25 - Canons and canon formation

Summary

Introduction

Criticism involves the selection, restoration, and evaluation of works retrieved from the past and the assessment, however tentatively offered, of works produced in the present. No doubt some societies can settle these tasks by an appeal to precedent, but where cultural production increases and audiences become less homogeneous – certainly the conditions that applied in Europe between 1660 and 1800 – more complex arrangements will become necessary for the estimation of cultural value and the provision of rational or plausible criteria of evaluation. In accomplishing both these tasks, a canon of some kind will prove useful.

For a long time the word canon had a restricted range of application. The most common usage referred to the collection of sacred writings accepted as authoritative by various Christian denominations. (Although Hebraic culture possessed its collection of sacred books, it did not call this catalogue a canon; however, European writers in the eighteenth century frequently did so.) Students of antiquity and sculpture were also familiar with the canon described by Pliny, whose discussion of the work of ancient sculptor Polycletus refers to ‘a Canon, or Model Statue’ that set the standard for subsequent representations of the human body in that art. Polycletus also wrote a lost treatise Canon, which set out the theoretical basis for representing the human body adequately, and the high status this treatise once enjoyed may partly explain the long-standing usage that links canons to general principles, accepted rules and axioms.