The Cowboy Way

Cowboys... some love them, some hold them in contempt...

For many Americans, cowboys embody the finest qualities of our culture: rugged men who prize independence , taciturn men who rise before dawn to work from sunup to sundown, strong men whose word and handshake mean more than a written contract, tough men who rarely speak but mean just what they say when they do...

Others don't always see cowboys in the same light...

William F "Buffalo Bill" Cody's Wild West extravaganzas were inspired by the
frontiersman's success in an 1872 stage production penned by dime novelist
Ned Buntline.

Europeans and Asians critical of US foreign policy during the second Bush presidency condemned it as being run by cowboys-- loudmouth yahoos who shot first and thought later, cultural Philistines proud of their own ignorance and unwillingness to listen to any other point of view.

But, for many in America, a cowboy is another critter entirely: the sort of man who lives his own life, goes his own way, and expects his neighbors to do the same and stay on their own damned side of the fence...

Annie Oakley, the Peerless Lady Wing-Shot,
wowed audiences throughout North America and
Europe with her marksmanship.

[The often critical overseas view of Americans as Cowboy Neanderthalicus has a lot to do with an Ugly American syndrome described in the 1958 political thriller of the same name.

Eugene Burdick and William Lederer's novel essentially predicted dismal failure for US efforts to contain Communism in Southeast Asia due, in part, to the local perception of Americans as arrogant and contemptuous of other cultures.  One character, a Thai newsman, comments a "mysterious change seems to come over Americans when they go to a foreign land.  They isolate themselves socially.  They live pretentiously.  They're loud and ostentatious."]   

Nations-- like religions--  require mythologies to create and maintain a sense of unique identity and purpose...

Gene Autry, seen here in a publicity still, was one of many motion
picture cowboys inspired by popular novels such as those written
by Ned Buntline and Wild West extravaganzas such as those staged
by William F Cody.

While a right to choose one's own destiny may be a common theme, nations must comb their individual histories and legends to find freedom's champions -- ancient Israel's Moses lifts his staff at the shores of the Red Sea, frontier America's Davy Crockett takes up his knife after firing his last bullet at the Alamo, Spain's El Cid's armor-clad skeleton leads a final charge in the 11th Century against Moorish occupiers, lovely bare-breasted Liberty holds the tricolor flag high as she leads the French over the barricades to their new Republic...

When we mull the towering place that the iconic and laconic cowboy holds in the mind of Americans, we remind ourselves that a key to understanding much of the United States' popular culture and politics is to know the myth of the Frontier.  In turn, the myth of the Frontier undergoes its own subtle metamorphosis, becoming a nation's Manifest Destiny to stretch the nation's borders from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the rocky shores of Maine to the California deserts, from the Oregon coast to Florida's sun soaked shores, a destiny ordained by God Himself...

American Progress (John Gast, circa 1872) depicts the United States,
personified as Columbia, towering over settlers moving across
the plains as they help fulfill America's Manifest Destiny to occupy
the entire central portion of the North American continent.

 

The iconic images of Crockett and Daniel Boone blazing trails through forest and green wilderness join pictures of cowboys moving herds across the hot waterless plains and sheriffs standing tall in dusty streets at high noon in the years after the Civil War...

In part, this postbellum fascination has something to do with a dime novelist known to his readers as Ned Buntline and Edward Zane Carroll Judson to his family.  Buntline was already making a handsome living with his lurid pulp stories when he left the Big City East to travel Out West to meet James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok.  He hoped to get some stories for a book about the lawman.  Unfortunately for poor Ned, Wild Bill had grown publicity shy and offered to pump the writer full of lead if Buntline didn't go away and leave him alone...

Giuseppina Morlacchi, an expatriate Italian
dancer already well-known in the United States,
gained even greater fame as Princess Dove Eye
in Ned Buntline's melodrama, Scouts of the Prairie. 

