I've asked you to read the introduction
to art history that is on the website,
and so you've read about the background
to art history, you know, what is art, how does art
history differ from other approaches to
art, and now I want to talk to you about
basic terminology, I want to go over some
of that material that we'll be using
over and over again in the course, and
three basic terms that we're going to be
using are medium, style and iconography,
and one might say that every work of art
or almost every work of art consists of
these three basic components. Now, the one
where there might be some question would
be, some people would say that works of
art that have, are non-representational,
that have no subject matter from the
visible world, from literature, from
history, from religion, they might say
that those have no subject matter and
hence no iconography. On the other hand,
some people would say yes they do have
subject matter, it's not just from the
material world around us, it's not
representational. We'll leave that aside
and discuss these three basic terms.
The first one I'm going to talk about is
medium. Now, you could have for the plural
the media, which would be the normal way
that you would take a work that is in a
Latin root and make it a plural, let's
just say medium, media becomes the plural
or anglicizing as it were, mediums, and
some people prefer today mediums because
the word media has such a broad range of
meaning, media, we talk such a broad range
of meanings, we talk about digital media
or print media, you know, things that are
maybe a little bit different than
traditional art. I don't care whichever
one you use. Medium is the physical
materials from which the work of art is
made and it also implies the techniques
used to make it. Now, sometimes we
actually use the technique as the name
of the medium, so particularly in
printmaking, for example, engraving or
etching or lithograph, that is talking
about the way in which the print is made.
The final print is usually ink on
paper, but that could also be drawing or,
you know, different types of printmaking,
so in that case they'll say, you know,
it's an engraving,
it's an etching. Other works of art, we
talk about the medium describing the
materials. We'll say that something is
made out of marble or bronze or it is
oil paint on canvas or oil paint on
panel, that's a wooden panel, it's on
pieces of wood, or, well with painting you
might have acrylics or watercolors or
tempera paint or sometimes you have
fresco
which is painting on wet plaster, on
walls or ceilings, there's all sorts of
different types of material that is used
to create the work of art and that is
the medium. Now, a lot of times when we
say the medium it may imply the
technique. For example, if I say it's a
marble statue well, you know that they
didn't take the marble and squeeze it
into shape or melt it and pour it into a
mold,
you know that marble is a stone and so
tools were used: hammers, chisels, rasps,
and they cut away the material that will
not be the finished work of art, so, you
know, just say marble, we have some idea
of what techniques are used to create
that work. The second term that I wanted
to talk to you about is iconography. Now,
the word literally means, icon means
image, graphy means writing, for example,
you know that biography is writing about
a life,
well iconography is not just writing
about images. Iconography is taking on a specific
meaning within art history and it refers
to the subject matter of the work of art.
Now, that includes any story or, if there
is any symbolism, any symbolism that's
involved, and it's become an entire
branch of iconography, I have to tell
people I'm an iconographer, I study the
subject matter of the works of art, how
the subject is expressed through style,
for example, and also how the subject
matter relates to various things in the
historical period, for example, religious
subjects relating to different
theological, devotional or liturgical
aspects, or,
you know, could relate to something
politically that's going on, you know, there's a
lot of different ways to talk about
subject matter. Now, when you look at your
book you'll usually see a title written.
You'll have the name of the artist if
it's known and then the title, and the
title is usually identifying the basic
subject. In fact, there's a lot of works
of art that don't have what would I call
a real absolute title. What we would call
a title is simply the subject matter, so
if we say, and here's an example from
religious art, if we say it's The
Crucifixion, most people aren't going to
say well, who's being crucified or why,
because that is a subject from Christian
art and it implies that's the
crucifixion of Christ. You could have, I
suppose, a painting of the crucifixion of
Spartacus, but then it would be
identified as that, or if I say this is a
a painting or a statue of Hercules, you know,
Hercules is a figure from Greek or Roman
mythology, and so if I say Hercules it
implies, you know, that this is a
mythological subject. Now, there's a lot
more than just identifying the basic
subject. In those cases, it's often
assumed that people know the story
behind it because, for example, in Western
culture, most people probably would know
something about those subjects even if
they were not, you know, of the Christian
religion or maybe they hadn't really
studied mythology, they probably heard of,
probably heard of Hercules,
but you can go much more deeply into the
subject matter of a work of art and you
can see how subject matter, you have the
same work of art, the same subject, is
portrayed by different artists, is
portrayed throughout history, how in
different eras and how the meaning of it
may change, or sometimes there's symbolism.
Well, let me give you one example, briefly.
You see a picture sometimes of a woman
holding a baby and perhaps there's rays
of light coming from their heads or gold
discs behind them or something else that
says to you ah, this isn't just any woman
and her baby, this is a work of Christian
art and it represents the Virgin and
Child or the Virgin Mary and the baby
Jesus or, as we often do, is use the
Italian Madonna, my lady. I would say
Madonna and Child or Virgin and Child
or the Virgin Mary and the Christ
child.
All of those are the same subject so, you
know, if we have a work of art that, you
know, it's called the Madonna and Child
in your book and I call it the
Virgin and Child, it's the same subject.
Specific titles are given when they
start having art exhibits and they have
to have little placards, so somewhere in
the 18th century, you know, the artist may
be naming the work of art, but before
then it's just whatever the subject is.
So, we've got this picture of the Virgin
and Child. Now, there's a lot of different
ways to show that and some of them have
symbolism. Sometimes you'll see Mary
seated on the ground or
on a very low bench, her footrest or
something like this, and then we're
saying she's the Madonna of humility, and
sometimes you'll see her enthroned,
wearing a crown or with angel holding a
crown above her head and that's just
representing Mary as the Queen of Heaven
because in Christian belief she is the
mother of Jesus whom they believed to be
the Son of God and he is by definition
the King of Heaven, so the mother of the
king is the queen,
you know, we'd say the dowager queen or
the queen bum perhaps, if you're English,
and there is,
there, I was going to say infinite,
there are large numbers of symbols that
are associated with Mary. She's been
given many titles from the Bible, from
scholarly exodus of Christians, for
example in the Middle Ages, in fact there is
one book that lists thousands of titles
of Mary, so she is the Ara Coeli, the
altar of heaven for example. She's
identified with the, she's identified
with the church, so when we come across
these things in works of art we'll talk
about them, you know, I'm not asking you to
memorize every meaning of every work
that ever existed but when we talk about
them in class we'll identify these and
discuss them and sometimes they're
controversial, sometimes people say yes,
now this, some people say this is a
symbol and someone will say no it isn't
and they may even disagree about what it
means,
so that's scholarship. Style. Define
style as the distinctive manner in which
the artist uses the visual elements.
Now, that may sound a little vague so
let's get a little more specific.
What are these visual or stylistic
elements? Now, almost every introductory
book on art or art history will list
visual elements, and some of them have
quite a long list, I've seen a book with
14 visual elements I also used to have
to teach from a book that had five
visual elements and I didn't actually
like that book very well but I did like
the outline of it and I like the fact
that it condensed the visual elements and
I'm going to use those, and, for example
the word of color. Some books will divide
that up into color, light and shadow,
you'll get three out of that. In this
case, they're going to combine them under
that one heading color, and things like
volume, well that involves both shape and
space so we can accommodate it within
these, the shortlist as it were of
visual elements. Now we said that that
was the distinctive way in which the
artist uses the visual elements and we
often say, you know, that every artist has
his own style.
Now, some artists imitate others,
sometimes more closely, sometimes there's
simply some influence there, but artists
have their own distinctive style just as
each one of you has your own distinctive
handwriting and it may resemble someone
else's but, you know, a handwriting expert
will be able to distinguish the styles
of handwriting, and sometimes you're
influenced. When you first learned to
write, you were taught to write probably
in elementary school and you had to copy
letters and you would write like that
and then as time went by you'd change
the way you would make some letters.
When I was in elementary school the
girls used to put little flowers or
hearts or something like that as their
dot over their "i" and so, you know, we
influenced each other. One time I saw a
picture of an old map and I liked the
way they made the "g"s, I thought it was
very attractive and I started doing that,
I started, I was influenced by that for
example, so, you know, we are influenced by
other people and we may change our style
because we change, my handwriting today
is totally different than it was 40
years ago and certainly much different
than it was 50 years ago.
