Hand with Head
In a painting, a hand appears above a head. What are we to think? Is the solitary hand connected to an arm that is blocked from view? We would agree: in everyday life, a head’s opacity can shield from view an arm raised on the far side of the body. A hand appears above a head. This description applies to the imagery in three paintings; these details pinpoint the situation:
What other qualities are shared? The artists who created these details share “o” as the last letter in their last names. From left to right: Giotto, Caravaggio, Picasso. We cite this quality to make a point: shared qualities, while often intriguing, even entertaining, are not always relevant. However – and this too bears emphasis – art’s development, like culture in general, is anchored in a system of interconnected realities none of which is fully controlled and explained by rationality and linear causality.
Coinciding with the revving of powerful engines – each at the dawn of a new century – the creation of the three paintings (with hands above heads) occur centuries apart. The temporal spacing of creation makes for an arresting pattern. From left to right, the details are culled from Giotto, The Lamentation(1304-1306); Caravaggio, The Entombment of Christ (1602-1604); and Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon (1907). Are the dates significant? Giotto’s painting (a fresco) marks the start of a reformulation in visual art that begins the Renaissance. Caravaggio’s painting marks a high point in the development of the Baroque. Picasso’s painting garners status, in hindsight, as the first great Cubist, or proto-Cubist, painting. What a coincidence: three painters, three centuries, three paintings, three matching focal points – a hand with a head. This essay starts with the obvious: What does the hand point to? Not physically, not literally, but formally, psychologically, thematically.
In a detail, a hand appears armless. If we enlarge our field of view to inspect the entire painting – the painting that surrounds the detail – we discover the arm is never visible. This condition provokes further questions: if an arm is not visible is it invisible? Does the arm exist at all? Is the arm present but hidden? Did the artist paint the arm not there, or paint the arm then hide the arm somewhere? If any of these, then why?
In painting a hand, without an arm visible, each artist aims for, and reaches, a different set of meanings. The meaning of a hand-attached-to-a-head attaches, in turn, to the larger context by which we interpret each painting’s meaning as a painting, and as an exemplary artwork from the larger, longer history of visual images.
- Giotto: the refinement of representation
1304 – 1306. Giotto is young, maybe thirty, three decades of his ‘career’ still ahead of him. His Lamentation is designed as one of the decorations of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy. The scene Giotto creates demonstrates his mastery of a new approach to representation. Lamentation exhibits a style that looks more believable, the imagery more natural, not based on formulaic depiction. Giotto’s imagery offers viewers the convincing illusion of volumes in space. And not simply ‘space,’ but a space. Out of doors, in a landscape, with a stone wall and a single tree in the distance. Calling the image an illusion is a relative term; no one is truly fooled, but Giotto’s painting seems, in comparison to the paintings of his contemporaries and immediate predecessors, to be more realistic. Giotto’s painting performs the representation of life. And, this emergent power of the portrayal to capture the visual qualities of living results in an increased capacity to embody emotion. The grief (and the belief) that registers on the faces of the mourners in the painting looks and, therefore, seems more real. The painting conveys a felt quality that is different, not just in degree but in kind, from the conventionalized, stylized imagery produced in paintings in European art during the preceding thousand years.
[Giotto, Lamentation, c. 1304-1306, fresco, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua]
The detail shown slips back into place in the exact center of the painting. If you examine this hand closely, you may be tempted to assume it blossoms directly from the head and upper torso; but, looking longer you’ll find a reason to see the missing arm’s presence, behind the body. The reason is mechanical – the whole style of the painting promotes our acceptance, of finding consistency and coherency in an interpretation of lifelike-ness for each aspect of the imagery. In this context, the hand attaches to the right arm, an arm that is present, only shielded from view. The missing arm is there, on the far side of the bowed frame of the figure, the pink-shrouded figure of John the Apostle, who opens his arms wide in an expression of awe and submission. The hidden arm becomes a key signal, marking this painting as a decisive shift into increased naturalism, one small step for Giotto, one leap for art away from the stylized presentation of what is identified as the International Gothic style. The complete painting, with the invisible arm connecting to the overlapped hand, is clearly a forerunner of an approach to painting – based on a humanistic approach from the perspective of an individual, stable viewpoint – that leads to the Renaissance. But the painting doesn’t leave all conventions behind: the halo behind each head, shown as a full circle, never an oval, continues the non-naturalistic representational approach prevalent in the waning Medieval period, a period in which concept takes precedence over percept.
