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De Zeventiende Eeuw. Jaargang 24 (2008)

De Zeventiende Eeuw. Jaargang 24

(2008)– [tijdschrift] Zeventiende Eeuw, De–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

Meaning in Art History
A philosophical analysis of the iconological debate and the Rembrandt Research Project⋆
Matthijs Jonker

Introduction

Since the origins of their discipline in the nineteenth century art historians have silently worked with a certain conception of meaning. In this conception the meaning of a work of art is seen as some kind of aura accompanying it, an essential or intrinsic property of the artwork. Therefore, I will call this the ‘essentialist’ conception of meaning. The application of this conception in art history has two main variations. In the first one, the artist is seen as the origin and sole source of an artwork's meaning. Through his creativity, brilliance and sometimes even through divine inspiration he expresses his ideas, intentions and emotions by infusing his materials with some intrinsic quality or concept, turning them into art with a given meaning. The art historian attempting to understand this meaning seeks to plumb the intentions, emotions, or other mental conditions the artist had at the time of the artwork's creation. In the other variation, an artist is seen to express (often no less brilliantly) the mentality of a nation or the underlying principles of a culture.1 Although the artist and his mental conditions are still important in this view, they are no longer crucial for understanding the meaning of a work of art. The meaning of a work of art is analysed by reconstructing the mentality or the principles of his culture. In this variation, culture is seen as a homogenous and ideal entity. The two variations can also be combined: in that case, the intentions of the artist are reconstructed, but they are regarded less as individual choices than as reflections of the mentality or underlying principles of his culture.

The essentialist view tends to downplay or ignore a circumstance that has received increasing attention in recent decades in art history as in other fields. That is, the social dimension of the work of art. This has been acknowledged in the last three or four decades in a large number of art-historical studies infused with concepts and methods

derived from sociology,2 anthropology,3 and economics.4 In spite of this, however, the essentialist conception of meaning still pervades art-historical discussions and governs the questions asked and methods used in art-historical research. I will try to show this by analysing two recent art-historical debates on Dutch seventeenth-century painting in the light of the philosophy of Theodore Schatzki.

First I will discuss the iconological debate on Dutch seventeenth-century genre painting, in which Eddy de Jongh and Svetlana Alpers were the two main antagonists. Here it will become clear that their differences are minor compared to their similarities. In philosophical terms, their dispute is not really a debate at all. Both authors adhere to the essentialist notion of meaning and to the homogenous and idealistic conception of culture. Second, I will turn to the debate about the methods and philosophical presuppositions of the Rembrandt Research Project. There the focus will shift to the conception of the artist as the origin or source of meaning of a work of art. In spite of some promising changes that have been introduced during the project, this a priori continues to govern the main questions and methods of the current research team.

However, before discussing these cases I will try to show what exactly is problematic about the conception of meaning, culture and subjectivity that I sketched in the first paragraph. I will do this by contrasting it to an alternative view of social reality and the place of individuals in it. This different perspective is offered by the American philosopher Theodore Schatzki, who is an ardent advocate of the so-called ‘practice turn’ in social theory. Schatzki combines the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger to develop a social ontology, a theory of the nature of social life.5 As we shall see, this entails radically different conceptions of the meaning of artefacts, of culture and of the role of individuals in it than in essentialism. And although Schatzki's theory is not specifically designed for art-historical purposes - his aims are more general - I believe it can be very useful for this academic discipline.6

Schatzki on social practices and subjectivity

Since the 1970s the ‘practice turn’ in social theory has been discernible in a wide variety of academic disciplines, such as sociology, philosophy, cultural theory and science studies.7 Notwithstanding the obvious varieties in emphasis in these different academic fields, all ‘practice theories’ work with a general conception of social reality, in which social practices are placed at the centre and are the starting point for its study.