So you could think of this as the
handwriting of the artist. However, it's
not just the handwriting of the artist,
we also talked about the style of a
particular historical period that during
one particular period of time, artists
very often used the visual elements in
certain ways. For example, a 15th century
in the Netherlands and then in work that
was influenced by that in Northern
Europe, artists try to show a great deal
of specific detail, what is the texture
of the cloth,
can I show objects with light reflecting
off of them, so that's, you know, a characteristic of
that period. During the 17th century, in
Europe, artists very frequently use a lot
of diagonal movement within the work of
art, and that's another characteristic of
that period, so we sometimes call, talk
about period styles. Now they're not
absolutes, there are exceptions as you'll
find out, but something that's very
frequently done. Let me give you one from
architecture. The pointed arch we
associate with what we call Gothic art,
it has nothing to do with the Goths but
that's what we call it today, and it
starts about 1140 and extends, you know,
throughout Europe, in some places lasting
into the 16th century, for example in
England, but that pointed arch is
considered a characteristic of Gothic
art. Actually, it was actually used
earlier in Burgundian art, but it was
taken over and used with other visual
elements and becomes a characteristic, if
you will, of the Gothic style in the late
12th,
mid 12th through the 13th, 14th, in
Northern Europe 15th and 16th century. We
also talk about regional styles. I just
said something about in 15th century
Netherlandish art, art in the lowlands, in
what today would be Belgium and the
Netherlands, and so I was combining
temporal 15th century with a region,
the lowlands, the Netherlands, and this is
including what is today called Belgium,
it's not just the Kingdom of the
Netherlands which we'll explain shortly.
So we sometimes talk about regional styles,
for example 16th century Italian art. In
most of Italy the painting has, its what
we call linear, it has very clear edges,
sometimes even lines around them, but in
Venice in the 16th century, artists start
to paint with loose brush work starting
with Titian and continuing on and even
artists like Giorgione paint with soft
edges, you know, even very early in the
sixteenth century and then it becomes
freer and freer so you can even see the
brush work in the second half of the
sixteenth century,
so that becomes both a temporal and a
regional characteristic that then is
carried on into other times and other
places,
Okay, what I want to do is talk about the
visual elements, go into more detail and
show you, you know, some things about
these and how the style will influence
the impact on the artist. The first of
these is color and I'm including both
light and shade within this larger
heading of color. Now, color probably is
the visual element that has the most
immediate impact on the viewer and it
often has very strong emotional
associations. For example, if you go into
a room and it is red, you going to have a
strong reaction to that. You may like it,
you may find it overwhelming, but it will
react on you emotionally and we even
have within our language phrases that
suggest these emotional impacts, some
emotional associations, for example, we
say I see red or I feel blue or jealousy is a
green-eyed monster. Now that last is a
phrase for Othello and what I often
think what shade of green was
Shakespeare talking about because I
don't think of that as a, an emerald
green
although Envy is associated with the
color green, I kind of think of some kind
of bilious green, maybe with some dark
tones in it, you know, that's, I got
some yellows and darker hues, maybe  some green that's not a pure
green or that doesn't look like new
leaves on a tree, it has a very different
emotional association being associated
with, what, one of the seven deadly sins
envy or jealousy and of course green
also has other symbolic meanings. It is
associated with fertility, for example, so
it has some very, there are positive
associations, you think of beautiful
leaves on the trees or beautiful green
grass, so colors, even when they are
symbolic of something or have a certain
emotional association, often it's the
shade of the color or the quantity or
the way it's used with other things. So,
we've established that color has an
emotional association. We divide colors
into two groups: warm and cool. Now, this
isn't exactly the temperature. For
example, if you have a gas furnace you
want it to burn blue, you don't want it
to burn red or yellow because
actually the blue flame may be hotter.
We're talking about, I guess you could
say a psychological impact of color. So
the warm hues are red, yellow, orange and
mixtures of those where those dominate, so,
for example, you could have a warm brown.
No, that's maybe primarily a reddish
brown or a golden brown and that would
be warm.
You also have cool colors. Cool colors
are blues, greens, violets and you could
think about, you know, sitting by a blue
lake with green grass under the shade of
a tree with green leaves and
violet shadows, you know, all very relaxing.
Your warm hues might, you know, be very
stimulating. They're hot, they're fiery like fire
or the Sun, and so when we say
stimulating, you know, a warm hue can be
stimulating in a, you might say, a good
way or a bad way. You ask people what do
you think is the happiest color and
they'll usually answer one of the warm
hues, very frequently yellow, sometimes
red or orange. On the other hand, you have,
you know, so much red, for example, or so
much orange it just, just makes you
nervous, you know, and of course different people
have different tolerances for different
hues but generally it's going to be
stimulating to have all that red or
orange or yellow. Cool hues, very relaxing.
There's a reason that they used to paint
walls of schools and institutions of
various kind green because it was
supposed to be relaxing and calming and,
you know, some of you will have a
favorite color and it may be from either
of these groups because of the way it
makes you feel. Also, colors can either
appear to advance or appear to recede. In
other words, they have an illusion of
space, so if you were to have let's say a
white canvas or a gray background and
you put let's say a circle of red on it
and a circle of blue, the red or the
yellow or the orange might seem to pop
out at you, and the blue might seem to go
back, or the green or the violet.
Now, as you'll find out, you can change
this somewhat, so that's another aspect
that we want to talk about. We could also
talk about three different terms that
refer to color, so these are three
different parts of color or referring to
three different aspects of color. Now, the
first one is hue and as you can see I
didn't put a definition on the
PowerPoint because the definition is one
of those definitions that doesn't really
tell you much, but the definition of hue
is the property that distinguishes one
color from another. The property which
distinguishes one color from another.
What? What's that mean?
Well, it's easier to give an example. When
we say color, we usually think of the hue.
Everything I've been talking about with
color,
I've been naming red and yellow and blue
and violet,
those are hues.
So, the hue is what we might call the
name of the color and as you can see you
could have a light red and a dark red or a
pure red or red that's mixed with other
things, and yet what is that property
that distinguishes it from the lightness
or the purity?
It's the redness. So light red, white blue
two different hues.
So that property is that, you might call
the color name, that might even be a
easier way to think of it. Okay, then we
have value. Now we're not talking about
money here, you know, how much does that
work of art worth, we're not going to
talk about that at all.
Value in terms of color refers to the
lightness or the darkness. Now, some hues
are in and of themselves lighter or
darker. You know, yellow seems to be lighter than violet,
but you can also change the lightness
and darkness of a hue or of a color. If
you are working with paint or ink or
something like that you mix, say, white in,
and that makes your color lighter, and
sometimes we give them extra names. You
mix white with red and, you know, you call it rose
or pink or something like that, but
essentially pink is light red, and then
if you mix a black hue in with it
you make it darker, you know, you have a dark red,
you might call it wine red or burgundy
or something like that, but you know
it's red, it's a dark red. Saturation
refers to the intensity or the purity of
the color. Now, some books will say it's
the brightness or the dullness, but those
terms also refer to the texture, you
think of something that's very highly
polished as bright and something that's
very matte, you know, and not polished as
dull, so I'm not going to use those to
refer to saturation, I'm going to use
purity and intensity. We're not working
with light, so every time you're using a
pigment such as in paint, there will be
some impurities. You know, if you mix
black with yellow, you're gonna get
something that has a green in it because
they make the black with with blue
pigments, but if you can think of the
most pure, the most intense of these
different hues, blue, it's usually what we
call ultramarine blue and literally was
made from lapis lazuli originally, now of
course synthetically made, that would be
your most intense, completely saturated
blue,
so it's the most pure blue, or what we
might call fire engine red, you know,
that would be your, you know, intense
bright red and you said we're using that
word bright there, not meaning polish
here but meaning intensity or purity,
but if you mix it with something it
would become less saturated, so if you
mix it with white, you know, you're making it
both higher in value because it's
lighter but lower in saturation because
it's less pure, less intense, or you could
mix it with black or you could mix it
with another color, so there's all sorts
of ways of changing that saturation.
