Frederick Antal and the Marxist challenge to art history

Introduction

Frederick Antal’s major work, Florentine Painting and Its Social Background: The Bourgeois Republic Before Cosimo de’ Medici’s Advent to Power, was first published in Britain by Kegan Paul in 1948. While it was written between 1932 and 1938, the book’s publication was delayed by the events of the Second World War. Although largely forgotten today, Antal’s book is significant: it is among the earliest scholarly studies to present a Marxist interpretation of the origins and development of Renaissance art. Perhaps most importantly for modern readers, it pioneered an interdisciplinary approach to art-historical research. Drawing on specialist literature in economic and social history, it set out to dispel the myth of ‘Florence as a community living in conditions of carefree prosperity, general harmony and timeless beauty’ (Antal, 1948: 5). At the time of its publication, Antal’s book presented a challenge to anglophone art history, then largely preoccupied with questions of aestheticism, formalism, and connoisseurship. Antal’s call for ‘co-operation between the various branches of historical science’ (ibid.: 8) was greeted with suspicion by a discipline protective of art as a culturally autonomous field.

Antal, a Hungarian art historian and graduate of the esteemed Vienna School of Art History, had intended to produce an ambitious three-volume history of Florentine painting, ranging from the 14th to the 16th century. This project was never realised; his death, in 1954, meant that only one volume was published. Commencing with Giotto and concluding with Masaccio, Florentine Painting and Its Social Background examined the art of the Trecento and early Quattrocento. Despite commending Antal for his erudition and scholarship, most contemporary critics condemned his book for its Marxist orientation. Millard Meiss, a scholar of Trecento art, reviewed it for the Art Bulletin. Meiss declared the book’s problems ‘arose from Antal’s rigid social determinism and other assumptions of his orthodox Marxist point of view’ (Meiss, 1949: 144). Another review, published in the Journal of the History of Ideas, noted, ‘Antal, following Karl Marx, believes that works of art, like any other aspects of a culture existing within a class society, ought to be explained as the outgrowth of the conditions of production and property’ (Mommsen, 1950: 370). A similar sentiment was expressed in the Burlington Magazine: ‘Unfortunately Dr Antal directs his researches into the narrow channels of class-conscious dialectics, which confuse and disappoint to an extent that it makes objective criticism a difficult and irritating task’ (Gronau, 1948: 298).

It is fair to say that Antal’s book has never recovered from its contemporary critical reception. Its reputation as an exemplar of reductive Marxist historiography, crudely applied to the liberal arts, has gone unchecked in the decades since it was published. Antal’s writings have not been included in anthologies of key art history texts and are now largely unknown to students of the discipline. In the words of Deborah Krohn (1999: 95), ‘Antal’s book is a relic and is not read seriously by students of early modern art or culture’. In the decades since its publication, Florentine Painting and Its Social Background has been republished only once, in 1986, by Harvard University Press. It is remembered, if at all, as a methodological dead-end, an artefact of pseudoscientific dialectical materialism. This assessment has overshadowed Antal’s principal aim: to open art history to ‘specialised branches of learning’ and ‘to make use of this knowledge in the service of art history’ (Antal, 1948: 5). Although unfamiliar to English-speaking art historians, Antal’s approach was consistent with modern scholarship from Central European art history, especially that of Max Dvořák, his teacher in Vienna.

Although no reference to Marxist critical theory can be found in Florentine Painting and Its Social Background, the book was evidently based on historical materialist interpretations of class struggle. Like Arnold Hauser, whose Social History of Art was published in 1951, Antal may have sought to avoid controversy by describing his methods as ‘sociological’ rather than Marxist. But this hardly assuaged the concerns of his critics. Cold War anxiety, then widespread in the social and political arena, extended to the cloistered world of Anglo-American art history (Orwicz, 1985). In humanist academic circles, Cold War tension was manifested in distrust of, and sometimes hostility towards, methods and practices derived from the social sciences. Michael Orwicz has argued that a liberal/conservative tradition of art history, based on an autonomous conception of culture, obstructed the use of social scientific approaches within the discipline. In the 1950s, writes Orwicz, ‘the principle underlying the humanities placed “man”/“individual”/“culture” outside of social and material realities’ (ibid.: 53). The ideological division of ‘culture/society and individual/social group’, says Orwicz, ‘organized much of the practice of art history in the academic system’ (ibid.). This attitude was deep-rooted and persisted in art history for some decades, long after social theory had established its credentials among other branches of the liberal humanities.

