Stefan Arteni

PAINTING, IMAGE, LIKENESS

SolInvictus Press 2003

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NOTE :

The illustrations of this essay reproduce paintings, color try-outs,

diagrams and color charts by Stefan Arteni, except the three details
of artworks on the top half of page 45 which show the techniques
of flesh painting and which reproduce two details from Byzantine
mosaics and a detail from a painting by Alexei Jawlensky

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INTRODUCTION

The ‘real world’…is replaced…

by possible worlds, i.e. prefabricated
selections from the ready made
repertoire available to the culture.
Itamar Even-Zohar

The urge toward permanence is not contradictory to the streaming chaos of

existence, it corresponds to the essence of bodying life (Heidegger): to transpose
chaos into schemata (Johnson, Mark Turner), to impress upon it the seal of
regularity in the sense of making constant what is inarticulate (Nietzsche). Facts
do not exist apart from a conceptual scheme. People with different conceptual
schemes live in different worlds (Weimer). What makes the world tractable is the
imposition upon it of one or more apriori structures.

Everything new is anticipated as something generally ‘known’ (Hollenstein): the

constitution of space is bound to the body and its movements; similarity,
contrast, contiguity, appear as a genetic Ereignis against a background; the
possibility of correlating a configuration and an image does not intrinsically
affect the configuration as such.

One question, to which the following intends to give an answer, is: what is
the potential of visual art, and where do its limits lie? What would constitute
an image? What consequences does the rift caused by modernity have for
painting, image, and likeness?

We must let the rift be, while textualisation articulates its possible variations.
Briefly, although no comments on the artistic existence of the work have been
made by iconophiles, the discussion gives glimpses on how a set of
non-platonizing answers is no longer recalled, held, or kept, until partially

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 redelineated by a few twentieth century painters. Learning to see requires
to make problematical what is said, to overcome the univocal, rootless,
shallowed, words, to prepare to open the eyes. Seeing may involve
‘translation’ of earlier visions into our vision as it is currently used, and
‘translation’ of our seeing into ‘their’ terms, a more originary, back and forth
seeing, a hermeneutics as wayfinding (the Odyssey calls Hermes the
‘wayfinder’): form as ritual of the world.

Men are born iconoclasts or iconodules.

Fred Berance

Since Plato, the legitimity of painting and image is covered up ab ovo (Boehm).
The scandal of the visual/iconic lies in a wider play space than verbal signs; this
space will be fixed icono-graphically in analogy with speech: the text gives the
semantic identification of the visual, establishing a relation between the iconic –
the image, a polyvalent artifact - and referent, independent of the latter’s
existence. The iconic will be strongly codified as iconography.

The image controversy ignores the artistic dimension (Giakalis). Comments on

artistic theory or style are absent. Even before the iconoclastic crisis, Gregory of
Nyssa writes: “One does not dwell on the colors, but looks at the figure alone.”

The iconoclasts insist on the presence of the prototype in the image. Constantin V
ignores the notion of a relation of resemblance between model and painted
image: in order to be a true image, the image has to be consubstantial with what
is depicted, image and original are all but magically the same (Schoenborn), full
correspondence between image and prototype is the only criterion that validates
an image. This attitude denies in principle the existence of the image.
Denigration and contempt for the material aspect of art is also one of the striking
traits of iconoclasm.

The 754 Council gives the argument a platonic twist: there is an abyss between
image and model.

The iconophiles first give equal weight to the written word and the painted
image. The iconophiles of the second cycle of the iconoclastic debate emphasize
however the superiority of the painted image (Photios). Theodore of Studion
claims that the sense of sight precedes all other senses. The tradition that goes
back to Heraclitus which maintained the superiority of the faculty of sight is
summarized by Aristotle: “Sight best helps us to know things.” Byzantine
painting becomes pseudo-figurative, quasi formal.

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When Gregory the Great equates the image sign and the homiletic function
(Maedler) and foreordains images to a strictly didactic and illustrative purpose,
he relegates Western Europe to a rhetoric grasp of the iconic – ut pictura poesis
(Simonides and the Latins) - on the model of ‘talking images’, a television effect
through words (Lange).

Amongst artes liberales painting is classified under ‘Rhetoric’, painting is

subsumed under ‘Word’. The conjunction visual art – poetry - rhetoric is
reinforced by the Counterreformation. Gilio labels visual art as muta predicatio
(Scavizzi), images are concrete and direct while letters are artificial and indirect
and learning belongs to the few (Paleotti). This silent form of iconoclasm reduces
the visual to an illustration of an underlying text, to seeing conceived as reading
(Baetschmann). The proprium of the pictorial forma as semantically open is
forgotten. The convertibility of the utterances of a medium (text) into a different
one (image), as ground for iconographic coding, becomes asymmetric, it weighs
in favour of text: pictura est laicorum literatura, an effort to take control of a
symbolic system by artificial, formalized, verbal systems, and supplant pre-
linguistic structures (Deely).

One should dissociate representation and

resemblance.
Mikel Dufrenne

mimetike eikon - image as copy/imitation

paragogos - misleading/deceitful/creative/formed in parody/
derived/copy
eidos - from the root ‘see’: the outward appearance in which
something shows itself/its stable whatness/ visible
appearance
eidolon - outward appearance that only looks like the outward
appearance proper/ Homer: what persists in Hades, the visible
but impalpable semblance of the once living (Onians)
mimeisthai - in the cult of Dionysos, to represent in dance, express/
related to mousike, it is a dromenon, a rite, movement/
mimesis of the mythos as happening in a Gesamtkunstwerk,
unity of gestural, mimic, dance, speech and music; it
degenerates into mimesis as imitation, mirror of reality, while
initially the accent is on the process (Weidle, Koller)

The atomists’ theory of visual perception states that eidola, spirits without
substance but articulated in the same shape, are given off by a thing and enter

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the pores of a viewer. Plato speaks of eikonas/eidola as shadows/reflections in
water, mirror, and art, illusions lacking the reality of what they depict.

Painting consists in ‘constructing’, in accordance with the laws of the very object
to be posited in being. Plato, with his theory of imitation in several degrees,
misconceives the nature of painting (Maritain). From Plato to Gadamer it has
been assumed that a painted image is a copy/mirror image/mimesis. The image
is the objective condition under which a few points are seen as a figure, a Gestalt
(Wertheimer).

The most powerful of visual sensations are contrast, brightness, and blackness
(Gregory). There is a principle of transformation that produces edges and
borders (Gregg). All experiencing is selective, it is a structuring.

Before perceiving a figure, one perceives the beauty and richness of

workmanship (Theophilus): the pictorial space is a manifold of interacting
elements – strokes/marks, areas, textures. It is a visual continuum: underlying
the concept of the continuum is the intuition of a given totality which is not an
extrinsic assemblage (Dedekind, Cantor). The first perception of painting within
a building is kaleidoscopic in nature, in the sense of color patterns changing as
the eyes wander.

An art becomes fine when it loses its utility.

Etienne Gilson

paradosis – tradition

The visually new has to be somehow part of the past accumulated visual
experience. Consistency derives from the element of interpretation of the past
and the discovery of new principles of repetition, ‘a recursion from the inside’,
effacement, transmutation (Bachelard).

Training for the Imperial Service consists in an education in the classics –

Byzantine ‘Confucianism - while unwritten tradition becomes the base of
customs and practices.