Artists have a diagram that shows color
relationships and that's called the
color wheel, and as you can see there are
different hues that are showing kind of
a wedge shape form forming a ring or a
wheel. In the center you have gray, I'll
explain why, and you can also see that
some of these hues have numbers next to
them, you have yellow, blue and red all
have a one. These are what we call
primary colors, and let's say you're a
poor artist and you can't afford to buy,
you know, dozens of tubes of paint today.
You would probably buy just a few and
among those would be a yellow, say
cadmium yellow, blue, maybe an ultramarine
blue, red probably once again a cadmium
red, and then you'd probably buy yourself
some white and some black, and with those,
at least in theory, you can make any hue.
Actually, you know, as you learn what your
palette is, you'll probably pick up a few
other hues that you want to use,
but yeah, you can keep it fairly simple because
from those three hues,
yellow, blue, red, you can create almost any
other hue,
but there's no way you can take other
hues and put them together and make
yellow or blue or red. Those are the
primary ones, those are number one, you
have to have those to make the other
ones. Okay, then you can see twos next to
some of them. You know, if you mix one part
yellow and one part red, you make orange,
so it's a secondary color. One part
yellow, one part blue, green. With one part
blue and one part red, you make violet,
and then of course you could make colors
between those, so if you took two parts
yellow and one part blue, you'd make
yellow green, or two parts blue and one
part red would be blue violet. Now, you
can go onto this infinitely, you know,
making it smaller and smaller bits, it
doesn't have to be done mathematically,
most people mix to sight, but it gives
you an idea of what these color
relationships can be and how you can use them.
When hues are adjacent on the color
wheel and they're next to each other and
they're sharing some hue, we call these
analogous and their harmonious because
they are sharing a hue. For example,
yellow. Everything on this wheel from red
orange, which has just a little bit of
yellow in it, to yellow-green, which has
what, one part yellow and two parts blue,
all share yellow, so those would be
harmonious, analogous, and of course the
closer it is by yellow orange, yellow
green, those would be very very close to
yellow, so those would be the most
analogous hues. On the other hand, if you
take hues that are opposite on the color
wheel, let's say blue and orange, those
are the most opposite colors. If you put
two fully saturated hues together that
are opposite or complementary, say orange
and blue, they set up a tension, you could
say they fight with each other. Now,
there's ways to get over that and we
will be talking about that very late in
the course actually. There is an artist
who uses near complements and what he
does is he makes them less saturated so
that they do have a kind of harmony,
that they can get together, now how's
that possible? Well, look at the color
wheel, there's something in the middle,
there's gray. Now, you probably all know
that you could take white paint and
black paint and mix it together and get
gray and you could, you know, more white
you have lighter grays, and more black
you'd have darker grays, but there's
another way to make grey and that is to
mix two complements, so if you were to
mix yellow and violet or blue and orange
or red and green
in equal amounts, you would get a very
equal gray. Now, what if you mix them in
unequal amounts? Essentially, you're graying
down the hue, so if you have blue and you
add a little orange to it,
you're making it less saturated, a little
more gray and the more you put in it,
you know, the closer it comes to, you know,
gray, but it also means that you could
have grays that are warm and cool, and
also, uneven mixtures of the complements
can make a brown and different kinds of
browns, obviously, too. Some browns and
grays, which we sometimes think of as
neutrals, can actually be warm or cool
depending on how they're mixed. Let me
give you an example of complementary
hues. Now, notice that this is
complementary with an "e", not
complementary with the "i", it's not giving
somebody a compliment, not saying
something nice about them, they
complement each other, in other words,
they fit together, they're opposites
that work together, you think something
like yin and yang, you know, they fit
together
as a whole, but they're very different. So
here we have our example and I'm using
red and green, and this is a painting by
Vincent van Gogh from the late 19th
century and it's known as the night cafe
and you'll notice the wall is this, you
know, very saturated red and the ceiling
is a very saturated green and then
throughout the room there are different
shades of green that I call a bilious
green on the billiard table, that's seems
to be a pun there, but at any rate you
have this contrast of red and green
which are complements, some of them fully
saturated, some of them, you know, mixed with
something else that's warm and
hot, yellows, and it does, it sets up
a tension, it makes you nervous, and then
he has this very dominant yellow, gold,
use of yellow orange, I guess color that
is very hot,
just as the red is very hot, and once
again, you know, there's this unease about
the color scheme here. Well, van Gogh
wanted to do that. He writes about this
and when we say cafe, in our country we
usually think of a place where you go to
buy coffee, but a cafe in France in the
late 19th century would also
be a place where you would go to
buy alcoholic beverages, we'd probably
say a bar, and some of them were very
harmful. For example, many people became
addicted to absinthe, which literally, if
you drink enough of it, is poisonous, and
so he described what he wanted to do with
this cafe that stayed up all night
and, you know, people could drink till
they were insensible, he said I wanted
to create the mood of a place where
anything could happen, where a murder
could be committed, and rather than, you
say, making dark shadows or something
like that, you know, he sets it up with
the tension and the colors which really
almost seem to fight with each other,
and as I say, make you feel very uneasy,
they're very stimulating, all of
these warm hues and then the compliments
which seem to fight with each other. Okay.
Now, we also want to talk about, we talked
about hue, we want to talk about the
value, or the lightness or darkness of a
color, and we said that warm hues seem to,
or warm color, warm hues seem to advance
and cool hues, or cool colors seem to
recede,
another thing, they appear as though they
have a different spatial placement even
though it's an illusion, but also true of
value. Light colors appear to advance.
Dark colors appear to recede, so this is
one way you can manipulate space in
a painting. If you want something to seem
to come forward you can make it lighter,
and if you want it to appear, you know, receding,
you know, coming, going backwards, going further in
depth, you could make it darker. I'll show you
an example in a moment. Another term that
I want to give you and we will be using
this one is chiaroscuro. Chiaro. Scuro.
You can see I divided the word into sort
of two parts, chiaroscuro. It means,
literally in italian, light, chiaro, scuro,
dark. Now, one way to remember that is
chiaro and it kind of looks like our word
for clear, there's not a real root there,
but, you know, that's light, and scuro
has a root that we're very familiar
with actually, the word "obscure", which
means it's dark, you know, the obscure side of the
moon is the dark side of the moon and
they both come from the same Latin root,
so scuro
is dark. Now, how do we use this in art?
It's not just anytime you use light and
dark, which is, you know, obviously pretty much all
the time, but it refers to modeling or
shading
in light and dark to make an image
appear solid, and pretty much most
artists who are trying to create a
illusionistic image will be using
chiaroscuro. So here's an example. You've
probably seen reproductions of this,
it's a 18th century portrait of a young
aristocrat and we know it as the Blue
Boy by Thomas Gainsborough. Now, as you
can see, you know, he looks like he's
three-dimensional, using one leg is
darker, he's using darker hues, and the
other, room, leg, he's using lighter
hues and the lighter leg appears to
advance, it appears as though it's coming
forward. The same thing, what looks like,
you know, his torso. It's lightest in
the front and then as we go to the side
it's shaded in shadow and that, it
makes it appear as though his torso is
actually three-dimensional, is actually
solid, you know, so that it gives the illusion
of a solid three-dimensional figure
standing in a space. Well, there's
something you don't know about this
painting, you've probably seen it and you thought
oh, this little boy in, you know, a
sissy costume or something, actually of
course this is the way that a
well-dressed aristocratic young man
would dress, there's nothing sissy about
it in its time, but there's something
else you don't know about it. This
painting is an "in your face, don't tell
me how to paint" kind of painting. That's
why Gainsborough painted it. At this time
they had set up a Royal Academy in
England
and the Royal Academy established rules
about painting and Gainsborough was
like, Gainsborough felt that he didn't
want to follow the rules all the time
and he wanted to show people that you
could break the rules and so he
painted this painting, now what was the
rule? The rule was that blues are cool
colors. Cool colors recede so cool colors
should be in the background, warm colors
should be on your foreground object, in
this case, you know, the figure, so by that
reasoning, you know, they should be
wearing, you know, red or maybe, you know,
warm, reddish-brown garment or something
like that
that would seem to advance and the
background should be, you know, cool blues
and greens, but Gainsborough decide he's
gonna break the rules. He'll say don't tell
me how to paint, I'm gonna break the
rules and so what he does is he puts his
figure in a blue costume, which should
recede, but he makes it lighter than the
background and remember light colors
advance, and then he has this warm
brownish background and he makes it
darker in places, so it seems to recede,
so you have the light blue coming
forward, advancing, and the warm browns of
the background receding, and the figure
looks, you know, perfectly 3-dimensional,
stands out perfectly well, in other words,
he breaks the rules, shows you can do it
and it works.
