Vanessa Sun
Looking at Art summary
There is no proper or correct way to capture the sense of sight in artwork. Two reasons for such are because artists convey their interpretation of view and the relationships between people and the space around them extremely differently. In Alice Chase’s Looking at Art, there is an exploration of both these differences as well as how art has developed and changed to exhibit these different perspectives on how scenes should be appropriated in artwork.
Chase begins her explanation of the issues struggles artists have by exploring our real life view: objects nearer to us in sight are always clearer and more colorful than those that are farther away. With this simple concept, photographers have issues trying to figure out what to focus on. But what about in the past when photography wasn’t an option? Obviously we must start by looking at the most ancient art- from the Egyptians. Their landscape art was relatively more informative than a visually accurate representation. Like a map, their landscapes focused on the shapes of objects rather than showing viewers what they would visually see. Romans viewed their landscapes as more essential to the big picture of paintings, unlike the Greeks who used landscape mainly as backgrounds. Landscapes glorified the achievements of Romans, such as showing that a hero in war is greeted with the grandeur of banners and celebration with his newly acquired lands in the background. Illustrations of an outside world also calmed the insides of homes with “views of mountains and seas peopled with legendary heroes” (Chase 20). These pieces of artwork had something fantastical about them. That is not unlike the Chinese, who also made their work depicting nature rather wondrous, with “mountaintops rising out of mist” (Chase 22). Every figure is drawn in a different, distinct fashion, with a variety brushstrokes, making rocks and trees unmistakable. This was all to capture a serene feeling, the “moods of man and the infinity of God” (Chase 21).
In the fifteenth century, landscapes and backgrounds turned to being as important as main subjects depicted in artwork. The most prominent example is “The Baptism of Christ”, in which Jesus is being baptized by his disciple but the setting is perhaps the true spectacle of the piece. The nature that the artist depicts is so detailed and conveyed that, in the artist’s opinion, God was in all of nature, not just showing his presence to mankind.
Unlike the religious paintings, The Dutch painted much of their country’s skies and fields. With much of the canvas focusing on the sky, Jacob van Ruysdael’s “View of Haarlem from the Dunes” is an example of such- there is a seemingly endless expanse of sky. Landscape art became more popular and Englishmen started to request paintings of the land they owned. These pieces were full of detail and accurate with what a viewer would see standing upon the grounds, but they were exaggerated with color, heightened to bring more life and texture into the artwork. Landscapes in America were made much in this fashion but depicted scenes of the Western countryside as Americans experienced westward expansion.
Then the paintings became more abstract. Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” suggested that artists express how they feel about the view they painted. Cezanne’s “Mont Sainte-Victoire” shows his mood as he depicts the mountain, the way it stood dauntingly tall above him. His way of seeing completes the landscape history that is told in the chapter. All these different styles are unique and can be used to change the way we all look at relationships as they are drawn or painted.
Chase moves on to discuss the spatial relationship between people in artwork. She starts with the example of Egypt once again, this time showing how they depicted people by depthless figure showing a face profile, shoulders, arms, and legs. This was perhaps not the way that people actually saw others in real life, but like in their landscapes, there were informative depictions that were relatively clear in what they were conveying. In the fifth century B.C., Greeks depicted people with three dimensional views that differed from the Egyptians. Including a bit of light and shade, the Greeks showed more depth than could be found in the Egyptian pictures.
Perspective is truly the issue in these sorts of artworks, especially as objects get farther away. Vanishing points and the like are diagrammed to distinguish how objects farther away seem smaller, but these elements were most likely ignored by ancient artists who deemed that everyone knew objects farther away from the same close ones were not truly smaller, so they must be painted the same size. Greeks and Romans still adopted the perspective that how we all visually view major objects like columns, walls, and buildings should be how they are depicted in artwork. As Chase says, “the perspective satisfies the casual glance but is not scientific” (42). Therefore, artists started to search for this scientific accuracy and arrived at various conclusions. There were issues with distortion, vanishing points, and distances. Eventually, it became obvious that no one would achieve the perfect recreation of perspective and spatial relationships.
