Colour in Five Wounds

‘Painters complain, art historians complain, that everyone these days sees only transparencies, which are the colours of light, not the colours of pigment. And so they get the wrong ideas, they see wrong, these people say. I say, this is new, it exists, we all see this light – we can learn from it – we could even learn to paint things to be transparent – ’
A. S. Byatt, Babel Tower, p. 227

In this excerpt from Babel Tower, the painter Desmond Bull is talking about the effect on his students of encountering oil paintings only via photographic reproductions, which take the form of projected colour transparencies: as if the original canvas had been miraculously transformed into stained glass. The setting for this part of Byatt’s novel is an art school in the late 1960s, so it is probably necessary to point out that the transparencies in question were analogue slides: i.e. positive colour images approximately 35mm by 24 mm on a transparent celluloid base, which were backlit by a projector to be displayed at enormous magnification on a white screen. The effect is similar to digital Powerpoint projection but the technology is quite different.

Bull’s remarks relate to a basic distinction in optics between reflection and transmission: between looking at light bouncing off an opaque surface, and looking at light passing through a transparent surface. An image perceived via transmission - e.g. a colour slide - will always seem more intense, even though it is also, in a sense, more immaterial than an image perceived via reflection - e.g. a painting on canvas. In analogue black-and-white photography, negatives and prints are similarly distinguished. It is notoriously difficult to preserve all the information from a negative in a print, not only because of chemical differences between celluloid and paper, but also because a negative is perceived via light transmission through a transparent celluloid base, and a print is perceived via reflection off an opaque white base.

So the translation from a negative to a print always involves a loss of information; conversely, as Bull points out, the translation from an opaque painting on a canvas to a transparent projection on a positive colour slide arguably adds something that cannot be found in the original. According to the guardians of art historical tradition, it is therefore a bad or garbled translation, which misrepresents the original. Bull disagrees: or rather, he argues that this misrepresentation has interesting consequences.

The translation from paintings to photographic reproductions not only means changing from reflection to transmission. It also involves converting unique, individual pigments into mathematical combinations of cyan/magenta/yellow. Colour photographs are made up of three layers (these are separate emulsions in a colour slide), which are sensitised to different wavelengths of light, and the combination of these three layers creates all the hues in the final image.

The use of colour in Five Wounds is mainly confined to the novel's heraldic coats-of-arms, in which the various tinctures stand for the book's protagonists: blue for Gabriella; red for Cur; black for Cuckoo; silver for Magpie; gold for Crow. However, colour is also used in a few other illustrations: notably the Synesthetic Diptych (above), which I have discussed before (including an explanation of how its composition is based on a section of Tintoretto's Paradise). Here I want to think more about how colour works in this illustration.

The pigments used in the original painting by Tintoretto, with their highly specific and heterogeneous ingredients (some of which are indicated in the written description of the painting in the novel), and with their own chemical histories, are transformed for the purposes of the visual reproduction in Five Wounds, which restricts itself to the heraldic tinctures of blue, red, black, silver and gold. Is this transformation analogous to the combination of dyes on a colour slide?

In the language of heraldry, it is only the idea of ‘red’ that counts, and not the particular pigment that embodies that idea. As in the passage from oil painting to projected slide, colour therefore becomes an entirely abstract category in heraldry, almost equivalent to number in mathematics, or a phoneme in linguistics (or a verse in the Bible?): an atomic element that cannot be subdivided or analysed further.

So in fact the analogy is not quite right. The conversion of any hue or pigment into a combination of constituent CMY elements in a photographic reproduction is not consistent with the conception of colour in heraldry, in which any given tincture cannot be expressed in terms other than itself, and also cannot be mixed with any of the other tinctures.

In keeping with this conceptual singularity, when the various tinctures are combined in a heraldic shield, they are never ‘mixed’ like paints on a palette, or like the dye layers that make up a colour slide: rather, their combination, in, for example, a division of the field, is a matter of juxtaposing independent segments, all of which by definition contain only a single tincture (as in a painting-by-numbers exercise). In any given shield, the constituent tinctures are therefore articulated like words in a sentence. The borders between them remain inviolable conceptually, even when (as in the heraldic shields Dan created for Five Wounds), the actual paint overruns the indicated borders.

