FROM THE DEPTHS OF THE PAST TO THE URGENCY OF THE PRESENT:
ENCAUSTIC AS A MEDIUM FOR ALL AGES
By Francisco Benitez
There is no doubt that encaustic has become one of the hottest painting mediums to appear on the art scene in the last twenty years. For a good part of the twentieth century, when new mediums, materials, and pigments were appearing on the market—such as acrylic, a plethora of new pigments and mediums, and new supports--encaustic painting was resigned to a somewhat marginal status. Despite interest in the medium by certain American and European painters working in isolation, such as David Aronson, who were active in the 1930’s and 1940’s, encaustic did not hit stardom until Jasper Johns began to use it for many of his “Target” and “Flag” series paintings in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Johns himself admitted that he used encaustic in a very basic and simple way, but even he did not realize the floodgates he was about to open.
How encaustic had humble beginnings in Ancient Greece as a paint for seafaring ships, to advance to the status of being one of the most highly-prized painting media in the golden age of the late Classical and Hellenistic periods, to then slowly fade away from artistic practice in the late medieval period, only to be reborn out the ashes in the twentieth century, is a compelling tale.
Encaustic, although not the oldest medium in history—that prize goes to fresco painting— is a member of a small elite of primal painting media from the dawn of civilization. [1. Minoan Fresco, National Archaeological Museum, Athens, c1500 BC] Although a written history can be traced to the Greeks, we know that beeswax has been a part of us as long as we have been around. It is known that some form of encaustic was used in Ancient Egypt, and it is not impossible that in fact the Egyptians may have given the knowledge to the Greeks. In any case, our best written record of the history of ancient painting is Pliny, a Roman scholar and encyclopedist from the first century AD, who wrote the Natural History. In Book 35, Pliny explains, although in less than scientific fashion, the beginnings and development of Greek and Roman painting.
Whether the Egyptians gave the knowledge to the Greeks, or they developed it on their own, one thing is certain, the Greeks saw the use of applying beeswax mixed with pitch to the wood of ships. Wax is an extremely resistant material, especially to the ravages of humidity and microbes. That is a good reason why so many of the Fayum portraits are in splendid condition. With pigment, a resin, and beeswax, artists began decorating ships with vivid colors and frightening attributes such as the gigantic eyes we recognize in triremes, which were meant to instill fear in the enemy.
This form of painting seemed to be very durable, and before long we see it being incorporated into the greater Greek tradition of wall and panel painting. The first great encaustic artist is considered to be Polygnotos (flourished around 475-450 BC), who was an artist who was crucial at making the break with the hieratic and schematic Archaic style, and pointing the way for a more optical and scientific approach to visualizing nature. There is a striking parallel with oil painting nearly 2,000 years later--as it became the painting medium par excellence in the Renaissance and Baroque because of an overwhelming impulse to represent nature and optical reality. Encaustic, because of its inherent “optical” qualities, was seen as a better medium to represent the complexity of the human form and nature than the flatter, water-based media such as tempera and fresco. Polygnotos was still an artist who was a product of his period, and although he moved painting in the direction of this new “opticality”—his major contributions were the development of complex draperies, facial expressions, and psychology—if one were to see his work today, it would remind one of Greek vase painting in its outlined forms, flat areas of color, and schematic approach to space. [2. Classical Period Fresco Painting, Parthenon, Athens, 5th c BC] Despite this, Polygnotos was an ambitious artist who was versed in many techniques, and his grand masterpiece was a vast mural cycle at Delphi representing Odysseus’ descent into the Underworld.
It was Apollodoros in the Classical Period who invented skiagraphos, which means “to shade”. It is he who thrust Western painting onto a long road which would reach its climax twenty centuries later in the work of Caravaggio, the ultimate “shadow” artist. This movement towards shading propelled art on a radical path whereupon it would give sculptural and three dimensional form to the figure, and bridge the gap between the painterly imagination and optical reality. Changing times required new media to reflect the shifting landscape of artistic evolution, and encaustic was a medium that aptly found a new central role. Apollodoros’ invention created a ripple effect in which a chasm developed, causing a division in art which lingers to this day—the eternal debate and tension between form and color, pathos and ethos, line and chiaroscuro [1].
The real moment where encaustic would take center stage was at the end of the Classical period and the beginning of the Hellenistic period, when a great school flourished on the Peloponnesus—Sikyon. I had the privilege of visiting the site this past summer with my wife. This city, which was one of the oldest in Greece, became the equivalent of a Florence, Paris, or New York, in antiquity. It sits upon a hill overlooking the strait which separates Peloponnesus from the mainland. There was a great school of painting, and it is said that competition was tremendous to enter, and if one was accepted, one faced paying tuition not unlike what today’s college students face. Eupompos, one of the first “celebrity” teachers, charged a talent per year at the academy, which was the equivalent of $20,000. Considering that in ancient times people did not have the same resources as today, that sum of money was a huge sacrifice for any family sending their child to be educated. Eupompos was the radical educator. He was one of the crucial figures that lifted art from being a manual craft to a higher sphere of intellectual and philosophical pursuit. He developed a program of instruction that encompassed not only mastery of materials, drawing, painting, anatomy, subject matter, etc, he also enveloped his students in, what we would consider today, a liberal arts or “Renaissance” learning atmosphere. Arithmetic, logic, geometry, grammar, and many of the disciplines associated with a classical education were an integral part of the Sikyonian school’s program. If this was not enough, Eupompos also saw to drawing being an integral part of the education of free schoolchildren all throughout Greece. It was no longer craft; it had become part of a well-rounded, enlightened education. [3. Sikyon today]
Out of this brilliant school came some of the greatest names of Greek art. Today they are unknown, but in antiquity they had a celebrity status rivaling or surpassing that of Picasso or Warhol. Pliny states that certain paintings sold for the prices of entire cities, and in Roman times coveted masterpieces brought from Greece were hung in public places and were almost considered sacred. These paintings became so famous that a whole business was born which has uncanny parallels to today’s poster business—master artisans would propose to wealthy Roman patrons to recreate famous Greek masterpieces in their villas, which would be part of a larger decorative wall fresco scheme. One of the most stunning examples is at the House of the Vettii at Pompeii, where we can recognize masterpieces by Zeuxis, Timomachos of Byzantium, and others.
In the Natural History, Pliny states that it is not agreed who invented encaustic--but the first artist to become famous as an encaustic artist in his own right was Pausias. Although we have little idea as to the scale and appearance of his work, Pliny mentions his work was smaller scale on wood, and often the subject matter was children and floral arrangements. Pausias also did ceiling paintings, frescoes, and large paintings. It is not clear whether he used encaustic with those projects. One thing that is known about his encaustic painting was that was a slow process and to counter criticism, he executed what came to be known as the “One-Day Boy”, as he did a full length picture of a boy in a single day. [4. Metope from the Tomb of the Swing, 4th c BC, encaustic, Louvre]
The master who taught encaustic to Pausias was Pamphilos, who happened to be the teacher of Apelles--considered the greatest painter of antiquity. Although the jury is still out on whether Apelles was an encaustic or tempera painter, there is no doubt he raised painting to a level which would not be equaled until the Renaissance nearly 1,500 years later. Apelles was not only the personal court artist to Alexander the Great, he pushed projectivist space outwards, inwards, and all around. His figures were steeped in atmospheric perspective[2]; his compositions were ambitious and full of mathematical complexity. According to a recent study[3], the author of the famous painting upon which Alexander mosaic at the Museo Nazionale in Naples is based, is actually by Apelles and not Philoxenos, as has been widely believed. There is a mention that “Apelles’ wax would fain have inscribed you…” in Statius’ Silvae. It is hard to believe such a vast and ambitious composition such as Alexander Vanquishing Darius could have been done with such a painstaking method such as heated encaustic. One thing that must be remembered is that in antiquity there was a cold and hot method for encaustic. Perhaps for larger compositions, the cold technique, also known as “Punic wax”, was used. [5. Alexander Mosaic, Museo Nazionale, Naples]
The meaning of encaustic in Greek is to “burn in”; therefore it would seem a contradiction in terms to say that a cold wax method needed to be burned in. Although Punic wax’s origins are unclear—from the name we can assume there is some connection with Carthage or North Africa—it became a widely used wax technique. It was made by boiling purified beeswax, and adding natrum, or the equivalent of a saponifying agent such as potash or sodium bicarbonate. In essence, it becomes a soapy wax which air dries, and can further be manipulated and fused by approaching a heating element such as a thermastris, or its modern equivalent--a heat gun or iron. Although Punic wax lacks the luminosity of heated wax, it is nonetheless beautiful as it has the appearance of a kind of wax-like tempera. Numerous studies on the Fayum portraits have revealed that both hot and cold methods were used, which means that depending on the local atelier and tradition, “encaustic” could mean one or the other. [6. Encaustic setup by Euphrosyne Doxiadis, author of the Mysterious Fayum Portraits]
As we pass from the golden age of Hellenistic painting and the Sikyonian School to Imperial Rome, we see encaustic still retains a central role in painting, especially for portrait painting as its optical depth lends itself so well to the rendering of human skin. The great tradition of ancestor portraits flourished in Rome, and as the Imperial Age fell into decline, the outlying provinces of the empire maintained their own local traditions, which are most evident today in the vast number of funerary portraits which have been unearthed in Egypt, known as the Fayum portraits.
