Who cares?

Piazza San Marco, by Francesco Guardi (1760)

I've been neglecting my blog. Months eating snails on a yacht with Gwyneth Paltrow (she claims she's vegetarian), and arguing the benefits of being a locavore whilst faffing around the islands have left me vacant. There are important things going on in the world, but I can't think of one for the life of me. I should start a Foundation to alleviate all this intestinal bloating, but I pissed all my cash away on sangria. 

Patsy Cline troubled herself over the decision between "A Poor Man's Roses, or a Rich Man's Gold." At least she had options. I just plugged another $300 into a '95 Saturn. If a rich man offered me gold, I'd be cradling his nuts in a silver spoon.

What the hell am I talking about? I've no idea. Here's another regurgitated diatribe about a topic I've only the scantest understanding of. You're welcome, freeloaders.

Let’s generously acknowledge at the outset that Piazzo San Marco (above) is an early work by Guardi, and that his figures are more “freely handled” than by a master like, say, Canaletto. However, the buildings immediately strike us as being way too small for the scale of the figures. Or maybe it’s the other way around; the figures are too big. Either way something’s wrong. Let’s imagine that Guardi started this painting by drawing the buildings in perspective to set the stage, which is probably what he did.

The detail (above) from his painting shows a small figure in a red cape, standing in one of the arches alongside the left side of the Piazza. The figure still looks a tad big for the arch, but if we assume for a moment that he is scaled correctly [and again, by “correctly” I mean “correctly relative to the main objects – the buildings”], then we can use that figure to create a relative scale for everything else in the painting.

It was pretty hard to find a vanishing point in Guardi’s painting, as the building on the left appears to have a lower horizon line than the building on the right (!). In any case, I began by drawing two green orthogonal lines from the central vanishing point to the top and toe of the red figure in the arch, then continuing them out to the left. You can see that the queue of little black guys on the left all fall inside those same green orthogonal lines. All those little black guys are in correct perspective relative to the figure in the red cape, which is in scale relative to the building. They all adhere to the same perspective scale. So far, so good.

The problem with Guardi’s painting is that his foreground figures are massively out of scale with the buildings. Dragging the left-most little black guy across and into the central foreground, you can see just how off Guardi’s scale is. His main figures are roughly twice as tall as they should be, according to the scale he established with his buildings.

The rule should be obvious: if you’re going to establish a scale by throwing a figure into your painting, then you had better stick to that scale. I threw that in bold because yeah, I'm shouting.

Bernardo Bellotto (above) did a better job placing convincingly scaled figures within his streetscape of the same Piazza.

In case you think I’m being unfair to Guardi (by calling him a hack, completely was unencumbered by talent), check out this next painting. I lost count of the amount of horizon lines. Vanishing “points” are all over the place, orthogonals converging only vaguely at best. If he scribbled this on the back of a napkin after a carafe of cheap hooch, you might be inclined to write it off as merely the onset of alcohol-induced idiocy, but it’s actually on canvas. Why he bothered, I’ve no idea.

Gustave Caillebotte: Mystery in the Making

Le Pont de l'Europe, Gustave Caillebotte 1886

Every time I walk down the street, the most instinctive, primal part of my brain asks two questions of each person I pass:

1: "Is this person a potential threat?"

2: "Is this person a potential mate?"

The first question may just be a throwback to growing up in Dublin, where every approaching kid in the lane by the railroad tracks was a potential threat to this skinny art kid. It was always tense and nervy. The second is, well, just human nature. It's a fleeting nod to my simian side, and I don't have to act on it to recognize its existence. I'm a believer that we are animals first, and humans second. But maybe that's just me, I don't know.

Anyhoo: If the answer to both questions is "no," then I feel nothing and go about my day. But if the answer is "yes" to either one (and if I'm being honest), then there's a momentary charge in the air. Even the mutt in the painting seems to feel it. The point is; I believe that Caillebotte created his painting, "Le Pont de l'Europe," to deal specifically with this instant of primal recognition. The mystery that's endured speculation is; to which question is he answering "yes?"

The dress code may be different, but "Le Pont De l'Europe" depicts that same scene from the railroad tracks of my childhood, except that here it's a flaneur from nineteenth century Paris instead of some scumbag from Dublin. 

Le Pont de l'Europe from Le Gare St. Lazare, 1868 [source]

The area around the railway station, Le Gare St. Lazare, was pretty seedy around the time. The protagonist (let's assume it's Caillebotte for now) is seen walking a couple of steps ahead of a woman dressed in black. Women dressed in this manner, and hanging out by the railway station in nineteenth century France, were assumed to be prostitutes. If we assume that this woman is walking alone, and that old Gus has simply passed her by on the street, then we can be pretty sure in this assumption as to her trade. Women rarely, if ever, would walk unaccompanied in so rough a neighborhood. 