And so to return to the written description of Tintoretto's Paradise in Five Wounds, Cur, standing before that painting the Ducal Palace, actually experiences it in a manner that is opposed to colour theory in both its photographic and its heraldic versions. For Cur, there is no absolute separation between pigments; but also, things are identifiable in terms of their history and their usage as well as their abstract, theoretical relations to other things. To return to the analogy with language, one might say that, while both photography and heraldry are interested exclusively in how colours may be combined within a closed system, Cur is interested in the etymology of colours (their origins and derivations), but also in the ways in which new combinations of pigments can generate new meanings.

The visual translation of Cur’s experience in the Synaesthetic Paradise diptych introduces these various ideas on colour theory into the subtext of the image, even though they are alien to Cur’s own way of thinking, because these theories place Cur’s experiences within the broader conceptual universe of the novel: that is, the images do not in fact reproduce Cur's experience so much as they relate it to that of the other four protagonists in the novel, who are represented in the diptych not only by their likenesses (which substitute for the four evangelists and Christ in the original painting) but by their associated heraldic tinctures.

I am not sure that any of this makes sense, but it all relates to the idea of translation. To the extent that certain nuances or concepts may be ‘lost in translation’, other nuances or concepts may be added, as Desmond Bull suggests. The Synaesthetic Paradise diptych translates both the original painting by Tintoretto and the written description of its constituent pigments on pp. 28-29 into its own visual idiom: one that draws on heraldry and photography as well as on painting. In doing so, it both removes aspects of the original painting and adds elements that are not in the original; similarly, it both reinterprets and adds to Cur’s experience of the painting (as described in the text) by superimposing several entirely different conceptions of colour onto it.

To summarise, the various conceptions of colour at play in the Synaesthetic Paradise are:

1) Colour as the product of the chemical properties of particular pigments. This conception underlies the written description, in which Cur perceives colour in terms of the smells of these pigments rather than their appearance.

2) Colour analysed in terms of optics and physics as the product of particular combinations of primary colours (cyan. magenta, yellow) or wavelengths of light along a spectrum. This conception of colour remains implicit in Five Wounds, in which the only available photographic technology is that of daguerreotypes, which are purely monochromatic images. However, Cur’s character is always opposed to / linked to that of Magpie, who is the novel’s daguerreotypist, so Cur's experience of the painting therefore implicitly invokes an opposed possible photographic reading of its contents.

3) Colour as a grammatical element within a semiotic system: i.e. heraldry. Individual colours therefore have no positive meaning, but instead only acquire meaning in combination with other colours, and only when they are articulated into grammatical statements (i.e. heraldic coats-of-arms). In terms of this system, the Synaesthetic Paradise is nonsensical: a gobbledy-gook visual statement that uses the heraldic tinctures, but fails to articulate them in any coherent or meaningful way, like a word salad. In that sense, it does correspond directly to Cur's initial impression of the picture.

4) Colour as one term in a binary opposition, which in this case is that proposed by Giorgio Vasari’s theory of art, which opposes Florentine disegno to Venetian colore: rational form to sensual content. This opposition corresponds to several other analogous binary oppositions, all of which can be used to organise elements within Five Wounds. Thus: disegno is to colore as line is to tone; as reason is to the senses; as theory is to data; as transcendence is to immanence; as the picture space is to the picture plane; etc.

The written description of the Paradise involves conception 1, and, implicitly, conception 4 (hence the accompanying running head is COLORE); the visual translation of this description into the Synaesthetic Paradise diptych involves conceptions 3, 4, and, implicitly and of necessity (since the book was actually printed using a CMYK process), conception 2.

Guest Post for the 'Big Idea' Feature at Whatever

I wrote a guest post for the 'Big Idea' feature at John Scalzi's popular Whatever blog in 2011. It is on the advantages of illustrated books as a format, and it includes some detailed discussion of the 'Synaesthetic Paradise' diptych from Five Wounds, which I use as a case study to explain the relationship between text and image in the novel. I'm drawing attention to this guest post again here, because it builds on my posts about Tintoretto and Andrei Rublev, which are immediately below.

Below is an excerpt from the post at Whatever:  

According to an old set of critical prejudices, the adult pleasures of true literature are entirely separate from the infantile sugar rush of pictures, and the presence of the latter in a book is therefore a kind of an implicit admission of failure on the writer’s part. The very word ‘illustration’ is part of the problem here, since it implies redundancy and subordination. Illustrations understood in this pejorative sense are somehow both more direct and more naïve than language. They cannot be paraphrased, but nor can they dissemble. They do not require interpretation, and they cannot contain a subtext. They are, by definition, un-literary.