Not one to be discouraged, Buntline decided to continue with the project and soon met William F Cody while interviewing Hickok friends and associates.  The two men quickly became friends.  Buntline realized Cody's story would likely be more interesting to his readers than Wild Bill's exploits with six shooters.  And thus it was that W F Cody found himself transformed into "Buffalo Bill, the King of the Bordermen", hero of a serialized 1869 Buntline novel.  It sold many copies...

[Buntline himself was quite a colorful character who'd been active in the anti-immigrant (i.e. anti-Catholic) Know Nothing movement during the 1850s.  Having served in both the Army and Navy, Buntline later narrowly cheated death when a lynch mob strung him up from an awning during the course of his murder for killing a man in a duel when the gentleman objected to the novelist's affair with his teenaged bride.  The Buntline resume included a year spent in jail for fomenting a riot as well as an off and on career on the  Temperance circuit despite the fact he was usually drunk when he exhorted audiences to shy away from Demon Rum.] 

Cynics often say box office success inspires imitation-- or perhaps, Col. Tim
McCoy had long planned his Wild West show, only to be beaten to the draw
by Col. William F Cody.

Three years later, Buntline penned a play ("Scouts of the Prairie") which starred himself, Cody, the Italian ballerina Giuseppina Morlacchi, and Texas Jack Omahundro who rode the Chisholm Trail after service in the Confederate army before he died prematurely at age 33 from pneumonia.  "Scouts" opened in Chicago in late December 1872, catching the ticket-buying public's fancy at the same time critics mocked it...

Success got Bill Cody to thinking maybe he just might ought to start his own Wild West Show...

1936 Frontier Exhinition, Fort Worth Texas: Stripper Sally
Rand (center, in western outfit) and her "nude" cowgirls in
hats, boots, and flesh-colored bra and panties

He did just that, creating a touring extravaganza that crisscrossed the United States and Europe from 1883 until 1913.  It spawned numerous rivals.  As Buffalo Bill's Wild West show wound down after a twenty year run, it likely gave fledgling moving picture makers a few ideas about how to capture the ticket buying public's fancy.  If so, it guaranteed mythic images of the West would be long cemented in the collective American psyche...

Perhaps it was faded newspaper accounts of crowds attracted by those old Wild West shoes that encouraged organizers of the 1936 Frontier Exhibition in Fort Worth to enlist Sally Rand, America's foremost ecdysiast, to showcase a theme involving cowgirl-of-a-different-kind entertainment for male visitors...



The spirit of the Cowboy West lives: Girl with Boots (Anonymous)

  

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Louis Nugent: Eat A Peach II

 

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Joe Jake Pratt: Dance for the Dead

 

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John Malone: Pink Flamingos

 

CREDITS

Note: All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: Annie Oakley poster from stanford.edu; Col Tim McCoy's Real Wild West Indian Village and Attack On Stage Coach from cowanauctions.com; Tom Mix comic from coverbrowser.com; Girl with Boots from tmdailypost.com; Gene Autry publicity photo from doctormacro.com; Giuseppina Morlacchi as Dove Eye from Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming

Cards of Mystery Blowin' Confusion All Around

"And cruel Death surrenders with its pale ghost retreating/Between the King and Queen of Swords"-- Changing of the Guards, Bob Dylan, 1978

Rock music has a number of cottage industries and among the most long-lived of these is the art and science of deciphering Bob Dylan's lyrics...

Unfortunately for my bank account, I'm not able to adequately pigeonhole Dylan's songs other than to note many echo my own thoughts and feelings in the same way thousands of other people say his writing provokes similar responses inside them ...

Bob Dylan's song, "Changing of the Guards," which appears on
his Street Legal contains multiple references to the Tarot

Dylan's lyrics frequently offer tidbits to whet the appetites of those who would parse his words, sifting them as carefully as a Kabbalist gingerly traveling narrow paths between the Sefiroth in search of mystic enlightenment...

One song from his Street Legal album, "Changing of the Guards", makes several fairly clear references to archetypal images gracing the mysterious Tarot cards: the Moon, Wheel of Fortune, Tower, Sun, Death surrendering (or reversed, in Tarot terminology) between the King and Queen of Swords.  A previous Dylan album, Desire, featured the Empress on its back cover...