Jeremy Tanner’s anthology The Sociology of Art outlines the origins and development of aesthetic and social thought. Since they were ‘institutionalised’ together as academic disciplines in the 19th century, the relationship between art history and sociology has been problematic, marked by periods of convergence and divergence:

As they acquired an independent social basis for their work, art historians redefined their discipline in such a way as to marginalise sociological concerns, and sociologists developed specific attitudes towards art and methods of analysis which were increasingly peripheral to art historians’ core interests. (Tanner, 2003: 2)

In the post-war decades, few art historians were more influential than Ernst Gombrich, director of the London Warburg Institute. Gombrich could not countenance art-historical research in which sociology played a prominent role. In 1979, he continued to oppose the tendency, as he saw it, to view art history as a ‘handmaiden of sociology’ (Gombrich, 1979: 132). Gombrich was not opposed to ideas that crossed disciplinary boundaries; Karl Popper’s epistemological philosophy, critical rationalism, was a major influence on Gombrich’s key study of pictorial representation, Art and Illusion, first published in 1959. But Gombrich did share Popper’s deep distrust of sociology. Indeed, he would consciously apply Popper’s liberal political philosophy to art history as an alternative to ‘sociologism’ (Azatyan, 2010; Berryman, 2017). Based on these attitudes, it is not hard to see how the social history of art was excluded from key intellectual debates in post-war British art history. In the late 1970s, however, a renewed interest in the relationship between art history and sociology was evident (Wolff, 1983). This dialogue was encouraged by the ‘New Art History’, an interdisciplinary approach that combined elements of feminism, structuralism, and critical theory (Harris, 2001).

With entire chapters dedicated to the economic and religious history of late medieval Italy, Florentine Painting and Its Social Background is an attempt to understand art history’s relationship to social and political history. Although, as Krohn contends, lingering fears of communism may have affected the book and its reception, the Cold War atmosphere cannot explain why Antal’s methods failed to gain traction. As noted by Millard Meiss in his review, other disciplines had successfully adapted historical materialist principles to their research:

Antal’s book is one of the first attempts to trace the origins of an extended period of art in contemporary social structure. Though similar methods of interpretation have become familiar in other branches of culture since the rise of Marxist criticism, they have not often appeared in the history of art. For our field this book is therefore an event. (Meiss, 1949: 144)

For Antal, Marxism was not just an ideology or a perspective through which art history could be reinterpreted and reanalysed, on class-based terms. Historical materialism was a ‘scientific’ method, which could add rigour and stability to art-historical research. In 1946, in a letter to Georg Lukács, Antal wrote: ‘If my books have significance, it lies in my having used a much wider range of specialised literature in every branch than has been customary so far, in order to construe the developments in art on a Marxist basis’ (Antal, 1979[1946]: 123). Antal, however, was not a Marxist theoretician. He was, in his own words, an art historian who wrote art history on a Marxist basis. Historical materialism was a strategy he deployed to understand the production of art and the development of styles. This system was more comprehensive than art-for-art’s-sake formalism or unhistorical connoisseurship, the approaches of Anglo art history that he derided. Most importantly for Antal, historical materialism was compatible with the discipline’s Central European tradition, where art-historical scholarship was framed by questions of method and based on broad historical research.

While Antal used Marxist analysis to challenge the assumptions of Anglo art history, it was not his intention to weaken art history’s disciplinary autonomy. Rather, with historical materialism, he sought to place art history on a firmer historical footing. Florentine Painting and Its Social Background was therefore meant to demonstrate how a Marxist concept of social history could be applied to art history, as it had been applied to other human sciences. Without defending its more deterministic features, this article supports a re-evaluation of Antal’s book, as an important forerunner of interdisciplinary art scholarship. It considers why Antal’s legacy has not endured, despite the ‘social history of art’ enjoying widespread acceptance in English-speaking art history in later decades.

Antal and art history

In his essay entitled ‘Remarks on the Method of Art-History’, Antal broached the question: ‘Why is it that a tendency still remains among some art-historians to put a break upon efforts to broaden art-history by a study of social history?’ (Antal, 1966: 184). This essay originally appeared in the Burlington Magazine in 1949, the year after Florentine Painting and Its Social Background was published, and was intended to provide a rationale for his social history approach. The question was therefore aimed at English art historians, for whom social history was foreign. Antal was conscious of the differences between English art history and the discipline’s Central European academic tradition. English art history, as he saw it, had evolved from a 19th-century tradition of art criticism and connoisseurship. This ‘impressionistic’ art criticism ‘was largely concerned to describe the fleeting reactions of a sensitive beholder before a work of art’ (ibid.: 185). Despite efforts in the early 20th century to ‘modify this extreme subjectivism by a more controlled, more constructed attitude’, English art history was still characterised by its ‘unhistorical approach’ (ibid.). This was in contrast to European art history and its historical outlook:

The severely historical spirit of the school of Vienna and the resolutely anti-art-for-art’s-sake attitude of Warburg together paved the way for a deeper, richer and less nebulous study of art-history, which can draw upon the very tangible results of the historical disciplines, in particular of social and economic, of political and religious history (not exclusively of the history of literature and philosophy) as well as of an historically-intentioned social psychology. (ibid.: 179)

After fleeing Germany in 1933, Antal may have considered Britain to be a temporary refuge. Antal, it seems, had planned to find work in the United States, along with many other Jewish intellectuals escaping Nazism (Frank, 2009: 316–17). In 1934, the Academic Assistance Council (AAC) in London referred Antal to the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars; the Emergency Committee was established in New York in 1933 by American academics for the purpose of employing refugee German scholars in American institutions. Antal’s referees included Kenneth Clark and Herbert Read; a recommendation by Read stated, ‘I do not know of any art historian whose work can, in my opinion, be compared in importance to Dr. Antal’s’ (ibid.: 317). However, a testimonial by historian Walter Adams, then secretary of the AAC, cautioned: ‘His vigorous personality may make him [Antal] a difficult colleague for some people’ (ibid.). Probably because of his Hungarian citizenship, Antal’s application for an American position was ultimately unsuccessful; he remained in London for the rest of his life.

