Artistic style

3. Style and signature

In contemporary debates in aesthetics what is at issue is not normally style or stylistic features in general, but rather 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 more than 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 is stylistically important: a penchant for subjects from Roman myth and legend together with fanciful Roman landscapes is arguably a feature of Poussin’s style, just as a tendency to domestic pastoral landscape is a feature of 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 a feature of style, as can the use of certain techniques. In recognition of these multiple possibilities, Nelson Goodman has defined a style as ‘a complex characteristic that serves somewhat as an individual or group signature… in general 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 of the painter’s style. What, then, is distinctive about style regarded as signature? One answer is that it is only aesthetically salient qualities that count as stylistic. But on the one hand, some aspects of a work of art, such as its size and subject matter, are always aesthetically salient whether or not they are part of style; on the other hand, style features are not always particularly salient: often only a very careful study will unearth them.

One of the important facts about a style is that it comes across as an expressive unity. A set of recurrent features is not a style unless the features themselves combine to form a certain ‘physiognomy’: the style is pompous or sentimental or Ciceronian. Hence style qualities do not just identify an artist, school or period; they also contribute to the expression of a particular ‘character’. One plausible suggestion, therefore, is to count as stylistic all those features of subject matter, form, expression, symbolism, materials and so on. which contribute towards the expression of the overall character of the individual or period in question.