A canon of the fittest

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EVOLUTIONIST PERSPECTIVES ON

ART HISTORY

Master thesis, MA Arts and Culture

August 2014

Prof. dr. W.J.L.M. van Damme

Laura M.F. Bertens, st. nr. 9923349

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Cover image: detail from Ward Shelley, Addendum to Alfred Barr, 2005, oil on mylar, 26 x 40.25 inches. The work refers to the famous flow chart by Alfred Barr, discussed in the Conclusion and shown in figure 10.

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3

INTRODUCTION

The theory of evolutionary development was set forth by Charles Darwin in 1859 in one of the most influential publications of all time in the field of biology, On the origin of species. Although this book was concerned specifically with the biological processes underlying the development of species, the theory was strongly influential as well in other fields of research, concerned with development or change. Particularly in the domains of anthropology, sociology and art history the concept of Darwinian evolution has played a pivotal role. The more general, non-Darwinian idea of evolution had been central to developmental studies of culture already for centuries; even in the art historical writings of Vasari the progressivist idea of a directed evolution towards a ‘better’ art is clearly present. With the introduction of Darwinian evolution these notions of cultural development became entwined with biological theories.

The observation of evolutionary processes in cultural expression and artefacts can be traced back to antiquity and has played an important role in historiography and the human sciences in general for centuries. However, over time the notion of directed cultural development towards a point of hypothetical perfection, as well as the corresponding belief in cultural developmental stages, came to be considered out-dated and suspect. The interest of the Nazi’s in physical anthropology brought out the dangers of this field and poststructuralist thinking of the 1960s and 70s – rejecting the claim of absolute, objective truths in favour of all-encompassing constructivism – furthered the subsequent decline in evolutionary research on racial differences. Theories of evolutionary distinction between races and peoples became politically suspect and are currently largely neglected.

Narrowing down to art history, we see a similar rise and subsequent decline of the idea of a gradual development towards greater complexity and realism. From Vasari to Gombrich the history of art had traditionally been described as a process of improvement, of imitatio and emulatio. An interpretation of Darwinian evolution as a similar process of biological improvement towards more and more complex life forms seemed a natural addition to, and confirmation of, the traditional interest in directed development within art history. As such, biological evolution came to serve as an excellent metaphor for these cultural and artistic changes.

Before continuing to discuss the topic at hand in this thesis, it is essential to include a few words for the purpose of disambiguation. There are different ways of discussing the relation between biological evolution and the study of cultures and art, of which I want to explicitly separate two. Firstly, the development of art and cultural expression has played an important role in the biological evolution

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6 of the human species; this link between artistic expression and biological evolution has been the topic of research for many decades and continues to greatly fascinate both biologists and art historians. Secondly, the development of stylistic and technical aspects of art and cultural expression has frequently been understood by art historians as following a gradual process of evolution, for which biological, Darwinian evolution has come to serve as a reference point. It is important to clearly distinguish between these two phenomena; while the role of art in human evolution is an intriguing subject, this thesis is not at all concerned with this connection between art and evolution. The biological origins of the earliest cave paintings, their evolutionary use and the wealth of information they and later artworks provide us with on the human mind and physiology are important subjects of study, but are not to be confused with the topic at hand. We will be dealing strictly with the projection of Darwinian evolution on the development of art by art historians.

That being said, let us turn to the research topic at hand. The 20th-century abandonment of this notion of evolutionist art history is mainly due to the insight that one cannot establish what constitutes ‘improvement’ or ‘increasing complexity’ in the visual arts. Up until the Modern period a sense of directed progress was seen in the perceived improvement in mimetic quality of the artworks. The famous 20th-century art historian Ernst Gombrich in particular strongly believed in an ascending line towards ever-increasing realism, as we shall discuss later. However, with the onset of Modernism, the interest in Primitivism and the shift towards abstract and conceptual art, the mimetic aspects of art had already lost their central function in assessing the traditional ‘quality’ of the artworks; in other words, one could no longer determine how successful an artwork was from the question whether it visually resembled reality. As a result of these developments, the metaphor of Darwinian evolution fell into disuse in the field of art history.

The present thesis concerns the uses of the metaphor of Darwinian evolution for the study of art history. How did evolutionism, before and after Darwin, develop in art historical writing? And how can a renewed analysis of the resemblances between biological evolution and art history resolve earlier problems with evolutionism and result in a reappraisal of the metaphor? The structure of the thesis is twofold. Firstly, we will look at the role of evolutionism in art history, both with respect to a pre-Darwinian, general sense of evolution and to a pre-Darwinian, specifically biological sense. This historical overview will describe the general tendency to read art history as a process of gradual development towards ‘improvement’ and the role biological evolution has played in this perspective. Secondly, this thesis proposes a new role for the metaphor of biological evolution within the field of art history. It is my firm belief that the abandonment of evolutionism in art history is largely due to an incorrect

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7 understanding of Darwinian evolution, caused in particular by the idea that development proceeds in a teleological manner, towards a complex and optimal end. This understanding of the process renders it moot as a metaphor, since the end point and the measure of complexity are of necessity subjective and ever changing in the arts. However, a better understanding of the actual biological process shows that the central tenet of evolution is the level of adaptation to one’s environment. As such, I believe the theory to be highly suitable as a metaphor for the history of art and chapters 2 and 3 are concerned with the elaboration of this idea. This metaphorical approach will be particularly helpful in exploring the ‘essence’ of art, addressing questions about the ‘genetics’ of art, the binding factors (if any) running through all different stages of art and the multiplicity of categories of art. It allows us to examine ideas about canon formation, the institutional theory and Wittgenstein’s family resemblance in a new context. The strength of any metaphor is its ability to show how a particular subject is in some respects comparable to another, analogous object or event (while being clearly distinct in other respects) and thereby to provide its user with a different viewpoint on the subject at hand, resulting in a better understanding. It is for this reason that I consider it helpful to explore the relation between Darwinian evolution and the history of art; several aspects of both diachronic processes are strikingly similar and will hopefully introduce a new viewpoint on the development of art. In the subsequent chapters I will illustrate the resemblances and the depth to which the metaphor can be extended.