To learn a visual art by example is to accept artistic tradition (Polanyi). The

student assimilates rules that are known and rules that are not explicitly known
to either the teacher or the student – an unspecified skill, Fink’s
Rueckverweisung (intentional renvois): ‘Catoptrica’ (theory of angles of
incidence and reflection and refraction of light, used for the creation and
placement of mosaics); ‘Skenographia’ (where the picture space is that of the

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room in which the painting is placed, i.e. the space before it); a homospatial
process, where two or more entities occupy the same space, leading to the
articulation of new identities, transitory and hazy (Rotherberg); the complex
bringing together of visual elements or additive combinations in figure-ground
configuration, that lead to superimposed stimuli; a system of vertical parallel
planes superposed, the horizon line often seeming curved and placed high; in
short, the notion of structural pictorial equivalents leading to Arnheim’s visual
thinking. The ‘Ekphraseis’ emphasize that the gaze of the viewer should
wander.

…a pictorial approach to philosophy…

Etienne Gilson

There is an ‘earth’ element in every work, a sign of mortality, at the level of the
material itself (Vattimo). What kind of being can one attribute to paintings if
their being is a slow an inexorable becoming, and when one considers how
difficult it is even to come up with a definition of art?

A painting has an ontological existence as it is a solid, material thing, object of

visual perception, enduring in a certain place and enjoying a continuous mode of
existence as long as it lasts (Gilson).

Painting is dominated by the unique role of the painted form which has its own
expressivity, independent of its ideological significance, independent of any
‘language’ of the iconic/image (Gilson). Form, forma, is the formula of a thing
whose function it is to gather together elements and include them in the unity of
a being: formosus, the formal plenitude for which a kind of shaped matter
(hyle+morphe) is meant by its nature – a bad painting fails to be a fully
constituted being - a formal structure that dominates content, a system that is a
relational network, the nothingness of form within the pictorial space where a
line is a thing, a being. When one isolates a fragment of a figurative painting out
of its context, the brushstrokes form an abstract composition – semantically
empty elements (Eco).

The phenomenological existence of a painting as a perceived object is twofold

(Gilson).

It has an artistic existence, as it having been produced by art as a painting. The

iconic/image has to be understood as painting, not copy, it is not the simple
representation of a prototype/model, but its codification, in different degrees of
iconicity: the degree of abstraction of the icon/image is culturally conditioned, a

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Byzantine or a Chinese literati painting will seem incoherent to a 19th century
Western European.

The painting has an aesthetic existence, as it being experienced by

viewers/receptors. Aesthetics, which grows out of West European philosophy,
might remain finally alien to East European thinking.

The artist is only a mediator

between inspiration and
matter. Matter has a life of
its own. It is with his brush
and on his palette that the
painter should first search
for perfection.
Raoul Dufy

A person born blind will first see, upon regaining the sight, an amorphous whole
dominated by color, which later will become a specific shape (Von Senden).

In the Western frame of mind, color tends to be emblematic and taxonomic

(Pastoureau). In the Renaissance, lighting is external to the painting.

For the Eastern European, skiasma (shadow/preliminary drawing), skiagraphia

(drawing/underdrawing), only fore-shadow aletheia (truth/reality), for form is
essentially defined by color. The sense of sight must be understood as the basic
faculty that initiates the process that leads to the grasp of truth. To know
(eidenai) consists in communing with forms (eide), it is a seeing (eidon). The
painting becomes an alethological Ereignis. There can be no substitute for this
world of vision, the sheer joy of seeing

Color creates form. For Pseudo-Dionysius color is light materialized, light is also
darkness. Palamas stresses the primacy of sight and the relationship between
sight and the ecstatic brightness of color, in an original space that is non-
homogeneous, bound to bodily orientations (Patocka).

Alchemical beliefs estimate color as the indication of the transmutation of matter.

Attributing symbolic qualities to materials and colors, the impulse comes to
enhance surfaces, substances and textures (James), stressing the importance of

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the visual and tactile senses in the appreciation of art works, architecture and
craft. John of Damascus rehabilitates matter and thus the material, artificial,
image.

Light is immanent in the painting-world. The flat surface color is self-lighting,

the colored background pushes the lighter colors forward – a perspective
through color - color extends beyond/withdraws within its borders (Schoene).
Color as matter becomes again self-lighting in the twentieth century, in the
works of De Stael and Poliakoff.

PAINTING

All is way (Tao).

Martin Heidegger

Painting, modus pingendi, should not be understood based on its possible

function of signifying some content. Painting should not be understood based
on an expression function, as expression of someone’s subjectivity. Paraphrasing
Heidegger and Ott, painting may be viewed as an overwhelming happening, in
which humans are allowed to abide. Painting paints, it is the ‘possibility of the
possible’ of a mortal’s act of painting.

Painting is a system of form-ation and trans-form-ation rules concerning finite

series of elements: kind and order, constants used as abbreviations, variables,
pictorial equivalents as a visual mediation strategy (Kearns). The nature of
painting exists, lies above and beyond, yet it has no concrete existence of its own,
except in the nature of each painted painting.

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The system of knowledge that underlies the art and understanding of painting is
based on rules–systematizations that possess a normative force over particular
questions of usage, but remain malleable to future extensive enough variations.
Rules are primarily descriptive, they express regularities; over time rules may
become prescriptive and thus dogmatic.

The artistic function concentrates attention on the pictorial mark itself, i.e. Levi
Strauss’ iconic figures: brushstrokes, paint layering, paint texture, etc.,
consequently against any referential or expressive functions, which point to
entities outside the pictorial. The pictorial, as such, is self referential, semantically
empty (Mukarovsky). The work appears on the background of artistic norms,
conditioned in their turn by a cultural and social background (Mukarovski). A
cultural history hides beneath the artefact.

The primitive mark, the brushstroke element, is a unit that seems to be a sign but
is semantically empty (Eco). The syntax lays down the formal rules according to
which pictorial compositional structures are to be built from the elements: a new
form is applied to pre-formed matter, a higher form is based upon a lower one.

The work is not the trace of art as activity, it is art itself; it does not
designate it, it gives birth to it…a sign signifies, form signifies itself.
Henri Focillon

schema - pattern/composition device/shape at rest [workshop term]

character - seal/cut in/to impress or stamp/visible aspect and image of
this visibility/character signifies that which makes a collection
of charagmata (drawn lines and strokes) into a coherent
configuration, Gestalt (Germanos of Constantinople)
charassein - to carve, engrave, visible, recognizable marks
hyle - matter
morphe - shape/visible shape
the latin forma is hyle+morphe/eidos+morphe

The iconoclasts sought to assert the priority of writing (Parry). Writing is as

much visual as painting (John of Damascus). Graphia/graphe means
delineation/representation by means of lines/painting/writing; graphe is both
visual form and written discourse (Nicephorus); grapheion (engraving
tool/chisel/brush/pencil), graptos/grapte (painted/marked as with letters), and
graphai (to engrave/inscribe) are related terms.

The artist is kainourgos (makes new/re-creates), grapheos (painter/scribe),

technourgos (creator of art), he possesses eutechnia (skill in art). Miniatures of

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the book of Genesis show Christ as a geometer, with a pair of dividers. The
figurative painter, one who paints or writes life (zographos), imitates the work of
the Divine Maker. Painting is graphia (painting/writing), hylographia (material
painting/material writing), zographia (figurative painting), logographia
(painted words). In the Far East a calligraphy may be signed ‘so and so painted
this’.

The painter gives shapes (schemata) to the amorphous (aschematistos), writes

John of Damascus. The making is a bringing forth, becoming fixed/established,
in the work’s enduring structure, an inner belonging together admitted into the
dynamic/fluctuating/changing play of surfaces.

