I’m back with Art! (Baroque and Rococco)

Yes! I finally find some time to blog.

If I have said previously that the entries will be more concise, this must be one of those really condensed versions. Perhaps even lacking, because I am not constantly referring to the source material.

Through this half year into a bachelor’s degree course which seems to be rather tiring, I have taken the decision to enforce some ‘preservation of sanity’ POS time for myself to do some other things beyond studies. So I return with a recent update on my newest leisure activity: watching a couple of half-hour videos on the history of western art.

I shan’t attempt to summarise 2 videos on the renaissance and the gothic era, as I can’t really remember. But today’s was on the baroque and the rococco.

Fast slipping my mind but anyway:

The baroque style:
– was initialised after the renaissance. Its primary development (or departure) from the renaissance? Two things. Firstly, a more naturalistic way of depiction. Naturalism, perhaps? (the term was later explained to have developed a rather derogative meaning). Human figures were depicted in more natural, everyday poses (rather than idealised as in the renaissance). Note: Directly after the great achievements of the great masters Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael, later artists immediately preceding adopted an imitative style known as mannerism. But Baroque developed after that. Secondly, the subject matter changed from the divine to the everyday.

Rococco:
– key words: lavish, fluffy, ornate and the like. Rococco developed in France and Italy, and probably elsewhere in Europe, but the works on show were primarily from these places. The Rococco style seemed removed from the normal everyday concerns of daily life for the masses, the subject matter concerned mostly (in the beginning, at least under the Sun King of France Louis the 14th) with the leisurely luxurious lives of the privileged elite. Love (romantic, stupid) featured prominently, perhaps aptly described as the ‘only worry, if at all’ of the lives of those depicted in these pastoral, heaven on earth paradises.

– it took a change for a more realistic view in later years. Perhaps influenced from a wave of support for moralism, the tone shifted to a depiction of satire of the elite (as in Hogarth – funny guy I loved his works when I heard of them! This brilliant artist seemed to have a love of ‘visual satire’ – in his work on The Rake’s Progress, he painted a series which followed a young rich man through his life of splendour and subsequent decline, with the pictures very much painting a clear picture of moral should and should-nots.) or with the depiction of everyday life. Someone did a work, The Blue Boy, which was spectacular for its defying conventions – blue, a receding cover, was never used by the masters as a foreground colour, preferring brighter colours like red for that purpose. But The Blue Boy featured a boy dressed in brilliant blue. And I must say, the work of handling the shading was most perfect. The rendered velvet was most real.)

– The change in depicting more everyday life subjects seem to have come with a separate movement called neo classicism. The underriding sentiment was a desire to revive classic art (Greek, Roman esp) and it seemed, the republican spirit with it. Perhaps a counter to the luxurious make-believe world of the idle echelons of society, it soon became the art of the French Revolution, depicting themes of revolt, liberty, nationalistic fervour.

Greek Art 4th century BC – 1st century AD

Greek art, though already being less rigid and natural compared to the structured rigidity of Egyptian art, continued to perfect its fluid style and its accurate portrayal of the human body.

The transition from the Doric to the Ionic order in architecture showed a shift from the more imposing but simple columns of the Parthenon to something that was slimmer, taller and thus gave the illusion of height and grace.

Similarly in sculpture, Greek art reached new heights with works like the Goddess of Victory, Praxiteles’ Hermes with the young Dionysus, Venus of Milo. Much rigidity has gone, and what is portrayed looks like idealised human forms. Relaxed poses, fluid portrayal of folds in drapery etc.

What is amazing about these statues is that, well, a lot of people thought that Greek artists took many human models, studied them, sculpted them but minused off their deficiencies and perfected them. But if one has really tried to do something like that before one will realise that in the end, what results is a ‘pale and insipid ghost’. Which is why these life-like statues are incredible.

What they did, Gombrich postulates, is exactly the opposite: they followed Egyptian methods of structuring the human body, but asked the question: how do I breathe in life to these structures? Well I guess they succeeded pretty well!

Another development was the transfer of these skills of ‘humanizing’ sculptures from the general model to a particular portrait of reality. Creating a bust of a real figure in history was seldom done in a life-like way (in fact I wonder whether it was commonplace to even immortalise them in stone), but the tactic was soon employed in this manner. Alexander the Great got his court sculptor to portray him with expression. Previous sculptures of real-life people seldom got this treatment, Gombrich attributes it to the difficulty of imprinting an expression on a work of art – he cited the difficulty we all have when we try to add an expression to a face, say, whilst doodling on paper. So this was another development – expression.

