been the conviction of collectors themselves for a particular painter or school that has proved enduring and reliable. The nineteenth-century dealer William Buchanan was quite open in admitting the need to bribe artists for their advice, but he did not always take it. When the classicistic artist G.A. Wallis recommended he pay attention to the Spanish school, declaring it to be 'rich beyond idea, and its painters are all great colourists', Buchanan ignored him. The Scottish collector William Stirling Maxwell, however, did not. In his new classical house designed by William Adam, he followed entirely his own inclinations, accruing an arresting collection of Spanish renaissance and baroque painting, fifty years in advance of Maurice Barrès recognition of El Greco as 'a strange and powerful soul'.
Not so much a rediscovery, more a recollection
The case of the Italian baroque is an interesting tale of fading in and out of the spotlight. From 1600 until 1759 baroque painters, especially Guido Reni and Carlo Maratti, dominated the European market. Apart from the artists Charles Le Brun and the engagingly mimetic Sébastien Bourdon, neither French nor Dutch artists were much approved. Dutch art rose in popularity during the century, especially in Britain and France, but the Italian baroque fell from grace as neo-classicism, promoted so passionately by the antiquarian J.J. Winckelmann, took over as the pinnacle of aesthetic and intellectual achievement.
The art historian Denis Mahon swam against the tide of Renaissance studies in the 1930s, and into the deeper waters of the seicento. To this he devoted all his attention, both as a scholar and a collector. Beginning with Guercino, he bought Italian seventeenth-century paintings assiduously for thirty years, until prices began to rise. His collection was exhibited in 1997 at the National Gallery, London, as 'Discovering the Italian Baroque'. It was built up, however, from British acquisitions made in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Thanks to Ruskin's promotion of the purer, simpler Italian primitives, later taken up by the assiduous Bernard Berenson, the seicento had subsequently fallen into 'cultural ostracism' (Marc Jordan, reviewing the exhibition in TLS 18.iv.79). This bias was pervasive, culturally linked to Victorian morality and an inspiration for the successful Pre-Raphaelite movement.
By 1930 fresh fields were needed, for scholars if not for collectors, but the seicento was not the obvious choice. Guido Reni had always retained admirers, cultural ostracism notwithstanding, but Domenichino and the Carracci had been dismissed as 'eclectic' by the purist aesthetic and Mahon did everything to rehabilitate them, linking their work to contemporary theory with his book Studies in Seicento Art and Theory (1947). As Haskell observes, 'It would have been just possible to have been brought up believing that Annibale Carracci was a great artist, to live for many years dismissing him as a sterile eclectic, and to enjoy a ripe old age admiring his pictures once more.'
Mahon once said that it takes about a century for an artist or school to be fully reinstated after a fall from critical grace. His exhibition was held exactly sixty years after the appearance of his first publication on Guercino, beating his own estimate by forty years. Yet, much as he has done to restore seicento painting, he also acknowledges that its dismissal had been more of a problem of scholarship than of connoisseurship. In Notes on the Young Guercino of 1937, he says that 'in England it is still something of the neglected Cinderella of Italian art, perhaps not so much from the point of view of appreciation as from that of art history '(my emphases).
One wonders whether Mahon's foresight was not based more on his instinct as a collector than on an objective perception of a gap in scholarship. So often success follows the trusting of a strong instinct, a human response to a painting, style or artist, a simple personal preference. As Michael Kitson has observed, the appeal of seicento pictures is not intellectual. It is to do with human feelings distilled through biblical and historical narrative, through economy of gesture and expression, through controlled composition, and 'the power of making the transcendental physically credible'.
Three Twentieth-Century rediscoveries
JAN VERMEER (1632-75)
Vermeer's reputation has achieved one of the most remarkable ascendancies of this century. A respected artist in his home town of Delft and three times Head of the Guild of St. Luke, he painted slowly, probably completing only twenty-eight paintings in his lifetime (the number is disputed, some scholars would accept more). Until 1700, twenty-two of these paintings were in one collection in Delft. It is not surprising, then, that it took a century for his work to be fully identified, admired and noticed further afield.
The exceptional value of his work today has much to do with its rarity. During the eighteenth century he was not so much forgotten as invisible. In Albert Blankert's monograph he notices how Vermeer was always appreciated by 'well-informed connoisseurs', and furnishes his readers with numerous examples from sale catalogues:
1719 'the famous Milkmaid by Vermeer'
1791 (of Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, Rijksmuseum) 'fine composition, which is generally characteristic of the work of this famous master'.