Giotto’s painting of the Lamentation depicts Jesus, released and lowered from the Cross; held by Mother Mary, He is encircled by mourners; overhead, a flock (?) of angels hovers. To many of us, here, now, these angels Giotto paints don’t really exist. They are products of his mystical faith. But they do exist in the painting. And, not to be not seen: that hand that attaches to the head (of the bowed Saint John) exists. Giotto’s rendition of the event – the Lamentation – incorporates his application of a (then) cutting-edge strategy of pictorial representation: the missing arm exists conceptually within the painting. Let’s repeat and refine: the missing arm exists conceptually within the painting. The arm does not appear in the surface of the painting because, and only because, from the angle of view the artist navigates, the arm is blocked by the bowed figure’s upper body. If the head and shoulder were suddenly, miraculously transparent, the arm would appear, visible in the painting; and, then, its appearance would subscribe to the paradigm of perspective: the arm would look radically stunted as it projects back, plummeting into depth. The arm would appear dramatically foreshortened.
Instead, and indeed, the head does exist, and so the arm disappears into hiddenness. Any other depiction of the arm’s spatial relationship within the context of the painting would be less accurate and, therefore, more disturbing. Painters working prior to Giotto – and in other cultures (e.g., Ancient Egyptian, Assyrian) – would approach the challenge by painting the arm differently. Giotto’s art offers a breakthrough, demonstrating a subtle naturalism not seen in the Byzantine approach to image-making that preceded his own.
Giotto paints the hand. The right hand attaches to an arm, a right arm that is present as surely as the left arm is present that flows underneath the robe and attaches to the left hand. The figure of Christ, lowered from the Cross, is complete: His legs are not severed from His torso, though the mourner with their back to us shields His thighs from view. A reading of the Legs as cut from the Body, or as protruding directly from the side of the green robe, such a reading would be not merely incorrect, but, to some degree, blasphemous. We, viewers, are directed by the logic of Giotto’s art to banish such thoughts that would require a re-conception of a mortal body and the sacred Body.
2. Caravaggio: symbolic representation
1602-1604. Caravaggio is thirtyish. In a country far to the north, Shakespeare, in his late thirties, has recently composed Hamlet (1601) and is writing Othello (1603). It must be in the air or water: darkness becomes gorgeous. Caravaggio doesn’t know – at least not for sure – that he doesn’t have long to live. He will kill a man over a tennis match (Love Forty!), and then die on the lamb. But, not yet. Today, the 9th of January, 1602, he starts the canvas that will, completed, depict The Entombment of Christ. When he finishes the painting (with a pristine surface), on the 6th of September, 1604, the imagery includes a solitary hand rising above a bowed head. Being adjacent, the hand appears to be connected to the head, appears to project from the head, like a thought issuing from the mind inside the head.
The head is a young woman’s. Her head is beautiful, weighted in grief; her nose glows, a delicate triangle of light. The wrist that connects the hand with the head aligns with a sweeping arc that runs along the upper line of the left shoulder of the grief-stricken maiden, the one whose head is bowed. This curve of the shoulder overlaps a second shoulder of a second young woman who stands at the far right side of the composition. She is not so lovely; her cheek is misshapen where it bulges. By the alignment of the second girl’s arm so it is hidden by the shoulder of the first female, Caravaggio completes the potent detail: the hand rising above a head.
