This means what is presented to the eye – what appears in a viewfinder. A photograph is a duplicate of this scene, frozen in time. Neither the viewer nor the subject moves in such a depiction.
As we have seen in previous chapters, there are limits to the range of tone value that a photograph can record, but, as the technology improves, this range is increasing all the time Some artists go to great lengths to ensure that the scene they observe is as static as possible, and that they themselves are set up in a fixed position. However this situation is extremely artificial. We do not normally stay still and observe static scenes. This sort of artificiality has been most important when artists have had a quasi-scientific curiosity about matching what they see in a viewfinder.
However, for most of the history of representational painting, artists have been more interested in responding to scenes which they have observed in less restricted circumstances – when they are observing more as normal people do (that is, when both the viewer and the subject are moving).
Parralax
Two-eyed vision allows observers to see more depth in a scene than is possible with one eye alone, but even if (like Munnings) the artist has only one eye, the apparent movement of the foreground against the background, and the twisting and turning of most live subjects, will enable the observer to appreciate what may be seen from a variety of angles. The observer senses the three dimensional structure of the scene much more forcibly when movement is involved.
The artist Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786 – 1846) sought to trace the line of tradition through the Egyptians, via the Greeks (who achieved perfection, according to commentators), and via the Romans (who imitated the Greeks, sometimes very well) to the height of the Renaissance. Haydon, like many others, considered perfection to lie in a style somewhere between that of the three great high Renaissance painters, Michelangelo, Titian and Raphael. After them, the art could only decline; but after a while, Haydon felt, it was partially revived in France. In England, Sir Joshua Reynolds made a bold attempt to regenerate this style, though his efforts were limited almost entirely to portraiture.
Haydon was at pains to differentiate this core or grand style from the style of the 19thC French painter David (1748 – 1825) even though David is usually thought of having revived the Classical style, transforming it into the neo-Classical style. Haydon considered this new style to be cold, hard and rigid. The true style of the Greeks and Romans, he wrote, was warmer, more varied, and a great deal less artificial. He clearly would have sympathised with Kenneth Clark’s view of Renoir (above).
It was the power of this core or grand style which so much impressed Renoir when he visited the ruins of Pompeii in 1881. The ancient Roman wall-paintings confirmed his suspicion that the art of French Impressionism was too much like a copy of the scene, (too much like a photograph as one might say). Renoir chose to bring his painting closer this elemental style. He returned to drawing outlines, and did so with a purity which remains unsurpassed.
Many courses at today’s so-called classical realist art schools start by teaching the student to duplicate what appears in a viewfinder, but there is little evidence to suggest that painters before the 17thC began in this way. They learnt by copying and varying works of their masters, not by copying nature. The core style does not begin with a photograph, whether made mechanically or by hand: it begins with the mind, with the lines and circles which are the first things that a child draws. Though the ability to copy the viewfinder is of enormous value, it is not essential. Consider the great works of Giotto, for example, superb illustrations in the form of decoration, but lacking the accuracy which is now commonplace.