Blankert also cites eighteenth- and nineteenth-century references to Vermeer's wonderful light, including comments of excellence from Reynolds. Yet it is the visionary Le Brun whose remark looks forward to Vermeer's attraction for a post-photographic era: 'He was especially fond of rendering effects of sunlight, and sometimes succeeded to the point of complete illusion'.
Just as recent art history has linked Vermeer's work to the application of scientific experiment in the seventeenth century, such as the development of lenses and experiments with the camera obscura, so the growth of interest in him in the late nineteenth century seems to have been linked with the invention of photography. The ability of photography to record what the camera saw encouraged a move in painting away from historical and allegorical subjects towards scenes of everyday life. Vermeer's images seem suspended, like a moment trapped in the camera shutter. His definition of planes and descriptions of the fall of light, such as his famous pointilliste highlights, combined with the muted colour values rendered by the camera obscura, had an immediate appeal for a visual culture adjusted to photography.
The critic who did most to promote him, Etienne Joseph Théophile Thoré (1807-69), also had a political motive: he saw Dutch art as non-elitist, its scenes of everyday life as an expression of an emancipated society. In this we see another cultural consonance with the art of Thoré's own times: the Impressionists, who painted indoor and outdoor scenes from contemporary life with dynamic immediacy and technical daring. All of these factors created a social, political and aesthetic environment ideally situated to receive the work of Vermeer, with its 'bold display of tactile reality, its extraordinary optical fidelity and its eternalisation of seemingly inconsequential moments' (Wayne Franits).
The ascendancy of Vermeer has continued through the twentieth century and brought in its wake the famous Van Meegeren forgeries, painted in the 1930s and exposed after the war. In 1996 the Vermeer exhibition in Washington and The Hague attracted crowds so huge that exhibition dates had to be extended and all tickets timed, even though The Hague exhibition was kept open until midnight every night. This scale of interest is in almost grotesque contrast to the paintings themselves, which are so few and so small.
JEAN-BAPTISTE SIMEON CHARDIN (1699-1779)
Like Vermeer, Chardin was a respected, establishment artist in his own day, though in the larger sphere of Paris and the Academy. His subject matter - domestic genre and still life objects - was not academic, however. It is one of Chardin's greatest achievements that within the aegis of the Academy, of which he was Treasurer for nineteen years, he managed to remain his own artist under pressure from academic hierarchies on the one hand and rococo style on the other. He was unfashionable, however, for the last ten years of his life and was quickly forgotten as the century closed.
Chardin's paintings of hovering, softly focussed objects, designed to be seen from a distance, were very different from the smooth, polished surfaces of his contemporaries. He rarely drew, and at close range his art has such an abstract surface that, as the critic Lacombe remarked at the Salon of 1753, 'the picture only offers a sort of vapour, which envelops all the objects'.
It was often regretted by Chardin's contemporaries that he did not apply himself to history painting. Cochin's comment on Chardin's pastels is typical: 'These pieces let it be known to what extent he had a feeling for what is noble, and what he might have accomplished in the history genre if he had put his mind to it.'
To a twentieth-century collector, fully appreciative of Chardin's flickering surface and accustomed to the challenge of work far more abstract, his command of design, of the relations of shapes and volumes, his ability to compose with harmony, economy and a spare beauty, are all qualities for which still life is wholly appropriate.
Thoré was again responsible, in tandem with the realist critic Jules Champfleury, for instigating Chardin's rehabilitation in the 1840s. He admired Chardin's resistance to rococo fashion and in the 1850s and 60s both men were influential in persuading the Louvre to acquire his work. Scholarship confirmed his return with the publication of Edmund and Jules de Goncourt's articles in 1863 and 1864, which formed the basis of L'Art du XVIIIe siècle, published twenty years later. Not until 1979, however, did a major exhibition in Paris, Boston and Cleveland clarify issues of chronology. Now Chardin's paintings have a universal appeal of both subject and style. His skill and economy in composition and rendering, as well as his superb control of a deliberately reduced tonal range, are greatly admired, his paintings sought after for their quiet beauty and restful surface.
MICHAEL SWEERTS (1618-1664)
A current example of an artist returning to prominence is Michael Sweerts. Sweerts was Flemish and he spent a decade or so working in Rome. He was highly regarded in his day: a visitor to Amsterdam who met him there in 1660 calls him 'one of the greatest painters in the world.... for he earns not less than one hundred gold pieces for a single head...'. His subjects range from portraiture through genre, allegory and artists' studios, to history painting. His images are arresting, intense and enigmatic.
