Alice Elizabeth Chase’s Looking at Art describes a number of ways that art has been observed and painted in. She starts with the earliest pieces of artwork from the Egyptians and Greeks and goes all the way up to the 19th century. The way an artist sees and paints his artwork depends a lot on his culture and what the people of his time find most important.
In Chapter 3: The Artist Looks at the View, Chase begins by discussing the way the Egyptians painted the setting in a map-like style. There was no desire to accurately depict their subject; the important thing was that observers understood what was going on and where everything went. The hieroglyphics helped to explain the process as well. For the Greeks and Romans, this was a different story. They used the landscape and scenery to romanticize nature and heroes from mythology. The Chinese found the landscape to be most important in a painting because you could detect the “mood of man and infinity of God” in nature. Each tree and mountain had its own individual structure; some spaces were even unpainted to represent mists or waters. Viewing art depended on the “cultural lens” of the artists.
Chase went on to describe art during the Renaissance, the time when people (especially artists) grew more interested in the world around them. This was especially prominent in the North. It was now “worthy” to paint the landscape prominently and accurately because the enlightened thinker could see God in nature, in his country. If you take a look at Brueghel’s The Death of Saul, you can see that the subject is small and in a corner of the painting; the mountainous scenery dominates the painting. Ruysdael’s View of Haarlem is also almost entirely scenery drawn with accurate light and shadow. By the 18th century, artists had mastered the “formula” of light/darkness in landscapes and no longer study it; like industrialization, art started to be “churned out.” It was the British in the 19th century that brought color into paintings again, and this was brought to the newly established U.S.A. Now that industrialization had begun and cities had been formed, American artists began to romanticize nature in their country. Most Americans still proudly carried the image of the “fresh, green breast of the new world” although the frontier was slowly receding. Artists in the mid 19th century reached a whole new level when they began painting to show ideas and feelings. Artists such as Van Gogh and Cezanne painted their landscapes with fancy brush strokes and peculiar patterns that helped convey their emotion to the viewer. In this way, viewers could look at landscapes through different eyes.
In Chapter 4: The Artist Looks at People and Space, Chase once again started with the earliest artists: the Egyptians. The painted their subjects the way they knew them to be. The Mesopotamians painted figures similarly—there was no foreshortening or accuracy in distance. The Greeks tried to add a third dimension to the figures and were the first to add correct foreshortening and shadow. This added “depth and solidity” to the paintings. As artists began to paint what they saw exactly, ideas on “perspective” arose.
Perspective includes the size of objects as they move further away, colors becoming bluer the further the distance, edges sloping together, the placement of the horizon line, and many more details. The Greeks and Romans had wanted to paint what they saw but failed to make their lines meet at the same point. It was in the 15th century, however, when scientists began to study vision and artists started to use a vanishing point (see Paolo Uccello). During the Renaissance, many artists experimented with the relationship between the viewer and the artwork. For example, Mantegna’s scene from the Life of St. James placed the vanishing point below the painting and placed the painting at eye level to you. Similarly, Pozzi’s St. Ignazio Entering Heaven seems to push up into heaven itself. Meanwhile, the Chinese and Japanese discovered the isometric perspective that is the best way to depict 3-D structures; most building structures are drawn with this perspective. Although we are used to the vanishing point perspective, it is most certainly not the only way to view a painting and Chase reminds us of this as she lists the advantages of different perspectives.
-Amanda Puitiza
