The Art of Arts

"This was a wild card. Anita Albus is not a professional scholar and was unknown to scholars in this field before the publication of this book. She was trained as a botanical painter in the manner of the Old Masters of the 17th century. These were painters of highly detailed descriptive images. I want to invoke in this context the great book of the 1980s by Svetlana Alpers called The Art of Describing . Alpers’s thesis was that whereas Italian art is dedicated to storytelling or visual argumentation or the standardisation of knowledge, Northern art was fundamentally descriptive and devoted itself to the task of rendering the look of things. She made that out to be an epistemological and cultural project of equal significance. Alpers was defending Northern painting against the more language-based, discursive and philosophically fortified Italian painting. But that was the 17th century, so that doesn’t count as the Renaissance. In a way, Anita Albus wrote the prehistory of Alpers’s book, but did so in a highly distinctive way. It’s a series of poetic essays. They’re like prose poems, really, and stuffed with arcane knowledge and scholarship. She has read the primary sources and has come up with a trove of arcane lore about plants and animals, her primary focus as a painter, but also about food and medicine, about folklore and folkways. She tracks down all these fascinating references. She has the storyteller’s gift. I always assign this book in class as a kind of counterweight to the more prosaic scholarly books. This is the kind of thing that students should be reading because it’s a book that’s driven by passion, by appetite, and by curiosity. It’s a completely original model of scholarship. In fact it belongs to a new genre which she invented. It is scholarly. Everything she says is grounded and true. She animates it all with her imagination. The Art of Arts is a book that is about the tradition of painting that was inaugurated by Jan Van Eyck, the Flemish painter of the early 15th century who invented oil painting in effect and was credited with that by Vasari. Even the Italians understood that it was a Northerner who with the practical genius of an alchemist learned how to bind pigments to mediums in such a way as to create these glowing translucent surfaces, capable of describing anything in reality. Metals, glass, water, fur, hair, wood, earth, plants, animals…. Suddenly a painting became—and this is what she means by ‘the art of arts’—a kind of comprehensive medium capable of engulfing and processing everything. It simply became the mirror of reality. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . These painters like Van Eyck tended to work on small scales and they produced miniature worlds. They essentially reduced the world to a small scale and created fascination and wonder as responses which competed then with traditional religious responses to art. As a result, it’s also part of the birth of secular painting. Although she’s got lots to say about Christian iconography, you get the sense that painting becomes a secularising project. It’s about the senses, it’s about the individual’s private pleasure in these works. She brings all that pleasure to the fore. I love this book and have enjoyed going back to it over the years."