This also holds for Schatzki's understanding of the nature and basic structure of social reality, his social ontology. Schatzki defines a social practice as an open-ended, temporally unfolding ‘bundle’ of organized human activity.8 By ‘activity’ Schatzki means ‘bodily doings and sayings’, i.e. concrete actions, including speech, in a given space and time. By emphasizing activity and actions, Schatzki opposes the conception of culture and society as a static, ideal entity. Instead, he regards culture as something dynamic and constantly changing. In addition, we will see that he distances himself from traditional conceptions of ‘mind’ and mental states. This is important in relation to the first variant of how a work of art receives its meaning - the ‘genius’ variant.

Schatzki's picture of social practices is not limited to activity. He also deals on a basic level with the matter of organization. By organization Schatzki means the ways in which actions (i.e. ‘bodily doings and sayings’) are linked to each other in social practices. Actions have the meaning they have because they are linked together in social practices in three ways.9

The first way is through practical understandings. Practical understandings are certain abilities that pertain to the actions composing the practice. Most relevant are three such abilities: knowing how to perform an action; knowing how to identify an action of others; and knowing how to prompt or respond to an action.10 This holds for simple actions such as calling someone over by a wave of the arm. All participants in this practice are able to perform, identify and prompt or respond to a call by a wave of the arm. The same holds for more complex actions such as creating the illusion of space and distance on a flat surface by using linear perspective. Notice that this conception of understanding goes against the traditional view in which it is seen as something that specific people possess (e.g. in their mind). According to Schatzki, although we do attribute understanding to individuals, it is not an intrinsic property they possess, but one they have as participants of a social practice.11

Secondly, in social practices actions are linked through rules. According to Schatzki,

rules are ‘explicit formulations, principles, precepts and instructions that enjoin, direct, or remonstrate people to perform specific actions’. Rules link the doings and sayings of a practice because people take account of and follow the same rules in that practice.12 Examples of rules in modern educational practices are finishing papers (by students) and grading them (by teachers) on time. To take an example from early modern painting practices, the recipes for creating certain colours by combining pigments can be seen as rules in Schatzki's sense. Another example is seventeenth-century guild regulations, according to which students could not place their own name on work they produced in a master's studio.13

Thirdly, actions are connected through the set of ends or goals that are pursued in a social practice.14 For example, in professional soccer practices the players train nearly every day with their team, work out by themselves, and have special diets in order to be well prepared for matches and to win the championship. To take another example, the tasks pupils carried out in Rembrandt's studio were pursued - besides in order to become masters themselves - for the sake of learning to paint in the ‘manner’ of the master so that eventually they could assist in the production of paintings for the art market or for clients.15 It is important to emphasize that, just as practical understanding and rules, these ends and goals are not properties of individual actors but features of a practice. The participants in a given practice have different degrees of mastery of its set of ends and goals. Our habit of ascribing understanding, rule behaviour and the pursuit of goals to individuals should be qualified by the realization that these understandings, rules and goals are principally features of social practices, namely their organization.

Schatzki's application of these principles goes even further. Not only are individual properties constituted in and through social practice: so are individuals themselves, complete with all their understandings and other mental conditions and goals. This brings me to Schatzki's discussion of subjectivity.

For Schatzki, the question of the social constitution of the subject is the question of how human beings are turned into individuals or how someone becomes ‘one of us’. His answer, not surprisingly, is that this takes place in and through social practices. According to him, for a person to be ‘one of us’ means that he behaves in a way that is intelligible to us. We learn how to express our beliefs, wishes and intentions intelligibly through training and conditioning in social practices, through internalising the practical understandings, rules and goals that make up a social context.16 Even most ‘private’

mental states - such as hope, fear and imagination - are said by Schatzki to be moulded in and through social practices and do not exist separately from their expression as doings or sayings.17 We become who we are, acquire our identities and are turned into individuals through exposure to and above all participation in the manifold linked actions that compose practices.18

Social practices are thus the most important context in and through which human beings acquire their identity. For example, some of Rembrandt's students, e.g. Ferdinand Bol and Govert Flinck, adopted a rather different, classicist, style after leaving Rembrandt's studio, in which they had to work in the manner of the master.19 An exclusively individualist explanation for this change in style - referring, for instance, to personal preferences and intentions - is unsatisfactory, because it fails to deal with certain major considerations. The stylistic changes can be understood far better when they are related to contemporary art and patronage practices, in which the classicist style was the criterion for good art (or: goal of the art practice) in the upper layers of society. Changing one's style to classicist indeed says something about one's intentions, but only in relation to those practices.