The first chapter will provide a historical overview of the use of evolutionary theories in the field of art history. In the second chapter a re-evaluation of the art historical use of Darwinian evolution is set forth; in 2.1 a proper understanding of the biological process is presented, followed in 2.2 by the application of this process as a useful metaphor in describing forces that shape the history of art and the formation of art historical canons. As such, chapter 1 provides a historical background, against which, in chapter 2, a plea is made for the usefulness of Darwinian evolution as a metaphor for the development of art. Finally, the third chapter presents a series of five specific case studies which further elaborate the theoretical framework in order to make it more concrete and applied. The case studies concern, amongst other topics, the biological phenomenon of the handicap principle applied to avant-garde art, the relation between artistic Primitivism and biological secondary traits, artistic equivalents of gene flow and the genetic bottleneck effect, the resemblance between art historical pseudomorphism and biological analogy and, finally, a bio-evolutionary approach to Wittgenstein’s theory of

Familienähnlichkeit. The (necessarily concise) discussion of these case studies will illustrate the use of

the proposed metaphor of evolution in studying the history of art, as well as the more profound issue of (the impossibility of) arriving at a stable, all-inclusive definition of art.

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CHAPTER 1. Evolutionary theories in the history of art historical research

The Oxford English Dictionary lists the following definitions of evolution:

1 The process by which different kinds of living organism are believed to have developed from earlier forms during the history of the earth.

2 The gradual development of something: “the forms of written languages undergo constant evolution”.

3. …

The theory of biological evolution, the first definition of ‘evolution’ mentioned in the OED, caused one of the most important shifts in our understanding of the world. Like Copernicus’ heliocentrism or Einstein’s theory of relativity, Darwinian evolution led to a paradigm shift in (Western) science and society. It has influenced all fields of the sciences as well as most domains within the humanities. As the OED definition above illustrates, this understanding of ‘evolution’ is just one in a number of definitions. In this chapter we will encounter both a broader understanding (cf. the second OED definition), conceiving of evolution as a gradual development, and the narrow Darwinian definition. The broader concept of evolution had existed for centuries before Darwin formulated his theory. This general notion of gradual development can be traced through all major discourses of historiography, philosophy and sociology over the last few centuries. As such it is also present in art historical writing.

In this chapter we will look at ideas of evolution in art historical writing prior to Darwinism (section 1.1), followed by a discussion of the influence of biological theories of evolution on the art historical field (section 1.2). Lastly, we will consider the changing evolutionist perspectives on art historical writing in the 20th century, particularly with the onset of Modernism (section 1.3).

1.1 PRE-DARWINIAN NOTIONS OF EVOLUTION IN (ART) HISTORICAL WRITING

The idea of evolution as applied to history and culture is not a recent one in European theory. As with most things, the ancient Greeks were here first. The idea that society had progressed from simple beginnings to a complex society can be found in the writings of many ancient Greek writers, as well as later Roman writers. Along with this development, cultural expressions and the arts were seen to have evolved to ever greater complexity. The ancients distinguished several stages in the development of the

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10 human race, of which the first represented the purest, referred to as the Golden Age. This Golden Age,

Χρυσόν Γένος, is first mentioned by Hesiod, in his Works and days (ca. 700 BCE), in which he

distinguishes a total of five stages up until his own times. His view on the development of humankind is by no means reassuring; while the people of the Golden Age lived “without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief”1, later generations became increasingly more troubled and violent. The development described by Hesiod is one of deterioration, in which growing societal complexity is seen not as a mark of civilization, but rather as signalling the downfall of the human race.

Hesiod’s pessimistic outlook on human development, as a series of deteriorating stages, was a common thread throughout most of ancient Greek and Roman writing. For instance, in his Cratylus (360 BCE), Plato has Socrates and Hermogenes discuss the different races introduced by Hesiod.2 Plato shared Hesiod’s negative perspective on these developments. A more optimistic example, however, of evolutionist thinking is found in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound (ca. 430 BCE); while most authors shared Hesiod’s lapsarian model, Aeschylus describes rather the opposite evolutionary direction, when he has Prometheus bring the human race to a more advanced state, by introducing fire. In a direct reference to Hesiod’s ideology, he has Prometheus talk about the primitive earlier stages of man, dwelling in caves, without knowledge of building, writing or agriculture. Prometheus tells “the tale of human sufferings, and how at first senseless as beasts I gave men sense, possessed them of mind. (…) bronze, iron, silver, gold; who would say that he had discovered them before me?”3

Roman writers adopted the general Greek model of successive, degenerative cultural stages. Ovid discusses them at great length in his Metamorphoses4 (8 AD), in which he talks of four stages –

gold, silver, bronze and iron – with the Golden Age being the purest and most primitive.5 While the golden race dwelled in caves and ate what nature provided for them, later races took to erecting houses, forming armies and building ships, thereby complicating society and ruining the innocence of the golden era. The idea of pure and primitive beginnings can be found in works by others, such as Vergil, but Aeschylus’ view of societal improvement is also represented, notably in the writings of Lucretius. In De rerum natura (50 BCE) he describes how “poems, pictures, chiselled shapes of polished

1

Hesiod, Works and days, II 109-120 (translation by H.G. Evelyn-White 1914).

2_{Plato, Cratylus, verse 398; discussing demons Socrates says: “You know how Hesiod uses the word? (…) Do you}

not remember that he speaks of a golden race of men who came first?” (translation by B. Jowett 1994).

3

Aeschylus, Prometheus bound, 502-3 (translation by I. Ruffell 2011).

4

Ovid, Metamorphoses, book I, 89-150.

5

Ibid., book I, 94-99: “Not yet had the pine-tree, felled on its native mountains, descended thence into the watery plain to visit other lands; men knew no shores except their own. Not yet were cities begirt with steep moats; there were no trumpets of straight, no horns of curving brass, no swords or helmets.” (translation by F.J. Miller 1999).

