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'Where System’ Seeing and the Venetian School
The Lord knows well what he (Titian) does, for if those painters knew how to draw, they would not be men, but angels. [i]
- Michelangelo
The drawing of Michelangelo and the color of Titian.
- Tintoretto
Colore or disegno? Which is primary, color or line? It’s been the biggest formal dilemma in western painting since the Renaissance, first emerging as a heated artistic rivalry between the cities of Florence and Venice in the mid sixteenth century. Two figures at the forefront of each city’s art scene, Titian and Michelangelo, formed the center of the controversy.
While two unique flavors of painting had been developing in each region for some time, it was not until 1550 that Vasari published his first edition of Vite, making the debate overt and public. Vite, or Lives of the Artist’s, was not merely a series of biographies but a treatise on the superiority of Florentine and therefore Roman art. Vasari named Michelangelo, the undisputed champion of the Roman art arena, as the greatest living artist. The Roman painting style (influenced by classical sculpture) was based on clear linear forms and pre-planed compositions -- what Vasari called disegno. But something entirely different was beginning to happen in Venice. [ii]
First, Venice had been influenced by the rich coloration of Flemish painting. Then in the very early sixteenth century, Bellini, Giorgione and Titian moved from the saturated, concisely contained, jewel-like hues of the Flemish to something seventeenth century critics would later refer to as colore. Rather than the specific color of particular objects, colore stood for the over-all tonal quality of a picture, along with the character and variety of its paint handling.
In Rome Michelangelo and Raphael were sometimes using saturated color as well. But their hues were either bounded by concise edges or meted out in subtle gradations. Color could be decorative, but its main function was to aid in the creation of a surface that was always segregated from other forms: its role was subservient to line. While Raphael and Michelangelo were perfecting this kind of crystal-clear painting, Giorgione and Titian were exploring the full range of what oil paint could do, inflecting the surfaces of their canvases in more experimental ways.
As the Venetian style began to flourish adherents of Florentine classicism sometimes praised its charm and beauty but invariably saw it as unfinished, undisciplined, and intellectually inferior. Specific edges are lost in these paintings, shapes become open, more full of atmosphere. Different layers of the surface begin to show through and a whole variety of new paint applications begin to appear, ranging from thin, even glazes to thick, encrusted impastoes. Multiple layers of dry-brush are often woven over the surface of these canvases like delicate tapestry; and there is what the Venetian critic Ridolphi would come to call colpi, or “stabs”: i.e. broken brushwork, energetic strokes like those we normally associate with the impressionists.
Vasari’s claim of Roman/Florentine superiority was challenged in 1557 by the Venetian critic Paulo Pino, who compared the richness of Titian’s more organic technique to “nature in all its variety,” characterizing it as more true-to-life than the Florentine style. But in 1568 Vasari would counter Pino with his second edition of Vite, positing the existence of an underlying logical form beneath nature which he linked to the more rational, formal structure at the root of Florentine painting. [iii]
In 1590, Paolo Lamazzo, rather than seeing the two polarities as diametrically opposed, encouraged artists to push both the effect of colore and the logic of disegno together on the same canvas. He envisioned his ideal painting as an Adam drawn by Michelangelo and colored by Titian, alongside an Eve drawn by Raphael and colored by Correggio. [iv]
The argument continued throughout the seventheenth and eighteenth centuries, and in a slightly modified form into the 20th.. This dialectic helped drive much of the best in European painting; some artists more clearly choosing a side, some opting for a tenuous fusion, others changing their emphasis over the length of their careers.
What lies at the center of this conflict between color and line? Is it a matter of stylistic preference and temperament? Or is there an objective tension here, some fundamental difference in how the two styles engage human perception?
One explanation is that Venetian painters began using blurred edges and soft, enveloping light in response to their visual environment. Venice is notoriously humid and foggy, like the rest of the Po river valley. This suggestion is perhaps partly true but by no means a complete explanation. Leonardo was well ahead of the Venetians in terms of atmospheric painting, producing Madonna of the Rocks in 1486 while living in Milan (also located near the Po and notoriously foggy) when Giorgione was just nine years old and Belini was still painting in a clean-edged, Flemish-like style with only small hints of something blurrier. Neither would produce a painting of comparable atmospheric effect until around 1505, the year Giorgione produced Boy with an Arrow.
