Véronique Plesch – Picturing Time

The Shape of Art History, or History Moves at Different Speeds

Botticelli’s Primavera offers a fitting opening as these art historical musings appear in the spring issue of the MAJ. Not only is this image often cited as a perfect illustration of the Italian Renaissance, but the word itself, French for “rebirth,” fits the season. It is also fitting that it introduces this contemplation on time, for just as the seasons blend into one another, so too does artistic tradition resist the rigid periodization of “Spring” or “Renaissance.”

Many years ago, I subtitled an article: “Time for the Renaissance Yet?” In that essay, as I considered works of art—both fresco cycles and theatrical plays—created in the French Alps in the 16th century, I discussed why “the Renaissance just does not happen” at that particular time and place. Most importantly, I reflected upon how to approach this unique artistic production. My conclusion, which I have revisited often since, was that, rather than labeling this art as “backward,” we must be willing to consider it on its own terms, rather than in a demeaning comparison with canonical works. I proposed theoretical models to do so, such as the relationship between “center” and “periphery.” While artistic centers define a reductive “master narrative” of innovation, originality, and individuality, they often discredit the production of remote rural areas where continuity and tradition are essential. The persistence of medieval forms well into the 16th century reflects a vibrant and dynamic “popular” tradition that resists the rapid stylistic changes of urban centers. Ultimately, we witness what we might term—adapting Fernand Braudel’s notion—an artistic longue durée. In other words, history moves at different speeds.

Take the work of Giovanni Canavesio, an artist on whom I have worked quite a bit (see my Winter 2022 Musings). His frescoes in the Ligurian town of Pigna, dated 1482, are exact contemporaries of Sandro Botticelli’s celebrated Primavera (the date, although approximate, is based on the widely accepted belief that it was commissioned to celebrate the wedding of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici in July 1482). In contrast to Botticelli’s idealized image, which draws on ancient mythology, Canavesio’s chaotic religious narrative perpetuates a centuries-old tradition—notice how the space lacks coherence; one would be hard pressed to locate a vanishing point!

Calling Canavesio a “Renaissance” artist seems plain wrong, because such labels are the product of an artistic consciousness alien to him; after all, the very notion of the Renaissance is a Florentine invention. This is the essence of what we call “periodization,” that is, how we shape history. In The Shape of Time, Kubler suggested that history moves at different speeds. Commenting on “the Christian transformation of Mexican architecture,” he noted that it “contains at least three major patterns of change. Indian life manifests two of them: one is the abrupt abandonment of native habits and traditions, and the other is the gradual acquisition of the new European modes of production. The discards and the replacements happened at different speeds.” Time thus varies in speed and, as Kubler adds, takes “manifold shapes.”

Encompassing Time

Kubler notes that one of the most enduring metaphors for historical narrative is drawn from biology and presents development over time as a “sequence of life-stages,” which “bestow[s] upon the flux of events the shapes and the behavior of organisms,” from birth to end of life. This pattern continues to underscore many of our stylistic labels, such as the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods of Greek art, which parallel infancy, maturity, and old age.

In art itself, there is a long tradition of representing the span of human life, from cradle to grave. Working in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, Hans Baldung Grien created new imagery such as this one (see a later panel on the same subject in the Prado Museum), merging existing themes such as the Danse Macabre (or Dance of Death), the Three Living and the Three Dead, and the Vanitas. We see four figures: a beautiful, naked young woman holds a mirror and arranges her blonde hair; a baby crouches to her right beneath a portion of the veil that’s draped around the maiden’s thighs; Death, represented as a decaying corpse, holds an hourglass and grasps that same veil; and finally, a fourth figure, an old woman, stands behind the maiden and the child.

