A few years ago, in the extensive retrospective of Robert Doisneau which was presented at the Recoleta Cultural Center of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, some of the famous portraits of the spectators of the “The Mona Lisa” that the French photographer took in the Louvre Museum in 1945. These photographs, taken when the museum finally fully reopened its doors to the public after the Second World War, record the various attitudes that an encounter with a masterpiece can awaken. Behind the rope that delimits the spaces, a woman with her arm akimbo throws an inquisitive look. Next to her, a man in a light suit, with his head forward, raises his eyebrows, perplexed. Behind him, a spectator appears who seems to fix his eyes on a detail. A boy speaks to his father, covering his mouth, perhaps out of respect for the silence in the room. A blonde teenager and an old woman with a hat look in front of them at something that is clearly far away and perhaps smaller than they expected.
From the French Revolution, when the Louvre was transformed into a public museum, “La Gioconda” has been the repository of the renewed views of visitors. Millions and millions of men and women from all over the world have made a pilgrimage to Paris just to see it. From the essays of Théophile Gautier and Walter Pater to the novels “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown or “Valfierno” by Martín Caparrós, which recreates the circumstances of the robbery supposedly devised by an Argentine swindler in 1911, all kinds of books have been written about it. Artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol have parodied her until she became a pop icon. Time and time again, Leonardo da Vinci’s painting has been the subject of documentaries and television shows. Tons of postcards, advertising posters, agendas, T-shirts, tea sets and key chains have been made with his effigy, and his name has been used to baptize restaurants, hotels, bars, perfumeries and even a brand of sweets. One can easily get rid of the problem by claiming that the image of the Mona Lisa is a stereotype, whose popularity has nothing to do with an authentic aesthetic experience, but with other kinds of phenomena, such as kitsch, the cultural industry or tourism. It is undoubtedly much more difficult to try to understand why the portrait of the wife of a prosperous Florentine silk merchant, painted in 1503, arouses so much admiration, beyond the transformations of taste, the succession of pictorial styles and the emergence of new artistic forms. What is the reason, ultimately, why this particular Renaissance painting is considered a masterpiece? Answering this question is one of the great challenges of aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Masterpieces, even when we are not aware of them, weave the fabric of our lives much more than we tend to believe. (…).
Recognition criteria
We could say that a first criterion that allows us to recognize a masterpiece is the exemplary character, not merely original and extraordinary, but also paradigmatic of the work, by virtue of which it establishes, within a certain culture, an aesthetic horizon. The second criterion would be its ability to capture in some way an experience that could be shared by communities that are far apart historically or culturally from each other and that may be unaware of the specific intention with which the work was carried out. The third criterion would consist of the factuality of the imaginary world that the work unfolds, that is, in the power to forge representations that, even being daughters of fantasy, are no less real, to the point of being deeply rooted in psychic life not only of those who have been able to contemplate, listen to or read them, but also of those who have not.
But human beings are not only moved, find comfort or sublimate our most intense emotions before great works of art. These also play a vital role in the network of convictions, certainties and practical knowledge that participate in our vision of the world. Circumscribing cognitive processes to science, reducing art to perception, emotion and non-logical faculties, has perhaps been a pernicious legacy of traditional aesthetics. Art is as much about pleasure as it is about knowledge: it is not the pastime of a passive public, which is often opposed to science as knowledge founded on demonstrations and experiments. As Nelson Goodman, the philosopher who has most emphatically rejected this confusion, has pointed out: “Coming to understand a painting or a symphony in a style with which we are familiar, to recognize the work of an artist or a school, to see or hear in new ways, it constitutes a cognitive development similar to learning to read, to write or to add”.
Works of art participate in our way of seeing, feeling, perceiving and thinking. For example, Goodman argues, in addition to altering our physical environment, a building “can, through various forms of meaning, inform and reorganize our entire experience” and, like a scientific theory, “can give new insight, foster understanding, to participate in our continuous remaking of the world”. The story of the dresden state opera, on the Theaterplatz, built between 1871 and 1878 under the direction of Gottfried Semper, is instructive in this regard. During the night of February 13, 1945, the “Semperoper” was reduced to rubble by bombs from the Royal Air Force (RAF), like almost the entire historic center of the city. In 1977, without financial backing from the communist government of the German Democratic Republic, which had demolished the Berlin Schloss 100 kilometers away, the citizens slowly undertook its reconstruction, piece by piece, molding by molding, starting from the original plans discovered in a loft. A painter and several artists, masons and spontaneous collaborators worked What could push these men and women, some of whom had suffered as children the bombings, the hunger and the miseries of the war, the loss of loved ones and the deprivation of political freedoms, to rebuild an opera house to which they probably would never have gone if the economic and social conditions that allowed its construction in the second half of the 19th century had been maintained?
The reconstruction of the Semperoper, against the will of a regime that execrated it as a monument to the bourgeoisie, allowed them not only to recover a building that had been the pride of Dresden, restoring the Saxon city to its former beauty and splendor, but also to remake its world, redefine the unique and collective experience to overcome the horrors of the past and project into the future. I do not think I am exaggerating if I say that the reconstruction of this great architectural work was for those people the work of their lives.
-Ricardo Ibarlucía is a philosopher, specialized in aesthetic theories. Author of “Why do we need masterpieces. Writings on art and philosophy” (FCE).
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