Rocznik Historii Sztuki (45.2020)

14

HARRY MOUNT

This argument was underpinned by Shaftesbury’s belief that everyone is equipped with an innate sense
of truth, and, more significantly from an art theoretical point of view, of beauty, which is the visual form of
truth.90 This meant that once men were freed from political or economic shackles to attend to their instincts,
a taste for beauty and truth would naturally come to the fore and the arts would improve.
Shaftesbury’s belief in innate ideas was diametrically at odds with the thoroughgoing empiricism of
his one-time tutor John Locke, who had argued that the mind is a tabula rasa untainted by any instinct until
it starts to learn from sensual impressions. Throughout his writings Shaftesbury felt the need to challenge
Locke’s epistemology, an epistemology which was, he must have realised, rapidly becoming a matter of or-
thodox belief amongst his countrymen.91 In his notes for Plasticks, for example, he argues against Locke that
the presence of instinct in dogs and birds indicates that the same must apply to humans.92 Richardson, on the
other hand, was a straightforward follower of Locke’s empiricism, as Carol Gibson-Wood has shown.93 The
difference is evident in their respective accounts of how painters arrive at their conceptions of the ideal. For
Shaftesbury this is unproblematic, given that the painter is equipped with an innate sense of beauty which
informs his selection of his models and any combinations or improvements he makes to them.94 For Richard-
son, as for any empiricist, the issue is more difficult, and he never gives a clear account of how the painter
arrives at his ideas of beauty and perfection. At one point he refers in quick succession to the painter selecting
from nature and to the painter forming a model of perfection in his mind,95 but he is clear neither about how
the painter should know what to select nor about how his module of perfection should be formed. It was an
issue that would later vex the similarly Lockean but much more intellectual Reynolds, whose struggle with
the problem resulted in the rigorously empirical but completely impractical solution of the central form, in
which the ideal was to be derived from the average of all individual specimens of a particular figure or type.96
In contrast to the situation in Britain, Shaftesbury argued that in France the presence of an absolute
monarch surrounded by fawning courtiers was an obstacle to the emergence of good taste. As a result French
taste was corrupt and addicted to small, sensual paintings.97 Shaftesbury’s argument that the quality of the
arts will be determined by the social and political conditions that give rise to them is quite different from that
advanced by French theorists, whose works tend to imply that ideal history painting is the consequence of
breeding up learned and theoretically informed painters, perhaps supported in their education by an academy.
While Richardson does briefly suggest that the Greeks produced great art because they were great men,98 he
for the most part follows French authors in believing that great art is the consequence of the talents and per-
sonal qualities of individual painters.
Although the close association Shaftesbury made between political conditions and artistic quality is well-
-known, the originality and significance of this idea has not, I believe, been sufficiently appreciated. The rad-
ical implications of this way of thinking for our understanding of the history of art might, I think, have been
much more readily apparent had Second Characters been published in its entirety. We are used to hearing that
Winckelmann, with his contention that the qualities of ancient Greek art reflected the qualities of ancient Greek
society, invented the social history of art.99 Fifty years earlier, however, Shaftesbury was making very similar ar-
guments in his notes for Plasticks, in which he extended his argument that art reflects society beyond the Britain
and France of his own day to the history of art as a whole. He asserts, for example, that the barbarous forms of
non-European art were attributable to the barbarous cultures that produced them, and that the ceramics produced
by the tyrannised Chinese were poor until they were taught better taste by the enlightened British and Dutch.100

90 Shaftesbury, Plasticks, pp. 167 (‘for, all Beauty is Truth’), 189—190. Cf. Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis, [m:] Characteris-
ticks (1714), vol. I, p. 142. See also J.A. Bernstein, Shaftesbury’s Identification of the Good with the Beautiful, “Eighteenth-century Stu-
dies”, vol. 10, 1977, pp. 304-125.
91 E.g. Shaftesbury, Plasticks, pp. 188-190. See also Klein, op. cit., pp. 27-30; Mount, Leonardo’s ‘Treatise’..., p. 209.
92 Shaftesbury, Plasticks, pp. 188-190.
93 Gibson-Wood, op. cit.,\rp. 181-186.
94 See e.g. Shaftesbury, Plasticks, p. 200.
95 Richardson, Theory of Painting, p. 161-162.
96 J. Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. R.R. Wark, New Haven-London 1975, pp. 44^45 (Discourse III, 1770).
97 Shaftesbury, Plasticks, pp. 212, 235, 269. See also Klein, op. cit., pp. 189-194; R. Woodfield, The Freedom of Shaftesbury’s
Classicism, “The British Journal of Aesthetics”, vol. 15, 1975, pp. 260-266.
98 Richardson, Theory of Painting, pp. 206-208.
99 J.J. Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, Dresden 1764. For a typical presentation of Winckelmann as the orig-
inator of the social histoiy of art see M. Hatt, Ch. Klonk, Art History: A Critical Introduction to its Methods, Manchester 2006, p. 22.
100 Shaftesbury, Plasticks, pp. 206, 221.