Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

A number of art historians and psychologists have suggested classification schemes for describing the spatial systems in pictures. Probably the best known is that due to Heinrich Wölfflin (1932) , who described the representational systems in European paintings of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in terms of five pairs of categories: linear and painterly, plane and recession, closed and open form, multiplicity and unity, and clearness and unclearness. Wölfflin's scheme was intended to apply to artists’ pictures in perspective, and this not only limits its formal scope but can have the effect of implying that pictures outside the Western realist tradition are defective or inferior. His scheme does, however, have the merit of attempting not only to describe the spatial relations between entities in the picture (plane or recession), but also the nature of the marks (linear or painterly) in which these entities are expressed. Other schemes such as those of White (1967) and Hagen (1986) have concentrated on describing what I shall call the drawing systems in pictures: systems that map spatial relations in the scene into corresponding spatial relations in the picture. Both these schemes include systems other than linear perspective, but neither is exhaustive; and neither scheme distinguishes among the various denotation systems : systems that map features of ... log in or subscribe to read full text