Sweerts' oeuvre was lost at the turn of the eighteenth century, as the younger generation of artists who had known his work died.
He was largely responsible for his own disappearance: of around 150 paintings only four are fully signed, three dated and nine have monograms, not all of them secure.
When an artist's oeuvre has disappeared it must be recovered from documentary evidence and from the few secure pictures that remain. This can take literally centuries, as their paintings have to be recovered from the oeuvres of other artists to whom they have been wrongly attributed. They must slowly emerge from their mistaken identity as, in this case, Poussin, Ter Borch and Vermeer.
In addition, Sweerts often departs from conventional iconography, or renders an unusual variant which makes his paintings difficult to pin down. Thus a dealer or scholar must sometimes risk controversy and make a courageous attribution in order to recognise a 'new' Sweerts.
Sweerts is a case of an artist rescued by scholarship. Late in the nineteenth century an art historian called Bayersdorfer read an article referring to a painter called Swart, in which a painting was described that Bayersdorfer knew - but he knew it as a Ter Borch. His interest and that of others was aroused and another art historian, Willem Martin, spent six years searching through inventories and sale catalogues before publishing, in 1907, descriptions of twenty-two paintings by Sweerts. Some of the most eminent art historians then began to take an interest in Sweerts and additions were made to the oeuvre.
After World War II more pictures appeared, and a young German scholar, Rolf Kultzen, assimilated a catalogue raisonnée of almost a hundred paintings as his PhD in 1954. This he followed with a major exhibition in Rotterdam and Rome. The exhibition catalogue, now very rare, remained the only published catalogue until 1996, when finally, after 42 years, Kultzen published a monograph on Sweerts. In the meantime further articles had been added and attributions made, those by Malcolm Waddingham being both sensitive and acute. In recent years younger scholars such as Thomas Döring and Suzanne Peters-Schildgen have written perceptive articles which have begun to uncover some of the meaning of his work.
Sweerts' oeuvre is now largely restored, though new paintings continue to come forward as his popularity and his prices rise. A portrait sold at auction in June 1997, with an estimate of £90-100,000, sold for £180,000. A small portrait of a boy in New York in January 1998, estimated at $180,000, sold for $310,000. Sweerts only large-scale history painting, The Plague at Athens, sold in 1997 in New York for $3m. In an oeuvre with so few signed paintings, that resists convincing chronology, controversy still flares and works continue to be doubted and reinstated as further research reveals more.
Sweerts' appeal to twentieth-century collectors may have to do with his electicism. He combines influences and doctrines, especially classicism and naturalism, in ways which can challenge art historians and theorists. He uses Carravagesque light contrasts and evolves a marked distance between focussed, highly lit and finished parts of the picture and darker, less defined areas, techniques which have echoes in photography. There are also unexpected shifts in gender roles. Sweerts likes to paint men undressing, as bathers or wrestlers. There are romantic portraits of young men, and marvellously immediate and touching portraits of young boys. Women are sites of patient industry and concentration, often still centres amid a bustle of other (male) activity. Sweerts also paints pictures which describe and comment upon the activity of art itself. These are all emphases which are remarkable for his time and appealing to us.
It is probably no coincidence that Sweerts' work became noticed in the early years of this century, when the expectations of art were being altered by experiments in abstraction and, later, surrealism. Some elements of content and meaning are knowable in Sweerts, but they are in suspension with others which, at a distance of three hundred years from their sources, are difficult to wrest from obscurity. The strange, disconnected mood of many of Sweerts' paintings may speak to a sensibility in which romanticism is well assimilated, and for which extracts and fragments - as some of Sweerts' more enigmatic scenes almost seem to be - hold poignancy. There is a psychological intensity in his portraits of ordinary people, and he seems to have had a genuine social conscience and concern for the poor, discernible in his street scenes from the Seven Acts of Mercy, that adds to his contemporary attraction. Indeed, what Michael Kitson has said of Guercino's appeal for Denis Mahon may be true of Sweerts in reverse - and in this lies his attraction for a society in which culture has increasingly to substitute for religion: he had the power to make the physically credible transcendental.
Lindsey Shaw-Miller
Wolfson College, Cambridge
Bibliography
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quoted in:
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