Although the figurative image is patterned on the human body, for the Greeks
the Gods are not anthropomorphic; it is humans who, now and then, are
theomorphic (Besancon). Theodore of Studion describes humanity as
theomorphic.

The figurative painting represents itself and something other than itself, it is a
formal game.

No little of the sterility of art theory…from… antiquity to our own

day, is due to the failure to state at the outset whether one is
thinking from the point of view of the producer of the work of
art, or of the consumer.
Bernard Berenson

The reader may commission a painting, may demand a specifically and expertly
formulated iconographic program. Regarding the material incarnation, the
painter’s starting point is more or less fluid, even when using a how-to
handbook of the ‘Hermeneia’ type as an aid.

“When a painting is in the making, we seem to recognize it little by little,

but without ever knowing ahead of time what its true visage will exactly
be…” (Jean Bazaine)

The artistic pictorial marks structure is not reproduction, but invention as

creative process – the art work is open (Eco), the ambiguity of decoding leads
one to look for ‘how it is done’ by concentrating the gaze on the brushmarks. In
the graphic visual continuum, the syntax layer, the unbounding of the ‘iconic
figures’ (Levi Strauss) or pictorial marks structures takes place, without any
regard for referential possibilities: the pictorial mark exists at a pre-linguistic
level.

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There is a distinction between the work as a material object and the form cast
into it. Contrapunctual form operates on two dimensions, horizontally
(melodically) and vertically (harmonically). Two or more melodies combine in
such a way that they develop independently of how they sound against each
other. But they have to be concordant.

To exist fully, means existing at the dimensions of the world…

because of the power to exist, [paintings] detach themselves
from the context and become signifying by themselves.
Mikel Dufrenne

The grand illusion of traditional aesthetics has been to look for the meaning of
the work outside of what gives it artistic meaning. Unless iconographically
codified, the work has a semantic openness. The ‘language’ of painting is not a
giver of meaning, it is a sense carrier; it carries its meaning in itself, it does not
give meaning to anything else but itself. The work reflects back on itself, it gives
itself the meaning that it, itself, is. In a painting, blue means firstly blue, not sky
(Piguet).

“Representation and signification differ in this: an object can represent

another than itself, and thus be a sign, but an object can also represent itself;
a sign is a sign only if it is a sign of something other than itself. All signs
involve representation, but not all representations are signs.” (Poinsot, 1632)

The painting is an articulated plane surface, a virtual/pictorial space, relations of

pictorial equivalents/visual substitutes, a structure based on the fact that sight
focuses on vertical planes at various depths, a lexicographic bricolage where one
must ascertain the referential illusion that transforms a configuration into image
of something (iconization).

The work is autoreflexive, the iconic melts into its materiality (the interpretant of
the sign/configuration is only a disposition to react in a certain way), it blends
into the material – it becomes a ‘plurisign’ bound into the pictorial context.
Forma should not be perceived as recapitulation of earlier memories, although
the artist inscribes painting out of an immense dictionary of pictorial signs and
citations (Barthes). Contrary to Barthes’ view, the unity of the work lies in its
origin, not in its destination. Self-reference, Aufsichberuhen (Heidegger), breaks
the one-to-one correspondence between image and archetype, because the image
system can respond only in terms of its self-referential structures, it can react
only in its own terms (Luhmann). Painting signifies as painting (De Schloezer).
The signified is immanent in the signifier – signifier and signified are part of the
same order of existence.

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IMAGE

We emphasize the main characters

and forget the accessory ones.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The painting is a non-verbal artefact, an ontological event. The painted image is

an auxiliary fictive construct, formed by art, an expedient that is useful, a play,
an as if, not an as – not a real analogy.

Form and color must first be grasped as things, they can be grasped also as signs
– as making known something other than themselves, the thing signified being a
sign in its turn (Maritain).

The sign shows up as cultural debris dragging along an unchartable history

(Leitch). The image as sign involves the reference to certain possible groups of
transformations. It changes when we refer it to a different group and determine
the invariants accordingly (Cassirer, Bourbaki). The rule may be defined as that
group of transformations with regard to which the variation of the image is
considered (Cassirer). The system is built by structured elements in dynamic
relations (Caws).

When something is seen, then its image is also seen in posse – the image has
potential existence before its iconographic production (Theodore of Studion).

A space exists between the sign and its potential meaning. Another space opens
between an assigned meaning and the actual reality. Imagination exploits the
space of free variations populated by images (Breton).

The idol would be the fall of the sign into a sacral object.
Paul Ricoeur

eidolo-latreia – veneration of shadows

Like John of Damascus, Husserl emphasizes the parallelism between the
memorial image and the image of the portrait type in its social function, as

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antidote against forgetting: memory as a constant abiding with something
(Heidegger).

The imperial image is essentially a head or bust. The cult is directed to the
emperor’s genius, the spirit in the head that survives death (Onians). The
religious title of Augustus links the emperor to Mercury, mediator between the
human and divine worlds (Warmind).

The imperial image theory is part of the prototype-image formula. The honours
paid to the artificial image, eikon technete, are transferred to the emperor
himself. Athanasius writes that in the image of the emperor one finds his aspect
and shape: eidos kai morphe. The iconoclastic emperors overuse the imperial
portrait. They insist on the presence of the prototype in the image – the image
makes imperial power really present.

For when a visible result is possible, it is

improper to postulate an invisible one.
Mimamsa Paribhasa

‘Meaning’ applies primarily to certain features of language and only derivatively

to other things, but some expressions of language are meaningless (Staal). The
urge to attach meaning to all kinds of entities is an arbitrary process, an
extrapolation from language – accretion of meaning (Schipper), the search for a
significance : looking upon manifestations of culture as texts.

It has been assumed that painting must be ‘program painting’. Semantics can be
applied to visual art via language by extending the notion of expressions beyond
language – the visual ‘text’ as a signifying practice through the iconic sign.

The sign exists only in its recognition – this involves users and contexts of use. In
the Byzantine tradition the image is presented in a minimal schema. The image
has a sign function only when it is taken as a sign, when the pictorial disappears
behind the pointing function. The image signifies within a sign and symbol
system.

Although the ‘content’ , the range of thematography, may be trite, mediocre, a

(West) European, as soon as gazing at an image, starts searching for the text
illustrated by the image. The relation of the two sign systems, image and word,
must be ascertained on a case by case basis (Keel). All visual ‘imitations’ are
anecdotes.

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Painting is not language precisely because it lacks the semantic component.
There is no systematic relationship between its structure and ‘contents’. Painting
consists of formal structures and acts that can be studied by adopting a syntactic
approach. They can be provided with any meaning/content whatsoever. This is
why only their form and the rules are handed down. The meanings are there to
fit the form.

For the naïve, tangible presence and cipher language

are not distinct.
Karl Jaspers

agalma [from agallo – I glorify/exalt/exult] – everything for which one exults/

cult statue

The iconoclasts believe in an immediate relationship between image and subject

represented, the image tending towards identity with the prototype, a magic-like
imitative reference and synonymy (Giakalis) - true images are taken to be
‘natural’, consubstantial with their archetypes. An ‘artificial image’, by not being
consubstantial with its archetype, is by necessity an idol.

A cult image should not be viewed simply as a ‘likeness’ or ‘portrait’, but as a

‘representation’ [representare – to make present as in legal representation
(Nicholas of Cusa)], when the identification is realized by means of attributes
and paraphernalia of a given deity (Onians).

