The Renaissance: A Short History by Johnson Paul

Author:Johnson, Paul [Johnson, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Modern Library
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

PART 5

THE APOSTOLIC SUCCESSIONS OF RENAISSANCE PAINTING

The history of painting during the Renaissance is enormously complicated and involves hundreds of good or outstanding painters, operating over a huge geographical area for the best part of three hundred years. In order to understand it, certain salient points must be grasped from the beginning. And the first point concerns visualization—that is, the way in which painters analyzed the visual world with their eyes and brains, and transferred what they saw to a two-dimensional surface. In deep antiquity, particularly in Egypt, the early civilization where the arts were most strongly developed, the visualization was aspective: that is, the artist, working in paint or low-relief sculpture, conveyed to his two-dimensional surface not so much what he saw as what he knew was there. All the details that he felt were significant for his purpose, not just those to be seen from a single viewpoint, were systematically put down. The result is real and truthful in the sense that everything represented is there, and so the information conveyed is exact. But the eye does not see it, or all of it, so in another sense it looks false or clumsy or primitive.

Since the artist is striving to create illusion, to produce a two-dimensional something that looks exactly like the real thing, he is never content with aspective art, unless (as in ancient Egypt) he is constrained by canonical conventions laid down by religious dogma. The ancient Greeks were subject to no such constraints, or freed themselves from them, so that from the seventh century B.C., and especially during the classic period of Greek art in the fifth century B.C., they developed various devices, such as foreshortening of the human figure and the use of perspective, to create two-dimensional illusions of reality. This replacement of aspective art by perspective art was one of the greatest steps forward in human civilization. It is not always easy to follow, since virtually no Greek wall painting survives. What does survive is usually on the curved or spheroid surfaces of painted vases and other utensils. The Greeks learned not only to portray the human body as it is seen, but to present it in realistic action and in the context of its surroundings. By using foreshortening and other illusionistic devices, and by deploying perspective conjunctions, they contrived to conquer pictorial space, just as in the twentieth century we began to conquer astronomic space. The Romans inherited their knowledge and skills, and some of their flat-surface painting does survive, notably at Pompeii. In the Wall of the Corinthian Oecus, in a wall from the Villa of Publius Fannius Sinistor and in friezes from the house of Marcus Lucretius Fronto we see three examples of the effective use of linear and aerial perspective, foreshortening and other tricks.

In late antiquity, or early in what we call the Dark Ages, this form of sophisticated illusionary art disappeared, and its techniques were lost. The loss applied as much to the Greek world of Byzantium, where

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