 Hi everyone. Can you hear me? Great. My name is Martha Lucy. I'm deputy director here for research, interpretation, and education. I feel like I should start by saying something about Notre Dame. I'm probably going to start crying. So I just want to, you know, like let's just acknowledge that it happened and it's devastating and I don't know. You know, maybe this will, it'll help us to be just sort of thinking, hearing beautiful art tonight, looking at beautiful art. Thank you Andre Dombarowski for everything that you did to bring Professor T.J. Clark here tonight. We are very honored to have you here, Professor Clark, which is what I'm going to call you. Thank you, Alia, for all your help in organizing this event. Tonight, T.J. Clark will read from his new book, which is called Heaven on Earth, Painting and the Life to Come. It was published by Tamsen Hudson in 2018. He is Professor Emeritus of Modern Art at UC Berkeley and I can't possibly tell you everything that he's done in all of his accolades because there are too many, but I will say that he's truly one of the most brilliant art historians of our time. He has had an enormous impact on the field of art history, especially modernist art history. He's one of the pioneers of the social history of art, which is a method that approaches a work of art not as something that just kind of fell from the sky, but that is actually grounded in a specific time and place and bound up in politics and geopolitics and social concerns and anxieties, you know, the real stuff of life. How do you understand visual form as an articulation of these conditions? His work tends to ask big questions, questions about life and death, physical space, the pull of images, and in this way, I think it is deeply humanistic. His writing style is personal, probing, self-reflective, and honest, and it pushes the boundaries of how histories of art can be written. He's the author of numerous essays and books, including The Absolute Bourgeoisie, Image of the People, The Painting of Modern Life, Farewell to an Idea, The Sight of Death, Picasso and Truth. Over the years, he has written about many of the works in the barn's collection, including an essay on the big Cezanne bathers that is normally hanging in our main gallery, but that is now in our conservation lab for research. I also understand that he's a poet. Okay. The book that he will be discussing tonight takes us back, I mean, takes us back to the Middle Ages and Renaissance, looking at the way that artists have imagined kingdom come or heaven descended to earth. So I can't remember if I said all of this already, but so he's going to come up and read from his book, and then we have two scholars, two art historians from the University of Pennsylvania that are going to come up and have a conversation with him, and I will introduce them. That's David Young Kim and, sorry, I'm forgetting my brain, Shira Brisbane, and they will come up after the reading and have this conversation, and then when we're done, T.J. Clark will be outside, near the shop, ready to sign some books. So please welcome T.J. Clark. Thank you so much. I'm going to just sort out my bits and bobs here, just get the techniques over, right glasses, drink of water, that kind of stuff. While I'm doing that, just to say, you know, a very sincere thank you to Martha for a very generous introduction. I also want to say thank you to Andre Dombrowski again for just having been a wonderful shaping force, you know, enabling this occasion to happen. Now, are you hearing me or would you like me to speak? Yeah, good. So, yes, I will read to you a couple of things from the book, but in order for that to make sense, I think I just have to say a little bit about what the book is and what it's about so that the passages I read will make some sense to you. I also hope it will just set the scene a little for Shearer's and David's questions. Let me begin by showing you the five artists that the book is about. Jotto, chapter one. In particular, this transfixing image, one of the, I think, the greatest pieces of picture making ever in the arena chapel at Padua. Joachim's dream is the usual title. The man hunched in sleep there is Joachim. We can talk later about why he's hunched in a rather miserable barren mountain surroundings accompanied by his sheep and a couple of shepherds and why an angel is appearing to him in the sky for a second time. Well, for the first time it was on the ground. Second time, probably a different angel in the sky. We can talk about why, but let me just say it's a moment of despair and alienation and doubt at which a message from on high appears, a redeeming and electrifying message. That's Jotto. Somewhere at the center of the book lies Bruegel and this astonishing, fairly small panel in Munich, usually called The Land of Cocaine, 1567, which is a vision of an afterlife, indeed, heaven on earth, an afterlife in which hungers cease for good. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to eat your bread in the sweat of your brow. You can lie there and pigs will amble up to you with knives in their sides asking you to carve off a bit of crackling and so on. It's full of extraordinary, wonderful detail. So this is the ultimate materialist vision of the afterlife, if you like, deeply steeped in, as far as we understand it, in the traditions of the European peasant Middle Ages. Though we're already out of the Middle Ages, right, very much so. We're in early modernity looking back perhaps at these fables and legends and dreams. Then Poussin. This picture is in Edinburgh, one of the second great series of the seven sacraments that Poussin did this time for a very formidable intellectual client. This is the last of them. He found it so difficult to part with it in 1648 when he sent it off from Rome back to France. When Bernini saw it, the great sculptor Bernini saw it a few years later, we have this astonishing, wonderful witness that what he couldn't stop looking at is that figure. I think I can probably do this. Can I? Does this have a laser pointer? Somewhere. Well, it doesn't matter. I'm going to tell with laser pointers. Here we are. A human pointer. What he couldn't stop looking at was that astonishing figure at the left-hand side of the woman outside the scene of the betrothal of Mary, the sacred scene, outside in some sense, and of course incomplete. Nothing but an extraordinary construction, faceted construction of light and shade, drapery, veiled, shrouded, and Bernini said, this is it. This is it. Chapter in the book tries to follow in his footsteps, if you like, or try to understand what it is about this figure that is so transfixing. And then a series of four works, four interconnected works, only two of which I shall show you by Veronese because it's overload to have all four. They're usually called an allegory of love and this is one of the most remarkable. It's about the phases and the trials and tribulations of Eros, the ups and downs, but it's all happening in a kind of supercharged realm of fabulous, high renaissance super-being. Once when I was lecturing about this very early on, I sort of borrowed a kind of notion from Nietzsche even, you know, and talked about these as Veronese's supermen and women in the Nietzschean sense, right? Not wearing a cape, but you know, just more than human. The human beings in the full, ruthless, marvelous potential. This is disingano, which I think is probably best translated disillusion. And the woman on the left, very interesting to think of her in relation to the woman on the left in Pusa. The woman on the left, I mean the younger woman, the woman with the bare breast, is seemingly taking her distance from, but still fascinated by, a fallen man. Why he's fallen, how he's fallen, what