In maintaining that who someone is depends on his role in the social practices in which he participates, Schatzki advocates an anti-essentialist conception of identity. Identity is not an intrinsic property that one possesses, but it depends on what one does. According to Schatzki, this also holds for what something is, i.e. the meaning of artefacts.20 Like identity, meaning also depends on the position or function something (e.g. objects, artefacts, or works of art) has in social practices. For example, if we want to know what the Night Watch meant in the seventeenth century, we should try to reconstruct the social practices, each with different practical understandings, rules and ends, in which the painting had a function. In this case we can think of militia practices and art (or painting) practices. If we want to know what the Night Watch means today, we should try to find out the different functions it has in contemporary social practices. Here one can think of museum practices, scholarly (e.g. academic art-historical) practices, tourism practices, and cultural heritage practices. The Night Watch will have a (somewhat) different function in each practice. This shows that ‘meaning is and can never be fixed’ and ‘meaning and identity are labile phenomena’.21 Moreover, according to Schatzki, nonhuman entities perform their own type of activity. Objects and artefacts do something to people; they have an effect on us and on our actions. One can think of the different functions, and thus meaning, a painting has when it hangs in a church or in a museum. When its position changes so does its function and, there-

fore, also its meaning.22 And because practices change, so does the meaning of a work of art. Moreover, a work of art can have different meanings simultaneously, because it can have a function in different social practices at the same time.

The conception of culture as an open-ended system composed of different social practices, each organized according to its own set of practical understanding, rules and ends, implies that there is no all-encompassing mentality or underlying principle governing culture as a whole. In this view, culture is thus seen as heterogeneous rather than homogenous. Moreover, because social practices are composed of human activity, culture is also conceived of as dynamic and always developing, instead of as a static entity as in the traditional conception.

Conceiving the artist and his mental conditions, including his artistic intentions, as moulded in and through social practices and also as participating in them afterwards, puts the importance of the artist as origin and centre of meaning into perspective. It means that we can no longer see him as a genius concerned only with his own artistic development and the furthering of art.23 In order to identify his intentions, we must start by reconstructing the practical understandings, rules and ends of the practices in which he was trained and participated. This entails that the artist and his intentions (but this also holds for other individuals such as patrons and viewers) will no longer be the sole source or origin of the meaning of the work of art.

The iconological debate and its philosophical presuppositions

Eddy de Jongh became a famous art historian because of his application of Erwin Panofsky's iconological method to Dutch seventeenth-century genre paintings in Zinne- en minnebeelden.24 His adherence to the traditional conception of the meaning of works of art is shown by the fact that he equates this meaning with the intentions of the artist, which in turn, can be derived from the mentality of a period or culture:

Nu gaat het er hier niet om, via de kunst een mentaliteit te demonstreren, maar, omgekeerd, om via de 17de eeuwse mentaliteit, de ideeënwereld, waarover de contemporaine letterkunde en andere schrifturen ons zoveel beter informeren dan de schilderkunst, achter de oorspronkelijke bedoelingen van de kunstenaars te komen.25

