Forms of Reconciliation: Leo Steinberg on the Beholder (1959-1972)

Leo Steinberg’s work, despite its lack of a general and declared theoretical position, is based on some fundamental principles, chief among them the beholder’s relation to the artwork. In fact, in  book Other Criteria, Steinberg declared: «All works of art or stylistic cycles are definable by their built-in idea of the spectator», an idea that seems to pervade his intellectual production. This paper considers the formational stage of Steinberg’s investigation of the subject, which begins with the essay Observations in the Cerasi Chapel in  and extends to The Philosophical Brothel, published in , by way of his interpretation of Velázquez’s Las Meninas, proposed for the first time in . If these writings established Steinberg as a pioneer in the study of setting, reception, and gaze in art, his method was not comparable to the subsequent explosion of studies on such topics. Contextualizing his writings (with the support of his unpublished material – notes, lectures, drawings, and correspondence), the paper analyzes Steinberg’s personal and unconventional idea of the potential intrusion of the beholder (physical, optical, and psychological) into the work of art, as well as the capacity of the image to act on the viewer’s self-awareness. The artwork, defined by Steinberg as a living agent, becomes one pole in an inter-subjective experience – a critical model that he seems to apply in his hermeneutical process and aesthetic judgments, re-defining the traditional formalist and iconographical approaches.