dreadful things about himself and his desire he has revealed. We don't know, of course, right? But it's some scene in which extraordinary beings are in a state of misunderstanding, fascination, attraction, repulsion. Very Veronese, all this. And here's another from the same series with some of the same complex, to and fro of the human. This one's usually called respect. These titles are later. You know, they don't do, but they at least get us sort of a little on terms. We've utterly lost, if there ever was a program for this quartet, we've lost it. But we do, you know, we know where we are. Again, this time a man taking his distance from and yet not able to escape from the pull of, the pull of Eros. Very much to be thought of, as a kind of mirror image almost of the other. That's the chapter. And then the yoking together, improbably I know, a last chapter, which is about this weird and wonderful, huge mural by Picasso in the UNESCO building in Paris, a brand new building unveiled in 1958. It's never been taken seriously, really, by scholarship and Picasso to Picasso. Never quite entered the Picasso canon. Well, I think it's fabulous. In its preposterousness, in its strangeness, what an extraordinary public work of art. And in so far as we understand the subject at all, it does seem to be about the sabotage, the fall, the collapse of human aspirations. Picasso sort of accepted the title, L'Icarre des Ténèbres, Icarus of the Shadows, which then was sort of a little bit folded into the more banal fall of Icarus. It does seem to be a reworking of the great Bruegel in Brussels. We call it the Great Bruegel. I'm absolutely sure it's the Great Bruegel. It's had a checkered history. It maybe is not all Bruegel in its present state, but the conception is undoubtedly, I think, the masters. And I tend to agree with the great Friedlander that it's a sort of triumph even of his last years, a late Bruegel in conception. A famous picture, of course, right? The object of perhaps a too famous poem by W. H. Alton about suffering. They were never wrong, the old masters and so on. And this is about the fall of human aspiration. Icarus flying too close to the sun with his wax bound wings, the wax melting and falling to his death in the ocean. But of course it's very much about who cares anyway. There he is, just a little splash in this great peasant panorama. That's part of the book, too, trying to think about the place of aspiration and downfall, the place of tragedy, really, in our conception of the world. Yes, apropos of Notre Dame. Yes, so that's probably enough just sort of scene setting. Let me try and say a word or two about the book's overall argument. You'll gather from the balance of pictures I've shown you that Bruegel looms large in the book. And the book's essential questions, its scope, its central tension, I tried to suggest in the book in the turn from the image on the cover, which is this one, the Giotto, to the frontispiece of the book, which is actually essentially the left hand side, the left foreground of this great Bruegel, great late Bruegel, magpial legalos, peasants dancing indefatigably, devil may care in the shadow of the gallows. I want somehow or other to think the relationship between the human aspiration or the human wish from miraculous transformation for the message from on high. And Bruegel's constant reminder, look, we dance in the shadow of the gallows. It's the gallows that men and women have made, men especially. And we somehow or other have to take the measure of that painful paradox. So what is the book concerned with? How did these paintings come together in my mind? Well, I think I can answer that by my first reading. They're both quite brief. Here's a little bit from preface, followed by a little bit from the introduction. And probably what we ought to have as we listen to this is another Bruegel, the massacre of the innocence, the biblical episode. It took a long time for me to understand that the elements of this book and a subject in common, what the artists whose pictures held me captive offered most deeply I came to see was a way of being earthbound, fully and only here in the world. This meant that the artists essentially set aside the question of belief and unbelief when they dealt with pagan or Christian themes or looked at the question as one facet of an indelible human comedy. And that other worlds though often vivid in their works were entirely part of the same human round built from humble or unregenerate materials and that therefore their paintings seem to offer the possibility of imagining even making the world otherwise without positing a future transformation scene where life would be raised for good know to a human to a higher power. This last refusal of the future seemed sanitary to me as the world all around began another cycle of end time politics and religious war. My great subjects as you have already gathered in the book are paintings by Giotto, Bruegel, Veronese and Pusa. Picasso gets a final look in but readers may wonder why I of all people end up writing about things done so long ago. It is because alas the long ago is coming back to life all round us. Writing in a time I'm going to show you one image and it's small and it's I'm not going to have it up for long but I don't think you can quite understand the impulse of the book unless you recall what was happening in the image world as it was as it was being written. This is an Islamic state execution scene as it appears on the web. Writing in a time of renewed wars of religion I find myself obliged to reach back to the late medieval and early modern ages. I'm going to get rid of that yeah. A succeeding enlightenment is no longer for us. The wonderful easy godlessness of French painting in the 19th and 20th centuries still my teacher of the beauty and depth that so-called secularization can attain has little to tell us sadly as men in orange jumpsuits plead for their lives on camera. We need the wisdom which includes the bitterness of men for whom the massacre of the innocence of the smell of heretics burnt flesh were commonplace. That's in the introduction and it sort of you know gives you something of the book's impulse. Now I have to say the book is not all doom and gloom. It comes out of a horrible time I think I think we're in a horrible time and that makes of course the delights and triumphs of painting all the more precious to people like me and I hope like you and the book is full of those delights I hope. Yes let me try to divide artificially the issues pointed to in that opening intro. One has to do with the nature of picturing pictorial thinking and I'll come back to that but let me start with the question of what's being thought about the question of heaven on earth indeed the investment of the human species in a certain vision of the world as we know it giving way to another altogether the world interrupt it cured of pain and confusion transfigured revolutionized all the investments and intensities that nature called human otherworldliness. What does the book the painting paintings the book is organized around have to say about this strand of the visionary imagination? Well two things really I think surely it is indelible in the human species it won't go away if we think we've attained to some kind of secular lucidity pessimism realism always the same visionary hopes recrew deaths reoccur and the horrors that go with them it's perhaps necessary it is the way human beings have of seriously entertaining the idea of the world not being this world not being the only one possible and it is if you've already got this in my view dangerous horribly dangerous the book comes out of a moment in which all round us end time politics and wars of religion work and are coming