At the apex of the composition, meaning concentrates, ideas coagulate, formal and representational, visual and verbal – the upraised hand is more than a hand of flesh and blood, it is a symbol. Or, more accurately: a part of a symbol. The symbolic makes sense when we see how the hand becomes one lifted end of a larger symbol that extends across the entire canvas. This symbol is a thing. An object with mass. Mass. Heightened realism overlays on top of a dense semiotic structure. Each layer contains and resonates with the other.
The painting is a picture. (In our contemporary era, most paintings are not pictures; but this one is.) A tightly-packed group of five (two young men, two young women, and an older woman) are lowering a body over the edge of a stone slab. Let’s revise, for this painting is a picture: A tightly-packed group of five (two young men, two young women, and an older woman) are seen lowering a body over the edge of a stone slab. (“Seen” is correct; it implies our presence, as viewers, as witnesses.) They lower the pale, bearded body of a young man (also thirtyish) who wears nothing more, nor less, than a flowing sheet looped around his waist. They handle Jesus’s body with care; the weight is real. The two males in the mourning party are bending, leaning in to the task – not a task, a golden opportunity – their hands and arms give Him support, at the knees and under His back.
The first hand shoots upward from a bowed head. On the left side of the painting, a second hand shoots from the side of the head of one man who leans down, to support the Body. This figure, on the left side of the composition, helps lower Christ into the tomb. Lowering the body is a burden less physical than emotional. A third hand juts out; you must look carefully to discover this dim hand, on the verge of disappearing into the darkness that deepens the right side of the painting. (See illustration below.) These three hands, with arms not visible, belong to people: they are Mother Mary’s two hands, at the extreme left and right, plus the third hand (the one at the painting’s apex) belongs physically to the young woman, Mary of Clopas, on the painting’s right, who looks upward, her misshapen mouth agape.
Amazingly, these three hands form a symbol – a large cross, the Cross. (And, amazingly, this symbolic aspect of the painting is overlooked by virtually all viewers.) Mother Mary aligns perfectly. Her hands fashion the two ends of the horizontal beam. The tension is palpable, fusing spirituality and spatiality; lines of visual force connect three hands that fly forth from the scene. Implied lines connect to complete a monumental cross – hidden in plain sight! The crucifix is formed simply by the viewer recognizing (and, once seen, the gestalt cannot be forgotten) how three hands connect over the full expanse of the painting’s composition. It is the viewer who completes the Cross, by making the connection. The left end of the Cross is the Virgin Mary’s right hand. Her hand hovers in a gesture of comforting; her hand lowered gently would fit perfectly along the upturned side of His face.
The entire scene employs a strategy of telescopic vision. Caravaggio controls every detail of his scopic regime. The angle by which the feet of the mourners are represented, exactly eye level to the painting’s viewer, must be composed from a considerable distance in order that the faces arrayed in the upper zone of the imagery are also seen from a perspective that is perpendicular to the picture plane. By collapsing the foreground, Caravaggio produces a painting that, in itself, is a detail from a much larger whole. The whole being the larger, broader panorama – in actuality, the studio where (it is safe to hypothesize) Caravaggio staged his models on a platform in preparation for producing the painting. With his killer painting chops, Caravaggio creates the painting, each texture (stone, cloth, flesh, hair) evinces convincing tactility. The scene seen as if from afar, crystallizes into close-up clarity.
Compositional diagram by C. McDaniel, of Caravaggio, Deposizione (The Entombment of Christ), 1603-1604.
3. A pictorial concoction
What is a “pictorial concoction”? It is (my term for) the production of new meaning created by the overlapping of forms separated in depth but aligned on the painting’s surface. This alignment results in a conjoining of forms, a new combinatory formal unit, pairing together near and far elements. A new level of meaning – psychological, symbolic, and aesthetic – takes shape. Literally.
