The history of painting is the history of humanity’s struggle to come to terms with its predicament. The reasons why we are interested in art are the same as the reasons why we are interested in religion, philosophy or science. This is why great art is never only about beauty; it is also about the recognizably valuable human experience that it transfers from one person to another. Differences in time or culture can be reduced away by these expressions of eternal concerns and questions. The great classical and religious texts, like the Bible, the Koran or Plato’s Discourses, have influenced the thought of different civilizations for thousands of years. But it is the ever changing art form of painting that has left us with a trail of individual testimonies to humanity’s perennial obsessions.
Painting really begins about 20,000 years ago in the Ice Age caves of France and Spain. What began as scratchings on cave walls had developed into forceful and dynamic animal paintings by 15,000 BC. The bison and horses painted by the cavemen in Lascaux were not just decorations. They were serving that magical or religious part of mankind that has propelled the arts through most ages. Painting the beasts of the kill was probably their way of magically trapping them. Completely lost from view until the late nineteenth century, they were so sophisticated that they were thought to be hoaxes until as late as the 1940s.
This may be where it all started, but it is not where our linear art history begins. The interrelated story of painting, where everything is connected to what has come before, starts in Egypt in the Nile valley. Four thousand years ago, amongst the building sites of the pyramids, artists were painting and sculpting those who were powerful enough to justify the privilege. Over 3,000 years of Egyptian culture has left a rich legacy of religious wall painting. The Egyptians used a different pictorial language from ours today, and painted to strict formulas, which can look stiff and alien to us now. It was not a time of artistic development – artists strove to replicate, not innovate – and the art was static, like that of the early Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultures, which relied on geometric patterns and formulaic representations. But the example set by the Egyptians was to spark off a revolution.
Finally, thousands of years of emulating the past began to give way to new forms. The Greeks were taking risks; they questioned ideas of philosophy, democracy, art and science in what looks like a very modern way to us now. They had learnt from the Egyptians, but they took what they needed from them and founded western civilization with their new ideas. For the first time painting emerged where scenes were painted with something like reality in mind, not unquestioned tradition. The Greeks didn’t achieve full perspective in painting, but they did discover how to shorten angles and give the impression of three-dimensionality, called foreshortening; now in Greece a human face could be painted from the side angle without the device of the eye being painted in a bovine fashion, as though it were being viewed from the front. This may seem a small change, but it was nothing less than a revolution – the beginning of art as we know it. Out went the slavish reproduction of handed-down models and in flooded questioning, invention and progress. These Greek painters (and their Roman followers who carried on their work) attained incredible levels of skill, which were unsurpassed anywhere until the Renaissance. But when the Roman Empire split in two in AD 395 and was dissolved in AD 476, the advancements of its arts were lost throughout Europe. Invading tribes destroyed what they could, and the civilization that created and appreciated the incredible statues and paintings of the period simply fell apart. To a small extent perspective, shading and other particularly Greco-Roman advances were held onto in some religious manuscripts of the new Latin and Greek Churches. The religious constraints on imagery in the Greek church meant that Byzantine art never came out of this phase of atrophy. It still continues to produce icons that have changed little since the days of Emperor Constantine in the fourth century. Like the earlier Middle Eastern and Egyptian cultures, it slipped into reverence for replicating the past. But in the same way that the Egyptians inspired the Greeks to greatness, the art of the Byzantines was the starting point for the Renaissance in the Latin Church in Italy.
While Rome was flourishing and Christ was causing trouble for the established pagans, 5,000 miles to the east the Chinese were painting their tombs in a similar way to the old Egyptians. They had comparable beliefs in the afterlife and painted similarly formulaic wall paintings, though in a more organic, curvaceous style. Not many early Chinese paintings have survived but like their close followers, the Japanese, they developed a rather different approach to painting from that of the Romanized West. Calligraphy was as prized as painting, even more so at times, so the painting traditions that grew up relied on well-defined ink outlines. The purpose of painting was very different too. It was less dominated by religious imagery, and was practised for a small, educated elite of nobles and bureaucrats. In landscape painting, it was tied to meditation.
Religious practices were a heavy influence on what the powerful Islamic world would represent in art. Artists were not encouraged to paint figures, so the human body was rarely used in art. Calligraphy and interlacing designs, or arabesques, were painted instead. This skill at pattern-making shows itself in the Islamic art of Persia and later in the Indian Mughal dynasty.