It is believed the Fayum portraits have their origins in the Alexandrian School, which was associated with Apelles’ passing through the city later in his life. As Greeks began to colonize Egypt more and more, especially in the fertile district of the Fayum (south of Cairo), an unusual tradition developed which was the fusion of local Egyptian funerary traditions with rational “realistic” Western painting approaches. Artists were both Greek and native-born, and infused the more ancient, hieratic and symbolic approach to portraiture with one which was individualizing, “skiagraphic”, and psychological. [7. Fayum Lady, c200AD]
Many of the tools which were used were medical instruments for eye surgery, cleaning the ears, etc, and in the mid-nineteenth century a tomb was discovered in Northern France of a woman painter from the same period, although clearly a different region, who had a box of waxes and various “cauteria” or tools. [8. St. Médard-des-Prés tomb objects] The markings of the heated tools are clearly seen in any of the Fayum portraits. Although it cannot be determined at present whether they were executed by itinerant artists, or whether it was the clients who went to the artist’s studio, it is clear is that they are remarkable in the high level of technique and sophistication, and demonstrate how the encaustic method lends itself remarkably well to representing the pathos of the sitters. The works often remained in the household of the owner until death, at which time they were applied to a sarcophagus. Contrary to what is commonly thought, the sarcophagi were not buried immediately; they were kept in a special chamber in the household and brought out on special occasions so the “spirit” of the ancestor could be present. After a number of generations, when the memory of the ancestor started to fade, the sarcophagus was buried often in a careless fashion in the ground with no ceremony. It is remarkable that the portraits are in such superb condition considering the neglectful way in which they were disposed. [9. Set of cauteria, National Archaeological Museum, Athens]
As these works were executed in the first few centuries after the birth of Christ, they are what we would consider products of late antiquity. The Fayum portraits are the last breath of the great Sikyonian School, before expiring at the dawn of the Byzantine period. After the fall of the Roman Empire, and when Christianity was sweeping most of the Western world, we see the last examples of encaustic painting in a series of precious panels which are currently at the St. Catherine Monastery in the Sinai, depicting Christ, the Virgin Mary, St. Peter. These works laid the foundation for the ever-popular and widespread icon painting tradition which continues to this day. However, it was tempera that took the torch, and until present icon painters traditionally use tempera instead of encaustic. [10. St. Peter, St. Catherine Monastery, Sinai]
At the end of the 6th century AD, encaustic disappears from view. Already in the later Fayum portraits, one sees a return to a more symbolic and schematic way of representing faces; since tempera was cheaper and easier to use, it began to replace the more expensive and work-intensive encaustic portraits of an earlier period.
Although it is impossible to say that it was not practiced in certain quarters of the world, perhaps in isolated communities in Greece or Russia, encaustic disappeared from view for over a thousand years. During the Renaissance, the only artists who attempted to experiment with wax were Lucas Cranach and Andrea Mantegna. It would take the emerging and evolving scientific discipline of archaeology to resurrect it from obscurity. In the 1599, Pompeii was discovered, as were a host of other sites throughout the ancient world in the following centuries. Excavations at Herculaneum began in 1738, and in the 18th century fervor swept Europe with a passion for the antique--the lost methods of the ancient artists held new appeal. The 18th century was a very complex time since the church was losing hegemony over the minds and bodies of the population; scientific thought was emerging at a meteoric pace, and art was going through an identity crisis. As the idealism and powerful impulses of the Renaissance had dissipated, many artists and intellectuals sought inspiration in the great traditions of the past—Pliny suddenly became interesting, as did political ideas developed initially in the ancient world, which propelled the radical overthrow of a royalist autocratic regime in France in the late 18th century.
One figure would emerge as the “discoverer” of the ancient encaustic method—the Count of Caylus. Caylus was a fervent French antiquarian, artist, historian, and all-around intellectual, and it is thanks to him that the encaustic method was rediscovered in the mid 18th century. He read Pliny carefully and became obsessed with this ancient technique which had held a prime place millennia before the well-respected oil technique was even developed. In the tumultuous times preceding the French Revolution, Caylus would feud with other intellectuals of the period, namely Diderot, for not revealing the recipes of the ancient wax mixtures[4] Although Caylus’ “discovery” was greeted with a certain amount of skepticism in artistic and intellectual circles of 18th century France, they sowed the seeds of a whole new generation of “investigators” of the methods of the ancients which would continue well into the 20th century. [11. Comte de Caylus]
The 19th century saw the publication of numerous tracts on encaustic painting, namely Jacques Nicolas Paillot de Montabert who published an eight-volume set of books on painting techniques (1829) which featured an entire volume on encaustic[5], as well as a landmark study published in 1884 by Frenchmen Henry Cros and Charles Henry, entitled, L’encaustique.
Although encaustic was something which fascinated antiquarians and historians, it did not become popular until the development and widespread diffusion of electricity in the 20th century. Mexican muralists were among the first to revive the technique, as well as French spiritual artist Georges Roualt, in the first half of the 20th century. In pre-war America, Karl Zerbe and David Aronson were known as artists who investigated and experimented with encaustic. This period did not have the antiquarian passion of a previous generation, but nonetheless did see the publication of a landmark book on encaustic, which was to be crucial for modern artists curious about the method--The Painter’s Companion, A Basic Guide to Studio Methods and Materials (1949) by Reed Kay[6].
As the main focus of this article is the historical aspect of encaustic, I will only touch briefly on the developments of the past thirty years. I leave this task to future writers to expand on this rich material.
In post-war America, Jasper Johns began to experiment with the method for his “Target” series, and in the years following, artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Mimmo Paladino, Roy Lichtenstein, and Julian Schnabel made it an integral part of their practice. [12. Jasper Johns, 13. Tony Sherman. In the 1980’s and 90’s encaustic became the “best-kept secret” of emerging artistic media, with artists such as Joanne Mattera, Paula Roland, Tony Sherman pushing the medium to its limits in abstract, figurative, and mixed-media directions. Today encaustic has become one of the most popular artistic media, with artists discovering an endless potential for layering and process. Artists like myself have been astonished by its capacity for rendering optical reality in a way which, to quote Xenephon’s passage of Socrates visiting the atelier of Parrhasios, “Is not painting, Parrhasios, a representation of what we see?”[7]
[1] Richard Frumess, Encaustic Painters of Ancient Times, 2009 (founder of R&F Handmade Paints).
[2] Aerial perspective or atmospheric perspective refers to the effect the atmosphere has on the appearance of an object as it is viewed from a distance.
[3] Paolo Moreno, Apelles: The Alexander Mosaic, Skira, 2001.
[4] Margaret Bevier, http://gallery.sjsu.edu/arth198/painting/encaustic.html
[5] Margaret Bevier, http://gallery.sjsu.edu/arth198/painting/encaustic.html
[6] Joanne Mattera, The Art of Encaustic Painting, 2001.
[7] The Whole Works of Xenephon, Harvard, 1916.
ENCAUSTIC AS A MEDIUM FOR ALL AGES
By Francisco Benitez
There is no doubt that encaustic has become one of the hottest painting mediums to appear on the art scene in the last twenty years. For a good part of the twentieth century, when new mediums, materials, and pigments were appearing on the market—such as acrylic, a plethora of new pigments and mediums, and new supports--encaustic painting was resigned to a somewhat marginal status. Despite interest in the medium by certain American and European painters working in isolation, such as David Aronson, who were active in the 1930’s and 1940’s, encaustic did not hit stardom until Jasper Johns began to use it for many of his “Target” and “Flag” series paintings in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Johns himself admitted that he used encaustic in a very basic and simple way, but even he did not realize the floodgates he was about to open.
How encaustic had humble beginnings in Ancient Greece as a paint for seafaring ships, to advance to the status of being one of the most highly-prized painting media in the golden age of the late Classical and Hellenistic periods, to then slowly fade away from artistic practice in the late medieval period, only to be reborn out the ashes in the twentieth century, is a compelling tale.
Encaustic, although not the oldest medium in history—that prize goes to fresco painting— is a member of a small elite of primal painting media from the dawn of civilization. [1. Minoan Fresco, National Archaeological Museum, Athens, c1500 BC] Although a written history can be traced to the Greeks, we know that beeswax has been a part of us as long as we have been around. It is known that some form of encaustic was used in Ancient Egypt, and it is not impossible that in fact the Egyptians may have given the knowledge to the Greeks. In any case, our best written record of the history of ancient painting is Pliny, a Roman scholar and encyclopedist from the first century AD, who wrote the Natural History. In Book 35, Pliny explains, although in less than scientific fashion, the beginnings and development of Greek and Roman painting.
Whether the Egyptians gave the knowledge to the Greeks, or they developed it on their own, one thing is certain, the Greeks saw the use of applying beeswax mixed with pitch to the wood of ships. Wax is an extremely resistant material, especially to the ravages of humidity and microbes. That is a good reason why so many of the Fayum portraits are in splendid condition. With pigment, a resin, and beeswax, artists began decorating ships with vivid colors and frightening attributes such as the gigantic eyes we recognize in triremes, which were meant to instill fear in the enemy.
This form of painting seemed to be very durable, and before long we see it being incorporated into the greater Greek tradition of wall and panel painting. The first great encaustic artist is considered to be Polygnotos (flourished around 475-450 BC), who was an artist who was crucial at making the break with the hieratic and schematic Archaic style, and pointing the way for a more optical and scientific approach to visualizing nature. There is a striking parallel with oil painting nearly 2,000 years later--as it became the painting medium par excellence in the Renaissance and Baroque because of an overwhelming impulse to represent nature and optical reality. Encaustic, because of its inherent “optical” qualities, was seen as a better medium to represent the complexity of the human form and nature than the flatter, water-based media such as tempera and fresco. Polygnotos was still an artist who was a product of his period, and although he moved painting in the direction of this new “opticality”—his major contributions were the development of complex draperies, facial expressions, and psychology—if one were to see his work today, it would remind one of Greek vase painting in its outlined forms, flat areas of color, and schematic approach to space. [2. Classical Period Fresco Painting, Parthenon, Athens, 5th c BC] Despite this, Polygnotos was an ambitious artist who was versed in many techniques, and his grand masterpiece was a vast mural cycle at Delphi representing Odysseus’ descent into the Underworld.