This condition enacts another reading of the hands Caravaggio incorporated into his Deposition. At the top of the painting’s imagery a hand emerges from the head. What we want to add, now, to our description: the hand “emerges” from the head, and additionally, simultaneously, the hand merges with the head. The combination of hand and head together form a pictorial concoction – a synthetic creation that exists only in a painting (and other forms of two-dimensional images). The pictorial concoction is the product of two forms that coexist on the picture plane but at different depths within the represented space of the image. The forms overlap, and, by overlapping, they appear to connect; they fuse. Perception links with conception. The uniting of forms, this union of disparate elements of subject matter on the surface of the painting, carries a psychological charge: A hand shoots from a head! And, additionally, the fusion of the forms, from different depths, does not negate all semblance of spatiality – the painting is not, all of a sudden, perfectly flat in this zone of representation. But a hole of ambiguity opens, where perception, perspective, and conception tumble over one another, taking turns for precedence.
In painting, “dismembered” parts (body parts or parts of anything) do not necessarily take on the qualities of a pictorial concoction. We reserve that to restrict the definition of a true concoction to a case in which the holistic meaning of the excised part is completed in concert with another element, which commands its own identity. Together they become something else, something newly thought provoking, a heightened awareness of a bond between separate forms that configured together to produce an uncanny alignment. It does, admittedly, require a judgment call. But such a challenge – the challenge of interpretation, the dynamic process by which each viewer engages with the process of looking and thinking, is central to the work of art. In Caravaggio’s The Entombment (see image): there’s a witty pictorial concoction that melds the prettiest mourner (the young woman with her head bowed) with the legs of Nicodemus, the male figure who holds Christ’s legs. This pairing – made possible by Caravaggio’s clever alignment of the perspective – produces a touch of comic relief, lightening the tragic moment, transforming the timeless into the everyday.
4. Anomalies: pictorial concoctions challenge representation
Thomas Kuhn argues in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, “recognized anomalies [are those qualities] whose characteristic feature is their stubborn refusal to be assimilated by existing paradigms. This type alone gives rise to new theories.” [97] While there has never been universal acceptance of how much, or how little, Kuhn’s thesis applies to the fields of the humanities and the arts, this essay asserts that qualities that are not snugly contained within the conceptual apparatus of creative production (and critical analysis) inevitably produce change – minor change (e.g., stylistic) and/or major change (e.g., hierarchic).
The pictorial concoction, as a visual mechanism, challenges the conceptual framework of representation within a representational painting. An aim of producing a lifelike image becomes, ipso facto, impossible. At the point of contact – where the pictorial concoction occurs – the painting’s ineluctable flatness competes for primacy, pushing the illusory representation of the image’s depth farther into the background of meaningfulness. The recognition of fresh, urgent meaning – as the viewer confronts the uncanny collapse of near and far forms into a new whole of ambiguous location – becomes a hole in the representation that cannot be resolved by the traditional paradigm of (illusionistic) painting.
5. Picasso: a representation of representation
1907. Picasso is not yet thirty, a Spaniard living in Paris. Already recognized as a painter of appealing talent. The Blue Period, the Rose Period. Then, poof, preliminary hints – he’s purchasing African art! – are recognized by those close at hand, but the painting Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon marks a decisive break. Why is he painting like this when he only recently enjoyed such success and warmed hearts with paintings of a boy leading a horse by an invisible tether, and a charming image of a family of acrobats resting out of doors?!!
[Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon, oil on canvas, 1907. Museum of Modern Art]
What everyone soon learns: the subjects in this new painting – five nude females – are inspired, in part, by those African sculptures the artist can’t get enough of; and the painting’s setting – a brothel (a brothel the artist visited in Spain) – further upsets the apple cart. What else? Picasso is now going full tilt in a direction that seems almost without precedent: That the sole purpose of the painting – the purpose of painting – is to experiment, and, especially, to experiment with what a painting can be, can become.