During this vast period Egyptian culture collapsed. China’s institutionalized traditions continued developing but stylistically they found a form that they kept to for 2,000 years. The world of Islam focused less on painting than on mathematics and calligraphy, while the South American, Indian and South East Asian cultures left no significant painted artifacts amongst their breathtaking temples. Meanwhile Greece and Rome peaked and were then sacked by invading tribes, bringing the arts of the West to their highest level in history before they were almost totally forgotten until the thirteenth century.
Wall painting from the Tomb of Khnumhotep II, c. 1,900 BC
Beni Hasan, Egypt
THE PAINTING From this painting we can see that hunting in the marshes of the Nile was Prince Khnumhotep’s favourite pastime. Finished nearly 4,000 years ago it was there to help him in the afterlife, like everything else in his tomb. The idea is as distant to us now as the picture may seem. The Ancient Egyptians believed that the soul contained three parts, two of which stayed with the dead body. If the body was not preserved and accompanied by the trappings of life, it could not have a good afterlife. So Egyptian tomb art had the important role of imitating real life, both accurately and symbolically. This is why Prince Khnumhotep’s wives and son, at his feet, are so small. Hierarchy was crucial, If they were bigger than Khnumhotep then they would have been seen as more important.
THE ARTIST Egyptian painters had to follow strict rules, which dictated that everything had to be recognizable. Nothing could be left to chance because it might not transfer to the afterlife. So the torso is always viewed from the front, the head looks as it does in profile, and the feet are viewed from the side. To us it might look stiff and unnatural, but this approach served an important purpose, and continued to do so for 2,000 years. However, across the Mediterranean the Greeks did not have such religious constraints. They learnt to copy Egyptian art and then, seemingly out of nowhere, set it free from its shackles.
The Death of Aktaion, c. 430–420 BC
Attic Red-Figured Calyx-Krater
49.2 cm (19½ in) high
Private Collection
THE PAINTING As punishment for watching the naked goddess Artemis bathing, Aktaion is transformed into a stag. His own hunting dogs rip him apart. This classic myth of sex and violence was later adopted by the Romans, and endlessly re-created in later European art. The painter is partly thinking like Ancient Egyptian artists, with each face still in recognizable profile, but everything else is in naturalistic action. The strict rules of representation have been broken and something totally new has been created. Aktaion’s feet are seen from the front, not the side. The ability to draw in perspective and the invention of foreshortening were groundbreaking developments in art. The idea of painting things as they actually looked, rather than the way they would best be recognized, had taken over. The history of art as we know it begins here.
THE ARTIST The rugged inlets of the Greek peninsula were perfect hiding places for pirates. As these bands of hardy individuals grew richer and more established, their embattled ports and hilltops became the kingdoms of Greece. We can attribute certain paintings to large important workshops, but instead of any major remains there are just pots like this one. Ancient Greeks like the Dinos Painter applied their independent spirit and inventiveness to Egyptian traditions and carried art to its highest levels. Previously, artists had adhered to a rigid sequence of rules and formulas. The Greeks revolutionized art by questioning it, beginning a continuous process that rages to this day.
THE PAINTING In the classic Greek stories of Hercules, we learn that he had a son, Telephus, by a woman who was sworn to chastity. For her crime Telephus was sent to die in the wilderness. Nursed by a lioness, he survived and was found by Hercules. Here he is feeding at the teat of a doe. This was a more acceptable scene for Roman eyes, who were used to seeing the legendary founders of their city, Romulus and Remus, suckling at a wolf. A lion – Hercules’ symbol of strength – sits passively in the corner. After his ascent to Olympus to become a god. Hercules married his half-sister Hebe, the goddess of youth. She looks on, wearing delicate drapery, with attendants by her side. The eagle, their father’s symbol, is perched between them. The picture is full of activity but is perfectly balanced. Although old, Hercules is still a god and has supple flesh, darkened by his twelve labours. The luminous skin tones, the drapery, the anatomically perfect figures and the advanced composition show how far Classical art had progressed. It is amazingly sophisticated, especially as it is just a wall decoration from a house in a provincial town. Renaissance artists strove to paint like this, but unfortunately all the skills they required disappeared when the Roman Empire crumbled in the fifth century.
