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"On seeing Giorgione's style," wrote Giorgio Vasari, "Titian abandoned that of Bellini, although he had long practiced it, and imitated Giorgione so well that in a short time his works were taken for Giorgione's." So Vasari, the sixteenth-century Italian artist, historian, and critic, chronicled the aesthetic formation of that period's great colorist, the Venetian painter Titian. Titian, who trained under both Bellini and Giorgione, learned their styles well enough to seamlessly complete paintings begun by both artists. Then he went on to forge his own acclaimed style in which drawing was absorbed into color. Working thus from his teachers toward his own sensibility, Titian seems to have derived a new art from old.
"Encounters: New Art from Old" was the theme of a striking exhibition at Great Britain's National Gallery in the summer and early fall of 2000. The exhibition catalogue offers the reader 24 beautifully illustrated essays, each focusing on a prominent contemporary artist who has created a new work of art based upon a chosen work from the National Gallery's collection. All 24 artists, whether sculptors, painters, or even video artists, have elected to base their work on the most traditional form of traditional art: easel paintings.
Clearly the exhibition and the catalogue alike were calculated to provoke, to challenge received opinion. Haven't we been told that contemporary art is by definition contemptuous of tradition? And isn't the greatness of an artist measured by the extent to which he asserts his originality, breaking with the past? On these and other matters, including the relationship between art and technology, Encounters has much to teach us. As Thomas A . Clark is quoted in one of the essays, "Innovation is startling and beautiful not because it gives rise to a new poetry, which would be incomprehensible, but when it is an old poetry made new." Yet for the most part these artists do not themselves work in the tradition with which they have chosen to dialogue. What then constitutes tradition, and how can these artists be situated in it?
Video artist Bill Viola chose a painting by Hieronymus Bosch (1474-1516) as inspiration for his new work. Viola, a creator of large video installations where moving screens as well as images, and intense sound as well as sight, forcefully engage the viewer, has been looking carefully at paintings from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Viola believes the transformation of art that took place during that period, driven by the techniques of Renaissance perspective and printing, anticipated the equally transforming technological developments in the arts today. Further, he draws a connection between the social, religious, and political upheavals of that time and our own. Thus he treats the painting by Bosch as a "visual template" from which he constructs his own moving pictures. Viola employed the same strategy in his 1995 work, The Greeting, which was closely based on Jacopo da Pontormo's sixteenth-century painting, The Visitation. Viola's electronic medium, and our experience of it, is vastly different from Pontormo's technique of painting, but even so an uncanny similarity between the images remains. "I don't believe in originality in art," says Viola. "I think we exist on this earth to inspire each other, through our actions, through our deeds, and through who we are. We're always borrowing."
Viola's intention to make something new through borrowing from the old is laden with concern for the essence of creative ingenuity and has little to do with sentimental longing for the past. Viola uses the template of the past, not to resuscitate it, but as a springboard for innovation.
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