The work of art does not send to any transcendence;

all its structural elements invite us to dwell
in its immanence.
Roman Ingarden

The facticity of the image consists of the support – the real reality, the carrier, i.e.
forma as hyle + morphe – which is correlative with the carried image world
(Fink). The carrier consists of the ground field, i.e. a distinct surface with a
definite boundary or an unenclosed surface like in cave paintings, and the sign-
bearing matter, constituted of non-mimetic and asemantic marks/elements that
create an artificial equivalent (Schapiro). The facets in the concept of the image
are: eidos (appearance), eikon (image), homoioma (likeness).

The carrier is usually seen through, covered up, overlooked, but not invisible,
and may become thematic when the pictorial context, in turn, covers up and

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de-forms any figural Gestalt (Merleau-Ponty). The image world is the unreal
shown in the painting. We tend to see more than is actually present (Merleau-
Ponty): a figural moment that allows the grasp of a whole (Husserl).

“When one uses X, the X too is something he is aware of, as well as and as a
necessary condition for X’s being a sign for Y.” (Deely)

The duality of the symbol presupposes signs which

already have a literal sense… and which by means
of this sense send/point to another sense.
Emilio Brito

signum - military standard/sign

semainein - to point out/to de-sign-ate
symballein - to bring together
typos - blow/beat of horse’s hoof/impression of a seal/imprint/
impressions supposed by Democritus and Epicurus to be made
on the air by things seen, and to travel through space/
hollow mould or matrix/engraved mark/ cast or replica made in
a mould/figure in relief/carved figure/exact replica/pattern
capable of repetition/an identically repeatable imprint

John of Damascus clarifies the ‘image’ concept. Generally, “an image is a likeness
(homoioma) expressing (characterizon) an original, yet being distinct from it in
certain respects”. John lists five (or six) categories of images. The fifth category
are the images of things past, whose memories we wish to preserve, as drawn in
books through words or as painted. For John, image is an analogous concept,
but in the case of the painted image the analogy is a most remote one. Analogy as
correspondence may be maintained through many distortions, it encloses a
moment of negativity (Splett). “A sign is an analogous or abbreviated
expression for a definitely known thing. A symbolic expression is one that is held
to be the best possible formula by which allusion may be made to a relatively
unknown thing”, writes Coomaraswamy. Artificial images can possess only a
relationship of extrinsic similarity between image and original.

Imaginal standing-in-place-of (Buehler): the painted marks in which one engages

do not denote what the things for which they stand would denote, the image
does not denote that which it seems to denote, but the same image does evoke
feelings which would have been evoked by the real thing (Bateson).

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Nicephorus applies Aristotelian logic to the image question and lays stress on the
image as a representation and as such distinct per se from that which it
represents. The artificial material image belongs to the category of relation, a
relation by means of resemblance, a relational connection of similarity. He writes
that the iconoclast refuses to understand the meaning of equivalence and
homonymity. The image of the emperor on a coin is an example of homonymity.

Figurative images are hypoicons, i.e. object-signs, largely conventional (Peirce).

The stock of images accumulated in society provide a ready made source of
signifiers – the image is apparently without a code, because with increasing
familiarity style and content become confused, images become conventional.

The semiotic operation occurs in a finite field,

the symbolic operation opens onto unlimited
translinguistic phenomena.
Jean Baudrillard

The process in which a sign vehicle as mediator (the pictorial unit) functions as
an image-sign (the sign is a unit, the unit may not be a sign) is called semiosis
(Morris). Semiology investigates the differences between signs in the systems.
The system is a finite set of signs actualized in the order of creation and
innovation: semiological systems actualized in actual works.

A matrix of relations, contrasts, color scales, is produced, which brings to light

the underlying visual code and its inner logic. The codes may be sign vehicles.

The similar is perceived despite difference, in spite of contradiction Apparent

incongruity becomes a newly discovered likeness: similarities in dissimilarities
(Ricoeur). The iconic image is a sign which somehow resembles the object which
it denotes: picture and interpretation of reality in its metaphoric and symbolic
dimension (Wimsatt).

The visible, figurative or not, is recuperated (Wirth). There is a supra-linguistic

order of force (Freud). Symbols are contingent, bound to a certain culture and all
interpretation is questionable. The extra-linguistic powers are socio-cultural – the
ground of images. Pre-linguistic realities force their way to expression via
symbols.

The work as event becomes autonomous as an intentional inscription. For the

receiver, authorship is essentially accidental, but, in the long run, the work is also
liberated from the restriction of a particular audience.

20
21
 Images are a kind of motion picture projected on a
screen of voidness.
Heinrich Zimmer

aitia - originally, guilt before the law/origin/natural cause

skia - shadow/ghost
skiagraphia - fore- or underdrawing/shadow
proskiasma - fore-shadowing
schesis - state/condition (alterable)/stationary condition stable or not/
nature/quality/expression/attitude/posture/relationship
Bild - originally wondersign (Przywara, Walter Otto)

Hans Georg Thuemmel lists a few definitions of the figurative image in a

collection of Byzantine texts compiled probably by Photios.
1. The archetype [archetypos/aition (cause)/Urbild]
is beginning [arche]
and model [paradeigma/Vorbild]
of the copy [paragogos/homoioma/skia/aitiatos (produced by a
cause)/apeikasma (copy)/Nachbild/Abbild]
of the copy’s cause [aition]

2. The image [eikon/Bild]

is a shadow drawing [skiagraphe/skiagraphia]
of the prototype [prototypos/Vorbild]

Theodore Of Studion:
3. The image [eikon]
shows the Gestalt relation [schesis]
or pattern [schema]

The configuration is established from the start by the

Grundstimmung, the fundamental disposition which
creates its own form.
Emilio Brito

peri- - round about/all around

per- - to go to the end-point/to go over to the other side
peras - related to spinning, weaving and binding/Moira spins bonds
which are fastened upon men/bond(loop) ends crossed/woof
thread/web of multiple cords/girdling/cord circling around/ a
cord defines a precinct: temenos, templum, tempus – cut
(Onians)/based on the image-schematic preconceptual

22
 structures of containment, spatial boundedness (Johnson)/
boundaries ‘between’/ holding itself together/bringing
to perfection
peirata - things which define, determine/bonds, boundaries/
determination (Bergren)/a network of bonds like a spider’s web
peras,limes - limit/overflow/play of limit and passage/passage (Derrida)/
for passages in painting cf. Andre Lhote
perigraphe - outline/ general appearance/individuality/compass of
expression/contained within limit/enclosed/self-contained
(circumscription)
perigraphein - to trace a line about/sketching
perigraptos - circumscribed
aperigraptos – uncircumscribed

Zeuxis speaks about mastering the technes peirata (the threads/the ropes/woof
and warp/rough draft) of his craft. Art draws out the outline of things by
concentration/selection/creating centers. It is not re-production but production
(Cassirer). Painting is inadequately understood as ‘mirror of nature’ or
‘exteriorization of subjectivity’ (Gadamer). Drawing is the art of leaving out
(Lieberman). That a picture looks like nature means only that it looks the way
nature is usually painted (Eco, Goodman).

Circumscription and uncircumscribability – there is a linguistic relationship

between aperigraptos and agraptos: that which is uncircumscribed cannot be
depicted – are central among the questions analyzed in the second phase of the
iconoclastic debate: the concreteness of the visible appearance of one individual
raises the question of the visual rendering of the divine which is neither material
nor circumscribed.

Nicephorus demonstrates the imprecise application by the iconoclasts of the

concept of perigraphe. Showing himself a well-versed Aristotelian logician and
employing a terminology far from platonism, he determines that it is not the
question whether something can be circumscribed (perigraphontai) but whether
it can be painted in an image (graphontai kai eikonizontai).

