A poster on Louisa Matthew's office door promises, “Art history you can't sleep through.” Matthew might add another poster that says, “Not your grandmother's art history.”
Matthew, associate professor of art history, is one of many scholars across the country beginning to teach art history in a different way, moving from a focus on style to an exploration of context.
“Art history is no longer just looking at a painting and asking what it looks like,” Matthew says.
While there is no question that studying the history of style is still a part of art history, scholars are now also focusing on context — studying the patron of a painting, the original site or function of the work, the material that it is made of.
“We find that there are all of these different ways of learning about a piece of art that is sited within its culture, not just its looks,” she says. “When you look at a slide on a wall in a classroom or at a painting in a frame in a museum, you can appreciate it for its aesthetic qualities, but you are missing all of what made it part of society. Art can have meanings other than the aesthetic — and it still does, but it's just harder to define them because so much time has passed since the work was created.”
In fact, art history research has become somewhat like detective work, as Matthew's recent sabbatical illustrates.
When Matthew began thinking about her research time, she knew that she wanted to study Venetian paintings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But she also had tired of the intense scrutiny of a single artist (Renaissance painter Lorenzo Lotto, the topic of her doctoral dissertation) and was ready for something new.
“I wanted to get a broader view of what artists were doing in Venice — not just the famous ones, but all the little guys who painted playing cards and wooden boxes,” she explains. “They were all members of the same guild, but we know almost nothing about these other guys.”
Because there was no base of knowledge to work from, Matthew started her detective work from the ground up, surrounded by centuries-old wills, tax records, and lists of confraternities in the State Archives of Venice, one of the most extensive and famous archives in Europe. “It's always particularly nerve-wracking to go out and say that you are starting a new project, especially when it's involved with archival research, because you never know what you are going to find,” she says. “I could have spent three months in Venice and come up with nothing.”
But Matthew didn't come up with nothing; in fact, she discovered a previously-unknown subset of Renaissance apothecaries whose primary vocation was to provide supplies to artists. She returned to Union with her research branching out into new areas, far beyond just the “little guys” of Renaissance art.
The reason for her successful detective work, she says, is the fabulous Venetian Archives, which allowed her to follow every new lead that she discovered. During her three-month sabbatical, Matthew spent each day in the archives, located in a monastery attached to the Frari, the great Franciscan church in Venice. Working in the reading room (a cloister room just fifty feet from Titian's two greatest masterpieces), she pored over centuries-old volumes — some made of paper, others of vellum – that were all bound in animal hide or, more cheaply, in paper.
One of the greatest challenges of the research was deciphering the handwriting in the volumes. In the Middle Ages, only well-trained clerics, priests, and monks wrote, but with the Renaissance, more people began writing, and the quality of the handwriting went downhill quickly. “It's daunting to open one of these huge volumes, which can have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of handwriting, and not be able to read a single word,” says Matthew. “You know that there might be something in there that would be useful to you, but you sit there and stare, starting with one letter. If you figure out what all the o's look like and then the s's and you just keep staring at it, you figure out what it says.”
Matthew sat down to decipher the handwriting and begin her research with an open mind — a tactic she recommends to her students. “When you are doing a research project, you've got to go in a lot of different directions at once,” she says. “It's confusing sometimes, but you take these different trajectories, and they cross-fertilize each other. Also, if one doesn't work out, you've got all these other ones going.”
This is particularly true for working in archives, since unexpected tidbits of misfiled information turn up often. “The archives are very complex and not well organized — especially in Italy — so you never know what you are going to find,” she says.
Fascinated with the pigments that painters used to create their art, Matthew sought to learn more, and soon found herself studying the industry of painting — the business side of art. Delving into economics and chemistry, she investigated the chemical make-up of the paint as well as the market for paint supplies, using sources from the burgeoning discipline of scientific art conservation and drawing from the State Archives' collection of documents on shipping, customs, and international trade and manufacturing — areas she never expected to study even a few years ago.
She spent a great deal of her time looking at painters' wills, hoping to determine the inventory of their workshops and the type of paints that they used to create their paintings. While looking through an index of wills, one name jumped off the page: Francesco dei Colori (Francis of the Colors). When she checked his will, she discovered that he was leaving large amounts of pigments to his family: white lead, lapis lazuli, and silver. “He was clearly somebody who dealt in pigments and was not a painter,” she says. She soon found the will of a pigment wholesaler whose inventory included a list of debtors and creditors — eight of them with the surname “dei Colori.”
“There aren't very many people who would get excited about something like this, but I have to tell you that it was all I could do not to jump up and down in the middle of the reading room in the archives,” Matthew says.
There was cause for the celebration: Matthew had discovered a never-before-known specialized profession within the field of apothecaries. “We knew that during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance painters bought their materials from apothecaries, but nobody knew that there was a subgroup that served artists,” she says. Nor did they know that that many had the same dei Colori surname, but it makes sense, according to Matthew. During the Renaissance many people took on the last names of their professions or of their hometowns. (Leonardo da Vinci [Leonardo from Vinci] is the most famous example.) “Of the colors” is a natural surname for a pigment seller.
Matthew's research extended beyond the pigment sellers to encompass both her continued exploration of lesser-known artists that were members of the guild and her study of the chemistry behind the pigments — making sense of the lead and other elements listed in the apothecaries' inventory. “I have always been interested in interdisciplinary approaches, but if somebody told me that I was going to be heading toward economics and chemistry, I probably would have fainted away,” she says.
Intrigued by these ties, she is thinking of introducing an interdisciplinary course involving art and chemistry. “We really are in an era now when conservation scientists are working with historians and vice-versa. Up until recently, they were two surprisingly separate vocations.”
And the gap is narrowing between economics and history and art as well. At a conference in Florence that Matthew co-organized last spring, economists, historians, and art historians from throughout the world gathered to discuss the business of art in Renaissance Italy. The response to the conference was outstanding, she says, and indicates that there is a significant group of scholars delving into this new area. In fact, Matthew is now teaming with economic historians on a comparative study of the art market in northern Europe and Italy in the fifteenth through eighteen centuries.
Matthew's interdisciplinary interest in art history is also permeating her classrooms. “In more and more of my classes at every level, I am talking about how things are made, what they are made of. It's not just a question of whether something is made of plaster and what pigments are used in a fresco. Materials have symbolic value as well as actual value, so there are lots of levels of meaning that can go into technology and how things are made.
“Art history is a very interdisciplinary field, which makes it very challenging,” Matthew says. “It's a wonderful field to teach in a liberal arts college because you can make connections consistently across disciplines.”