I love this illustration of Eurystheus being frightened by creatures from Hades. It was drawn over 3,000 years ago by a Greek artist from a workshop in Caere.
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| When have you seen a better illustration of "Yikes!" ? |
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| The flesh tones are as modern as Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon or Jenny Saville |
The subsequent 3,000 years brought all the advantages this artist never had: vastly improved art tools, digital or analog, delivered to his door; his global choice of art teachers accessible 24/7 through the internet; artificial light to expand his work day, air conditioning and a soft chair to enable him to work in comfort; a vast library of high resolution images to help him find inspiration in 3,000 years of precedents; regular meals to keep his belly full; glasses for when his eyes weakened and health care for when his hand began to shake.
Yet, look at illustrations in today's publications and tell me what those 3,000 years of progress have added to the quality of our pictures.
48 comments:
Fascinating. The question is why -- laziness, ego, self-deception? No doubt many artists today would say, "My stuff is great; it's the critic who doesn't get it." Or maybe the illustrator says he's on-board with the latest hot trend, or is delivering the correct cultural or political message, and that's what counts. Or maybe she says she's doing it well enough to please today's viewers., and maybe she is right about that. Or maybe the editors of the media in which the work appears are unsophisticated or are motivated by objectives other than artistic excellence.
Niggle - Is it Cerberus (singular) rather than creatures ?
Bill
Bill-- A worthy point. Yes, this illustrates the time when Cerberus (the three headed dog of hell) is unleashed by Herakles on Eurystheus, but here Cereberus seems to have arrived with 9 additional serpents of hell. Visually, I like the suggestion of Robin Osborne (professor of ancient history at Oxford) that the wall of heads "replicate the impression of many separate jaws received by anyone faced by a hostile dog."
This drawing is on a piece of pottery, with other drawing circling around.
Anonymous ("Fascinating. The question is why.") -- Agreed, that is the question. Your list contains lots of good contenders (although, of course, the ancient Greeks were no strangers to "ego."). The ancient Greeks did not have what we call "fine art" or "art for art's sake" the way we do, so they didn't have illustrators aspiring to that, and as far as I know they didn't have what we call "conceptual art." In fact, they had just one word (techné) which combined art, craft and skill. Perhaps that kept the ancients from becoming too self-absorbed.
Another possibility is that today's artists have to earn income to buy food, while the ancients could just catch and slaughter a goat.
Excellence has fallen off across the board. The American empire is in decline and people are struggling to make ends meet while their shameless "leaders," so called, loot the country in a hurry for the last scraps before it's all gone. I know an educated professional doing real, high-end work (not teaching diversity seminars for the HR department) who can't afford more than a tiny, cramped apartment for his family of three. Boomers may not realize it because most of them did well for themselves, but it's bad out there. The outlook of young people is bleak, and with good reason. They see the open-air drug markets, the dirty, crime-ridden cities, the crumbling infrastructure, the crippling debt, the ever-rising food prices, the incalculable waste and fraud, and they also see their government sending billions of dollars overseas and stirring up shit that will inevitably slingshot back onto our shores in the future. These conditions are not conducive to a Renaissance in the arts. Maybe things are stirring in some other corner of the globe, although it seems like nobody is unaffected by the present turmoil.
The best of Ancient Greek decorative amphora art is so elegant and advanced in pattern design I find it hard to believe its age. Stunning in its freshness, to the point of feeling as modern as ancient. Where has the progress been? To think it took thousands of years to rediscover what they had known, only to have it go into eclipse again in short order. Surely so much more insight has been lost and is yet to be rediscovered, if we collectively could ever care enough again.
Kev, are you familiar with the writings of David Ramsay Hay (1798-1866)? He is probably best known as an interior decorator for Queen Victoria, but for most of his adult life he was deeply interested in re-discovering what he believed were the lost, mathematically derived (and thus objectively true) "laws of beauty" by which Greek art attained its unmatched excellence. He published several books expounding the results of these investigations. They are filled with tables of harmonic ratios and illustrations of those ratios applied to, variously, architecture, decoration, the ideal human figure, the human head, and color. Some of those illustrations (as of the figure) are filled with a dizzying array of criss-crossing guidelines that caused some contemporaries to dismiss his efforts as impractical for artists. Still, I think his work is admirable, and it's unfortunate that no one has picked up the torch.
David, Cerberus is canonically covered in snakes, a fact rarely pointed out. Ancient Greeks did overdo many of their mythical creatures.