Antal never held a regular academic post in London, but he did occasionally lecture at the Courtauld Institute, where, according to Anthony Blunt, ‘he exerted considerable influence on a small group of students, to whom his enthusiasm and his astonishing range of knowledge were an inspiration’ (Blunt, 2004[1971]). John Pope-Hennessy, then a young art historian, remembers Blunt being especially ‘captivated’ by Antal’s Marxist convictions (Pope-Hennessy, 1991: 305). Pope-Hennessy became acquainted with Antal in the 1930s when Antal was working on Florentine Painting. Despite rejecting his ‘generalised style history and rudimentary sociology’, Antal left a lasting impression:

Antal was a very different figure; he was an orthodox Marxist, and his concern, throughout a long career, was to establish an equation between society and style. Central European in appearance and cast of mind, he had a low, rather mellifluous speaking voice which was in striking contrast to his radical beliefs. (ibid.: 304)

Antal’s interest in the methods of art history can be traced to his education, especially the influence of his two principal teachers, both of whom were major theoreticians of the discipline. The first was Heinrich Wölfflin, whose formalistic method Antal encountered while studying art history in Berlin. The second was Max Dvořák, who supervised Antal’s doctoral dissertation in Vienna. Dvořák, a Czech-born art historian and curator, was a central figure in the Vienna School of Art History (Rampley, 2003, 2013). His key concept, Geistesgeschichte (the history of ideas), had a profound impact on Antal’s intellectual development. The Vienna Art Historical Institute, located within the Austrian Institute of Historical Research, was more compatible with Antal’s concept of art history as an historical science (Stirton, 2013). In ‘Remarks on the Method of Art-History’, Antal stressed his indebtedness to the Vienna ethos: ‘The Viennese school of art-history, to which Riegl, Wickhoff, and Dvořák belonged, gave a far more prominent place to history and the historical development of style’ (Antal, 1966: 176). This was in contrast with Wölfflin’s synchronic model of formal analysis, which was autonomous and largely unhistorical. Wölfflin’s new visual science, says Antal, ‘conceded, relatively, the smallest place to history’ and ‘reduced the wealth of historical evolution to a few fundamental categories, a few typified schemas’ (ibid.: 175–6). Antal would reject Wölfflin, ‘who considered art to be detached from the ideas of their time, and who stressed in art the “eternal”, the “absolute”, [and] purely formal values’ (ibid.: 176).

Thus, whereas Wölfflin sought to isolate styles from their historical contexts by creating an autonomous method of stylistic analysis based on the formal characteristics of artworks, Dvořák dealt with art history as part of intellectual history. In Dvořák’s words, ‘A great artist never stands absolutely outside the spiritual and intellectual ferment of his time and if the threads binding him to it are invisible to us then it means that we have failed to look deeply enough either into his art or into the age in which he lived’ (Dvořák, 1984: 71). Dvořák’s comprehensive understanding of art and its connection to broader history strongly appealed to Antal. The pioneering example of this approach was found in Dvořák’s history of the art of the Van Eycks, published in 1904. According to Antal, Dvořák had not been able to explain how oil painting had suddenly emerged in 15th-century Flanders without recourse to social and economic history. For answers to ‘the enigma of the Van Eyck brothers’, Dvořák had looked beyond conventional art-historical sources, ‘in books of economic history’ that explored ‘the new bourgeois culture in Flanders, of which this art was a product’ (Antal, 1966: 177). In this important study, Dvořák had not only established a connection between art and its wider social and economic milieu; he had also demonstrated how the art historian’s knowledge of art could be enhanced by learning from other disciplines. Although Antal ultimately rejected Geistesgeschichte in favour of Marxism, Dvořák’s influence remined conspicuous in Florentine Painting and Its Social Background. Antal wrote in the introduction:

As Dvořák has pointed out, economic facts throw light upon the whole development of art, even if only indirectly. In speaking of the art of the van Eycks, he remarked that art history had so far offered no explanation of its sudden emergence; the sources of the new bourgeoise culture, of which this art was a product, were not known, since the growing importance of Flanders is ‘mentioned only in books of economic history which no one ever reads’. As matters stand to-day, greater knowledge and understanding of the origins of the Renaissance are often to be found in general handbooks of economic history than in works on art history. (Antal, 1948: 4)

Towards a social history of art: Antal’s ‘methodological turn’

Antal’s interest in the nexus between art and society began in the years before the First World War. And yet, the importance of sociology would remain underdeveloped in Antal’s work until the early 1930s. Antal’s intellectual journey was not a straightforward trajectory. For most of the 1920s, when he began to build a reputation as a scholar, his method of inquiry continued to follow Dvořák’s Geistesgeschichte. During this period, Antal became known for a handful of specialist articles that dealt with stylistic aspects of late Gothic and Quattrocento painting (Antal, 1924–5, 1925). This output was largely conventional in scholarship and did not correlate with his political outlook; as noted, Antal had been actively involved in the Hungarian proletarian dictatorship in 1919. His article ‘Thoughts on the Development of Trecento and Quattrocento Painting in Sienna and Florence’, published in the 1924–5 volume of the Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, prefigured Florentine Painting and Its Social Background, but without expressing the ideological viewpoint of the later work. Antal did not attempt to reconcile his scholarly and political viewpoints until the early 1930s, when he became interested in the possibility of a Marxist interpretation of art history.