It was Apollodoros in the Classical Period who invented skiagraphos, which means “to shade”. It is he who thrust Western painting onto a long road which would reach its climax twenty centuries later in the work of Caravaggio, the ultimate “shadow” artist. This movement towards shading propelled art on a radical path whereupon it would give sculptural and three dimensional form to the figure, and bridge the gap between the painterly imagination and optical reality. Changing times required new media to reflect the shifting landscape of artistic evolution, and encaustic was a medium that aptly found a new central role. Apollodoros’ invention created a ripple effect in which a chasm developed, causing a division in art which lingers to this day—the eternal debate and tension between form and color, pathos and ethos, line and chiaroscuro [1].
The real moment where encaustic would take center stage was at the end of the Classical period and the beginning of the Hellenistic period, when a great school flourished on the Peloponnesus—Sikyon. I had the privilege of visiting the site this past summer with my wife. This city, which was one of the oldest in Greece, became the equivalent of a Florence, Paris, or New York, in antiquity. It sits upon a hill overlooking the strait which separates Peloponnesus from the mainland. There was a great school of painting, and it is said that competition was tremendous to enter, and if one was accepted, one faced paying tuition not unlike what today’s college students face. Eupompos, one of the first “celebrity” teachers, charged a talent per year at the academy, which was the equivalent of $20,000. Considering that in ancient times people did not have the same resources as today, that sum of money was a huge sacrifice for any family sending their child to be educated. Eupompos was the radical educator. He was one of the crucial figures that lifted art from being a manual craft to a higher sphere of intellectual and philosophical pursuit. He developed a program of instruction that encompassed not only mastery of materials, drawing, painting, anatomy, subject matter, etc, he also enveloped his students in, what we would consider today, a liberal arts or “Renaissance” learning atmosphere. Arithmetic, logic, geometry, grammar, and many of the disciplines associated with a classical education were an integral part of the Sikyonian school’s program. If this was not enough, Eupompos also saw to drawing being an integral part of the education of free schoolchildren all throughout Greece. It was no longer craft; it had become part of a well-rounded, enlightened education. [3. Sikyon today]
Out of this brilliant school came some of the greatest names of Greek art. Today they are unknown, but in antiquity they had a celebrity status rivaling or surpassing that of Picasso or Warhol. Pliny states that certain paintings sold for the prices of entire cities, and in Roman times coveted masterpieces brought from Greece were hung in public places and were almost considered sacred. These paintings became so famous that a whole business was born which has uncanny parallels to today’s poster business—master artisans would propose to wealthy Roman patrons to recreate famous Greek masterpieces in their villas, which would be part of a larger decorative wall fresco scheme. One of the most stunning examples is at the House of the Vettii at Pompeii, where we can recognize masterpieces by Zeuxis, Timomachos of Byzantium, and others.
In the Natural History, Pliny states that it is not agreed who invented encaustic--but the first artist to become famous as an encaustic artist in his own right was Pausias. Although we have little idea as to the scale and appearance of his work, Pliny mentions his work was smaller scale on wood, and often the subject matter was children and floral arrangements. Pausias also did ceiling paintings, frescoes, and large paintings. It is not clear whether he used encaustic with those projects. One thing that is known about his encaustic painting was that was a slow process and to counter criticism, he executed what came to be known as the “One-Day Boy”, as he did a full length picture of a boy in a single day. [4. Metope from the Tomb of the Swing, 4th c BC, encaustic, Louvre]
The master who taught encaustic to Pausias was Pamphilos, who happened to be the teacher of Apelles--considered the greatest painter of antiquity. Although the jury is still out on whether Apelles was an encaustic or tempera painter, there is no doubt he raised painting to a level which would not be equaled until the Renaissance nearly 1,500 years later. Apelles was not only the personal court artist to Alexander the Great, he pushed projectivist space outwards, inwards, and all around. His figures were steeped in atmospheric perspective[2]; his compositions were ambitious and full of mathematical complexity. According to a recent study[3], the author of the famous painting upon which Alexander mosaic at the Museo Nazionale in Naples is based, is actually by Apelles and not Philoxenos, as has been widely believed. There is a mention that “Apelles’ wax would fain have inscribed you…” in Statius’ Silvae. It is hard to believe such a vast and ambitious composition such as Alexander Vanquishing Darius could have been done with such a painstaking method such as heated encaustic. One thing that must be remembered is that in antiquity there was a cold and hot method for encaustic. Perhaps for larger compositions, the cold technique, also known as “Punic wax”, was used. [5. Alexander Mosaic, Museo Nazionale, Naples]
The meaning of encaustic in Greek is to “burn in”; therefore it would seem a contradiction in terms to say that a cold wax method needed to be burned in. Although Punic wax’s origins are unclear—from the name we can assume there is some connection with Carthage or North Africa—it became a widely used wax technique. It was made by boiling purified beeswax, and adding natrum, or the equivalent of a saponifying agent such as potash or sodium bicarbonate. In essence, it becomes a soapy wax which air dries, and can further be manipulated and fused by approaching a heating element such as a thermastris, or its modern equivalent--a heat gun or iron. Although Punic wax lacks the luminosity of heated wax, it is nonetheless beautiful as it has the appearance of a kind of wax-like tempera. Numerous studies on the Fayum portraits have revealed that both hot and cold methods were used, which means that depending on the local atelier and tradition, “encaustic” could mean one or the other. [6. Encaustic setup by Euphrosyne Doxiadis, author of the Mysterious Fayum Portraits]
As we pass from the golden age of Hellenistic painting and the Sikyonian School to Imperial Rome, we see encaustic still retains a central role in painting, especially for portrait painting as its optical depth lends itself so well to the rendering of human skin. The great tradition of ancestor portraits flourished in Rome, and as the Imperial Age fell into decline, the outlying provinces of the empire maintained their own local traditions, which are most evident today in the vast number of funerary portraits which have been unearthed in Egypt, known as the Fayum portraits.
It is believed the Fayum portraits have their origins in the Alexandrian School, which was associated with Apelles’ passing through the city later in his life. As Greeks began to colonize Egypt more and more, especially in the fertile district of the Fayum (south of Cairo), an unusual tradition developed which was the fusion of local Egyptian funerary traditions with rational “realistic” Western painting approaches. Artists were both Greek and native-born, and infused the more ancient, hieratic and symbolic approach to portraiture with one which was individualizing, “skiagraphic”, and psychological. [7. Fayum Lady, c200AD]
Many of the tools which were used were medical instruments for eye surgery, cleaning the ears, etc, and in the mid-nineteenth century a tomb was discovered in Northern France of a woman painter from the same period, although clearly a different region, who had a box of waxes and various “cauteria” or tools. [8. St. Médard-des-Prés tomb objects] The markings of the heated tools are clearly seen in any of the Fayum portraits. Although it cannot be determined at present whether they were executed by itinerant artists, or whether it was the clients who went to the artist’s studio, it is clear is that they are remarkable in the high level of technique and sophistication, and demonstrate how the encaustic method lends itself remarkably well to representing the pathos of the sitters. The works often remained in the household of the owner until death, at which time they were applied to a sarcophagus. Contrary to what is commonly thought, the sarcophagi were not buried immediately; they were kept in a special chamber in the household and brought out on special occasions so the “spirit” of the ancestor could be present. After a number of generations, when the memory of the ancestor started to fade, the sarcophagus was buried often in a careless fashion in the ground with no ceremony. It is remarkable that the portraits are in such superb condition considering the neglectful way in which they were disposed. [9. Set of cauteria, National Archaeological Museum, Athens]
As these works were executed in the first few centuries after the birth of Christ, they are what we would consider products of late antiquity. The Fayum portraits are the last breath of the great Sikyonian School, before expiring at the dawn of the Byzantine period. After the fall of the Roman Empire, and when Christianity was sweeping most of the Western world, we see the last examples of encaustic painting in a series of precious panels which are currently at the St. Catherine Monastery in the Sinai, depicting Christ, the Virgin Mary, St. Peter. These works laid the foundation for the ever-popular and widespread icon painting tradition which continues to this day. However, it was tempera that took the torch, and until present icon painters traditionally use tempera instead of encaustic. [10. St. Peter, St. Catherine Monastery, Sinai]
At the end of the 6th century AD, encaustic disappears from view. Already in the later Fayum portraits, one sees a return to a more symbolic and schematic way of representing faces; since tempera was cheaper and easier to use, it began to replace the more expensive and work-intensive encaustic portraits of an earlier period.
Although it is impossible to say that it was not practiced in certain quarters of the world, perhaps in isolated communities in Greece or Russia, encaustic disappeared from view for over a thousand years. During the Renaissance, the only artists who attempted to experiment with wax were Lucas Cranach and Andrea Mantegna. It would take the emerging and evolving scientific discipline of archaeology to resurrect it from obscurity. In the 1599, Pompeii was discovered, as were a host of other sites throughout the ancient world in the following centuries. Excavations at Herculaneum began in 1738, and in the 18th century fervor swept Europe with a passion for the antique--the lost methods of the ancient artists held new appeal. The 18th century was a very complex time since the church was losing hegemony over the minds and bodies of the population; scientific thought was emerging at a meteoric pace, and art was going through an identity crisis. As the idealism and powerful impulses of the Renaissance had dissipated, many artists and intellectuals sought inspiration in the great traditions of the past—Pliny suddenly became interesting, as did political ideas developed initially in the ancient world, which propelled the radical overthrow of a royalist autocratic regime in France in the late 18th century.
