The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting, 1400-1800 (review)

The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting, 1400-1800 by Thomas Puttfarken. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, U.S.A., 2000. 332 pp., illus. $45.00. ISBN: 0-300-08156-1.

I have often been disturbed by the incongruity between the foreground and background in most pictures by Leonardo da Vinci. This erudite and tightly argued book gives an answer to that puzzle. Puttfarken shows that there was a shift in the manner in which perspective and composition were used and viewed from about 1400 to 1800. In the Renaissance (particularly in Italy) the human body was the unit of order and structure. Linear perspective set up a unified space for the bodies to be placed in, and their arrangement in this space was the focal point of any compositional order--rather like grouping actors on a stage. In this framework the background was merely that, a backdrop for the drama in front. Moreover, if the figures were drawn about life-size, as was often the case in the Italian Renaissance, this accentuated the sense of real presence of the figures (usually the Madonna, Jesus, saints and so forth). But this is not the way the order of Renaissance art is usually conceived. Ernst Gombrich, for example, has argued that the use of perspective introduced a problem into the composition of art inherited from the Middle Ages: there was now a tension between the geometrical arrangement (the two-dimensional [2D], pyramidal and hierarchical composition used since Byzantine times) and the general randomness of the real world, since the use of perspective requires figures to change size as they recede into deep space. But according to Puttfarken such a tension exists only if the pictorial composition is seen as an arrangement on a 2D surface, not as figures in space.

The shift toward the 2D viewpoint took place around the late sixteenth century. Before that, however, no such tension existed because the concept of order applied to the arrangement of bodies in the picture not on its surface. The shift (seen, for example, in the work of Nicolas Poussin) accompanied the general change from large-scale pictures (life-size frescoes and such) to small-scale easel paintings. With the reduction in scale there was no longer a sense of the physical presence of the figures (the Madonna and saints) but more of a viewing of the narrative in and across the picture. The framed picture was now looked at (not only into), and hence the 2D arrangement was more conspicuous. Composition in the modern sense now emerged, and perspective was a means of achieving not only an illusion of space but a visual order and structure across the surface of the picture. The smaller-scale Northern art also played a key role in this shift.

Knowledge of, and sensitivity for, the original physical placement of pictures is extremely important to Puttfarken's thesis. For example, he presents a most insightful and convincing analysis of Titian's famous Pesaro Madonna. In this picture the Madonna is placed high on a staircase on the right side of the picture; she is balanced on the left by a flag. Saints and donors are arranged at the foot of the stairs with St. Peter halfway up, at the geometrical center. But this composition is the 2D arrangement, viewed, say, as a picture in a book. However, in the context of a life-size painting above an altar in a chapel in Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice, which is approached by a viewer in the church at an oblique angle from the left, the arrangement is a conventional, pyramidal, hierarchical one with the Madonna at the top flanked by saints and donors--since the figures are seen in the space above the altar, not on the surface of the picture. This is one of many such engaging and insightful studies of specific works of art. Puttfarken's...