Desportes, Alexandre-François: Landscape with a Dog and PartridgesLandscape with a Dog and Partridges, oil on canvas by Alexandre-François Desportes, 1719; in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 111.76 × 143.51 cm.Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of The Ahmanson Foundation (AC1993.39.1), www.lacma.org
Increasing interest is shown in notable painters’ versions of other artists’ works. These are not academic copies (such as the study made by Matisse, when a student, of Chardin’s La Raie) but creative transcriptions. Examples that can be appreciated as original paintings are those by Miró of Sorgh’s Lute Player; by Watteau of Rubens’s Apotheosis of James I; by Degas of Bellini’s Jealous Husband; by Caulfield of Delacroix’s Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi; by Larry Rivers of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Mlle Rivière; and by Picasso of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Velázquez’s Las Meñinas, and Delacroix’s Woman of Algiers (which produced Roy Lichtenstein’s Femmes d’Alger, After Picasso, After Delacroix). Picasso has also painted free versions of works by El Greco, Lucas Cranach, Poussin, and Courbet, as Rubens had of Mantegna and Titian, Rembrandt of Persian and Indian miniatures, Cézanne of Rubens and El Greco, and van Gogh of Millet, Gustave Doré, and Delacroix.
In an abstract painting, ideas, emotions, and visual sensations are communicated solely through lines, shapes, colours, and textures that have no representational significance. The subject of an abstract painting may be therefore a proposition about the creative painting process itself or exclusively about the formal elements of painting, demonstrating the behaviour of juxtaposed colours and shapes and the movements and tensions between them, their optical metamorphosis and spatial ambiguities. Many abstracts, however, are more than visual formal exercises and produce physical and emotional reactions in the spectator to illusions of shapes and colours that appear to rise and fall, recede and advance, balance and float, disintegrate and re-form; or of moods created of joy, sadness, peace, or foreboding; or of effects produced by light or by flickering or throbbing movement. Some abstracts evoke the atmosphere of a particular time, place, or event; and then their titles may be significant: Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive (Robert Motherwell); Late Morning (Bridget Riley); Broadway Boogie Woogie (Piet Mondrian); Gold of Venice (Lucio Fontana); Capricious Forms (Wassily Kandinsky). Symbolism
Most early cultures developed iconographic systems that included prescriptions for the site, design, function, form, medium, subject matter, and imagery of their painting. The siting of early Byzantine murals, for instance, echoed the symbolic, architectural planning of the basilica. Thus, a stylized, linear image of Christ, surrounded by heavenly hosts, occupied the central dome; the Virgin was represented in the apse; and stiff figures of apostles, prophets, martyrs, and patriarchs occupied the aisle walls. The format of early devotional paintings was also prescribed, Christian and Buddhist deities being placed in the focal centre of the design, above the eye level of the audience and larger than surrounding figures. And, in the conventional arrangement of a Christian subject such as the Holy Trinity, a central, bearded, patriarchal God, flanked by archangels, presented Christ on the cross; between them was a dove, representing the Holy Spirit. In a rendering of the risen Christ, the Son faced the audience, with the Virgin Mother on the left and St. John on the right of the design. In East Asia a traditional format depicted Buddha on a lotus throne or in a high chariot drawn by oxen across clouds, surrounded by figures representing the planets. Deities generally appear against undefined grounds of white (signifying eternity or nothingness), blue (the celestial vaults), or gold (representing heavenly light by radiating lines or the spiritual aura by a nimbus). The elaborate surface preparation of supports and the painstaking execution with the finest materials symbolized the intention that paintings dedicated to a deity should last forever. The imagery, subject matter, and form might also have a mystical function: the realistic rendering of animals in contrast to the perfunctory human representations in Ice Age rock paintings, thought to signify a wishful guarantee for success in hunting; the earthly pleasures depicted on ancient Egyptian tomb murals intended to secure their continuance for the deceased; and the North American Indian sand paintings designed for magic healing ceremonies and the Tantric (relating to Tantrism, a school of Mahayana Buddhism) mandalas used for meditation and enlightenment.
Symbolism in Eastern painting—intended to deepen the experience of a picture’s mood and spirituality—is more generalized and poetic than in Western art. Both the execution and the subject matter of Buddhist Chinese and Japanese painting have a religious or metaphysical significance: the artist’s intuitive, calligraphic brush movements symbolizing his mystical empathy with nature and his cyclic landscape and flower subjects expressing his belief in the spiritual harmony of natural forms and forces. Much of Indian symbolism is visually emotive, images such as snakes, plantain leaves, twining creepers, and rippling water being overtly sexual. And, although symbolic attributes and colour codes identify Indian mythological characters (for example, the four arms of the terrible goddess Kali and the blue skin of the divine lover Krishna), the formal character and colour scheme of settings generally reflect the narrative’s emotional mood (for example, vibrant, dark-blue, cloudy skies and embracing, purple-black glades evoking amorous anticipation and red grounds expressing the passions of love or war).
Krishna Lifting Mount Govardhana, Mewār miniature painting, early 18th century; in a private collectionP. Chandra
Western symbolic systems, however, are more intellectually directed, their imagery having precise literary meanings and their colour codes intended primarily for narrative or devotional identification. The iconographic programs of the early Christian churches, for example, laid down complex formulas for the viewpoints, gestures, facial expressions, and positions of arms, hands, and feet for religious figures. An elaborate Ethiopian Christian iconographic system was followed until very recently, and elsewhere traditional methods survive of identifying archangels and saints by their attributes and by the symbols of martyrdom that they display: distinguishing white-bearded St. Peter from black-bearded St. Paul, for example, and portraying St. Catherine with a wheel and St. Bartholomew with a knife and skin. Christian iconography adopted and elaborated Greco-Roman and Jewish symbolic imagery: the pagan signs of the vine and the fish, for example, and the image of Christ as the Good Shepherd based on the Greek Hermes Kriophoros. Medieval and Renaissance writings define an immense vocabulary of symbolic images, such as the crescent, sea urchin, and owl signifying heresy, the toad and jug representing the devil, and the egg and bagpipes as erotic symbols (all of which appear in Hieronymus Bosch’s 15th-century narrative moralities). Angels and devils, hellfire and golden paradise, heavenly skies and birds in flight representing spirituality and rebirth are examples of the similarity of symbolic meaning for many religious, mythological, and allegorical traditions. The significance of images common to several cultures, however, may also be very different: the dragon representing avarice in European medieval allegory symbolizes friendliness in Japanese Zen painting; and the snake, symbol of temptation and eroticism in the West, signifies, by its skin shedding, the renewal of life in East Asian iconography.