One should not confuse the natural and the artificial image. The artificial image
can not capture, circumscribe, the model substantially, it only draws (graphei) its
visible aspect. Graphe causes the visible of what is being represented to be
present. To paint is not the same as to circumscribe. Graphe, related by
resemblance to the prototype but separate from it, has its own existence, its own
temporality. A painted image makes a thing recognizable, not according to
circumscribability, but according to its ability to be painted.

23
A thing is circumscribed by place, or by time and beginning, or by apprehension.
The existence of circumscription is the existence of what it circumscribes, it is a
characteristic tied to the one possessing it.

By making a distinction between graphe and perigraphe, Nicephorus recognizes

‘the autonomy of graphe’: visual art has a domain of its own.

The imprint has low definition, the image is ‘frozen’,

there may be no referent…[there is] work done
on the surface: the physics of production combines
with the pragmatics of interpretation differently from
a mirror. It is a painting.
Umberto Eco

Resemblance is not identity. The distinctiveness of the particular (ectype)

overrides the metarule (archetype). There may be excess of difference or excess of
resemblance where the particular is identical to the metarule (Smith). The
extreme of mimesis is the consubstantiality of image and archetype, but two
things occupying simultaneously two disjoint domains can not be identical.

The plane mirror reflects a virtual image. The mirror faithfully reflects: vertical
mirrors do not reverse or invert although at the conceptual level the deceptive
illusion of reversing is encouraged by self-identification with the person ‘inside’
the mirror. The mirror shows absolute congruence while a printed photo does
reverse the image to give an illusion of reality. The mirror provides an ‘absolute
double’ of the stimulating field, the object being the image referent. A catoptric
absolute icon is not an icon but a double. The mirror is a prosthesis-channel. In a
distorting mirror, the image gives information about the channel, not the object
(Eco).

In order that the antecedent might become a sign of the consequent, the
antecedent must be potentially present while the consequent is usually absent.
The mirror does not refer to remote consequents. Mirror images are not signs
and signs are not mirror images. The photo is a ‘freezing’ mirror although the
imprint is heteromaterial and in any imprint generic characters ultimately
prevail over specific ones.

In a painting generic characters prevail over specific ones and there is no

guarantee that there is a referent. Aesthetic perception should focus not only on
the content but on the way the channel is used (Eco).

24
 When children play, they
come…under the spell of
absolute obligation and
under the shadow of the
possibility that the game
may be lost.
Hugo Rahner

The iconographic system is strongly codified, historically changing, a one to one

relation of signifier to signified where convertibility of visual and textual signs is
relatively easy, e.g. Ripa’s ‘Iconologia’ (Eco). Its signifier is an iconic system by
itself. The iconic code, iconic image signs, can no longer be explained by
linguistic rules. Levi Strauss’ iconic signs – graphic codifications in the sense of
the transformation of object perceptions – have no natural analogy with the
referents, they are culturally conditioned conventions. The referent rests on
cultural units (Eco).

An iconic code refers to a previous perception code, the iconic sign gives a
perception of the object, after this was selected on the grounds of recognition
codes and clarified on the ground of graphic conventions: equivalence between a
graphic sign and the relevant traits of the recognition code. The iconic sign
constructs a mode of relations, structurally similar to the perception code. Iconic
signs are sign functions (Eco). It is a graphic elementary grammar, the flat surface
can be changed, there are more possible variants in an iconic code than in a
verbal one. Iconic signs/images appear to be natural, when in fact they include
interventionist devices which are not always apparent: treatment effect can be
considered as a form of coding – style.

At the level of syntax, the articulation layer, the pictorial, compositional, marks
structure (Levi Strauss’ iconic figures, semantically empty), forms a graphic
visual continuum: a closed syntax and a semantic openness - to date, only the
Chinese and Japanese have codified the asemantic brushmarks and textures used
for painting and calligraphy – where there are infinite ways of coding the nascent
iconic signs.

A painting is undercoded. Iconic signs may become iconic utterances or revert to

iconic figures. There are complex visual ‘narrative’ structures or a system of
iconic utterances when the iconic code becomes a sign in the context of that

25
system where doubtful signs may fit, a selection at work to locate the most likely,
culturally codified, semiosis system, where the referent, real or not, is a cultural
unit (Eco). The iconic utterance is an idiolect that builds a code for itself, an
idiolect of iconic signs, a code that gives meaning to its analytic elements (Eco).

The idiolect may be the invention of a new code within its own context -
redundancy and surprise: artistic pictorial structures work as open semantic
structures, it is here that one looks, to see how it is done (Eco).

I do not believe in the religious

picture. It is man who must be
religious.
Alfred Manessier

The image passes itself off as reality. It is artifice, an illusory universe, an

artificial spectacle. The image can not convey anything al all about truth; in an
image-message, misunderstanding is the rule (Schaeffer). It is a question of
creating pictorial equivalents. The pictorial image will rely on form, it will
become not a recall, but a nascent signification (Bachelard).

The holy as trace (Heidegger) – replicas are supposed to have the same power as
the original image; if an image acts as mediator of the holy, to have a myriad
mediators means to dilute it to the point where it ceases to be efficacious. Along
with differences, temporal relations –the befores and afters – have been distorted.

For physical reasons, no painting can be duplicated. Even replicas made by the
same artist who did the original, are different from the original; the size, the
materiality, the colors, the environment where they are located, are not the same
(Gilson). The annihilation of object meaning is achieved through mass
production: printmaking is popular because a pseudo mass produced object is
also artistically rare and individual (Mueller).

Benjamin’s ‘distracted perception’ operates in an area of disseminated duplicates:

scarce, permanent, versus rationalized, popularized images where the goal is
efficacy – an inflation of images in the media (Baudrillard’s simulacra), an
interminable parodic game of mirrors mirroring, of deteriorated signs, imitations
of imitations, that become more important than the original; new technologies of
reproduction as the means by which the masses are constituted as an organized
consensus at a low and weak level. Film and photography collapse the difference
between original and copy as they have no original and reproductivity is
constitutive (Vattimo): a totalized ‘simulacrization’ and uprooting, the death of
art as utopia, as kitsch, as silence (Vattimo).

26
27
LIKENESS

Signs are placed in totalizing and

determined schemata
which can be reread according to
certain laws.
Jan Patocka

The gaze focused on the image has as goal not its reality as image but the image’s
subject, where reality does not coincide with the reality of the image. One has to
make a deliberate effort to focus on the form, and even so there is a tendency to
reverse and focus on the content (Jamieson).

In the imaging synthesis, the present reality is left aside and one’s gaze is busy
with the unreal. There is always a certain ‘play-space’ between image and the
thing it is image of. To each image appartains the conscience of the distance
between appearing-image and appearing-real (Patocka).

The apparent immediacy of a material image, confers upon it a kind of magical

quality, an assumed reality: image and archetype are not merely experienced
together or one after the other, but there subsists between them a felt unity, not a
rational or logical connection (Husserl). The image discloses one thing with the
help of another. The image is an imperfect sign which quickly becomes loaded
with subjectivity: the tendency of the sign to transform itself into a thing, of value
in itself, which sets off reactions without the intervention of signification
(Maritain).

In an image, one has to distinguish between its imaged object, and the way in
which the object is given by the image. Grasping the imaged is based on rules

28
concerning the given image structure: sender/source and
receiver/viewer/receptor must share a common code, the receiver’s system of
references may produce an interpretation not envisaged by the sender – the
unpredictability of decoding (Jamieson). Communication media, e.g. visual art as
a communication medium, are symbolic codes that set rules for the way in which
signs can be combined (Luhmann). Hereby they also assure the transmission of
selections.