Line and brushstroke. Now, we often divide
paintings into two categories, these were
actually established by a German art
historian named Heinrich Wolfflin
around the turn of the 20th century,
around 1900, you know, he lived in late 19th and
into the early 20th century, and he wrote
a book called The Principles of Art, and
in it he had a list of stylistic
categories that were in opposition and
among these was the word linear and the
word that we have translated as
painterly, he was German, he was writing
in German, and the word that he used to
describe paints with loose brush work
would have translated literally as
picturesque, you know, he kind of made up
a word, Germans can do that, and so it
didn't work to translate it literally so
we had to make up in English, they had to
make up a, another term and the term was
painterly, you know, like a painting as it
were, so sometimes you have artwork and
here we're thinking of paintings but it
could also be drawings or prints that
have very clear edges,
you know, here's a clear distinction between, say,
the background and maybe the object, and
also there are many artists who paint
with lines, they first create their
image with line and then they add color,
so oftentimes that line is, you know, part
of the image and it defines the contour
of the forms, and so this is what we call
linear art with very clear edges and
especially when they aren't using line.
The opposite of that is painterly where
you have loose brushwork or sometimes
diffuse or obscure contours, obscure
edges, maybe you can't quite tell where
one part ends and another begins or it's
in shadow perhaps or it's loosely
painted, so let me give you some examples.
This is an artist we'll be talking about
in class again, although not this
particular work of art, this is Madonna
and Child of Mary and the baby Jesus by
Botticelli from the late 15th century,
and this one happens to be in the United
States, it's in the Fogg Museum, Cambridge,
and if you look at it closely at it you'll see
there's lines around everything, you
know, there's lines around the faces,
there's lines around the bodies, the
nose, the mouth, the fingers, if you can
see clearly the fingernails, you know,
everything is defined in terms of line
and Botticelli is very, very well known
for his linear style, it's very, very
graceful, very, very beautiful curving
lines, and so he's a perfect example of a
linear artist,
but here's the opposite.
This is painterly and my example here is
a detail, so when you're getting close
in I, whenever I can I like to show
details because it gives you a better
example of what the painting surface
actually looks like, and this is from one
of Rembrandt's many self-portraits, and
so as you see we're sort of honing in
on the face, that's when a detail means
you're looking closely at one
part, and as you can see we can
actually see the brushstrokes, we can see
the texture of how he laid down the
brushes look at that cap
that he's wearing, you can look at this
and you can say, okay I can see that he
used a flat brush and, you know, he drew
that flat brush across with, loaded with
paint across this surface and we can
still see the mark of the brush as it
were. Also, if you look at the face, so
where exactly does the chin and the neck,
are they distinguished, or, you know,
the, say some of the edges of the face
and the hair or, you know, one
part from another, there's some very dark
shadows here that make it a little bit,
you know, obscure, it's not like
Botticelli where you can see every
single thing clearly and there's a line
around it. In this case, the figure is
created with loose or free brushstrokes
that build up the form and in this case
the artist has left those brush strokes
for us to see and sort of like the
activity of the artist, you know, that we
can still communicate with him and can
still get an idea of, you know, his
physical activity, what he was doing.
Okay, we've talked about color, line and
brushstroke, and now we want to talk
about shape. Now, line and shape can have
direction and movement. I'm not
necessarily talking about, you know,
physical movement although there are
works of art that are kinetic, that do
move, let's say mobiles for example, but implied
movement, if you will, or if you want to call it
psychological movement, I guess you could
do that too. Some forms seem to be, some
shapes seem to be more horizontal,
vertical, diagonal, curving or angular, so
let's look at some examples and let's
see how the artist can use that and, you
know, what's implied, you know, what
emotional or psychological state is
implied by these different shapes or
different directions of either line or
shape. For example, horizontal, you know,
so it's stretched out, seems to be
peaceful, serene, relaxing, you know, you're
lying down to sleep, you're stretching
out to rest, and so what I'm giving you
here is an example by a 17th century
artist named Vermeer, that's a view of
his home city, his View of Delft in the
Netherlands, and if you look at the
different shapes in it, the buildings, you
know, there you have a strong band,
it's almost a horizontal band of the
buildings on the side of this water, and
then if you look even closer, you know,
you're seeing say the roofline, you're
seeing this wall, you're seeing the edge
of the quay,
you can see a bridge just off-center a
little bit to the right,
and, you know, these are all horizontal
forms, you have a little bit of a kind of
curvy diagonal in the foreground but
it's pretty much horizontal until it
tapers off a little bit, and then if you
look at the clouds, the clouds are about
two-thirds of the painting and there is
an artist of the same period of 17th
century named Lairesse who brings
clouds billowy and on diagonals, but
that's not what's going on here. The
clouds are actually floating around in
our horizontals, you know, and you want to
have a line from one side of the picture
to another that, you know, describes them
as, you know, horizontal, paralleling the
shape of the the town and the buildings,
and of course if everything we're
horizontal it would be really boring
wouldn't it, so of course the clouds are
not, you know, I say a rectangle, they're
amorphous in shape,
they're just longer, and you have a lot
of small vertical elements: towers, edges
of buildings, for example. Now, I'm gonna
tell you something about this serene,
peaceful, relaxing view of Delft: if you
look at the space right over the bridge
as it were, it looks a little bit empty.
Well, there was a reason for that. They
had an armory there and one time the
armory filled with gunpowder blew up, and
of course it took out the houses that
were around it and it left a great
crater in the ground, and this painting
was painted after it and it has been
suggested that Vermeer was doing it as
you know sort of good propaganda for his
city, he wants it to look safe,
serene, relaxing, you know, like it never
ever happened, or isn't going to happen again, and
interestingly enough that bridge, which
is, as I said before, the place where the
armory once stood, is actually shorter, so
he's extended it and made it
more horizontal, you know, more calming as
it were, right at the place where the
disaster happened. Incidentally, they
rebuilt the armory and it blew up again,
so it's not quite as safe as you might
think from looking at this picture. Okay,
the opposite is vertical, things that go
upwards, and we often do associate
gothic architecture and this is a 13th
century French church and it's actually
the side aisle of Reims Cathedral, which
means it's lower, you know, than the main point,
but as you can see it still exemplifies
verticality. You have all of these little
colonettes that are attached to the
larger column and they're rising
upward, you know, they seem to be, you know,
thin and tall, and then you have pointed
arches that once again are pointing
upwards and it's a little hard here to
see the windows but the windows also are
pointed, and so what you're having
is this feeling of reaching upward. Now,
many human religions do have this
feeling of reaching upward associated
with spirituality. You can see it in the
Gothic Cathedral, of course. If you think
of ancient Sumerian religions where you
have Ziggurats, essentially artificial
mountains, they're step pyramids, they, you
know, they're shaped like a pyramid but
they're in steps that go upward, and, you
know, the shrine to the God is at the
highest point. The Olympian deities live
on the mountain or, you know, Mount
Olympus. The psalmist says I shall lift
my eyes to the hills from whence cometh
my help, my help cometh from the Lord ,who
made heaven and earth, so, you know, this
idea of looking up, and of course we
think about the sky deities and Sun,
you know, Sun gods and, you know, you look
up and there is Ra or
Horace or Otto, I don't know if you're, or
Hamon, and, you know, all of these ideas
of looking up, representing spirituality
seem to be pretty ingrained in human
beings, so sometimes that's what
verticality implies as in the Gothic
Church and here's another example. This
is by El Greco, it's as seen from the
book of Revelation or the apocalypse,
which is supposed to be a vision of St.
John, it's the opening of the
fifth seal with the Saints receiving
more gold but their white robes is what
the Bible says, and you can see these
people are all sort of elongated, they're
stretched out, they have small heads in
proportion to their bodies, and El Greco,
of course, is famous for painting, he's
very elongated and very painterly, as you
can see, figures, paintings, but in this case,
you know, it is a religious subject so,
you know, it is enhancing that idea of spirituality.