Tarot cards have been with us since the middle of the 15th Century.  The best evidence does not date them any earlier and this same evidence suggests the first people to use them simply played games with them in the same way we use modern cards to pass the time or to gamble that Lady Luck favors us...

Visconti-Sforza Tarot: The Star

Like Dylan songs, Tarot cards spawn any number of scholars intent on deciphering their true history and purpose.  (We might note these seekers of knowledge are every bit as earnest as those who would prove Christopher Marlowe or Sir Francis Bacon were the "real" Shakespeare and as dogged in their pursuits as those who know that mystery tale teller Rex Stout did not speak tongue-in-cheek in 1941 when he proposed Dr Watson, confidante to Sherlock Holmes, was a woman.  We must give some credit to Stout even though we might pity those who doubt Shakespeare's authorship of his plays. Would, Stout asks, any self-respecting man ask another man to play Mendelssohn on a violin for his listening pleasure?  A powerful argument indeed.)...

Many people simply do not believe the 15th Century theory holds water when it comes to tracing the origin of the Tarot.  A popular birthplace for them is Egypt, at a time eons ago when Isis herself spoke and stones rose from the Earth to form the Pyramids.  But others say the Land of Pharaohs was just a way station in a tale that began in Atlantis with prescient priests encapsulating their ancient wisdom into a symbol-filled deck while awaiting the destruction of their continent in a single day and single night...

 

Arthur Edward Waite, best known today for
his design of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck, was
also an early member of an influential late 19th
century occult society known as The Order of
The Golden Dawn

Drawbacks travel in the caravan bearing the Atlantean and Egyptian theories...

Scholars interested in the history of playing cards in Europe appear unable to find any written or inscribed references to them that go beyond a 1367 prohibition against their use in the city of Bern, Switzerland.  About nine years later, Florence, future cradle of the Italian Renaissance, also forbade their use.  More laws against them popped up in Marseilles and Lille in the early 1380s.  But attitudes change.  In 1392 or 1393, records kept by Charles Poupart, treasurer to the French king Charles VI, show that it was His Majesty's pleasure to compensate painter Jacquemin Gringonneur the sum of 56 sols for three packs of cards, "gilt and colored, and variously ornamented," that did amuse the king...

[Playing cards, as a form of recreational pursuit, date back to China during the Tang Dynasty, possibly before the 9th Century and were popular throughout Asia by the 11th Century.  Current opinion has it that cards with four suits similar to the ones we know today came to Europe in the late 1300s by way of contact with Egypt.]

Chinese playing card: Ming Dynasty, circa 1400

As for the Tarot cards specifically, the earliest surviving examples appear to be several hand painted decks created by an unknown artist (or artists) for the aristocratic Visconti and Visconti-Sforza families.  The most complete of these decks are 74 cards housed by the Pierpont Morgan Library.  Yale University has 67 cards in its Cary Collection.  Nine other institutions throughout Europe and the America have exhibits ranging from a single card to 48 of them.  All of these cards, with the possible exception of 23, can be reasonably dated to around 1450 or a few years later...

Rider-Waite Tarot: The Star
(Waite saw this trump as stmbolizing
spiritual truth irrigating both land and
sea with the Waters of Life)

What makes the Tarot cards so mysterious are the fact that a complete modern deck consists of two separate decks, the one a Major Arcana with 22 symbolic images and the other a Minor Arcana of 56 cards subdivided into four suits that correspond to the Spades, Diamonds, Clubs, and Hearts in modern day playing cards...

The division into two decks isn't actually what makes the cards so intriguing...

It is those 22 symbols that have engaged the minds of men and women since Court de Gebelin proposed in his 1781 work, Monde Primitif, the cards of the Major Arcana were actually a synthesis of all human knowledge collected by the ancient Egyptians and distilled into The Book of Thoth, somehow saved from the ruins of burned and pillaged temples...