And if he is walking with her, why is he acting cagey and walking so far ahead? No well bred man would precede his companion. Either way, and despite the fact that she is looking at him, Caillebotte seems oblivious to her presence and is instead gazing at the man on the bridge. 

Dressed in the blue and bowler hat of a laborer, perhaps he is simply lost in thoughts of work and life. Caillebotte the engineer and lifelong bachelor, might naturally have an affinity for this. But perhaps this man in blue - idle during what is after all the middle of the work day, judging by the shadows - is on the prowl for someone just like Caillebotte. The painting has been interpreted as two men cruising each other.

I like how Caillebotte changed the architecture of the bridge between paintings

As if to prove my point, Caillebotte created this second painting around the same time. It's a wonderful cinematic moment that seems to capture the scene a few seconds after the first painting. Caillebotte has ditched his female companion (for it was never her that he was interested in), and has stopped by the man in blue. Is this just the engineer in him that's been distracted by the marvels of steel and industry on the horizon, or is he up for a little what-not in the hoo-ha with our man in blue? 

Well, "who cares," is the obvious answer. But it's fun to speculate, and the air of mystery around the painting is much of its enduring charm. What's especially interesting is how he has used linear perspective to help construct his narrative. 

He tampered with the reality of the actual scene, straightening buildings on the background that are in actuality oblique to the bridge, and widened the left of the bridge so that "the universe faithfully transcribed proves an illusion, and accuracy covers a lie." [Kirk Varnedoe]

"The superfluity of lines, which all seem to converge on the profile of the man, raises the question of what exactly Caillebotte was seeking to achieve through such unusual emphasis. Everything would seem to suggest that it identifies this man as the protagonist of a narrative encompassing the entire work." [Hirmer]

Various interpretations exist. Some say that this rigidly constructed scene "depicts a city that would have interested the Futurists, a place of dynamic intersections and personal anonymity, where human relationships count for nothing." [source]

"They seem to be quite alone," says Nicolas Sainte Fare Garnot, curator of the Jacquemart-Andre Museum. "Every person is lost in a very wide world."

In an earlier painted sketch (above), the architecture of the bridge dominates and overwhelms the scene. Though we see the same man, it's hard for our attention not to be sucked to the back of the painting, towards Place de l'Europe.

This sketch seems to back up the "critique of modernization" interpretation, with its overbearing architecture dwarfing a faceless man.

In another sketch, he's introduced a couple to stop our gaze from being distracted by the roaring perspective, and to draw our attention back to the guy on the right. Caillebotte paints the couple's heads at the same level, suggesting a whispered conversation regarding the other man's intentions. Perhaps this is the moment before a robbery. 

He's instantly created narrative, and established that human interaction (or the lack of it) is precisely what the painting's about.

Comparison between sketch (left) and final painting (right)

Comparing the compositions of the sketch and the final painting (above), the woman in the sketch (left) looks like a basketball player. She's massive. With her long dress, she appears to be even taller than him. This clearly wouldn't do for a gentleman to be dating a giraffe in 19th Century Paris.

But Caillebotte obviously wanted to keep those two heads close together and aligned with the horizon line in the final painting. Why? Maybe it's simply a compositional choice he made about the connection between their heads being more important than the distance between their steps.

In order to do that, and to remain true to linear perspective, he had to position the woman a few steps behind our protagonist so that she didn't appear to be as tall as him. 

Maybe the painting is simply about a shared moment of intimacy between them. In the close up, he appears to be leaning back as if to hear what she's saying. She seems to look at him adoringly. We're also aware that there are other figures on the bridge. The tight bunching of heads along the horizon line emphasizes the isolation of the figure in the shadows.

Suddenly, we've got it all wrong. Caillebotte is not the man walking with the woman; he's the man standing by the bridge. Isolated by the shadows and alone with head in hands, it's Caillebotte the sad loner.

"Modern life doesn't create close relations between human beings," Garnot says. "You are [in] complete loneliness in these new buildings, new avenues, new boulevards. There's something quite sad about that."

We'll never know the intended meaning of the painting. Caillebotte was known in his time as a collector of paintings and not as a painter, his work only becoming popular as late as 1950. He started painting relatively late, at age 27, and only lived to 45. A catalog from his Musée d'Orsay show states that "since the artist is dead, no amount of documentation will ever recapture a complete reckoning of his view of the world, or understanding of him as an individual."

