Two Great Revolutions in Painting

Painting's history in Western tradition went through two major phases: the first was a one-point perspective, the second was Cubism. Both marked a distinct new attitude to the way things could be distributed in space. The first gave the illusion of spatial depth on the 2-dimensional place. In contrast, the second considered how objects could be laid out on the picture plane, laying the ground for countless other innovations in abstraction.  

Before One-point Perspective

Before the inception or invention of one-point perspective, two-dimensional imagery of Western art was to varying degrees decorative and hieratic. By decorative, it acted much like wallpaper, with a figure-ground relation and with imagery that followed some order or rule that was repeated to create a rhythmic effect. Hieratic means conforming to a hierarchy, an example in Egyptian murals where the most important people are depicted larger than less important people, with that logic in descending (or ascending) order.

Hieratic imagery is therefore didactic and expressive of generic hierarchies. In so-called primitive art, distinctions are made between body parts and animals according to their dynamic relationship to the action. <<The great early art historian, Alois Riegl, argued that such variations were ‘haptic’, which meant that the different emphases, reflected in size and detail, reflected the bodily investment in an action or activity. For example, the arm throwing a spear might be bigger than the one that is not.>>

When I use the term decorative here, it refers to how painting echoes low-relief sculpture's decorative functions on architecture. This can be seen in numerous manifestations as in Egyptian bas-reliefs, Ancient Greek vase painting, in the murals from the early Aegean civilizations, and in Rome's surviving wall paintings, notably in Pompeii. If there are spatial figure-ground relationships, they usually are relatively simple, not following any complex law. This is also the case with Medieval art: the imagery is pressed against the frontal plane.

The Revolution in Pictorial Space

The revolution of the organization of pictorial space synonymous with the Italian Renaissance can be seen as reflecting a need for pictures to do more than describe and decorate, but to reflect the deeper instincts of the new humanism, thus to imbue figures with an inner life.

This is what Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72), in his famous treatise on painting (first appearing in Latin, De pictura in 1435, and translated into Italian a year later) meant by istoria.

Alberti’s introductory remarks on this theme have uncanny undertones of the Greek manner of conceiving images: ‘Painting contains a divine force which not only makes absent men present […], but moreover makes the dead seem almost alive’. But it is not only this presence that is the aim. Painted images must, according to Alberti, have affective power. The emotivity that he reads in Cicero and Horace is to be translated into the visual image: ‘The istoria must move the soul of the beholder when each man painted there clearly shows the movement of his own soul’.

Linear Perspective Renaissance art. 2016. Via theartist.me.

Since the figures within the frame were supposed to body forth with greater expressive profundity, they had to be shown as agents within their milieu, as occupying some causal relationship to identity and existence.

As the French art historian Hubert Damisch explains in his impressive study on painting and perspective, the question of perspective was entered into once the subject placed him/herself as an occurring and thinking subject with a certain point of view as distinct from the generic, universal view of religious icons. The origin of perspective presumes the role of a thinking, participating viewer.

Between Humans and the Divine

This is the contradiction that is at the heart of sacred images of the Renaissance. They are as much in the name of someone on earth as they are in the name of God. They are made by an individual but convey a message from a transcendent being. They speak to mortals but on behalf of the immortal.

Take, for instance, one of the annunciations produced during the period when Alberti's track was being written. Fra Angelico (c.1395-1455) produced several annunciations, but the Annunciation formerly of S. Domenico in Florence and now in the Prado exemplifies many of Alberti's stylistic aims.

The Annunciation, fresco. By Fra Angelico. 1438-45. Via britannica.com

There is a clear sense of the consecutive placing of the figures according to their position in allegorical time: the fall with the expulsion of Adam and Eve and subsequent redemption through annunciation of Christ's coming.

To return to Alberti's argument: the order and arrangement of these events, the fact that they don't merely occur as pasted on a single plane allows for empathetic engagement. They are understood with greater poignancy. In contrast to Medieval and Gothic art, which speaks to us more schematically, Renaissance istoria, as Alberti would have it, appeals to our sympathy and, hence, our humanism.

The most enduring part of On painting is the section that deals with the arrangement of objects on a two-dimensional plane to give the illusion of three.

