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How Pictures Complete Us: The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Divine by Paul Crowther

How Pictures Complete Us: The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Divine by Paul Crowther Paul Crowther, How Pictures Complete Us: The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Divine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), 192 pp. As Paul Crowther will undoubtedly recognize, the present reviewer — a medi- evalist, who is neither a philosopher nor a theologian, nor even stricto sensu an art historian — is an odd choice to comment on a theoretical treatment of pictures, beauty, and the divine between the Renaissance and the present. But it is hard to imagine who might possess the expertise necessary to evaluate or even summa- rize the entire range of arguments Crowther presents: a theory of beauty based on Plato and Joshua Reynolds but also reworking Kant’s sublime; a theory of the picture as essentially three- dimensional and essentially planar, even where not perspectival; a theory of time and the universe as necessitating “iconic projec - tion”; and a treatment of metaphysical orientations as existential, monistic, or theistic, with the theistic preferred. There are many moving interpretations of pictures here, especially those of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, although the publishers have done the author a disservice in the extremely muddy, some - times indecipherable reproductions, especially those of more representational art works. Crowther’s understanding of pictorial meaning, and of the spatiotemporal world it manifests, as beyond reduction to material or psychological terms seems to this reviewer more convincing than recent efforts to explicate art through cognitive science. And the leap in the final chapter, if abrupt, seems profoundly right. If God the creator is both Supreme Being and beyond Being, then the world of spatiotemporal things, in itself and as manifested in painting, is not linear or knowable or encompassable. And vice versa. But as Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger’s works, analyzed in chapter three, impel one to note, and as medieval art might also suggest, more needs to be made of the hideous, the disgusting, and the unadulteratedly evil. Moreover, for all of Crowther’s highly analytical and rigorously argued approach, he in places assumes rather uncritical distinctions between the artistic and the nonartistic and between pictures and other forms of art — distinctions that an attention to the Middle Ages (alas, almost always omi- t ted in such sweeping art historical and philosophical discussions) might do a good deal to problematize and inform. — Caroline Walker Bynum doi 10.1215/0961754X-4254156 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/common-knowledge/article-pdf/24/1/171/518247/0240171.pdf by DEEPDYVE INC user on 22 August 2019 L i t t l e R e v i e w s 171 http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Common Knowledge Duke University Press

How Pictures Complete Us: The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Divine by Paul Crowther

Bynum, Caroline Walker
Common Knowledge , Volume 24 (1) – Jan 1, 2018
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Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press
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0961-754X
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1538-4578
DOI
10.1215/0961754X-4254156
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Abstract

Paul Crowther, How Pictures Complete Us: The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Divine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), 192 pp. As Paul Crowther will undoubtedly recognize, the present reviewer — a medi- evalist, who is neither a philosopher nor a theologian, nor even stricto sensu an art historian — is an odd choice to comment on a theoretical treatment of pictures, beauty, and the divine between the Renaissance and the present. But it is hard to imagine who might possess the expertise necessary to evaluate or even summa- rize the entire range of arguments Crowther presents: a theory of beauty based on Plato and Joshua Reynolds but also reworking Kant’s sublime; a theory of the picture as essentially three- dimensional and essentially planar, even where not perspectival; a theory of time and the universe as necessitating “iconic projec - tion”; and a treatment of metaphysical orientations as existential, monistic, or theistic, with the theistic preferred. There are many moving interpretations of pictures here, especially those of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, although the publishers have done the author a disservice in the extremely muddy, some - times indecipherable reproductions, especially those of more representational art works. Crowther’s understanding of pictorial meaning, and of the spatiotemporal world it manifests, as beyond reduction to material or psychological terms seems to this reviewer more convincing than recent efforts to explicate art through cognitive science. And the leap in the final chapter, if abrupt, seems profoundly right. If God the creator is both Supreme Being and beyond Being, then the world of spatiotemporal things, in itself and as manifested in painting, is not linear or knowable or encompassable. And vice versa. But as Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger’s works, analyzed in chapter three, impel one to note, and as medieval art might also suggest, more needs to be made of the hideous, the disgusting, and the unadulteratedly evil. Moreover, for all of Crowther’s highly analytical and rigorously argued approach, he in places assumes rather uncritical distinctions between the artistic and the nonartistic and between pictures and other forms of art — distinctions that an attention to the Middle Ages (alas, almost always omi- t ted in such sweeping art historical and philosophical discussions) might do a good deal to problematize and inform. — Caroline Walker Bynum doi 10.1215/0961754X-4254156 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/common-knowledge/article-pdf/24/1/171/518247/0240171.pdf by DEEPDYVE INC user on 22 August 2019 L i t t l e R e v i e w s 171

Journal

Common Knowledge – Duke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 2018

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