Canaletto and Superman

Westminster Bridge, by Canaletto (1746)

Canaletto is known to have used Camera Ottica to mechanically assist in creating his cityscapes of Venice, but closer study reveals that that wasn't the end of the story. He manipulated the perspective in his scenes, sometimes changing the vantage point and giving a more flattened and distant view. Pushing the stationpoint back gives the viewer a more panoramic and flattened picture plane.

I call it Superman Perspective. It’s the flattened way things would look if you could see detail from a thousand miles away. In his “Westminster Bridge” painting, we get the sense that Canaletto must have used a high-powered telescope to see his subject. There’s very little evidence of linear perspective in the arches under the bridge. The closer you are, the more distortion will be apparent. In reality, you’d have to swing your head around to take in this whole scene, and the bridge would appear to balloon towards you in the center. Canaletto has made the artistic choice to straighten the bridge ‘unnaturally’.

It’s more impersonal, but it depends upon your goal. Maybe, in the end, the telescopic view speaks volumes about Canaletto’s personality. Perhaps he wanted to see the world from a distance, to rise above the cacophony of human interactions. For someone like Caravaggio, on the other hand, human drama was clearly the very stuff of life. He'd have us sit right at the table in Supper at Emmaus, involving us directly in the conversation.

These cubes drawn in two-point perspective (above) illustrate my point. In A, on the left, the viewer is positioned a thousand miles away from the cube, viewing it as if with Superman’s supervision. The red orthogonals (lines drawn along receding parallel lines to the vanishing point) of the cube stretch out to some infinitely distant theoretical point on either side when presumably they would converge into Vanishing Points 1 and 2. The further away from the object we are, the further away the vanishing points are.

They closer we get to the object (or more accurately the picture plane), the closer to the centre line those Vanishing Points come. In B, on the right, we are so close to the cube that it’s sides have become completely distorted and are towering over us. You can see that the vanishing points (VP1 and VP2) are so close to the center line that they are visible within the frame. This is known in architectural draughting as “accelerated perspective,” because it gives an exaggerated sense of spatial depth.

In both these photos of the same vase from the Vanderbilt mansion in Rhode Island, the horizon line is level with the lion’s head. However, there’s a difference: we can tell that the camera was closer to the vase in the photo on the right. How do we know? The orthogonals on the right photo recede to vanishing points closer to the center line. This creates the kind of distortion we saw in the cube illustration.

In a large mural of a niche, for example, we would want to paint the vase more as it appears on the left, regardless of the stationpoint of the viewer in actual space. Why? Too much distortion in a mural is ugly (that's just my opinion).  I'm not talking about anamorphism here (where the stationpoint strictly determines the construction of the paintings perspective), I'm talking about wall sized paintings in the style of the French landscape panoramas of Zuber et Cie. I'd argue that large murals are meant to be viewed from a distance, so our linear perspective should reflect that. 

A New Perspective on Velazquez

Velazquez has us standing high above the action in Old Woman Cooking Eggs, but I’ve never fully understood why, though we are clearly staring down on every object in the room, the old woman’s head is out of whack in terms of linear perspective.

The boy is in correct perspective, so that we can see the top of his head (and imagine an ellipse around his hairline) in keeping with all the other objects in the room, and yet she is perfectly in profile. Why is that? The only conclusion I have is that it deliberately creates a disjointed reality. Here is this old woman cooking a meal she’s done a million times before, absent-mindedly staring away into space. The distorted perspective physically reinforces the effect that she’s psychologically not present.

Her detached gaze has often been interpreted as blindness, but I don't think that she's blind. I think it's that she seems detached due to the off-kilter angle of her head. Maybe it's down to his being barely 19 years old when he painted it and it was simply a 'happy accident', but I like to think that this is his genius on display and that it just 'felt' right. Or perhaps it was a deliberate calculation: perhaps Velazquez manipulated perspective in the same way that we might deliberately manipulate value in a painting to establish a focal point.

Drawing ellipses on some of the major shapes in the painting, and a green line across her shoulders, clearly demonstrates a horizon line that's at least at the top edge of the canvas, if not above it.

Woman teaching Geometry, 1310

This 14th Century illumination shows the personification of Geometry. I'm glad she's not teaching me about geometrical perspective, as all the objects appear to be sliding onto the ground.

Equally, in Old Woman Cooking Eggs, either the table is correct and it's the woman's head that's tipped back, or her head is correct and - like the illumination - it's the table that's tipping forward. Either way something's wrong, but oddly it all seems right.

