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Masterpiece.Term with three main meanings, successively of diminishing precision: (a) a test-piece of worksubmitted to a craft organization as qualification for entry as a master (e.g. ‘Hans submitted hismasterpiece to the guild in 1473’); (b) a work considered an artist’s best and/or mostrepresentatively central (e.g. ‘Hans’s masterpiece is surely the Passion cycle in Berlin’); (c) simply awork considered very good and/or canonical, either absolutely (‘Hans’s Passion cycle is amasterpiece’) or in some particular respect (‘a masterpiece of colour’). The first meaning isdiscussed in §1 below, the other two in §2 below. A further complication of definition is that thevarious western European synonyms—particularly the French chef d’oeuvre, Italian capolavoro,German Meisterstück and Hauptwerk—have had different histories and still have different nuances.The English word ‘masterpiece’ is a 16th-century derivation from the German Meisterstück, probablyby way of the Dutch derivative, but its later development has run more in parallel with uses of theFrench chef d’oeuvre. The terminological complexities are excellently documented and disentangledby Cahn (1979), whose book is the standard study of the masterpiece.

1. The test-piece.

From the late 13th century in France and the 14th century in Germany references are found to craftguilds demanding test-pieces of journeymen and immigrant workers for entry to the rank of ‘master’,itself a recent usage for the senior controlling members of city craft unions. In southern Europe thepractice existed too, often with less regularity and rigour, but did not bear as heavily on suchcraftsmen as painters and sculptors: thus, in Italy tests or prove were sometimes imposed, but theItalian word capolavoro is a post-Renaissance imitation of the French chef d’oeuvre in its moregeneral senses, (b) and (c). In northern Europe, however, the masterpiece often became a favouredmeans of control by established craftsmen, and as early as the 14th century was being extended topainters and sculptors. By the 15th century there was a wide range of practice, from guildsdemanding no masterpiece to guilds demanding several: an example of the latter extreme is theguild of painters and sculptors in Kraków, which from 1490 demanded a Virgin and Child, a crucifix,and a figure of St George. It will be noted that, as well as representing common subjects of theartist, these three cover a range of principal representational skills—drapery and nude figure, mattand lustre, and so on.

Formally the craft masterpiece was a defensible test of skill, a means of guarding the public fromincompetent manufactures, but in practice it lent itself to various kinds of protectionist abuse:exemptions for sitting masters’ kin, stipulations of prohibitively expensive conditions (preciousmaterials, specially rented workshops, feasts for the masters) and arbitrary assessment. From the15th century on there were frequent protests from city councils and princes about craft guildprotectionism depressing trade and, sometimes, quality and innovation; from the same time it also

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became increasingly common for princes to insist on painters and sculptors whom they wished toemploy at their courts being exempted from regulation by city or guild. By the 17th century paintersand sculptors in some great guild-ridden centres were attaining a degree of freedom from guildcontrol through the institution, often with government support, of the ACADEMY. A paradigm of thisnew kind of academy was the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture founded in Paris in1648, which from the start was envisaged by the State as a counter to the guild, or maîtrise, fromwhose regulations academicians were explicitly exempt.

In very many cities, however, the painters and sculptors had never been submitted to themasterpiece demand, even when other crafts were, sometimes simply because their number wastoo few to form their own guild or a substantial section within a conglomerate guild. The moreconspicuous guild masterpieces surviving and identifiable in museums are pieces from such craftsas those of locksmiths and clockmakers, not painters and sculptors. Issues arise of how far paintingand sculpture were at the time considered special cases, how far the guild aesthetic and ideologyassociable with the general institution of the masterpiece was compatible with their and ourconceptions of ‘art’, and what this aesthetic and ideology was.

It might be expected that the masterpiece be associated with uniform or conservative local stylesand craftsman-like standards of facture, and there does look to have been some such tendency.Strong guilds, however, had more effective means of limiting idiosyncrasy or distinction—inspectionand marking of wares, control of raw materials, regulation of workshop size and marketing—and theexistence of a masterpiece demand may well be more a symptom of a strong guild than a primarycause of well-made mediocrity. More subtly, the institution of the masterpiece could focus andformalize issues of a quite modern kind about artistic achievement and its basis. In particular, therewas a question in such crafts of design as painting and sculpture about whether a masterpieceshould be of the craftsman’s own, original conception, or whether it was enough to produce atechnically secure replica of an already existing pattern.

In 1516 there was an exemplary dispute about this within the painters’ and sculptors’ guild atStrasbourg. One faction proposed that ‘the candidate shall make his piece an independently [frei]designed one, without using any model pattern, but rather out of his own intelligence and ability’;this design would then be his, for making replicas. Another faction, composed of what seem smalleror less successful masters, objected to this demand, arguing from a proper respect for pastmasters: ‘We are troubled about the masterpiece, that it is to be made independently, without anymodel pattern, as they propose, which is unheard of; knowers and lovers of art, whether religious orsecular, have never despised or been ashamed of taking their forebears’ art and learning from it.’They name four distinguished Strasbourg painters and sculptors of the previous half-century whohad been more generous in their attitude to people copying masterpieces from their or others’designs (see Rott, 1938). The first group’s position entails a sense of artistic originality, ofintellectual property and of a distinction between mere executive competence and inventivecreativity. The second group assumes a collective city repertory of designs that both exploits andhonours the inventions of outstanding past masters. The structure of the issue, however, was aclear signal that the way to distinction was individual design and creation of patterns.