Three centuries later, Thomas Cole drew from this tradition when he symbolized the ages of man as a journey on a river, with each age corresponding to a different season and time of day. We start in the spring, at sunrise. On a quiet stream that emerges from a cave, a boat carries an infant and a guardian angel. Youth is set in the summer at midday, in a landscape with trees in full leaf. The “voyager” (as Cole calls him) is now a teenager. In charge of his destiny, he grasps the rudder with one hand and reaches for an “air-built castle,” while the angel watches on from the shore. At dusk and in autumn, under stormy skies, the middle-aged voyager braves turbulent waters as he approaches an ocean seen in the distance. In the final painting, the voyager, now an old man, has reached the “great ocean of Eternity.” In winter and by night, the angel directs him to look up to an opening in the dark clouds as he joins his hands in prayer.

Previously, in The Course of Empire (1833–36), Cole had applied a similar framework to capture a longer chronological span—that of a civilization, from its birth to its fall. Here as well, he combined the different moments in history with a time of day. The Course of Empire moves from The Savage State at dawn, to The Arcadian or Pastoral State in the mid-morning, to The Consummation of Empire at the civilization’s midday peak. A stormy sunset is the setting for Destruction, and we witness the fifth and closing scene, Desolation, by moonlight as the once-glorious city is reclaimed by nature. In this allegory, though, the cyclical nature of the times of day underscores the cyclical nature of civilizations.

Visitors to the Sistine Chapel tend to focus on Michelangelo’s ceiling and ignore the rest of the pictorial program, which in fact encompasses the entire span of human history. When Michelangelo was commissioned to paint the ceiling, he stepped into a chapel already partially decorated, and was tasked with completing the pictorial ensemble. His contribution included both the beginning of time, with nine scenes from the Book of Genesis on the ceiling (1508–1512), and the end of time, with the Last Judgment on the altar wall (1533–1541). As visitors step into the chapel and crane their necks to be awed by the ceiling, they miss paintings by celebrated Quattrocento artists such as Sandro Botticelli, Pietro Perugino, and Domenico Ghirlandaio. The lower portion of the walls features scenes from the Life of Moses (on the south) and the Life of Christ (on the north) and the upper section displays portraits of the first thirty-two popes. The vast program thus depicts the periods known as Ante legem (“before the law”), Sub lege (“under the law”)—that is, before and after Moses received the law—and Sub gratia (“under grace”) after Christ’s redemptive Incarnation. Rounding out the scheme and bridging past, present, and future, Michelangelo painted Prophets and Sibyls: figures from Antiquity who foretold the coming of Christ.

In the Santa Trinita altarpiece by Cimabue—the artist considered the first name in Italian painting—we see the prophets as they are traditionally represented: sporting white hair and long beards to denote their old age, they hold scrolls, the “ancient” form of the book (the forerunner of the modern codex), suggesting that their writings are part of the Old Testament but announce what is to come with the birth of Christ. Depicted bust-length under the arches of Mary’s throne, they form the true foundations of both the composition and holy history.

Here are two details from depictions of the Annunciation—the transitional moment that hinges the Old and New Testaments, when Mary receives the news of her giving birth to Christ. In the first detail, from the Mérode Triptych, we see a codex placed over a scroll, signifying the New Testament both building upon and supplanting the Old. A similar idea is expressed in the second detail, from a large altarpiece that was commissioned for the Champmol charterhouse near Dijon. Mary sits under a porch (a transitional space between exterior and interior) built in delicate Gothic style—the style contemporary with Broederlam’s audience—while behind her stands a monumental round building in the earlier Romanesque style.

As I discussed in my Spring 2021 Musings, the setting for the Mérode Triptych is “truly ‘modern’”: all these works possess, to a large extent, generous amounts of anachronistic details (similarly, Pilate’s wife in Canavesio’s fresco is elegantly dressed in 15th-century garb). Anachronism is more than the result of an artist’s inability to recreate the visual world of a distant past. Instead, it represents a meaningful desire to blend temporalities and to bring holy history to the “here and now”; in other words, to affirm its actuality. (On this topic, I recommend the book by Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, Anachronic Renaissance.)

The Time of Making and the Time of Viewing

There’s the question of time spent making the work: this delightful watercolor by Lois Dodd was clearly quickly executed. As we look at the diaphanous washes and calligraphic lines, we are brought back to the life-drawing sessions that would take place in the summer in Dodd’s Cushing garden (read Dodd’s recollections here).