This means that De Jongh's primary objective in establishing the meaning of the works of art under investigation is analysing the mentality of the Dutch seventeenth century. To achieve this, he predominantly uses contemporary textual sources: literature (e.g. Joost van den Vondel and Jan Krul), emblem books (e.g. Jacob Cats and Roemer Visscher), and art-theoretical texts (e.g. Karel van Mander, Samuel van Hoogstraten, Gerard de Lairesse). According to De Jongh, these sources bring the two basic elements of Dutch seventeenth-century mentality to the fore: the tendency to moralize and the preference for ambiguity and poly-interpretability.26

His next step is connecting this mentality to contemporary works of art, genre paintings in particular. De Jongh claims that in these paintings the preference for ambiguity and the moralizing tendency is expressed by certain depicted objects - such as stockings, bubbles and arrows - which at first glance seem to be straightforward representations of reality. According to De Jongh, however, these objects often stand for other things and even for abstract ideas. For example, the stocking is a symbol for the female genitals, the bubble a symbol for the vulnerability of human life, and a boy playing with arrows a symbol for Cupid.27 In other words, according to De Jongh, Dutch seventeenth-century genre paintings possess a deeper, symbolical layer that lies beneath the pictorial surface. It is on this layer that their meaning is located. The central feature of Dutch genre painting is, thus, not realism, as was thought since the nineteenth century but ‘apparent realism’ (‘schijnrealisme’). And the objects and situations they represent should not be seen as ‘reflections of reality’ but as ‘realized abstractions’.28

Fierce criticism against De Jongh's iconological method was levelled by Svetlana Alpers in The Art of Describing (1983). She argues that the meaning of genre paintings - but her thesis holds for seventeenth-century Dutch art in general - is not to be sought beneath the pictorial surface but is made visible on it.29 In doing so, Alpers emphasizes the how, the realistic manner in which Dutch paintings are made, whereas De Jongh focused almost exclusively on the what, the subject matter (objects and situations) of the images. As Alpers sees it, the iconological focus on subject matter derives from the paradigmatic role of Italian art in academic art history. She argues that the iconological method, which was originally developed for Italian Renaissance art, was unjustly transferred to seventeenth-century Dutch art by De Jongh. This transfer was

illegitimate, according to Alpers, because each culture was supposedly governed by a different set of underlying principles or mentality.30

Alpers grounds her claim about the differences of mentality in the history of contemporary science. From Johannes Kepler's model of the eye, Francis Bacon's experimentalism and Robert Hooke's use of the microscope, she extracts a conception of knowledge which supposedly governed seventeenth-century Dutch culture as a whole.31 Knowledge, in this conception, is attained through describing what is seen. In keeping with this notion, Alpers goes into what she calls the ‘mapping impulse’ in the Netherlands. According to her, ‘the Dutch’ had a predilection for mapmaking as a means of getting to know the world.32 This implies that images are as valid as words when it comes to describing the world. She claims that Dutch seventeenth-century culture was not dominated by texts, as was the Italian Renaissance, but by pictures. Connecting this interpretation of Dutch culture to contemporaneous art, Alpers asserts that Dutch seventeenth-century paintings present themselves as ‘structures of knowledge’. According to her, they are products of a culture for which visual representation was the preferred way of knowing the world: ‘pictures document or represent behaviour; they are descriptive rather than prescriptive.’33

In Alpers's book, the differences between Dutch and Italian culture extend to the ways by which works of art receive their meaning. In this context she goes into the word-image relation in both cultures. According to her, in Italy there was a clear distinction between visual representation and verbal sign. Images usually refer to prior existing texts. The Dutch art of describing, on the other hand, stood apart from this kind of ‘verbal grounding’. In the Netherlands ‘images are at the centre of human making and constitute an attainment of true knowledge’.34 In Dutch paintings verbal and pictorial signs are equated. There is, in short, something more like a picture language than a realm of hidden meanings. This is why Alpers also criticizes De Jongh for focusing almost exclusively on literary sources in order to establish the mentality of Dutch seventeenth-century culture.35