One figure would emerge as the “discoverer” of the ancient encaustic method—the Count of Caylus. Caylus was a fervent French antiquarian, artist, historian, and all-around intellectual, and it is thanks to him that the encaustic method was rediscovered in the mid 18th century. He read Pliny carefully and became obsessed with this ancient technique which had held a prime place millennia before the well-respected oil technique was even developed. In the tumultuous times preceding the French Revolution, Caylus would feud with other intellectuals of the period, namely Diderot, for not revealing the recipes of the ancient wax mixtures[4] Although Caylus’ “discovery” was greeted with a certain amount of skepticism in artistic and intellectual circles of 18th century France, they sowed the seeds of a whole new generation of “investigators” of the methods of the ancients which would continue well into the 20th century. [11. Comte de Caylus]
The 19th century saw the publication of numerous tracts on encaustic painting, namely Jacques Nicolas Paillot de Montabert who published an eight-volume set of books on painting techniques (1829) which featured an entire volume on encaustic[5], as well as a landmark study published in 1884 by Frenchmen Henry Cros and Charles Henry, entitled, L’encaustique.
Although encaustic was something which fascinated antiquarians and historians, it did not become popular until the development and widespread diffusion of electricity in the 20th century. Mexican muralists were among the first to revive the technique, as well as French spiritual artist Georges Roualt, in the first half of the 20th century. In pre-war America, Karl Zerbe and David Aronson were known as artists who investigated and experimented with encaustic. This period did not have the antiquarian passion of a previous generation, but nonetheless did see the publication of a landmark book on encaustic, which was to be crucial for modern artists curious about the method--The Painter’s Companion, A Basic Guide to Studio Methods and Materials (1949) by Reed Kay[6].
As the main focus of this article is the historical aspect of encaustic, I will only touch briefly on the developments of the past thirty years. I leave this task to future writers to expand on this rich material.
In post-war America, Jasper Johns began to experiment with the method for his “Target” series, and in the years following, artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Mimmo Paladino, Roy Lichtenstein, and Julian Schnabel made it an integral part of their practice. [12. Jasper Johns, 13. Tony Sherman. In the 1980’s and 90’s encaustic became the “best-kept secret” of emerging artistic media, with artists such as Joanne Mattera, Paula Roland, Tony Sherman pushing the medium to its limits in abstract, figurative, and mixed-media directions. Today encaustic has become one of the most popular artistic media, with artists discovering an endless potential for layering and process. Artists like myself have been astonished by its capacity for rendering optical reality in a way which, to quote Xenephon’s passage of Socrates visiting the atelier of Parrhasios, “Is not painting, Parrhasios, a representation of what we see?”[7]
[1] Richard Frumess, Encaustic Painters of Ancient Times, 2009 (founder of R&F Handmade Paints).
[2] Aerial perspective or atmospheric perspective refers to the effect the atmosphere has on the appearance of an object as it is viewed from a distance.
[3] Paolo Moreno, Apelles: The Alexander Mosaic, Skira, 2001.
[4] Margaret Bevier, http://gallery.sjsu.edu/arth198/painting/encaustic.html
[5] Margaret Bevier, http://gallery.sjsu.edu/arth198/painting/encaustic.html
[6] Joanne Mattera, The Art of Encaustic Painting, 2001.
[7] The Whole Works of Xenephon, Harvard, 1916.
Roman Painting
A chapter from Le sexe et l’effroi, 1994
Pascal Quignard
Translation from the French by Francisco Benítez
A dialogue from Xenephon shows Socrates inquiring Parrhasios about the essence of painting. Socrates was condemned and executed in 399 BC. Xenephon composed the Memorabilia, around 390 BC in Scillonte.
One day Socrates enters the Athenian studio of Parrhasios, the zôgraphos. The word—painter—in Greek is said zôgraphos (he who transcribes the living). In Latin the term is artifex (he who practices an art, who makes a work which is artificialis).
“Tell me, Parrhasios,” declares Socrates, “Is not painting (graphikè) an image of things which we see (eikasia tôn orômenôn)? Recession and projection, light and dark, hardness and softness, the sateceous and the smooth, the youth or age of the body—you imitate these things with the aid of colors?”
“You speak the truth.” responds Parrhasios.
“And now if you wish to represent beautiful forms (kala eidè), and since it is not easy to find a man who is not above imperfection, you work with several models. You take from each that which is most beautiful, most perfect, after which you compose a body of total beauty.”
“That is, in effect, the way we work.”, says Parrhasios.
“Really!”, cries Socrates, “That which is most persuasive, most suave, most touching, most dear, most deserving in being explored, that which we desire the most, the expression of the soul (to tès psychès èthos), are they not things which you imitate? Or is it that precisely which evades imitation (mimèton)?”
“But we have to look at the way in which things are imitated, Socrates,” responds Parrhasios. “These things possess neither proportion (summetrian), nor color (chrôma), nor any of the qualities of which you have just spoken. These things cannot be visible (oraton).
“Ah!”, responds Socrates, “Do we not see men who have a gaze (blépein) which either expresses kindness, and at other moments, which is filled with hate?”
“That seems correct.”, responds Parrhasios.
“Would it not be necessary to imitate these expressions through the rendering of the eyes (ommasin)?”
“Indeed.”, says Parrhasios.
“When our friends are happy or sad, do their faces (ta prosôpa) reveal someone precoccupied with his/her own happiness or sadness, or of someone impervious to such things?”
“No, by God!”, exclaims Parrhasios. “In happiness, joy scintillates upon the face. In sadness, a dark shadow overcomes the gaze (skuthrôpoi).”
“Are we able, then, to create an image (apeikazein) from these various gazes?”, asks Socrates.
“Of course.”, responds Parrhasios.
“Either by high airs and noble appearance, by humility or servility, moderation and the right measure, or even excess (hubris), as well as that which evades beauty (apeirokalon), it is through their faces (prosôpou) and attitudes (schèmatôn) that men betray or withhold their emotions.
“You speak the truth, “ says Parrhasios.
“Then these things should be imitated (mimèta),” says Socrates.
“Indeed,” responds Parrhasios. (Xenephon, Memorabilia, III, 10, 1).
This dialogue between Socrates and Parrhasios expresses the ideal of ancient painting. Three stages determine the ascent from the visible to the invisible. First, painting represents that which we see. Then, painting represents beauty. Then, at last, painting represents to tès psychès èthos (the éthos of the psychè, the moral expression of the soul, the psychic disposition at the crucial instant).
How is one to represent the invisible in the visible? How is one to seize an expression at the defining moment of a myth (basically freeze-framing the éthos of the muthos)? In the discussion between Parrhasios and Socrates several words make a precise reading difficult. The word, prôsopon, in Greek signifies both the face seen head-on and theater mask (it also stands for our grammatical stand-ins; “I”, “you”, which are Greek prosôpa, Etruscan phersu, Latin personae. They are “mask-faces” for men who speak). In his Poetics, Aristotle says, “It is the gaze before the consequence of the act which is the best ethos.” Take for example Troy in flames, the dead in Hades. Only after come the face, the attitudes, the movements, the clothing which follow the role of the hero in action at the éthikos instant, the “crucial” moment (the Roman crucifixio was an ethical instant in the narrative of the Nazarene god’s death).
In other terms, behind each ancient painting there is always a book—or at least a narrative condensed into an ethical instant.
Greek painters and sculptors were well-read and erudite. The modern equivalents of Parrhasios or Euphranor are not Renoir or Picasso, but Michelangelo and Leonardo. Euphranor the Athenian pretended to possess the full extent of knowledge of his own century. The assembly of the Amphyctons, grand council of Greece, decreed that Parrhasios would receive universal public hospitality and the costs of his accommodations would be paid by the city in which he desired to stay. They lived surrounded by glory. Plato denigrated these “handymen” (Seneca the Younger would say, “the sordid”) who were draped in honors which the mathematicians and philosophers envied. Plato became irritated to see the importance accorded to Parrhasios by the city of Athens, that “sophist of the visible”, that illusionist, that new Daedalus whose craft consisted of constructing deceptive illusions, that conceited dandy who had the audacity to wear embroidered coats. The purple embroidered coat of Parrhasios is the most celebrated symbol of late 5th century Athens. Nothing remains in our hands now than the recollection of a cloak. Of the works which were the most famous we have only scarce information in an old volumen or fragmentary traces through copies of copies upon the walls of villas. Archaeology and reading have exhumed them. Two thousand years later, we infer the forms which are uncertain; uncertain as the silhouettes of a mist when the night dies and the first rays of morning light rip them from brush and roof, and then erase them in full day.
Time has not conserved the works of Polygnotos, Parrhasios, or Apelles, like it has the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The men who admired them to the point of consenting them such privileges at the cost of free cities had to admire the easel paintings and frescoes which were as beautiful as the tragedies.
We will never see them.
This book is a collection of dreams offered to the traces of ruins.
Parrhasios came from Asia Minor. He came from Ephesus. His father practiced the art of painting and was called Euenor. Parrhasios became the greatest painter of his time. He was more famous than Zeuxis. His pride knew no limits. One day he raised his right hand and declared: “The terms of art (technès termata) were found with this hand.” Besides his red cloak, Klearchos said that he even would wear a gold crown. His drawings on hide skin and stencils in wood (which were used by silversmiths and ceramicists) were so beautiful that the citizens, during his lifetime, would buy their vestigia. Theophrastos said that he was happy and would sing to himself when he worked. By humming to himself (hypokinuromenos), he sought to ease the fatigue of work. The technique of Parrhasios was still conventional; the colors were still ethical (as is today in our society where black is grief, blue is for boys, green is hope). The fourth century BC Athenian painter, Euphranor, said that the Theseus by Parrhasios did not hold a rose from mankind, but rather a rose from a rose bush.