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11 sculptures- all these arts were learned by practice and the mind's experience, as men walked forward step by eager step. (…) For one thing after other [sic] did men see grow clear by intellect, till with their arts they've now achieved the supreme pinnacle.”6

In these lines from Lucretius, explicit mention is made of the arts, which are described as the result of a constant human development towards “the supreme pinnacle”. A similar and more elaborate early art history can be found in Pliny’s Historia naturalis (ca. 77-79 AD); here a chronological overview is presented of painters and sculptors7 and this is arguably the first evolutionary perspective on art history in particular. Pliny describes the development of art as a constant process of improvement and invention, in which artists built on the achievements of their predecessors. A similar line of progressivist thinking can be found in Vitruvius’ De architectura (ca. 15 BCE). The art historian Thomas Munro observes two seminal ideas of cultural evolution in the writings of Pliny and Vitruvius: the notion of cumulative change and the idea that art develops through the ages as a form of social heritage, gradually being built up by successive individuals into a collective possession.8

This concept of a primitive beginning followed by a series of societal stages, whether declining or evolving towards something better, has been an almost constant thread running through the historiography of culture. With the spread of Christianity, the Golden Age model was substituted by the equally degenerative biblical stages, from the Creation and time spent in Paradise, through the fall and expulsion from Eden, the time of the prophets and the First Coming, to the present stage in history. With the gradual onset of the Renaissance, a more positive belief in progress developed, a new sense of pride and advancement, directly connecting the contemporary artistic achievements to the heritage of antiquity. Gradually, evolution came to be seen once more as a progressive development, a process of constant improvement.

A major proponent of this new historical view was Giorgio Vasari (1511-74), who provides us with an overview of biographies of famous artists in his Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed

architettori (1550), for which he is often regarded as the intellectual founder of the art historical

discipline.9 Much like Pliny, he sets out to describe a process of imitatio and emulatio by successive artists, but does so more explicitly. In his grand theory of art historical development he uses a biological metaphor, likening the changes in the visual arts to the stages of biological growth: birth, childhood,

6

Lucretius, De rerum natura, book 5, 1453-1465 (translation by W.E Leonard 1916).

7

Pliny, Historia naturalis, book 35, section 5-46.

8

Munro 1963, pp.38-39.

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12 mature age and death.10 Although the element of decline is explicit in this metaphor, Vasari believed the artistic achievements of his own time to reflect the progressive stage of maturation, rendering his account of artistic development up until the Renaissance an example of positive evolutionism. Of particular interest to our exploration of evolutionary views is Vasari’s view on the relativity of artistic success; as Preziosi points out11, Vasari observed that an artist could be deemed highly successful by his contemporaries as having reached a level of perfection, while in the bigger perspective of art history he could be considered ‘primitive’ by later generations12. Here Vasari could be said to come close to a biological understanding of this relative success. As shall be discussed later, biological evolution can be seen as a continuous process (however not teleological) and, looking back on evolutionary development, different species can be seen to represent subsequent stages in this evolutionary process. Likewise, artists are understood by Vasari to represent stages of the artistic evolution, all part of a bigger process. At the same time animal species, and by analogy artists, are by no means imperfect stepping stones, merely serving a bigger purpose. Each species and artist is ‘perfect’ in its/his own right as well, being adapted to the environment of the particular place and time. In this way, each artist is part of a bigger narrative of cumulative evolution and each work of art can be considered ‘incomplete’, as part of an intermediate stage in the longer narrative of art history, and simultaneously complete, within the specific contemporary context.13

1.2 ART HISTORY IN THE 19th CENTURY: A TENDENCY TOWARDS SCIENTIFIC METHODS AND THE INFLUENCE OF DARWINISM

We jump ahead several centuries and continue our investigation of art historical evolutionism in the 19th century. Although the exact origin of art history might be traced back to Vasari, the academic discipline is thought by many to date back to the writings of Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68) or, more strictly, to

10_{Preziosi 2009, p.14; Vasari’s use of biological metaphors in describing cultural change is also illustrated by the}

fact that he is the first author to use the term rinascita, rebirth.

11

Ibid., p.15.

12

“As the men of the age were not accustomed to see any excellence or greater perfection than the things thus produced, they greatly admired them, and considered them to be the type of perfection, barbarous as they were.” Vasari, as quoted by Preziosi 2009, p.15.

13

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13 the formal incorporation of art history in German university programmes in the 1840s.14 This second half of the 19th century is of particular interest to our overview of evolutionism.

During the 18th century, the Enlightenment, instigated in the previous century by pivotal thinkers such as Francis Bacon, John Locke and Isaac Newton, had transformed the intellectual world and changed the ways in which the world was perceived and studied. Scientific methods were developed and rational and experimental ways of investigating natural phenomena gained importance. The new approach also concerned the ways in which we came to study human nature and development, which was further stimulated by the colonial expansion and the rapidly growing knowledge of other cultures. This was the background against which the discipline of anthropology arose and within this academic climate the developing field of art history started to become more scientific as well in its methodologies and theories.15

Like the early 19th-century human sciences, the field of biology found itself at the dawn of a major paradigm shift. During the first half of the 19th century biologists set out to unravel the mystery of the development of species. In the previous century, natural theologians such as Linnaeus had been keen to discover, through meticulous categorization, God’s plan in the creation of a wide range of perfectly adapted species.16 Now, scientists started to suspect a slow but steady change of species and as early as 1745 and 1754 respectively, Pierre-Louis Maupertuis and Denis Diderot outlined theories of species evolution.17 The first extensive theory explaining the gradual change of species was formulated by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), who published his findings in 1809.18 Although this was a major step towards our current understanding of evolution, Lamarck mistakenly thought that traits obtained during life could be passed on to later generations, an idea commonly referred to as ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’.

Lamarckism was eventually, half a century later, challenged by a new understanding of biological evolution, still current today. Although we credit Charles Darwin (1809-1882) with this revolutionary insight, published in 1859 in his On the origin of species, it was in fact simultaneously and independently conceived of by both Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913).19 While the theory is

14

Preziosi 2009, p.7.

15

Pfisterer 2008, p.71.

16_{Campbell 1999, p.415; Linnaeus published his Systema naturae in 1735.} 17

Harris 1996, pp.357-58.

18

J.-B. Lamarck, Philosophie zoologique ou exposition des considérations relatives à l'histoire naturelle des

animaux, 1809.

19

In fact, in 1858 Wallace wrote a paper on the concept, which he sent for revision to Darwin, who was at the time in the middle of writing an extensive book on the topic and promptly decided to present his preliminary findings before the Linnaean Society, while making a shorter version of the book ready for publication (Harris 1996, p.363).

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14 widely accepted nowadays, in Darwin’s time the concept of natural selection, a key element in Darwin’s theory, remained highly contested for almost a century. However, the main notion of the occurrence of Darwinian evolution (by means of a not yet specified selection process) became commonly accepted among biologists within a few decades. And this general interest in evolution and the natural laws underlying biological development was not restricted to the field of biology, but played a pivotal role in shaping the human sciences as well, in particular sociology and anthropology.