From a philosophical point of view, there is not much difference between the methods of De Jongh and Alpers. Both authors interpret Dutch paintings in reference to an all-encompassing underlying set of principles or mentality that they suppose to govern culture as a whole. As I see it, both art historians adhere to the second variant of how works of art receive their meaning, in which culture is seen as a homogenous and ideal entity. Both authors appeal to pre-existing principles established through the examination of other cultural products. Their disagreement is limited to the choice of which cultural products to turn to, literature or natural science. De Jongh's reliance on literature leads him to seek the key for the interpretation of paintings in moralization and poly-interpretability, while Alpers's insistence on the predominance of science brings her to the conclusion that Dutch art is best regarded as acquisition of knowledge through description.

De Jongh almost never establishes a direct link between the literary sources he uses and the genre paintings he interprets. He assumes that certain painters and clients knew the texts he uses as sources for explaining the paintings. Evidence for this assumption is lacking, let alone proof that these texts were used in the production of these specific paintings. In my opinion, this has to do with the fact that his conception of culture is too unified and continuous. It is simply not likely that Dutch culture as a whole, for the entire seventeenth century, was governed by a tendency for moralizing and a preference for polyvalence. This is certainly not proved by De Jongh's references to contemporary texts.36 However, Alpers can also be criticized for not establishing a direct link between the art of ‘the Dutch’ in the seventeenth century and scientific developments in the same period. In this regard, her book has the very same shortcoming as the publications of De Jongh. The connection between (mostly) foreign scientists and Dutch paintings remains utterly unconvincing.37

Concerning the notion of meaning that was expressed in this dispute, I agree with Alpers's criticism on De Jongh's exclusive focus on what is painted. However, her alternative of locating the meaning of a work of art in the pictorial surface, i.e. focusing on how it is painted, does not entail a different notion of meaning. Both scholars think of meaning as an intrinsic property of the work of art, rather than as dependent on the function it has in social practices. Since De Jongh and Alpers have such similar conceptions of culture and of how works of art receive their meaning, their debate on Dutch art is not really a debate at all, at least not in terms of their philosophical presuppositions.

Having reached this conclusion, it is well to ask how one might move beyond this ‘debate’. Here too, Schatzki's conceptions of culture and meaning can be of use. Practices can and do change over time, one and the same object is bound to have a different function, and thus meaning, over time. We should take this historical and cultural contingency into account in art-historical investigations by starting with reconstructing the practices in which a given artwork functioned. One can think of my example of the Night Watch in the previous section: the work can, and in my opinion should, be understood from the varying perspectives of its place in different practices and cultures. With respect to genre paintings, for which information concerning a commission or early sale is missing, we could try to find out where these were placed, in which kinds of homes, and which function they had. This is not to say that the ‘what’ (subject matter) and the ‘how’ (manner in which) become irrelevant. On the contrary, it is very likely that these dimensions can give important clues about the functions these paintings fulfilled. It is even possible that they will lead us to contemporary discussions in which genre paintings were used as moralizing images.38

In reconstructing seventeenth-century social practices the art historian will have to look for those aspects of human actions that make them hang together. In other words, the art historian will have to reconstruct the organization of social practices, i.e. practical understandings, rules and goals. These can be found in the types of sources that are already widely used in art-historical research, such as works of art, art-theoretical treatises, contracts, guild rules, emblem books, probate inventories and so forth.39 The trick is to look at them in a different way, posing different questions to them and therefore getting different answers. There are no definite criteria for identifying social practices - just as there are no definite criteria for identifying the hidden meanings of genre paintings in iconology. Like any other scholarly hypothesis, a reconstruction of a seventeenth-century social practice will have to be judged and accepted or rejected by other art historians.

