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9. Union of, and Dichotomy between, Man and his
Work. The mirror-image concept has a pedigree lead-
ing back to Plato's Politeia and Gorgias. Aristotle too
believed in a union of the morality of the poet and
that of his work. This theory had a long life; we find
it in the Stoa, in Cicero, and in Quintilian (Heitmann

[1962], pp. 9ff.). And the Renaissance assimilated it,
mainly owing to Marsilio Ficino's Theologia Platonica,
the cornerstone of Renaissance philosophy. To quote
an essential passage: “We can see in them [i.e., paint-
ings and buildings] the attitude and the image, as it
were, of his [the artist's] mind; for in these works the
mind expresses and reflects itself not otherwise than
a mirror reflects the face of a man who looks into it”
(Gombrich [1945], p. 59). This ancient conception,
which in due course became part and parcel of the
humanist Renaissance tradition, can be traced through
the sixteenth century (Weinberg, 1961) and even
through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth.
Boileau, in L'Art poétique (1674), expressed firm belief
in the correlation of character and artistic qualities:

And probably not independent of Boileau, Jonathan
Richardson in An Essay on the Theory of Painting
(1715), a pioneering work for England, enlarged on
the topic that “The way to be an Excellent Painter,
is to be an Excellent Man.” The theory of a mirror-
image relationship between character and work has
found a following into our own days. In fact, it is often
naively applied by art historians, who are forgetting
that ambiguity is a specific characteristic of the visual
image: what looks chaste to one beholder may appear
obscene to the next. Reflections upon the man behind
the work must therefore be regarded with considerable
skepticism. There are, however, also some deliberate
attempts—such as in Hartlaub and Weissenfeld (1958)—
to present the old Platonic concept in a modern psy-
chological dress.

This story would not be complete without taking
note of the fact that a theory diametrically opposed
to that of the mirror image had found advocates at
an early date. There are passages in Catullus, Pliny,
Apuleius, Ovid, and others (Heitmann [1962], pp. 16f.)
denying a connection between the morality of the
author and that of his work. And from Boccaccio on,
the assertion is repeated that no link exists between
the author and the character of the stories told by him.
The theory culminates in Diderot's axiom, published
in his article “Platonism” in the Encyclopédie, that
great men may be morally deficient and a burden to
those close to them, and that nevertheless their work
remains untouched by such personal shortcomings.
There is, in short, no link between grand auteur et
homme de bien. In le Neveu de Rameau Diderot
maintained that geniuses are hypertrophically devel-
oped in one direction, but are failures as persons: Ils
ne sont bons qu'à une chose, passé cela, rien; ils ne
savent ce que c'est d'être citoyens, pères, mères, parents,
amis.

It has been noticed that Diderot's forcefully stated
thesis was readily taken up in the nineteenth century:
Goethe, Victor Hugo, Paul Bourget, and others learned
their lesson from him, and from here, of course, there
opened anotehr avenue to the nineteenth-century
theme of the alliance of genius and madness. But it
has also been shown (Heitmann [1962], pp. 30ff.) that
Diderot, far from being a pedant, could happily con-
tradict himself. Discussing François Boucher (whom he
detested) in the Salon of 1765, Diderot remarked that
the degradation of taste, color, composition, etc., re-
sulted from a degraded personality. Other passages too
show that he had not entirely dismissed the old mirror-
image theory. It is, in fact, remarkable how vigorously
the doctrine of a harmony between man and work
reasserted itself. This is demonstrated by material col-
lected by M. H. Abrams (1953, Ch. IX) and K. Heit-
mann (1962).

The apparent impasse that mars a solution to this
problem is understandable: common sense insists that
every work of art bears the personal stamp of its maker.
Nonetheless, it would be absurd to postulate that a
fierce brush reveals an unruly temperament or that
“tame” painters or writers have gentle characters, are
morally healthy, law-abiding, and pleasant to deal with.
Diderot himself tried to resolve these contradictions
by drawing new conclusions from the Platonic concept
of divine frenzy. In De la poésie dramatique he sub-
mitted that the artist in the ecstasy of creation is a
being very different from his normal self. We must
clearly differentiate, he argued, between ourselves and

(Heitmann [1962], p. 20);

(“... the enthusiast who takes up pen, fiddlestick,
paintbrush.... When in a frenzy he is everything he
desires to be in the art that dominates him. But the
very moment the inspiration is over, he returns to earth
and becomes what he has been before, quite often an
ordinary man”). Basically in the same vein Flaubert
postulated much later (1853) the principle vivre en
bourgeois et penser en demi-dieu (“live like a bourgeois
and think like a demi-god”). Baudelaire seems to have
deepened this insight by explaining that there are men
whose art must be regarded as the result d'une vaste
énergie vitale inoccupée (“a vast latent vital energy”).
Art here assumes a cathartic function, a theme dis-
cussed in an illuminating chapter of M. H. Abrams'
work (1953). It appears that as early as the 1830's John
Keble, who held the Oxford Chair of Poetry, progressed
to a “proto-Freudian theory, which conceives of liter-
ature as disguised wish-fulfillment....” Psychoana-

lytical dialectics offer a deepened awareness and new
methodology in approaching the problem of interac-
tion between the artist and his work. In psychoan-
alytical opinion (Kris, 1953) artistic products add a
new dimension to the artist's personality, because the
works result from the resolution and sublimation of
repressions. In this way the unity of work and person-
ality is preserved, for we are made to understand why
a retiring character may be a bold artist, or an outgoing
artist timid in his work. Discreetly handled, this ap-
proach may also throw more light on the still mysteri-
ous resources on which artistic genius thrives.

Although we are reminded that the man of the
second half of the twentieth century no longer believes
in geniuses (Lowinsky, 1964), they can hardly be abol-
ished by an act of “cultural will.” Geniuses will appear
and be acknowledged both in the arts and sciences as
long as Western man regards free development as the
inalienable right of the individual. The extreme self-
interest normally associated with genius and conceded
to it by society without a murmur is and will remain
at the very core of the problem of individualism.