Antal’s connection to political Marxism predates his Marxist art history by almost two decades. During the First World War, he was a member of the Sunday Circle, an informal group of Budapest intellectuals including Georg Lukács and Béla Balázs. This association would lead to his involvement in the short-lived communist regime in Hungary. Under Lukács, the People’s Commissar for Public Instruction, Antal was appointed to lead the Directorate of Arts and Museums. One of his first tasks in this role was to oversee the nationalisation of private art collections and the preparation of an exhibition from this material (Wessely, 1979: 116). Antal’s foray into revolutionary politics, however, did not last long. It ended when the so-called Hungarian Soviet Republic was defeated by counter-revolutionary forces. Antal focused his attention on scholarly pursuits; after moving to Berlin in 1922, he edited the academic journal Kritische Berichte, an art review dedicated to problems of art-historical methodology. It was during this period that Antal’s preoccupation with Dvořák’s history of ideas was most evident.

As an exponent of Dvořák’s Geistesgeschichte, Antal sought to identify the intellectual and spiritual outlook of a period through the study of its art. Following this approach, he closely analysed the stylistic characteristics of artworks and artists to understand the ideology (or Weltanschauung) of their time. In his 1924 article on Florentine and Sienese painting of the Trecento and Quattrocento, Antal devised the category the ‘Giottoesque’ to describe a classicist tendency discernible in the art of this period. However, as his research grew in scope and ambition, Antal came to realise that a formal description, based on Giotto’s style, was too vague and general. Furthermore, an analysis of Renaissance painting devoted to formal features, at the expense of subject matter, failed to adequately explain the social, philosophical, and religious dimensions of this art. Antal would henceforth seek to understand a style in its totality. When defining style as an art-historical concept, he would pay equal attention to form and content. The social history of art would therefore stress the interconnectedness of subject matter, form, and social referent. Antal presented his new concept of style in ‘Reflections on Classicism and Romanticism’, an important essay first published in 1935:

If we take sufficient account of content we realise at once that styles do not exist in a vacuum, as appears to be assumed in purely formal art-history. Moreover, it is the content of art which clearly shows its connection with the outlook of the different social groups for whom it was created, and this outlook in turn is not something abstract; ultimately it is determined by very concrete social and political factors. If, therefore, we wish to understand a style in its totality, we must trace its connection with the society in which it has its roots. (Antal, 1966: 2)

For Antal, historical materialism offered art historians unique socio-historical possibilities unavailable to other approaches. The first draft of Florentine Painting and Its Social Background was completed in 1933. Although Antal is best known for this book, he was not interested primarily in the art of the period that it covers. Rather, Antal’s area of specialisation was Mannerism, the art of the Cinquecento. He had been working on a major study of 16th-century Florentine painting in the late 1920s but decided not to publish this manuscript. It was at this time that Antal became increasingly interested in the Marxist interpretation of history and its potential application to art history. He felt, therefore, that he needed to master the social and economic history of Florence before he could write a full history of Florentine art (Blunt, 2004[1971]). Antal also came to realise that the crucial revolution in the development of Florentine art had occurred in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. As John Pope-Hennessy explains:

His initial intention was to stake out the case for Marxist art history in a volume on the Cinquecento. That this was never written was a serious loss, but he found first that it was impossible to write on the sixteenth century if he had not written on the fifteenth, and then that the fifteenth century could be discussed only after study of the fourteenth. (Pope-Hennessy, 1991: 304)

Florentine painting and its social background

Florentine Painting and Its Social Background opens with a comparison of two paintings, one by Masaccio and the other by Gentile da Fabriano. These paintings, which hung side by side in the National Gallery in London before the Second World War, were both painted in Florence within a year, in 1426 and 1425, respectively, and were both pictures of the Madonna and Child. And yet, as Antal notes, in terms of colour, composition, spatial arrangement, and modelling, there is a vast difference between the two paintings. These striking dissimilarities would prompt Antal’s question: ‘How could two such widely differing pictures have been painted in the same town and at the same time?’ (Antal, 1948: 2). This question would not only serve as a starting point for Antal’s social history of Florentine painting. More broadly, it would also necessitate a new approach to understanding the problem of style in art history. For, according to Antal, this puzzle could not be adequately explained by the conventional analytical methods available to art historians. Although formalism could describe these stylistic differences, it could not offer a valid explanation for them. A formal analysis would merely

seek to explain the difference between these two pictures by saying that each belongs to a different stylistic trend, one to what it calls the ‘classic’ or ‘renaissance’ style and the other to the ‘late-Gothic’. Each style has its own specific development, and art history is the history of these styles. But can styles be explained merely by putting labels on them and describing their characteristics? In other words, is the co-existence of various styles in the same period explained by merely stating the fact that they do co-exist? (ibid.)