Antoine Court de Gebelin, a former Protestant
minister turned archaeologist, was the first to
propose an ancient Egyptian origin for the Tarot

Unfortunately, de Gebelin had little more than his enthusiasm for the notion to back up his theory...

Others following de Gebelin in seeking an esoteric or occult origin for the Major Arcana have proposed several more plausible, if yet unproven, ideas.  One hypothesis of some interest is the notion the cards were a pictorial summary of alternative religious beliefs considered heretical by the medieval Church.  One of the first to ponder this possibility was occultist and Masonic historian Arthur Edward Waite...

Waite, in his 1910 The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, dismissed suggestions of truly ancient origins for the Tarot in Egypt or India or China as "deceptions and self-deceptions" due to a lack of evidence for the cards prior to the 14th Century.  He considered it a "missed opportunity" that previous researchers had not analyzed the Major Arcana as a possible symbolic encapsulation of doctrines taught by long outlawed Albigensian sects...

Necronomicon Tarot: The Star

[Outside of specialists in medieval European history, Albigensian sects (often referred to as Cathar sects in contemporary writing) are little known today except among those folk interested in returning Christianity to what they perceive as its original roots.  What we can say definitively about the movement is that it seems to have appeared in the south of France in the 11th Century, flourished for a while, and then found itself attacked and brutally suppressed in the mid-13th Century.  Pockets of Albigensian belief lingered on in the French Languedoc, the Pyrenees Mountains, and Northern Italy until at least the early 1330s.

It is, however, a more tricky task from a historian's standpoint to outline actual Cathar beliefs.  The Church ordered the writings of its members destroyed as heretical so we are generally left with only the testimony of the sect's opponents as to its doctrines. A majority of scholars agree the Albigensian faith probably had its roots in a much earlier attempt to reform Christianity (the so-called Paulician heresy) and that its beliefs likely contained Gnostic and Dualistic elements.  Beyond this, we descend into the realm of academic squabbling.
 

Pamela Colman Smith, "Pixie" to her friends, following written
comments by Arthur E Waite, created the beautiful images of the
Rider-Waite Tarot deck

From the standpoint of Rome, the Cathar movement was particularly dangerous.  True enough, it had many adherents amongst the peasantry.  But, unlike most heresies, the Albigensians found allies and even some believers amongst an already independent-minded nobility in the South of France.]

Since Waite made his comments over a century ago, other researchers with a mystical turn of mind have taken up his suggestion that the Albigensian heresy may have some connection with the images of the Major Arcana...

Pamela "Pixie" Smith was also a commercial illustrator
whose work adorned children's books, war relief
posters, and calendars such as this 1899 celebration of
Shakespearean plays.

And, since it is difficult to know exactly what constituted Cathar belief, some like Alfred Douglas conclude no conclusive correlations can be made.  Douglas does believe the numerical arrangement of the Major Arcana suggests Gnostic themes well:  Man is born a Fool, ignorant of the Divine Spirit residing within him, becomes aware that the world is surely more than he sees around himself as he ages, contends with orthodoxy imposed by the political and religious hierarchy, and then begins a long, introspective journey that leads to the liberation of his soul from the many illusions of the world of matter and reunion with the Divine...

While aspects of Gnostic doctrine are quite attractive and not necessarily at odds with the teachings of the Church, it has traditionally been considered dangerous or heretical for several reasons.  Among them is the fact that a number of Gnostic sects have rejected Tanakh (the Hebrew Scriptures) as inspired by a cruel and malevolent force, the Demiurge, who created the material world in which we live and breathe, whom they often identified with Satan.  A few sects have gone so far as to reject all forms of sexual expression, even in the confines of marriage, as evil...

Others, scholars and artists alike, have sought meaning in the Tarot as we shall see in future essays.  Some have pondered the archetypal images of the Major Arcana in the light of Carl Jung's theories...               

Tarot Josnell: The Star

 

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Louis Nugent: Blues Alive Tonite

 

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Fine Art America now features painting, drawings, and photographs by twenty-two artists who celebrate majestic and uncompromising landscapes, settlements, people, plants, and flora and fauna scattered across the vast emptiness called West Texas.