Although Darwin’s theory is now commonly agreed upon by biologists, at the time it was by no means the only significant theory of evolution. In addition to Lamarckism, the ideas of the philosopher, biologist and sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) should be mentioned. His contribution to the field stands out from other evolutionary theories because it does not merely go into the biological history of the human species, but includes the cultural development as well. Until then, these two domains had mostly been studied separately as belonging to the natural sciences and the social sciences, respectively. Spencer’s theory tried to take into account all of human history, including biological, social, anthropological and historical dimensions. Initially a supporter of Lamarckism, he later included natural selection in his theories.20 He set forth his explanation of evolution in 1857, a year before Darwin, in the essay ‘Progress: its law and cause’, followed by several books on the topic. In Spencer’s all-encompassing theoretical framework, evolution denoted the change towards increasing complexity, meaning in the case of cultural evolution a progressive and gradual development towards increasing happiness and moral health in society.21 This progressivist fallacy, seeing evolution as necessarily directed at increasing complexity, was the common basis for many evolutionist theories of societal development, formulated at the time (by for instance Lewis Henry Morgan and Edward Burnett Tylor).22 Spencer’s ideas about the all-encompassing nature of evolution as well as the constant move towards higher complexity is made explicit in his ‘Progress: its law and cause’:

“Whether it be in the development of the Earth, in the development of Life upon its surface, in the development of Society, of Government, of Manufactures, of Commerce, of Language, Literature, Science, Art, this same evolution of the simple into the complex, through successive differentiations, holds throughout. From the earliest traceable cosmical changes down to the latest results of civilisation, we shall find that the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous, is that in which Progress essentially consists.”23

20 Munro 1963, p.55. 21 Ibid., p.56. 22 Sanderson 1990, p.13-15; Munro 1963, p.58. 23 Spencer 1857, p.445.

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15 Amidst these changes and the broadening of the scientific domain, the field of art history had to assert its scientific merit in relation to the other human sciences. The artistic production under study became greatly extended, both synchronically, due to colonial encounters with non-Western cultures, and diachronically, with the (re)discovery of cave paintings and the prehistoric cultures they belonged to.24 In response to these developments, a strong interest in underlying universal ‘laws’ of artistic development came to the fore during the last decades of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. This new scientific direction in art history was reflected in the birth of the discipline

Kunstwissenschaft. Within this practice, a novel approach to the study of art objects was developed,

taking it away from mere historiographical description, towards a reduction and scientific investigation of styles and the evolution of these styles. The new methodology opened up the field to interdisciplinary views incorporating anthropological and psychological theories.25

An example of this new approach can be found in the publications by Gottfried Semper (1803-1879). His early work Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder praktische Ästhetik (1860), published only one year after Darwin’s theory, conveys a strong evolutionism in its description of the abstract-geometric origins of ornament followed by a progression towards figurative, realistic forms. Semper’s view on the development of architecture and decoration is clearly naturalist, relating the origins of architecture to man’s biological need for shelter. Decorative designs could be traced to the particularities of used materials and only later became aestheticized. In Kleine Schriften (1884) he took to studying ornaments in a scientific manner, even applying a formula to the process through which new forms of ornament arose, taking as variables the materials, external influences such as climate characteristics or religious and political influences, and individual traits of the artisans.26 Here the influence of the natural sciences and the recent discovery of universal laws governing the development of species is particularly clear27.

A major figure within the nascent field of Kunstwissenschaft was Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945). In his reasoning, as presented in his Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: das Problem der Stilentwicklung

in der neueren Kunst (1915), we hear traces of Hegel. This philosopher introduced an evolutionary

perspective on history, centred around the notion of a Weltgeist, world spirit, which spurs on a

24_{Reichle 2012, pp.131-133. The cave paintings at Altamira had been known for centuries, but were discovered}

anew and brought into the scientific domain by Don Marcelino Sanz de Sautola in 1879.

25

Basu 2011, pp.109-110; Golden 2001, p.80.

26

Semper 1884, pp.267-271; Poerschke 2005, pp.127-128.

27

Although Semper does not mention Darwinism explicitly as an influence, he does explicitly refer to Cuvier’s slightly earlier theory on the development of species, which directly influenced Darwin’s theory; Semper 1884, pp.259-291; Golden 2001, p.81; Basu 2011, p.125

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16 teleological process of history. In Wölfflin’s theory on art historical development, aspects of this Hegelian teleological evolution of society and culture are evident, through a genealogical development of different form elements.28 Although Wölfflin does not explicitly refer to Darwinian evolution, I would contend that the notion of stylistic progress through recombination of elements from earlier styles parallels the Darwinian understanding of genetic recombination instigating the birth of new species. But like Semper and so many other contemporaries, he mistakenly took the notion of evolution to mean a progression towards something more complex and hence ‘better’: “Within formally correct, that is, viable architecture an evolution is possible, which we are not totally unjustified in comparing with the evolution of organic life forms. Progress in both realms takes place similarly: an evolution from dull, poorly articulated forms to the most finely developed system of differentiated parts.”29

Around this time, a similar interest in natural laws governing artistic and cultural practice was particularly strong in Great Britain and Scandinavia, in which an equally unilinear evolutionism was favoured amongst many scholars.30 This is exemplified by the work of the collector Henry Lane Fox, later Pitt Rivers, who displayed his collection in the Pitt Rivers Museum in a typological manner, representing a gradual evolution in formal aspects, which he observed in for instance spear heads and shields.31 Common amongst these evolutionists was the notion that whatever the driving force of artistic development and whatever its perceived direction, the artistic expressions of the earlier, ‘primitive’ peoples were significantly inferior to later objects.32

Another important figure in the art historical evolutionism is Alois Riegl (1858-1905). Darwinian thought is clearly present in Riegl’s search for a guiding and determining principle in the development of artistic expression. To this end, Riegl coined the term Kunstwollen (will to form/art), described by the architectural historian Joseph Rykwert as an “independent, unpredictable but collective determination that fixed every changing style.”33 Like Semper, Riegl was looking for universal laws dictating the artistic process; however, in his insistence on an inner pan-human need to produce art, his ideas were very different and he was strongly opposed to Semper’s focus on the practical utilitarian materialism of artistic production.

While earlier art historians had been keen to study and describe the individual artists and their particular contributions, Riegl was concerned with the collective direction of artistic development, as it

28

Preziosi 2009, p.117

29

Translation cited from Golden 2001, p.88.