back so ultimately the book's question is this can these visions of transfiguration be worked with entered into but also reflected on played with trans value is it possible for the idea of heaven on earth to be brought down to earth are there ways of preserving the myth of time coming to an end or coming to a great turning point without that hardening into a text a war cry a holy bread a script for a ruthless sect and that's where the books second constant strand of questions comes in that is what is it that human beings do when they turn aside from language to some extent and think in pictures when they think without putting things into words I think the five artists in the book are thinking like mad about the visions and wishes that I've been describing and they're doing it most of them in an epoch remember when opposing or disbelieving those visions the established Christian visions above all for most of these putting those such doubts and reservations into words might well have led them straight to the inquisitor's chamber actually very nice it was led to the inquisitor's chamber on one occasion because the inquisitor thought his treatment of the feast at Cana was too full of buffoons and buffoonery and it was this somehow or other blasphemous or what was what was the point very nice he gives a wonderful series of phone naive replies and he gets away with it but only just you know I mean it's dangerous right so I see these artists as using the full resources of painting to make the established visions vivid beguiling make the visions come to life I certainly don't see them I mean be preposterous I think in Jotto's case for instance as in any uncomplicated way disbelievers or non-believers but I do see them here's the power of painting for me I do see them bridging the bringing the visions down to earth I think these paintings find room wordlessly for doubt deception failure absurdity tragedy the truly indelible strangeness and sadness of life as we have it so to that extent right it it puts these visions of transformation and future resolution always always in doubt bringing it back to the reality of human existence let me end my brief intro by returning to Bruegel to the land of cocaine and this is the second piece I'll read from the book I hope by now you'll sort of see the way in which in some ways it epitomizes the questions that recur the land of cocaine I've been arguing comes out of the world of proverbs and as with many a proverb its tone is hard to catch its comic certainly it wears its wisdom and compassion lightly and works to show us a world a set of human and animal actors that is absurd and wonderful at the same time unbelievable and irresistible just because this seems to me the thought that is the nature of the world in general some such proposal about humanity underlies all the best of Bruegel I think he wants us to go on wondering at the juxtaposition in his great magpie but on the gallows of a crude instrument of public death taken for granted by those who've grown up with it and an irrepressible urge to dance in its shadow I don't think the word callousness will do to sum up the attitudes and forms of life in play here Bruegel's and the dances I mean any more than peasant simple mindedness or sheer will to survive something of these is in play no doubt as well as unapologetic earthiness and openness on the part of people who work the land hard to the instigations of weather light and the seasons that there are parallels between magpie of the gallows and land of cocaine is obvious the peasant shitting in the corner there can you see him I'm sorry I wanted says but you better see him gosh I had to fight with the publisher not that the publisher was approved but you know I was I it had to include the bottom left corner my frontispiece so and that's it's a very important figure for Bruegel of course the peasant shitting in the corner of magpie is partner to the man in cocaine pulling himself out of the groove can you see him up top top right a man you have in order to get to the land of cocaine each your way through a mountain of but wheat porridge and of course you absolutely flatulent and exhausted by the and you drag yourself out of the the groom so those two figures I think speak to each other magpie's beautiful central foreground the sunlit hummock supporting the gallows with its animal skeleton and pecking bird is cocaine's tilting slope quiet and down the dancers in magpie have made a small eternity for themselves where death for a moment is in abeyance but it would be wrong to press these analogies too far magpie is as close as we come in Bruegel I think to a comprehensive statement about the place of human sociability the strange mixture of sadism sadism and togetherness that seems intrinsic to the human in the whole order of the earth it makes sense that this picture if we are to believe an early biographer of Bruegel is singled out in Bruegel's will as a bequest to his wife apparently a special family treasure cocaine by contrast is the opposite of a panorama or world landscape it is imaginary essentially a close-up paradise for Bruegel that is an end to sadism and togetherness it seems can be posited only as something too near too fat too immobile to be true I don't believe that Bruegel's picture is simply satirizing our dreams of an afterlife or a better life to come he's not poking fun exactly at the evangelist's great no more death neither sorrow nor crying the picture looks to me full of wonder at the idea of escape from all three but the last thing it asks us to do is ascent to the vision exactly or believe it a real possibility and that if you like I'm going to cut things a little short now that's what I think is so wonderful and necessary about these pictures I've been trapped by gripped by is that they enable you to enter the visions in some sense ascent to the visions certainly see them as yes this is really part of the way we have to envision the world if we were just stuck with nothing but the world the world would be intolerable there'll always be a heaven if reality is as hellish as reality is it's a necessity but here's here's the ultimate point for me the wordlessness is so important that these pictures enable us to enter the the vision entertain it take it deeply seriously but not not be believers in it not enroll in the army of the faithful not not be gripped right as so much of the 20th century was by the idea of an end to the present and a break to the future and that for me is real wisdom and it's a wisdom that picturing makes possible okay thank you we'll invite david and shira to come up to the chairs please yes all three of you so i'm just going to say a little bit about david and shira shira brisman who is on the end down there is assistant professor in early modern art at the university of pennsylvania before joining the faculty at penn she was a melan postdoctoral fellow at columbia and at the university of wisconsin madison her book albert door and the epistolary mode of address was published by the university of chicago press in 2016 she's had numerous fellowships supporting her research including one from the center for advanced study in the visual arts and her current research investigates the boundaries between privacy and society patterns and aberrations religious modes of thinking and categories of secularization david young kim is also at the university of pennsylvania he's in the art history department associate professor he's a specialist in southern renaissance art and his work focuses on issues of art literature transcultural exchange and material culture before joining penn in 2013 he was a postdoctoral faculty fellow at the university of zürich in switzerland um and he was a visiting faculty member