Inspirations: Andrei Rublev by Andrei Tarkovsky

 

The clip above includes (from about 00:45) the final sequence in Andrei Rublev by Andrei Tarkovsky, a (very) unorthodox biographical film about a fifteenth-century monk and icon painter in Russia. The action of the film directly dramatises selected scenes from Rublev's life in black-and-white, but after the action concludes, we enter this colour sequence, which consists of a series of slow tracking shots (interspersed with equally slow zooms and / or push-ins) over the painted surface of Rublev's surviving icons. This method of animating static paintings has become a cliche in TV documentaries about art, and Tarkovsky's production notes from 1962 indicate that it was already established as a convention even then.

In our film there will not be a single shot of Rublev painting his icons. He will simply live, and he won't even be present on-screen in all episodes. And the last part of the film (in colour) will be solely devoted to Rublev's icons. We will show them in detail (as in a popular scientific film). The on-screen demonstration of the icon will be accompanied by the same musical theme which sounded in the episode of Rublev's life corresponding to the time during which the icon was conceived [quotation taken from Robert Bird, Andrei Rublev, p. 37].

In the colour sequence, the music fills the entire soundtrack and thereby assumes an importance that recalls the ending of Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped: i.e. it seems to signal transcedence even as it literally emphasises immanence and materiality (the surface of the painting).

Robert Bird describes the significance of the colour coda to Andrei Rublev in the following terms (p. 10):

[It] consummates the halting narrative, retrospectively revealing its underlying logic and transforming its deep textures into glorious surfaces. However, the icon display also suspends the complex weave of dialogue, music and ambient sound in a pious supplication. In effect, it dissolves the film's heavy temporality in its eternal patterns, as if Tarkovsky was ceding authorship to St Andrei Rublev. Several of Tarkovsky's subsequent films end in a similar confusion of temporal and spatial planes, a feature which irks some viewers as an 'easy transcendence' of the characters' otherwise torturous progression across the dolorous earth. However, by extending his searching gaze into the transcendent plane, Tarkovsky is also raising the stakes of his aesthetic gamble. Instead of the certainty of faith, he contemplates the possibility that there can be no true ending, possibly no true story at all, under the weight of time [Bird, Andrei Rublev, p. 10].

I first saw Andrei Rublev in about 1991. Its coda had a transfixing effect on me, and I have spent the twenty years since trying to re-enact this effect in one way or another. One of the immediate, enabling ideas it seemed to suggest was that the dialectic of realism vs. abstraction was a question solely of the scale of observation: that is, any image becomes abstract if you zoom in close enough; and any apparently flat surface is revealed to be sculpted if you blow it up large enough. I have therefore engaged in numerous attempts to photograph the surface of historical paintings in microscopic detail. Below are two attempts at this: close-ups of the surface of paintings from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, which are part of icon-like renditions of gold fabrics, in which imprinted abstract patterns achieve their effect by textural means.

In Five Wounds, Dan and I do something similar by isolating a fragment of Tintoretto's Paradise, and then translating it into a collage of abstract shapes of different colours, which are juxtaposed as if in an insane painting-by-numbers exercise. This exercise combines the literal and abstract within the same scale of representation: i.e. by means of a mosaic effect, it combines the perspective of the 'establishing shot', which shows the whole painting, with the isolation of particular details or fragments that characterises the close-up.

In the endpapers of the first edition of Five Wounds, this manipulated visual citation from Tintoretto was rendered even more abstract by being presented as a blown-up fragment of a fragment, thus:

Many icons are literally mosaics of course, and Tarkovsky compared the unusual structure of Andrei Rublev to that of a mosaic:

You can stick your nose into some fragment, beat it with your fist, and scream: 'Why is it black here? It shouldn't be black here! I don't like to look at black!' But you have to look at a mosaic from afar and on the whole, and if you change one colour the whole thing falls apart [quoted in Bird, Andrei Rublev, p. 38].

The mosaic is an ancient pictorial technique, but the ending of Andrei Rublev is - despite its eschewal of dramatisation and mise-en-scene - intrinsically cinematic, or rather, photographic, because slow-motion and the close-up are both quintessentially photographic effects, which initiated a new way of looking at the world by giving us access to what Walter Benjamin called the optical unconscious. Photography also revolutionised the way we think about paintings, not only by making it easy to reproduce them, but also by making it easy to isolate details from them (and even, via X-rays, to analyse their constituent elements).

