That may or may not seem like a ridiculous question. But I was reading an essay by Joseph Nechvatal about visionary art when I came across this passage regarding a technique called sfumato which DaVinci wrote about in his Maniesto and taught to his students:
"Sfumato is the subtle, smoothly imperceptible, gradation of dark colors which approaches a smoggy unity useful in the creation of psychological atmospheric effects evocative of the visionary display in the Apse of Lascaux. This is so as sfumato invites and promotes an expanded, diaphanous, dilated focus and necessitates a more expansive field of vision. Thus a visionary (anti-perspectivist) characteristic of high renaissance art was sfumato unity particularly because it depended upon a balance achieved as a matter of intuition and hence was beyond the reach of rational knowledge or technical manoeuvres. With sfumato we see the seeds of a visionary counter-tradition in opposition to the crisp, detached, geometricised optics of point-perspective.
This oppositional optical practice of sfumato visualization was taught by Leonardo to his students in his Treatise on Painting where he encouraged languid attention to the ambiguous grubbiness of cracks and smudges on decrepit walls which may suggest faces and forms to the viewer in order to aid artistic imaginative and visionary ability."
Now, it's been many years since I read Dali's treatise on the paranoiac-critical method, so I can't quote any bits off the top of my head, but if memory serves (and I'm not saying it does), there seem to be some striking similarities leaping out between the two methods.
I'm just saying...
No comments:
Post a Comment