I think a good chunk of the good design is in how the image is cropped, with the hand right in the middle.
again forgot to login, that's me
xopxe-- That's a new one on me. I didn't realize Cereberus was accompanied by snakes. I grew up on the Gustave Doré version. But can we get a tip of the hat for the way this Greek artist chose to stylize those polka dotted snakes?
The drawing is cropped as best I could, in view of the fact that it's on a round surface. If we kept turning it, we'd see Herakles turning Cereberus loose. But the artist clearly intended that any particular perspective would show an independent design.
I've been through Hay, but briefly. Jay Hambidge's Dynamic Symmetry more extensively. And other mad diagrammers besides; who think they've discovered the secrets of all creation via protractor and ruler.
I take the position of George Inness, as I understand it. Namely that Geometry alone, while perfect, is stultifying, stiff and inhuman. And pure expression, while wild and fun, is also slovenly, chaotic and unbeautiful. But in the tension between geometry and expression, we skim the cream of both worlds.
I think the 'snake-parts' - on Medusa, the Chimera, and here - are attributes manifesting from (rather than just combined in as 'parts') the being. So the characteristics that make up the serpent would be present in and expressed in these (but not as a visual or ther allegory any more than snakes are).
(Semi-speculative disclaimer applies)
Bill
Bill, I think the snakes (and dogs and birds and etc) were pretty literal for Greeks. Had to check my memory of Cerberus genealogy being composed of half-snakes of sorts by visiting wikipedia, and found this:
Plato (c. 425 – 348 BC) refers to Cerberus' composite nature, citing Cerberus, along with Scylla and the Chimera, as an example from "ancient fables" of a creature composed of many animal forms "grown together in one"
Yes, literal in that they weren't metaphors and were actually part of the creature, but as an emodiment of (part of) the nature of that animal, in the way centaurs emodied wildness in their human part rising up out of the animal lower. Well, what I was trying to get at, anyway.
Bill
Against this, though, as early as at least the third or fourth century BC there's the 'rationalising' principle already there in Palaephatus;
"They say that the Centaurs were beats that had the overall form of a horse except for the head, which was that of a man's. Now, in case anyone believes such a beast existed, it is an impossibility. The natures of horse and man are inharmonious, and it is impossible for a horse's food to pass through a human mouth and throat. Besides, if there had been such a form then, it would also exist now."
And then goes on to give a hypothetical story about their real origin as mounted riders with an invented etymology for centaur to back it up.
"They would burn and pillage and then run off into the mountains...those looking at them from afar could only see the backs of the horses, not their heads, and the upper part of the men, not their legs...From this image was fashioned the unbelievable myth, that a horse-man was born from the cloud on the mountain".
Bill
( '....Centaurs were beats' < beasts)
Had a quick look, the earliest written account for Cerberus' genealogy seems to be from Hesiod's Theogony. Echidna, called a Nymph but a half woman/snake monster , mated with Typhaon; result - "brutal brood...Orthos, Geryones' hound....the carnivore Cerberos, Hades' bronze-baying hound, fifty-headed [put that on a pot] .... and third, a Hydra, malicious and grisly".
So he gets it from his mother.
Bill
The question is why -- laziness, ego, self-deception?
I think there are plenty of graphic designers working in the advertising space who make designs just as good. Their work is available in packs for marketing firms to license for a few bucks per vector image, and it features racially diverse people flying through coffee paraphernalia, surfing the stock market, lighting a giant lightbulb, or climbing ladders onto the keyboards of 18-story mainframe computers.
I think the relative lack of illustrations as heavily designed as this has more to do with the pursuit of naturalistic imagery than with any general inability to design punchy graphics.
Richard-- I don't question that there are illustrators and graphic designers in the world who can do just as well. I think there are a whole lot more who can't, or who can't tell the difference, and who don't really care because they've matured in an era where it doesn't matter-- where the concept matters more than the design, or the most important thing is the sizzle to make it go viral, or where the client imposes a set of constraints guaranteed to thwart artistic quality.
I invite you to put my theory to the test. There are plenty of illustrated publications today with content that could qualify for the subject of "Yikes!" (ICE in Minnesota, public health threats, wars, political polarization, etc. etc.) Sit down in a comfortable chair with the New Yorker or Psychology Today or the New York Times or virtually any newspaper with editorial cartoons and see if you can find an illustration stronger than this one. I'm not saying you won't, but you won't find many.
Putting aside for a moment the question of a design census, do you at least agree that naturalism often comes at the cost of graphics?