Even Matisse and Gertrude Stein are puzzled at the outset. More than a century later, Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon continues to confound scholars and to befuddle ordinary museum goers (it is on permanent display in the Museum of Modern Art, NYC). With its subject matter of nude females standing before a curtain, blue patches of sky, fruit in a bowl arranged still life style at the figure’s feet, the composition of Les Demoiselles bears savvy references to the tradition of Western representational painting (especially robust in Europe from approximately 1470 to 1870). But, look! Those naked women, especially those on the right, appear chipped with an axe from pink blocks of wood; the curtain, too, looks carved. The figures don’t stand in front of the curtain; they meld with it. The sky resembles stiff drapery, not the transparent, gaseous atmosphere of a realistic landscape painting, not the soft pastel colors of an Impressionist en plein air depiction of the out-of-doors. The entire image looks constructed, built from planes that unfold across the painting’s surface, tucking here and there, folding back into shallow depth. The sky too seems made out of a thick material that protrudes in the negative spaces in the center of the canvas and then parts open like a window curtain to make room for the masked face of the female on the upper right side of the composition.
In the 118 (and counting) years that have elapsed since its creation, Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon, has solidified a reputation as one of the supreme achievements of visual art. (Most) scholars, critics, curators, and artists now recognize the painting, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, as seminal: it blazes the path toward full-fledged Cubism. Soon paired with French painter Braque on a whirlwind of creative experimentation, Picasso throws over four hundred years of Western art. Working inside their dilapidated studios in Montmarte, a beehive of bohemian activity in Paris at the start of the 20th century, the cubists pioneer a new paradigm: visual art-making is now defined by the fragmentation and abstraction of subject matter; by the combination of multiple perspectives into a unified field of forms; by the exploration of space and mass as penetrable and interchangeable; and by the composition of the entire arrangement into a fusion of forms collapsed into the shallow dimension on and near the picture plane.
With Cubism’s arrival, something major is gone: gone is the illusion of subject matter as one of painting’s most cherished aims. No longer is the aim of painting to function as a transparent lens, a window if you will, offering a view into another reality – a subject matter depicted in the fictive depth of the painting. The painting is its own reality.
Post-Cubism, progressive artists, critics, and viewers understand: the translation of subject matter from our world into a painting demands negotiation. The shift from a reality that is three-dimensional (and moving too!), to the compressed version in two-dimensions changes spatial relationships. A lot. And the viewer is also moving. Looking at the painting. But not looking and moving inside the painting. You, as a viewer, cannot stroll around, inside a room depicted in a painting. You can’t walk around a woman; you can’t inspect her far side; and she can’t shift her position, inside a painting. You can never witness anything from any other angle than the exact one the artist offers. Unless, as Picasso demonstrates in tackling a Cubist exploration, the artist provides multiple viewpoints.
How did Picasso build on the past? What he acknowledged was the influence of African and Oceanic art (available in anthropological displays and for limited purchase in fin de siècle Paris). He also claimed, proudly, the influence of Cézanne, a painter’s painter (make that: a painter’s painter’s painter!) a half-generation older than Picasso. The puzzling nature of space found in Cézanne’s paintings allowed Picasso access to an alternative approach to representation. Cézanne painted near and far as conditions that can interpenetrate; he entertains flipping back and forth between an emphasis on two and three dimensions (pattern versus space), and the changes of viewpoints, the tentative mapping of edges, the flickering color.