Now, verticality doesn't always mean
spirituality, for example, this is a mid
16th century portrait by Bronzino and
you can see that this man, you know, very,
very elegant, he has these long tapering
fingers, he's standing up very, very straight
and he is also slightly elongated which
was a characteristic of the Mannerist
period of the 16th century, and not only
imaginary figures, you know, would be portrayed
this way but
aristocrats like to show themselves as
very elegant, and you can also think of
things like fashion models or fashion
drawings as being very elongated to look
chic and elegant, so verticality once
again. Okay,
here we're neither spiritual nor chic
and elegant even though we do have, as
you can see, a gothic pointed window
behind us. This painting is an American
painting from the 20th century, it's by a
regional artist whose name is Grant Wood
and it's one of those, you know, very, very
famous paintings that you see reproduce
and sometimes spoofed a bit, it's called
American Gothic and we pointed out that
the house has a pointed arch behind it
divided into two pointed sections, even
the clapboard on the building, you know,
has, is running vertically which, you know,
usually you think of building, usually
you think the clapboard on buildings was
running horizontally so here it's, you
know, running vertically, you have that
great point of the gable and then the
people, the people are elongated, you know, they're all kind of stretched out and the man is
with a pitchfork,
once again, three vertical elements, you
can almost call them lines, very thin
shapes, the way his garment is placed,
he's got the coat coming down in
verticals on either side and then, you
know, the seam in the middle, another
vertical, and, you know, they're also very
compressed and that combination, they're
vertical but they're also compressed
together, you know, there's not a
lot of open space, so it, how does it make you feel?
You know, when I'm in class I asked students
come on, throw out adjectives at
me, you know, what do you think these
people are like, how would you describe
them, and, you know, we get words like dour
and stern and repressed and, you know, all
sorts of things that people would we
would call them, I say do you think
they're gonna be the life of your next
party, you know, no no no, of course not,
but a couple of words that you might
also think of them is they seem to be,
what, good, upright people, and there's
that pun on the word vertical is upright,
so he's playing, I guess, a little bit
visually, verbally with this idea of
verticality in a very different way than
the works that we just saw, you know,
artists are free to take elements and,
you know, create something a little bit
different than other people, in fact we
encourage, we want them to do that. Diagonal.
Diagonal implies action, drama,
movement. This was a while back so you
probably don't remember it but there
used to be an advertisement for an
automobile in which, you know, the car
would go around and it ended up in a
garage that was shaped like an acute
angle, like with the diagonal roof, and the
tagline was triumph, the shape of things
to come,
and of course driving right into that
triangular garage, you know, it was implying
speed, movement, you know, going forward, and that's what diagonal does. Now, it implies action and here I
have two examples, one it's kind of, the
action looks a bit frozen and the other
the diagonal is somewhat spacial. The
one is from a 5th century BC Greek
relief and it's the Battle of the Greeks
and the Amazons and as you can see in
the battle scenes, you know, people are on
the diagonal. You have this one group of
the two Greeks threatening the Amazon
and they may create a equilateral
triangle because the men are leaning in
and the woman is
another sort of triangle below them, it,
that's why I say it looks frozen because
they're so equalized that, you know, we
have that idea of the action, you know,
all of these diagonals and the legs and the
stance and the raised arms, and yet
they're completely balanced that they
almost seem to be frozen in their action.
On the other side you have the man, the
warrior pulling the Amazon from her
horse and of course he's leaning back
and she's being pulled back and then the
horse is going the other direction, is
reraring up, so once again you have this feeling
of action, you know, something implied by
the diagonal, and if you think
whenever you move you, you know, you've got to
throw yourself off a perfect,
vertical form and, you know, and you
do, you know, perhaps if you're running,
you know, maybe I'm a bit of a diagonal.
The other work of art is from the 16th
century, late 16th century by an artist
named Tintoretto and he has exaggerated
the perspective, he has exaggerated these
architectural moldings and what are
supposed to be wall tombs, they're reaching
back into space and it just seems to, you
know, to zoom back into space with
this diagonal movement, and you'll also
see this figure in the foreground, in the
left foreground with the raised arm,
raised up diagonally. Okay, what's going
on here? This actually is the finding of
the body of St. Mark, the discovery of
the body of St. Mark. Some of you know
that the patron saint of Venice is St.
Mark and the Cathedral of Venice is
San Marco, and this is essentially
showing how they got their relic which
is supposed to be the body of St. Mark,
which is in the Cathedral I believe
under the altar. They, he was supposed to
be buried in Alexander so they went to
Alexandria and found the body, well
there's lots of bodies, how do we know
which ones Mark's? So they're pulling
these bodies out of the tombs
up there on the wall, probably didn't
really look like this, for this is, you
know, centuries and centuries later
imaginary, and St. Mark comes down from
heaven, that's, he's the figure in the
foreground with the raised arm and you
see a little glow of light, his halo
around his head and it's like he's
saying stop, you found me, take me back to Venice, so it's obviously a little spot of which may I
call holy grave-robbing that is being
approved of by the saint himself, but so
are we doing a lot of movement here, you know, like
a battle scene, no, we're talking
about drama and all of those, you know,
dramatic gesture of the raised hand and
the dramatic diagonals of the
perspective, you know, seem to zoom back
into space, they, you know, people taking
bodies out of tombs, well, this makes it
dramatic, this makes it exciting, it
elevates it in a sense to something
besides crummy grave robbing. Okay,
curving lines. Curving lines we feel are
innately graceful and for your example I
brought you in two female figures, one is
by a mid twentieth century British
artist Henry Moore and he would often
use these abstract forms of female
figures and of course the curving lines
are implying you know femininity and
gracefulness, and of course there's a
long tradition of that and here is an
early 16th century example, about 1510, by
Giorgione, probably finished by his
friend Titian after Girogione died in
1510, known as the Sleeping Venus, so
the goddess Venus sleeping in the
landscape, and as you can see we had
these very graceful curves,
very gentle curves here that define the
female form and are also,
in some cases, repeated in the curve of
the landscape and a little bit in the
clouds and this winding road and the
hillock behind her, so that idea of grace
is implied in the curving forms and
curving shapes and lines. Now, curving
forms could also be very energetic, for
example and I'm bringing you something
very, very old and some of you may remember
this from the Art History 1 class if
you took it, it's a Minoan landscape, it's
sometimes been called the earliest
landscape that still survives. What
you're looking at is predominantly a
reconstruction because this is a fresco,
it's a pieces of colored plaster that
actually had to be picked up and put
together like a jigsaw puzzle with many
pieces missing to create this, but, you
know, we're not gonna look about that,
worry about that, what we're gonna look
at is all the curving shapes and the
curving lines, and these are, you know, the
hills of Crete or Thera, the islands
around Greece, the Minoan culture was
based on Crete, and this particular one
is on one of the other islands there, but
you can see that the landscape, it's
almost undulating, you know, the fae, the
forms curve in and they curve out and then
you have these little birds and plants,
you know, coming in from them when
someone talks about the sound, you know,
the idea of the hills are alive with the
sound of music I'm more apt to think
of this than I am the Alps actually
because it does almost seem like the
hills are dancing there with all of
these wonderful energetic curving lines,
and here's another example and this one
from closer to 1500 C.E. or A.D., actually
probably around 1482, this is
Botticelli's Primavera,
the title means Spring, and you have
classical deities in a landscape, we'll
discuss this painting later in more
detail in class, what I want you to
notice here is all of these shapes and
lines that are just, you know, curving
forms and Botticelli's known for that,
and if you look at them, you know, they
almost seem to be performing a little
dance, a very staid dance not, you know,
today's dance but almost like when we
would dip down and come up and so you
have Zephyr, that's the blue guy on the
far right and he's leaning out, he's
grasping Cloris and, you know, almost this
down and then her arm leads you up the
figure next to her, arms leading
down and then up,
the draperies and the gesture of Venus,
the female figure in the center, you know,
down and then the hand this welcoming
hand leading you up, the Three Graces are
dancing in a ring and as you can see, you
know, the hands are raised, hands, you
can always imagine them, you know, going
around in a circle and maybe dipping up
and down and then our eye goes down
and, you know, it comes up with the
Mercury's hand, we follow that up and we,
you know, we follow his arm upward, so
there is this rhythmic movement implied
by the shapes and the myriad of curving
lines and it seems very, very graceful,
but also, you know, an energy about it,
as I said it's almost like a dance on the surface,
and here are some details so you can see
a little more clearly.
