A D R I A N  S T O K E S

Adrian Stokes and the Psychoanalytic
by
Ron Graziani

This is the guiding spirit behind Quattro Cento: A Different Conception of the Italian Renaissance. By reconstructing the emotional spirit within this particular past, necessarily reinterpreting the art of the Quattrocento, the result would in turn nourish and change the present situation and with the method developed in Sunrise in the West, what Stokes now called the "mature method" and its sustaining "brotherly element"—defined as the enhancement of opposites rather than "the usual means of balance or equal opposition"¹² —Stokes could concentrate on one aspect of the Quatrocento without denying its counterpart, e.g., Venetian vs. Florentine, or later, carving vs. modeling, or finally, the psychoanalytic vs. the aesthetic. Stokes wrote in Quattro Cento, "It is now time again...for we have learned the anti-Ruskin lesson well [the exclusively intellectual version of pure aestheticism such as that of Roger Fry]...to re-instate, attempt anew the co-ordination of the spirit of western man with his art."¹³

Stokes defined this spirit in the Quattrocento through the concept of "stone blossom." Although continually reshaped throughout the book, the image of "stone blossom" comes to represent "constricted energy," devoid of "melody"—the meter of energy unfolding.¹⁴ The Quattrocento work of art becomes "firm like the wide face of a rose,"¹⁵ immediately intriguing. But energy "which usually emerges like a melody"¹⁶ is nonetheless present. And, through contemplation it is this "energy" that keeps the sudden "flash" of the encounter from exhausting itself. In Quattro Cento. Stokes described this "energy" through water's interaction with stone, with the resulting accumulating residue—the "incrustation"—the empirical verification of that interaction. It is water that registers the "time bound" melody in stone, while the instantaneous "stone blossom" effect explodes the "flood of time."¹⁷

Stokes confronted the problem facing most critics in the 1920s: despite the fact that a work of art generates an effort that is "time bound" to its historical making, it somehow manages to transcend its determining factors. Stokes' notion of immediacy through constriction "explains" how the work transcends history: the totality of its tensions survive it. Stokes used a 19th century aesthetic formula, Pater's dictum about "all art approximating to the condition of music,"¹⁸ but turned it on its head. For Stokes, melody becomes the historical ingredient in art works, the incrustation in Quatrocento works of art, while the "stone blossom" effect becomes the transcendent quality. What is "emblematic," entrancing, in a Quatrocento work of art is this very stone blossom effect. For Stokes, the emblematic was always the only "fit subject for literature."¹⁹