Art, in step with Cézanne, faces a different set of goals: to explore painting not as mimesis but in its capacity as an invented, interlocking system of signs. Cézanne’s approach ignites (inspires, points a way forward for) Picasso and Braque. According to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler: “Cubism’s primary innovation was a non-imitative way of representing things” [his emphasis]. Cubism in the visual arts, as well as in poetry, film, and literature, fosters an aesthetic that dismantles the stability of forms, both spatially and temporally, a process that then allows for their re-integration into cohesive arrangements that do not match everyday reality. Multiple viewpoints, an aesthetics of relativity. (In all the arts, a new way of thinking opens: Wallace Stevens publishes (1917) the poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”.) Of all the changing emphases that define Cubism, art as a semiotic process becomes paramount. Cézanne recognized that the base fact of painting’s two-dimensionality altered, ineluctably, the relationship of art to subject matter. Once the artist had taken this step, there was no turning back. Picasso, sensing the significance of this path, followed in Cézanne’s footsteps, and, inevitably, went further.
Demoiselles d’ Avignon – represents representation. Picasso is demonstrating he can paint things in multiple ways at once: first, as a hand above a head, with the arm blocked from view, the hand references the long-standing tradition of illusionary representation. This is representationalism: the arm is foreshortened and blocked from view, it is not seen but it remains, cognitively, present, in the painting’s shallow space. And, second, the hand combines with the head, together they form a new entity, an entity that exists in, and because of, the arena of the painting. This is a representation of representation. A self-conscious approach that verifies and valorizes the viewer’s presence as an integral, ineluctable partner in the process of creation. Interpretation becomes representation. The representation of the representation of representation. And, third, the hand hovers, disembodied, in ambiguous space. Timeless.
6. Precursors /or/ without precedent?
Cubism provided freedom to the artist – forms could henceforth be splayed open, split into parts and the parts arranged on the surface of the painting without regard to the mimetic dictates of the visual factuality of the subject. This, it has been claimed, is a revolutionary breakthrough that changed painting from all that came before. Our view aligns more closely with the overall theme of Cézanne’s recognition: the present builds upon the past. While artists of previous eras did not, literally, break open a single form and move the parts helter-skelter around the canvas, what they did achieve – which must be seen as a significant precursor – is freedom to explore what holistic combinations of multiple forms would create. Cubists challenged the paradigm of painting in degree, but not in kind. Cubism breaks apart singular forms to create new pictorial inventions; prior explorations utilized overlapping as a naturally-occurring visual event to obliterate (by hiding) portions of forms and then recombining the remainders in ever more startling results.
Jacques Jordeans’ Hommage an Ceres [Offering to Ceres] (circa 1619) is a stunning example of an artist (of the 17th century!) who pushed the envelope of representation to an extreme radicality.
[Jacob Jordaens, Hommage an Ceres (Offering to Ceres), c. 1619. Prado Museum. Image in Public Domain]
Examining Hommage an Ceres in an exhibition devoted to Jordeans in Kassel, Germany, we are thunderstruck at the artist’s dismantling of spatial coherency, by the shifting back and forth, voids into solids, by the dismantling of bodies, by the function of the picture plane as a staging area for visual experimentation in the creation of never-before-seen forms. Look! Smack dab in the middle of the painting: a hand connects to a head!
While underneath the white horse, a girl’s head balances on a boy’s. On the right side of the painting, another dizzy arrangement: more heads on heads. Because the heads’ perimeters are full, each form refuses to budge – there is no sense of overlapping, the space in the painting becomes wildly ambiguous. Depth and flatness ricochet back and forth throughout the painting.
Jordeans, in the early 1600s, conducts an experiment in painting’s possibilities that rivals, in complexity, the achievement of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon. Observe: Picasso’s and Jordeans’ paintings contain numerous parallels – like the still life arrangements of food, in each painting, that reference Western tradition – while, everywhere in each canvas, visual traditions of representation are being toppled by the revolutionary treatment of volumes in space. What does a hand attached to a head, or heads stacked on top of heads, signify? Changing styles of representation do not obliterate the past — they overlap. The past continues to exist, to exert itself. Each version we’ve looked at demonstrates how, throughout its history, painting operates with strong, strange sources of power. Painting is a language that can represent an external world, can reveal an internal world, and always presents the symbolic order as a world unto itself.