Okay, besides curving we have geometric shapes. Now, you know,
obviously things like arcs and circles,
you know, kinda have both curving forms
and more cubic shapes as can be fitted
within the idea of geometric shapes, and
what I picked to illustrate that was a
tomb statue of a pharaoh from the Middle
Kingdom in Egypt, and, you know, you can
see the block from which this was carved,
you know, that it's very much a
rectangular form, the figure itself seems
to be very blocky, many of the shapes
like the the legs and the feet and the
shoulders with the arm crossed over
the torso almost seem to be rectangular
with curved edges, and then of course the
crown of Egypt is various shapes on a
conic or a cylindrical shape, it is very
symmetrical, you know, it's just
very rigid in shape and it does seem to
imply a stability or permanence. These
were used in tombs for what we might
call the soul of the deceased,
there were believed to be different
parts of the soul and one was called
the Ka, and the Ka, if he didn't have
a place to rest, would have to wander the
earth, so they tried to preserve the body,
but what happens if something happens to
the body, he could also use something
like the tomb statue of the deceased, in
this case the king or the Pharaoh,
and so they wanted this to imply, you
know, eternity, stability, permanence, it
was to help the the Pharaoh live forever,
but his spirit would continue on,
and that seemed to be implied.
Now, not all geometric shapes are going
to seem to be, you know, stable and
permanent. You also have angular forms,
forms that, you know, are like acute angles of say a triangle. This is Picasso's Weeping Woman from the
20th century and the figure seems to be
broken up into all of these angular
forms, you know, if you think about how
you feel when you're suffering or when
you're upset, when you're going through a
lot of pain or, you know, emotional trauma,
you may feel like you're coming apart
and he visualizes that, so when you look
at this it may even give you a better
feeling of suffering and pain and agony
than a very realistic, yet, what, image of,
you know, so we're looking at someone
crying,
you know, she's literally coming apart
and you can see that the parts of the
face, you know, have angular forms that,
you know, they're almost like they're
daggers stabbing at you, it does seem to
imply suffering and agony and pain.
You'll also notice that he's using
complementary hues, red and green, yellow
green or deeper green in some places,
which of course we said fight with each
other, you know, they set up this contrast and
tension which, you know, increases this
feeling of agony.
Okay, our fourth visual element of
space. Now, when we talk about space in
works of art sometimes we're actually
talking about actual physical space, a
sculpture, which is three-dimensional,
architecture, which is three-dimensional,
with spaces that you could walk into, and
then sometimes we're talking about
illusionistic space, works of art that
create the illusion that even though you
have a flat surface, say a canvas or a
piece of wood or a wall or a piece of
paper, that's flat, but the image on it
looks as though it's three-dimensional,
and I have here two ways that you can
create that illusion, one is called
atmospheric perspective, another is
called linear perspective. Perspective
means that you are showing the illusion
of depth, it's a way to do that, and
we'll come and talk about those in a
minute but first I want to talk about
actual space. Now, when you're creating a
work of art that is sculptural it's
three-dimensional and sometimes it's, you
know, extends out from a surface, that's
called relief sculpture or sometimes, you
know, you can see it, you know, fully on
all sides perhaps and it's, but we, we
would call sculpture in the round, and so
this is a sculpture that you could
literally walk around and see it from
all different angles, that we're just
looking at the photograph from one point
of view, it is a 17th century statue in
marble of David as he's battling the
giant Goliath and it's by, undoubtedly 
one of the most important artists of
the 17th century,
Bernini. Now, Bernini had a way of
creating a link between the
viewer and his works of art, and here you
see David is in action and you can see
all those diagonals that make you feel,
you know, diagonal movements, and he's
pulled back his arm, he's holding a sling,
he's got the rock in the sling and he's
gonna let it fly. Now what I want you to
do is imagine. You're standing in front
of this picture, the statue. There is the
space that is occupied by the actual
marble statue, but with Bernini there's
almost a kind of, I call it charged space,
a relationship between the viewer and
the statue because it's almost as though
he could let that rock fly and it
would come into your space, so he's
breaking down that illusion that this is
just art, you know, you're supposed to
react and interact, and so the space
between the statue and the viewer
actually, you know, has some meaning as
well as the physical space of the
statue. Now, another type of space, of
course, would be architecture. This is
space that you can actually walk into,
you know, that you can actually
experience around you and above you and
I'm going to show you here two different
examples of religious architecture, one
is a model of the hypostyle hall
at Karnak in ancient Egypt, it's now, of
course, somewhat in ruin,
you know, some of it still survives, but
you can get a better idea when you look
at this little model, and you can see
that there are these huge pillars. Hypostyle, we refer to this as there's a
forest of columns, a forest of pillars,
and so they're very, very thick,
they would be extremely tiny in
the space. Now, how does that make you
feel? Okay, imagine, let's say you're an
Egyptian priest because not anybody
could walk into the temple. The
ceremonies would begin outside in a
large open area and in fact they would
process from about three miles away from
Luxor to Karnak, so you're out in the
desert sun as it were, open spaces, and
then you come to the temple, and you
enter into this hal,l and from this big
expansive space of the outside, you're in
a forest of columns and these are huge
columns, they dwarf you, and they're very
set close together, as you can see. How
do you feel? You might feel small and
insignificant, and actually the way the
temples are arranged is the rooms,
they become smaller and the room
in which the statue of the god would be
placed might be, you know, much smaller, so it's
almost like you're being compressed, you
know, into humility as you get closer and
closer to the statue of the deity, you know, as you
approach the god as it were. That's a
very different religious experience than
what you might experience in a Gothic
cathedral. Now this is an early Gothic
cathedral, this is Leon Cathedral, it's
a late 12th century and it's in France
and it has some of these vertical
elements, it's not as vertical as you'll
get later on, but the vertical elements
of the colonettes rising up, of the pointed
arches, and these large spaces, you know,
between the columns and, you know, across the
central hallway which we call a nave, and
of course you'd have colored light
coming in through these stained-glass
windows,
and once it would have been painted
brightly just as the temple at Karnak
would have been
painted brightly, so all those things
are part of the both aesthetic and
religious experience, and literally the
patron of the first gothic structure,
which is Abbot Suger at St-Denis, but
then outside of Paris now within Paris,
you know, he wrote about the experience
of a Gothic Church, you know, it is very
expansive. It's actually much smaller
than the Hypostyle Hall at Karnak,
but because the spaces are more open
because, you know, it seems to be soaring
upward, you have this feeling of, you know,
you're what Sujay says is your soul
rises in an anagogical manner, it's kind
of a a mystical experience, and that's a
very different religious experience, but
it is at least in part engendered by the
architecture, you know, the architecture
is leading you into certain emotions
that are considered to be appropriate
for the religious experience of these,
you know, two different religions. That
was architecture and sculpture, real
space, you know, something that's actually three
dimensional. A lot of art, they have
paintings, you know, a lot of art creates the
illusion that they are three-dimensional.
The illusion of space or solidity or
depth on a flat surface. In this case
we're looking at a work of art by an
anonymous artist from the 15th century.
We can identify a number of works by him,
we don't know his name,
nothing is signed, there's no documents
that tell us what his name is,
so we call him the master of the legend of
Saint Lucy or just the Lucy Master after
one of his works of art, obviously not
this one. This one's in Minneapolis, it's
a lamentation over the body of
Christ, and I brought it in because it
illustrates a number of ways to create
the illusion of three dimensionality, and
here are some of those ways. Overlapping.