THE ARTIST In AD 79 the Roman statesman and scholar Pliny rowed across the Bay of Naples to inspect the explosion of Vesuvius. Like all the inhabitants of Pompeii and Herculaneum, he was buried under the volcanic ash. Trapped and preserved, the bodies of residents and animals can still be seen here. Since the eighteenth century excavations have uncovered paintings like this. The quality of this one in particular shows just how far painting had advanced in the 500 years since the Dinos Painter’s vase, It took another 1,400 years for anyone to come close to it again (further north, in fifteenth-century Florence). By the first century Rome had outstripped the Greek world and was busy buying up and copying Greek art treasures. The names of the greatest Greek and Roman artists are known from texts, like the fourth-century BC Greek painter Apelles, who was as legendary then as Michelangelo or Raphael are now. The great artist who created this painting, however, is as anonymous as the town’s dead.
Hercules discovering Telephus, c. AD 70
Removed from the ‘Basilica’ at Herculaneum
Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples
THE PAINTING This is the portrait of a mummified man, embalmed 1,900 years ago in Egypt. He has nothing to do with the ancient artistic traditions that accompanied dead pharaohs of 2,000 years earlier. He has been painted as his friends knew him. Affable and lively, he looks at us engagingly. Silhouetted against a pale green background, he is lit from one source, above his head on the left. It brightens his forehead and casts shadows under his chin. This technique was lost to western art until fifteenth-century Florence. The throws of his white robes look casual, painted in thick lively strokes. Free handling of paint like this did not appear again until sixteenth-century Venice. His pose, with body turned and his face looking directly at us, is another Renaissance rediscovery. Probably still in his twenties, his groomed beard and moustache are finely picked out. Far from being still and characterless, like previous Egyptian paintings of figures, this young man has all the sensitivity and humanity that we would recognize in a good portrait now. It feels very modern. Painted for religious beliefs in rebirth, based on an accurate image of the dead, it was placed over the face of the mummified man and buried with him. Yet the reasons seem immaterial now. They were essential to understanding earlier Egyptian art, but this painting is of a very real man, someone we could know. The reasons why it was painted are less important, as we naturally relate to this painting.
THE ARTIST The portrait was painted by an unknown artist, living somewhere in the Fayum area southwest of Cairo. Egypt had been part of the Greco-Roman world for 170 years by the time this was painted, and old Egyptian art would have looked as foreign then as it does to us now. Even to the artist, the old tried and tested ways of painting the dead would have long been forgotten. The demand was for Greco-Roman inspired art, and the strict regime that suited 3,000 years of pharaohs and grandees was swept away along with Egyptian independence. Egypt’s cultural and political strength came to an end as the power of the pharaohs declined and the power of the priests increased. Alexander the Great took Egypt in 332 BC. From this time until the twentieth century the country was ruled by successive foreigners, her first native culture dead.
Portrait of a Man. c.AD 80–140
Panel
38.8 cm (15¼ in) high
Private Collection
b. China c.AD 600; d. China AD 673
Emperor Wudi of Northern Zhou Dynasty,
from the ‘Thirteen Emperors’ scroll. 7th century
Ink and colour on silk
51 × 531 cm (20 × 209 in) – total size
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Denman Waldo Ross Collection
THE PAINTING Most ancient Chinese painting, like that of the Ancient Greeks, has vanished without trace. This rare painting, a detail from a massive scroll, shows Emperor Wudi with his attendant eunuchs. Just as in Egyptian pictures, the eunuchs are smaller to show that they are less important. Amazingly, despite working within these artistic constraints, the Chinese made the same innovative leap that the Greeks did. Liben put the eunuchs behind Wudi, creating a naturalistic painting as well as increasing the grandeur of the Emperor. Chinese art has always been about drawing with ink, and Liben was one of its great masters. Here we get the impression of a round, solid Emperor, just from the outline. Drawing directly on to the silk scroll with pen and ink, Liben gave volume to the sleeves and body by very simple lines, and added colour later.
THE ARTIST Liben forced Chinese attitudes toward art to change forever with his intensely realistic drawing. Like artists of the European Renaissance 900 years later, he transformed the practice of a painter into the notion of an artist. He was the first in a long line of Chinese artists who were also scholars and important civil servants, and he helped to elevate painting, like calligraphy, to be considered one of the highest intellectual and spiritual attainments. Liben worked in a culture vastly different from one we would recognize, but here he has managed to capture an individual of dignified majesty who could belong anywhere.