The Rembrandt Research Project and the anachronism of attribution research

Since its start in 1968 the main goal of the Rembrandt Research Project (rrp) has been to catalogue Rembrandt's complete oeuvre of paintings. This means that attribution research has always been its ‘core business’. Initially it was thought that this would lead to a substantial reduction of the number of paintings ascribed to Rembrandt by Abraham Bredius in 1935 and Horst Gerson in 1968.40 The reason for this was that the members of the rrp thought that these catalogues included many imitations and forgeries from

later centuries.41 Because of this presupposition they initially also found it unnecessary to investigate contemporary workshop practices. In the first volume of the rrp's catalogue (Corpus i) the team members write: ‘the many ties linking Rembrandt to his contemporaries in the Netherlands and abroad have been deliberately left aside, not because they are in general unimportant but because they can provide no basic criteria for defining his painted oeuvre.’ The picture of the artist that results from this limitation is that of a ‘strictly individual development’.42 In other words, the social context of patrons, public, fellow painters, etc. is ignored and the paintings are analysed, interpreted and attributed or rejected as if they came into existence outside of social practices and did not function in them. Both Rembrandt and his paintings were conceived of as autonomous entities, distinct from the activity of other human beings (social practices). Moreover, the meaning of a painting, as an authentic Rembrandt, was seen as an intrinsic property of the work, a property of which Rembrandt was the sole origin. In this phase of the project, it is therefore clear that the rrp adhered totally to the first variant of the essentialist conception of meaning that was described in the introduction.

However, study of the results of scientific examination (e.g. dendrochronology, X-radiography, and infrared reflectography) made it clear to the rrp that the catalogues of Bredius and Gerson contained surprisingly few works that did not originate in the seventeenth century. Most dubious paintings turned out to be made during Rembrandt's lifetime. This falsification of the team's initial presupposition about the number of later forgeries and imitations caused a change in attitude concerning the study of social context. In Corpus iv, Ernst van de Wetering, who has been director of the rrp since 1993, writes:

In preparing previous volumes (...) it had become increasingly clear that our inquiry into the autograph Rembrandt oeuvre would be more effectively pursued by paying greater attention to the questions of when, where, and for what purpose the non-autograph paintings were done. Research on Rembrandt's workshop practice, the training of his pupils and the contribution to his production by these pupils and by assistants was therefore gradually intensified.43

Growing interest in social context and the function (‘purpose’) of seventeenth-century ‘Rembrandtesque’ paintings,44 mentioned in this passage, was already visible in Corpus ii, where an essay by Van de Wetering on Rembrandt's studio practices was included.45 This means that the members of the project gradually came to see Rembrandt and his paintings as enmeshed in social practices, which is a positive development from a

‘Schatzkian’ point of view. However, the passage above also shows that the team's main goal remained the same. Research on workshop practices was carried out in order to establish Rembrandt's autograph oeuvre. Thus, their activities continued to consist mainly of attribution research.

According to the Dutch literary studies professor Mieke Bal and the American-Dutch art historian Gary Schwartz, there are several conceptual problems inherent in the type of attribution research that was carried out by the team members throughout the project. These problems, if one accepts their critique, were not solved by the shift to social context. Bal holds that attribution research is problematic because it is intrinsically anachronistic. I will discuss two of her reasons for this claim. According to Bal, all attribution research assumes - implicitly or explicitly - the existence of a ‘trans-historical core’, that it is possible to reconstruct a historical reality.46 In the case of the rrp this core is Rembrandt's painted oeuvre. It is supposed to consist of all and only those paintings he completely made with his own hands. Bal's objection to this assumption is that it conceals the fact that in reconstructing such an image of an artist's oeuvre there is also always a large amount of constructing involved, because we project our notions, e.g. of authorship and individuality, onto the past. In other words, whereas it is (implicitly) claimed that with the help of attribution research we relive the past ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen [sei]’, the actual result is more a picture of ourselves.