at the universidade federal de saupallo in brazil his book um published in 2014 is called the traveling artist in the italian renaissance geography mobility and style it explores the 16th century discourse around artists travels and how that travel impacted artistic processes so um take it away well professor clark it's been so wonderful to have you in philadelphia the past few days um especially hearing you yesterday at the end of the andan and core symposium speaking on saison and and we just met yesterday but you don't know this but we've actually been in conversation for a very long time and that is not only because i've been reading you um for for many many years but um i've been teaching you for many many years um and um in fact i i have to confess that though my um area of expertise is 1400 to 1800 um there hasn't been a single course in which i haven't made uh tj clark somehow appear on the syllabus so i have to say thank you for actually now writing a book on early modern art um because because i've managed to sneak you in uh um anyway i should give her a discount i bought it um i wanted i wanted to um begin thank you uh with the detail um of a painting and um we we've already invoked the tragedies of today the fire in Notre Dame and then i wanted to show this uh detail of a fire um this is a detail of a fire that is happening in a brogol painting a house is on fire um and um these tiny figures you can see one of them has a ladder um and is climbing a top um on the other side of the bridge another figure two other figures are carrying ladders trying to um trying to come to the rescue um this burning house is embedded uh in this painting hunters in the snow in fact it is very difficult to find the burning house in hunters in the snow um i can help you um so it is it is under the bird there um really in the kind of middle ground of the painting it's it's a detail that one could so easily miss uh and one son so easily does miss uh in in observing hunters in the snow and i think i'd like my first question to you about about brogol to be about um a human capacity to miss disaster to overlook disaster and this is something you raised of course with with the fall of Icarus with those tiny legs that cause a very small splash but uh you know looking at this house on fire in in a very difficult painting a painting that even includes another fire on the right hand side which we don't miss um i wanted to ask whether whether you um think that brogol is commenting on our ability to to create distance between ourselves and the disasters of the world how good are we at seeing um and what is brogol's commentary on our capacity to see yes do you want me to save my answers to the end or do you want me to no i'd like i'd like you did good okay um yes it's a wonderful question and i it you know it leads absolutely to the heart of the matter doesn't it i mean uh so the famous poem by Ordon which you know i'm sure some of you know um says that uh about suffering they were never wrong the old masters and he seizes on brogol's for Icarus and you know that essentially what he thinks brogol is or what he says brogol is saying is um human beings turn aside from from tragedy and misfortune and uh life goes on and you know human beings are fundamentally uncaring I don't think that's misrepresenting his uh I don't I don't agree with that I don't ascent to that as what brogol is saying to us um you know that that uh misfortune misfortune disaster horror are very much part of brogol's world and sometimes human beings turn aside from them and sometimes they engage with them do they not and when when uh horror and tragedy are an incident in a picture I think you have to ask yourself the question hmm so what is not an incident in brogol's brogol's vision of the world what's not incidental what is it that the world what is it that sustains and uh maintains humanity the human life I actually think in both the case of hunters in the snow and the form of Icarus it's it it it's something isn't it to do with look horrors happen but not the business of of of tending the land making a living coping with the seasons being hunters or gatherers or farmers or right you know obeying these age-old imperatives of human existence that that's that's the world it's not that horror and tragedy and aspiration are worthless it's just that we have to think hard about their place and some and and for a lot of the time their place is is is small I wanted to maybe maybe press you on this a bit this question about distance and about the distance of the viewer from what's in the painting you know Joseph Kurner has also written on Bosch and brogol and written about this painting in his recent book and and one of the the events that he cites in the 16th century to help us understand how how brogol is gauging his viewer is the publication by Abraham Ortelius of the world atlas yeah something that suddenly the the atlas is printed and it's something you can see the world on your lap you can hold the world on the lap you can navigate the world by by by the appearance of the printed atlas and and so for Kurner this this he brings this in as as evidence and combines it with the with the burning house to say that brogol is calling attention to the the distance that his viewer the viewer of his time enjoyed the viewer of his time enjoyed this distance to view of the world enjoyed seeing the world from afar and therefore it was blind and I wanted blindness came from that um uh capacity to understand that the world had been mapped and that the world could be understood uh from afar yeah and and I wanted to ask you whether that is um a significance about the world of the 16th century to you is that is that something that for you is at stake uh in early modern art I think it's I'm sure it's at stake in early modern art I'm sure it's part of this complex pictorial personality called brogol um probably uh you know Joseph Kurner's uh work I revere I scholarship is you know I mean I'm an amateur here right you know and Joseph is uh it is an authority um I do find myself I do find myself diverging you see from from the from the scholar's view of brogol um and and really um being remaining convinced by the layman's view of brogol that brogol's world is truly importantly a world of course it's not a peasants view of the world but it is a view in which the peasants view of the world is is is foremost it's seriously entertained so you know I I guess you you'd sum up the difference between the way I'd respond to hunters in the snow and the way Joseph Kurner does is all these things just slightly you know they tune up differences right but I'm going to just sort of you know there's let's just throw it out um I don't think this is a world map you know I I I don't think brogol looks from on high through the through the optic of humanist intellectuals uh of course he's taking knows all about it he's not he's a sophisticate but I think of course his sophistication goes far deeper than the sophistication of the sophisticate uh and and so he seriously puts against that mapping totalizing humanist imperative the the continuing closeness and physicality and absolute necessity of the peasants world the peasants material engagement with things so that that seems to me what in his work puts at a distance tragedy but tragedies to be measured against look peasants know what tragedy there's a great line in the in the peasants in pounds peasant cantos where he he looks out of his prison cage and pizza you know and sees a sees a peasant working the earth and he says you know the enormous tragedy of a dream in that peasant spent shoulders that's that's brogol ask good I wonder if there isn't though some some sort of middle ground I mean you've you've evoked there's