Innovators in Sculpture and Innovators in Painting by Dianne Durante
By Joseph Kellard
Innovators in Sculpture
Self-Published, 2015
162 pp., $8 (Kindle), $30 (hardcover)
Innovators in Painting
Self-Published, 2020
140 pp., $8 (Kindle), $30 (hardcover)
Those interested in art history can choose from an abundance of books stretching back to Giorgio Vasari’s seminal 16th-century work The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, a collection of biographies of Italian Renaissance artists.1 Best-selling modern classics include E. H. Gombrich’s 1950 The Story of Art and W. H. Janson’s 1962 History of Art, which provide sweeping overviews of the Western canon from antiquity. Common among more contemporary books is Art, a 2008 tome showcasing hundreds of artists and artistic movements from around the world.
Although these books and others introduce readers to many artists and their innovations, they generally treat originality as undefinable and elusive. In her pathbreaking books Innovators in Sculpture and Innovators in Painting, Dianne Durante takes readers on a unique journey, a highly essentialized analysis of the major innovations throughout Western art. She expertly navigates this vast, complex subject, displaying artists who have created progressively more representationally accurate and expressive works through unprecedented means.
Author of seventeen books on art and history, Durante based Sculpture and Painting on her walking tours through the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Collectively, they are a manageable 302 pages featuring 584 images from the museum and other sources. . . .
Sculpture presents eleven major innovations, from the life-sized sculptures of the ancient Egyptians to Baroque artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s grand-scale ensembles of mixed media. In Painting, Durante identifies twenty-nine innovations, from the simple cave paintings of prehistoric France to the color-reflective shadows in Claude Monet’s canvases, whereby he pioneered French Impressionism in the 19th century.
Durante bases her standards for originality in art on Ayn Rand’s aesthetic theories, distinguishing major innovations from less useful inventiveness and purposeless gimmickry. Durante holds that if an artwork is to qualify as a major innovation, then it must first capture the viewer’s attention and clearly communicate the artist’s ideas and values (his “message”). It must be “so unusual, so vivid, or so emotionally gripping that it makes you stand still and contemplate” it. Major innovations not only enable artists to create their own unique works of art, but they also provide other artists with tools and techniques “to convey their values and ideas more effectively” (Sculpture, 8; Painting, 9). Durante holds that major innovations prove so useful that they become essential to the artist’s tool kit and are widely used thereafter.
In Painting, she recognizes the greater complexity of the medium compared to sculpture, classifying its twenty-nine major innovations into five categories, and elaborates that major innovations “capture our attention by showing the real world more vividly and accurately, including its volume and depth, or tell us more effectively what we should pay attention to, or set a mood and thus tell us what the painter feels (and expects us to feel) about his subject” (Painting, 121).
Durante elaborates her conception of innovations by discussing artworks exemplifying them. For instance, she notes that pre-4th-century BC sculptures were created to be viewed primarily from the front, explaining that Greek innovators later chiseled three-dimensional sculptures that onlookers walked around for side and rear views. She illustrates this point with images of a 2nd- or 3rd-century BC bronze statuette of a robed dancer and the 2nd-century BC Nike of Samothrace—enabling readers to grasp more concretely why the ancients would find these works so novel that they would stop, look, and think longer about them.
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Durante credits ancient Greeks with more than half of the major innovations cataloged in Sculpture and nearly a third in Painting. Another of their breakthroughs was to include anatomical details in human subjects, exemplified by a 6th-century BC sculpture of a Kouros. Whereas ancient Egyptian sculptures, for example, had breakfast-sausage-like toes, the Kouros sports toes with knuckles and other body parts with more defined features. Durante writes, “During the sixth century BC, sculptors made rapid progress at showing eyes, ears, abdominal muscles, knees and other anatomical features more realistically” (Sculpture, 25).
Greek painters originated foreshortening, in which figures and objects appear larger nearer the foreground; and variation in ground lines, wherein subjects and objects are depicted higher or lower within the picture to suggest their proximity to the viewer. Both techniques create a greater illusion of three-dimensionality.
Each chapter in Durante’s chronologically structured books is devoted to one major innovation. But within many chapters (especially in Sculpture), she provides additional content not directly related to particular innovations. These sections and side discussions help connect the historical narratives, enabling readers to more readily identify the nature, evolution, and significance of the innovations.