Turning to the notion of authorship itself - and this is Bal's second reason for calling the rrp anachronistic - she claims that in attribution research an illegitimate ‘shift from art to psychology’ is made. This is a shift from ‘hand’ to ‘mind’ (or ‘intention’), in which ‘hand’ refers to the craftsman who handled the brush and in which ‘mind’ (or ‘intention’) is a modernist construct, a projection on the part of the art historian. She criticizes the members of the rrp because they conflate the artwork with the artist's intention in a one-to-one relation. They work with a psychological notion of the artist (or author) in which his mind is unjustly seen as the centre, or origin, of meaning.47

As a solution to these problems Bal offers an alternative approach to the study of works of art and of Rembrandt in particular. She claims that since historical reality is nowhere to be found, we should start with reflections on our questions, methods and notions when interpreting art. In other words, we should make the construction as explicit as possible and stop deceiving ourselves by concealing it behind an unattainable ideal of reconstruction.48

Whereas I sympathize with Bal's criticism on the rrp insofar as it is similar to my ob-

jections to the essentialist conception of how works of art receive their meaning, I do not agree with her solution. She is wrong in claiming that the reconstruction of an historical reality - seventeenth-century art practice, for instance - is invalidated by the fact that it always entails constructing. By focusing mainly on our current relationship with works of art, she takes the ‘history’ out of art history. In doing so she goes too far, because historical reconstruction is still a criterion for good art-historical research. In other words, it is a goal in art-historical practices. And one of the reasons art-historical reconstruction is valuable, in my opinion, is precisely because it puts our current relationship with works of art into perspective. It makes us see that works of art had different functions in different practices in different ages.

Bal's criticism of the rrp, as I see it, is founded in the literary studies practice, which has its own (a-historical) type of practical understanding, rules and ends (i.e. criteria for good research). When she applies these criteria to art history and rejects the art-historical goal of reconstruction, her a-historical alternative is not taken seriously by art historians.49 Moreover, by studying, for instance, seventeenth-century treatises and guild regulations, I believe that reconstruction (of contemporary social practices) is possible.50

Bal's second point of criticism on the rrp, about their psychological notion of authorship, is shared by Gary Schwartz. He claims that in conceiving the paintings as ‘coherent products of one mind and one pair of hands’, the members of the rrp always have dictated terms to a seventeenth-century workshop.51 In addition, Schwartz writes,

the set of features that an [authentic] Rembrandt was presumed to possess - demonstrably thought up and executed entirely by the master and fitting transparently into his artistic development, consisting of enough original material of a kind consistent with other undoubted Rembrandts and with little enough damage and restoration to justify regarding it as his - probably does not exist and may never have.52

This shows that Schwartz's criticism indeed converges with that of Bal: the psychological notion of authorship used by the rrp is intrinsically anachronistic; and throughout

the project the hand/mind of the artist (or author) was seen as the origin of the meaning of a painting: an authentic Rembrandt.53

In addition, Schwartz holds that in the type of attribution research carried out in the rrp, an illegitimate connection is made between quality and authenticity. In Corpus I, for instance, it is claimed that ‘an artist has a certain limit as to the quality of his work’.54 In other words, the team members assumed that paintings made by Rembrandt are generally - in fact, always - of a higher quality than paintings made by his pupils and assistants. This is a questionable presupposition, according to Schwartz, because it does not begin with a definition of what makes a painting good. Instead of looking for the quality of a painting, art historians search for its author, which when found stands for the quality of the work. The name of Rembrandt is equated with high quality. The problem is that the attribution of a painter's name has to be carried out in reference to quality again. Thus, we end up in a vicious circle.

The equation of authorship with quality is not only problematical because it leads to a circular argument, but also because it shows that the team members adhere to the essentialist conception of meaning. According to Schwartz, both authorship and the quality of works of art are habitually discussed by the team members as intrinsic properties. Moreover, in spite of the methodological changes during the project, the main problem of the anachronistic notion of authorship remained the same.