30 Pfisterer 2008, p.78. 31 Hall 1997, pp.187-188. 32 Pfisterer 2008, p.78. 33 Rykwert 2011, p.vii.

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17 was propelled along by a logical and deterministic unfolding of a chain of formalist solutions. He has, however, been described as less of an evolutionist and more of a relativist34; while most evolutionists were convinced of an artistic progression towards improvement and perfection (for instance of mimesis), Riegl asserted that these artistic characteristics were in fact relative and the different stages in expression of human Kunstwollen could not be seen as an ascending line.35 In this respect, his evolutionism is rather progressive and related to the use of the evolutionary metaphor which will be set out in the next chapter.

Nonetheless, Riegl’s theory poses problems. The will-to-form, Kunstwollen, working as a universal, psychological force, seems to be the magical driving force in a black box of development, much like the Hegelian Weltgeist. The artistic development then becomes wholly deterministic, governed by a mysterious process, the workings of which can only be traced in hindsight, when looking at past developments. As such, the argument is a circular one: the development has proceeded this way, because this is the only way it could have proceeded. Ernst Gombrich notes this problem in his discussion of Riegl’s determinism: “Change becomes the symptom of change as such, and to hide this tautology, some grandiose scheme of evolution has to be called in, as happened not only to Riegl but to so many of his successors.”36

The scope of the proponents of Kunstwissenschaft became extended beyond the study of traditional ‘high art’, to include ‘low art’ and a broader range of visual cultural practices.37 This broader interest is also apparent in the approach of their contemporary Aby Warburg (1866-1929). He advocated an all-inclusive, interdisciplinary art history, including not only high art, but a wide range of cultural and scientific objects, low art and ethnographic artefacts as well. This is exemplified by his well-known

Bilderatlas or Mnemosyne project, which traced the relationships between widely diverse images and

artefacts, through which, much in line with the spirit of the time, greater underlying patterns and categories were investigated. Furthermore, his studies of indigenous peoples and the likeness of their rituals to the rituals of earlier Western cultures were strongly evolutionist. In a lecture from 1923, discussing his investigation of the Hopi Indian community (which he visited in 1896), Warburg formulates his research question as follows: “A glance at similar phenomena in pagan Europe will bring us, finally, to the following question: To what extend does this pagan world view, as it persists among

34

Pfisterer 2008, p.78.

35

Preziosi 2009, p.152; Pfisterer 2008, p.78; Basu 2011, p.124.

36

Gombrich 1960, p.18.

37

The field of Kunstwissenschaft expanded the borders of the traditional art historical field, both with respect to the objects under study and the used methodology; this strive for a broader scope can nowadays be seen again in the field of visual studies (Somaini 2012, p.18).

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18 the Indians, give us a yardstick for the development from primitive paganism, through the paganism of classical antiquity, to modern man?”38 Warburg was critical of the progress and relentless spread of Western civilization, destroying extant ‘primitive’ cultures, but despite this sceptical outlook, his observations and interpretations clearly result in a model of unilinear evolution, an “… evolution from instinctual, magical interaction to a spiritualized taking of distance.”39 The place of serpents in Hopi rituals, discussed in his 1923 lecture, serve as “an example of that primordial condition of which the refinement, transcendence, and replacement are the work of modern culture.”40

1.3 CHANGING PERSPECTIVES ON CULTURAL EVOLUTIONISM IN THE 20th CENTURY

Incorporating evolutionist notions in the study of art history was very popular, as we have seen, during the second half of the 19th century. However, during and after the First World War the interest in evolutionism waned. This seems to have been the result of several factors. First of all, Spencer’s theories that had played such a pivotal role in cultural evolutionism came under attack during his later years. In particular his insistence upon ever-increasing complexity became untenable in the light of new observations; biologists pointed towards the success of simple life forms while complex life forms were seen to have gone extinct.41 Furthermore, the strong evolutionism underlying Marxist ideas caused the theory to become associated with Soviet communism, making it unpopular amongst Western liberal scholars.42 And thirdly, in the field of anthropology criticism of the evolutionist theories of cultural development arose, which had a strong influence on the other fields of the human sciences. The initial introduction of cultural evolutionism in art history was mainly due to the developments in anthropology, deemed to be a more scientific and authoritative field than art history. So when the prominent anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942) instigated an anti-evolutionary reaction, this directly affected the popularity of the theory within art history.43

Franz Boas started questioning the validity of cultural evolutionism in the early 20th century. Although Boas was understood by many to reject the idea of cultural evolution in its entirety, leading to what has been called the ‘Boasian reaction’44, this is not actually what he proposed. He was sceptical of 38_{Warburg 1923, p.163.} 39 Ibid., p.187. 40 Ibid., p.187. 41 Sanderson 1990, p.36; Munro 1963, p.162. 42 Munro 1963, p.162. 43

Sanderson 1990, p.36; Munro 1963, p.163; Lewis 2001, p.382.

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19 the extreme reductionism the evolutionary theory had led to, i.e. the belief that extant cultures could be seen as neatly divided along developmental stages, making up a unidirectional evolutionary scale of human development.45 That is to say, he rejected what was called the “comparative method”46, much relied upon by Herbert Spencer in his Descriptive sociology47 and resulting in a ranking of human cultures on a hypothetical evolutionary ladder leading from simple to complex. Boas was not looking for universal laws, but instead focused on the individual cultural practices and their idiosyncrasies. Nonetheless, he did believe in the general validity of cultural evolution and kept on using the theory in his work and in educating his students.

Boas’ sceptical attitude towards the dogmatic use of unilinear, cultural evolutionism was taken up by many of his followers in the field of anthropology, most of whom were far more polemic than he had ever been.48 This disdain for evolutionism, spreading through the field of anthropology, had direct bearings on the art historical use of the theory and evolutionism lost its momentum in the human sciences for a few decades, although it was never completely dismissed.49 It underwent a recovery, starting in the late 1940’s, connected with fierce opposition to the Baosian paradigm. Boas was criticized for choosing historical particularism (a focus on the history of individual cultures and their expressions) over the comparative method of cultural evolutionism; as we have seen, this criticism was partially grounded in a false understanding of Boas’ work.50 Theorists like Leslie White and Marvin Harris were particularly keen to dismiss Boas’ anthropological methods in favour of a return to evolutionism.51 Thus, the second half of the 20th century saw a revival of cultural evolutionism in the field of anthropology, albeit in a renewed form, focusing on multilinear evolution as opposed to a unilinear one.52

The (inevitable) focus on anthropology and the influence it had on art historical theory has somewhat detracted our attention from looking at the perceived evolution of art per se, i.e. without necessarily connecting it to cultural evolution. To return to this purely art historical perspective, we will end this overview with the evolutionist ideas of Ernst Gombrich (1909-2001), one of the major art historians of the 20th century. The anthropological take on cultural evolution was mainly concerned with

45_{In this critique, he was mainly responding to the evolutionary theories of Edward Burnett Tylor and Lewis Henry}

Morgan; these evolutionist theorists contributed greatly to the fields of sociology and anthropology, but cannot be further discussed in this concise overview.