St Matthew
From the Ebbo Gospels, painted at Reims, c.AD 816–23
Vellum
25.4 × 20.3 cm (10 × 8 in)
Bibliothèque Municipale, Epernay
THE PAINTING St Matthew sits awkwardly over his lectern, his face and eyes screwed up in obedient but terrified concentration. God is channelling His gospels through Matthew, who anxiously gets them down on paper. His wild hair and the electric folds of his robes tremble with the power of his calling. The fast flicks of gold paint in the landscape mirror the intensity of emotion; the immediate strokes reflect Matthew’s frantic writing. The painter believes in the excitement of this moment – it is in every brushstroke. It was a painting created by the faithful for the faithful, in a time of belief. From the end of the Roman Empire until the beginning of the Renaissance, art was simple communication with paint. The painter copied the image from an old Roman original, but instead of blindly mimicking it he made an original and vivid painting full of movement and immediacy.
THE ARTIST Christianity was only 800 years old. It was battling with paganism and, at the borders in Spain, with Islam. The first Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne, had died only two years before the Bishop of Reims commissioned this gospel, and the future of the Christian world inhabited by our nameless artist-monk was very unsure. Devoted to God and to the spreading of His word, painting would have been one way to express his faith. We cannot imagine the deep religious reverence of a man living in these conditions, but we can certainly appreciate the fervour he left us in paint.
THE PAINTING We can look at this painting and simply see it as an evocative landscape, without ever worrying about the reasons why it was made. It is a beautiful mountain landscape, with gnarled trees jutting out on rocks receding through mists, a temple near the top, a stream running down to a lake and a horizon of endless mountains off to the left. We don’t know if the mountain carries on up, and it doesn’t matter, as everything we need in a landscape is here. To western eyes it might look odd as we are used to long landscapes with a focus in the foreground, whereas here everything is in the middle and higher. And it’s colourless. For thousands of years Chinese painting has been based on fine outlines of ink, and colour in this kind of painting would distract from its purpose. It wasn’t painted just to be a pretty picture, like a western landscape – looking at this was an act of meditation, bringing the viewer to a spiritual state closer to Buddha. The Chan sect of Buddhism, the largest at the time of this painting, said that rituals and religious study were a waste of time. Buddha existed in everyone, and could be reached by meditating. In the highest state of meditation you could see the ‘Absolute Principle’ of all life. Meditating on nature, or art that represented the unity of nature, was a way to do this. There were many ways to judge how well a painter was helping you to attain this high spiritual state, and the best at it were hugely important figures. Acting as a sort of spiritual guide, Chinese landscape painters were more important and more venerated than other artists anywhere in the world.
THE ARTIST In Xu Xi’s Advice on Landscape Painting, he wrote about the need for paintings like this so that everyone could satisfy their spiritual need for wholeness between themselves and nature. By everyone, he meant the artistic and spiritual elite who could understand the principles of high art and meditation; the peasant masses didn’t come into it. Not every wealthy court official and city dweller was lucky enough to have time to contemplate nature, and so Xu Xi’s help by painting these scenes was well rewarded. He was a member of the Sung Dynasty’s Imperial Academy for sixty years, and is regarded as one of China’s greatest landscape artists.
b. China c. 1020; d. China c. 1090
Travellers in the Autumn Mountains. 11th century
Ink on silk
141 × 96.5 cm (55½ × 38 in)
Private Collection
b. Gansu Province 1082; d. Heilongjiang Province 1135
Court Ladies Preparing Silk (detail)
Ink. Colour and gold on silk
37 × 145 cm (14½ × 57 in) – total size
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
THE PAINTING This is just one detail from a four feet long silk scroll. It was painted to be slowly unfurled, for private viewing. Its bright colours make it very different from the meditative, monochrome landscapes of Xu Xi. It is also very unlike painting in the West, which at that time was for public display. In this scene the elegant court ladies are beating the newly woven silk. They stand very close together, and although there are no shadows or other more western methods of defining solidity, somehow they still seem to be standing in real space. Yan Liben’s advances in outline drawing had been fully mastered by this time. The ladies are busy in a moment of concentration, and it is this sort of intimacy that gives Chinese art its sense of informality. However, this is a highly considered informality. The academic traditions in China were much stricter than those in Europe 600 years later. In academic reverence to a master of the past, the Emperor copied this from an earlier painting by Zhang Xuan. We know this because his grandson, Emperor Zhangzong, wrote this information on the scroll eighty years later, imitating Huizong’s own calligraphy.