The Florentine bourgeoisie of the Trecento and early Quattrocento was not a homogenous class structure. Antal’s account of Florentine society was not based on class conflict between the middle class and the aristocracy, or between the upper and lower middle-class strata. Rather, to make sense of this period and its art, he focused on the upper middle class. This powerful mercantile class was composed of two elements: a cultured, progressive, and intellectual element and a rival conservative element. Differences in their respective cultural preferences, according to Antal, determined differences in artistic styles. Whereas both elements of the upper middle class possessed economic capital, cultural capital was concentrated in the progressive upper middle class. This social stratum used naturalism and classicism to distinguish their aesthetic preferences from the popular and aristocratic tastes of the other classes. The styles of Giotto and Masaccio best exemplified the intellectualism and rationalism of the progressive middle class. These advanced painters were contrasted with Duccio, Simone Martini, Lorenzo Monaco, Gentile da Fabriano, and a multitude of other ‘late-Gothic’ artists, whose styles were tethered to medieval art. Giotto and Masaccio broke from Gothic conventions and paved the way for Renaissance painting.

Thus, in keeping with its economic rationality, derived from banking and other commercial activities, the progressive upper middle class held a world view that ‘was secular and life-affirming, expressed action and energy, was sober, logical and calculated’ (Antal, 1948: 289). Naturalism and classicism were the visual expressions of this rational outlook because they spurned the otherworldliness of Gothic and Byzantine conventions. Antal critically contrasted this progressive sensibility with the late Gothic styles of the same period, which he argued were emblematic of symbolic and aristocratic modes of medieval thought. This perspective was extended to religious sentiment and patronage. Of the great mendicant orders, the Franciscan and Dominican, the upper middle class preferred to patronise the latter. Franciscan poverty, even if largely notional, did not appeal to its mercantile interests. Also, the philosophical system of Saint Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican, was more conducive to the intellectual outlook of the cultural elite. For this reason, Antal placed Fra Angelico, a Dominican friar, on the side of rationalism and classicism.

While conventional art history identified styles based on their formal characteristics, social history attempted to explain styles based on their implied ideological outlooks. However, Antal’s attempts to apply his concepts to the history of the 14th and early 15th centuries led to a complicated picture of Florentine art and society. After Giotto’s death in 1337, advanced Florentine art entered a period of decline for most of the 14th century. This was occasioned by the collapse of the banking houses of Bardi and Peruzzi and the calamitous effects of the Black Death of 1348. In the third quarter of the 14th century, when the lower middle class gained a share of political power, the progressive upper middle class was forced to make artistic concessions to petty bourgeois tastes. It did so by giving its own art a more ‘popular’ sentiment, as indicated by Andrea da Firenze and Niccolò di Tommaso. Although the upper middle class regained control of Florentine society in the 1380s, a period that coincided with the art of Spinello Aretino, a follower of Giotto, its fortunes were short-lived. Henceforth, after a period of economic decline, political authority in Florence was concentrated in the hands of a few powerful families.

Antal’s stylistic analysis was often complex and contradictory, especially when related to the political and economic vicissitudes of Florentine society. During a period of social instability, when sections of the upper middle class assumed aristocratic lifestyles and values, it was no longer possible to determine any definite style or direction in art. Because the nobility and the lower middle class were both culturally backward, art at this time reflected the popular tastes of the petty bourgeoisie and the reactionary (Gothic) tastes of the aristocracy. The art of the early Quattrocento was therefore described as a blend of ‘popular’, ‘aristocratic’, and ‘rational’ styles, thus reflecting ‘the many-sidedness of the mentality of the Florentine upper middleclass’ and its changing social circumstances (Antal, 1948: 315). This mishmash of styles was represented by Lorenzo Monaco (described as ‘popular-aristocratic’), Gentile da Fabriano (‘aristocratic’), and Masaccio (‘intellectual’ and ‘classical’).

On the social position of the artist

Antal’s class-based account of the social position of the artist and the role of the patron in determining the emergence of early Renaissance styles was especially controversial. Because artists were generally of inferior social position, and were largely dependent on their patrons’ largesse, ‘their own economic and social conditions affected the development of art less than did those of their patrons, whose outlook on life was the ultimate factor in determining the emergence and interrelations of the various styles’ (Antal, 1948: 274). In the 14th century, when there was no clear dividing line between the arts and crafts, ‘artists—including of course painters—had to satisfy every possible requirement of their clients’ (ibid.: 280). The dependent relationship between artist and patron enabled Antal to view style not as an expression of artistic personality or singular genius, but rather as an expression of class attitudes and ideology. In this way, the artist was a medium through which the patron expressed their class-based world view. ‘Differences of opinion between artist and patron as to the style of a painting’, said Antal, ‘were probably rare; the patron would almost invariably have selected artists whom he could expect to work to his satisfaction’ (ibid.: 283). It was anachronistic, Antal argued, to think of the artist in 20th-century terms, as an autonomous creative agent:

The freedom of the artist which, of course, did not exist in the modern sense, was confined within the framework of his rigidly prescribed commission. In general it was the rule that the painter was regarded as a craftsman and therefore should have no more freedom with his work than the latter would. (ibid.)

