“Works of art in earlier traditions celebrated wealth. But wealth was then a symbol of a fixed social or divine order. Oil painting celebrated a new kind of wealth- which was dynamic and which found its only sanction in the supreme buying power of money. Thus painting itself had to be able to demonstrate the desirability of what money could buy. And the visual desirability of what can be bought lies in its tangibility, in how it will reward the touch, the hand, of the owner” (90). Here I once again see the power that the subject has. This makes me wonder what works of art celebrate now.
“This was a problem which persisted throughout the tradition. When metaphysical symbols are introduced (and realistic skulls as symbols of death), their symbolism is usually made unconvincing or unnatural by the unequivocal, static materialism of the painting-method.” (91). Is this because it looks different from the rest of the painting and therefore loses its power? Is the artist’s goal to even make a metaphysical symbol look natural? I could see one going for either effect.
I find it extremely interesting that religious oil paintings do not work or cannot work in a sense. The example of Mary Magdalene is a great one. Although she is supposed to be depicted as a changed woman, “the paint cannot free itself of its original propensity to procure the tangible for the immediate pleasure of the owner…This method of painting is incapable of making the renunciation she is meant to have made. She is painted as being, before she is anything else, a takeable and desirable woman. She is still the compliant object of the painting-method’s seduction” (92). Is this the inevitable fate of women in paintings?
I love the idea of William Blake as the exception to this, “He did everything he could to make his figures lose substance, to become transparent and indeterminate one from the other, to defy gravity, to be present but intangible, to glow without a definable surface not to be reduced to objects” (93).
“Let us now return to the two ambassadors, to their presence as men. This will mean reading the painting differently: not at the level of what it shows within its frame, but at the level of what it refers to outside it” (94). From this reiteration of the gender roles in painting, it is clear that these should be constantly kept in mind.
I am getting from this book that there comes a time in art where more understanding can be reaped from knowledge of history. I guess it’s like that with everything.
“The conflict again emerges in the painting-method. The surface verisimilitude of oil painting tends to make the viewer assume that he is close to- within touching distance of- any object in the foreground of the picture. If the object is a person such proximity implies a certain intimacy ” (97).
“Prior to the recent interest in ecology, nature was not thought of as the object of the activities of capitalism; rather it was thought of as the arena in which capitalism and social life and each individual life had its beginning. Aspects of nature were objects of scientific study, but nature-as-a-whole defied possession ” (105).