46_{Sanderson 1990, p.37; Gombrich 2002, p.269.} 47

First edition published 1873, continued additions until 1934 (from his death in 1903 continued by others).

48 Lewis 2001, p.381. 49 Sanderson 1990, p.45. 50 Lewis 2001, p.382. 51 Munro 1963, p.173; Lewis 2001, pp.382-384. 52 Munro 1963, pp.167-169.

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20 the reasons why humans would produce art and the different evolutionary stages that could be discerned amongst cultures based on their cultural products. The art historical evolutionism, however, was focused on the progress of art in itself, the on-going improvement of artistic capability, as we have seen in the first section. This notion of progress required criteria with which to measure the quality and improvement and for centuries these were based on the mimetic nature of art. Already in Pliny’s discourse the ultimate asset of an artwork was deemed to be its resemblance to reality. This belief persisted well into the modern period. Gombrich’s famous art historical textbook The story of art (1950) is based on this premise, as the author himself explicitly mentions in The preference for the Primitive (2002): “… traditionally the history of art has been conceived and told in terms of a technical progress towards the imitation of nature. Pliny in ancient times and Vasari in the Renaissance had built their narratives on this conception, and so did I, when I wrote The Story of Art …”.53 However, with the start of Modernism in art, measuring quality according to mimetic properties became problematic. Not only did artists move away from figurative realism, but primitivists started actively turning to the ‘non-naturalistic’ artistic methods of ‘primitive’ peoples, thereby utterly undoing the model of mimetic progress. If evolutionism were to be maintained, the criteria for gauging evolutionary progress had to be altered.

In his Art and illusion (1960) Gombrich describes with great clarity the shift in interest among art historians from mimesis towards the physiology and psychology of perceiving art. He notes how the idea of an ever increasing mimesis becomes untenable. In his overview of the different practices of

Kunstwissenschaft54, he rightfully points to the subjective nature of perception and the fact that the ‘success’ of art cannot be measured by its physical likeness with the portrayed reality, but should take culturally and psychologically constructed ways of seeing into account.55 Art is never a direct reflection of reality; it cannot be. Instead it uses illusionist tactics, such as foreshortening in painting, to create the illusion of realism. Nonetheless, the argument of Art and illusion seems to remain grounded in evolutionism. A unilinear progression still seems to underlie artistic development, but the mimetic nature of artistic practice has been replaced, as the standard with which to measure the ‘evolutionary stage’, by a socio-psychological measure of the development of audience perception in the particular community; in other words, the perception of representations of the world underwent changes, for instance in the way three-dimensionality was deemed to be convincingly represented by the artistic creator. Gombrich discussed, as an example, the comparison between the ancient Egyptians and 53 Gombrich 2002, p.9. 54 Gombrich 1960, pp.10-17. 55

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21 Greeks56; Egyptian art relied on a perception dominated by the – in Gombrich’s view rather primitive – sense of touch, leading them to paint all limbs of a figure, even if this did not comply with the visual representation of the scene. In contrast, the Greek artists progressed to include the “more advanced” sense of seeing (which accounts for their introduction of visual aspects, such as foreshortening).

In Preference for the Primitive, which was published posthumously in 2002, Gombrich investigates Primitivist art of the 20th century and tries to incorporate this phenomenon in his view of artistic progress. Throughout this work his focus in studying the Primitivist tendencies remains the stylistic and technical aspects. As such, Primitivism is described as a strategy that tries to restore clarity where complexity has gone too far and has become detrimental instead of progressive. It is therefore in Gombrich’s opinion still a move towards improvement, by rectifying obfuscating developments. To support this theory, his view of Primitivism becomes dangerously selective and biased.57 Conceptual Primitivism is completely left out, due to the strict focus on stylistic elements. Here Gombrich shows us the dangers of theory, particularly in the humanities, where theories are by their very nature not as easily laid down in universal laws; working on the basis of an unshakable belief in artistic evolution will create blind spots and biases and impede the ability to further one’s understanding of artistic development.

Although this overview is by no means complete58, the main theories on the evolutionary approach to art history have been addressed, creating a context for the next chapters. In the following chapter, the theory of biological evolution, as it is currently understood, will be summarized. Subsequently, this will be presented as a metaphor for the development of art, in which the essential elements of biological evolution will be related to analogous processes seen in artistic development.

56 Gombrich 1960, p.15. 57 Rhodes 2008, p.388. 58

Many others have played important roles in the history of evolutionism in the humanities and in art history in particular, amongst whom Ernst Grosse, Jacob Burckhardt and Carl Gustav Carus.

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CHAPTER 2. Darwinian evolution and its metaphorical application to art history

In the last chapter we have seen how the theory of Darwinian evolution made its way into the human sciences and became an important influence on research fields such as anthropology and art history. We have seen, however, that the theory of evolution was not always properly understood by scholars in the humanities, leading to misconceptions of both biological and cultural evolution. In this chapter we will first of all take a closer look at the theory of evolution, as it is currently supported, including some relatively recent concepts added to Darwin’s theoretical framework59. Subsequently we will connect these aspects of Darwinian evolution to the processes observed in the development of art. In doing so we will also discuss some misunderstandings encountered in the theories of cultural evolution of the 19th-century art historians and anthropologists discussed in the last chapter.