Parrhasios was not the inventor of pornography. He invented the extreme line (the extremitas, the contour, the termata technès). What Pliny the Elder translated as extremitas, Quintilian called circumscripsio, which in rhetoric means the “duration” of a sentence. Pliny clarifies: Ambire enim se ipsa debet extremitas et sic desinere ut promittat alia post se ostendatque etiam quae occultat (Since the extremity must go around and terminate in order to give the impression that there is something behind it, and to reveal that which it hides). Parrhasios is finally that painter who adds fantasy to the vision of the visible. It is the surprising shamanic inscription that the painter himself inscribes in the lower part of his Heracles confronting frenzied death: “As in the darkness of the night (ennuchios) the god appeared to me (phantazeto) frequently in dreams, so we are able to see him here (oran).”
The dialogue between Parrhasios and Socrates says this: naturalism is the basis of art; if beauty is in the appearance (the phantasma), the purpose is in the ethical expression (the great divine or superhuman emotions). Aristides of Thebes exemplifies the notion that art should add, in its the representation of the ethos, that of the pathos. Who was the great painter? The great painter was s/he who effectively rendered in the represented figure the inner struggle between character and emotion. Pliny the Elder described a painting by Aristides of Thebes that Alexander loved so much that he robbed it during the sack of the city in 334BC: “A city is taken, a mother is fatally wounded; her baby reaches for her bare breast. The gaze of the mother expresses her awareness of the child and is afraid that as her milk is exhausted by death it may suck blood.” (Pliny the Elder, Natural History, XXXV, 98). Aristide of Thebes painted death which breastfeeds, it’s the same crucialis moment as Parrhasios of Ephesus painting the nailed Prometheus from the face of the prisoner from Olinthos. It is the instant of death.
How do we decipher an ancient painting? In his Poetics, Aristotle explains that tragedy consists of three distinct elements: the narrative, the character, and the end (the muthos, the ethos, and the telos). The intention of painting is in its revelation of character. It’s a matter of having the muthos of the painting coincide with the ethos of the main character at the moment of the telos or just before the telos. The best ethic is either a consequence of the act: Troy in flames, Phaedra hanged, Cynaegirus whose hands are cut off; or it’s the preceding instant: Narcissus before his reflection, Medea before her two sons whom she will kill. The ethical consequence becomes the attribute which makes it possible to no longer have to write the name of the hero near the figure. In the Middle Ages, Alcuin wrote: “A woman holding a child on her knees is not enough for me to find the name of the figure. Is it the Virgin and Christ? Venus and Aeneus? Alcmene and Hercules? Andromache and Astyanax?” He recommended to either write the name underneath the figure, or to represent the proper attribute. What is an attribute? When Neakles had to represent the Nile, he painted a river and placed a crocodile on its banks. Virgil would accentuate the codification of attributes: the ash tree is what makes the grove beautiful. The pine tree is what makes the garden beautiful. The poplar is what makes the difficult path which follows the river beautiful. The fir tree is what makes the mountain slope beautiful. Each place possesses an attribute whose presence defines it.
It was a learned painting. It was more learned even than the painting which pretended to challenge it during the Renaissance. The Ut Pictura Poesis of Horace had true meaning in Antiquity, and went astray during the folly of the Renaissance. The painter is nothing more than a poet who is taciturn; nothing more than the poet who is a verbal painter. Ancient painting is a poet’s narrative, condensed in an image. Simonides would say: “The word is the image (eikon) of actions.”
The ethical instant is the “mute word” of the image. In Greek, the zôgraphia (the transcribing of the living) is poetry which silences itself whilst concentrating itself within the image, which does speak—added Simonides—by “hushing” itself (siôpôsan). The image-actions make men enter the memory of mankind by concentrating themselves in the ethos (by becoming God).
The ideal of statuary beauty was ethical. It is difficult to discern between ataraxia and petrifaction. It is the tranquilla pax, the placida pax, the summa pax of the divine ones. From this the strange purpose of art is assigned by Lucretius: “to give for a moment the peace of mind of the sage to that which lacks wisdom”. It is apotheosis (theomorphosis): to don oneself in the body of the gods. It is the coming together of the Ataraxians. Those for whom joy is steadfast, exempt from pain, exempt from pity, exempt from anger, exempt from kindness, exempt from cupidity, exempt from desire, exempt from fear of death, exempt from feelings of love, exempt from work-related fatigue, they are not the ones who rule the world. They observe it. It is the divine theater masks that the city grants to certain men according to their own ethos.
In Virgil, at the moment of her suicide, Dido pales at her impending death; with her trembling cheeks, streaks of blood in her eyes, she declares, “I am done living (Vixi). And now I will descend to the bowels of the earth like a great image (magna imago).”
Beauty is god frozen in action. It is to offer people hospitality and luxury and silence (otium and quies) which lie in wait for impending death. The “great image” is the sculpture in the tomb. The question regarding painting is: How to appear as a god in one’s eternal instant?
Greek ceramicists used “cartoons” which they cut out from silhouettes outlined in chalk or charcoal, produced by projecting a shadow upon the surface of the wall. We call them stencils. Aristotle defined painting by the juxtaposition of non-blended marks seen up close. The distant appearance of colors was a challenge for both the frieze sculptor and the temple tapestry artist, well before it was an issue for the mosaicist. It was the technique poikilos (or still the skiagraphia, the trompe-l’oeil of the proscenium where the colors only fused at a distance). The Romans chose the skiagraphia of the Greeks for their own villa frescoes (theater décor painting).
The zôgraphia of the Greeks is divided into easel painting and décor painting (where the colors are not blended but are colorful, “tachygraphic”). To Zeuxis’ legendary slowness Antipatros counters with: “It took me forty years in order for me to paint in forty days.” The Romans called the rapid and excellent technique of the Asianists (the Alexandrians) compendiaria. The via compendiaria is the resolution of this unfinished kind of painting, in trompe l-oeil, with clearly-intended colors, drawn with the help of stencils, which was in opposition to the painting of shadows of colors. Agnès Rouveret has shown that the scaenographia was split into two distinct operations: the first was the adumbratio (the proper skiagraphia) which is trompe-l’oeil architectural wall painting with lateral extensions; and the other was the frons, the frontal projection with balance and symmetry of all horizontal and vertical lines in relation to the center of the circle (ad circini centrum omnium linearum). A page from Lucretius describes a colonnade by describing the difficult and strange “perspective” (angustia fastigia coni), which is not a true perspective; it was what the Romans defined as the impression of “dark cone which draws in a far-off view” (in obscuram coni acumen). Lucretius adds: “A colonnade, although it is of uniform height, and all the pillars supporting it are of equal size (in perpetuam), yet when we look at its whole length, from one end, it seems to diminish gradually into a cone, the roof meeting the floor and the right side the left, until they have all joined at the apex of the cone.
Lucretius’ De Natura Rerum calls forth a multitude of paintings. Lucretius evokes the square tower which becomes a round object from a distance. He says that immobility is but a slowness which is imperceptible to the naked eye, such as the herd which grazes in the distance, or as the ship which capsizes in the sea. The great Epicurean poet defines yet again the tragic instant of ethical painting. Lucretius’ De Natura Rerum (along with the tragedies of Seneca the Younger) is the largest gallery of Roman frescoes which remains.
But there is more: De Natura Rerum utters the secret of Roman painting. The paintings of the second Pompeian style are organized like the colonnade Lucretius describes: the upper half of the panel is the only part to be decorated in order to create the illusion of spatial depth. The lower part forms a projecting foreground. Then the frons of Lucretius’ colonnade arises where the lines of the lateral walls converge, illusory parallel lines dissolve at a mid-point distance of the panel lines; the “dark point of the cone” only applies to the upper half (the truly painted space on the wall).
For Lucretius as for the entire Epicurean school, an incertus object lives at the core of the locus certus. It is the Adèlos (as the phallus of the Villa of the Mysteries is hidden beneath its veil). The Latin incertus translates into the Greek as adèlos (invisible). Improvable as such, the invisible is real. The invisible is the atomic tissue of the world. Anaxagoras said: Ta phainomena opsis tôn adèlôn (the phenomena are that which is visible of those things unknown). The colonnade in the distance recedes like a cone and dissolves at the incertus point (adèlos, obscuram coni). A res incerta inhabits this imaginary point which is as focalized as it is obscure. This mystery of the incertus point where perspective diminishes contrasts with the large panoramic plans which the Romans instead called the locus certus. By associating notions of the correct distance and that of uncertain perspective, they called the locus certus the stage (proscenium) in the theater. This place was called certus because the architect, when he planned the construction of the theater, anticipated the distant visual distortion of the tier arrangements.
The Roman innovation consisted in transposing trompe-l’oeils to the walls of private homes, which reproduced the decors of Hellenistic theaters. The private Roman home was the first political theater where the patronus would exercise his power over his gens and over his clientele. But the patronus guards himself in rivalising the tyrannus. The domestic villas were not to be palaces of tyranny: instead they would be villas where the palace would be illusory (where the rivalry with the prince would not be palatial but only parietal; there is a filial relationship of the villa with the palace as with Aeneus and Anchises).
In this way the citizens were able to enjoy a semblance of a royal hunt in the opsis (the spectacle) of the ludus (the games) in the arena; the walls of their villa would become “tachygraphs” of palaces, fictive hunts, and theater scenes.
