Jesse Bryant Wilder - Art History For Dummies

The earliest works of art — prehistoric cave paintings from 30,000 BC to 10,000 BC (see Chapter 4) — were likely to have been a key part of a shamanistic ritual (a priest acting as a medium enters the spirit world during a trance). In many prehistoric cultures, people thought religion and ritual helped them to prepare for an afterlife or control their environment. For example, fertility rituals were linked to a god or goddess of crops and were designed to guarantee a successful harvest. Art (and often dance and music) frequently had a role in these religious rituals.

Scholars don’t know much about the religion of prehistoric humans (people who lived between 30,000 BC and 3500 BC). But they know a great deal about the religions of the earliest civilizations in Mesopotamia and Egypt (which began around 3500 BC). Some Mesopotamian art and most Ancient Egyptian art have a religious theme. Egyptian art typically focuses on the afterlife and humans’ relationship with the gods.

During the Roman period (476 BC–AD 500), religious art was less common than secular art (art about humankind’s life on earth). But religious art dominated the Middle Ages (500–1400), lost some ground during the humanistic Renaissance (1400–1520) and Mannerist periods (1520–1600), and made a comeback in the Baroque period (1600–1700) during the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants.

The U.S. Constitution guarantees separation of church and state. But in many earlier civilizations, religion and politics were two sides of the same coin. Egyptian art was both religious and political. Egyptian pharaohs, for example, viewed themselves as the gods’ divine representatives on earth. The notion of the divine right of kings, in which kings were supposedly appointed by God to rule on earth (and which continued up to the French and American revolutions in the late 1700s), is analogous to these Ancient Egyptian beliefs.

Here are examples of how art expresses power politics:

Art immortalizing achievement: In Ancient Greece, Pericles (the leader of Athens at its cultural and political peak) ordered and paid for the building of the Parthenon and other monuments (using money permanently borrowed from Athens’s allies) to memorialize Athenian power and prestige. “These works will live forever as a testament to our greatness,” he said. This art was meant to glorify the state.

Art celebrating victory and power: Similarly, the Romans erected columns, such as Trajan’s Column (see Chapter 8), and triumphal arches, like the Arch of Constantine, to celebrate Roman victories and assert Roman power.

Art inciting activism: In the early 19th century, the French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix fired up people to fight for democracy with his painting Liberty Leading the People (see Chapter 17). In the 1960s, artists like Jaspar Johns and Carolee Schneemann created protest art to stop the war in Vietnam.

A lot of art was commissioned by rich and powerful patrons to serve the patrons’ purposes. Some of them commissioned religious works showing themselves kneeling beside a saint, perhaps to demonstrate their religious devotion and earn brownie points from God. Others commissioned works to celebrate themselves or their families — for example, Philip IV of Spain paid Spanish painter Diego Velázquez to immortalize Phil’s family during the Baroque period.

Some patrons merely wanted to fatten their art collections and enhance their prestige — like Pieter van Ruijven, who commissioned works from Johannes Vermeer in 17th-century Holland. Van Ruijven (1624–1674) was one of the richest men in Delft and Vermeer’s primary patron.

No one paid Vincent van Gogh to paint. In fact, he only sold one painting during his lifetime. Van Gogh was the classic starving artist — but he kept painting, driven by a personal vision that his public didn’t share or understand.

Many modern artists are also driven by a personal vision, a vision that offers the public a new way of looking at life. Typically, these artists have to struggle to communicate their vision and find an accepting public. Until they find that acceptance, many of them must eat and sleep in Van Gogh’s shoes.

Design is the arrangement of visual elements in a work of art. In this section, I show you how to recognize and interpret design elements in the art you see.

Pattern is as important in visual art as it is in music or dance. A song is a pattern of notes; a dance is a pattern of movements; and a painting is a pattern of colors, lines, shapes, lights, and shadows. Patterns give consistency and unity to works of art. Mixing a pretty floral pattern with a checkerboard design would be as inconsistent as pasting two types of wallpaper together. The key to pattern is consistency. That said, an artist may choose to intermingle several patterns to create contrast (see “ Looking for contrast,” later in this chapter).

Sometimes patterns in art are as easy to recognize as the designs in wallpaper, but more often the patterns are complex, like musical motifs in a Beethoven symphony or the intricate designs in a Persian carpet or a rose window (see Chapter 10). Patterns may also be subtle, like the distribution of colors in Jacopo Pontormo’s Descent from the Cross (see Chapter 13).

Visual art also has rhythm, like music. Although you can’t tap your feet to it, a visual beat does make your eyes dance from hot color to cool color, from light to shadow, or from a wide wavy line to a straight one. Without varied visual rhythms, the artwork would be static (or monotone, like wallpaper, with the same visual rhythm repeated over and over), and your eyes would lock on one thing or fail to notice anything at all.

Each part of a painting or relief has visual weight. The artist carefully distributes this weight to balance the work of art. Look at the visual weight distribution in Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera (see Chapter 11): The two male figures on opposite ends of the painting balance it like bookends. Venus stands in the center spreading love from left to right — to the trinity of Graces (on the viewer’s left) and to the goddess Flora and the nymph Chloris (on the viewer’s right). If Botticelli had placed Flora, Chloris, and the Graces on the same side of the painting, it would have appeared lopsided. Besides, Botticelli is telling two love stories in the same painting.

Usually, the more symmetrical and balanced a work of art (sometimes to the point of stiffness), the more likely it is that the piece of art depicts something godlike, important, or ideal, as in Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (see Chapter 11).

The stiffness that balance can bring with it (see the preceding section) can be balance’s biggest problem. For example, most Egyptian statues are so symmetrical that they seem rigid and unable to move. Art needs something to upset the scales a bit.

Contrast can disrupt balance while preserving it, as in Polykleitos’s Doryphoros, or Spearbearer (see Chapter 7). The statue is balanced, but his limbs strain in opposite directions. The opposites — the cocked left knee and the cocked right arm — balance each other while creating contrast and tension.