Now, we see in the center Mary, you know,
holding her dead son Christ on her lap,
and behind her is standing Saint John,
he's the figure with the yellow garment, we
say that, you know, Christ is on Mary's
lap even though we know this is a, you
know, it's a flat piece of wood
essentially that's been painted because
we can see her knees and, you know, most
of the body seems to be, you know, where
we visually would interpret her lap to
be, and then there's John we'd say he's
behind her. Now the painter didn't paint
the entire figure of Saint John and then
paint the entire figure of Mary and then
paint the entire figure of Christ on top,
you know, each one on top of the other,
you know, he knew that the illusion
would be created, he just painted that
part that we see of John and the part
of Mary, you know, her underneath
Christ is not, you know, painted a blue
for Mary's garment, you know, he would
have stopped and painted, you know, Christ
there, so we have this overlapping of the
figures, they appear to overlap because
they, you know, abut each other and we
interpret them as continuing on
beneath the other figure. Okay
overlapping, that's a good way to suggest
that there's some depth, that one figure
is behind another. Another is different
sizes, when something's large, you know, we
think of it as being closer to us, so
here we have these people in the
foreground and they're pretty big
compared to the background. Look in the
background, there's this whole city, of course
it's supposed to be Jerusalem, but it
actually is a city portrait of Bruges in
Flanders, so this happens in a number of paintings
by the Lucy master so we know he
came from Bruges, and you see various
towers, there's the Belfry as it was
being built at the time and the
tower that's closest to the crosses is
the Tower of the Church of Our Lady, but
wait a minute,
those are huge towers and, you know, these are
walled cities, none of these people could
fit in that, they're, the people are much
larger than the buildings and then
you've got mountains, so the people are
much larger than the mountains, well that
doesn't make any sense or does it? It
makes sense visually because we know
that when something's close to us, even
if it's smaller, you know, it's going to
look larger, so a person who's standing
close to us looks much larger than that
distant city or those distant trees and
mountains which look smaller, they're
smaller as they get further and further
away, so size suggests to us that these
objects and figures are in three
dimensions, that they are actually
existing in space,
and then there's shading, and we talked
about that chiaroscuro, when you're
modeling in light and dark and, once
again you look at any of these figures,
say look at the figure of Christ,
you know, there's dark shadows, there's
some medium tones and there's highlights,
and that makes the figure seem to
be solid and three-dimensional, and
here's a term I promise to explain to
you, atmospheric perspective. It's also
called aerial perspective because it has
to do with the atmosphere of the air and,
you know, our region's a perfect
place to look at them, if you're driving
down the Blue Ridge Parkway, why do they
call it the Blue Ridge Parkway, because
as you see these mountains in the
distance there's air or atmosphere
between your eyes and the distant
mountains and sometimes, depending on the
atmospheric conditions, it gives them a
kind of bluish haze, sometimes a grayish
haze, but, you know, so it seems to be
blue, and then of course if you, you know,
get closer, you know, it may take on
the actual colors of, say, the trees, say
it's fall,
you know, then we start to see beautiful
colored trees as the leaves are turning,
and if you get out of your car and you walk
right up, you know, you can even see the
individual shapes of those
trees, so we have this blueness but
we also have this haziness, something
that's far away from us, say those
mountains, they look hazy, you know,
they're not, they've got softer
edges, and something that's really close to
us, it's really clear has harder edges as
you can see in the picture, and, you know,
when you get really close, as I say, you
get really close to that tree you can
see every vein in the leaf, but you can't
see it from a distance, it just looks sort
of hazy, so that hazy and often that
bluish tone that, for example, distant
mountains
take, that's called atmospheric
perspective, so if something is, gets hazier
and bluer in the background, we're
seeing atmospheric perspective, and then
the foreground and I know, you know, you
don't have any, I don't have any details
to show you of this, but if you were
looking at the details of the figure
there's plants, this is actually a
characteristic of the Lucy
master, he has lines of, you know,
strawberries and leaves and, you know, you
can see the lines of them,
they're very, you know, clearly painted,
they're not atmospheric at all in the
foreground. I think when most people say
perspective though they're usually
thinking of linear perspective. Now,
linear perspective, and we'll be talking
more about this of course later on, was
actually invented, or discovered,
depending on whether you think of it as a
natural phenomena or a mathematical
concoction I guess, but in the early 15th
century by a artist named Brunelleschi,
and then it was, you know, developed, and he
noticed that if you have straight lines
and you extend them,
they will appear to meet at a focal
point, which we today call a vanishing
point, and there's two kinds of linear
perspective, there's one-point perspective
which you see here this example, which of
course Brunelleschi would never have used
but it looks like a highway maybe
through the American Southwest, someplace
that's absolutely flat, and we know that
the highways do not taper off to nothing,
you have to have the parallel sides of
the highway to accommodate the cars, but
if you look in to the far, far distance
right on the horizon it appears that the
two sides of the highway are meeting at
a single point, and also these trees,
which are presumably the same size, you
know, seem to get smaller and smaller
proportionately, it's all worked out by
mathematics, and look down at the bottom
and you see this grid, the way a lot of
artists in the 15th century learned to
do linear perspective was a book that
was written called the, well
translated it would be about painting or
on painting and it was by an architect and
humanist scholar named Alberti, and
this is, you know, how he described
creating the perspective that was
discovered or invented by Brunelleschi
and you can see that you have lines that
are oblique to the picture surface, they
are not parallel, they, you know, extend
out, seem to meet at a single vanishing
point, and then, once again, you know,
working it all out with your
mathematical and geometric
constructions, these shapes, this
little grid, the lines that are parallel
to the picture plane seem to get closer
and closer together as they go back into
space. One of the things that you will
notice, and when you take your quiz
notice this, that in the 15th
century when they first started doing
linear perspective, a lot of times they
create these grids and then they use
them as the tiles or the inlaid marbles
on the floor of the building that they
are showing in their picture and I'll
show you an example in a moment. There's
another kind of linear perspective that
was invented by or discovered by
Brunelleschi that's called two-point
perspective and this is when you're
showing something, we'll say the edge
of a building is pointing out at you, you can
see this rectangle, this cube here,
and so each side is going back to a
single vanishing point. Now the vanishing
points don't even have to be within the
picture, you know, you could cut this off
and have the vanishing points be
somewhere outside the picture, but it is
called either linear because you're
using all these lines to create it or
mathematical perspective,
and here's some examples. On the left I
have a sixteenth century, early 16th
century woodcut of the Nativity by
Albrecht Durer, and you can see that
there's a lot of, you know, straight lines
that are oblique to the picture plane.
You have the edge of the plinths, you
have the joints of the threshold, you
have these rafters and the ruined stable
and they all, as you can see if you
extend those lines, meet at a single
vanishing point, and though, over here on
the right we have a painting of the
Annunciation from the 15th
century in Italy, and you'll notice those,
that grid on the floor that I mentioned,
and then even the walls,
this artist wants to show you that he
knows how to do linear perspective, he's
put coffered ceiling, the lines in the
ceiling,
lines on the walls, and they all go back
to a vanishing point in the landscape
outside the window, not centered here,
and then he puts his figures in the
foreground, so I guess he doesn't have to
deal too much with the relative size, but
of course this subject has mainly two
figures in it, Mary and the angel telling
her that she will bear the Christ child,
but that gives you an idea of what I talked
about is once you've done all that work
to create the grid, many of the artists
wanted to use it, and here's another
example.
This is from the Sistine Chapel in the
Vatican. On the walls you have scenes
from the life of Christ and some of
those scenes from the figures of the, what
the Christians call the Old Testament,
the
stories of Moses for example, and this is
by the artist Perugino and it's Christ
giving Peter the keys to the kingdom of
heaven, which is essentially a analogy or
a statement to Christ's name, he says you
are Peter upon this rock, I will build my
church,
were Petrus in Latin also means rock,
and I will give you the keys to the
kingdom of heaven and whatever you bind
on earth shall be bound in heaven and
whatever you loose on earth shall be
loosed in heaven, and that is the verse
that the bishops of Rome, the popes, say
give them their papal authority and
primacy because Peter became the first
Bishop of Rome.
Well, at any rate, this is shown here very
literally in a sense though, with Christ
actually handing keys to Peter right
here in this center foreground, and then
as you can see, the background looks like
it's taking place in Rome, Jesus was
never in Rome, but with these very
classical buildings some of them look
like triumphal arches, they are actually
based on Roman triumphal arches and a
octagonal domed building in the center,
but you can see once again the grid
that's on the stones of the
Piazza and how the people are
proportionately, so these people are
further back in space so they're
smaller, the people who are foreground are
larger and you have your diagram showing
that Perugino has figured out the
linear perspective for this.