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Avis Noelle: Big Bend Beauty

 

Fine Arts America now features  work celebrating the mysterious and lovely Bayou State of Louisiana and its unique lifestyle:

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Margaret Bobb: The Two Sisters

 

CREDITS

Note: Information on the early history of Tarot Cards is taken from The Encyclopedia of Tarot, by Stuart Kaplan (Stamford, Connecticut, 1978), The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by Arthur Edward Waite (London, 1910), The Tarot: The Origins, Meanings, and Uses of the Cards, by Alfred Douglas (London, 1973). All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: Bob Dylan Street Legal album cover from bobdylan.com

Stories to tell

Automobiles make our lives much simpler...

But, with the convenience of relatively quick transportation from Point A to Point B or Point C, comes the loss of things noticed on an unhurried stroll...

Camera in hand, I strolled down Avenues Concho and Chadbourne in downtown San Angelo, venturing briefly into Paintbrush Alley.  Following are scenes from my lazy ramble around a town on the edges of the Texas desert.  No comments (or captions) accompany these images.  The reader is invited to imagine the stories they tell...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE MARKETPLACE

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Easier still: browse the Louis R Nugent gallery at Fine Art America.  Choose from 250+ unique ideas for home and office decor or holiday and birthday cards for yourself or special someones who deserve something extraordinary.  Individual cards cost less than $5.  Wall prints from $22.

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Louis Nugent: The Girl from Guadalupe

 

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Fine Art America now features painting, drawings, and photographs by twenty-one artists who celebrate majestic and uncompromising landscapes, settlements, people, plants, and flora and fauna scattered across the vast emptiness called West Texas.

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Karen Slagle: Cloud to Ground Strike

 

Fine Arts America now features  work celebrating the mysterious and lovely Bayou State of Louisiana and its unique lifestyle:

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Susan Bordelon: Bayou des Glaises at Big Bend Louisiana

 

CREDITS

Note: All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: all photographs by Louis R Nugent

 

Of Petrarch and Portraits

Renaissance translates to "rebirth" in French... 

Italian also being a Romance language with its roots in Latin, there's a vague similarity between what a lovely lady on a fashion runway in Milan might call the Rinascimento, formed from a verb, rinascere, "to be reborn", and the French word spoken by a lovely mademoiselle as she poses au naturale on the Rive Gauche for a sadly starving young artist with much talent... 

And those readers fortunate enough to have read Caesar in the original know balding Gaius Julius would utter "renascentia" if there'd been occasion for similar concepts of new beginnings to cross his mind...

Laura de Noves, wife of Hugues de Sade (a distant
ancestor of the infamous Marquis) is believed to have
been the mysterious noblewoman whom Petrarch
adored from afar despite her rejection of his amorous
overtures.

You and I will normally use this word, Renaissance, to describe a time spanning roughly three and a half centuries.  For the non-academically inclined, this period from the early 1300s until the mid-1600s  is sometimes only a list of names (Medici and Leonardo and Petrarch, for instance) and places (Florence, usually) committed to short-term memory before a History of Western Civilization midterm...

If our short term memory extends beyond the test, we may recall our professors or high school teachers spoke glowingly of the Renaissance.  Painting became more realistic as artists consciously applied themselves to capturing the natural world through an understanding of linear perspective and anatomy.  Men wishing to know about the world observed it and recorded what they saw accurately-- paving the way for the scientific revolution...

Slowly, sometimes haltingly, a new world view emerged in the city-states and nations of Europe from a combination of observation of the natural world surrounding mankind and a rediscovery of ancient Greek and Latin authors such as Aristotle and Cicero.  A poet, Petrarch, saw the period after the collapse of the Roman Empire as an age of darkness when the light of learning gave way to celebration of barbaric ignorance.  Many modern writers credit him with giving us a concept of medieval times as The Dark Ages...