One who does not understand the theater, the arena, the triumphal march, the games, sees not Rome. All power is theater. Every house (domus) is a simulated dominatio of the dominus over his gens, over his freedmen, over his slaves. Also, all painting is a theater mask (phersu, persona, prosôpon) for the patrician, in that it elevates him to the status of a family god. The ancient artist was not unable to individualize faces. Under the name of imagines, the Latins venerated life-like masks of their forefathers which they kept in a small closet in the atrium. But the Greek assembly or the Roman aristocracy which commissioned paintings specifically wished to avoid a likeness: they demanded the artist transform their face into a colossos or an icon. In other words, they wanted to be metamorphosed into a god or heroic ethos. It was this irreal aptitude which stripped away the private and personal mask and transfigured it into a more ideal and theomorphic state, which was the fortune of Polygnotos.
It was here that there was a curious metamorphosis: the tragic scaenae frons, which was created in the middle of the 5th century BC in Athens; and because of Aeschylus, three centuries later it would inhabit Italian homes by supplying a visual theory of imposing tragic architecture, and by disguising and subordinating wall illustration to ethical illusion. The height-enhancing cothurnus boots on the scaena tragica, already heightened by a platform in the proscenium, accounts for the heightened character of the upper part of the frescoes which itself rests on a line forming the base. This line which is conceived as a platform upon the wall, is the primary meaning of the word, orthographia.
Cicero wrote to Atticus: “As I criticized openly before him the narrowness of the windows (fenestarum angustias) of the house, the architect, Vettius Cyrus, retorted back that the points of view upon the gardens would not give as much pleasure if they were through wider openings.” He added that this would facilitate the ray of light leaving the eye; the cone of light coming from the garden would concentrate and block the shock of the atoms which form the simulacra at the edge of the window; thus, the result would be more brilliance, more contrast, more emotion, and more suavitas. The Romans revered paradise in the form of a garden. Paradeisos is a Greek word which means “park”. A philosophical school was called the Academy; another was called the Lyceum; another was even called the Portico.; the most austere and certainly the most profound, the one which would exert a dominant influence over Rome (up until 230), was called, the Garden. The great Roman families under the princedom of Augustus, while stripped of their political privileges, would seek to distinguish themselves from the other social classes through the beauty of their villas and gardens, the number of slaves, the culinary extravagances, the rarity of the objects, the antiquity of the painted and sculpted works, the collection of splendours plundered from vanquished peoples making the “spoils of the world”, which the dignitaries from the victorious empire would divide amongst themselves. The uselessness of the service (officium) imitates the otium (the idleness) of the princes. And the otium of the princes imitates the ataraxia of the gods in the far reaches of the sky.
What is a garden in Rome? The Golden Age revisits the present. It’s about finding something of divine inactivity. It’s holding oneself immobile like the stars in the sky, surrounded by a nimbus, like holding oneself immobile like a cat before assaulting its prey, like holding oneself immobile like the still leaves before a storm, like the statues of those gods standing in groves. Such should be life facing death. It is to hold to oneself the vision of the garden encapsulated on the edge of the window, stopped by two rays opposing it by fascinated eyes.
Plato forbade that we give false appearances to landscapes. The physis was unrepresentable because it was divine. Plato wrote that the “profaner” who had the audacity to rival demiurgy itself, which gushes forth from the physis in the form of the world (cosmos,) would have to be called an artifex or psuedo-demiurge. It is under Augustus that landscapes and riverbanks would appear. Virgil in ten years would bring brooks, the pliant shadow traversing them as well as the river snake, the beech tree, the edge of the path, the hedge, the pollen-gathering bees, the raucous song of the woodpigeons, the boiled chestnuts, the turtledove on top of the elm tree, the clouds which move over the fields.
Virgil was a genius. He produced nature in fifteen years. He was the only one to do so. He died on September 21st, 19, at the port of Brindisi, where he had disembarked two days previously coming from Greece and sweating next to the fire which had been lit since he was trembling from fever. He showed, holding up his hands, his tablets, demanding that that they be thrown into the crackling flame—the Aeneid.
It was the painter Ludius who invented silhouettes. Painters before Ludius called topia landscape types. Far from endeavouring to represent real landscapes, the task of the topia consisted in assembling the typical features of the suavitas of the scenes that they evoked: the edge of the sea, the countryside with its shepherds, the port and its boats, the riverbanks and the nymphs, the sacred landscapes. Pliny the Elder mentions that it was Ludius who animated the topia with the help of silhouetted little characters going by foot on paths, mounting on small donkeys or on carts (asellis aut vehiculis), traversing rounded bridges, line or butterfly fishing, grape harvesting in the distance, carrying small birds in nets on the incline of a hill (Pliny the Elder, Natural History, XXXV, 116).
What does the word suavis mean in Roman? When Lucretius opens the second book of The Nature of Things, while seeking to define the Greek wisdom of Epicurus (the eudaimonia accessible to man), he describes suavitas (softness). He starts thus: Suave is to observe from high above the grove the warriors who kill each other upon the plain. Suave is to plunge the world again into death and contemplate life fleeing all bonds and fears. Lucretius adds that suavitas is never crudelitas (cruelty): crudelitas consists in the voluptas faced with human suffering.
Suavitas is the instant of death, but it’s the instant of death in which we participate even when it saves us. Contemplation of death heals men--the Epicurians as well as the Stoics would say, from diametrically-opposed arguments. Seneca the Younger himself would say, “to consider death with disdain” (contemne morte) as a medicine (remedium) for the full length of life.
The window which overlooks the garden should be angusta (narrow). Anguish is that which tightens our throats. Beauty is centripetal. All beauty amasses in pockets, by insular entities, even those atomic, all the while disassociating itself from the gaze of all those contemplating it. Framers are makers of boundaries. It’s about making a sacred place. The window as the frame makes a temple from a piece of the world. The window makes a garden like the frame intensifies the scene which it forsakes. Forms seek isolation in the frame which instigates the interminable retreat of that thing which approaches, ever so slowly, towards them.
The representation of life immiscible with life itself meant the living (zôè) was put to death (zô-graphia).
This movement is in itself already an “anachoresis”. Painting retires from the world.
Prudery is another anechoresis. Sexual anachoresis, for which we retire into a dark chamber in order to love, re-adorns the body with a fine aura (that extremitas which Parrhasios invented, by Pliny’s word). It envelops the human body in fictive invulnerability and an impalpable barrier: it is an invisible templum. It’s the theme of the “clothing” which is not seen, of Adam’s “costume”, of the magical libidinal tissue, of the nimbus. It is as much an inhibition from repugnance as it is a distancing from violent closeness.
It is the aura of respect such as what surrounds the stars (which are the bodies of the gods). Podeidonius would say that the elements of beauty of a work were those of the cosmos. He distinguished the form, color, majesty, and the glistening of the stars in the form of a halo.
A chapter from Le sexe et l’effroi, 1994
Pascal Quignard
Translation from the French by Francisco Benítez
A dialogue from Xenephon shows Socrates inquiring Parrhasios about the essence of painting. Socrates was condemned and executed in 399 BC. Xenephon composed the Memorabilia, around 390 BC in Scillonte.
One day Socrates enters the Athenian studio of Parrhasios, the zôgraphos. The word—painter—in Greek is said zôgraphos (he who transcribes the living). In Latin the term is artifex (he who practices an art, who makes a work which is artificialis).
“Tell me, Parrhasios,” declares Socrates, “Is not painting (graphikè) an image of things which we see (eikasia tôn orômenôn)? Recession and projection, light and dark, hardness and softness, the sateceous and the smooth, the youth or age of the body—you imitate these things with the aid of colors?”
“You speak the truth.” responds Parrhasios.
“And now if you wish to represent beautiful forms (kala eidè), and since it is not easy to find a man who is not above imperfection, you work with several models. You take from each that which is most beautiful, most perfect, after which you compose a body of total beauty.”
“That is, in effect, the way we work.”, says Parrhasios.
“Really!”, cries Socrates, “That which is most persuasive, most suave, most touching, most dear, most deserving in being explored, that which we desire the most, the expression of the soul (to tès psychès èthos), are they not things which you imitate? Or is it that precisely which evades imitation (mimèton)?”
“But we have to look at the way in which things are imitated, Socrates,” responds Parrhasios. “These things possess neither proportion (summetrian), nor color (chrôma), nor any of the qualities of which you have just spoken. These things cannot be visible (oraton).
“Ah!”, responds Socrates, “Do we not see men who have a gaze (blépein) which either expresses kindness, and at other moments, which is filled with hate?”
“That seems correct.”, responds Parrhasios.
“Would it not be necessary to imitate these expressions through the rendering of the eyes (ommasin)?”
“Indeed.”, says Parrhasios.
“When our friends are happy or sad, do their faces (ta prosôpa) reveal someone precoccupied with his/her own happiness or sadness, or of someone impervious to such things?”
“No, by God!”, exclaims Parrhasios. “In happiness, joy scintillates upon the face. In sadness, a dark shadow overcomes the gaze (skuthrôpoi).”
“Are we able, then, to create an image (apeikazein) from these various gazes?”, asks Socrates.
“Of course.”, responds Parrhasios.
“Either by high airs and noble appearance, by humility or servility, moderation and the right measure, or even excess (hubris), as well as that which evades beauty (apeirokalon), it is through their faces (prosôpou) and attitudes (schèmatôn) that men betray or withhold their emotions.
“You speak the truth, “ says Parrhasios.
“Then these things should be imitated (mimèta),” says Socrates.
“Indeed,” responds Parrhasios. (Xenephon, Memorabilia, III, 10, 1).
This dialogue between Socrates and Parrhasios expresses the ideal of ancient painting. Three stages determine the ascent from the visible to the invisible. First, painting represents that which we see. Then, painting represents beauty. Then, at last, painting represents to tès psychès èthos (the éthos of the psychè, the moral expression of the soul, the psychic disposition at the crucial instant).