For example, Durante recounts roughly a thousand years of retrogression to open her chapters on the early Renaissance painter Giotto and sculptor Donatello, who rediscovered the innovations lost from classical antiquity. As Durante explains, when Christianity dominated Europe, many pagan Greek and Roman artworks were destroyed or buried. Sculpture and painting were used as didactic tools for teaching scripture to the illiterate masses, and innovation ceased for several centuries. To medieval Catholics, a god-ruled supernatural realm was all-important, and accurate portrayals of life on Earth were irrelevant: “Thus medieval painters were either ignorant of, or they outright rejected, the innovations that had been made over thousands of years for accurately representing human beings and this world” (Painting, 57).
Christian sculptors and painters repeatedly depicted essentially the same religious figures, stories, and compositions. In chapter 8 in Sculpture, Durante looks at a representative 12th-century wooden work, Virgin and Child in Majesty, highlighting the fact that Christian sculptors reverted from the more anatomically accurate achievements of the Greeks. She notes the Madonna’s “melting shoulders and badly proportioned forearms,” details that the sculptor likely considered unimportant (Sculpture, 83). Similarly, in Painting, she writes of the 13th-century Enthroned Madonna and Child, again underscoring the lack of details that made figures in the works of earlier painters appear more lifelike:
With long, elegant hands that seem to have no bones at all, [the Madonna] holds the Christ Child on her knee. The Child, as always, has adult proportions. The Madonna and the Child, as always, have greenish skin-tones. Their drapery is painted, as always, in decorative swirls that bear little relation to the forms of the bodies beneath, but have gold highlights to indicate the importance of these two figures. The overlapping of the figures gives a hint of depth—but in contradiction of that depth, the legs are not properly foreshortened (the thighs seem ridiculously short), and the throne seems to be ironed onto the background. (Painting, 59)
Likewise, Durante’s discussion of 5th-century BC Greek sculptures, with their run-of-the-mill though enormously influential faces, helps readers grasp the 4th-century BC innovation of using facial gestures to depict emotions. Scopas’s portrayal of emotion through facial expressions supplanted the calm expressions that Pheidias depicted, ushering in a new artistic era that culminated in the passion-filled 1st-century BC sculpture Laocoön by Agesander, Athenodorus, and Polydorus of Rhodes. Of this iconic and innovative work, Durante writes:
Looking at the emotions playing across these faces makes us speculate on the minds behind the sculptured bodies: the thoughts behind the marble bones and muscles. It makes us wonder what the subjects of these sculptures are feeling and thinking. Emotions engage us even more than a figure such as the Apoxyomenos [a sculpture of an athlete twisting and extending his arms outward] who shares our space. That’s why facial expression counts as a major innovation.” (Sculpture, 51)
Among the many intriguing subjects of Durante’s books are her discussions on the characteristics fundamental to all art innovators, Michelangelo’s groundbreaking artistic independence, how oil-based paints made possible new techniques, the Renaissance painter who discovered four major innovations (the most by any known artist in both mediums), why Rodin’s technical abilities regressed as his career matured, and what modern artists have in common with their medieval Christian counterparts.
Durante’s compare-and-contrast techniques—wherein she sets artworks side by side to help determine their themes or to highlight features as a means to clarify a distinction—are among her best teaching tools. Others include thought experiments and questions for readers to ponder. These methods encourage readers to think more deeply and carefully about artistic innovations, both major and minor. She also writes clearly, and when she uses artsy or abstract language, such as “sfumato” or Rand’s definition of art as “a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments,” she consistently restates the ideas in simpler terms (Sculpture, 8).
Given that Durante’s subjects involve countless artworks across millennia, books of her kind lend themselves to debate, as when she applies her standards to modern sculptures and paintings and concludes that none of them has originated major innovations (and excludes nonrepresentational abstract works as “anti-art”). But whereas some writers endlessly debate minutiae, she provides clear, overarching standards for judging a vital aspect of art.
To my knowledge, these books are totally unique in providing a systematic study of art history focused on innovation and innovators. Sculpture and Painting take an innovative step in art scholarship, transforming a monumental topic into a manageable form that help readers to better understand and appreciate the work of artistic trailblazers from time immemorial.