Pietro Perugino (1446–1523)The Gift of the Keys to Saint Peter, 1481-2, Fresco, 11 × 18 ft (3.4 × 5.5 m), Sistine Chapel
GROUND-BREAKING ARTWORKS CAN CHANGE THE WHOLE GAME
From time to time, an artwork is produced that radically changes the formal means by which art may be made. Such changes usually signal not only a change in style and technical possibilities, but also broader cultural shifts. For example, development of fully rendered perspectival space in fifteenth-century Italy was not only an extraordinary formal innovation, it also heralded a broader intellectual and scientific movement, evidenced by humanistic ideals, new discoveries in mathematics, and a fresh spirit of intellectual enquiry.
Not all formal innovations are quite so radical, but they are always important. Caravaggio’s development of a highly theatrical presentation of human drama, clothed in a newly pungent sense of realism, was both shocking and persuasive to his audience at the end of the sixteenth century. Similarly, the Romantics Joseph Mallord William Turner (1789–1862), John Constable (1776–1837), Francesço Goya (1748–1828), and Èugene Delacroix (1798–1863) introduced innovations in which spontaneity, open brushing, and highly flexible compositions replaced more stable and calculated approaches to painting, reflecting a sea change in sensibility across an entire culture.
The next great formal innovation was Impressionism in the 1870s, one of the most profound shifts in representational language, in which artists discovered a whole new way to recreate a sense of light in painting. Again this came at a time of enormous social, political, intellectual, and cultural upheaval. New discoveries in science and optics combined with a new sense of the nature of art and the role of the artist to bring this about.
From the late nineteenth century onward, the pace of formal innovation accelerated as social and political change also began to move at a faster pace. Postimpressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Orphism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Expressionism each presented new formal innovations all within a space of fifty years or so. The second half of the twentieth century was no less prolific. The advent of Abstract Expressionist painting constituted another quite radical innovation in the way that painting can function and be appreciated. Similarly, Minimalism and Conceptualism also mark entirely new beginnings for art making, offering new visual languages, means of presentation, and aesthetics.
It is worth noting that formal innovation is nearly always associated with art of the highest quality. On the other hand, formal innovation is not a prerequisite for good art and is still a comparatively rare phenomenon.
Pietro Perugino (1446–1523)
The Gift of the Keys to Saint Peter, 1481-2, Fresco, 11 × 18 ft (3.4 × 5.5 m), Sistine Chapel
The mastery of perspective was one of the great formal innovations in Western art.