For example, I agree that the pot is beautifully illustrated and decorated, but your praise of the character acting seemed a considerable stretch. It seems to me that quite a bit of expression was lost there in the artists’ flattening into design.
And what about mood? I’d propose that design is not on the outs so much as it is subject to opportunity costs.
I will have to think about it some more, but my gut instinct is that we care more about, and have better, graphic design today than at any other time in history.
Robert and Kev Ferrara-- Ahhh, the relationship (is it always "tension"?) between math and beauty, between geometry and expression, between quantitative and qualitative measure, moderation and harmony-- was there any topic more fundamental and exciting in the ancient Agora where everything began? The proportions that Robert describes are the echo of the "perfect" mathematical proportions of the Parthenon.
Long before Plato walked in the Agora, Pythagoras of Samos was struggling with this same issue (coincidentally around the time that the drawing we're discussing was created) so we may not be able to resolve it before the weekend.
In an earlier blog post I suggested that Pythagoras was the first human being we know of who recognized the connection between mathematics and the design of the world. Arthur Koestler wrote about the awesome significance of that epiphany: "[Pythagoras'] influence on the ideas, and thereby on the destiny of the human race was probably greater than that of any single man before or after him.... [His] was the first successful reduction of quality to quantity, the first step towards the mathematization of human experience-- and therefore the beginning of science. Pythagoras discovered that the pitch of a note depends on the length of the string which produces it, and that concordant intervals in the scale are produced by simple numerical ratios." From there it was just a hop, skip and a jump to the "music of the spheres," the musical hum of the planets in their orbit, like the intro to Kubrick's 2001.
Richard wrote: "your praise of the character acting seemed a considerable stretch."
A month ago we were discussing a picture in the NYT where a woman's trauma was demonstrated by scribbling with a crayon over a photograph. You found that design "most beautiful, most artfully designed, most alive, most fashionable" from the examples I offered. Perhaps so. But I personally find this 3,000 year old design superior, and what's more I find the "character acting"-- the wall of monsters nipping at his hand, the alarmed face, the hands up in alarm-- more persuasive. The photo in the NYT may show a character who has been devalued or scribbled on but in the thought experiment I proposed, this Greek drawing could show a woman allegorically beset by a horde of societal monsters-- a much more tightly focused, opinionated and (I would say) stirring picture.
I'm not exactly clear, when you say "the pursuit of naturalistic imagery," whether we're talking about the dominance of photography, video, and now AI? Are we talking about "photo-illustrators" who use photoshop to cut and paste images in a photo decoupage? I agree it's difficult for graphics to overcome that tsunami.
Let's keep in mind that Plato hated artists because of the naturalistic, mimetic imitative quality of their work. He would gladly have escorted them to the border because their naturalism interferes with our philosophical growth from the world of appearances to the world of reality.
Let's keep in mind that Plato hated artists because of the naturalistic, mimetic imitative quality of their work.
He did approve of techne, though.
Also, this piece of pottery was made around the time a great transition from oral to written culture, one that Plato had little love for. Perhaps he would have thought of this as we do of AI-slop today?
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Postmodern Anonymouse
I don't see good 'design' here. Just naivety. Similar to that found in other badly drawn images of animals attacking humans by 8 year old children or in the paintings of Henri Rousseau.
Hard to see the design with the art on the pot in rough shape and cropped away from the totality. I personally was thinking more of designs like this: https://collectionapi.metmuseum.org/api/collection/v1/iiif/251467/529942/main-image
David and Kev: I suppose many art students go through a phase of obsessing over proportion; I know I did. The blank page and its intimidating possibilities, along with the fear of failure, make very attractive the notion that there could be a "right" answer, a mathematical formula for great art. I've noticed that people who excel at STEM and then try their hands at art often get hung up on this notion.
I concur regarding the significance of Pythagoras! This is trivial, but while coding a simple computer game as a project with my son, I showed him how to use that famous Greek's most famous theorem to plot the X and Y pixel coordinates of objects moving around the screen — answering every kid's question, "When are we even going to use this stuff?"
Laurence John-- I don't think of naivety in opposition to good design. In fact, one of the reasons people admire and collect naive art is the excellence of its innate design (think Bill Traylor's "yellow chicken" or Henry Darger's marvelous "In the Realms of the Unreal"-- examples here:https://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2006/02/difference-between-tragedy-and-mere.html ). Some of the smartest, most sophisticated artists piggyback on the raw designs of the naive (think Picasso's use or tribal or prehistoric art, or Dubuffet's use of children's art or art brut). I think the feeling is that even the most unsophisticated can have a natural sense of design, the way a bower bird selectively decorates its nest. Sophisticated artists often value that uncivilized, unbleached vision.