THE ARTIST In China it has never been rare for emperors to paint, but Huizong took it so seriously that the entire Northern Song Dynasty is thought to have fallen because of it. He was from a long line of artistic emperors, who added to the Imperial collections and held discussions about painting, calligraphy and art collecting. Collecting for Huizong was easy – if he wanted a painting, the owner would have to hand it over. When he inherited the throne, aged nineteen, it was expected that he would continue his ancestors’ enlightened royal patronage. This he did, but spent so much of the next twenty-five years immersed in art and religion that he ignored his official duties. Xu Xi influenced his landscapes, but Huizong’s style was pretty individual. Because of his position his painting was officially considered to be a work of genius. Early art historians called him ‘divine’ so it’s difficult to know exactly how important he was to Chinese painting. In China it was considered an honour, not a forgery, to sign an artwork with the name of a great master, so there are more paintings around with his name attached to them than he had a hand in actually making.
THE PAINTING The warrior Temujin celebrated his uniting of the Mongols, in 1206, by crowning himself Genghis Khan. Meaning ‘ruler of all’, this ambitious title was earned by conquering and enslaving every nationality from Eastern Europe to China. This simple picture, painted in thick watercolour known as gouache, commemorates his triumph. He sits in his tent at the centre of the scene, surrounded by the soldiers and officials that made his vast and bloody empire run so mercilessly well. Above, the deep blue sky is filled with trailing flowers and branches, which are strangely missing from the ground. This is deliberate, as it mimics a Muslim prayer mat. Flowers replace the intricate patterns of eastern carpets, while the tent stands in for the kneeling area that always points to Mecca. The picture draws on a curious and subtle intertwining of secular art and religious undercurrents, and shows interdependence with the ancient Oriental cultures. The calligraphy plays its part too, both for its decorative finesse and for the explanation it gives. The art of calligraphy was thought of as highly as it was in the Chinese and Japanese traditions.
THE ARTIST Islam’s founder Mohammed (d. 632) did not encourage painting as a form of religious expression. It was not banned, it just didn’t have a place in the Koran. This explains why painting in the otherwise highly developed Islamic world did not advance as it did elsewhere, and why the painter of this image had to rely on a prayer mat for inspiration. Like Egyptian, Chinese and European cultures, the arts of the Muslims were formed by their religious beliefs. Mohammed considered architecture to be wasteful, and lived in a hut for most of his life to prove his piety. The making of religious figurative images was an abomination to him, and so his followers turned their backs on what they saw as unholy or wasteful practices of producing art. While architecture and other forms of art with geometric patterns nevertheless flourished, like at the Palace of Alhambra in Mohammedan Spain, this artist probably wasn’t encouraged much as a figurative painter. He is likely to have gained more employment as a calligrapher. Though Persian artists couldn’t paint many pictures like this, they did go on to have a huge effect on the Islamic art of the Mughal Empire in India.
Temujin proclaiming himself Genghis Kahn, 14th century
Ink and gouache on vellum
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris
St Mark
From a series of four saints probably
from a gospel, 16th century
Paper
23 × 19 cm (9 × 7½ in)
Private Collection
THE PAINTING Christian art was being made in the sixteenth century that was, if anything, a backward step from the French School St Matthew painted in Reims 700 years earlier. This was because the art of a vast region of Eastern Europe and the near East stood still for 1,000 years, as dead and lifeless as Egyptian art had become 3,000 years earlier. In the fourth century the Roman Empire split in two, with one capital in Rome and the other in Byzantium (modern Istanbul), making two vast Christian empires (the Latin and Greek Churches). By the ninth century the Greek Church decided that religious art was a window to the Divine and that mere artists should not be trusted to paint His likeness. So, in the style of ancient cultures of the past, the Eastern Church entered into a period of artistic limbo, producing icons to be worshipped that were copies or variations of existing paintings. That’s where our St Mark comes in; with none of the life or expression of the Reims St Matthew he is little more than an eastern copy of an old Roman original.
THE ARTIST This anonymous hand probably worked in Istanbul, which by now had been taken by the Muslim Ottomans. Painting for an ever-diminishing group of Christians, the artist had to use paper rather than expensive vellum. In Muslim Istanbul this was outpost art, the naturally entrenched artistic views of the artist’s patrons being only increased by their isolation.