They could almost be from two separate paintings

The Fruitseller, Vicenzo Campi (1580)

It wasn't that unusual to play around with multiple perspectives in a single painting when trying to create a point of attention. Vicenzo Campi unnaturally tips the bowls of fruit towards us for pictorial effect, despite the fact that they are clearly on a different plane than the woman and the landscape.

Since we're ripping apart masterpieces, why does is seem as though are there two separate light sources? Maybe I'm wrong, but is her face is lit from lower down than everything else? The shadows on her headscarf seem almost horizontal, and her eye is fully lit.

Linear perspective is like any other tool in painting. You can use little bits of it, or ignore it completely. It's up to you. It's a topic that a lot of painters avoid as being overly mathematical, but as Velazquez shows us with his early masterpiece, even in a rigidly constructed pictorial space there's room to be intuitive. 

Focus, Dammit!

Do we even know why we do things? How many times have I said I can't do something when what I really mean is that I don't want to. It comes down to lack of awareness. 

So, why can't you meet me? 
"Because I have to take my cat to the vet". 
What'll happen if you don't take the cat to the vet? 
"It'll crap on the bed and my girlfriend will hate me." 

Okay, so you've weighed the consequences and chosen not to meet me. There's a clear distinction here between "I have to" (meaning I have no power) and "I choose not to" (meaning I have power). We make unconscious choices in our painting practice too. 

The awesome Dan Witz

For example, we could choose to go totally nuts on a portrait and paint every last pimple and split end on Angelina Jolie's head (she must have at least one), but why bother? I mean that honestly. Fine if you do that, but know why you've chosen to. Personally, I'm impressed by photorealism from a strictly technical standpoint, but I've little interest in it artistically. I choose to paint more loosely (or maybe I just can't paint that well). But the point is that anything short of exact duplication of nature is a deliberate choice, so why choose to paint loosely in this or that passage and tightly in another?

Bellini's painting of St. Francis in the Desert coming out of his cave in utter rapture is a great example. I've stared at this painting so many times, and it's crystalline clarity still makes me dizzy. Every element in the painting is given equal focus and attention to detail. In this instance, the technique serves the painting. Bellini made a deliberate choice to spend a bazillion hours painting every last blade of grass. But why?

St. Francis has clearly spent some time in this hermitic barred cage. His back to the sun, head buried in the Book and surrounded by the trappings of Man, his awareness of the world outside is like that of Plato's cave; limited to shadows cast on the walls. 

Bellini depicts the Moment of Clarity beautifully, where St. Francis turns around and seems to experience the world and the glory of it's creation for the very first time. Leaving his cane and sandals in the cave, he walks out and appears to scrunch his toes in the gravel (who doesn't love walking on sand for the first time in summer?), almost frozen in awe with arms wide open to the  world. he almost seems skewered on a sunbolt. It reminds me of the old shamanic vision quest. There's something distinctly hallucinogenic about the landscape, and it's one of the most powerful paintings I've ever seen.

Camille Corot

Or on the other hand maybe you like the soft landscapes of Corot and might choose to paint like that, where everything is blurred, hazy and romantic. The decision doesn't have to be an overall one. You could choose to manipulate the softness of individual edges within your composition, based upon your idea for the painting. Some amount of softness makes for charm, and is extremely popular.

"Corot developed a treatment (of) looking at trees with a very wide focus. He ignored individual leaves, and resolved them into masses of tone, here lost and here found more sharply against the sky. Subordinate masses of foliage within these main boundaries are treated in the same way, resolved into masses of infinitely varying edges. This play, this lost-and-foundness at his edges is one of the great distinguishing charms of Corot's trees." [source]

Vermeer, Milkmaid (detail)

Vermeer created the softest red haze around his painted flesh which makes it seem to glow. Everything is ever so slightly out of focus, perfect for those dusty, quiet interiors.

Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors (detail)

Hans Holbein rendered textures beautifully, but distinctly and with tightly bound outlines which makes them stand alone in his compositions. Whether we choose to leave the whole painting or even just a particular edge blurred or in tight focus is a matter of personal preference, but should be a conscious one. 

From the laws of human attraction to the kind of landscape we like to lay down our blanket and picnic in, there’s an innate human need for mystery. Don’t spell every last detail out for me; let me search for it. I do the same thing with my cat when I stick a treat into a rubber ball and let her find a way to get it out. We’re simple creatures, after all. J. R. R. Tolkien called it "that shimmer of suggestion that never becomes clear sight, but always hints at something deeper, further on."

