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Viewing Positions
“The painter should not paint only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within himself. Should he see nothing within himself, then he had better desist from painting what he sees before him.”
Caspar David Friedrich
Renaissance Perspective
Around the turn of the first millennium, painted images in the European tradition, when they existed at all, were depicted as “flat.” This flatness – the complete alignment of subject and form, figure and ground – was intended to suggest a direct connection to the sacred. The “icon,” made in a spirit of “fear and trembling,” was understood to be a kind of copy of an original image rather than a representational invention, ensuring its legitimacy after periods of intense theological controversy centering on the interpretation of the Biblical injunction against idolatry (especially in the 8th and 9th centuries). In the Byzantine (Greek) world and its successors, the icon retained its centrality, while the Western (Latin) tradition gradually moved closer to the form of mimetic representation celebrated in the Renaissance.
Piero della Francesca’s The Flagellation of Christ (1468-1470) epitomizes these fundamental changes in approach for two primary reasons. The first is that the central subject – the Flagellation of Christ, one of the traditional Passion scenes – does not dominate the composition. Instead, it is situated in the recessed, enframed left half of a bisected space that is dominated on the right by fifteenth century Italian buildings and three figures in the dress of that period (the central figure is the painting’s patron, the Duke of Urbino). In this way, Piero postulates a very different relationship between the moment in which the painting was created and the sacred past, a starkly different sense of unfolding historical time that is articulated spatially through triangular figure groupings, architectural echoes, a series of framing devices (such as the columns on the left), and especially a system of linear, vanishing point perspective that is mapped out geometrically on the floor. This system of linear perspective is built into the optics of photographic lenses and is central to cinematic illusionism.
In On Painting, the most influential 15th century treatise on art theory, Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) argues that it is critical for narrative painting (what he expansively calls a “istoria”) to include at least one figure
who admonishes and points out to us what is happening there; or beckons with his hand to see; or menaces with an angry face and with flashing eyes, so that no one should come near; or shows some danger or marvellous thing there; or invites us to weep or to laugh together with [the painted figures]. Thus whatever the painted persons do among themselves or with the beholder, all is pointed towards ornamenting or teaching the istoria [i].
This tradition of engaging the viewer and trying to solicit involvement through empathy and theatrical modes of address was later central to the Baroque models pursued by artists such as Caravaggio as well as painters like Rubens and Rembrandt who were actively in dialogue with Italianate conventions.
[i] Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966, 78)
Figures and Landscape
The emphasis in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) on seeing figures from behind (in German, Rückenfigur) has roots instead in a characteristically Northern tradition in which background characters look out into the landscape. This is particularly evident in a work like Flemish painter Jan van Eyck’s Madonna of Chancellor Rolin (1436). The interior is even more opulently, if less schematically, detailed than the one in The Flagellation of Christ with a comparably rigorous treatment of columns, portals, and floor tiles, but where Piero’s method is predicated on rhyming echoes and contrasts between similarly proportioned groupings, van Eyck use stark juxtapositions of scale to encourages the viewer to proceed sequentially from foreground to background.
The mystical narrative encounter of the title – in which Chancellor Rolin in fifteenth century dress is situated opposite the Madonna and Child – is located entirely in the foreground plane. However, the receding perspectival tunnel in between the figures leads the viewer back, first into a plunging garden space, and then to a pair of smaller figures atop a partitioned observation deck with their backs turned towards us. Those figures act as viewer surrogates, guiding us out of the narrativized interior and into the recognizably Flemish landscape that expands off into the distance.
Friedrich's Views
Friedrich places his “back-figures” in a middleground plane and guides the viewer towards them, but obscures or leaves only partially visible the objects of their gaze. In paintings like Two Men Contempating the Moon (1819-1820), the recessional path is placed at a diagonal (which is in turn symmetrical with the rock formations in the foreground) and trees are used as a Claudian coulisse enframing paired figures engaged in nocturnal reverie.
A Woman at the Window (18220 is more startling not only in its employment of a single, centrally placed female figure, but also in the use of the grooves of the floorboards to emphasize perspectival recession into a wall and a partially shuttered window.
Friedrich combined aspects of both of these in his most recognizably Romantic image, The Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog (1818). As in Woman at the Window, the viewer is drawn to a back-turned observer positioned on a sort of viewing platform at the center of the frame and the painting makes even more thorough use of echoing symmetries of landscape elements than Friedrich’s moon-viewing paintings. Here, however, the pervasive fog creates the impression that these progressively receding islands of order are discontinuous and disconnected, an effect that is reinforced by the sloping of the crags in the right foreground and the convergence of the diagonal horizon lines in the distance on the space blocked by the human figure. The viewer is continuously, even vertiginously, drawn forward into a space whose contours are only partially delimited and whose limits remain invisible.
With this spatial and conceptual suspension, Friedrich has created the most vivid possible evocation of an interior journey and of the Romantic sublime, one that has exerted a dramatic influence on filmmakers from the silent era to the present.
Vantage Points and Cinematic Point-of-View
In these clips, two eminent British filmmakers who were well-versed in the stylistic vocabulary German Romanticism adapt the visual strategies of Caspar David Friedrich in strikingly different ways. John Boorman connects the journey into the wild in Deilverance (1972) with optical point-of-view (reinforced by the use of a zoom lens) and rhythmically cuts to the running water in the manner of silent cinema.
Terence Davies characteristically focuses on more private, interior experiences, bracketing off his distinctly postwar chamber drama with a movement back out onto the street that precisely matches the one that opens the film. Seemingly nothing has happened in the short space of narrative time between the beginning and the end, but this was literally a question of life and death for the female protagonist, whose reserve concealed passionate depths of emotion that are conveyed here by the final movement of Samuel Barber's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 14 (1941).
References
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Darius Khondji
