CULTURE SHOCK:The very best art is that which succeeds in giving the artless impression that it cares not whether it succeeds, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
OVER THE PAST month, I've encountered two extraordinary aesthetic experiences. On the face of it, they could hardly be more different. One is visual: the big, awe-inspiring Late Titian and the Sensuality of Paintingexhibition at the Accademia in Venice. The other is musical: Martin Hayes and Denis Cahill's new album Welcome Here Again. One is immediate and spectacular, the other subtle and insinuating. One uses a "classical", the other a "traditional", vocabulary. One is a supreme expression of old age, gathering the paintings (including the sublime Ecce Homofrom the National Gallery in Dublin) that Titian made when he was in his 70s and 80s. The other features artists at the height of their powers in early middle age.
Yet emotionally and in terms of aesthetic effect, the two experiences seemed similar. And in trying to identify the roots of that similarity, I was driven back to what is probably the single most lasting influence on western art. It is the articulation of a notion that is now so thoroughly subsumed into our ideas of how art works that it has become virtually invisible. It turns up over the centuries in different forms and under different rubrics - "cool", "flâneur", "the art that conceals art", "not caring". But its original name is sprezzatura, and it comes from a most unlikely source - a handbook for would-be courtiers, first published 480 years ago.
In the Book of the Courtier, Baldassare Castiglione, a Mantuan humanist and diplomat, articulated, for the benefit of those seeking successful courtly careers, the idea that the best way to succeed was not to appear to be trying to succeed. His massively influential book, which quickly spread all around Europe and became the bible of aristocrats and social climbers everywhere, centred on sprezzatura, which is probably best translated as "cultivated nonchalance" or even "artful artlessness".
In the dimension of power hunger, it remains the gold standard for politicians - the illusion of sincerity and guilelessness.
But Castiglione also linked sprezzaturawith art. He drew it, indeed, partly from his study of the paintings of his friend Raphael. " We may", he wrote, "call that art true art which does not seem to be art: nor must one be more careful of anything than of concealing, because if it is discovered, this robs a man of all credit and causes him to be held in slight esteem." No single notion in the history of western art has been - or remains - quite so influential as this belief that aesthetic power lies in the appearance of ease, of not reaching for effect. If you've ever wondered why the term "laboured" is such an automatic critical put-down, the answer lies in the Book of the Courtier.
It is not, of course, an unchallenged ideal. Romantic movements arise every so often to attack it. "Hot" alternates with "cool" as the desired temperature. Painting or architecture that make a display of the labour that went into them - Jackson Pollock, or the Pompidou Centre - startle us now and then. But these eruptions are protests against the eternal, almost unbroken, reign of artistic nonchalance.
Sprezzaturakeeps turning up, even in unlikely places like the Marxist Berthold Brecht's notion of his ideal spectator as a distanced, unemotional, appraising figure. In Irish literature alone, Oscar Wilde presents his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, as "a trivial comedy for serious people". Stephen Daedalus in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artistinsists that "The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." Patrick Kavanagh strives for "the difficult art of not caring".
At its height, sprezzaturais a function of complete mastery of form and technique. An artist reaches the point of having nothing to prove, and the apparently cold gesture of nonchalance becomes a form of spiritual renunciation. In the late Titian paintings, the great master of the finished surface adopts a quick, sketchy style with open, visible brushwork and a looseness of form that led Victorian critics to dismiss these works as unfinished paintings by an artist too frail to hold his brush properly. Now, they seem astonishingly "modern", and their very speed and apparent artlessness expresses both his accumulated mastery and a desire to transcend it. X-rays of the paintings show how painstakingly he worked to create the effect of having merely dashed them off.
You get the same effect with Martin Hayes's playing on Welcome Here Again. For those used to the thrilling pyrotechnics of, say, Live in Seattle, with its long sets of tunes building towards ecstatic conclusions, the album's understatement seems, at first, a little disappointing. The pieces are mostly short - the majority less than three minutes. There is no self-conscious display of technique and the sleeve notes declare that "we try to avoid an overly technical or cerebral approach".
But as you listen more, you understand that, for Hayes and Cahill, technique has ceased to matter, because it has been so thoroughly subsumed that it can be a springboard into the regions of instinct and intuition where real artistic nonchalance exists. There is a blissful ease to the music that reminds you that while very good artists do sprezzaturawith a knowing swagger, the great ones do it with an oblivious humility.