[Readers with a scholarly interest will remind me controversies about the Renaissance abound inside the academic community.  French historian Jules Michelet appears to be the first modern author to use the term "Renaissance" to define a specific era.  He did this in 1855 in a history of his homeland which, not surprisingly, emphasized the role of La Belle France in civilizing the rest of Europe...



Renaissance painters often evoked classical themes,
placing them alongside contemporary figures, as in
this detail from Sandro Botticelli's allegorical
The Birth of Spring

Contemporary thinkers debate whether the Renaissance represents a clean break with the past or simply a continuation of a gradually developing civilization.  Some say it was a time of decline fueled by a pessimism that caused intellectuals to look to the past to find inspiration in a world ravaged by the Black Death.  Others duel with articles on the role played by powerful families like the Medici of Florence versus the impact made by the intellectual contributions of artists and scientists themselves.  But few scholars even try to ignore the impact on the transmission of knowledge caused by the invention of the printing press.]   

A good number of educated people will also credit Petrarch with more than inspiring an easily remembered historical term like the Dark Ages.  They see him as "The Father of Humanism"...

When the poet (who was born in Tuscany in 1304 and who died near Padua in 1374, aged 69 years and 364 days) is so honored by authors, they usually echo Georg Voigt, a German historian, who used "humanism" to describe a revival of interest in Classical Greek and Roman learning during the Renaissance.  As politically and philosophically savvy readers are aware, humanism is an umbrella term.  It has also been associated with movements with quasi-religious overtones.  Today, it generally refers to a non-theistic world view embracing ideals of reason and altruism and freedom from the scourge of superstition...

In an attempt to create more realistic images, Renaissance artists experimented
with linear perspective and the balancing of light and shadows.  Paolo Uccello's
Presentation of the Virgin is also another example of the Renaissance tendency
to link ancient events with contemporary European society.

[Petrarch was a modern man in several senses of the word.  His father was a lawyer who wished his two sons would follow in his footsteps.  Petrarch, of course, rebelled against this decision, although he packed his bags and spent the seven years of school required for this training in quiet rebellion, secretly plotting to be a poet and man of letters.  He eventually found a career in the Church as a widely traveled ambassador.  Despite the celibacy expected of him, Petrarch fathered at least one son and one daughter.  And he became the poster child for unrequited love when his eyes first fell upon a woman named Laura on April 6, 1327, during Good Friday services.  There is a hint in his writings that he attempted to have requited love with Laura but she refused his advances on the grounds she was wed to another.  He spent the rest of his life in lonely adoration of this fair haired woman of modest but dignified bearing, celebrating her beauty in some of the finest poetry of the early Renaissance.]

Let's briefly return to the Renaissance and some of the artistic innovations that sprang from its turbulence...

We should perhaps start with Giotto...



Giotto: The Marriage at Cana

Giotto di Bondone (1266-1377) was described by Giovanni Vallani, a banker who lived at roughly same time as "the most sovereign master of painting in his time, who drew all his figures and their postures according to nature."   Giotto was amongst the first artists to realize two dimensional images could roughly duplicate illusions of three dimensional reality...

Linear perspective can be defined in several ways but each definition boils down to creating illusions of depth and distance.  One simple way to demonstrate this concept is to draw two parallel lines (such as railroad tracks) that gradually come closer and closer until they meet.  Buildings nearest the viewer are drawn larger while those which are supposed to be far away are smaller. Not surprisingly, the real trick to achieving a realistic linear perspective requires some understanding of mathematics, particularly basic geometry.  Not surprisingly, rules for creating an illusion of depth were developed by artists whose work required an understanding of geometry-- most notably, the architects Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) and Leon Alberti (1404-1472)...

[Brunelleshi's masterpiece, Santo Spirito church in Florence, started five years or so before Brunelleschi's death and not completed until 1481, remains among the world's best examples of using form and the illusion of converging lines to create a sense of incredible depth.]



Filippo Brunelleschi: Interior, Santo Spirito

Renaissance painters also created more realistic works because they showed greater understanding of color than their predecessors...

