Benjamin Sanits

Art is a complex structure with a multitude of influences behind the completed product. Seeing the same scenario, whether it be a mountain or a grassy plain, anyone would construct a distinctive artwork because of the complicated forming of perspective. Reconstructing a scenario onto canvas is complex in that the artist has to not only fit a picture on the canvas but also fit his unique style and focus as well. This unique style, though unique, is subtly (or sometimes not so subtly) predictable because culture and time period play a large role in molding this perspective and thus the art follows decently predictable patterns through time and space. Alice Elizabeth Chase, in “Looking at Art”, outlines the influence of culture and time period on the style of a piece of art in chapter three. In chapter four, Chase continues off of chapter three by elaborating on how different people from different cultures expressed meaning through the masterpieces.

In chapter three, Alice Elizabeth Chase tracks the influence of culture and time on the typical qualities of art in the progression of time periods. Ancient Egyptians didn’t see a picture for the scene or for the meaning. What they did see were the shapes and occurrences. Instead of over-romanticizing the image, the ancient Egyptians drew the image for what it was, or what they perceived it to be, as a general occurrence, as a “map”, and thus they drew a simple representation of what really existed. On a contrary note, during the 7^th century BC in Assyria, the image was sorely romanticized, with dark grey figures lining the sides of a mountain – bringing the focus to the main part of the photo: the king slaying a lion on the mountain top. Ignoring the trustworthiness of such an incredibly fantastic account, the image is much more surreal than any of those created by the Ancient Egyptians. Both are obviously skewed by position of the artist in reality but the general styles range from simplistic to romantic.

In different ways, the Greeks, the Romans and the Chinese bore focus in their art to the environments. The Greeks were very self-absorbed and used the environment to emphasize human figures. Also self-absorbed but in a different way, the Romans brought attention to the environment through victory paintings about conquered territory. The Chinese, on the other hand, focused on detail in their landscape art to convey religious meaning and mood (quite un-self-absorbed). What all these have in common, still, is their fantastic interpretation of landscape art.

Understandably, as time progressed so did the styles of art. Religion dictated fantastical interpretations of religious figures with golden backgrounds and flat figures. During the fifteenth century, this all changed with artists that became increasingly self-aware. They added backgrounds of trees and rivers and mountains rather than the old-school gold background. This was more realistic and this movement led to many innovations in art, like: the uses of shadows and realism in art, the use of proportionality in the physical form, and much more. The art varied so much that Chase made a point to compare the different tendencies in art in “the North” versus Italy. Italy still had religious paintings with backgrounds of leaves and grass being there for the main story. Meanwhile the paintings in the North still had religious paintings but the backgrounds became almost as important to the story and the major points in the paintings.

More recent yet, Chase mentions an even more intimate style concerning nature and landscaping. In seventeenth century Holland, the Dutch loved their landscapes and to capture their love of rolling fields of green they simply drew paintings like that of the windows default browser screen. Seeing the beauty in skies, many of their paintings were confined to a quarter of the canvas because the skies took up enormous portions of those canvases. This is a new trend, probably brought on by a strengthened naturalist movement in art. Older art was confined to religion but at this point, even if god is a present ideal in a painting, nature seems to have taken a stronger role in art.

Now that styles are understood, the question is about individual preference when it comes to representing information. How could one display a picture with overlapping figures while still conveying easily the events that had transpired? The ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians had similar ideas. Instead of representing the event the way it is seen from one perspective, characters are moved and arranged in a way that describes what happened while also resembling the true arrangement of characters or objects. The way the Greeks handled this issue of arrangement is difficult to tell from the last remaining pottery but it seems that the similarly simplistic and two-dimensional sketches. The Italians seem to have actually used mostly the images drawn three-dimensionally with the occasional strange twist. So the issue of representing data didn’t range that much from area to area but with the progression of time three-dimensional art became more predominant.

Art is like a creature in and of itself. It is constantly growing, constantly evolving. Art develops and changes through the innovative and talented hands of artists and entrepreneurs. As Alice Elizabeth Chase discovered, the expression of a perspective and style depends on a combination of many lenses but two of the most important being culture and time period. Art obviously changes and will continue to change. Like popular culture it is difficult to track and predict new trends but change is inevitable and it always has been.