Kev Ferrara-- I had trouble following your link but I know what you mean. Greek vase painting has been a standard for excellence in design for millennia. In his classic book, On The Art of Drawing, Robert Fawcett wrote that "the study of Greek vase paintings is obligatory for the student...." I take your point about this drawing being "cropped away from the totality." Unfortunately, once we go beyond the excerpt shown here, the 3D shape of the pot begins to distort the image.
I had trouble following your link...
Sorry, here's a direct link. Herakles with women, satyr, and Pan in the garden of the Hesperides Met Museum, 5th Avenue gallery, 4th Century B.C.
“I don't see good 'design' here. Just naivety. Similar to that found in other badly drawn images of animals attacking humans by 8 year old children”
I would argue those are inseparable. Strong graphic design and naivety are inherently linked through a shared treatment of the image as a flat graphic plane, and through a shared pleasure in purely 2D shapes existing on that 2D surface.
In the real world, humans exist in space and interact with one another in 360 degrees along multiple axes (near/far, up/down, east/west).
Great figurative painters must wrestle with how to extract clear graphic reads from objects behaving naturally in space, but they always do so incompletely and imperfectly. When the graphic plane is treated naively (whether by children, chalcolithic cave painters, or bronze age vase decorators), no such wrestling is required. The artist is free to maximize the quality of the design without accommodations made for naturalistic illusion.
Children have weak understandings of spatial relationships in 3D space, so figures are shown in profile or head-on, and interactions occur almost exclusively along the east/west axis. That is ideal for the graphic plane. They can’t draw foreshortened forms and therefore focus instead on silhouette, which further supports graphic read. Lacking anatomical subtlety, they emphasize the broad impression of the overall shape of a figure rather than internal complexity, again, perfect for the graphic plane. They see objects only in local color, with no perception of light or atmosphere. And so on.
At their most naive, children and cave men see the page simply as a surface for marks and shapes. They draw only circles, stripes, polka dots, triangles, zigzags, scribbles, symmetry, and asymmetry. This is the purest form of abstract graphic design and is fundamentally related to the highest expressions of abstraction, whether in Persian rugs, the borders of an amphora, and so on.
Richard,
You've previously expressed your fondness for Cy Twombly, so it seems you and David are on the same page on this one.
Actually, if you recall, David said that “as physical marks standing alone,” he “wouldn't consider them particularly beautiful.”
He was only interested in language games, which is a completely perpendicular concern to design, a purely visual phenomenon.
Language games (and titles) aside, if you like Cy Twombly you're also probably going to be predisposed to the naive, the raw, the unsophisticated, because you think it represents something more honest and pre-civilised.
Referencing the pot I linked to above, at least...
The secondary drawing conventions - highly consistent calligraphic or linear descriptors and outlines - attached to the flat primitive abstract shapes are intellectual in nature. Which, I would say, elevates the abstraction away from primitivism toward sophistication. Such appears in most all fine decorative art. One does not see this minimalist finishing/decorative embroidery in cave paintings.
The strict three value/color approach in the orchestration of the decorative forms, as well as constancy of shape scales and shape gestures, are also minimalist finishing techniques which brings sophistication; and which are generally absent in truly primitive works.
Which is to say, what raises the bar from the primitive to the elegantly decorative is the perfect detail-attentive stylistic consistency and minimal means across the pattern.
Make no mistake, it takes intelligence to recognize and understand the importance of consistency across the pattern and to apply it through diligent craftsmanship.
I think there is a direct parallel in all this to cartoon wit and verbal wit, maybe even in intellectualism more generally, as I've suggested before.
If you like Cy Twombly [it’s] because you think it represents something more honest and pre-civilised.
Nope, just like how it looks. The shapes and gestures, the bright colors, feel good as sensory phenomena.
I don’t know how people look at a picture and think about stuff like that at the same time. I would find that very distracting, especially with abstracts given how much they demand you to turn off your conceptual brain to appreciate them.
So what the F are we even talking about ?
