Cátedra del Prado Colloquium. Reflections on Historiographical Studies

Alexander Nagel (University of New York)

Humans preserve material memories even as physical materials deteriorate, yielding the paradox that works have often been partially or wholly replaced in efforts to make them persist. A fundamental form of preservation is more making. Most art in most cultures is made out of older art, either materially by reworking or repainting it, or conceptually in the sense that new works are grounded in the forms or techniques of older artworks. Works of art extend into a sort of protracted performance that creates continuity through the discontinuities of human lives and deaths and larger processes such as displacement or migration. The protracted performance can become the work of whole societies and helps produce societies. It seems you cannot have an imagined community without works of visual art. Ephemeral performance was primary in human development, but an extended phase of community develops when communities come together to preserve and extend material memories, something they did long before the development of writing.

José Riello (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

Recent generations of art historians have done their best to decipher, among others, the textual and narrative basis of art works and of some of the issues related to the artist’s agency, or to their patron, or to the institutions and customs that prescribed their activities within determined and determining settings of negotiation, as well as their relationship with the context determining the production of the works in question. Thus, they have focused on issues related to perspective in their studies of gender, colonial policies, global history, the circulation of artistic objects and the transfer and contamination of cultural convention, the anthropological roots of manifestations ­– more or less artistic – and their temporal dimension. However, their capacity to read and interpret  the style of those works of art historically has not been encouraged, nor have they notably developed those skills necessary to disengage themselves from the narrower objectives of “attributionism.” This, I believe, would be an essential topic, even a radical one, for a History of Art that seems, as it were, to be irrevocably doomed to become an ancillary offshoot of a broader cultural history, in view of these historiographical tendencies. For these reasons, this brief address shall focus on the role that works of art play in Alexander Nagel’s historiographical production: they shall be considered to be the objects of study, and additionally, taking center stage, will foster contemplation of conceptual or historical issues of great import.

Gabriel Cabello (Universidad de Granada)

In Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci, Paul Valéry points out that Leonardo’s secret, the secret of those “in possession of the highest intelligence,” resides in understanding the relationships that exist among things whose law of continuity escapes others. In Anachronic Renaissance, Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood find in Valéry’s statement the model that was to hold sway over the principle of substitution in place in the 15^th and 16^th centuries. The works of the past were replaced by works of the present, not by way of repetition but rather through a commutation that made of the preceding work one that was not of the past, but rather of an equally present nature. This “law of continuity” destroyed the principles of the history of art developed by Panofsky, who holds that a work is an index of its time. The temporary fiction based on chronology is split asunder here: the new work is legitimized by the chain that dates back to a “model type,” but, in any case, the chain needs a new work to select it, one that springs from the ruins of the past. As if it were the Ship of Theseus, all original components permanently renewed, the principle of substitution described by Nagel and Wood compels us to “think up structurally” objects that have “doubts” as to their possible historical identities. Hubert Damisch and Aby Warburg – the first, on the basis of  the structuralist notion of the “transformation group,” the second on the basis of the updating of the formulas to describe Pathos in Antiquity – also found that works of art abided by a “law of continuity” that destroyed chronological time. With them, thus, and in accordance with Nagel and Wood’s oeuvre, we dare wonder whether and how works of art generate their own history when they configure a constellation in which the present and past fold together.

Daniel Lesmes (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

It has often been said that historians’ original sin is anachronism. Lucien Febvre so stated by declaring: “Caesar dead by gunshot.” Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood refer to something similar, although less dramatic: the Elizabethan clock that tells time in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. This clock surely runs fast, as does the writer who in principle writes about the past posing questions that only now might be formulated.  The first might be a mistake; the second is an opportunity to understand the real complexities of history.  With the backdrop of Febvre’s statement, which isolates different eras, it was precisely in his time that a concept of history surfaced that allows for thinking that the past is not narrowly at a distance from the present, or even cloistered behind it. But it was not until 1992 that Jacques Rancière tried to explain that porous temporality by means of a direct criticism of Febvre’s work. It was then that the pejorative connotation of the term anachronism would be overturned.  As of then, many intellectuals have thus used the word: Georges Didi-Huberman, Nicole Loraux, Mieke Bal, and Alexander Nagel.  I would like to dedicate a brief address to Alexander Nagel during the Colloquium organized by the Museo del Prado, with the intent of understanding the nuances he has introduced in the study of the history of art from his special anachronistic perspective.