The demand for a qualifying test-piece survived some way into the age of academies. At first theAcadémie Royale still demanded a ‘chef d’oeuvre’, and subsequently a piece called the ‘morceaude réception’ on much the same basis. There was a range of practices in other academies; inEngland the Royal Academy of Arts, from 1768, accepted a ‘Diploma Work’ after election, and in amore relaxed spirit. In art pedagogy the test-piece principle still persists in various guises such asstudents’ final-year diploma exhibits, although, as is often noted, the true medieval masterpieceideal is more clearly represented by the art historian’s doctoral thesis. But the active life of the term‘masterpiece’ has long been in the wider senses (b) and (c) as defined above.

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2. The outstanding work.

Almost from the first the English word was used also in extended and transferred senses—thusShakespeare in 1606 (Macbeth, 2, iii, 67): ‘Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!’—and theremay have been several reasons for this. One certainly lay in the fact that, as Cahn demonstrated,the French chef d’oeuvre had come to be used in the 16th century also of great buildings, prodigiesof art, and French use affected English use here as in much else. Another is that there is asuggestive instability in the dual-substantive structure ‘master-piece’: it may be still (i) the piece thatrenders someone a master of a guild, but it may also, and in English rather more naturally, be (ii) amaster- or controlling piece, a little as in ‘master key’ or ‘master plan’, or (iii) it may be simply thepiece of a real master, whatever is meant by that. There may even be a latent sense (iv) that thepiece is a master in that it instructs us, in an art or a culture. The lexical history of the word is laidout and exemplified in the Oxford English Dictionary, though naturally in references crisplydifferentiated. Contemporary use is in practice slovenly—as in such titles as ‘Masterpieces ofModern Art’—and often ambiguous; but since there is no point in deploring usage, the question iswhether it entails assumptions that, on reflection, might seem problematic for the users’ conceptionsof art. There seem at least two zones of such assumption.

In the sense (b), of an artist’s best or most central or climactic piece of work, sometimes also themagnum opus or the physically grandest, ‘masterpiece’ involves some suggestion of the artist’soeuvre being integral in character and almost parabolic in trajectory. The masterpiece is,presumably, where that character is most expansively, completely and tautly realized, and wherethat trajectory is at a peak; the life-project is of-a-piece but also linearly goal-directed, and so atsome moment most nearly achieved. Such an idea is in some tension both with many actual currentnotions of personal creative identity and with the shape of many artists’ oeuvres, or lives’ work.Fisher (1991) analysed the contradictions between the sense of masterpiece and a modernconception, partly determined by our museum culture, of works of art existing in series, not tomention in phases, each work therefore inherently incomplete. There are also tensions with theesteem widely given to the sketch (as in drawings and bozzetti), for visibility of the process offacture, and for turning-point works that exhibit problem-solving in progress (as in Picasso’sDemoiselles d’Avignon, 1907; New York, MOMA) and are therefore imperfect.

In the sense (c), of an indisputably very good or great piece of work, ‘masterpiece’ presupposes ascale of value, but not in such a way as to offer a frame for reflection on the problems and criteria ofevaluation; it just forecloses discussion. Although it has less focus than such terms as ‘classic’,‘touchstone’ or ‘paragon’, it does imply and invite thought about ‘the canon’, in the sense of arepertory of exemplary works embodying the best of the culture. Cahn, again, demonstrates how farthe development of the concept of ‘masterpiece’ in the 17th and 18th centuries was associated withthe formation of canons both of Classical sculpture and of High Renaissance and Early Baroquepainting, and, although these canons lost much of their cogency in the 19th century, the term stillgave a form to the appetite for the indisputably fine cultural achievement.

The concept of the canon has been studied more fully in relation to literary history and the claims ofsocio-cultural engineering than in relation to visual art. The formation of canons of artisticmasterpieces has been rather different from that of sacred books through a selection of authentic,canonical texts, although it may be coloured by some connotations from this. The prototype artisticcanon was the Late Antique selection of those Classical texts considered suitable models forimitation and, in schools, an educational convenience: the criterion for inclusion was representativelinguistic or stylistic correctness—not uniqueness, brilliance or articulated richness of humancontent. At least something of this survived into the 17th- or 18th-century canons of Classicalsculpture and early modern painting. With the gradual disintegration of the Neo-classical episteme

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during the 19th century, an evolving and locally variable canon of European artistic masterpiecescame to represent much more than correctness: genius, originality, human wisdom and plenitude,even prowess of the racial or national culture, and thus inevitably sectional and class values. Ifexclusive, unchanging and unreflective, masterpiece canons may have a socializing effect that isanything from aesthetically impoverishing to politically sinister, it is argued; the remedy would behistorical and critical scrutiny, and a resistance to closure. In any event, the shifty term ‘masterpiece’is likely to prove more symptomatic than illuminating.

Bibliography

H. Huth: Künstler und Werkstatt der Spätgotik (Augsburg, 1925/R Darmstadt, 1967)

H. Bechtel: Wirtschaftsstil des deutschen Spätmittelalters (Munich and Leipzig, 1930)

H. Rott: Quellen und Forschungen zur südwestdeutschen und schweizerischen Kunstgeschichte im 15. und16. Jahrhundert, iii; Oberrhein, Quellen, i (Stuttgart, 1938), pp. 221–2 [docs for Strasbourg dispute of 1516]

W. Cahn: Masterpieces: Chapters on the History of an Idea (Princeton, 1979) [the standard work]

R. von Hallberg, ed.: Canons (Chicago, 1984)

P. Fisher: Making and Effacing Art (New York and Oxford, 1991), ch. 6

Michael Baxandall

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