Page - 270 - in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Volume LIX

cHARLES hOPE270 introduction of new techniques for the depic- tion of nature. One had to explain why such techniques were introduced. At different pe- riods, as Gombrich knew very well, artistic in- novation was prompted by a variety of factors, which might include rivalry among artists, new ideas about the function of art among patrons, and even such banal concerns as a desire to do something different. His writings on these top- ics, mainly focussed on Renaissance Florence, were highly innovative at the time, and an- ticipate a great number of later studies by other scholars on patronage and taste. Here too one might mention his interest in the possible influ- ence of ancient comments on art as transmitted by classical authors, especially in the context of rhetoric. Schlosser had had relatively little to say about such texts, but Gombrich gave them a new prominence, which was soon taken up by oth- ers, including, for example, his students Michael Baxandall and Svetlana Alpers. Gombrich himself constructed his last book, The Preference for the Primitive, published post- humously in 2002, around this type of theme, attempting to discern a continuous pattern in European taste, as the fashion for the more deco- rative and highly evolved types of style gave way to an appreciation of a more austere and suppos- edly more authentic approach. The argument, however, does not work particularly well, since Gombrich used it to explain too much, includ- ing in the category of the primitive objects as diverse as the paintings of Perugino and African masks. The search for an all-embracing theory is also evident in his longest book, The Sense of Order, published in 1979. This is essentially a sequel to Art and Illusion, dealing with decoration and orna- ment. In his introduction Gombrich drew atten- tion to “the complementary character of the two investigations, one concerned with representation, the other with pure design”. He went on say: “I hope that the book on Symbolic Images (1972) and other matters I have written on narrative and il- lustration can now be seen as fragments of an even more ambitious project: to study some of the fundamental functions of the visual arts in their psychological implications.”4 The connection be- comes much more evident in the light of the un- published book on iconography and the projected book on The Realm and Range of the Image. The Sense of Order has not had the same im- pact as Art and Illusion, partly because it deals with decoration, a topic that is not central to the history of art as it is currently studied, and partly because the argument, reflecting the series of lectures on which it was based, does not always emerge particularly clearly. In fact, the book ad- dresses several quite distinct topics, such as the psychological basis for the use of ornament, the history of ornament and of ideas about it, and the role of taste in its development. But every page contains observations of extreme interest, and it is essential reading for an understanding of Gombrich’s central preoccupations. If one looks at his career as a whole, it is evi- dent that although he studied art history in this university, to describe him as an art historian in the sense in which the term is normally used today is to misrepresent what he did. Certainly, he was uneasy about being categorised in this way, but he did not offer an alternative description. He was a historian in the sense that a cosmologist or an evo- lutionary biologist is a historian. For cosmologists the understanding of the universe depends on an understanding of how it developed; and for biolo- gists too an understanding of the present variety of life on earth depends on an appreciation of how organisms evolved. For Gombrich, any theory about the psychological implications of art must take as its subject-matter the different manifesta- tions of artistic activity as they evolved over time and in different societies. The history of art, in short, provides the evidence on which the theory 4 E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorate Art, Oxford, 1979, p. ix.