With the rise of Alexander and his well-known conquests, art took another new direction. Art from that period on (around 3rd century BC) became dynamic, powerful, expressive, ornate, as though to reflect the growing strength of a unified empire and the wealth and diversity of multi-culturalism. As it was, art ceased to be the concern of a minor Greek city but was ‘the pictorial language of almost half the world’.

Gombrich refers us to the Corinthian order, which to me is primarily recognisable by the graceful spiral volutes of the Ionic being changed into stylised foliage that furnished the top of Corinthian columns. Also to the altar of Zeus from Pergamon, which was more concerned with the portrayal of vibrant movement than in stylised grace.

Laocoon was another work of art that he referred us to, which I personally find rather memorable:

It’s rather dramatic isn’t it. It tells the story of Laocoon, a Trojan priest who had forewarned his fellow citizens to beware the Greek horse, and was punished by the gods who sent two large serpents to suffocate him and his two sons in their coils as they were afraid he would thwart their plans. The story’s from Virgil’s Aeneid.

Yet Gombrich did insert a bit of a personal sentiment here when he describes how he couldn’t help but feel that this could have been art that would appeal to those bloodthirsty for a gladiatorial spectacle. Perhaps this signified a switch in art direction from a period where art was primarily concerned with magic and religion to one where the artist is concerned with the problems of his craft for their own sake: how to sculpt something that would appear most expressive, that would allow the artist to show off his talents? Gombrich ends the paragraph on a rather sad note that perhaps, the fate of Laocoon and his two sons never really occured to the sculptor when he was shaping the stone.

With the empire grew wealth, and wealthy merchants soon began to have the luxury of having a bit of art brought to their villas and what not. Pompeii, an ancient equivalent of a modern luxury resort town, was well-preserved in volcanic ash when Vesuvius, an active volcano nearby, erupted in 79 AD, thus most art pieces are still kept in pretty good condition. Whilst not all works were breathtaking, a few certainly caught the eye, and Gombrich extends this by asking us to imagine how real high quality art of the period would have been if such wonderful portraits were created in a rather unknown little town like Pompeii. I can only imagine.

Another interesting thing about Pompeii was the landscapes that were found there. It may sound rather insignificant but it was a breakthrough, for in previous eras no one really bothered with landscape and when depicted, was only a background for military exploits, which took up the foreground. I guess wealth of a nation really does play a part in art. When poets in the Hellenistic period like Theocritus discovered the simple joys of country folk like shepherds, much attempt to recreate their idyllic lifestyles was done in art. Landscape of this period is interesting for the fact that, at first glance, they look rather normal, like a reflection of reality. However, closer examination would soon inform the viewer that this cannot be, as the laws of perspective are not applied. In fact, Gombrich thinks that the Greek artists of this period still hung on to ancient beliefs that important things are drawn nearer and less important details, in the background. This created illusory depth I suppose.

To round up Gombrich used his favourite philosophy on how the Greeks started off emulating Egyptian (Oriental) art, but added on to it through their own innovative explorations, shaking off the ‘awkward limitations’ of Egyptian structural order.

