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Yet if one studies these works in relation to the tradition as a whole, one discovers that they Were exceptions of a very special kind. Works by Rembrandt, El Greco, Giorgione, Vermeer, Turner, etc. Pictures immediately spring to mind to contradict this assertion. Oil painting conveyed a vision of total exteriority. A painting could speak to the soul - by way of what it referred to, but never by the way it envisaged. The soul, thanks to the Cartesian system, was saved in a category apart. All reality was mechanically measured by its materiality. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity. It reduced everything to the equality of objects.
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Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. The pictures in a Florentine palace represented a kind of microcosm in which the proprietor, thanks to his artists, had recreated within easy reach and in as real a form as possible, all those features of the world to which he was attached. The show him sights: sights of what he may possess.Īgain, Levi-Strauss comments on how a collection of paintings can confirm the pride and amour-propre of the collector.įor Renaissance artists, painting was perhaps an instrument of knowledge but it was also an instrument of possession, and we must not forget, when we are dealing with Renaissance painting, that it was only possible because of the immense fortunes which were being amassed in Florence and elsewhere, and that rich Italian merchants looked upon painters as agents, who allowed them to confirm their possession of all that was beautiful and desirable in the world. What is their advantage over walls of stone or wood? It is as though the collector lives in a house built of paintings. A patron cannot be surrounded by music or poems in the same WaY as he is surrounded by his pictures. Let us consider a painting which belongs to the tradition whose subject is an art lover.īefore they are anything else, they are themselves objects which can be bought and owned. And the history of the tradition, as it is usually taught, teaches us that art prospers if enough individuals in society have a love of art. It supplies us with our archetypes of 'artistic genius'. Its norms still affect the way we see such subjects as landscape, women, food, dignitaries, mythology. It defines what we mean by pictorial likeness. The tradition, however, still forms many of our cultural assumptions.
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For these reasons the period of the traditional oil painting may be roughly set as between 15. At about the same time the photograph took the place of the oil painting as the principal source of visual imagery.
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Yet the basis of its traditional way of seeing was undermined by Impressionism and overthrown by Cubism. Oil paintings are still being painted today. Nor can the end of the period of the oil painting be dated exactly. The oil painting did not fully establish its own norms, its own way of seeing, until the sixteenth century. When oil paint was first used - at the beginning of the fifteenth century in Northern Europe - for painting pictures of a new character, this character was somewhat inhibited by the survival of various medieval artistic conventions. But the oil painting as an art form was not born until there was a need to develop and perfect this technique (which soon involved using canvas instead of wooden panels) in order to express a particular view of life for which the techniques of tempera or fresco were inadequate. The technique of mixing pigments with oil had existed since the ancient world. The term oil painting refers to more than a technique. If this is true - though the historical span of Levi-Strauss's generalization may be too large - the tendency reached its peak during the period of the traditional oil painting. It is this avid and ambitious desire to take possession of the object for the benefit of the owner or even of the spectator which seems to me to constitute one of the outstandingly original features of the art of Western civilization. Significantly enough it is an anthropologist who has come closest to recognizing it. This analogy between possessing and the way of seeing which is incorporated in oil painting, is a factor usually ignored by art experts and historians.