Concerning the implications of these arguments for future art-historical investigations, I have already made clear why I do not agree with Bal's solution to the problems in attribution research. Schwartz, on the other hand, offers a more viable alternative, in my opinion. According to him, attribution research can still be a legitimate art-historical activity if it abandons the idea that there is such a thing as ‘a’ corpus of Rembrandt paintings. Instead, he claims that we should try to attribute Rembrandtness to paintings and other objects (and styles, use of colour, etc): ‘the paintings in the rrp Corpus (and many other objects and images not in it) partake in varying measure of various qualities of “Rembrandtness”’. For example, ‘function’, ‘condition’, ‘fame’, and ‘ownership’ are listed as such qualities by Schwartz.55 This implies that determining who painted what will no longer be a goal in itself. And investigations into seventeenth-century workshop practices, for example, would not have to be subservient to attribution research anymore, as they now are in the rrp; rather both types of study can inform each other.

In my opinion, Schwartz's solution is valuable because it expresses an anti-essentialist conception of meaning. It entails that an artwork's meaning is no longer conceived of

as an intrinsic and unchanging property, but rather as socially constituted, i.e. relative to social practices. Schwartz's rejection of the very idea that there is ‘a’ corpus (or oeuvre) of Rembrandt paintings, points in the same direction. These points also show that Schwartz's position is similar to Schatzki's.

I would like to add to this that attribution research should refrain from working with the psychological notion of an author as an individual, i.e. Rembrandt (and his hand or mind) as the sole maker of an authentic Rembrandt. Instead, we should look at the author as constituted by and functioning in social practices. Moreover, conceiving of artists, patrons and the public in the context of social practices will yield more valuable results because it reduces the danger of projecting one's present notion of authorship, authenticity and quality on an era in which these notions meant very different things. Therefore, it will not always be necessary to ascribe a painting to an individual master. Sometimes it will be sufficient to attribute a painting to a workshop or even a city in order to reconstruct its function, and thus meaning, in seventeenth-century social practices. As a result, art history will be freer in the choice of objects to be studied.

Conclusion

Although a change in art-historical practice is already underway, my discussions of the iconological debate and of the type of attribution research carried out by the rrp shows that it is not yet completed. The essentialist conception of meaning continues to govern art-historical investigations, guiding the questions asked and the methods and notions used. In the case of the iconological debate, the intrinsic meaning of genre paintings was thought by both antagonists to be derived from certain all-encompassing cultural principles, which shows their adherence to the second variation of how works of art receive their essential meaning. In the case of the rrp, the first variation is in play: the intrinsic meaning of the paintings was thought to derive from the individual artist. As such, the meaning was conceived of as the authenticity of a work of art. In my opinion, this should serve only as a starting point for art-historical research and not as an end or goal. In spite of the promising methodological shift to a wider social context of pupils and assistants, the rrp continues to work with an anachronistic notion of authorship. To this day, delimiting Rembrandt's painted oeuvre remains the main goal. I have argued with the help of Schatzki's ontology that the problems in both cases stem from the same root, i.e. the essentialist conception of meaning. Applying Schatzki's thinking to art history brings not only a biting critique of certain long-standing practices. It can also offer new perspectives for improving a field that over the past decades has increasingly made use of questions and methods from other disciplines. Various social sciences and laboratory procedures have enriched the field but have also made it more complex. I believe that Schatzki's conception of social practices, and the related notions of meaning, culture and subjectivity, offers the intellectual rigor and unity that is needed.

Abstract - This article discusses, from a philosophical perspective, two recent art historical debates about Dutch seventeenth-century art. With the help of the American philosopher Theodore Schatzki's practice approach, both the iconological debate, in which Eddy de Jongh and Svetlana Alpers are the main antagonists, and the debate about the methods and presuppositions of the Rembrandt Research Project are presented in a new light. It is shown that in both cases the traditional and essentialist conception of meaning of works of art still plays a fundamental but problematic role. Schatzki's theory makes it possible to go beyond this essentialism and to further academic art history, by offering a new framework for research. In this framework, the meaning of works of art is strongly connected to the function they have in social practices.


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