as we know this enormous critical tradition behind brogol and you know these these questions about whether he is a the distance to ethnographer whether he's sympathetic to the peasants I'm very struck in your book how all of the paintings that you've chosen to write about have figures pinned to the ground you chose the one brogol painting tit for to dedicate an entire chapter to where the figures are their gravity is is is and their their well their gravity is pinning them to the ground and what is compromised is what we think of as what is distinctive about humans are caught that is our cardinality the fact that we are bipedal the fact that we walk on two legs and that is what is being compromised here but I wanted to to ask to draw our attention to figures in brogol who are who are not pinned to the ground and don't have a divine perspective but are but are somewhere in between and that is the figure of the tree climber yeah so this is a motif that we see in in in some of brogol's paintings he likes he likes to figure tree climbers this is a painting of somebody stealing eggs from a nest right this this boy who's climbed up and it's a one of these wonderfully pre-photographic moments in painting where his hat is falling off and brogol just captures that the hat falling mid-air and this this figure in the foreground sort of our guide figure is is pointing us to the to the activities of this of this nester and of course in the in the astonishing brogol drawing the beekeepers we again have a figure of a tree climber somebody who who has whose legs are wrapped around the tree so I wanted to ask you know in in in a book that's about in certain ways being pinned to the ground and what it means to be earthbound what it what is the figure of the tree climber and if I if I may provoke us to think maybe a way of thinking about this question you know when I look at these figures and when I read your book I was reminded of the wonderful poem by Robert Frost called birches where frost sees he's looking it's a it's a winter scene so very poor galleon scene and frost is observing how how birches bend in the snow under the weight of the ice and he says that he likes to imagine when he sees these birches bent in the snow that some boy has been climbing them and that is what is that that is what has produced their their bending and and he likes he he he he goes on imagining the boy climbing up and up and up towards heaven then he says may no fate willfully misunderstand me and half grant the wish earth's the right place for love I don't know where it's likely to go better so it's this moment where he's imagining the human ascent to heaven and then he says but not permanently this is just for my imagination I want to be down on the ground yeah and and so I'm wondering if you could if that if that frost poem or these figures of tree climbers are helpful to you and you're thinking about what is worldly and earthbound and the commitment to earth and earthboundness at a moment in painting when we think the commitment is to transcendence yeah glorious you you know when you bring on frost you've sort of got me eating out of your hand fabulous um yes you're the poet I understand no I write poetry occasionally um uh yes and actually I mean this idea that um you do the boy does climb the tree he wants to you know he went uh that's that's an indelible impulse and it's a dangerous impulse but it's playful and it's part of it's part of being human and testing the possible but but the tree bends and you come down to earth and in fact it it even bends into a pool doesn't it or it's over a pool so there is danger there's water and earth and these are great these two and I add the there's another uh tree climber isn't there that I'm hugely fond of in New York and the harvesters the boy who climbs the tree after after the hay has been cut because there's no point in doing it until you've got an open ground but then he shakes the tree for you know to get so he's a bird nester naughty boy you know and and so aspiration you know tree climbing is dangerous and can be just for for the wrong kind of human reasons uh but the boy out the tree shaking apples down from the tree that's part of that's part of agriculture this this brings me I'm going to ask you one final question about brogol and then turn it over uh to David uh because your your last comment really made me think about something a question I really want to ask you about about reading brogol and thinking about brogol you know we have so little in terms of primary sources you know nothing from his own hand to help us navigate and understand what he was thinking and that's a blessing in a way because it it binds our um extraction of meaning to the pictures without the you know the busyness and the noise of of whatever maybe um whatever he may have had to say um and so one of the um one of the methods of of studying brogol then is to call in as evidence um when you're when you're studying one picture another one of his pictures and to um and to um and to see brogol against brogol to read brogol against brogol and you've just cited an example of uh two two paintings where um the tree climber might have very different valences might have very different um that brogol's attitude toward the tree climber might be very different and so what I want to ask you about is um um one of the the places where scholars reach to in looking at um and and you do this uh also in the in the chapter on the land of cocaine um is is to the prints that brogol produced um the drawings that he made that were then printed um about the prints they often have um epigrams or morals or you know language at the bottom that um that provides some way of reading them the paintings of course are free of such language and so I want to ask you about what it is to use its particular then about painting why painting this is a book that's all about painting we know that brogol made drawings for prints um we know that prints were a way in which his paintings reached other audiences reached many audiences but um do you think it's do you wish to defend that he is able to do something in painting um that that is really particular to painting I think so yes I do I mean I agree it's dangerous ground you don't I don't want well I don't mind fetishizing painting do it all the time but you know it's it uh but you have to be careful um but I do think if those of you who will have a look at the book you can have a look for yourself at the difference between the print of the land of cocaine and the painting and the difference is difference is enormous um and you can just sum it up by saying the painting sort of brings to material life it treasures it savers episode after episode of of the real in a way that the print I mean prints are not a bad print but it but it but it's reductive and you know it well for a start it's monochrome you know and the painting's color is so astonishing I mean in the end in the chapter on this as you recall I say well I just I can't do any more now than just enumerate and even enumerate enumerating these wonders is false because that's not the way you take them in but you know you sort of go around and I mean uh you know that you I remember being there with uh with my partner and Wagner in front front of the picture in Munich and we looked at it for our sort of hours and then finally and saw that there was a thin stream there's a what that wonderful can we put it back to it yeah yeah uh you know of course everyone sees this wonderful right you know the oh eggs in the land of cocaine they have little bird legs and you know they're they're so eager to walk towards you and they've taken their top off and inviting you to eat um and but then and saw that there was a thin stream of yellow