Another step to modern art: Impressionists on

Apart from Goya and the rest, there arose another stream in the 19th century: Impressionism, which consists of painting not just what the eye sees, but what reaches the eyes, including light beams that ’caused a sensation on (the) retina’. Impressionist paintings can blur and add ’spots’ of white caused by reflection. The painters: Monet, Renoir and a couple of others whose names I’ve forgotten. I personally like some of Renoir’s paintings, but that’s beside the point.
So why paint that way? Rookmaaker claims that earlier on Hume had dealt with an epistemological problem regarding causality. If I let a knife fall 999 times, how can I be sure that it would fall likewise on the 1000th time? Monet and co. struggled with this question too, but as painters.
So what one perceives may not be what really is. ‘Reality… is an unknown X.’ In response to this impressionist painting depicted what the senses perceived, including all the ’spots’.
Around 1885, it was said, the impressionist group started to get restless and had run up to another problem: is what we’re painting really reality? Monet took another step towards modern art: ‘There is no reality. Only the sensations are real’. So his works started to deviate more and more from reality, and grew more and more abstract.
Renoir, on the other hand, didn’t let go of reality that much. Rookmaaker calls it his weakness, for he held on to reality without really quite believing in it. But at the same time his weakness was his strength, for he knew that there was something precious in reality that he was afraid to lose. I think for me, purely aesthetically, Renoir’s style achieved a pretty beautiful kind of midway between reality and a refreshingly alternative way of depicting reality.
Gauguin was another artist from the period who struggled with this question, but who felt that an artist should not just copy nature, rather use specific artistic methods of portrayal to denote certain feelings. Vision after a Sermon is quoted here, it depicts a number of women having left the chapel after a sermon on the fight between Jacob and the Angel. They see the fight taking place in front of their eyes on the field before them, but to show that it is a vision, not reality, Gauguin paints the grass red. Yet, to show that to the women it is as real as any other farmyard triviality, Gauguin paints a real cow on the red grass. Interesting feller.
Gauguin’s art style was expressionism, which his followers adopted too. Rookmaaker writes:
‘The art of Gauguin and his followers… is aimed at synthesis, realising freedom and humanity in art without losing the realism’.
Van Gogh’s answer to the epistemological question was to paint not what his eyes saw, but to express his feelings and experience when faced with reality.
Cezanne decided to paint not only what he saw, but to add reason to it, to understand what he painted. Rookmaaker states that it seemed like Cezanne was trying to uphold the principle of the Enlightenment, that one not only relies on sensory perceptions, but also ropes in reason, to make out what one is witnessing. He was thus a (rather funny) painter who went around changing aspects of nature (‘uproot that tree!’ jk) in order to achieve rational structural composition.
There was at the same time another kind of art that grew in reaction to the academic sort of art carried out by the impressionists and expressionists, and this is art nouveau. It is mystic-romantic art. I don’t think I got Rookmaaker on what their artistic philosophy was, but it seemed that these guys placed a greater emphasis on aesthetics, were ‘enemies of positivism and its dehumanizing science’, and art nouveau influenced the applied arts (creative industries) greatly, even till today. I guess if reality is an unknown X these artists decided instead that an aesthetic interpretation of reality is more worthwhile to depict than a positivist, abstract view of it.

Greek Art, 7th to 5th Century

Greek Art. :) Love the simplistic naturalness.

Greece apparently did start with studying Egyptian art and adopting many Egyptian conventions such as the depiction of the human body from only two angles: the Front, and the Side. But that wasn’t all. They explored. In 400 BC the record breakthrough happened with the discovery of foreshortening. The vase that I saw on the page depicted a man’s foot shown for one of the first times from the front, effectively foreshortened. It may seem like an insignificant accomplishment, but it paved the way for other artistic breakthroughs. Thus Greek artists achieved a balance between an adherence to rules and the freedom to explore.

Greek sculpture ( =) ) was natural, though not a replica of an exact person but done more in the sense that the sculptor drew from his knowledge of the human form to shape a life-like figure.

For example, this! By an early (and impressive!) sculptor called Myron, it looks so natural that Gombrich claims discus throwers try to imitate the pose to find out how ancient men threw the discus. But, hey – soon one figures that there is the same, age old, age old formula of the Egyptians: Myron has shaped his figure such that the best, most outstanding profiles of the different parts of the body are shown, so this might not actually be how discus throwing was like in ancient times! Yet Myron ‘conquered movement’: he found a way to depict it naturally in his sculpture, unlike the rigidity of Egyptian art. It’s a paradox in sculpture (rather like poetry in motion): poised movement.

For Greek art, it seems that Form was not geometric nor angular, but free and relaxed. In a relief entitled ‘Tombstone of Hegeso’, this free and relaxed form was achieved through a harmony of curves: from the curves of the hands, to the curves of objects (in this case a chair), and the drapery that the figures had on them.

Greek art was also concerned with expression, how the representation of the body should reflect the inner life. Socrates (!) who, to my astonishment, was trained as a sculptor, gave the following advice: artists should represent the ‘workings of the soul’ by accurately observing the way ‘feelings affect the body in action’.

Egyptian Art, and Mesopotamian

Much of Egyptian art, in my memory, seems to come from tombstones… Gombrich states that images were made out of the belief that they guaranteed eternal existence. Just as, in earlier times, sacrificial burials in which slaves and family members were buried alive with a great ruler to ensure they accompanied him in the afterlife, images and sculptures of these people (and of the great ruler himself) were made in later times when sacrificial burials were abandoned because they were either too costly or too cruel, in order to ensure Life for Eternity. This was taken so seriously in Ancient Egypt, that sculptors were defined as ‘he-who-keeps-alive’.

