Pictorial Space throughout Art History: Cézanne and ... - ARAS
Pictorial Space throughout Art History: Cézanne and ... - ARAS
Pictorial Space throughout Art History: Cézanne and ... - ARAS
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<strong>ARAS</strong> Connections Issue 2, 2012<br />
|45| inspired by a scene. The prose description may be vivid <strong>and</strong> interesting but it<br />
lacks a unified structure.<br />
There are other kinds of unity besides spatial unity. The surface can be<br />
unified, color can be unified, <strong>and</strong> the composition (arrangement of shapes <strong>and</strong><br />
lines) can be unified. Even if the painting is unified in all these ways, however,<br />
the spatial problem remains; unless it is resolved the painting will be structurally<br />
fragmented.<br />
Why is a unified structure important? Who is to say that unity should be a<br />
criterion of quality? Only when a painting's structure is unified does it become a<br />
living universe, complete unto itself. All the internal components of an animal, its<br />
heart <strong>and</strong> lungs <strong>and</strong> liver for example, have to be consistent with its overall limits<br />
of size <strong>and</strong> metabolic rate. Every animal is unique <strong>and</strong> some are more vigorous<br />
than others but each must be internally balanced. Otherwise it dies <strong>and</strong><br />
disintegrates. A painting that functions as a window is like a picture of an animal,<br />
while a painting that is structurally unified is like the live animal itself.<br />
Plotonius wrote in the second century A.D.:<br />
It is by the One that all beings are beings ... for what could exist were it<br />
not one? If not a one, a thing is not. No army, no choir, no flock exists<br />
except it can be one ... It is the same with plant <strong>and</strong> animal bodies; each<br />
of them is a unit ... Health is contingent upon the body's being<br />
coordinated in unity; beauty, upon the mastery of the parts by the One;<br />
the soul's virtue, upon unification into one sole coherence |46|.<br />
The window concept of painting became prevalent during the Renaissance<br />
when painters strove for realism using the new sciences of perspective <strong>and</strong><br />
anatomy. Many art historians argue that pre-Renaissance painting is flat because<br />
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