The Kano School of painters dominated Japanese artistic expression for over three hundred years, from the 15th to early 19th century. Among the school’s cultural work is the painting titled “The Vinegar Tasters. “
The painting depicts three sages, icons of Chinese thought (Confucius, Buddha, and Lao-tzu) sitting around a barrel of vinegar. Each has poked a finger into the batch and tasted the vinegar, eliciting a facial expression of sourness, bitterness, or sweetness. The reactions to the taste of the viengar reprsent the philosophy of each taster, and thus each school of thought. Confucius has a sour expression, the Buddha has a bitter expression, and the Taoist Lao-tzu has a n expression of sweetness. Confucius is sour because everything in society is wrong and requires an autocratic intervention to straighten out human folly. To the Buddha, life is suffering and thus bitterness. To the Taoist, harmony with nature and acceptance of its ways releases the self for contentment and tranquility.
Is there a Western equivalent of “The Vinegar Tasters”? Raphael’s “The School of Athens”mat be. With its array of historical Western philosophers of the day, the work reveals not reactions to vinegar (i.e., life and the world) but the weight of each man’s thought — if not reaction to rubbing shoulders uncomfortably with rivals. Being that the figures represent ancient philophical schools, the shear number of them makes the painting a busy Western equivalent.
A wary Plato and Aristotle dominate, each pointing confidently in opposite directions (Plato up and Aristotle down), representing the distinction between metaphysics and natural science. A pedantic Socrates emphatically lectures a young listener.
A melancholy Heraclitus slouches far from the crowd, as does the sour hermit Diogenes.
Art is easily reduced to caricature in the search for gesture or facial expression that reduces thought or priciple to a single word or taste. We can pursue portraits and photographs of thinkers into the modern era in search of reducing their philosophies to moods, dispositions, and personalities.
No school of painting in the West pursued the formulaic Kano school. But some paintings — not revealing facial expression but relying on gesture and posture — can identify phiolosophers and philosophies. One of the more famous is David Friedrich Caspar’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,” which commentators have identified as a portrait of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