The theory of the artist was the focus of study of Julius von Schlosser and his students, Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz (1979). ‘In the case of the theory of the artist’, says Catherine Soussloff, ‘this is particularly relevant because both textual and historical investigations into the concept of the artist occurred in Vienna from about 1905 to 1934’ (Soussloff, 1997: 99). Von Schlosser was the leading partitioner of the ‘philological’ approach to art history in Vienna. In his book The Literature of Art: A Handbook on the Source of Recent Art History (Die Kunstliteratur. Ein Handbuch zur Quellenkunde der neueren Kunstgeschichte), published in 1924, von Schlosser systematically organised the primary and secondary literature of Italian art into chronological order. Von Schlosser held the biography of the artist in a privileged and isolated status, thereby ‘locating the basis of the origin of art history in an essential narrative form, in a text he considered to be biographical, in an author also an artist, and in a style of writing considered to be truthful’ (ibid.: 103). Antal’s historical inquiry into the social position of the artist was not intended as a critique of von Schlosser’s philological approach; indeed, Antal drew heavily on this scholarship for his own research. Rather, in providing an historical background to this literature, he sought to establish a more solid historical basis for von Schlosser’s textual representation of the artist.

Thus, Antal presented an historical materialist interpretation of the mythology of the artist as presented by Kris and Kurz in their book Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist. This work, first published in Vienna in 1934, investigated the legend of the artist in Renaissance texts, revealing certain stereotypical qualities indicative of the personality of the artist. In this literary genre, the heroic artist stood above society. Common tropes from artist biographies included accounts of artistic precocity, often involving the presence of portents or harbingers of artistic genius; exceptional virtuosity in artistic media without laboured effort; intense or unusual spirituality or wisdom; and magical influences ascribed to artistic production (Kris and Kurz, 1979; Soussloff, 1997: 97). Like von Schlosser, Antal upheld the artist’s biography as a privileged genre of art literature. However, instead of viewing these texts as objective or transparent accounts of art history, he saw them as inventions of liberal ideology, in which creative autonomy disguised the artist’s material struggle for independence. The symbolic representation of the subject of the artist, in the form of literary biography, was therefore evidence of the artist’s new social status and emancipation from the medieval craft system.

Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Commentarii exemplified this genre and attested to the new social status accorded to the artist in the early 15th century. It was, as Antal noted, the first book to translate Pliny’s stories about ancient artists into Italian and the first artistic autobiography, in which Ghiberti included descriptions of his own works. Its influence was far-reaching, providing a model for Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, published in the mid 16th century. Ghiberti was a member of the elite circle of Cosimo de’ Medici and the humanist scholar Niccolò de’ Niccoli. With the Commentarii, Ghiberti sought to expound the theoretical basis of art, the importance of which was emphasised in accordance with the new rationalist outlook of Quattrocento Florence. As Antal saw it, ‘The ultimate aim of his [Ghiberti’s] book was to contribute to the improvement of the social position and to the education of the artist’ (Antal, 1948: 376). Ghiberti’s Commentarii were contrasted with an earlier, technical treatise on painting written by Cennino Cennini in the 1390s. Whereas Cennini looked upon painting as a form of manual dexterity, Ghiberti desired to establish its theoretical foundations: ‘He particularly wanted to make his scientific knowledge accessible to other artists: in the fields of optics, perspective, anatomy, and the theory of proportion’ (ibid.). Thus, artists who were able to place their art at the service of theoretical or scientific knowledge were more likely to achieve social independence:

It was by establishing a theoretical and scientific foundation for itself that art could obtain greater social recognition, could free itself from the crafts, and so those who practised it could rise from the condition of artisans close to the upper middle class. (ibid.)

Legacy and critique

Anthony Blunt was among the first English art historians to adopt the ‘scientific’ methods of Central European art history. In his book Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450–1600, published in 1940, Blunt acknowledged his indebtedness to the Warburg Institute, where he had ‘the inestimable advantage of seeing a really scientific method consistently applied’ (Blunt, 1940: vi). Blunt also acknowledged the influence of Antal, who, by his own account, had had the greatest impact on his new approach to art history: ‘To Dr. F. Antal I am indebted for instruction in a method which has, I fear, been applied in an only too slipshod manner in this book’ (ibid.). Chapter four of Artistic Theory in Italy, ‘The Social Position of the Artist’, was inspired by Antal’s current research in this area. Indeed, Blunt’s book offered a taste of the social and intellectual history of art later expounded by Antal in Florentine Painting and Its Social Background.

