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The art of describing, The art of describing - Coggle Diagram

- - - - In calling for a fine artist (De Gheyn) to record what he sees in a microscopic lens, Huygens assumes that picturing serves a descriptive function.
        
        The artist and his art are linked in this conclusion not to the noble tales, the beautiful bodies, and the expressive gestures of history painting, but quite simply to the world seen, the world known through seeing rather than through reading.
        
        Huygens displays an extraordinary optimism about the entire enterprise of the new science for traditional theological reasons. He was certain that God's great plan was being more fully discovered in the lessons of the microscope and the telescope, the camera obscura.
        
        The contrast between the teachings of antiquity and the discoveries of modern technology and science
        
        Images are thus tied to an advancement of learning. knowledge that takes the form of a picture
  - - - looking dressed-up rather than transformed
      - the eyes cannot by themselves estimate distance and size. It is this that telescopes and microscopes made clear in the seventeenth century.
  - - - The link between pictorial depiction and natural knowledge in the writings of Huygens is not based on mathematics or scientific theory, but rather on observations, experimental procedures, and their practical out- come.
        
        Until recently, art historians have tended to separate high art, on the one hand, from image-making as a craft with utilitarian uses.
- - - - Rembrandt, finally, turned from the art of describing in order to evoke time past.
- - - - The aim of Dutch painters was to capture on a surface a great range of knowledge and information about the world
        
        Theirs was not a window on the Italian model of art but rather, like a map, a surface on which is laid out an assemblage of the world.
        
        It is a commonplace of cartographic literature that maps combine art and science
        
        here is assumed to be an inverse proportion between the amount of art displayed and the amount of informa- tion conveyed. Art and science, even when combined, are in some conflict.
        
        the map allowed one to see something that was otherwise invisible, the same can be said about the microscope and about the dutch art
        
        two major types of images :the panoramic or what I should prefer to call the mapped landscape
        view, and the cityscape or topographical city view.
        
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- - - - The problem faced by a modern viewer is how to make this art strange, how to see what is special about an art with which we feel so at home, whose pleasures seem so obvious.
        
        The distinction between this seventeenth- century emphasis on seeing and representation and the Renaissance emphasis on reading and interpretation has been illuminated recently for us in the writings of Michel Foucault
        
        you cannot tell the story of a Dutch painting, you can only look at it
- - - - drawing all things after life just as they are seen, to put nature seen before personal style or self
        
        the self is identified with the images of the world stored in the mind = working out of one's store of visual memories constituted working out of oneself
        
        Alberti's picture, by contrast, begins not with the world seen, but with a viewer who is actively looking out at object; The picture is not claimed to be part of vision but is indeed the artist's construction, an expression in paint - And so much are we heir to this view of man, or perhaps more particularly so much are art historians heir to this view of artistic representation, that it is hard to see it as a particular modality and not just the way representational art is.
        
        There is probably no artist or writer who meditated as continuously and as deeply on the relationship between seeing, knowing, and picturing the world as did Leonardo da Vinci.
        
        But if the picture takes the place of the eye then the viewer is nowhere. Though fascinated with appearances, Leonardo fears giving himself over to such demands of total absorption and fears the sacrifice of rational human choices that this notion of picturing assumed.
        
        The conflict is one between passive self-absorption and active making.
        
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        historical precedence for the photographic image
        
        the issue is not "record of fact" versus the "look" of things, it is not different ways of perceiving the world, but two different modes of picturing the world: on the one hand the picture considered as an object in the world, a framed window to which we bring our eyes, on the other hand the picture taking the place of the eye with the frame and our location thus left undefined
        
        working surface without the intervention of viewer
        
        Giorgione achieves a comprehensive view of the figure by addition, as it were, by putting together separate views.having the viewer enabled to see all around the figure in a single glance.
        