How the Old Masters created the look of Gold in Painting

The detail (above) from Van Loo's painting, Marie Leszczinska Queen of France, is fascinating to me. I've been trying to figure out why I think his rendering of the gold table is unsuccessful. Though he's obviously a meticulous craftsman and clearly spent ages with a magnifying glass in one hand and a paintbrush in the other, there's something overwrought about the brushwork. His table looks plastic, but it took me a while to figure out why. 

Charles de Solier, Hans Holbein the Younger

Holbein was, of course, a master at painting the detailed effects of light and shade on any number of textures. I examined his Portrait of Charles de Solier (above) for clues as to his technique for painting gold.

Local color and value are notoriously hard to read, so I took color samples from the sword handle, (a) through (e) above, and then de-saturated them to get their values. Applying these five values against Munsell's value chart shows some interesting results.

The values are all gathered tightly around the bottom of the spectrum, between Value 1 and 3. There is nothing at all in the mid-tones from 3 all the way to 6, when all of a sudden we have our one and only highlight, (e). What surprised me was just how dark everything was. Even the brightest highlight on gold is only a 6, yet the highlight still jumped a full three values from its closest neighbor.

I knew that medieval painters, when planning to include gilding in a painting (say, on a halo), would map out their value composition as if the gold leaf was a dark element. This initially seems counter-intuitive - Gold isn't dark! - but when we see how dark the overall value scheme of gold is in the Holbein painting we can see why it works.

I tried the same experiment on another sample, this time a much brighter 'gold', taken from Le Brun's Hall of Mirrors painting in Versailles...

Firstly, it's interesting to note the palette swatches taken from the 'gold': They're kind of a dull brown, and not very gold at all. Again, regarding the values, we see that the majority of values are between 2 and 5, and the highlight jumps three values but is still no more than an 8.

Le Brun has used a mid-tone (d) on the circular frame, but the egg-and-dart molding has no (d) tone; it makes the 3-value-jump from dark tones straight to highlight just as in the Holbein painting, and is very successful for it.

Why is it that Van Loo's painting is unsuccessful?

Yikes! The first thing that stands out is the number of colors. Van Loo went a little overboard unnecessarily. The more colors you lay down on a space, the more you're making me stare at that area in order to figure out what's going on. Don't make me focus too much on a background object: the focus should be on the main subject.

Let's look at it more closely. Seen as black-and-white value reductions, the spread across the spectrum is much more evenly spaced than the (better painted) Holbein. Specular highlights on metallic objects are supposed to jump out at us. Van Loo's spectrum looks more like that of diffuse light, not specular.

If you want to represent specular highlights on metallic objects, you need to jump at least three values beyond your mid-tones. The way to do that is not to brighten the highlights, it's to darken everything else. Van Loo had nowhere to go from Value 7.5, as Value 10 is pure white, and as such is a purely theoretical limit.

It's like in Spinal Tap. When you turn the volume all the way, where do you go from there?

Spinal Tap, "This one goes to 11" scene [video link]

Justice Punishing (detail), Noel Coypel

In this detail from Justice Punishing, by Noel Coypel, we can see how effective hatching is at representing highlights on metallic surfaces. The hard jump in value from dark mid-tone to highlight works really well to suggest gold. Van Loo's smooth gradations look too soft by comparison. [Incidentally, Coypel's painting is also an excellent reference for the structure of the acanthus leaf].

David Briggs wrote a very concise description of diffuse and specular light, and explains exactly where we should place specular light reflections. Make sure to read all three pages.

Coving, the Nef (vessel) of Louis XIV (detail), René Antoine Houasse

Houasse's fresco from the Abundance Salon, Versailles, shows (along the bottom) gold embroidered cloth using a similar technique. But this time, instead of hatching, he's used dots to simulate the threads.

Look at these examples from other painters to get an idea of their method. Notice the jump from darks straight to highlight in the Rembrandt details. I love the way he painted light on metal. You might conclude that the bigger the gap in value between shadow and specular highlight, the more successful the illusion.

Rape of Prosperine (detail), Rembrandt van Rijn

Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem (Detail), Rembrandt van Rijn 

Portrait of Pope Leo X (detail) , Raffaello Sanzio

Madame de Haussonville, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Ingres' detail shows the exact same phenomenon in the values on the painted gold frame. Even though the frame is in the background and the spread of values is not as great [he has rightly reserved his highest and lowest values for the main subject in the foreground], his specular reflections make the same jump.

Still Life with Silver Jug (detail), Willem Kalf