Artistic style

« The ancient rhetoricians discussed style in terms of rhetorical figures, both semantic (such as metaphor andpersonification) and syntactic (such as asyndeton and antithesis).

Contemporary stylisticians and discourseanalysts have used modern linguistic techniques to identify particular stylistic features of poems, plays and ordinarydiscourse.

Style in this sense is identified as how something is said rather than what is said: with form rather thancontent.

Very different things can be said in the same style, so style would appear to be independent of content.And the same content can be expressed in different styles: 'The cat is on the mat' is in plain style, in contrast to'The feline animal is situated upon the rug', which is (inappropriately) in grand style, but they mean much the samething.

Style would therefore seem to involve choice of words and syntax - the 'formal' elements of the discourserather than the content.

Are all formal elements part of style? Monroe Beardsley ( Lang 1987 ) has tried to mark off stylistic from non-stylistic features of a discourse as those linguistic features which carry connotative or secondarymeaning or which enable it to 'reflect a subordinate illocutionary action'.

So Caesar's famous assertion, 'Veni, vidi,vici', primarily means that he came, he saw and he conquered, but in leaving out 'and' the utterance also implicitlyasserts that Caesar operated quickly and decisively.

The trouble is that any linguistic feature can have connotativeor secondary meaning.

Even when I say 'The cat is on the mat', I am implying that what I say is plain andstraightforward.

Indeed, any attempt to distinguish stylistic from non-stylistic linguistic features may well fail, sinceany word or grammatical construction in an appropriate context can contribute to style.

The same is true of formalelements in the other arts, such as a particular sequence of chords or colours.

The attempt to define a set ofuniquely stylistic formal features seems to be hopeless. 3 Style and signature In contemporary debates in aesthetics what is at issue is not normally style or stylistic features in general, butrather what is the nature of 'a style'.

Since a style is what picks out the work of a particular artist, period or place,perhaps a style can be thought of as the recurrent formal elements that identify a work as belonging to that artist,period or place.

The most important problem with the formalistic approach to style is that a style consists of morethan just a set of formal elements.

Styles have particular expressive qualities: they are plain, ornate, pompous,diffuse, sweet, euphonious, Miltonic, energetic, Latinate, abstract or flabby.

Very often, subject matter isstylistically important: a penchant for subjects from Roman myth and legend together with fanciful Romanlandscapes is arguably a feature of Poussin's style, just as a tendency to domestic pastoral landscape is a featureof the Barbizon school style.

A particular kind of iconography or conventional symbolism may also be important.Sometimes the use of certain materials - a preference for oil over watercolour or for bronze over marble - can be afeature of style, as can the use of certain techniques.

In recognition of these multiple possibilities, Nelson Goodmanhas defined a style as 'a complex characteristic that serves somewhat as an individual or group signature… ingeneral stylistic properties help answer the questions: who? when? where?' ( 1975 ).

The problem with this proposal is that not all identifying features are stylistic; the actual signature on a painting, for example, might not be part ofthe painter's style.

What, then, is distinctive about style regarded as signature? One answer is that it is onlyaesthetically salient qualities that count as stylistic.

But on the one hand, some aspects of a work of art, such asits size and subject matter, are always aesthetically salient whether or not they are part of style; on the otherhand, style features are not always particularly salient: often only a very careful study will unearth them.

One ofthe important facts about a style is that it comes across as an expressive unity.

A set of recurrent features is not astyle unless the features themselves combine to form a certain 'physiognomy': the style is pompous or sentimentalor Ciceronian.

Hence style qualities do not just identify an artist, school or period; they also contribute to theexpression of a particular 'character'.

One plausible suggestion, therefore, is to count as stylistic all those featuresof subject matter, form, expression, symbolism, materials and so on.

which contribute towards the expression of theoverall character of the individual or period in question. 4 Style and expression The Hegelian idea that a period style expresses the collective spirit of an epoch or country and that the style of aparticular work of art is a symptom of that spirit has been roundly criticized by twentieth-century art historians.Meyer Schapiro ( 1994 ) has urged that we should not extrapolate from a single painting to cultural attitudes in general: one-to-one correlations usually hold only between single aspects of a painting and the culture from whichit originates.

Erwin Panofsky ( 1955 ) has shown how we cannot tell what general attitudes are expressed by a painting unless we can place the picture in the history of style and the history of iconography.

We can interpretwhat Tintoretto's Last Supper expresses only if we know the history of renderings of the Last Supper.

The picture has to be seen as a response to and a rejection of previous Last Supper s, such asGiotto's and Leonardo's.

Ernst Gombrich ( 1960 ) has made a similar point with respect to works within a painter's individual style: what a painting expresses is a function of its place within the artist's 'language' or repertoire.

Van Gogh's painting of his room atArles is relatively serene in the context of Van Gogh's oeuvre, whereas if it were ( per impossibile ) by Cézanne it would express much greater turbulence and distress.

Deterministic theories of style change have also beencriticized.

All such theories treat style as inevitably moving towards some goal, but artists cannot be striving to. »