Although, whenever Egyptian Art is mentioned, I immediately think of those rigid, geometrical shapes we see on walls as murals, Gombrich presents a very interesting portrait head.

Amazing! The Egyptian artist here chose only to portray the bare essentials, but in the simplicity, we see defining human characteristics.

I think I see a common factor between this portrait head and the geometrical drawings on the walls – restraint. Egyptian art seems to ‘hold back’ – it is conservative. Gombrich describes it as ‘geometric regularity’ coupled with a ‘keen observation of nature’.

I did not see the keen observation of nature in the portraits of gods in human form or humans themselves very much, save for the fact that, yes, they are recognisable as humans or gods in human form. But I liked what Gombrich said about the Egyptian art of drawing the human form, suddenly it made sense to me why Egyptian humans looked so ’strange’. Ever wondered what was ‘wrong’ with this kind of human portrayal?

Look at the angle from which each part of the body is produced:
Head: side
Eye: Front
Body: Front
Limbs: Side (although for this particular picture some hands seem to be shown from the front view)
Feet: Left feet view (because you can only see a big toe from this angle if you’re looking at a left foot, or, in this case, two left feet for every figure)

‘Wahaa?’ Why did Egyptian artists portray people that way?

Gombrich wouldn’t venture to say that they lacked the skill of portraying people realistically, instead, he proposes that Egyptian artists wanted to present each part of the body in the pose that strikes us most vividly. Somehow they felt that the side view of a face was most interesting, the front view of a torso most appealing, limbs from the side portrayed movement more vividly, eyes more alluring from the front, feet were better looking with a big toe peeping… Gombrich wonders if they felt foreshortening was ghastly because it looked like the toes were ‘cut off’? Perhaps.

How did Egyptian artists work? They worked with lines – first they drew lines all about and tried to distribute figures evenly throughout – structural composition. Another thing they demanded was accuracy – this was where I saw the ‘keen observation of nature’ – apparently they drew birds whose species are so exact that modern zoologists can still identify them today.

Egyptian artists loved their conventions and stuck to them pretty much through their long and illustrious history. I guess for their new artists the key word was not Innovation, nor Experimentation, but Convention and Tradition – sticking to old ideas. Thus there wasn’t any change in Egyptian history for a really long period… until… Akhenaten, the one rebel in the whole of Egyptian history it seems. This monarch decided to come along with a less rigid and solemn art, and commissioned a more naturalistic way of painting and sculpture, to the horror of the masses. His successor Tutankhamun adopted some of these practices, apparently, for there was an art piece done of him and his wife where the latter affectionately places her hands on him (something that didn’t happen before in the solemn dignity of Egyptian art in the past) and he is portrayed as slightly slouching on the throne (which is possibly lolling by Egyptian standards). Gombrich ventures a guess, thinking that these two monarchs could have hailed Minoan influences from the little Greek island of Crete, who had a more naturalistic style of art which flourished at the same time, for their sudden changes to Egyptian art history… but anyway, with the passing of Akhanaten, Egypt was more than happy to revert to old ways of painting, and it was back to our rigid geometric regularity again.

So maybe it is too after all, at least in the case of Egypt, the Primitive could produce art realistically, but they just didn’t want to?

I felt it was a shame that Gombrich claimed little is known of Mesopotamia and thus his bit on Mesopotamian art, which I have more interest in, is really a midget. Why is Mesopotamian art less well-known? Gombrich cites 2 reasons: unlike Egypt, these Mesopotamians didn’t seem too fanatical about immortality. So their art, wasn’t built to last. Secondly, instead of using stone, they used dried mud-brick, which crumbles to dust. Again, it wasn’t everlasting.

Looking at Mesopotamian art, I felt their art to be more natural compared to Egyptian art. Themes are more or less the same: battles, real life depictions, heroes etc. It has a convention: people are portrayed in a certain way. Yet it doesn’t appear too rigid. The people, though evidently posed (as compared to the gracefulness of Greek sculpture and the flows of the Baroque), seem to be poised in action, not posed in rigidity, as in Egyptian art.