Artists have long figured out techniques to control and direct the viewer’s gaze as it travels through a work. In this panel by Domenico Veneziano, the second figure from the left, St. John the Baptist, both looks out towards the viewer in order to grab their eyes and then directs their glance with a gesture that Claude Gandelman called the “gesture of demonstration,” a term he borrowed from Bertolt Brecht to refer to gestures that perform a “gaze-directing function.” This strategy was advised to artists in Renaissance treatises such as Leon Battista Alberti’s De Pictura (in particular, Book II, where he discusses the “commentator” figure). This finds a contemporary illustration in computer eye-tracking (ET) research.

When I studied Giovanni Canavesio’s extensive Passion cycle in the southern French town of La Brigue, I had the occasion to consider how the artist structures and modulates his account. As he plots twenty-five scenes on two registers (as the horizontal bands that contain images are called), Canavesio keeps the viewer’s eye moving from scene to scene (thereby experiencing a narrative that starts at Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem and concludes with his Descent into Limbo), but also varies the speed with which one traverses the panels and, along with it, the time spent in each scene. This happens in all his fresco cycles; in the example from Pigna reproduced above, we can see how, exploiting the left-to-right sense of reading that is customary to us Westerners, we enter Pontius Pilate’s palace on the left, move to the figures of Christ and Pilate’s wife, who is turned to her husband and addresses him (a speech scroll contains her words), and how, when we reach the Roman governor, our glance is directed back to Christ.

Masaccio also implements these tactics in his celebrated Tribute Money fresco, but here, the eye doesn’t travel the scene in a linear left-to-right manner. Christ is the focal point: this is where our eye enters the composition. Surrounded by the apostles, he faces the viewer. His glance and gesture lead our eye to the left, first towards Peter, who stands among the apostles and extends his right arm in a similar manner, guiding our gaze to a small figure who crouches by the lake shore, on the composition’s extreme left. The crouching man is Peter, who, as instructed by Christ, retrieves the money for the tribute from the mouth of a fish; we then see him again, on the other side of the painting, paying the tax. The repetition of Peter determines what we call a “continuous narrative”: three different moments that occur within a single space.

Sequencing Time

As Kubler moves away from a biological model for a “history of things,” he resorts to the notion of a “formal sequence” to describe a linked succession of objects that evolve over time as their makers seek solutions to a specific visual or technical problem. Besides the question of the pertinence of Kubler’s overarching theory, what I would like to retain here is how indeed a sequence captures the passing of time. As Elizabeth Sears has shown, there were “many systems of age division,” with as few as three (as in Baldung’s panel) or four (as in Cole’s Voyage of Life) to as many as twelve different ages. German painter Jörg Breu the Younger was the first to depict The Steps of Life, in which a staircase leads up and down as man passes from cradle to grave, in nine different moments—an image that was very popular in the 19th century, when many versions were published and displayed in homes.

The more fleshed out a sequence, the better the sense of development over time and continuity that it suggests, which is particularly true when this concerns a shorter time span. Eadweard Muybridge’s chronophotography (“time photography”) captures animal motion with a series of frames that decompose a brief action and reveal facts unnoticed until then (most famously, that a galloping horse had at one point all its legs up in the air). The succession of images is key to suggesting progressive change. As George Kubler said: “Without change there is no history; without regularity there is no time.”

In my last Musings, I mentioned how when 18th-century author Gotthold Ephraim Lessing tried to grasp the differences between words and images, he argued that “painting uses . . . figures and colors in space” while literature articulates “sounds in time.” I noted how this distinction deserves some revision, particularly in our age of time-based media. A pivotal figure in bridging—and even collapsing— spatial and temporal boundaries was Muybridge, who took his succession of snapshots one step further, when, in 1879, he devised what he called the Zoopraxiscope, which would project and animate his still photography, in effect becoming a motion picture. Just a few more years and Louis and Auguste Lumière would debut the device they famously named the Cinématographe. They were drawing on the Kinetoscope invented by Thomas Edison and William Dickson in 1891, which their father had witnessed in the summer of 1894. Unlike the Kinetoscope, which could only be viewed through a peephole by one person at a time, the Cinématographe could be experienced by an audience. And this is what happened, first privately on 22 March 1895 and in a public viewing on 28 December 1895, when spectators witnessed for exactly forty-six seconds a crowd of workers pouring out of a centrally placed gate of the Lumière factory in Lyon.

