Stone-Struck Painters and the Gothic within Adrian Stokes's Quattro Cento

• In Event: The Gothic Present and Renaissance Art II

Abstract

In a note to his ekphrastic essay, “Pisanello” (1930) Adrian Stokes claimed that Michelangelo, in his “consciousness of stone,” dealt the final blow to the dying Quattro Cento, the period in which artists were yet to feel the “apartness of the inanimate.” Developing an alternative to the dominant discourses of modernism, Stokes constructed an analogy wherein the Quattro Cento is to the Gothic as the Greek is to the Mycenean: “Both the Greeks and the Quattrocento took what was there and soldered it up...” What was there for the Quatto Cento, was an unbridled energy that Stokes describes as a combination of “Gothic thrust” and “Provencal joyousness.” Taking its cue from Stokes’ animistic understanding of the imitative “forms” proper to art of Pisanello and his contemporaries, and focusing on Pisanello’s medals, this paper will explore histiography and critical potential of the idea of the Gothic as the thing to be contained.

Author

• C. Jean Campbell, Emory University