Antal did not want art history to be absorbed into the category of social or general history. Rather, he saw Marxism as a perspective through which art history could be reinterpreted and reanalysed. Historical materialism could add methodological rigour to existing art-historical knowledge and build upon the achievements of Dvořák and the meticulous scholarship of the Vienna School. Most importantly, for Antal, Marxist analysis could explain the development of styles in historically objective terms. Whereas Dvořák’s history of ideas was unscientific and based on an abstract notion of autonomous spirit, historical materialism was a method that provided a ‘scientific’ understanding of the social conditions of cultural production. The new scientific perspective proposed by Antal could therefore build upon, and finally exceed, Dvořák’s Geistesgeschichte and von Schlosser’s philology. However, replacing Dvořák’s spiritual world view with one based on dialectical materialism would expose Antal (and Dvořák) to criticism from both liberal and Left-leaning scholars.

When explaining why Dvořák’s legacy was neglected by academic art historians in the post-war decades, Matthew Rampley has blamed a tendency to misconstrue his work as popular, grandiose, or nationalistic (Rampley, 2003: 214). But Dvořák’s writings may also have been too closely associated with Antal and his reductive historicism. Paul Stirton is correct in his assessment of Dvořák, that he ‘introduced the possibility of a social history of art in which artefacts could be understood and interpreted in terms that reflected the society in which they were created’ (Stirton, 2006: 48). Gombrich, a vocal and persistent critic of both historical materialism and idealism, shared this view. He would often conflate both tendencies: ‘From my student days in Vienna I had become increasingly sceptical of the solutions offered by Neo-Hegelian Geistesgeschichte and Neo-Marxist Sociologism’ (Gombrich, 1979: 60). As noted earlier, Gombrich’s critique of the social history of art was an extension of Karl Popper’s arguments against historicism and determinism, tendencies he believed to be implicit in sociology (Berryman, 2017).

Antal’s account of the social position of the artist vis-à-vis the patron in determining the development of styles was his most challenging contribution to art history. Later art historians engaging with the social history of art were forced to wrestle with this legacy. This was most problematic for New Left writers working within the broad Marxist tradition. In 1973, when outlining his approach to the social history of art, T. J. Clark disavowed the earlier work of the so-called scientific Marxists. For Clark, their crude application of historical materialism was too mechanical. ‘When one writes the social history of art’, wrote Clark in his manifesto ‘On the Social History of Art’, ‘it is easier to define what methods to avoid than to propose a set of methods for systematic use’ (Clark, 1973: 10). Clark began by naming some of his taboos: ‘I am not interested in the notion of works of art “reflecting” ideologies, social relations, or history’. In a veiled reference to Antal, ‘I do not want to talk about history as “background” to the work of art’ (ibid.).

However, before concluding, it must be noted that not all practitioners of the social history of art worked within a Marxist tradition or theoretical framework. Francis Haskell described his approach as ‘severely empirical’ and not ideological. In his social history of Baroque art, Patrons and Painters, Haskell deliberately avoided any attempt to ‘explain’ art in terms of patronage. He wrote: ‘I have been forced to think again and again about the relations between art and society, but nothing in my researches has convinced me of the existence of underlying laws which will be valid in all circumstances’ (Haskell, 1980[1963]: viii). On some occasions, Haskell found the connections between economic and political conditions and certain styles to be particularly close; at other times, however, he conceded that he was unable to ‘detect anything more than the internal logic of artistic development, personal whim or the workings of chance’ (ibid.).

Like Haskell, Michael Baxandall wrote social history free of Marxist interpretation. Baxandall covered similar territory to Antal, focusing on the art of the Quattrocento. In his book Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, Baxandall pointed out that ‘social history and art history are continuous, each offering necessary insights into the other’ (Baxandall, 1988[1972]: page unnumbered). In other words, art history and social history were methodologically complementary. Like that of Haskell, Baxandall’s method was deeply empirical. He used archival documents and primary sources to explore the 15th-century picture trade and to find an economic basis for ‘the cult of pictorial skill’ (Baxandall’s phrase). Importantly, Baxandall devised the concept of ‘period eye’ to explain the vernacular visual skills of 15th-century Italians; that is, the visual competencies used in daily life by people to understand pictures in their social, religious, and commercial contexts. Based on concepts used by Cristoforo Landino, a contemporary Florentine art critic of Quattrocento pictures, Baxandall assembled a visual ‘equipment’ for looking at 15th-century pictures in 15th-century terms. This historical perspective offered ‘an insight into what it was like, intellectually and sensibly, to be a Quattrocento person’ (ibid.: 152).

Whereas Baxandall began his book by noting how styles of painting responded to contemporary social circumstances, he concluded by reversing the equation, by suggesting how modern viewers could use ‘the period eye’ to sharpen their perceptions of historical societies. This is important, said Baxandall, because a society developed its own distinctive visual skills and habits, and these became part of the medium of the painter. The modern viewer therefore needed to learn to look at pictures like a member of that bygone society. This perspective was in contrast to that of certain art historians of a Marxist persuasion, who viewed pictorial styles through the prism of modern class consciousness and who saw art as a means of ‘illustrating’ social history. Without naming Antal or Hauser, Baxandall was especially critical of the schematic and formulaic interpretations of historical materialism, especially a tendency to rigidly identify styles of art with modes of production (e.g. capitalism). Baxandall denounced these approaches as ‘destructive uses of pictures which must be avoided’ (Baxandall, 1988[1972]: 152).

