Some Alien Qualities of Samuel Johnson’s Art

Abstract

In recent decades scholars of the visual arts have demonstrated rather convincingly that aesthetic responses are largely conditioned by one’s previous experiences of art. In other words, we recognise something as artful only when we have been schooled, either formally or informally, in its techniques.¹ Thus the Impressionist painters, whose artistry is immediately recognisable to modern viewers, often seemed crude or ridiculous to their contemporaries, especially to their ‘academic’ contemporaries.² Our modern taste, though, has been trained to respond to their paintings, and we may even have been taught to see the natural world differently through their eyes. Conversely, when an artistic movement has had its day, the skills of reading its cues and interpreting its symbols can be lost, leaving the art with a distant, alien feel. Thus Egyptian art will often seem to us inscrutably formal; and the mosaics of Ravenna, which represented the height of artitic sophistication in their day, can seem naive, even simplistic, coming as they do in the wake of the great realistic achievements of the Greco-Roman tradition.³