Design, generally speaking, requires the accentuation of phenomena. To accentuate requires the destruction of information/subtlety . The highest information state, borrowing from physics, of the picture plane is a purely entropic static, the lowest is a black and white rectangle split in two.
kev
Yes, I agree, it’s not truly naive at all, except in the sense that the Greeks chose naive tropes to deliver their content: figures shown in profile with east-to-west orientation, simplified features, and so on. Cartoons, abstracts, etc borrow from the naive to break from certain limitations of the purely naturalistic.
Richard: "I don’t know how people look at a picture and think about stuff like that at the same time. I would find that very distracting, especially with abstracts given how much they demand you to turn off your conceptual brain to appreciate them."
I didn't say that people "think about stuff like that at the same time". Every image we look at evokes responses that allude to other cultural associations, whether we're conscious of it or not. That's why a cave painting feels different to a Vermeer. It's not just the 'style' that's different. It's the myriad cultural associations that accumulate and cling to certain images across time.
"Design, generally speaking, requires the accentuation of phenomena. To accentuate requires the destruction of information/subtlety ."
This is only true if the method of accentuation is stylization (graphics, cartooning, glyph-work, typograph-ication, icon-making, decorative design, etc). Stylization eradicates everything that falls outside its pre-figured limited suite of visual conventions. And that is severely lossy with respect to phenomena generally. The result is de-naturalization.
So, with respect to the Greek jar art, stylishly amplifying the shape to such an extent obliterates the possibility of sculpted form, form lighting (or lighting generally), atmosphere, pictorial depth, naturalistic texture, perspective recession, and so on.
Whereas, in more naturalistic yet poetic work, especially the great stuff, the only phenomena that is discarded is that which is self-confusing to its own phenomenal effect. In discarding the self-contradicting confounding bits, the phenomenal effect is purified so it is just that much more powerful/accentuated.
An over-simple example: Take a photograph of a parade receding away from your eye toward the horizon, trace it in line onto paper so what appears is a bunch of stepwise diminishing silhouettes overlapping into depth and distance. Odds are, you couldn't control the photo to remove all the tangents occurring between the outlines of the near and far elements.
Now re-jigger all the elements to, as best as possible, remove the tangents between near and far elements, and in that simple re-arrangement, the depth effect will be greatly improved without any loss to any other significant quality.
In discarding the self-contradicting confounding bits, the phenomenal effect is purified so it is just that much more powerful/accentuated.
What contradicts the poetic effect is still naturalistic information that must be removed.
Even tangents are informational. If you remove them all from your crowd, you introduce unnatural spacing and regimentation in the crowd, as if people are COVID-distancing or lining up for Muslim prayer. A naturally clumped crowd will produce tangents, they’re part of what makes a real crowd feel like a crowd. We make the crowd a cartoon crowd when we remove them.
I had a funny feeling this would be your tack.
There's nothing naturalistic about depth-cue-destroying tangents. They are an artifact of unnaturally freezing an instant (reality, our eyes, and our perspective are in constant motion, as is a parade) and unnaturally seeing all the shapes as having distinct abstracted linear borders. If we just looked at an oncoming parade, we would never notice a foreground figure tangenting a background figure because a host of other depth cues would make such a sensation impossible.
Hah, well, you already knew, I think, from Twitter that I believe tangents are an overstated convention in art/design, as we see, for example, in Rubens’s masterpiece Tiger Hunt, where many of them are used to great effect. I believe you baited me.
Anyway, this is becoming much too technical. Before long we will be debating the perception of stereoscopic vision at various focal lengths. Let’s leave it aside for now.
David, interesting post.
"Yet, look at illustrations in today's publications and tell me what those 3,000 years of progress have added to the quality of our pictures.
Nothing at all, just saturated us with the quantity (which in many ways, if not all, is cause of diminishment in quality).
I believe this is because art, being a reflection and expression of the human spirit, cannot be qualitatively dependent on technology. In practice, technology turns out to be an apophatic means to recognise what humanity, and consequently art, actually is. The uncanny valley is always between the blue remembered peaks.
Nothing at all, just saturated us with the quantity (which in many ways, if not all, is cause of diminishment in quality).
Really? No one from the Michelangelo to the Wyeths added anything to painting/art since the ancient Greeks? Cmon man, that’s a bunch of malarkey.
By "progress" (David's term) I mean technology and the techne thereof, not the aesthetic discoveries made over the years of artistic practice, exemplified by such artists as you cited.
Oil paint, grisaille, glazing, etc. aren’t techne?
Yes they are, as is a stick scratching red ochre on a cave wall, but what I'm referring to here is technology at a larger distance, to the point of being a simulacra of the haptic act of mark-making.
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