The Psychology of Visual Art Eye, Brain and Art

Introduction

Paintings traditionally present a single, static view of the world. Indeed, still life paintings are, by definition, unchanging and inanimate. Portraits also disregard time in the sense that they capture the relatively stable demeanour of the sitter, which conveys their character (refer back to the portrait of Erasmus in Figure 5.7, p. 85). Some paintings do convey the passage of quite long periods of time, particularly narrative paintings that tell a story in a series of episodes integrated in a single composition. Several traditional pictorial devices are available to artists striving to convey the passage of time in a narrative painting. In ‘continuous narrative’ paintings, the same protagonist appears in several places, often separated by architectural structures that mark out different episodes in the story. Jacopo Pontormo’s elegant ‘Joseph with Jacob in Egypt’ (Plate 17; see colour plate section) presents several episodes from Joseph’s life as Viceroy of Egypt. Joseph appears in four locations, always wearing a red cap, lavender cloak and amber tunic. The story begins in the left foreground with Joseph presenting his father Jacob (kneeling) to the Pharaoh. In the right foreground, a messenger presents Joseph with news of his father’s illness. In the middle distance, Joseph is shown ascending a staircase with one of his sons to visit his ill father. In the top right, Joseph is shown presenting his sons to his dying father. Pontormo uses subtle pictorial cues of movement to convey the passage of time. Movement always produces a progressive change in position. Notice that the successive episodes in the story unfold progressively across the canvas and into the distance from foreground to middle distance (the figures in the far distance are thought to be references to Joseph’s earlier arrival in Egypt to seek grain; Langmuir, 2003).

How can artists convey events that unfold much more rapidly, involving brief bursts of dynamic action? This chapter will explore the techniques that artists use to convey a sense of action and the reasons for their effectiveness. The next section considers techniques used in still images such as paintings (Cutting, 2002), and the subsequent section considers animated images. The success of the various techniques is related to their ability to excite activity in the motion-detecting neural circuits of the visual cortex, which were mentioned in Chapter 3.