        Or the device of thefigura serpentinata, a figure twisted around itself like Bronzino's St. john the Baptist (fig. 34), is used in such a way as to reveal more sides to view. We can trace the history of this Italian manner of picturing right up to Picasso
        
        a perspective picture is made up of a sum of representations
        
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- - - - A king, in this essentially leveling view, is but one individual among all the others and the problem is how to tell him apart as an individual. Identity (in this case of an individual man) is valued over and even opposed to resemblance (in this case to a kingly look).
        
        one could say that Italian art was based on an intentional turning away from individuality in the name of general human traits and general truths. In such an art resemblance to certain ideals of appearance or of action
        
        The Dutch trust to and privileging of portraiture, which is at the center of their entire pictorial tradition, is connected on the other hand to a desire to preserve the identity of each person and each thing in the world.
        
        deconstructed wonders
        
        calls attention to the fact that the world is known not through being visible, but through the particular instruments that mediate what is seen. Size, for example, is relative and dependent on the seer.
        
        the strategy is to see multiple views of one individual (the mouse), or to multiply the number of individuals seen (the skulls), the aim is to draw our attention to the various features of mouse or skull. It is a fragmenting approach.
        
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- - - - Saenredam's aim in diminishing his role as creator is to give priority to the documentation of the church seen and thus to present the picture itself as a document of a particular kind
        
        In each instance word and image combine to document the claim the object has on our attention without any recourse to narrative entanglements
        
        The inscription, in other words, does not seem to be providing an interpretive key to the painting. The circumscribed nature of any representation
        
        What is suggested in the pictures is not the content of the letters, the lovers' feelings, their plans to meet, or the practice and the experience of love, but rather the letter as an object of visual attention, a surface to be looked at. The attention that Ter Borch's woman directs at the letter's surface replicates the way in which we as viewers of the picture are invited to attend to various surfaces displayed: the pearl at her ear and its blue bow; the curls of hair; the fringe of the carpet; the pillow in the corner.
        
        We have already found evidence in our study of maps of a continuity between writing and drawing.an Mander introduces the letter because of its ability to close distances, to make something present, to communicate secretly.
        
        the letter was treated at the time as a prime object of vision. What was communicated was intended for the eyes alone.
        
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- - - - Word and image combine to document smth without using any narratives
  - - - The attention that Ter Borch's woman directs at the letter's surface replicates the way in which we as viewers of the picture are invited to attend to various surfaces displayed: the pearl at her ear ; the curls of hair; the pillow in the corner.
      - Vermeer still remains true to the presence of the letter as a text that absorbs attention while remaining inacces-
        sible.
  - - - Rembrandt in the Abraham and Isaac etching focuses our attention on the relationship between speaker and listener.
      - Rubens as offering an alternative to the northern tradition.
- - - - For example: the justly proportioned human body-constructed or imagined, but never seen
  - - - If we have the working surface without the intervention of viewer we can try to show the world not as it seem but as it is
        
        we can give a comprehensive view of the figure by putting together separate views
        
        fragmenting approach
        
        JACQUES DE GHEYN, Four Mice: the strategy is to see multiple views of one individual (the mouse), or to multiply the number of individuals seen (the skulls), the aim is to draw our attention to the various features of mouse or skull.
        
        rolling the object over and over by trying to show different aspects of it
        
        to make the world free from the confusions of our senses
    - - Attentive looking, observational craft
        
        locates God in the details of His creation.
      - representing everything else in nature exactly and unselectively
      - Pictures document or represent humen's behavior. They are descriptive rather than prescriptive.
      - to preserve the identity of each person and each thing in the world
    - - Rembrandt rejects the notion of knowledge and of human experience that dominates Dutch images
        
        he turns away from the craft of representation
      - Vermeer's exemplary role in the definition of the art of describing
        
        He meditates on the knowledge and descriptive function of the picture
- - - - Picture as the historical precedence for the photographic image
        
        to preserve the identity of each person and each thing in the world
        
        the oddities were thought to expand knowledge of God's creation
- - - - two major types of images :the panoramic or what I should prefer to call the mapped landscape view, and the cityscape or topographical city view.
        
        Goltzius was the first to go out and draw what he saw, he uses bird's-eye view, the manner in which the surface of the earth has been transformed onto a·flat, two-dimensional surface
        
        history is pictured by putting before our eyes an enriched description of place rather than the drama of human events
- - - - Huygens displays an extraordinary optimism about the new science for traditional theological reasons. He was certain that God's great plan was being more fully discovered in the lessons of the microscope and the telescope, the camera obscura.
        
        Images are thus tied to an advancement of learning. knowledge that takes the form of a picture
        
        Utilitarian function of art