Figurative scenes are the iconic transposition of narratives, they reproduce an

initial verbalization. The semiological problem would be to investigate how this
transposition is carried out, what are the correspondences from one system to
another and in what measure there is correspondence between signs
(Benveniste). There is, in fact, a principle of non redundancy between systems,
one is not able to say the same thing with words that can be said with music
(Benveniste): systems are not interchangeable, and the value of a sign is defined
by the system that incorporates it.

An anagogic – guide to a higher reality – conception of the image depreciates it

in favor of the reality of which it is a mere suggestion. The visible image points to
the invisible truth. In a religious painting, the artefactual image is at the same
time a painting, a human figure embodying features of the human species, an
image of a biblical character, and a pointer to the mystical mysteries.

The true rule is that which applies to instances singly

turn by turn, by making them all one with it.
Giovanni Gentile

Let us direct the gaze towards an image taken as a merely physical pattern: the
object perceived is no more an image of something. As soon as it functions again
as an image, the characteristic of its ‘representation’ undergoes a total change,
the physical pattern enters into a new intentional unity (Mohanty).

The figure can stand out because there is a perceptually vague, yet essential,
background, against which the figure appears, but the figure can recede into the
background. Only in the light of a known pictorial code the structurally
permitted relations appear as representable. The image does not resemble, as
totality, its subject: between image and object there is not a resembling rapport
as between two things. The image has to contain certain marks that make it
susceptible of being interpreted as a quasi-aspect of the thing (Patocka). One can
think of this difference as a complexity gradient in which the archetype is always
more complex than the system itself: the system becomes one of pictorial
equivalents (Lhote).

29
The strategies by which a system can use relatively few responses to compensate
relatively many inputs constitute the system’s selectivity – the capacity for
reducing complexity (Luhmann). The construction of the system is effected by
means of conventions, e.g. rules of formation, that are not arbitrary. The choice is
influenced by practical methodologies: simplicity, elegance, etc. When the rule
system changes, the validity conditions of the configurations formulated in it
also change.

Figurativization/iconization/representational image is the creation of a spatially

extended correlate from a model. This is achieved by creating a patterned
construction in a given materiality. Under perturbation the shape breaks up into
locally stable elements as certain features are structurally more stable, and the
shape is degraded more and more by the proliferation of accidents until it ceases
to be recognizable (Thom).

Rhythmically structured Gestalten appear from relatively simple, amorphous,

meaningless, but impressive, ‘Vorgestalten’, as a tensionfull event. A Gestalt
appears as a whole and structures itself in natural parts. A Gestalt appears
already configurated. From independent Gestalten comprehensive wholes are
constructed.

When attention ceases, parergic objects fill the field of one’s sensibility. The
sojourn in the parergic sphere may be prolonged in indefinitum (Patocka).

The act of making the general come forth is not the rejection
of something, but the reserving of place for variations.
Felix Kaufman

Peirce states that anything that can be isolated, then connected with something
else and interpreted, can function as a sign. To be a sign is to be a sign for
something.

The representing iconic sign’s graphic likeness with the perception model of a
referent, a model that in turn is based on manifold processes (Eco), may show a
higher or lower level of iconicity that depends on degrees of likeness or
abstraction of the iconic sign. Iconicity is relative to a given culture. The producer
submits to the rules for constructing a cultural pretending. It may be questioned
whether all icons are likenesses or not. The piercean hypoicon is a material,
however simplified, figurative image or diagram (Thom).

Representation is relative to sign system. Whether a sign is representational

depends not upon whether it resembles what it denotes but upon its relationship
to other signs in the system (Goodman). There is no degree of similarity that is

30
necessary or sufficient for likeness (Peirce). The limit of the similar is the
identical.

Image and archetype are not congruent. One sees more than is actually present.
Only the Gestalt properties that form an organized whole are dominant – the
strongest pregnant Gestalt – and come into play. The image functions as a sign if
a formal identity enables it to be issued again and to be recognized.

“When one sees an object as only representing another, the idea one has of
it is the idea of a sign. This is the way one looks usually at maps and
paintings.” (Logic of Port Royal)

An interplay of absence and presence (Derrida): the absence withdraws in the act
of presencing, the way the mode of projection of a map withdraws and does not
appear itself as part of the map, the way the mode a painting depicts that which
it is a painting of seems to withdraw or not be in the painting. The map is seen
and read. All maps exaggerate certain marks and erase others (Georges Jean).

The iconic sign must be preserved: by erasing it in order to discover what is

behind – the content – one looses both the art and the meaning.

Remember that before…telling

any story whatsoever, a painting
essentially consists of a plane
surface covered with colors
assembled in a certain order…
Maurice Denis

eikonographia - sketch/description
eikon - [from the verb eiko related to video] appearance as perceived ,
known/image/similitude/pattern/ according to Przywara, the
eikon is located between the image of its archetype which it
re-presents by making-present, and the appearance (Schein),
the visible sensible that must be seen through to obtain/reach

31
 the concept
homoiosis - [homoios – to be like] likeness
mimesis - to copy/to mirror/to show itself as an eidolon, a little eidos,
which is but semblance (that which shows itself as something
which it is not itself) of pure appearance (that which
announces itself in something that shows itself)

The image is a ‘coming to the fore’, ‘showing itself’, ‘coming to presence’

(Heidegger). Unfortunately, the relation between image and likeness is
commonly ruled by the mimetic assumption.

For John of Damascus an image is a likeness of the prototype, except for the
stipulation that they are not like each other in all respects; the image has a
mnemonic function, it is a sign and a reminder (Parry). In fact John separates
eikon and homoiosis, for even a bad likeness can realize the function: natural
image (physike eikon) and artificial image (technete eikon) are similar, but not
necessarily congruent/commensurable/coincident. A bad drawing may function
as representation of something.

Theodore of Studion , Nicephorus and Photios introduce and utilize Aristotelian

logic terminology. They start by separating the image from the likeness:
kat’eikona and kath’homoiosin. Theodore of Studion suggests that the extent to
which the painter captures the likeness is not the prime consideration: the typos
(image/imprint) may not have the same shape (isotypos) as the prototypos. In
fact there may be a difference between circumscribed original (archetypos),
which thus can be a prototype (prototypos ipso facto), and the copy/image
(paragogos). For Nicephorus, likeness, as intermediate relation, mediates
between the person portrayed and the image/portrait. Photios mentions that
likeness is not even necessary, as an extra-art clue (inscription, monogram,
epigraphe) can play an identifying role and assign a communicative function to
the work (Pelikan). Of course, within a mostly non-literate culture, the
inscription turns into an abstract design.

Once integrated with a painting, real objects cease

to be natural things, they are assimilated
by the structure.
Juan Gris

A painting reaches the viewer at second hand – the painting’s reality that no
longer effaces itself, symbolism of the way of painting, and the viewer’s own
reality: the ‘aesthetic boundary’. Receiver aesthetic experience is loaded with
many factors: rarity, antiquity, fame, associations of ideas which are at work in

32
the estimation of works. The receiver/viewer wants legibility, what the painting
represents, the anecdote or allegory, ideas better expressed in a book (Gilson).

“The masses…react by reducing articulate discourse to a single dimension,

where signs lose their meaning and peter out in fascination”. (Baudrillard)

Luhmann defines ‘meaning’ prelinguistically, as a referential context of

actualizable possibilities, that is related to the intentionality of experience and
action. It is meaning-intention which constitutes the essence of ‘expression’ (in
Husserl’s sense) as contrasted with a meaningless sense of marks. Meaning is a
dispositional property of the sign, a disposition towards something (Stevenson).
A sign sets up in the receiver the disposition to react to a designatum (that which
the sign refers to) in the way in virtue of which the sign is a sign to the
receiver/interpreter/receptor under context determined conditions.

