欧洲十九世纪风景画里非常规的视觉元素和革命性的空间特征

Abstract

Various European landscape painters in the nineteenth century presented different unconventional visual qualities in their paintings that reveal their distinct understandings of perceiving the external physical world in terms of spatial characteristics. The selected European landscape painters in the nineteenth century are John Constable (1776-1837), and Claude Monet (1840-1926). A stratified spatial characteristic is presented in Constable’s landscape paintings. This stratified spatial characteristic destabilizes the concept of equal acuity of visual field that is assumed in the Renaissance model. It also reveals the understanding of subjective attraction that is involved in perceiving the external physical world. A dynamic spatial characteristic is presented in Monet’s landscape paintings. It invalidates monocular vision as presumed in the Renaissance model as the dynamic qualities are resulted from binocular vision. All of these spatial characteristics challenge the visual characteristics and presumptions in the geometrical model of spatial representation adopted by the classical painters of the Renaissance. Constable’s and Monet’s landscape paintings signify a radical shift from objectivism and absolutism in the Renaissance to subjectivism and relativism in the nineteenth century; and open up further challenges carried on in the 20th century. In this study the concept of space is understood as the physical space that pertains to the physical object world in which organisms and objects are situated. Other spaces like cosmic space, psychic space, spiritual space, and memory space do not fall into the scope of this study. Space perception of the physical object world is “the process through which organisms become aware of the relative positions of their own bodies and objects around them.” Such a physiological process of perceiving the world is constant and universal. But the awareness and understandings of such spatial perception change across times and cultures; so are the visual representations of the understandings of such spatial perception. By presenting pictorial visual cues and elements conveying spatial characteristics, painting is a form of visual representation that represents and expresses the reflection upon what is understood about human spatial perception. Thus different spatial characteristics as visually presented in painting implicate different reflective understandings of spatial perception as well as revealing the different understood relationships between the perceiver and the perceived environment. In order to unfold the thesis of my study, the discussion will mainly be divided into three parts. Part one will first focus on analyzing the crucial principles with which Renaissance painters visually represent the three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface in painting. Second, this part will analyze the implied presumptions of spatial perception in Renaissance linear perspective system. Part Two and Part Three, based on the discussion and analysis in part one, will focus on analyzing how the above unconventional spatial characteristics are conveyed through the dissimilar visual elements as presented in Constable’s and Monet’s landscape paintings.