How is one to represent the invisible in the visible? How is one to seize an expression at the defining moment of a myth (basically freeze-framing the éthos of the muthos)? In the discussion between Parrhasios and Socrates several words make a precise reading difficult. The word, prôsopon, in Greek signifies both the face seen head-on and theater mask (it also stands for our grammatical stand-ins; “I”, “you”, which are Greek prosôpa, Etruscan phersu, Latin personae. They are “mask-faces” for men who speak). In his Poetics, Aristotle says, “It is the gaze before the consequence of the act which is the best ethos.” Take for example Troy in flames, the dead in Hades. Only after come the face, the attitudes, the movements, the clothing which follow the role of the hero in action at the éthikos instant, the “crucial” moment (the Roman crucifixio was an ethical instant in the narrative of the Nazarene god’s death).
In other terms, behind each ancient painting there is always a book—or at least a narrative condensed into an ethical instant.
Greek painters and sculptors were well-read and erudite. The modern equivalents of Parrhasios or Euphranor are not Renoir or Picasso, but Michelangelo and Leonardo. Euphranor the Athenian pretended to possess the full extent of knowledge of his own century. The assembly of the Amphyctons, grand council of Greece, decreed that Parrhasios would receive universal public hospitality and the costs of his accommodations would be paid by the city in which he desired to stay. They lived surrounded by glory. Plato denigrated these “handymen” (Seneca the Younger would say, “the sordid”) who were draped in honors which the mathematicians and philosophers envied. Plato became irritated to see the importance accorded to Parrhasios by the city of Athens, that “sophist of the visible”, that illusionist, that new Daedalus whose craft consisted of constructing deceptive illusions, that conceited dandy who had the audacity to wear embroidered coats. The purple embroidered coat of Parrhasios is the most celebrated symbol of late 5th century Athens. Nothing remains in our hands now than the recollection of a cloak. Of the works which were the most famous we have only scarce information in an old volumen or fragmentary traces through copies of copies upon the walls of villas. Archaeology and reading have exhumed them. Two thousand years later, we infer the forms which are uncertain; uncertain as the silhouettes of a mist when the night dies and the first rays of morning light rip them from brush and roof, and then erase them in full day.
Time has not conserved the works of Polygnotos, Parrhasios, or Apelles, like it has the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The men who admired them to the point of consenting them such privileges at the cost of free cities had to admire the easel paintings and frescoes which were as beautiful as the tragedies.
We will never see them.
This book is a collection of dreams offered to the traces of ruins.
Parrhasios came from Asia Minor. He came from Ephesus. His father practiced the art of painting and was called Euenor. Parrhasios became the greatest painter of his time. He was more famous than Zeuxis. His pride knew no limits. One day he raised his right hand and declared: “The terms of art (technès termata) were found with this hand.” Besides his red cloak, Klearchos said that he even would wear a gold crown. His drawings on hide skin and stencils in wood (which were used by silversmiths and ceramicists) were so beautiful that the citizens, during his lifetime, would buy their vestigia. Theophrastos said that he was happy and would sing to himself when he worked. By humming to himself (hypokinuromenos), he sought to ease the fatigue of work. The technique of Parrhasios was still conventional; the colors were still ethical (as is today in our society where black is grief, blue is for boys, green is hope). The fourth century BC Athenian painter, Euphranor, said that the Theseus by Parrhasios did not hold a rose from mankind, but rather a rose from a rose bush.
Parrhasios was not the inventor of pornography. He invented the extreme line (the extremitas, the contour, the termata technès). What Pliny the Elder translated as extremitas, Quintilian called circumscripsio, which in rhetoric means the “duration” of a sentence. Pliny clarifies: Ambire enim se ipsa debet extremitas et sic desinere ut promittat alia post se ostendatque etiam quae occultat (Since the extremity must go around and terminate in order to give the impression that there is something behind it, and to reveal that which it hides). Parrhasios is finally that painter who adds fantasy to the vision of the visible. It is the surprising shamanic inscription that the painter himself inscribes in the lower part of his Heracles confronting frenzied death: “As in the darkness of the night (ennuchios) the god appeared to me (phantazeto) frequently in dreams, so we are able to see him here (oran).”
The dialogue between Parrhasios and Socrates says this: naturalism is the basis of art; if beauty is in the appearance (the phantasma), the purpose is in the ethical expression (the great divine or superhuman emotions). Aristides of Thebes exemplifies the notion that art should add, in its the representation of the ethos, that of the pathos. Who was the great painter? The great painter was s/he who effectively rendered in the represented figure the inner struggle between character and emotion. Pliny the Elder described a painting by Aristides of Thebes that Alexander loved so much that he robbed it during the sack of the city in 334BC: “A city is taken, a mother is fatally wounded; her baby reaches for her bare breast. The gaze of the mother expresses her awareness of the child and is afraid that as her milk is exhausted by death it may suck blood.” (Pliny the Elder, Natural History, XXXV, 98). Aristide of Thebes painted death which breastfeeds, it’s the same crucialis moment as Parrhasios of Ephesus painting the nailed Prometheus from the face of the prisoner from Olinthos. It is the instant of death.
How do we decipher an ancient painting? In his Poetics, Aristotle explains that tragedy consists of three distinct elements: the narrative, the character, and the end (the muthos, the ethos, and the telos). The intention of painting is in its revelation of character. It’s a matter of having the muthos of the painting coincide with the ethos of the main character at the moment of the telos or just before the telos. The best ethic is either a consequence of the act: Troy in flames, Phaedra hanged, Cynaegirus whose hands are cut off; or it’s the preceding instant: Narcissus before his reflection, Medea before her two sons whom she will kill. The ethical consequence becomes the attribute which makes it possible to no longer have to write the name of the hero near the figure. In the Middle Ages, Alcuin wrote: “A woman holding a child on her knees is not enough for me to find the name of the figure. Is it the Virgin and Christ? Venus and Aeneus? Alcmene and Hercules? Andromache and Astyanax?” He recommended to either write the name underneath the figure, or to represent the proper attribute. What is an attribute? When Neakles had to represent the Nile, he painted a river and placed a crocodile on its banks. Virgil would accentuate the codification of attributes: the ash tree is what makes the grove beautiful. The pine tree is what makes the garden beautiful. The poplar is what makes the difficult path which follows the river beautiful. The fir tree is what makes the mountain slope beautiful. Each place possesses an attribute whose presence defines it.
It was a learned painting. It was more learned even than the painting which pretended to challenge it during the Renaissance. The Ut Pictura Poesis of Horace had true meaning in Antiquity, and went astray during the folly of the Renaissance. The painter is nothing more than a poet who is taciturn; nothing more than the poet who is a verbal painter. Ancient painting is a poet’s narrative, condensed in an image. Simonides would say: “The word is the image (eikon) of actions.”
The ethical instant is the “mute word” of the image. In Greek, the zôgraphia (the transcribing of the living) is poetry which silences itself whilst concentrating itself within the image, which does speak—added Simonides—by “hushing” itself (siôpôsan). The image-actions make men enter the memory of mankind by concentrating themselves in the ethos (by becoming God).
The ideal of statuary beauty was ethical. It is difficult to discern between ataraxia and petrifaction. It is the tranquilla pax, the placida pax, the summa pax of the divine ones. From this the strange purpose of art is assigned by Lucretius: “to give for a moment the peace of mind of the sage to that which lacks wisdom”. It is apotheosis (theomorphosis): to don oneself in the body of the gods. It is the coming together of the Ataraxians. Those for whom joy is steadfast, exempt from pain, exempt from pity, exempt from anger, exempt from kindness, exempt from cupidity, exempt from desire, exempt from fear of death, exempt from feelings of love, exempt from work-related fatigue, they are not the ones who rule the world. They observe it. It is the divine theater masks that the city grants to certain men according to their own ethos.
In Virgil, at the moment of her suicide, Dido pales at her impending death; with her trembling cheeks, streaks of blood in her eyes, she declares, “I am done living (Vixi). And now I will descend to the bowels of the earth like a great image (magna imago).”
Beauty is god frozen in action. It is to offer people hospitality and luxury and silence (otium and quies) which lie in wait for impending death. The “great image” is the sculpture in the tomb. The question regarding painting is: How to appear as a god in one’s eternal instant?
Greek ceramicists used “cartoons” which they cut out from silhouettes outlined in chalk or charcoal, produced by projecting a shadow upon the surface of the wall. We call them stencils. Aristotle defined painting by the juxtaposition of non-blended marks seen up close. The distant appearance of colors was a challenge for both the frieze sculptor and the temple tapestry artist, well before it was an issue for the mosaicist. It was the technique poikilos (or still the skiagraphia, the trompe-l’oeil of the proscenium where the colors only fused at a distance). The Romans chose the skiagraphia of the Greeks for their own villa frescoes (theater décor painting).
The zôgraphia of the Greeks is divided into easel painting and décor painting (where the colors are not blended but are colorful, “tachygraphic”). To Zeuxis’ legendary slowness Antipatros counters with: “It took me forty years in order for me to paint in forty days.” The Romans called the rapid and excellent technique of the Asianists (the Alexandrians) compendiaria. The via compendiaria is the resolution of this unfinished kind of painting, in trompe l-oeil, with clearly-intended colors, drawn with the help of stencils, which was in opposition to the painting of shadows of colors. Agnès Rouveret has shown that the scaenographia was split into two distinct operations: the first was the adumbratio (the proper skiagraphia) which is trompe-l’oeil architectural wall painting with lateral extensions; and the other was the frons, the frontal projection with balance and symmetry of all horizontal and vertical lines in relation to the center of the circle (ad circini centrum omnium linearum). A page from Lucretius describes a colonnade by describing the difficult and strange “perspective” (angustia fastigia coni), which is not a true perspective; it was what the Romans defined as the impression of “dark cone which draws in a far-off view” (in obscuram coni acumen). Lucretius adds: “A colonnade, although it is of uniform height, and all the pillars supporting it are of equal size (in perpetuam), yet when we look at its whole length, from one end, it seems to diminish gradually into a cone, the roof meeting the floor and the right side the left, until they have all joined at the apex of the cone.