If imitation and image likeness are the essence of the work to be done, this
imposes limitations upon the maker and the work may be an indifferent work of
art. The art of painting and the art of making images, making (painting) and
knowing (image): the art of imaging is more of a particular case of language. The
image points out something else. The painting points to itself. By treating a
painting only as a photograph, an image of something, it may be lost as a work
of art (Saraiva). If imitation were the end of visual art, why not deception,
trompe l’oeil, which is the perfection of imitation?

The copy appears as the object of an impossible pursuit, a concept which

vanishes when an attempt is made to define it. It resolves itself into inducing an
illusion, which presupposes an artificial faking (Maritain).

In painting there are no morals. Everyone is at liberty to build up his/her own

form. All that is required of him/her is that he/she must state his/her methods
clearly and give syntactical rules instead of pseudo-philosophical arguments.
Inflation occurs whenever art adopts a posture where the artistic selections, in
themselves media-conforming, are so arbitrary (Luhmann), that they can no
longer appeal to receiver.

33
34
EXCURSUS

In the realm of the

imagination, everything that
shines is a gaze.
Gaston Bachelard

The ideology of color, Hesychasm and the pictorial color of light, return color to
pure movement, to its power of undefined mutation, each tint reacting upon the
next, the ongoing work being able to change key continuously: transposition
(Duthuit), improvisation that rests on an implicit knowledge (Sperber), where
colors in differentiated structures combine with and result from cultural contexts
(Sahlins). Pictorial polyphony: the effect of colors applied flat where some jump
and some retreat, overlapping planes simultaneously implying spatial recession
and asserting surface flatness, illusion of volume through the fluting effect, the
shifting of hues by mixing with a dominant – emphasis on color-light,
presentation rather than representation.

Within a room with windows made of colorless, transparent plates of glass,

daylight is cool, bluish, while shadows and reflections are warm. In
the mausoleum of Galla Placidia daylight is filtered through window panes
of orange-tinted alabaster. The mosaics are mostly blue.

An Edict of Diocletian gives a good deal of information on mosaicists’

workshops. It was incumbent upon the pictor imaginarius to supply the model
of the composition with the iconographic data. The pictor parietarius transposed
the designs into the desired dimensions and adapted them to the curvature of the
wall. The musearius was the craftsman who, on the basis of the color indications
supplied by his colleagues, chose the glass cubes or tesserae, two to ten
centimeters square, from a range of about two hundred colors, broke and
fashioned them with a hammer and inserted them at various angles in the
intonaco. The parietarius replaced later the imaginarius. Turning to frescos, it
was the parietarius who was responsible for the entire work.

35
Color harmony is the reenactment of the central theme of Byzantine philosophy,
the relation of the multiple to the One, a qualitative scale of the sensible where
other units may be situated as ‘transitions’, ‘nuances’, etc. Charles Henri has
shown that perception of color comes before perception of shape. This brings
about dissociation of color and outline, e.g. Dufy, and modulation, i.e. the use of
flat areas of color (aplats) instead of chiaroscuro. One has to choose between
chiaroscuro, color and ornament. When color is exalted, ornament is subdued
and chiaroscuro almost eliminated. During the process of painting, colors are
continuously changed, both in tone (lightness or darkness) and in tint, by
simultaneous contrast (Chevreul). Brushwork texture (Renoir, Van Gogh) may
also express the sense of form. The Impressionist revolution consists of the
resurgence of color, the oscillation between color and trait, the recuperation by
the artist of ancient procedures.

Finally, limiting the commentary to oil painting, there remains a matter of the
greatest interest – the question of the use of color. The painter uses paints, i.e.
pigment ground in a vehicle. An addition of medium may change the visual
properties of the paint. Materials often constitute long lasting limitations.

Complementary colors, used in proper proportions, have a stabilizing power

(Itten). A color stared at and the complementary afterimage that appears as a
halo surrounding it, are matched by paints that neutralize each other in mixture,
producing a colored gray. [There are also the optical complementaries that spin
to gray on Maxwell discs, slightly shifting away from the above matched paints.]

Every perceived pattern is dynamic.

Rudolf Arnheim

The eye discerns about 150 tints between violet and red and about 200 light-dark
gradations (Chandler). Visual perception implies the formal coherence/good
continuation/consistent shape rule (Arnheim). One sees the hidden structural
forces of the surface (Kandinsky), direction, isolation, intrinsic interest:
- perception gradients (depth);
- texture (microstructure) gradients;
- color gradients: often, complementary dyads and triads are perceived as
forming a pattern which preserves the unity of the object and/or of the
painting, although complementaries may be separated by passages
(Cezanne);
- gradients of light-dark contrast, e.g. the three traditional vertical planes
parallel to the picture plane (Gibson): foreground, middleground and
background.

36
 The eye sees the global constructive law, the chromatic syntax:
- saturation;
- temperature (cold-warm contrast);
- surface size, i.e. a light, warm colored surface ‘irradiates’ and seems larger
than it actually is;
- structural inversion: the subordinate color may become dominant in certain
areas or in a different scale;
- the principle of similarity: similar elements tend to appear on the same plane,
units of similar tint and/or similar light or dark tone are perceived
together – chromatic similitude;
- the simplicity principle causes a perceptive scission (Arnheim): a colored spot
appears located on top of the background, not within it; local color appears
separated from the superposed layer of light and shadow: by a delimitation
of light and dark areas, different as saturation or tone, the object will be
reconstituted as consisting of two or more homogeneous areas (Braque,
Hering); shadow may be replaced by a color, e.g. blue, complementary to
light, e.g. orange (Cezanne), the complementaries tending to form a pattern
resulting in dynamic stillness.

Painting begins over again with Manet.

Paul Gauguin

Some of the works shown in this essay are conceived on the basis of a consonant
scale of imperfect complementaries, thus producing a slight dissonance. Colors
are selected from real available paints. Paints are superposed as well as broken
by mixing together and/or by the addition of black and/or white. The
complementary of a given color may also consist of either a mixed color or
two/three colors that are the equivalent of the complementary, e.g. the dyad
cadmium orange + Prussian blue: Prussian blue may be replaced by viridian
and, as dissonance, cobalt violet (Bonnard); the dyad cadmium yellow deep +
ultramarine blue: ultramarine blue may be replaced by ultramarine green and
cobalt violet (a dissonant scale).

The mixing of two colors located near to one another on the color wheel
produces a pure hue, e.g. green–yellow + blue-green = green. Two distant colors
produce a variety of grays.

The phenomenon of cyanotropy occurs when white is mixed with a paint and the
hue acquires a degree of blueness – for this reason Rubens used ‘warm gray’
grounds. The exceptions are some yellow-green hues that become warmer by
mixing with white (Marc Havel). A lighter scumbling over a dark underpainting
(white over red ochre) produces a cool hue.

37
38
39
Red mixed with black tends to violet, yellow mixed with black takes a green hue.
When black is mixed to orange, no cooling occurs (Marc Havel ).

Superposition (combined with texture):

Opacity - underpainting (dead colors), covered by opaque
overpainting, although left uncovered here and there (reserves),
e.g. gray or red ochre underpainting for blue
Translucence - the effect of colored grounds or dead colors when the
overpainting is dominant, but, depending on its thickness ,
its color will be modified by the underpainting
Opalescence - an opaque, but thinly applied color (frottis)
Transparence - the glaze; a color glazed with a similar hue will be enhanced;
a dark underlayer may be glazed with its complementary,
e.g. brown -black covered by a blue glaze produces a deep black.