In the next few years Giorgione and then Titian would create works with even more ethereal passages than Leonardo, but they were doing something beyond merely suggesting intervening air or varying depths of field. Both he and Titian began to place layers of beaded paint over other tones, gently fracturing the surface of their forms and breaking up the contiguity of tone and hue in complex ways. They were using loaded brush marks with multiple hues in one stroke and then dragging delicate flicks of paint lightly over the gridded grain of the canvas, touching only the top of the weave and leaving other tones visible underneath. From close-up these marks often float over the form, obliterating specific borders between objects but creating fluid tonal relationships with striking verisimilitude. These techniques break up visual acuity in ways that evoke the kind of visual experience we have outside of the fovea.
The fovea is where we see the world most clearly. While the rest of the retina is covered by an opalescent membrane, the fovea resides at an opening right in the middle of it. Here, light traveling through the eye is able to pass directly to the receptor cells on the surface of the retina. Foveal seeing only extends about one degree in each direction from the center of our vision, and acuity breaks down quickly from there. Not only does light have to pass through the milky layer of cells which line most of the retina, but there are very few cone receptor cells in the non-foveal part of our vision. The cones are mostly found in the fovea and are capable of high acuity seeing. Rods are virtually non-existent in the very center of the retina, but become prevalent outside the small area of the fovea. [v]
The membrane that covers most of the retina protects the more light sensitive rods, which are used in night seeing. So our peripheral vision is more sensitive to changes in light but has lower acuity than the very small area of the fovea; which is less sensitive to luminance but much more able to distinguish detail. Our sentient experience of reality is generally centered around the fovea, we continually move our eyes around so that we are looking through it at the thing we are conscious of. But there is another reason why foveal seeing is more conscious. There are two distinct regions where visual perception is processed. These two areas are separated in the brain and deal with different aspects of seeing. The where system is located lower down and toward the back of the skull, nearer to parts of the brain that control less conscious biological processes and physical coordination. The what system is higher up and more toward the front of the skull, nearer to the centers of the cerebral cortex that deal with more conscious, intellectual thought processes. The what system recognizes things, sorting out difference in detailed patterns. It’s the system that allows us to read, and the system more closely related to Vasari’s rational disegno: but the where system is more sensitive to movement, light, location and over-all changes in value.[vi]
Signals from the cones (more prevalent in the fovea) are processed in the what system. Nerve messages from rods are sent to the more unconscious where system. [vii]Part of the dynamic of looking at a late painting of Titian’s like The Flaying of Marsayas is that it sets off associations with more unconscious, non-foveal, where system seeing. We look at the surface of the painting and are denied an exact sense of edge or surface recognition. Then our eye feels forced to look around at some other passage, as though we were trying to “foveate” our vision. But the overall values convince us that the scene still feels like “nature,” alive and “in all its variety,” as we would perceive it out of our more intuitive peripheral sight. When we focus closely on the surface of the painting our what system, rather than getting the illusion of a specific, sculptural effect, recognizes the complex painted surface as just that: a complex painted surface. When this happens there is also an awareness of the colpi, active “stabs” of paint, and with it the sense that we can feel the movement or action of the artist’s hand in the process of painting. Because of the associations we have with motion and where system seeing, this sense of the artist’s action coheres with the visual illusion in the painting, adding to its sense of life-likeness.
It’s no wonder sixteenth century artists and critics framed the disegno and colore debate around reason and intuition, form and life-likeness. It’s not just that one style seems to have been created with a different kind of temperament, but each one directly affects the mind in a different way through the eyes.
[i] Loh, Maria H. 2007. Titian remade: repetition and the transformation of early modern Italian art. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute.
[ii] Disegno e colore, Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T022879?q=disegno+and+colore&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Livingstone, Margaret. 2008. Vision and art: the biology of seeing. New York: Abrams, pp. 24-26
[vi] Livingstone, Margaret. 2008. Vision and art: the biology of seeing. New York: Abrams, pp. 24-26, 50-52
[vii] Livingstone, Margaret. 2008. Vision and art: the biology of seeing. New York: Abrams, pp. 24-26, 50-52