The History of Painting

At the dawn of art the image does not admire — it incants and immortalizes. The Egyptian canon locks the figure into an unchanging formula: shoulders frontal, head and legs in profile, size by rank rather than by the eye; thus the tombs and the "Book of the Dead" are painted, to conquer death by repetition. Assyria covers the palaces of Nineveh and Nimrud with alabaster reliefs of the lion hunt, where the strength of the king equals the strength of the realm. In Babylon the Ishtar Gate under Nebuchadnezzar II shines with glazed bulls and dragons — a heavenly order brought down into brick. And on Crete and at Mycenae the frescoes of Knossos breathe with the sea and the dance — a brief breath of freedom within the palace wall.

Greece lifts the spell from the image and sets man in its place — beautiful, well-proportioned, free in his motion. Attic red-figure vase painting discovers foreshortening and gesture: bodies come alive, myths are played out as a scene. The sculpture of Phidias on the Athenian Acropolis (the Parthenon, the statue of Athena) gives the epoch its face of a divine order in human form. Rome inherits this idol and adds to it the sober portrait — and on its margin, in the Fayum portraits of Roman Egypt, wax encaustic looks for the first time straight into the eyes of mortal man. This direct, enormous gaze will become the bridge to the icon.

When the ancient cosmos crumbles, painting goes underground — into the Roman catacombs, where the first Christians paint not gods but signs of hope: the Good Shepherd, Orpheus, Jonah, the orant with upraised hands. Then the image comes out into the light in mosaics: Ravenna under Justinian (San Vitale, the processions of Justinian and Theodora; Sant'Apollinare) floods the walls with gold, where the space is not earthly but eternal. Thus the icon is born: the body loses its weight, the gaze grows enormous, the gold abolishes depth — because it is no longer the world that looks upon us, but the Kingdom. The Sinai "Saviour" of this period is already an almost mature countenance.

The Middle Ages nearly lose the image altogether: Byzantine iconoclasm (726–843) forbids and destroys the icons, and only the Triumph of Orthodoxy in 843 brings them back — now understood, vindicated by the dogma of the Incarnation. Thereafter the icon ascends: Theophanes the Greek carries the austere Byzantine fire into Rus', and Andrei Rublev, in "The Trinity" (c. 1411 or 1425–27), gives it its highest stillness and love. In the West the Gothic bursts the wall open with the stained-glass window (Chartres, Sainte-Chapelle) — light becomes theology. And at the very end of the epoch Giotto, in the Scrovegni Chapel (c. 1305), restores to the figure weight, feeling, and space — the crack out of which the Renaissance will emerge.

The Renaissance brings back the ancient idol on a new level: Masaccio, in "The Trinity" (c. 1427) and the Brancacci frescoes, constructs space according to linear perspective, and the world becomes measurable. Leonardo ("The Last Supper," 1495–98; "Mona Lisa," c. 1503–19) and Michelangelo (the Sistine Chapel ceiling, 1508–12; "The Last Judgment," 1536–41) carry man to titanism — and at once to trembling before the judgment. In the North Dürer cuts "The Apocalypse" (1498), in which the epoch hears the coming storm; Bosch paints hell from within. Then the light breaks: Caravaggio ("The Calling of Saint Matthew," c. 1600) strikes with a ray out of the darkness, and Rembrandt ("The Night Watch," 1642; "The Return of the Prodigal Son," c. 1668) leads the light inward into man — from pride to repentance.

The Enlightenment raises a new idol — Reason and the Virtue of the citizen — and painting gives it a strict form. Jacques-Louis David casts the revolution in the cold marble of classicism: "The Oath of the Horatii" (1784) and "The Death of Marat" (1793) turn politics into a cult. But where the idol of Reason turns into the guillotine and war, the brush is the first to see the truth. Goya paints "The Third of May 1808" (1814) and cuts the series "The Disasters of War" (c. 1810–1820) — without heroics, only the cry of a man under the muzzle. Here the Enlightenment looks for the first time upon its own collapse.

The century seeks a replacement for the fallen cult of Reason and casts about. Romanticism stakes everything on passion and the infinite: Delacroix paints "Liberty Leading the People" (1830), and Caspar David Friedrich sets man with his back to the abyss ("Wanderer above the Sea of Fog," c. 1818) — the soul before the boundless. In Russia the Peredvizhniki restore conscience to art: Repin ("Barge Haulers on the Volga," 1870–73), Kramskoi, Surikov paint the people and history as a judgment. And in France the Impressionists (Monet, "Impression, Sunrise," 1872) renounce the idea altogether — what remains is pure sight, light, and the instant, out of which the whole of the twentieth century will later grow.

The World War tears the visible world apart, and the avant-garde drives disintegration to its limit: Malevich exhibits "Black Square" (1915) as the "zero of forms" — the end of the old image and a claim to a new religion of non-objectivity. The Cubism of Picasso and Braque shatters the object; the abstraction of Kandinsky drives colour toward pure music; utopia promises a new man. But the idol of utopia turns into war, and painting cries out once more: Picasso paints "Guernica" (1937) — a black-and-white scream over a bombed city, the loudest anti-war image of the century. Expressionism (Munch, "The Scream," 1893, as a prologue) and postwar art hold this nerve of horror and longing for meaning.

After the fall of the ideologies the great common idol has vanished, and the picture of the world has scattered into a multitude. Art has become plural: conceptualism, installation, video, and the digital image crowd painting out, while the market and irony often take the place where meaning once stood. This is an honest, subtle epoch — as yet it has no "Black Square" or "Guernica" of its own by which it might be known. But for that very reason the old question of the law is heard in it again: after the collapse of all idols — by what does man live, and to what does he return. The answer is still being written.