Other Pioneers of Perspective

Yet Alberti's treatise was not by any stretch the first of its kind. In the year 1000, the Middle Eastern philosopher-mathematician Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham, 965-1040) explained in his Perspectiva how light projects itself into the eye conically. Although not specifically concerned with picture-making, such discoveries were quickly adapted.

Brunelleschi (1377-1446) made the leading development in the discovery of pictorial perspective by showing how, when a building is drawn into a mirror, its tapering outline receded into the horizon. Donatello (1386-1466) also exhibited the use of perspective by using tapering grids in the paintings in the form of floor tiles.

It was Alberti’s outstanding contribution to extend Brunelleschi’s findings by arguing that the eye was the mid-point between two pyramids, their two tips, or vertexes, meeting at the iris.

Some forty years later, Piero Della Francesca (1420?-92) in De Perspectiva Pingendi (1474) overcame what he saw as the weakness of Alberti’s thesis, which limited its recessions to the ground or frontal plane by showing how solids could be figured in any part of the pictorial recession.

The Flagellation of Christ. Circa 1455 and 1460. By Piero della Francesca. Via Wikipedia.

Leonardo and Natural Perspective

Finally, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) criticized the mathematical methods as unconvincing, and sought a distinction between what is now known as classical perspective and natural perspective.

Leonardo’s natural perspective—or what he perceived natural perspective to be—allowed that the human eye is seldom at an ideal point of looking. This perspective was not as rigid and did not appear to be following rules. It did not seem to be governed by mathematics or some controlling system. For Leonardo, natural perspective looks at things from more than one point. (This insight would also prove to be revolutionary when we turn to Cubism)

Virgin of the Rocks. By Leonardo da Vinci. Circa 1508 and 1600. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Even when the body is still, the eye blinks and makes numerous imperceptible spasmodic movements. One of Leonardo’s main challenges to traditional perspective came in the form of what he called Aerial Perspective, ‘because by the atmosphere we are able to distinguish the variations in distance of different buildings, which appear placed in a single line’.

It is an observation that anticipates Cézanne's intense reconfigurations on space in his paintings of Mont Saint-Victoire, attempting to fuse the fluctuations of human perceptions with those of the physical atmosphere.

The Plain with Mont Sainte Victoire, View from Valcros. By Paul Cézanne. Circa 1879 and 1880. Wikipedia Commons.

Multiple Perspectives: Cubism

The acknowledgment that the image is a concentration—a kind of intelligible compromise—of countless multiple perspectives reaches its climax in Cubism.

Cubism is the cornerstone of the powerful Modernist narrative of reading art as an incremental stylistic progression: painting begins as flat by dint of its nature, progresses to illusionistic space, and then returns to two-dimensions by transcending the inadequacy of perspective and through conscious deference to the picture's formal truth of two dimensions. 

However, this theory, as compelling as it may seem at first, misses the point somewhat. This is because Cubism cannot claim to be a predictable stage of representation that responded to its developments in the way that pictorial perspective could.

Put another way, we cannot say that Cubism was inevitable like Impressionism perhaps after photography, or the Baroque after Mannerism. Rather, its invention was something of a mystery.

Whereas pictorial perspective had its precedent in geometric deduction, Cubism's precedents are only found after the fact. It did respond to the need for a more solid pictorial form following Impressionism's spatial dissolution, but that does not suffice as an explanation. Cézanne's interpretation of space as a series of subtly interlocking, imbricating planes was undoubtedly a breakthrough. The 'discovery' of African sculpture whose reductions of the face to starkly abstracted planes was congenial to artists seeking alternatives to the naturalist or idealized human form.

Georges Braque (1882-1963) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) came up with Cubism after Picasso showed his friend the terrifying and groundbreaking Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907. However, it is inaccurate to call this the first Cubist painting as Picasso never considered it complete.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. By Pablo Picasso. 1907. Via Wikipedia.

Since 1906 Picasso had already been experimenting with chunky nudes with mask-like faces and vaguely prismatic surfaces reminiscent of Cézanne’s jagged-lined, roughly-hewn bathers (Two Nudes now in MoMA, is a signal example).

The forms of the bodies still do not have the crisp planar look that made later figures look like they had come from a robot-factory, nor do they have the radically abstract disaggregation, a breaking apart, that reduces everything into shards and fragments.