Now, paintings do not always have to have
linear perspective to look
three-dimensional. This is a convention
that has been used since the early 15th
century, and in the 15th century some
people used it, some people didn't,
it essentially spread from Florence,
where it was invented, to the rest of
Italy and then eventually in the second
half of the 15th century some artists
started using it in northern Europe, but
it's, you know, it is a convention, so let
me show you before linear perspective.
Now this is a fresco painting on the
wall from Pompeii and as you know,
Pompeii is a Roman city that was covered
up by volcanic ash in the eruption of
Mount Vesuvius and then was excavated
starting in the 18th century, so this is
one of the paintings on the wall and
it's, you know, it's not in perfect
condition as you could see, it's
painted very freely too, but I think you
could make out the fact that you have
different buildings here. The Romans as
far as we know never used linear
perspective, you know, there's some discussion
about whether they knew the mathematical
principles, but we have no pictures that
have survived showing linear perspective
from Roman times and moreover we have no
authors talking about it, not necessarily
those words but just describing it which
makes us think that the artist did not
use it, and here, of course, they aren't.
The buildings look three-dimensional,
they're shaded, you know, we can see
pillars and doorways and roofs, but
they're from all different points of
view. For example, the building here on,
one of it's kind of ruined off to the
left, but you can see a doorway and some
corbels underneath the, possibly the
roofline and the doorway, you know, it
looks like, here it looks like we're
looking up into the door and and up to
the cornice and you can see, you know,
shading,
and the other building, you know, seems to,
you know, the edge of it is pointing out
to us, the corner of it, but the two sides
go back at very different angles, it's
not, you know, an organized two point
perspective there, and then the building
on the right, we're looking down on, we're
looking down on the roof as it were
rather than up, they all look pretty much
three-dimensional but they do not follow
the conventions of linear perspective.
Now that's nothing wrong with that and
that's one of the things I often have to
teach students because I'll have
students say oh, well, they didn't do it
right or, you know, it's wrong, but they
didn't use linear perspective, so I say
why do you say that,
you know, because at certain times
artists use linear perspective, at other
times they didn't, but I just wanted to
show you some of the difference. Okay,
we're still talking about illusionistic
space, space that isn't really there, you
know, it's not a wall or a paper or a
canvas or a wood, and here's two examples,
one from art history from the 16th
century and the other probably familiar
to you from popular culture. It's, both
are to illustrate foreshortening.
Foreshortening. Now, foreshortening I'm going
to define as the perceived distortion,
it's not really distorted, it just looks
that way,
so the perceived distortion of an object
that is oblique to the picture surface,
oblique meaning that it is not parallel
to the picture surface, so, okay, let's take
Uncle Sam first.
Uncle Sam from the world war two
recruiting posters is pointing out at
you and he's saying I want you and his
finger is coming straight out at us
except if you literally think about it,
it looks like what is it, short and
stubby? His arm
looks kinda short and that's what we
call foreshortening, that's what it looks
like when something is coming straight
out at you. Imagine, you know, someone's
got his hand out straight at you and the
other arm
that you can use this, showing it,
the other arm is parallel to the body or
to the picture plane if it's a picture.
Well that hand that's extending straight
out looks larger than the hand that's
parallel and also the arm it's going to
look, what, shorter and stubbier. Yeah, the
arm's okay, it's not harmed, it's just the way it, that we
see it, so here we have Hans Baldung
who is a German 16th century artist, he's
created this print of the groom
bewitched, he does a lot of witchcraft
scenes, and so you have the, you know, the
little witch who with a flaming torch
lean in the window and the groom has
fallen, what, passed out, insensible, but
his feet are extending right out toward
us, you know, like great big feet, a great
big soles of his shoes, and as we look
back, his torso is shorter and his head,
you know, seems to be squished in there.
Well, you know, we understand what's
going on here, we don't think that his
body suddenly got squished, you know, we
read it as it's foreshortened, the legs
are extending toward us, you know, so the
feet look large in relationship to the
head and, you know, the various body parts
seem to be pushed, shortened, you know,
pushed closer together. You can also see
this with the horse and one of the
things they love to do in the
Renaissance was show horses from the
rear because it could show off their
skill at foreshortening, so you have the
horse's rear pointed out toward us and
then, you know, we know that a horse's
body is longer than that,
but we also know that if we see the
horse from the rear, you know, the torso
of the horse, the ribcage, the body of the
horse is going to look shorter, so this
is foreshortened, and the fifth and final
visual element that I want to talk about
is texture, and this will also include
any pattern. Texture is a visual element
that appeals to the sense of touch,
and it often has to do with how light
reflects off different surfaces. Just
think about it for a minute. If you had
various substances laid out in front of
you and one of them was sandpaper and
another was a piece of satin, you might
not have to touch the sandpaper or touch
the satin to know what they would feel
like probably cause you've done it before
but also because you're looking at the
way light reflects off the sandpaper and
the way the light reflects off the satin
and judging how it would feel, so if an
artist wanted to create, you know, the
illusion of that texture, they would
imitate the way light would reflect from
different surfaces, but first let's talk
about actual texture. For example,
sculpture. We have here an alabaster
sculpture by the artist Auguste Rodin,
it's from the Greek myth of Orpheus and
Eurydice, this is created, though, in the
late 19th century and, you know, the story,
of course, is Orpheus goes down into
Hades to rescue his dead wife Eurydice,
and he's the greatest musician so he
plays his music and even Hades or Pluto,
once, Hades is the Greek name, Pluto is
the Roman name, even he, you know, has his
heart softened, the ruler of the
underworld has his heart softened by the
beautiful music, so he agrees to let Eurydice
come back to life if Orpheus can fulfill a seemingly simple task.
He says you go back up through the, you
know, the cave of the underworld where he
entered the underworld and Eurydice will
follow you and do not turn around
until you are both out of the cave. Seems
simple except Orpheus keeps wondering is
she really there, was I tricked, you
know, whatever, and he's so anxious to see
her that he steps out of the cave and
turns around and Eurydice is still
within the mouth of the cave and he
loses her forever, so this is, you know,
before, you know, they're just still in
the cave and the entrance of the cave
and, you know, Orpheus has not yet
stepped forth, I see he's holding,
covering his eyes. It's made out of
alabaster which is somewhat translucent
stone, so the figures are polished and
somewhat light can sink into
them as well as reflect off of them, but
what the artist has done is to give you
that stony feeling. He's left the stone
with some of the marks of the tools, some
of the marks of the stone without, you know, polishing it up, and it's giving you that
feeling of actual texture of the stone
to contrast with the the polish of the
figures, so this is, you know, what the
actual texture of the stone is, you know,
no one's painted this to look like it. On the other hand,
you have, and this is just a tiny little
detail from a painting by Jackson
Pollock, it's called One and he is the
artist who does a lot of drip paintings
or action painting where he throws and
drips paint on these, you know, huge, huge
canvases, so, you know, you take, see a
little reproduction and you can
apparently make it out, but if you look
at it very closely when you're looking at
the actual work you see all of these
different textures which are the actual
texture of the paint, some places where
it's dripped, some places where it's very
thick, some places where it may be so
thin that you can see this canvas
beneath it, and there are all of these
different shapes and textures of the
paint itself so that's the actual
texture of the paint.
Now, there are other artists who create
the illusion of textures from the
natural world. They're imitating the
surfaces and the way light shines on
those different surfaces. When someone
creates a work of art that makes you
think it's real, you know, and often with the
texture being a strong element of that,
you know, it's all, it's the space
and the shapes and of course the texture,
but we do call that by a French term
trompe l'oeil or fool the eye, the artist
trying to fool you into believing that
the objects that he painted are actually
real. Now, no artists imitated texture
better that Jan van Eyck. This is a
detail from a painting by Jan van Eyck
showing the Virgin Mary, and just look
at all of the different textures that he's
created, the softness of the hair, the
light shining off the jewels, brocade in
the background, plants, flowers, the lily
and the rose that seemed to grow from
her crown and, you know, says that Jan van Eyck was the master of showing illusionistic texture.
