Shards of Babel: Fragmentation & Pictorial Language

Although we often don’t notice, paintings speak to us using many different languages. The first to come to mind is oddly rather esoteric: the language of symbols. At the same time, the painting’s most direct language — that of the material — is often overlooked. There are other languages, such as patrimony and derivation, but those languages are so hermetic as to prevent all but the most specific and individualized dialogs.

In some ways, it is not strange that the language of symbols takes precedence over the language of materials. In our everyday life, we bestow the spoken and written languages with dominance over pre-verbal languages (often called body language). Since written language, which is given so much weight in our culture, and the symbolic language of painting share so many similarities, it is hardly unusual that this should be the case. However, I think painters — especially painters of the 20th century — take exception to this undemanding hierarchy. This, too, seems natural, as the artists’ love of the material has motivated them to choose painting as their crucial form of communication: painting over the written word.

The Belgian surrealist René Magritte’s witty painting La trahison des images — also known as Ceci n’est pas une pipe — addresses this frustration succinctly. As does Marcel Duchamp’s equally witty, although bitingly sardonic rebuttal: the readymade. I say Marcel’s rebuttal, although of course he presented his Fountain — a urinal turned upside down and signed with his pseudonym R. Mutt — as a candidate for artistic approval in 1917, and La trahison des images would not be painted until 1928. The brilliance of Duchamp is that he not only anticipated a rebuttal to a declaration that would not be made for another dozen or so years, he quite possibly anticipated rebuttals to arguments not yet made.

The fissure between the language of the symbol and that of the material has not always been in such a predicament. If we look back to the art of the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries — indeed all the way up until the end of the 15th century — we will see that these two idioms are not always at odds. They possessed an appealingly symbiotic relationship. We need only look at the gold-encrusted icons of the Byzantine or at the illuminated manuscripts throughout Europe to notice how closely material and symbol worked to form a single complete edict. It is no surprise that art (both painting and sculpture) was such a prominent communication tool of the time, more prevalent than the written word. While these paintings have at times been dismissed as unsophisticated or naïve due to the lack of perspective, avoiding illusionistic space allowed medieval paintings to present a single unified front between the symbology of the time and the materials used to create them. Nor should these paintings be dismissed as unrealistic because they withhold the mirage of great depth. I sincerely doubt anyone has ever painted a more realistic or righteous housefly than the Quattrocento painter Carlo Crivelli — or anyone ever will for that matter.

Beginning around the 15th century, another equation was, quite literally, being added to this painterly mix: mathematics, or more specifically, algebraic geometry. The Islamic mathematician Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham (known to the western world by the Latinized version of his first name, “Alhazen”) wrote the first correct explanation of vision, titled Kitab al-Manazir. His work would be translated into Latin in 1270 under the title Optical Thesaurus Alhazeni and would significantly influence the understanding of perspective and illusionistic space in painting.

The connection between mathematics and painting was so strong that by 1306, we already see Giotto di Bondone beginning to introduce systematically informed space into his frescos at the Cappella Scrovegni in Padua. He no longer lined his figures side-by-side in full view as previous artists had done, allowing observers to create their own narrative. Instead, he positions one figure behind the other. In doing this, he begins the tradition of the artist telling the viewer how to see and from what vantage point.

By the middle of the 15th century and continuing throughout the Renaissance, many of the most prominent artists — Filippo Brunelleschi, Piero Della Francesca, and Leonardo da Vinci, to name a few — were also recognized during their time as profound mathematicians and/or scientists.

Al-Haytham’s contribution to the introduction of perspective in painting is important beyond the obvious scientific ramifications. Islam has been distinct among the Abrahamic religions for the continual adherence to the prohibition on representational imagery. Unlike the iconoclastic sects of Christianity and Orthodox Judaism, however, Islam also has a long and rich history of visual arts, due in great part to the focus on geometric rather than representational symbology. Ironically, Al-Haytham would have probably found his contributions towards creating a convincing representational space distressing, if not completely profane.

It might have been a good idea if painters had heeded Mohammed’s warning against representational imagery as a form of idolatry. The seduction of perspective and the desire to create the illusion of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface would overwhelm all other painterly concerns entirely for the next four hundred or so years — and would continue to attract a particular fascination even to the present.

The previously unified languages of symbology and material were torn apart by the seduction of illusionistic space. The material language became subjugated to the language of the craftsman and the worker — still the structure and support of the painting, but pushed into the background, their unique contributions muted.

On the one hand, the language of the symbol was given supremacy over all other languages in painting. So much so that even today, when asked to describe a picture, the viewer will almost always describe the symbols first and will often be completely unaware of the material or other aspects of the work. But on the other hand, it suffered as well: codified through perspective, painters ceased to investigate and mine the symbolic language of art and instead relied on mathematical equations to convince the viewer of the painting’s correctness or success.

It is not surprising, then, that during the Renaissance, artists focused more and more on creating representational space, while their subject matter moved away from the spiritual and religious and towards the scientific and mathematical. Throughout these times, the knowledge and understanding of space, vision, and volume increased tremendously. Still, by the 17th and 18th century, artistic goals were no longer in sync with mathematical and scientific interests. It is easy to imagine Piero Della Francesca and Leonardo da Vinci consorting with the scientists of their days. But it is challenging to think of François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, or even Jacques-Louis David doing so. With perspective firmly in place, the language of the symbol’s most considerable concern had dwindled to “whether or not to ornament.” Symbolic language was drowning in a decorative pool.

Revolution was on the horizon, of course — for humanity as well as for painting. Workers who had long been underfoot, expected to carry the heavy burden of labor while being silent and invisible, began to revolt against supreme monarchies and sun kings. Almost as conspiracy, artists began to incorporate workers rather than rulers as their subject matter. Artists also began to contemplate the neglected language of material in new and fresh ways. One has only to look at Vincent van Gogh’s Red Vineyards near Arles (1888) or Paul Cézanne’s La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue des Lauves (1902) to know that the language of the material was no longer content to sit in the shadows and be at the beck and call of the symbolic language.

It was another scientific discovery that would really take the wind out of the sails for perspective: the camera. While perspective had once been in the realm of great thinkers and mathematicians, the camera now made it possible for anyone to create convincing representational space at the click of a button. For four hundred years, what had been the artist’s most extraordinary feat would now become a common parlor trick. Artists were forced to reevaluate and relearn so much of the artistic language of the past. We see this beginning clumsily as early as the 1780s, when Jacques-Louis David and the neo-classicists turned towards ancient Greek and Roman art. However, it is not until after the horrific devastation of the First World War that artists — and indeed much of society — could break with the conventional supremacy of the modern western world and really begin to embrace the ideas of the past.

It is interesting to note how nearly every major artist of the post-WWI world would begin to eschew illusionistic space, and how many would begin embracing non-western culture. Perhaps one of the reasons Pablo Picasso has been considered such an influential artist of his time was that even in his earliest work, it was apparent he had no interest in creating illusionist space. As soon as he could free himself from its bonds, he began to develop a vibrant world with a newly created symbolic language.

Modern artists continue to sift through the remnants of painting’s various languages, looking for those various shards of Babel. Many contemporary artists — Anselm Kiefer, Joseph Beuys, Antoni Tàpies — attempt to resurrect the once-powerful language of material, making scale and medium the primary subject of their works. The irony that painting once spoke to us in tones of gold and silver and now speaks to us in the muted timbre of felt, lead, and dust should not be lost.