2.1 THE PROCESS AND KEY ELEMENTS OF BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION

Before discussing the workings of biological evolution, it is essential to distinguish two major elements in Darwin’s theory. First of all, the theory describes how species have not been ‘created’ or come into existence in their current forms - remaining unchanged throughout time - but have developed from earlier species, through a slow process of gradual changes. Although Darwin persistently refers to this process as ‘descent with modification’ and only uses the term ‘evolution’ in the last paragraph of his On

the origin of species, nowadays we refer to this theory as the theory of evolution. The idea of biological

evolution was not new when Darwin described it; as we have seen, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck had already published his observations on the development of species and the idea of a gradually changing world had been described by geologists James Hutton and Charles Lyell60 and supported by paleontological and biogeographical evidence. This part of the theory was therefore readily accepted within a decade after Darwin’s publication in 1859.

However, the second element of Darwinian evolution met with strong resistance and remained contested well into the 1940s. This concerns the proposed mechanism for evolution, natural selection, which is based on the idea that individuals with particular heritable traits produce more offspring than

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At present, biological evolution is a widely known theory and the description given in paragraph 2.1 is based on textbook explanations of the process, in particular Campbell 1999 (chapters 13-15 and 22-24) and Harris 1996 (chapters 18).

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24 others and that a population therefore gradually changes over time. It is important to note that it is not necessary to accept the idea of natural selection in order to agree with the idea of evolution. Natural selection is one possible mechanism, nowadays considered by far the most important, but other forces might be driving the process of evolution.

The main reason that natural selection was not as quickly taken up as the idea of evolution was the baffling problem of how this selection would come about. At the time, the processes of inheritance were still unknown and the notion of natural selection was therefore an inexplicable driving force, much like Hegel’s world spirit and Riegl’s Kunstwollen. Actually, the basic principles of inheritance had already been discovered by a contemporary of Darwin, the Austrian monk and scientist Gregor Mendel. He introduced the concept ‘heritable factor’, nowadays referred to as ‘gene’. What is stunning, is the fact that he could not see any of these described elements, but managed to correctly deduce these processes from the mathematical patterns seen in the phenotypical traits61 of his pea plants.

Although Darwin and Mendel were contemporaries, the connection between their theories remained unnoticed at the time and in fact Mendel’s theory was largely ignored until around 1900, when biologists realised the relationship between the then newly discovered chromosomes and the heritable factors discussed by Mendel. Slowly, these genetic processes came to be connected to Darwin’s theory of natural selection during the 1930s and in the 1940s a general understanding of the process was reached, referred to as the modern synthesis, so called because of the combination of knowledge from diverse fields such as palaeontology, geography and population genetics.

The evolutionists discussed in section 1.2 were forming their ideas about the evolution of arts and culture around the theory of evolution, but without taking the element of natural selection into account. As we have now seen, this part of the theory was at the time largely rejected and furthermore it is not readily apparent how natural selection (or any driving force for that matter) could steer cultural evolution. This issue will be further discussed in section 2.2. In the remainder of this section the process of evolution will briefly be explained, followed by the causes of evolution; natural selection is generally recognised nowadays as one of these causes, but as we will see, it is not the only force driving evolution. Some of the alternative driving forces will be regarded with respect to art historical developments in section 2.2.

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The term ‘phenotype’ refers to the whole of observable, physical traits exhibited by an organism, while genotype refers to the total of genes coded in the DNA of the organism. An individual with a gene for blue eyes, for instance, will exhibit blue eyes as a phenotypical trait.

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2.1.1 The process of evolution

Darwin described the gradual change of species as ‘descent with modification’. He supported the idea that all species were related to each other through their descent from common, unknown ancestors that had lived in the distant past. The descendants of this ancestral species had come to inhabit diverse habitats with wildly varying environmental conditions. Through selective processes of heredity, discussed below, populations gradually grew apart and today the earth is populated by millions of species. Darwin believed these species to be related through a tree-like system in which multiple points of branching, from the root to the outer edges of the tree, connected all species. This model was directly derived from Linnaeus’ innovative classification of all known species. Linnaeus was the founder of the field of taxonomy and the first to classify all animals in a hierarchical system of increasingly generic groups (genera, family, order, class etc.).62

While Linnaeus used his system merely to categorize species, without ascribing relations of kinship to the groups, Darwin connected the system to the theory of evolution; at each junction in the tree one could find the most recent common ancestor of all species in branches sprouting off of that junction. Species at close distances shared more characteristics than species at greater distances. While Linnaeus and Darwin could only study the phenotypical characteristics (such as anatomical and embryological traits) to work out these relationships, most of their findings have later been confirmed by DNA comparison.

Many of the branches end in extinct species and can be considered dead ends from an evolutionary perspective. The tree therefore illustrates the important notion that evolution has not been unilinear and deterministic, but multilinear, with multiple evolutionary lines dying out or continuing. This is very important to the history of cultural evolutionism; as we have seen, many 19th- and early 20th-century scholars, up to the Boasian reaction, had described cultural evolution in a teleological manner, unilinear and progressing towards one ultimate goal of complexity and perfection, believed to be Western contemporary civilisation. With the 1940s’ revival of cultural evolutionism, however, unilinear evolution was replaced by multilinear evolution and the diversity of cultures encountered all over the world became regarded not as the ‘fossil record’ of a singular evolutionary process, but as the current outcomes of many branches of evolution; we will come back to this in section 2.2.2.

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2.1.2 Natural selection

In the face of the overwhelming evidence of fossil records, comparative anatomy, embryology and - more recently - genetic studies, the proposed process of evolution can hardly be contested and has been accepted as standard knowledge in the sciences for decades. The processes through which the described selection takes place have been harder to unravel. Darwin introduced the process of natural selection, explained in this section, but several other additional mechanisms have since been described, sometimes referred to as non-Darwinian, of which a few relevant ones are set forth in 2.1.3.

The reasoning of Darwin’s theory of natural selection can be broken down into three inferences based on five observations, as described by Ernst Mayr in 198263, providing Darwin’s theory of evolution in a nutshell:

- Observation 1: the potential reproduction of any species is large enough to cause an exponential

increase in all populations, if all individuals would successfully reproduce. This is easily illustrated for the human species; women can bear about one child every year from puberty until menopause and men are potentially capable of impregnating multiple women per day, from puberty until death.

- Observation 2: most population sizes nevertheless tend to stay fairly constant. - Observation 3: there are limitations to environmental resources.

=> Inference 1: a population produces more offspring than the environmental system can support, which

leads to a selective process, a struggle amongst the offspring over the available resources, in which only a part of the offspring can survive and be capable of reproduction; this was an insight already reached by Thomas Malthus in ‘An essay on the principle of population’ (1798), in which he noted that human suffering (through disease, war, famine etc.) was caused by the disproportionate increase in our populations with respect to the limited resources available.

