 |
| Hope: G.F. Watts |
In my last post on Burne-Jones I talked a little about the difference between his poetic style of painting by comparison with the more realistic style of Millais and the other first wave of Pre-Raphaelite painters, and in this post I propose to say a little more about this difference both in terms of style and technique and we will see how the one can affect the other.
I have borrowed my title from a talk given by Ruskin at Oxford in the early 1880's, one of a series of six lectures published under the title of "The Art of England". Ruskin meant by the word "mythic" the desire to represent general truths rather than specific facts. One of the examples he chooses to illustrate the "realistic" school is a watercolour by Rossetti of "The Virgin in the house of St.John" where Mary is depicted rising in the morning to trim her lamp. Although the incident may have symbolic value it is presented in such a way as to impress on the viewers' mind the absolute veracity of the thing actually having happened. The contrast with the mythic school thus becomes clearer; here we are concerned primarily with the presentation of symbols and personification and the two artists he chooses to represent the mythic school are Watts and Burne-Jones. He summarises the difference between the two modes of thought thus: " had both Rossetti and Burne-Jones been set to illustrate the first chapter of Genesis, Rossetti would have painted either Adam or Eve - but Edward Burne-Jones a Day of Creation.
My experience at the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition was that the "mythic" school of painting, as represented primarily by Burne-Jones, seemed to suggest a deeper truth, to be in a sense more true, than the realistic school, although I accept of course that is entirely a matter of temperament and has no objective basis in reality. Nonetheless as a painter I am always interested in how a thing is done, and so I then move on to the thorny question of why should this be so. What is it about the mythic school which seems to me to reveal something more profound? Here we come to the point which I often come back to in the analysis of painting, ie the means of expression at an artists' disposal are in fact fairly limited. Critics will talk of abstract emotions, of the anguish, joy or sympathy with the plight of lovers or whatever it may be that a painter puts in to his pictures but as a painter I have looked in vain in the art supplies shops for a tube of paint marked "empathy". They don't exist. All an artist has is a range of colours and the ability to arrange them on a flat surface. Subject of course is important, more important even I must confess than I used to be prepared to admit, but it is not as all important as many people might think. Here to demonstrate the point are two pictures of a very similar subject
 |
| Arthur Hughes ; The Nativity |
 |
| Madonna and Child with St.John: Bouguereau. |
One of the most interesting points a comparison of these two pictures raises, interesting especially for a practising painter, is how does the level of realism utilised by the artist effect the response of the viewer. Or to put it in the terms of the debate about the realist and mythic schools, do the different schools demand or require different levels of realism. It is fairly obvious that an artist who is intent on emphasising the actual facts of the scene depicted is hardly able to over play the realism of his or her technique but what interests me is does a similar technique help or hinder a painter of the mythic school in his attempt to portray the general or universal rather than the specific? If we look at Bouguereau's picture we are struck by the reality of the figures, by their weight and solidity, and of the props likewise, we feel we could give our knees a nasty crack against the Madonna's marble throne. The message of the picture is partly at least therefore, "this is real, the Christ child was also a human child, very similar to any we might meet every day of our lives". In comparison, look at the little picture by Hughes, surely what is being stressed here is the miraculous nature of the incarnation, what we see is a vision of something other, the fact of such an event once having taken place in history at a specific time and place is surely of secondary importance to the universal and on-going miraculous nature of that event.
What are the technical means deployed by the two painters to help convey the different messages? The thing which distinguishes the Hughes from the Bouguereau above all is the flatness of the former. This flatness is apparent in two ways; firstly in terms of the overall composition, the figures are pushed up towards the picture plane and it is hardly possible to imagine walking around the manger whereas with Bouguereau the space is fully articulated, there is not a great deal of depth but everything is in its place. Secondly and perhaps more importantly the figures and objects in the Hughes picture are painted with the minimum amount of chiaroscuro. The development of chiaroscuro (literally light and dark) which occurred in painting around the turn of the sixteenth century was greeted as a great step forward in the quest to depict the natural world and was seized upon by almost all painters of the period. A generation or two later, the Mannerists had already come to realise that accurate depiction of natural light phenomena was a double edged sword and one great painter of the earlier period also seemed to sense the possible dangers and ignored it, to the great harm, it must be said, of his career at the time and subsequent reputation for almost three centuries. That painter of course was Botticelli, and its no accident I think, that the painter most concerned with mystery and allegory should have felt the new methods of realism would not help him achieve his aims. A picture such as this surely depends at least partly for its impact on the fact we don't pause for a moment to consider whether it depicts an historical fact.
 |
| Mystic Nativity: Botticelli |
 |
| The Transfiguration of Christ: Raphael |
What we can see here is a demonstration of the interesting fact that most masters of the High Renaissance were happy to light their figures with a studio light even when they were placed outdoors, giving them a full tonal range and thus a great degree of roundness and solidity which, in fact would never be the case in an outdoor light. It is done so skilfully that the unnaturalness of the lighting tends to pass unnoticed. Botticelli's figures on the other hand have enough chiaroscuro to prevent them looking perfectly flat like a playing card but no more. Solidity is not one of his concerns and I think it reasonable to suggest that too much solidity and thus too much reality can be counter productive for the painter who wishes to deal with allegories and archetypes. Ruskin himself was certainly aware of the fact that too much realism could be inimical to symbolism. The critic who insisted on the minutest observation of nature for the painter of nature was also able to say :" I cannot...demand botanical accuracy in the graining of the wood employed for the spokes of a Wheel of Fortune. Indeed .... I am under an instinctive impression that some kind of strangeness or quaintness, or even violation of probability, would be not merely admissable, but even desirable, in the delineation of a figure intended to represent ... an idea or an aphorism." Well there is certainly no shortage of strangeness or quaintness in this wonderful picture by Botticelli
Burne-Jones, the starting point of this inquiry himself mused over the same problem, He once said that his pictures ended up as being "a reflection of a reflection of something purely imaginary". This wasn't merely a pretty turn of phrase but an accurate way of describing his work process. If he wanted a prop in a painting he would, if it were something complicated, have it made, armour particularly, then he would make studies from the made item and then make the final image on canvas from those studies. I can't help but feel that he was thus intentionally keeping realism at arm's length, he didn't want to get too involved in the physical matter of his pictures for fear that it would muddy the poetic matter. There is no "botanical accuracy in the graining of the wood" in this picture below and it would seem that Burne-Jones agreed with Ruskin that that was to the pictures benefit rather than otherwise.
 |
| The Wheel of Fortune: Burne-Jones |
 |
| Hesiod: Moreau |