The squirreler may be interested in comparing De Mayerne’s notes on the

painting of a red, yellow, orange, or green area with its ‘translation’ into today’s
paints, associated with the use of the palette knife, its loading and scraping
action, that lets the bottom layer(s) show through and at the edges.

40
41
42
 Everything I wish to paint
is divine image.
Serge Poliakoff

A color scale, e.g. cobalt violet red + barium yellow or nickel titan yellow, with
the dominant yellow, will produce by mixture mainly earth color tints which
may be approximated by actual paints – e.g. yellow ochre, Naples yellow light,
Sienna raw, green earth, raw umber, green umber - and which also have their
own complementaries. The subdominant may become dominant in small areas.
In order to maintain isophany (same value on a scale from light to dark), tints
will have to be modified accordingly. If more than one pair of complementaries
is desired, it is best to use those pairs located far apart, e.g. on (almost)
perpendicular diameters of the color wheel.

A second, subordinate color scale, may be added to the one above. It will work in
the same way, e.g.:
either cadmium red orange + cerulean blue/manganese blue (mixing produces
some interesting colors similar to cobalt violet deep/manganese violet/
ultramarine red)
or cadmium red light + ultramarine green (a range of mixtures including a
color close to English red)
or cadmium red medium + cobalt green light ( the last two scales produce
a range of mixtures that includes a color close to cobalt violet red)

The first scale above, cobalt violet red + barium yellow or nickel titan yellow, is
situated close to the exception to the rule, which is the green-yellow + purple

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scale. There is no real purple paint. Therefore it is replaced in practice by a red
and a violet juxtaposed or, due to the fact that colors tend to shift toward the
extremities of the spectrum when mixed with white (as observed by Vibert and
Marc Havel and applied by Bonnard), by orange +white (shifting to red) and
blue + white (shifting to violet), juxtaposed. This will produce, by replacing
cobalt violet red, a three color scale, e.g. barium yellow/nickel titan yellow
+cerulean blue + cadmium red orange. When three colors are present, one must
be at maximum intensity, the second one diminished, and the third one barely
suggested (Lhote).

Modulation requires:
- saturation of lights and attenuation of shadows; shadows should be replaced
by color; one should not divide shadow and light on each object, but make up
whole sections with the color of shadow [also a darker nuance of light, tinged
by reflections] and other sections with the color of light [transformed by
surrounding shadows; black also may be color of light]; local color may be
altered by or may give way to ambient color (Dufy);
- reduction of secondary contrasts to musical modulations;
- maintenance of perception of flatness of the work’s surface; color area
boundaries indicate distance, nearness, melting into a two-dimensional plane,
e.g. harder boundaries indicate distance (Albers); isophanous parts [i.e.
sharing the same level of lightness or darkness] of two superposed planes
will meet farthest from the big concentrated contrasts of the planes [e. g. the
case of foreground, middleground, background (Lhote)]; they may be
separated by color traits (Byzantine mosaics, Van Gogh);
- precision in the delimitation of shapes should be equally compensated by
passages, i.e. melting of one shape into another (Lhote).

Two complementaries may be separated by colored traits, by a neutral tint

partaking of both, or by drawing them apart through pure, saturated colors
located between the two that are opposed (Lhote, Dufy). It may again be
interesting to compare here the Byzantine layering for flesh painting, a
technique that survived in Western practice (the example below is based on De
Mayerne’s notes), with Jawlensky’s ‘translating’ it into today’s paints. His
procedure may be best approximated by the use of two pairs of
complementaries: cadmium orange + Prussian blue, and either madder lake deep
+ permanent/cadmium green light, or cadmium red purple +
permanent/cadmium green deep, or cadmium red deep + viridian, tints being
kept as much as possible isophanous. Permanent/cadmium green consists of
viridian and cadmium yellow mixed in variable proportions. Two thirds of the
surface are half-tints (middle tints), the remaining third consists of light and
shadow summed up (Rubens).

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Addition of a common denominator type relation, e.g. usually same lightness,
isophany, although there is a scale of different intensities, and/or a constant hue
overlaying a complementary relationship – association of secondary and tertiary
colors - may be achieved by adapting Villon’s system of three vertical parallel
planes , the traditional foreground (dark), middleground (light), background
(gray), and by assigning a color, instead of a light value, to each plane, e.g.
respectively red, yellow, blue. The plane’s dominant color may be overlaid by
mixing [e.g. yellow + blue = green; orange + blue =gray (complementaries)], by
optical blending [ yellow & blue = colored gray; orange & blue = rose], and by
superposing layers.

COMPLEMENTARIES CHART 1

Parentheses set off paints approximating both the mixtures of the complementaries,
white and black, and the complementaries of the resulting tints. Brackets are used for
paint samples not on the chart or located elsewhere on the chart.

Barium yellow/ - cobalt violet red
Nickel-titan yellow
(Naples yellow light - cobalt violet light/
ultramarine blue reddish
Naples yellow deep - ultramarine violet/
cobalt blue + violet
Cadmium red medium - cobalt green light
[Cobalt violet red - barium yellow/
nickel-titan yellow]
Cadmium red light - ultramarine green
([Cobalt violet red - barium yellow/
nickel titan
yellow]

Green earth - flesh tint/ English red - cinnabar green

Naples yellow red light)

Cadmium red orange - cerulean blue/

Yellow ochre - [cobalt blue + Prussian blue] manganese blue
(Cobalt violet deep - cadmium yellow
light
Raw Sienna - cobalt blue greenish Manganese violet - zinc yellow
Ultramarine red - cobalt yellow
Mars violet - cinnabar green yellow
[Cobalt yellow + ultramarine red produce
Raw umber in turn:
Naples yellow French - cobalt blue deep/
Green umber - brown-red ochre/ cobalt blue deep +
Venetian red) violet
Yellow ochre, raw Sienna, raw umber] )

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COMPLEMENTARIES CHART 2

Cadmium red deep - viridian Cadmium yellow medium - ultramarine

(Cobalt violet light - cadmium yellow lemon/ violet
Naples yellow light
Cadmium yellow deep - ultramarine blue

Chrome oxide - madder rose dore Cadmium orange - Prussian blue

opaque (Yellow ochre ½ burnt- cobalt blue light

Indian red - cinnabar green deep Flesh ochre - cobalt green

deep

Sienna burnt Brown ochre

[Brown-red ochre/ - green umber] ) Brown ochre mat

Venetian red
Burnt umber

[Gold ochre - viridian bluish] )

Cadmium red purple - cadmium green deep

Madder deep - cadmium green light

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COMPLEMENTARIES CHART 3. EARTH COLORS

Yellow ochre - cobalt blue + Prussian blue Gold ochre burnt - light gray

Raw Sienna - cobalt blue greenish Sienna burnt light - light gray

Gold ochre - viridian bluish Sienna burnt deep - light gray

Naples yellow French - cobalt blue deep violet Brown ochre light - light gray

Yellow ochre ½ burnt - cobalt blue light Brown ochre deep - light gray

Flesh ochre - cobalt green deep Ocre des Anciens - light gray

Brown-red ochre/ - green umber Raw umber - light gray

Venetian red
Burnt umber - light gray
Indian red - cinnabar green deep
Kassel earth - light gray
English red - cinnabar green light
Ivory black - white gray
Mars violet - cinnabar green yellow
Vine black - white gray

Mars black - white gray

Note. The complementary of gold ochre burnt is a light blue-gray , the complementary of
raw umber is a light red-violet gray, etc.

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