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Raphael's authorship in the 'Expulsion of Heliodorus.' - interpretation of court painter Raphael's mural
Art Bulletin, The, Sept, 1997 by Michael Schwartz
The history of the essence of Western art corresponds to the change of the essence of truth. - Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art"(1)
Introduction: Toward a History of Artistic Intention
One of the intractable questions concerning the visual arts today is the relevance of the artist in determining the meaning or significance of his or her work. Debates continue about whether artistic intention matters. Some proclaim that the only information that can legitimately be brought to bear on interpreting a painting is what corresponds to the artist's fulfilled intentions. Others insist that reference to the maker's mental state is simply unnecessary for understanding an image.(2) It remains unclear not only to what degree we might escape the orbit of either/or thinking on the issue, but also why in the first place we have become so concerned with defending or decrying artistic intention.
This essay inaugurates a historical approach to the problem. It downplays contemporary epistemological issues in favor of concrete inquiry into the emergence of artistic intention in Western painting. It proposes that we investigate how historical viewing audiences have understood the production of images.
In principle there is no one way of understanding how images are produced. Yet some sense of origination always underlies one's engagement with an image. A change in this sense may alter not only the content but also, more profoundly, what the image is understood to be. Take the Mona Lisa. If we construe the painting as having originated via contractual agreement between Leonardo and a Florentine merchant to paint the latter's wife and then go on to discover preliminary drawings, we would see the Mona Lisa as a portrait. But if we conclude that there was no such model, that Leonardo painted an imaginary figure from his fantasia, that would bring about a categorial shift; the image would no longer be a portrait.(3) Or if we come to realize that the picture before us was produced in the twentieth century by a paint-emitting machine that duplicates the facture of paint layer by layer, then we would see the work as some kind of chilling simulation of a painting.
Changes in our sense of the production of an image are not, however, as willful as the above examples might suggest. There are deeply ingrained practices or habits of such ways of understanding, even if these may be plural or in flux at any given moment.(4) By taking account of the ways audiences have understood the production of images, we might get a clearer picture of what is at stake in seeking, ignoring, or rethinking "artistic intention." In order to initiate such a project, I shall be analyzing Raphael's Expulsion of Heliodorus as a particularly focused moment in the emergence of the painter as an artist who "intends" pictorial representation [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. My operative assumption is that with the advent of postmedieval pictorial practices, the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries saw considerable flux in understanding the production of paintings.(5) There was in fact such flexibility in grasping who was responsible (patron, artist, deity) and in what ways (as donor, maker, creator) that the pictures themselves often offer models of how to comprehend their own production. It is to such internal models that we shall be looking for guidance.
Why the Expulsion of Heliodorus? Because this mural occupies a prominent and pivotal place in the Renaissance emergence of painter as artist - as the human agent essentially responsible for the visualization of religious themes. The Heliodorus's array of self-referential models posits authorship as complex, divided between the patron and painter. The patron, Pope Julius II, authorizes his court painter Raphael to narrate sacred history, and the painter, in turn, shows us the Heliodorus tale. Moreover, the painter's act of showing transfigures the visual reality of what he shows. This transfiguration, I argue, indexes the workings of the artist's mind as the most immediate ground of the metaphysical truth of the narrative. The Expulsion of Heliodorus thus presents an early instance of the painter as a "creative" artist who has the "divine" capacity to represent ideal truth. This study delineates the precise contours of this artistic economy.
Personal Style
The Expulsion of Heliodorus is located in the Stanza d'Eliodoro on the third story of the Vatican palace [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. This room is part of a suite of apartments constructed in the quattrocento that, beginning no later than 1507, were remodeled and redecorated for private, ceremonial, and courtly functions.(6) Raphael began frescoing the Stanza d'Eliodoro in 1511; work continued after the death of Pope Julius II in 1513 and was completed in 1514 during the pontificate of Leo X.(7) One of the room's primary functions during the High Renaissance was as a papal audience chamber, although other rooms in the suite may have also served this purpose.(8) The early-sixteenth-century beholders of the frescoes would have been members of the papal court, along with a diplomatic corps of foreign ambassadors, a viewing audience undoubtedly among the most culturally elite and sophisticated in all of Europe.(9) We shall be concerned with how this courtly audience would have understood the Expulsion of Heliodorus as a visual narrative authored by Raphael - one where the terms of pictorial authorship are historically specific.
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