We say the sky is blue and we may describe a certain man's shirt and pants as blue.  But if I paint these three things-- sky, shirt, pants-- with the same shade of blue, I will have a canvas that looks rather unsophisticated and a bit primitive.  But if I use three shades of blue, my work appears a bit more natural...

Understanding color requires the understanding of a basic principle: adding white will lighten a color, adding black will darken it.  And understanding color requires knowing that blending two colors together will create a third color: yellow weakens red to create orange, blue and red transform into purple...



The cangiante technique in Renaissance Art: the prophet Daniel
from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel uses color substitutions to
achieve lighting and shading effects that would be ineffective if
the original color is used.

[Lest we appear disrespectful to artists of the Dark Ages, we should note the costs and difficulties of obtaining many pigments limited the creative expression of painters during those times.  Renaissance artists employed many of the same techniques (such as egg tempera, fresco, and encaustic) used by their predecessors but enjoyed much greater access to paper and pigments.]

Four painting techniques used by Renaissance painters deserve special mention...

Michelangelo employed one of these techniques, cangiante, a form of color substitution, several times during the painting of the Sistine Chapel.  Cangiante is used when the painter is unable to make the original hue light or dark enough to achieve the desired effect or when a darker or lighter version of the original color will make the painting look flat and dull.  In our illustration, Michelangelo substitutes green for blue in attempting to show us the shadows of the prophet Daniel's robes...

Sfumato, another Renaissance technique, blurs sharp outlines by gradually blending one tone into another through very careful application and overlapping of thin glazes.  Leonardo da Vinci coined the term and became its most prominent advocate.  He saw sfumato as "being without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke".  Unione, the third method, attempts to maintain vibrant colors during the sfumato process...

Sfumato technique in Leonardo's Mona Lisa

Chiaroscuro, the fourth technique, utilizes strong contrasts between light and dark, to create illusions of three dimensional reality.  It (not surprisingly) takes its name from merging two words translating to light and dark.  From the standpoint of an optical physicist, chiaroscuro uses value gradation of color and analytical division of light and shadow shapes to achieve the appearance of volume...



Chiarascuro effects can be achieved in modern
photography by manipulating contrasts and the
values of lighted and shaded areas.

The basic principles of chiaroscuro, incidentally, were not born in Renaissance days.  A 5th Century BCE Greek painter, Apollodoros, is said to have been the father of this form of "shadow painting"...

We might note these techniques, particularly sfumato and chiaroscuro, can be used by photographers as well as painters.  A camera functions best when it captures the scene before its lens.  However, as it does so, it creates a two dimensional image defined only by length and width.  The depth perceived by the human eye vanishes on the computer screen or the printed photograph when we review the pictures of something which looks so magnificent in person but so drab when captured...

A number of photographers, either through formal training or personal experience, find themselves more comfortable working with black and white rather than with color.  This is due, in part, to the fact that contrasts between black and white and varying shades of gray help create a sense of depth lacking in most untreated color images...

Down the line, we'll chat about Renaissance representations of living forms-- humans, animals, and plants...

Today, it suffices to say perhaps our lovelorn poet Petrarch was onto something when he thought there was much value to studying The Classics...

Raphael's The School of Athens employs a multitude of techniques (linear
perspective, foreshortening, and the manipulation of hue and light, to name a
few) to create a realistic homage to the enduring influence of classical Greece. 

 

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Louis Nugent: At the Scrapyard

 

Follow and Like Louis R Nugent Photography on Facebook @ louisnugent22.

Fine Art America now features painting, drawings, and photographs by twenty-one artists who celebrate the majestic and uncompromising landscapes, settlements, people, plants, and animals of West Texas.

http://fineartamerica.com/groups/west-texas.html

Sergio Garcia Rill: Milky Way Rainbow

 

Fine Arts America now features  work celebrating the mysterious and lovely Bayou State of Louisiana and its unique lifestyle:

http://fineartamerica.com/groups/cajun-country-louisiana.html

Barbara Jacquin: Bass Player in New Orleans

 

CREDITS

Note: All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: black and white desert landscape photograph by Louis R Nugent