Leonardo da Vinci's advice on viewing art

Leonardo da Vinci advised art viewers that the perfect distance from which to view a painting was the length of the human face. To me, that is a fascinating dictum, because it tells a lot about how Leonardo planned his paintings. Firstly, despite his living in Italy where the Mediterranean light is frequently sunny and bright, Leonardo must have factored in the darkness of building interiors and flickering illumination when considering how his paintings were to be viewed. He must also have wanted his paintings to be appreciated fully in all their subtle detail and nuance, only possible from a close examination. That short distance between viewer and art also tells of the intimate dialogue Leonard wanted to set in motion when he created art.

When you see Leonardo's drawings, particularly his silverpoints, this intimacy is even more salient. Most of his silverpoints are perhaps two to three inches by four to five inches, at most. They are tiny. But despite their diminutive size, they are incredibly powerful. His notebooks and drawing books, too, are very small indeed and it amazed me, when I saw some of them at the Louvre in a wonderful exhibition, that he had such control of his hand on such a restricted surface, especially when all the writing was "backwards". Drawings have always been considered intimate media. Silverpoints, chalks, pen and inks, graphites, charcoals, pastels and even watercolours - they all invite close inspection, a whispered dialogue between art and viewer. Historically, drawings were to be displayed (and protected) in muted light, in the inner sanctum of an art lover's home, in the "cabinet de dessins". Usually of a scale that is in function of the human hand and the marks it makes on paper or vellum, a drawing is ideally viewed by a single person at a time, a very human scale in concept and proportionality.

The scale of art is an endlessly interesting consideration, with a huge effect on the viewer. Every artist gets involved in this issue each time a work of art is conceived, as you have to decide what size the work of art is going to be. At present, we seem to live in a world of extremes - there are diminutive, often gem like creations and then there are the colossal works which often have trouble fitting even into large public spaces. These are works conceived for viewing from a long distance, with the art often dominating the space in dramatic and often vividly coloured fashion, with robust content and form. Perhaps an obvious example of a large canvas is Picasso's passionate antiwar Guernica, measuring 11 x 25.6 feet, now at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid (http://www.museoreinasofia.es/). Viewing gives a visceral jolt, but I always feel I need to back away quite a distance fully to understand its powerful messages.

Another series of large paintings that come to mind are the 14 Mark Rothko paintings in the Rothko Chapel adjacent to the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas (http://www.rothkochapel.org/). Their size, (11 x 15 feet or larger in the triptychs), the chapel built to house them and the general ambiance created by these vast dark canvases are utterly memorable. This is the artist who declared back in 1942, about his and Adolph Gottleib's work, "We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal..." Interestingly, in the next decade, he replied to critics who were claiming that he was working on a large scale to compensate for a lack of substance in his paintings. He wrote, "I realise that historically, the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them, however ... is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command!"

And yet, Rothko circles back to what Leonardo said, in terms of the viewer's ideal distance from his paintings. The span of centuries does not change this recommendation: Rothko suggested that eighteen inches are an ideal distance from which to view one of his canvases. Like Leonardo, Rothko knows that at those close quarters, a sense of intimacy leads to a dialogue with the art that can take the viewer far beyond self into the realm of the unknown.

The Magic of Art

Ever since man has been creating art, and especially for the last 30,000 odd years, magic and art are closely linked. Perhaps Marcel Proust said it best, when he wrote in Time Regained, "Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscape would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, still send us their own individual special radiance."

You only have to leaf through any art magazine or go online to any gallery website to see how accurate Proust was about the multiplicity of optics and voices displayed in art. Magically we are transported to other lands and other ways of life. We see faces familiar and unfamiliar, fantasy upon fantasy, different approaches to objects that we have never thought about before... A visit to a major museum proves Proust's point about the longevity of great art down the ages. The masters know how to combine passion, subject matter, composition, colour, technique and the elusive wave of their "magic wand" to create art that withstands the test of time.

Ellen Lanyon, an American artist noted for her wonderful juxtapositions of fantasy and reality, calls upon this element of magic in her art. Using nature, everyday objects and intertwining living creatures and technology, she advocates for ecological balance. Her approach is joyous. As she says, "I become the magician who can transform flowers into fire, create the animals out of the inanimate, and utilise osmosis and gravity to create an illusion. Artists have the powerful tool of the imagination to make everything happen."

Call it imagination, call it magic, but so many artists spring to mind when one thinks about how art forces us to see other universes. Surrealist Salvador Dali is perhaps an extreme example, but Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko or draughtswomen working today like Sky Pape or Carol Prusa all have shown me fascinating, magical worlds I had never conceived of. And those are but a small number of artists that come readily to mind - we can all make up our own list of magician artists.

Creating Something from Nothing

Listening to NPR, this morning, Rachel Martin interviewed the English songwriter-singer, Emeli Sande, about her music, now that she is launching her first album here in the United States.  She is a highly lucid and engaging young woman, a neuroscience major, who has reverted most successfully to her first love, music, since opportunity came knocking. 


At one point, when asked when she started writing songs, she replied,
"I began writing when I was about 6 or 7. And even at that age, I just thought it was so incredible that you could create something from nothing, and it was all in your mind and imagination," she tells Weekend Edition host Rachel Martin. "The combination of poetry and music I just thought was incredible."


The phrase, "you could create something from nothing, and it was all in your mind and imagination", set me reflecting on how the same thing is true about visual artists, all composers... just about any creative act.  It is all so, so simple, in truth.  From some magical recesses of one's brain, out pops an idea, an inspiration, a "what if you do such and such a thing?.    it is like finding a shiny, perfect shell as you walk along the beach.  You pick it up and turn it over, marvelling at it, evaluating it, examining its possibilities.


This remark dovetailed in a way with many of the theses that Simon Schama puts forward in his marvellous book, The Power of Art, in which he had fascinating and stimulating chapters on eight artists down the ages, from Caravaggio to Rothko, who have been revolutionary each in their own way.  The 2006 book accompanied a BBC/PBS series of the same name, which alas, I have not seen, but in any case, the book is - as always with Simon Schama's books - a gem.


Each of the artists examined in this book basically dared to adhere to their own visions, the ideas that emanated from their minds and imaginations. They pursued these ideas even if they were totally at odds with what other artists were doing or even what their patrons wanted them to produce by way of art.  Of course, they evolved over time, but they kept believing in their own inner voices and ideas. 

Perhaps the last artist written about, Mark Rothko, was the one who had to keep seeking and clarifying his ideas the longest.  He once said that paintings had to be miraculous, Schama wrote.  And indeed, he was fifty years old before the miracle paintings began, his dazzling, amazingly subtle colourstacks. (At left, Blue, orange, red, and below, Pink and orange.)  Rothko said that painting was an exercice in continuous clarification, as Schama wrote, but once the artist had clarified the ideas, he had to ensure that this clarity was passed on to the beholder.  Back to the dialogue, the communion, between artist's work and the viewer, or in the case of Emeligoes without saying.

 So simple, so elegant, so difficult - this materialisation, seemingly from nothing or nowhere save the inside of one's head - of something that then becomes interesting, beautiful, inspiring, memorable enough to speak to other humans...  Something from "nothing".