I asked one of my history students last week about what she thought separates history—as we study it and think about it—from art that has a historical setting. Natalie paused a second and then said “Evidence. Evidence and corroboration.” I liked that answer a lot.
“You know that painting of Manifest Destiny,” she went on, “that shows the woman in white floating through the air stringing telegraph wire behind her and carrying a book? It could have happened that way, but I’m going to want to see proof.” The only art I take at face value, she added, are portraits, and even then, it’s likely they’re idealized. Speaking of idealized, there’s a semi-famous painting in the Texas Governor’s Mansion by artist Robert Onderdonk called The Fall of the Alamo. It’s dramatic and romantic, certainly mythic, but whose grounding in what Natalie expects to see in a work of history is nearly non-existent. It reminds me of that line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
It’s a question not just applicable to paintings and plays but any kind of artistic endeavor.
All over Vienna at the turn of the 19th century, there were rumors that composer Antonio Salieri had poisoned his fellow composer Wolfgang Mozart. Salieri himself knew of the rumors and they distressed him greatly. His mental health declined, and he attempted suicide in 1823. Afterward, he suffered from dementia until he died.
The movie Amadeus implies that Salieri was complicit in Mozart’s death. The rumors and their fallout led to a very good movie, but the facts are quite different. A 1983 article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine lists the various illnesses from which Mozart suffered during his life from the time he was six, and it’s quite a list. Over the course of his short life, Mozart suffered from various fevers, repeated upper respiratory tract infections, smallpox, tonsillitis, typhoid fever, either hepatitis or yellow fever, and bouts of an auto immune disorder called HSP, which can often cause kidney troubles. Renal failure and pneumonia—even today things that anyone caring for an older relative will be familiar with—are regarded as the final ailments that killed him.
It is a much less dramatic story. But science and evidence are the necessary elements when you want to know the facts. Art is something else. But it’s incumbent upon us not to confuse the two and to know which is which.