yolk tipping down one side and you could go through you know I do that in the box just you know just this and this and this and this so it's that it's that it's paintings infatuation well great paintings but not all great paintings are infatuated with the particularity of the world Mondrianism um and and I love Mondrian but but you know but but but Bruegel is infatuated by the this there-ness of the world and you know it's endless substance well I have about six more hours of questions on Bruegel um but since since we we've just um um delighted in in in painting I'm gonna turn it over to my colleague who's the expert no no but I mean thank you so much well I I mean I'd like to also thank uh Andre for Andre Drabowski my colleague for making me score I'm the last couple of weeks in reading the book and trying to articulate some interesting questions to T.J. Clark um but I also wanted to just pick up on what you said on this wonderful image of you and Anne Wagner before the painting and this and this and this and this and in your introduction you were talking about what happens or ought we to turn away from words and language to the picture yeah and obviously as art historians we're doing exactly the opposite right we're turning from the picture to language to words um and I wanted to ask you um well the big question I wanted to ask you is what is our history but we don't have time for that right now or how should I do our history um but um over drinks but um and I noticed I don't know David that's pretty simple oh really oh no no no go into the heart oh well I mean I mean it's interesting because you allude to um T.S. Eliot but then at a particular moment in the Giotto chapter you say our history needs prose to go around the emptiness and Joachim's dream yeah and um I think what's so interesting about your writing is that we see we see the dramatization of a mind at work not a mind and repose like these guys but a mind at work who is actually almost drawing um the drawings of the paintings you're talking about so I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what is your art historical language um what are the political stakes of using um that language what are you trying to do with the English language since you have um many international readers um and books are translated so um yes I know these are very big questions but I'd be so curious to see um tell us what happens after you say this and this and this and this what's the next step yes the T.J. Clark takes yeah it's great well that could keep us going for you know several several months um it yeah I mean I um I'll give you just the beginnings of an answer and it's sort of based on something I something I said to friends uh the other day they were pressing me on this and I said well could we think more about look we're language animals I I I love writing I love language um and there's nothing more natural uh to language animals like us than make trying to make our language reach out to the non-linguistic I mean that's what that's what language you know that's one of the things that language is tremendously good at and which stretches and uh um in venoms and you know electrifies language hmm how on earth do I put that into words so it's a natural activity this um could we think of writing about painting as sort of something like a musical performance right a a good or a bad performer performing a score so that you know we don't like performances that just draw attention to themselves but we do like performances that that somehow or other stay faithful to to the score but draw attention to uh to aspects of it that have never occurred to us we we don't mind rubato we don't you know we um performance is improvisation and reframing and uh getting a certain distance and then coming back um but we don't like well I won't name names but you know you you know the kind of performer when you think hmm well that was you not Bach you know um uh and I think there's a tremendous scope there for writing about art which of course I mean there have been great great writers about about art in very very different you know I mean I worship Ruskin but you couldn't you couldn't you can't write like Ruskin um I I enormously admire the fine tuned dryness very English dryness of Michael Maxendoll for instance right you know writing about uh Piero and all the time you're thinking he's going to move towards saying in the end what it really yeah what's that about no no no you know um so so there are many modes of performance interesting interesting modes of performance and so um and I even said to these friends jokingly really well look we do take performance of music in normalcy seriously don't we we sort of admire it well of course we're never going to admire performances of paintings the same way because after all music by and large is written to be performed and paintings are not painted to be performed although paintings always anticipate words coming in their direction mm-hmm so I just think this is I mean you know this is one of my very commonsensical quarrels with the discipline is that it doesn't hasn't thought hard enough about about this dimension of the task mm-hmm I mean art history not thinking critically about its own language yeah yeah I mean I think um I'm so glad you went there there and evoking um Baxendale because um I wish I were a student at Berkeley in the hallways um and because I noticed a couple of zingers against the notion of the period I yeah I did my homework um in which you call it the far flight of historic historic fancy called looking with the period I um you also say um it is a stubborn fragment of an utterly unknowable world that brings it now into my present putting my picture of pastness and continuity in doubt um and I was wondering if you could unpack the statement for us and help us understand where is the line between TJ Clark the writer TJ Clark um the historian do you believe in art history or do you believe that we're somehow always distant from that historical past and is this part of the pathos is this what motivates us this constant desire to to reach that which we can never attain is that the desire of art history something that is never attained yes it's interesting that your question was do you believe in art history is that right I saw I sound like Charles Dempsey right there goes my fellowship I don't believe in art history oh I mean I don't look you heard I hear first guys so um okay here's the beginning um the far flight of historicist fantasy which is looking with a period I actually that's a that's not what backs and all does it is something the period I as a concept that sort of turns up in his work um but but of course he is always much more qualified and subtle and dialectical about it and he too I think in practice knows that historical understanding is always this fine tune poised uncertain uh relation between the now and that the not now that you wish somehow or other to get in your grasp and behind my version of history which I do sort of believe in I suppose is you know is dear or water Benjamin still and I quote him I think at that point in a fun note one of my students in the summer and so is footnote 28 and you know Benjamin of course despite he devotes the enormous part of his life at crucial moment the endless compilation of materials about 19th century Paris so he's a historian but but he is constantly reflecting on hmm what what is it to have the now and have the past enter in relationship to me is it me going back into it and entering its frame of understanding empathizing with it totally hates the word the German word empathy of course and all of that tradition I'm sure you know yes he sort of says that that's the historicism of newspaper readers um what so as I