Context 159 - May 2019

54 C O N T E X T 1 5 9 : M A Y 2 0 1 9 students of the Royal Academy during his presidency (he was the inaugural president) between 1769 and 1790. As the critic Edmund Gosse writes in the preface to my 1884 edition of Discourses : ‘Neither the lecturer’s facts nor his opinions are authoritative enough to pass unscathed under a modern scrutiny’. Nevertheless, the Discourses are a remarkable attempt to establish a new academic discipline in an era in which access to source material was pretty limited. In The Seventh Discourse, delivered in December 1776, Reynolds sets before his students his principal artistic concepts. These he separates into the objective (truth), which include matters of fact as well as technique, and the subjective (taste), which include the natural processes of mind and imagination; and he suggests that it is the response to these processes, whether they be fundamental or ephemeral, that a work of art evokes which distinguishes it from a mere painting. Ruskin frequently refers to the Discourses in his series of 64 essays published sequentially as Modern Painters, often to disagree. However, it is Reynold’s concept of taste informed by knowledge and experience that re-emerges as The Lamp of Memory. Needless to say, the debate about the purpose and meaning of art did not end with Ruskin. L’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake) was a 19th-century counter- movement that tried to divorce the production of art from its patronage or commercial value; conversely there have been numerous attempts to capture the power of art and architecture in support of political and nationalistic movements. Moreover, today artistic value and monetary value are all too often confused. In his 1972 book Ways of Seeing , the artist and critic John Berger sought to unravel this. His list of preconceived assumptions that the viewer starts with: ‘Beauty, Truth, Genius, Civilization, Form, Status, Taste, etc’, are pretty much the same as Reynolds’s ‘taste’. But while for Reynolds they are essentials for artistic understanding, for Berger they are baggage that does not help with modern-day interpretation. Art, he says, (and, in many ways, I say architecture too) has always been about wealth and status: a statement about its owner and his possession of things – house, estate, landscape, luxury objects, beautiful women, or to his social standing – titles, honours, learning, taste. Originally these were reflections of the commissioner of the art, but as commercial markets for art evolved it could be applied much more widely. Berger rolls the debate forward to the modern era, when the power of art has been adopted by the commercial sector to harness people’s natural desire to enhance their status by making them want things that are available to buy. This creates a further problem for us in the heritage sector because the public’s desire for the stuff of modern living often does not fit well with the historic fabric they wish to house it in. The chapel of c1150 in Ludlow Castle was built in a circular shape to reinforce the aspiration of Gilbert de Lacy to be Knight Templar, an overt act of status- building. It has just been re-roofed, having been open to the air for some 250 years, to improve both the protection of its fabric and its use as a wedding venue. The design is conjectural but it has been well done. Despite its not being a full ‘re-establishment’ of the building, my inner Viollet- le-Duc rather approves; but my inner Ruskin is appalled. My inner Berger is still sitting on the fence. One issue Reynolds, Ruskin and Berger all agree on is the necessity of subjective analysis informing practice. In the historic environment today we are used to the assessment of ‘significance’ as an analytical tool, although this often results in our seeing only the most obvious aspects. If we are to follow in the footsteps of these great men, we need to fully examine a building, its history and its people to deliver conservation as an art rather than just a range of techniques. So we conservationists need to celebrate the Ruskin bicentenary with all due admiration and some caution.We need to see like Ruskin, understand like Reynolds and question our own assumptions like Berger. If we can, we will be getting somewhere. James Caird, chair@ihbc.org.uk Palladio’s Villa Poiana, built in 1548–1549 for the local landowner and former soldier Bonifacio Poiana (Photo: Marcok, Wikimedia)