Primitive Art

I’m not very enthusiastic about these, but I understand they have a place in history.
Gombrich was talking about how primitive people of North America painted horses in their caves. He tried guessing their motives. His theory was, if we imagine our own experiences with photos of people dear to us – we would hardly scratch the eyes of a friend in a photo, although we know that things of that sort would hardly hurt our friend in real life. It’s a strange reaction, and perhaps, after knowing this innate human quality in us, we can venture to apply it to these primitive people who painted horses…

Perhaps the paintings served magic purposes? Perhaps they felt that, if they painted them, it would give them power to subdue these prey? It’s quite an irrational response, but in comparison with what we wouldn’t do with a photo of our friends, pretty likely. In fact when Gombrich related an incident in which a photographer tried to take photographs of horses of tribal people they cried and asked him, ‘If you take them, what would be left us?’, I thought it bore an uncanny resemblance to his hypothesis.

Gombrich next addresses the question: why does primitive art look so remote to us? I guess we no longer share the same worldview and ideals as the people of Old, thus it is hard to understand the rationale behind their art. Somehow, in the geometric simplicity and balance of a totem pole, or a mask with two eyes and a mouth cut out, primitive Man saw a representation of power. To them, a slight tweaking of a pole, just adding two slits for eyes and a larger moon shape for a mouth, transforms the pole entirely. There is a sense of the divine.

Is it because the primitive could not produce life-like images? Gombrich begs to differ, and emphatically, for it is stressed at various points of the book that primitive Man could and occasionally did do something rather life-like, which astonishes his modern reader here quite with what Man can do with primitive tools. I saw a reproduction of this rather life-like sculpture, it’s called the ‘Head of a Negro, probably representing a ruler (Oni), from Ife, Nigeria, 12th – 14th Century. Bronze, Museum of Mankind, London’. Gombrich feels that the primitive did not produce life-like images because they chose not to, that in their own perceptions they felt that the simple geometrical twists they added to the materials they chose to work with was what expressed their own sense of the divine (or whatever else they chose to express) well.

An interesting sculpture I saw was one done of the Aztec rain-god Tlaloc. I can’t find a good picture online! Darn. Anyway Tlaloc is often depicted (from what I saw Gombrich reproduce and what I saw online whilst searching too) in sculpture as a being that is shaped from serpents – think serpentine coils for eyes, nose and an impressive mouth formed by two snakes whose fangs form protruding teeth. Gombrich surmises that this is the result of a primitive association of lightning with serpents – is not a terrifying lightning bolt in the sky reminiscent of the coiling serpent on the ground? He finds it interesting that the Aztecs would choose to portray their god in this way, to me it seems like the sculptural equivalent of metaphors.

In his words: ‘It was certainly fitting to form the image of the rain-god out of the body of the sacred snakes which embodied the power of lightning’.

The Story of Art

Yes! I borrowed a one-volume introduction to art history of sorts by E.H. Gombrich, The Story of Art. It’s a very readable text that aims at introducing the trends in art from primitive ages to the present, minus any unfamiliar technical jargon that may confuse beginners. It especially appeals to me because Gombrich said in his preface that when he wrote the book he had teenagers who were just beginning to get exposed to art and would like to take a step further in examining the subject in mind. :) Like me!
Another good thing about the book is that Gombrich laid down a rule: he would never write about pieces that he couldn’t show on the book (something, I am afraid, I can’t do on my blog). So no confusion, and certainly no need to borrow another book to view works that you never knew existed.

Another initial step to Modern Art

That’s lifting from one of the subheadings of the book.
There was a reaction the the facts-only portrayal in Art. William Blake (who was also a Romantic poet ;) ) reacted against the Machine Age. Reminding me a bit of myself in years past, he invailed against technology, and his works were full of lyrical natural depictions. He designed his own covers for his manuscripts, and the one on his Songs of Innocence and Experience was typical: the words swirled into long, leafy beanstalk like structures that told of the irrationality of his Art (and his message of free love).
There was also another stream called Romantic, and this seemed to deal with landscape paintings that depicted an idyllic pastoral theme.
Now we come to a theme I found rather interesting. Rookmaaker devotes this section to discussing ‘Christian’ paintings, and I believe by this term that he meant ‘Christian’ rather loosely, to refer to art that was not iconically religious but which was done by people who were themselves adherents of the faith, whether or not they were weak, or strong in it.
The art of the period (Enlightenment) showed that Christ was, ‘to borrow a term from mathematics… extrapolated’ from the canvas. Rookmaaker cites three cases: Leys’ Women praying at a Crucifix near St. James in Antwerp, where we see a group of women fervently praying, but the object of their prayers is nowhere to be found. The message: physical reality, painting what the eye saw. God could not be seen, therefore was not in the world, and so he was ‘extrapolated’.
In the second example, Ciseri’s Ecce Homo, we see Pilate and wife, but where is Christ? The scene is factually real, it is the scene a detached onlooker would probably have found if he was at Pilate’s place at the time: Pilate’s back is facing the onlooker, he is looking out of a Roman balcony, important Roman officials are poised naturally around, his wife is walking dejectly somewhere from the right… But that is about it. There is no other message to this piece of art save its factuality. And that was the message, the worldview, that the painter was trying to put across: paint things as they are, because all that is, is.
The third example was, aside from being slightly blasphemous to me personally, rather hilarious if we took it light-heartedly and detachedly. Holman Hunt’s The Shadow of Death shows Christ in a carpentry setting stretching, and his shadow in the shape of a Cross imprinted on the wall behind him. Rookmaaker felt that ‘the painter shows us nothing of any depth or importance at all… Here is a fact, of no importance … and we are invited to give it meaning, within us, in our feelings (certainly not with our intelligence)’.