understand what he's thinking about as an alternative is you absolutely immerse yourself in the evidence that comes to you of this past but this part this evidence this past is with you now and it it's part of you it's part of the present and it's difference from that present the fact that you want it you need it in the now that's what you struggle with and that a roughness of the presence is maybe the the division or line between heaven and earth perhaps I mean maybe we could actually find analogies yes between that as well um I know you have lots of admirers and former students in the audience so I want to give them a chance to ask some questions but um we listened to your lecture yesterday on and so um the question I would like to ask I mean I have some questions about Joltobl we can save that for later but um what's next what can we expect from TJ Clark um in the months or the year to come and so we can actually welcome you back to Philadelphia and stage another book event where hopefully I won't be sitting here gosh oh I hope you are sitting here um well I don't know exactly um I I I really do I really must write this darn book about Cezanne which is you know just being sort of haunting my life for 50 years or something you know it's absurd but it's so difficult and so wonderful of course why do you say difficult but it difficult only means that you know you just go on being fascinated by this utter enigma gosh we are up there in the conservation studio this afternoon looking at the bathers and I mean uh you know I've been living with the bathers for decades I'm still totally baffling totally baffling so this um but I I'm going to give it a go I will try and write a a book about Cezanne if I can it just is a kind of um um yeah it's tough that's really good to hear I feel so much reassured about my own um difficulties with writing um we have this wonderful unhygienic um orange uh microphone does anybody have any antibacterial wipes um and I think it would be nice to open it up there's so many on 19th century um specialists and people from around um Philadelphia who would love to ask you some questions um so perhaps um the first brave person who would love to catch the it's not it's actually hygienic I was just kidding just if someone wants to catch the orange ball um please ask questions um about the book or about um the general um the rest of what our history can be can you hear me uh yeah actually my question is it goes back to Giotto you said that you wrote the book with the image of the religious people cutting off people's heads yes yes I did yes so every other group of paintings in your book seems to be rooted firmly in the earth and yet when you talk about Giotto and the angel is coming down yeah to me that seems the evil part that's the part that makes people think of these this not the supernatural necessarily but religion you know that the religion is going to give you the answer so why did you include that um did you include it I mean it's a lovely painting but it certainly doesn't embrace the other ideas that you seem to have especially when you show that photograph and said that that was what was in your mind when you wrote this book yes um yes it wasn't as they say God forbid that it was in my mind too constantly but but but it was on my mind that you know we we we were entering something which was a dark time a new dark time um uh maybe I gave you the wrong impression um you know heaven on earth the book is about constantly about the aspiration uh to towards a higher realm maybe the remember the two verineses I showed you it's very important actually that they perhaps were ceiling paintings I believe they weren't ceiling paintings but they were hung they were made to be hung very high probably over doors or something in my view but whatever else is where exactly they were they were always to be viewed from below with those figures looming over you as right super men and women aspiring to some kind of extraordinary realm just above us so it the the aboveness is always part of it for me and the the jotto which actually was the it was writing about the jotto that made the whole book come together for me and um look the blue is transfixing of course maybe David we can you know this will come back lead back to a a word or two about jotto between the two of us to um the blue is transfixing and the blue indeed is heaven but about the most material heaven ever imagined isn't it and the angel is somehow or other materializing out of that heaven uh but remember that the whole other half of the picture is this gray mountain landscape this earthly landscape with these poor sheep scrambling about in this wasteland right god look up what they're trying to get a feed out of these horrible spiky plants and so to save the angel seems to be coming to save mankind by whatever is going to happen next and that seems to reflect much more on what's happening now with caliphates and fundamentalism and and things like that so the rest of the painting is wonderful it's it's the angel that disturbs me i guess gosh you are very secular in your yes yes actually well no only because you're talking about yes okay well yeah but all i can say is look you know um as i think we atheists look are the the so-called god debate every i i this was a bit in the book that i i discard it because i i need but you know i i i every age gets the atheism it deserves and uh and we got Christopher Hitchens and you know that drivel um and you know a real atheism has to has has to take religion deeply seriously and everything about it that's indelible and aspirin i mean there's a wonderful sorry i'm going to go on a little bit at this point great admirer of um the writer Jeremy Harding writes regularly from the london review books and also writes very excellent books he wrote a great book called border vigils um in which he tells the story which is about you know well do you know what it's about walls borders the horror the horrors of you know the contemporary crisis of migration um and he tells the story in morocco of a woman we didn't we don't even know where she came from somewhere in west africa didn't know her name don't know her even though but you know one of the tens of thousands of people trying to get into spain and europe and she came she got over the barbed wire but she was picked up and she was seven months pregnant and she was picked up and she committed suicide that night in the cell having got that far and then the next day she was buried quickly but uh another another person in the camp who didn't know her came to the funeral and um i can't remember how jeremy uh knew this got to know this but anyway this guy who was a evangelical christian spoke over her grave and i'll read it to you it's just dreadful it's just great of course great and dreadful this is what he said um at the graveside a man who had never met the woman who killed herself read from the epistle to the Ephesians for we wrestle not against the flesh and blood but against principalities against powers against the rulers of the darkness of this world against spiritual wickedness in high places you can't do without that that that uh that's a religious imperative um and that rhetoric and that you know that that register of human aspiration in patients um denunciation that's i want that preserved i value that i wish we had an angel coming though just say that to us any more questions a question i'm maybe tim you you you mentioned nichi oh sorry you mentioned nichi and of course nichi's vision of history is always comparative um that we can't know what we're feeling except through reference to the past that we understand our present comparatively my question concerns the way in which in brogill and in um in almost all the examples of