Antal’s most controversial topics, concerning the social status of the artist and the material preconditions of artistic production, had more in common with the sociology of art, which investigated the social construction of the artist. Pierre Bourdieu and Howard Becker, pioneering sociologists in this area, examined the contexts and networks in which works of art were produced and consumed. Western ‘art worlds’, said Becker, followed an ‘intensely individualistic theory of art’, perpetuating the idea that ‘specially gifted people create works of exceptional beauty and depth’ (Becker, 1982: 352–3). Bourdieu’s systematic sociology included the formulation the ‘field of cultural production’, a social system in which cultural goods were collectively produced and appropriated, and where agents competed for ‘cultural capital’. The social and political struggles of the field were concealed by disinterested ideals. Bourdieu described the artist-centric discourse as the ‘charismatic ideology’. This ideology privileged individual creativity while marginalising the actions of other agents engaged in the field (among them patrons, critics, collectors, curators), who together ‘participate in the production of the value of the artist and of art’ (Bourdieu, 1993: 261). Thus, ‘it is this ideology which directs attention to the apparent producer, the painter, writer or composer, in short, the “author”, suppressing the question of what authorises the author, what creates the authority with which authors authorise’ (ibid.: 76; original emphasis).

When Florentine Painting was published, the ‘charismatic ideology’ of the artist informed the basic assumptions of disciplinary art history. Style was seen as a singular attribute of the artist and an expression of creative autonomy. This inalienable belief also informed much of the criticism of Antal’s book. Antal’s project was ambitious; it aimed to produce a comprehensive history of Renaissance art based on a synthesis of cultural, economic, and political factors. In considering artistic styles as specific combinations of these elements, works of art were thereby no longer viewed in purely formal or individual terms, as isolated aesthetic objects. Instead, a work of art’s style was an expression the social and ideological outlook of its public. The artist was the agent through which this social outlook was expressed.

Conclusion

Antal was over 60 years old when Florentine Painting and Its Social Background was finally published. He did not live long enough to defend its legacy or answer his critics. Antal’s legacy can therefore be compared with that of Arnold Hauser, his contemporary; whereas Antal died in 1954, Hauser lived until 1978. Hauser, who was a similar age in 1951 when The Social History of Art was published, was able to defend his work. In response to his critics, Hauser published a detailed methodology and rationale of his research (Hauser, 1959). And with the publication of Mannerism in 1964, Hauser was able to demonstrate a more refined and focused application of social history, while downplaying the Marxist overtones of his earlier work (Hauser, 1964). Antal’s widow, Evelyn Antal, oversaw the editing and posthumous publication of his few completed manuscripts. Of the younger generation of New Left critics, John Berger was among the few who defended Antal’s ‘orthodox’ Marxism (Berger, 2016: 33–6). Francis Haskell, a leading art historian of the post-war generation, was more qualified in his assessment: he acknowledged Antal’s ‘many contributions’ and ‘flashes of insight’, while at the same time rejecting the ‘dogmatic and over-simplified’ aspects derived from historical materialism (Haskell, 1968: 161).

Antal’s book became a caricature of the mechanistic and deterministic tendencies of historical materialism. It is remembered, if at all, as an approach to be avoided. However, the book should also be remembered for its achievements and its ambitions, which have been ignored or forgotten by many of its critics. The most important of which was Antal’s efforts to broaden the scope of art-historical research, and in keeping with its place in the human sciences, to provide art history with a solid methodological grounding. Jonathan Harris has quoted from a letter by Alan Wallach, supporting the republication in 1999 of Hauser’s Social History of Art: ‘If today the boundaries of the discipline seem more permeable, more open to scholarship in other fields than when Hauser wrote, it is in no small measure due to his pioneering effort’ (Harris, 2001: 89). The same must be said about Antal and his ‘pioneering’ book, Florentine Painting and Its Social Background, which preceded Hauser’s book by three years.

Many readers and critics in the 1950s were confounded by Antal’s explanation of early Quattrocento Florentine painting, with its ‘many-sided’ and conflicting mixture of classical, rational, and late Gothic styles. Indeed, an account based on ‘the co-existence of various styles in the same period and in the same place’ was atypical, especially at a time when art history was defined by linear period styles and modernism by successive style-based movements. However, after several decades of postmodernism, this description should seem less perplexing. Charles Jencks, for example, describes the plurality of styles and attributes of postmodern culture as ‘double-coded’, with ‘differing tastes and opposite forms of discourse’ coinciding (Jencks, 1992: 13). Antal’s understanding of Florentine painting was ‘double-coded’ in a general sense. His account of Florentine art and society might therefore appear more familiar to a new generation of historians and critics, and to a contemporary art world where disparate and contradictory styles readily coexist.