We can get insight into that first transformation of art into fArt, circa 1500, from the research of Alexander Nagel, an art historian at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. It looks as though a few religious reformers — in particular Girolamo Savonarola, the Florentine firebrand — began to be disgusted by the distracting realism of certain new sacred paintings, like the ones that scored artistic points by posing local girls as biblical heroines: “The figures you have made in the churches are in the likeness of one or another woman, which is very badly done and in great disregard for what is God’s,” Savonarola raged.
The issue, as Nagel spelled it out in his book “The Controversy of Renaissance Art,” was that the paintings’ viewers, instead of having their minds on God and his saints, were engaging in “the pleasurable activity of pictorial analysis” — the kind of contemplative work that Noë finds in what we’re calling fArt.
Some of Savonarola’s contemporaries solved the problem. Franz von Sickingen, a patron of Martin Luther himself, suggested that those distracting church paintings should be moved into secular settings — as “ornaments of fine rooms,” he said, where their “art, beauty, and magnificence” could be safely studied and enjoyed. That is, those newfangled religious objects should be appropriated into the domain of fArt, to receive the kind of attention we give them today when they’re hung down the hall from the Warhols. (Of course, other versions of fArt have cropped up at other moments in other places — in Persia, or China, or Japan — but they didn’t play a role in the Leonardo-to-Warhol story.)
In the early 16th century, all sorts of objects whose functions might once have been clear start migrating — start being appropriated — into such rooms. You see religious paintings being gathered into art collections where they can’t have had any ritual use. The Mona Lisa itself never gets delivered to the patron who paid to have his wife commemorated in it; instead Leonardo da Vinci carries the painting with him as he travels, reworking it as an example of his fArt. After Leonardo’s death, in France in 1519, the painting is treasured by King Francis I and his heirs, none of whom cared about the woman it showed or the pride of the man who married her.
Around that same time, paintings start being created that are so hard to figure out, they could only ever function as fArt. A picture by the Venetian artist Giorgione is referred to as “The Three Philosophers,” but the title is that vague only because we have never been able to settle on what the artist had in mind for his three figures.