- Observation 4: individuals in a population differ in their phenotypical characteristics and no two

individuals are identical in all respects.

- Observation 5: most of these variable characteristics are heritable.

=> Inference 2: the chance of survival in this struggle for resources is not random, but depends in part on

the heritable phenotypical traits of the individual; those individuals with characteristics that make them better adapted to the environment are likely to reproduce more than less adapted individuals.

=> Inference 3: this imbalance in the ability of individuals to reproduce will result in gradual changes in

the population, with favourable traits accumulating over time.

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2.1.3 Other mechanisms of evolution

Darwin described natural selection as the driving force behind evolution and although this was not instantly taken up by contemporary scientists, the tendency to look for one particular force, directing a progress of ever-increasing complexity was very popular in the fields of anthropology and

Kunstwissenschaft, as described in 1.2. This belief in a unilinear, teleological process of cultural

improvement antedates Darwin’s theory, but was certainly reinforced by it (cf. 1.1 and 1.2). However, we have since come to understand that evolution is not merely driven by natural selection. Several other mechanisms play a role in the evolution of a population of individuals and have a bearing on our use of biological evolution as a metaphor for the evolution of art. I will therefore shortly describe the

bottleneck effect, the founder effect (both instances of genetic drift) and gene flow.

The process of evolution is based on a continuous gradual change of hereditary characteristics. This was puzzling to Darwin and his contemporaries, who were unaware of the existence of genes. The biologist Neil Campbell describes this aptly when he says that it must have seemed like “a paradox of inheritance: Like begets like but not exactly”.64 Nowadays we know this to be caused by genetic processes of recombination, crossing-over, and mutations. In this way a constantly changing gene pool is created in a population. Of the mechanisms governing the selection process working on this variation only natural selection works to make the individuals in a population better adapted to their particular environment. This is a crucial point, since evolution is generally taken to be wholly directed towards adaptation and natural selection is often the only process taken into account. This is not the case in biology and I shall argue that these additional processes play a role in art as well.

Let us first consider the bottleneck and founder effects. When a population is sufficiently large, random reproduction will keep the gene pool quite steady, with each new generation representing the last generation very well. But when population size becomes small, a new generation will not accurately represent the last generation due to the sampling error. This phenomenon is called genetic drift. Although populations rarely become this small, there are two cases in particular in which genetic drift is relevant. First of all, a population might be severely reduced by a natural disaster, such as an earthquake or flood; the remaining gene pool is no longer representative of the earlier gene pool, a phenomenon described as the bottleneck effect. Some genes will, by chance, be overrepresented, while others will have disappeared altogether. Thus, the genetic variety of the population becomes dramatically reduced, as illustrated in figure 1. A second instance of genetic drift concerns the founder effect. This occurs when

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28 a few individuals from a population leave and form a colony elsewhere. If the number of colonists is small, again a sampling error will cause the gene pool to change significantly, as illustrated in figure 2.

In addition to these two types of genetic drift, the process of gene flow deserves some attention, before we turn to the application of this biological framework to the history of art. When a sufficiently large population is entirely closed off from other populations, random reproduction will maintain a genetic equilibrium in the gene pool. However, most populations are not completely isolated and individuals might migrate to other populations or mate with individuals from another population. In this way, genetic exchange takes place with other populations and the genetic equilibrium of the original population becomes disrupted. If the gene flow is strong enough, two initially separate populations can merge completely. To illustrate how this would translate to the domain of art, the Italian and Northern Renaissance could be seen as two populations. These populations ‘lived’ separately from one another to Figure 1. The bottleneck effect. A dramatic reduction in the size of a population, due to for instance a natural disaster, is depicted as the population being forced through the neck of a bottle. The few surviving individuals no longer represent the genetic diversity of the original population and a next generation will therefore be significantly different from the parent generation.

Figure 2. The founder effect. A small number of individuals of a population (in extreme cases one pregnant individual) leaves (or is isolated from) the population and starts a new population elsewhere. The gene pool of this colony is drastically reduced, as with the bottleneck effect, and the new population is no longer representative of the parent generation.

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29 a certain extent, but exchanged information whenever artists from these populations travelled or communicated. We will encounter more on gene flow (or rather, meme flow) in art history, in 3.2.

2.2 APPLYING THE THEORY OF BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION TO ART HISTORY

Now that we have set out the relevant aspects of biological evolution, it is important to establish how these elements can be related to the history of art, taking into account how they have been interpreted, either correctly or mistakenly, by earlier art historians, as discussed in chapter 1. First, we need to determine the relationship between the main evolutionary agents and their counterparts in the domain of art history. Subsequently, we will consider unilinear versus multilinear evolution, in 2.2.2, followed by a translation of Mayr’s observations and inferences (cf. 2.1.2) to the realm of art history in 2.2.3.

2.2.1 The main agents of evolution: memes as replicators, artists and artworks as interactors

In 1988, the philosopher David Hull wrote an influential book, Science as a Process: An Evolutionary

Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science, in which he proposed that science evolves

in much the same way as the evolution of biological species. Far from being metaphorical, his use of evolutionary theory was meant in a literal sense. As a philosopher, Hull specialised in the philosophy of biology and he abstracted the theory of evolution and its biological elements, such as genes and organisms, in order to translate these to the domain of science. To describe evolutionary processes in a general sense he discerned two main agents: the replicator, “an entity that passes on its structure largely intact in successive replications”65, and the interactor, “an entity that interacts as a cohesive whole with its environment in such a way that this interaction causes replication to be differential”.66 In a biological sense the replicators are the genes, being passed on by the interactors, which are the organisms. Hull translated these elements to the realm of science, providing an example for our analysis of art.

With his theory Hull was operating within the field of memetics, a field dating back to Richard Dawkins’ introduction of the concept meme. He coined this term in his famous book The selfish gene (1976), in order to discuss the spread of ideas and cultural information, seen to occur alongside biological evolution.67 Memes are the cultural equivalent of genes and represent small units of cultural information that get passed on between individuals in a population. They are, to use Hull’s concepts, the 65 Hull 1988a, p. 134. 66 Ibid., p. 134. 67 Dawkins 1976, p. 206.

A canon of the fittest - Evolutionist perspectives on art history