The Steps to Modern Art

Here I aim to summarise the book by Rookmaaker, ‘Modern Art and the Death of a Culture’. I believe the blurb. It is ‘illuminating’. I swear I won’t be able to look at an art piece the same way again.
Book starts with Byzantine art, trying to cover the periods before modern art so as to show the causes that set the foundations for modern art. Byzantine art is iconic. Rookmaaker says of a typical Byzantine painting of the Madonna that it is a sermon on Mary, if you like. It tells people that you can come to Mary with your troubles and she will help you. In other words it is not a realistic portrayal of Mary, or a sensational (what one senses) portrayal of Mary. It has a central message that it is trying to get through with its portrayal of Mary.
The quote to remember for this period of Art: The Message is in the Medium.

Then came Medieval times, which scholastic theology had great influence upon. It drew a dualism between the realm of Grace and Nature. The Heavens were where Grace, the ideal, was found, and that is what mortals should aim for, but here on earth, Nature is all there is, and Reason reigns, by virtue of it being the only way we can perceive Nature. Reality is only understood by sensory perceptions.
In the Renaissance this was played out when people decided that since earth was where Nature is all that there is, God was out of the equation (relegated to the Heavens) and so Humanism was born. Everything became an attempt by Man to understand the world and achieve perfection in his Natural sphere…
This gave way to Enlightenment tendencies. This is the point where God becomes totally isolated from the picture. If reality is only understood by sensory perceptions, Man’s reason is the only tool to understanding the world. Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) was the central principle of the day.

This deviates a bit from the Art trend, but what happened after God was taken out of the equation and Reason was heightened was that the iconic style of painting disappeared. Rookmaaker did take pains to emphasise that Art was not about just the Aesthetic: Art has a central message that is depicted in the Medium.

So in the Renaissance period artists realized they couldn’t just paint an icon. Sensual reality became important as well. Rookmaaker uses Rembrandt’s Christ on the Road to Emmaus to illustrate: Rembrandt wants to show that Christ is the central figure in the story of his journeying with two believers after his resurrection to their place for supper, yet he doesn’t want to abandon reality by depicting Christ was a yellow halo around his head. Rembrandt wanted to paint a picture that would look real, befitting the actual scenario. So Rembrandt solves the problem pretty neatly by structural composition that makes it apparent to the onlooker which of the three figures is Christ.

In the Enlightenment sensual reality took an even more important row. Ideals as the Message disappeared. For instance, in the Renaissance, it was common for art to be done about Venus, the Roman goddess of Love and Beauty. Nobody believed she actually existed or worshipped her, but she stood for an Ideal: Love and Beauty. But in the Enlightenment there was to be no more of that. Everything had to be known through the senses. Why paint a picture of something that you did not believe in.

So gradually people painted what they saw. Be it landscape or portraits. A landscape by Turner entitled Rain, Steam and Speed painted, not pictorial reality, but what one would expect to see on a rainy day: an obscured, hazed, blurred vision of a train speeding along. The portrait example that I found most ridiculous (but also most powerful) was that of the evolved Venus: Venus paintings of Old were nude portraits of idealized women signifying Beauty and Love, but Ingres painted what a nude would probably be in reality: a very unabashed prostitute staring out of the canvas. She happened to be a figure of some notoriety, which, Rookmaaker surmised, must have shocked many contemporaries. But it made a point: Venus, the Ideals, were really and truly dead.