In any case, the Demoiselles is an artistic milestone of image-making like that of Michelangelo's Medici Tomb or Giotto's Arena Chapel. It made artists and non-artists alike see things with new eyes. In the words of Picasso's biographer, John Richardson, the painting 'was a principal detonator of the modern movement, […] for Picasso it would also be a rite of passage: what he called an "exorcism"'.

In 1908, the art critic Louis Vauxcelles used the word ‘cubes’ to describe Braque’s painting, but it was, Guillaume Apollinaire, poet, friend-cohort and impresario for the group, who was the first to understand the full importance of Cubism and to commit this conviction to print.

In his article, ‘The Cubists’, printed in L’Intransigeant, on 10 October, 1911, Apollinaire stipulated the Cubism was ‘not the art of painting everything in the form of cubes’, but a school that lays claim to the highest aims of the art of its day. In a more informative article written four months later, Apollinaire defends Cubism as a ‘pure painting’ and ‘an entirely new plastic art’ belonging to ‘mathematicians […] who have not yet abandoned nature’. Picasso himself ‘studies an object the way a surgeon dissects a horse’.

Violin and Candlestick. By Georges Braque. 1910. Via Wikipedia.

The dissection metaphor was not glib but specifically chosen, since one of the more amenable clichés about Cubism is that it lays out its subject on the picture plane like a concertina, allowing more than one side to be seen at once.

But such analogies do not leave sufficient space for the highly intuitive side of Cubism. Cubism advocated itself as a realism, arguing that it could (supposedly) penetrate to the inner order of space to broach the fourth dimension, time.

Philosophers like Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and mathematicians like Maurice Princet (1871-1971) are periodically invoked in discussions about the Cubist cause, but their influence should not be taken too far. Cubism was a fortuitous discovery of some enormously talented artists at a time of social struggle and frenetic stylistic change in all the arts.

Subsequent Cubist Artists

Its subsequent adherents such as Juan Gris (1887-1927), (whose paintings are fine enough to be considered alongside Cubism’s co-founders), Albert Gleizes (1881-1953), André Lhote (1885-1962), Ferdinand Léger (1881-1955), Jean Metzinger (1883-1956), Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935), Jacques Lipschitz (1891-1973), took their business as Cubists very seriously, so much so that Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (1887-1965, before he called himself Le Corbusier) and Amédée Ozenfant (1886-1966) published their Purist manifesto in 1920 in their review L’Esprit Nouveau (the new spirit).

Here they proclaimed a rappel à l’ordre, (return to order), a call for Cubism to return to the discipline of the ‘heroic phase’ of analytical Cubism (c.1910-12), for to them Cubism had become lax and decorative. After the severe and almost mystical phase of analytical Cubism, a sweetness had crept in, they felt, that was a betrayal of the higher aims of this new style. They believed that Cubism provided the gateway to a refined and purified way of seeing the world.

They believed that even Picasso himself had been disloyal to the Cubist cause by lapsing into decorative. The Purists' reproach that Cubism had been unable to realize its destiny suggests ambitions for the style that reached toward social and perceptual reinvigoration.

Still Life with Glass of Red Wine. 1921. By Amédée Ozenfant. Via Wikipedia.

They and other artists with the same penchant for pictorial discipline revived the golden section, or golden ratio, to the extent that a group, the ‘Section d’Or’, was named after it. Dating from before the Renaissance, the formula dictated that the ideal pictorial structure consisted of a relationship where the sum of two qualities is to the larger quantity as the larger is to the smaller.

These devices, including Cubism, were for them a gauge, a lens, a conduit to better awareness, the key to the eternal structure of things, and thus their inner being.

The Czech-German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) remarked that Cubism was not the invention of a new stylistic veil to be cast over the subject, but the opposite, what exposed the inner structure of the image, the ‘subcutaneous net beneath the image’s skin’.

Cubism stood for a tool for a better understanding of the laws of painting, the relationship of simple things to the whole. To go even further, for many artists in the first decades of the twentieth century such as Ferdinand Léger, Cubism was an imaging process that could change people’s perceptions and would alter the world positively in tune with the (they still believed then) utopian promise of technology.