Chapter 4: Realism and Perspective

Realism and Perspective: From Renaissance Painting to Digital Media

“Realistic” images are not always what something “really” looks like—it is rather an interpretation of someone’s perception of that thing. Realism can and has been liked to different approaches and conventions over the years that are in turn linked to various political agendas. Realism in the visual arts has been seen as a goal for the artist to depict something as it would have been seen by the eye; however, the visual arts do not always try to produce a “realistic” looking image. During the Renaissance, painting changed as artists strived to produce images as they would have appeared to the eye of the observer rather than using art as merely symbolic productions. I was amazed to read that the emperor of China’s Chin dynasty was buried with 7,500 life-size clay warriors and horses that were individually shaped and uniquely made. That’s an incredible amount of time and effort, especially during 200 B.C.
Cubism is an abstract art style where planar shapes are used to represent nonlinear objects and are then shifted around space. The conventions of representation both in art and image making give rise to new worldviews.

-Visual Codes and Historical Meaning
Image codes and conventions reproduce historical meaning because they change over time, and the images created in the past therefore look different than images created today or in any other time period.
Sepia toning of photographic prints was common during the nineteenth century largely because the process made the photographs more resistant to decomposition over longer periods of time than regular, untreated black-and-white photographs produced at the same time. Because of this, we tend to associate sepia tones with older photographs. The portrait of Alice Liddell holds special meaning not only because the subject is the inspiration for the Alice in Wonderland story, but because her portrait is unusual for the time period, containing a natural background, a more relaxed pose, and softer edges. This is a reproduction of the early classical Renaissance artists before Raphael. Reproduction of a work’s style is a nostalgic remake which doesn’t necessarily reflect what is considered to be “realistic” during the time period of the reproduction.

-Questions on Realism
Aesthetics and people’s tastes change over time, and this is reflected in the art from different time periods. Realism best typifies the set of conventions or style or representation that is considered at a given historical moment to accurately represent nature or what is real. There isn’t a universal standard for realism; rather, this is something that varies between cultures and time periods. For instance, Josef Stalin mandated and return to a classical pictorial realism in the 1930s which became known as socialist realism. Because of this mandate, abstract art became very dangerous and artists who refused to abandon or change their work were sometimes exiled to Siberian work camps. There is an episteme for every period in history. An “episteme” is “an accepted, dominant mode of acquiring and organizing knowledge in a given period of history. Later epistemes are not inherently better or even more advanced than earlier ones.

-History of Perspective
“Perspective” comes from the Latin word perpicere which means “to see clearly,” “to inspect,” or “to look through,” and refers to the mechanisms used to produce images of objects in space.

-Perspective and the Body
In ancient Egypt, people of greater importance were represented in images as being larger than people of lesser social importance. Today we do not typically employ the same standard; however, this is a good representation of how images and their standards change between time and cultures.

-The Camera Obscura
The camera obscura served as an aid for artists and even scientists and mathematicians to visually recreate images as they appeared.

-Challenges to Perspective
The movement of Impressionism developed in the late nineteenth century and contained techniques that employed visible brushstrokes and unique depictions of light to represent movement in the recreated images. Cubism “deliberately challenged the dominant model of perspective through an analytic system that broke up the perspectival space of the conventional painterly style.” Cubism and surrealism spar with the dominant worldview for which perspective is the paradigm, which makes sense because realism has been the dominant worldview in Western societies for centuries. Abstraction’s purpose lies in emphasizing a perspective that is not a universal principle.

-Perspectives in Digital Media
Digital imaging presents new modes through which viewers experience varying perspectives about the virtual words that appear on computer screen, television screens, and other modes of depiction. John Haddock, for instance, recreates famous images by rendering them as if they were images in a video game and then making screenshots of them known as “isometric screenshots.” Virtual images are simulations which represent constructed or ideal images rather than actual conditions. They are most likely images but can also be applied to real-world objects such as pacemakers and hearing aids which act as simulators. Technology has allowed visual reality systems to become teaching aids to medical students in situations where the students would not otherwise be able to exam internal structures of the human body.

Talking Points:
1.) What would we consider “realism” today in our society and cultural frameworks?
2.) Compare figures 4.2, 4.6, and 4.20. Do you think perspectives go through cycles? How are these three images alike, yet come from very different time periods?
3.) How can virtual representations be used or seen as art? Are video games and the like the new medium through which artists will create?
4.) Have all the barriers of “art” been pushed so far that any new ideas of what “art” is seem contradictory to what we would normally consider art?