Lucretius’ De Natura Rerum calls forth a multitude of paintings. Lucretius evokes the square tower which becomes a round object from a distance. He says that immobility is but a slowness which is imperceptible to the naked eye, such as the herd which grazes in the distance, or as the ship which capsizes in the sea. The great Epicurean poet defines yet again the tragic instant of ethical painting. Lucretius’ De Natura Rerum (along with the tragedies of Seneca the Younger) is the largest gallery of Roman frescoes which remains.
But there is more: De Natura Rerum utters the secret of Roman painting. The paintings of the second Pompeian style are organized like the colonnade Lucretius describes: the upper half of the panel is the only part to be decorated in order to create the illusion of spatial depth. The lower part forms a projecting foreground. Then the frons of Lucretius’ colonnade arises where the lines of the lateral walls converge, illusory parallel lines dissolve at a mid-point distance of the panel lines; the “dark point of the cone” only applies to the upper half (the truly painted space on the wall).
For Lucretius as for the entire Epicurean school, an incertus object lives at the core of the locus certus. It is the Adèlos (as the phallus of the Villa of the Mysteries is hidden beneath its veil). The Latin incertus translates into the Greek as adèlos (invisible). Improvable as such, the invisible is real. The invisible is the atomic tissue of the world. Anaxagoras said: Ta phainomena opsis tôn adèlôn (the phenomena are that which is visible of those things unknown). The colonnade in the distance recedes like a cone and dissolves at the incertus point (adèlos, obscuram coni). A res incerta inhabits this imaginary point which is as focalized as it is obscure. This mystery of the incertus point where perspective diminishes contrasts with the large panoramic plans which the Romans instead called the locus certus. By associating notions of the correct distance and that of uncertain perspective, they called the locus certus the stage (proscenium) in the theater. This place was called certus because the architect, when he planned the construction of the theater, anticipated the distant visual distortion of the tier arrangements.
The Roman innovation consisted in transposing trompe-l’oeils to the walls of private homes, which reproduced the decors of Hellenistic theaters. The private Roman home was the first political theater where the patronus would exercise his power over his gens and over his clientele. But the patronus guards himself in rivalising the tyrannus. The domestic villas were not to be palaces of tyranny: instead they would be villas where the palace would be illusory (where the rivalry with the prince would not be palatial but only parietal; there is a filial relationship of the villa with the palace as with Aeneus and Anchises).
In this way the citizens were able to enjoy a semblance of a royal hunt in the opsis (the spectacle) of the ludus (the games) in the arena; the walls of their villa would become “tachygraphs” of palaces, fictive hunts, and theater scenes.
One who does not understand the theater, the arena, the triumphal march, the games, sees not Rome. All power is theater. Every house (domus) is a simulated dominatio of the dominus over his gens, over his freedmen, over his slaves. Also, all painting is a theater mask (phersu, persona, prosôpon) for the patrician, in that it elevates him to the status of a family god. The ancient artist was not unable to individualize faces. Under the name of imagines, the Latins venerated life-like masks of their forefathers which they kept in a small closet in the atrium. But the Greek assembly or the Roman aristocracy which commissioned paintings specifically wished to avoid a likeness: they demanded the artist transform their face into a colossos or an icon. In other words, they wanted to be metamorphosed into a god or heroic ethos. It was this irreal aptitude which stripped away the private and personal mask and transfigured it into a more ideal and theomorphic state, which was the fortune of Polygnotos.
It was here that there was a curious metamorphosis: the tragic scaenae frons, which was created in the middle of the 5th century BC in Athens; and because of Aeschylus, three centuries later it would inhabit Italian homes by supplying a visual theory of imposing tragic architecture, and by disguising and subordinating wall illustration to ethical illusion. The height-enhancing cothurnus boots on the scaena tragica, already heightened by a platform in the proscenium, accounts for the heightened character of the upper part of the frescoes which itself rests on a line forming the base. This line which is conceived as a platform upon the wall, is the primary meaning of the word, orthographia.
Cicero wrote to Atticus: “As I criticized openly before him the narrowness of the windows (fenestarum angustias) of the house, the architect, Vettius Cyrus, retorted back that the points of view upon the gardens would not give as much pleasure if they were through wider openings.” He added that this would facilitate the ray of light leaving the eye; the cone of light coming from the garden would concentrate and block the shock of the atoms which form the simulacra at the edge of the window; thus, the result would be more brilliance, more contrast, more emotion, and more suavitas. The Romans revered paradise in the form of a garden. Paradeisos is a Greek word which means “park”. A philosophical school was called the Academy; another was called the Lyceum; another was even called the Portico.; the most austere and certainly the most profound, the one which would exert a dominant influence over Rome (up until 230), was called, the Garden. The great Roman families under the princedom of Augustus, while stripped of their political privileges, would seek to distinguish themselves from the other social classes through the beauty of their villas and gardens, the number of slaves, the culinary extravagances, the rarity of the objects, the antiquity of the painted and sculpted works, the collection of splendours plundered from vanquished peoples making the “spoils of the world”, which the dignitaries from the victorious empire would divide amongst themselves. The uselessness of the service (officium) imitates the otium (the idleness) of the princes. And the otium of the princes imitates the ataraxia of the gods in the far reaches of the sky.
What is a garden in Rome? The Golden Age revisits the present. It’s about finding something of divine inactivity. It’s holding oneself immobile like the stars in the sky, surrounded by a nimbus, like holding oneself immobile like a cat before assaulting its prey, like holding oneself immobile like the still leaves before a storm, like the statues of those gods standing in groves. Such should be life facing death. It is to hold to oneself the vision of the garden encapsulated on the edge of the window, stopped by two rays opposing it by fascinated eyes.
Plato forbade that we give false appearances to landscapes. The physis was unrepresentable because it was divine. Plato wrote that the “profaner” who had the audacity to rival demiurgy itself, which gushes forth from the physis in the form of the world (cosmos,) would have to be called an artifex or psuedo-demiurge. It is under Augustus that landscapes and riverbanks would appear. Virgil in ten years would bring brooks, the pliant shadow traversing them as well as the river snake, the beech tree, the edge of the path, the hedge, the pollen-gathering bees, the raucous song of the woodpigeons, the boiled chestnuts, the turtledove on top of the elm tree, the clouds which move over the fields.
Virgil was a genius. He produced nature in fifteen years. He was the only one to do so. He died on September 21st, 19, at the port of Brindisi, where he had disembarked two days previously coming from Greece and sweating next to the fire which had been lit since he was trembling from fever. He showed, holding up his hands, his tablets, demanding that that they be thrown into the crackling flame—the Aeneid.
It was the painter Ludius who invented silhouettes. Painters before Ludius called topia landscape types. Far from endeavouring to represent real landscapes, the task of the topia consisted in assembling the typical features of the suavitas of the scenes that they evoked: the edge of the sea, the countryside with its shepherds, the port and its boats, the riverbanks and the nymphs, the sacred landscapes. Pliny the Elder mentions that it was Ludius who animated the topia with the help of silhouetted little characters going by foot on paths, mounting on small donkeys or on carts (asellis aut vehiculis), traversing rounded bridges, line or butterfly fishing, grape harvesting in the distance, carrying small birds in nets on the incline of a hill (Pliny the Elder, Natural History, XXXV, 116).
What does the word suavis mean in Roman? When Lucretius opens the second book of The Nature of Things, while seeking to define the Greek wisdom of Epicurus (the eudaimonia accessible to man), he describes suavitas (softness). He starts thus: Suave is to observe from high above the grove the warriors who kill each other upon the plain. Suave is to plunge the world again into death and contemplate life fleeing all bonds and fears. Lucretius adds that suavitas is never crudelitas (cruelty): crudelitas consists in the voluptas faced with human suffering.
Suavitas is the instant of death, but it’s the instant of death in which we participate even when it saves us. Contemplation of death heals men--the Epicurians as well as the Stoics would say, from diametrically-opposed arguments. Seneca the Younger himself would say, “to consider death with disdain” (contemne morte) as a medicine (remedium) for the full length of life.
The window which overlooks the garden should be angusta (narrow). Anguish is that which tightens our throats. Beauty is centripetal. All beauty amasses in pockets, by insular entities, even those atomic, all the while disassociating itself from the gaze of all those contemplating it. Framers are makers of boundaries. It’s about making a sacred place. The window as the frame makes a temple from a piece of the world. The window makes a garden like the frame intensifies the scene which it forsakes. Forms seek isolation in the frame which instigates the interminable retreat of that thing which approaches, ever so slowly, towards them.
The representation of life immiscible with life itself meant the living (zôè) was put to death (zô-graphia).
This movement is in itself already an “anachoresis”. Painting retires from the world.
Prudery is another anechoresis. Sexual anachoresis, for which we retire into a dark chamber in order to love, re-adorns the body with a fine aura (that extremitas which Parrhasios invented, by Pliny’s word). It envelops the human body in fictive invulnerability and an impalpable barrier: it is an invisible templum. It’s the theme of the “clothing” which is not seen, of Adam’s “costume”, of the magical libidinal tissue, of the nimbus. It is as much an inhibition from repugnance as it is a distancing from violent closeness.
It is the aura of respect such as what surrounds the stars (which are the bodies of the gods). Podeidonius would say that the elements of beauty of a work were those of the cosmos. He distinguished the form, color, majesty, and the glistening of the stars in the form of a halo.