brogill save one that you showed us there is that comparative we see both um poles in the picture we see the gallows and we see the dancing and the picture explores and leads us to think through those comparatives but in land of the land of cocaine there there is only the implicit comparative to our current state and i'm wondering this is such an unusual picture for brogill um whether this is an act of faith that we will always understand this picture through reference to the delimitedness of our own existence our own lives or if there's something else going on here yeah yeah it's very i don't yes i'm not sure of an answer it i think you're right that it's exceptional um it it might have something to do with the date it's dated there on the bottom left 1567 and as some many of you may know this is a dreadful year in european history in particularly the history of the netherlands it's the it's the big uh the spanish duke of alba comes with an army to put down protestant heresy in the netherlands and you know blood bath follows an absolute blood bath follows it's you know it's the absolute nadir of or one of the many nadirs of religious war early modern in early modernity so i wonder if and and many people right from the very beginning wonder why you will know the scholarship much better much better than i do but sort of the wonder and sort of other people in the audio but you know from very early on in in belgium in the 19th century scholarship and so on there's very wonderful reflection on what this what the relationship to the realities of 1567 might be even as even a i think a very wrong headed but somehow touching idea well this was a kind of denunciation of of of netherlandish um materialism and uh and you know kind of attachment to the things of the earth and in a time of deep trouble and so i again i can't go along with that i can't go along with that i mean i the best i can say is yes it's exceptional um i say this at one point in the in the book it's exceptional after all brogol is not a guy who you think of as picturing paradise right brogol in paradise i mean that's the my chapter title and it's meant to say wow um yeah uh fredland the great fredlander says you know uh brogol's heaven is an empty place pretty interesting um and his hell is absolutely full yeah uh again i'm not you know i don't ascent to that actually you know i i don't think brogol is in any straightforward way a pessimist um but i do think it's very telltale that when he allows himself in this dreadful year to entertain the idea of heaven on earth it's you know it's not the world upside down it's the world the same way up only more so with all of us you know absolutely fallen and enjoying our fallenness really so this is complex thinking isn't it heaven knows what it means yeah oh i i want to get this right you could speak into the when i first uh encountered your writing about 10 years ago i remember i think it was michael freed referring to your writing in his book on mensel said you professed a great contempt for the translation of uh the love of art into a kind of alternative religion uh you know that that kind of fetishizing of art as a new possible kind of moral universe or something but one of the things i loved about your book is is the way you in great detail showed how aesthetics could be ethical in some way that there's some some texture to the concerns of painting as you describe it that leads you to a kind of poised moral disposition and i think the your answer the last question maybe spoke to that a little bit more but i i wonder if you might say a little bit more about how you understand that and verinesi's work because i found that especially beautiful the the way you described his his feeling for the interior of the body manifesting into every physical surface yeah i really like the idea that you put me on the spot at the beginning i didn't mean to no no no i you're you're quite right and i'll just say yeah yeah well you're of the double party without knowing you grow up you know you grow up and you change your mind and of course i still think there's a danger in fetishizing art as an alternative religion of course there is of course there is but but i am now unapologetic about the idea that actually i've grown so bored with the irony and condescension towards art of my discipline and i think it's time we thought again about actually uh roigle and verinesi might be a whole lot cleverer than we are and and have and have worked out an account of the human the material the immaterial you know which which is truly challenging still and we should try and get on this wavelength so so so that's what lies behind it um yes you're absolutely right i mean for me the verinesi's account of being bodies in the material world uh is you know it look again not to not not to glamourize and flatten the activity of art verinesi was an artistic operator he ran a big studio he did he did all kinds of things his art operates at many different levels but when he's really going he is utterly engaged with the with with the with the materialist account of you know what how human beings behave with each other how they feel themselves what clothing is what's a strange thing that human beings have clothing um and you know and how do they deal with it and so and so so all of those things it comes back really to what we were saying yeah wow these these are so many things that uh art history ought to think harder about Michael laser has a question back there i'd like to come back to the question of the importance of religion um tim when you were giving that biblical quote just a little closer Michael oh sorry yeah when you were citing the bible about the importance of questioning power it's not like we don't have non-religious sources telling us that yeah and i just wonder if when you think about imaginations of the ideal if you think there's a fundamental difference between religious versions and secular versions utopias versus imaginations of heaven yeah that's great that's great um yes we do we do have sector i mean unfortunately they're not like effusions you know i mean in other words who was it who said gosh those christians they have all the best songs you know and behind that joke it lies to seriously right that we do inherit this this past in which so much of human paradox and aspiration and tragedy you know is put in terms that we don't people like me don't ascent to but but then you look at uh speak truth to power oh yeah right you know the threadbare rhetoric of so much secular politics um it's a tragedy of course right and you know of course i i absolutely revere you know the great secular writers and i sort of said in passing look you know still for me french painting for instance you know speaks to the possible i look at a sezanne and think yes this is what a world utterly emptied of the transcendent the godlike could be and it could be wonderful so you know i mean we're not without secular resources in which the true dimensions and intensities of human life are on offer but but my goodness you know uh they're not in yeah they're in somewhat short supply sure did you only wonder i'm sure it's working a lot on secular secularization maybe did you want to respond to that or i don't know i wanted to like i think i'll respond to that by inviting people to the gift shop um which we should do now okay all right um well martha did you want to wrap things up or well well you know we would just like to thank you so much for coming to philadelphia for giving the lecture and um talking about your book and um the books will be on sale um next to the gift shop and um tj clark has kindly agreed to sign many many many copies um for us so thanks very much and congratulations again on the book thank you very much