Although we can grant the Lumière brothers the distinction of the first public screening of a moving image, many other innovators, besides Edison and Muybridge, were contemporaneously aiming at capturing motion in time. The birth of cinema mirrors that of photography a few decades earlier, with several pioneers coming up with processes to record reality. These ranged from Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s Heliography (“writing with the sun”), with which he photographed the view from his window at Le Gras in 1826 or 1827, to Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, who presented his Daguerreotypes at the Académie des Sciences in Paris in January 1837, while the British Henry Fox Talbot struggled to beat Daguerre to the finish to present his own “art of photogenic drawing.” In both the history of photography and cinema, we witness one of Kubler’s guiding ideas, that change and innovation occur while searching for solutions.

Coda: Time as Duration and Simultaneity

But with cinema, the question of picturing time is not fully resolved; the problem is not completely solved, for time is not so easily grasped. Just a couple of decades after the Lumière brothers’ invention, in the teens, le tout-Paris would flock to Henri Bergson’s lectures at the Collège de France to hear the philosopher discuss laughter, but also time. Bergson distinguished between temps (“time”)—which is measurable and divisible into specific units—and what he called durée (“duration”), which is continuous, subjective, and ever-changing.

Linked to this fluctuating durée, Bergson introduced the notion of simultanéité of experience across space and time. This is where artists such as the Cubists and the Futurists found their inspiration. Most notably, Robert Delaunay championed the notion of “simultaneity” as can be seen in his series of Fenêtres simultanées. In the Hamburg version, the Eiffel Tower—for him, an icon of modernity—dissolves into a prismatic field of light. By layering reflections, transparency, and memory into a single view that breaks boundaries between picture and frame, Delaunay successfully turned static spatiality into dynamic duration, capturing a simultaneous multiplicity of temporal perception.

 

References

Alberti, Leon Battista. De Pictura (1435). English: On Painting. Trans. Cecil Grayson. London: Penguin Books, 1991.

Braudel, Fernand. “La longue durée.” Annales 13 (1958): 725–53.

Cole, Thomas. “Description of ‘The Voyage of Life’.” In Gorham D. Abbott, The Voyage of Life: A Series of Allegorical Pictures Entitled “Childhood,” “Youth,” “Manhood,” and “Old Age,” Painted by the Late Lamented Thomas Cole, of Catskill, N. Y. And Engraved from the Originals, in the Highest Style of Art, by James Smillie, of New York City. New York: Spingler Institute, 1856. 5–6.

Gandelman, Claude. Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991.

Kubler, George. The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962.

Lumière Brothers’ Association. “The Lumière Brothers’ First Films.” Ed. Thierry Fremaux, narrated by Bertrand Tavernier. Kino Video, 2 September 2003. YouTube video, 1:01:00.

Nagel, Alexander and Christopher Wood. Anachronic Renaissance. New York: Zone Books, 2010.

Plesch, Véronique. Painter and Priest: Giovanni Canavesio’s Visual Rhetoric and the Passion Cycle at La Brigue. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.

—–. Sixteenth-Century Pictorial and Dramatic Religious Cycles in the French Alps: Time for the Renaissance Yet?” In Tributes in Honor of James H. Marrow: Studies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Painting and Manuscript Illumination. Ed. Jeffrey Hamburger and Anne Korteweg. Turnhout: Brepols, 2006. 281–93.

Sears, Elizabeth. The Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations of the Life Cycle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.

 

 

Image at top: Sandro Botticelli, Primavera, tempera on panel, 80 x 124 in. (202 x 314 cm), c. 1482, Uffizi Gallery, Florence (photo: Wikimedia Commons).