Pictorial Space throughout Art History: Cézanne and ... - ARAS

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