Tintoretto's Paradise

The version of Paradise that Tintoretto painted for the Ducal Palace in Venice in 1592 is reproduced above. It is referred to several times in the text of Five Wounds (although I never name the artist in the novel). It is also quoted visually in a diptych on pages 28-29. In the standard scholarly biography of Tintoretto, by Eric Newton, there is a long passage on the painting, which I sent to Dan as reference material. Starting on p. 198, this passage reads as follows.

The finished painting is, as it were, a colossal three-dimensional wall-paper, a vast pattern representing space itself, marked out in dark patches, between which one’s eye [199] seems to penetrate into a radiant, crowded infinity, as though innumerable groups and clusters of figures had arranged themselves like galactic systems one behind the other in the interstellar void.

At first glance this absence of formalized planes and, in particular, the lack of a base with a firmly established foreground, confuse and bewilder the eye, but gradually the brave pattern, with the noble silhouettes of Christ and the Virgin as its climax, asserts itself. One begins to see it as the only possible solution to the problem. .... The finished painting is ... governed by none of the normal optical laws. The effect is not of standing in this world and gazing into the remote distances of the next but of seeing through a glass wall into a celestial aquarium in which both light and distance mean nothing. Single figures and groups of figures float through this supernatural ether, towards or away from the glass wall, in a ceaseless rhythmic movement, not under the spell of gravity but in obedience to the magnetism that radiates from Christ and the Virgin who bend gently towards each other above them. The gaps between them are not areas of radiance but glimpses of interstellar space, and that space is not so much occupied by the myriads of the blessed as composed of them. The radiance in which they have their being has become interchangeable with their being itself. The world of visual experience with its vocabulary of ‘near,’ ‘far,’ ‘upper,’ ‘lower,’ ‘towards,’ ‘away from,’ no longer exists. This, in purely practical terms, gives Tintoretto the immense advantage of being able to enlarge or diminish any figure at will without contradicting the laws of perspective; it retains the medieval system of scale by importance without abandoning the Renaissance system of scale by distance.

Newton’s insistence on seeing the Paradise as the crowning achievement of Tintoretto’s career (he died in 1594) seems misguided, given that the painting is now usually attributed jointly to Tintoretto’s son Domenico, a much inferior artist, and to the workshop. With this revised attribution in mind, the peculiar composition seems less the result of unconventional artistic genius and more like incompetence, but this illustrates a more general point about the nature of interpretation, which is always the result of a series of enabling preconceptions. As Gabriella concludes in Five Wounds, an illegible message was easier to transcribe if one already had some idea of what it might say.

Newton starts with the presumption that the painting is by Tintoretto, and Newton knows that Tintoretto is a genius. Everything in his account follows from that basic premise. My own, admittedly uninformed, first impression was that it was rather turgid, whoever painted it, but that makes Newton's achivement in this passage even more impressive. It is a brilliant piece of creative writing, insofar as it succeeds in reinscribing this apparently mediocre work as a masterpiece. Even so, Newton's approach seems rather old-fashioned now (the biography was published in 1952), and not only because it is based on obsolete research.

Newton is a late descendant of a tradition of conoisseurship that goes back to Giorgio Vasari, who founded art criticism as an academic discipline in the sixteenth century, and in the process suggested what it is that critics should be doing. Vasari’s purpose was three-fold: to provide clear descriptions of paintings that, in an age before photographic reproduction, could often only be viewed in situ; to establish a set of criteria by which one could distinguish great painting from good, and good from bad; and to establish a canon of painters who, collectively, embodied those criteria.

Vasari was perhaps the first major theorist of Western art, but one of the first important art critics in the same tradition was Pietro Aretino, whose literary output was far more varied and whose ideas on art were far less systematic, but whose letters and sonnets about Titian helped to establish the latter as one of the most successful painters in Europe in the middle of the sixteenth century. For example, Aretino described Titian’s portrait of Eleonora Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino (above), painted c. 1536-8, as follows.

The union of colours laid in by Titian’s brush expresses, besides the concord that reigns in Eleonora, her gentle spirit. Modesty [modestia] is seated with her in an attitude of humility, purity resides in her dress, consciousness of her virtue [vergogna] veils and honours her breast and hair. Love fixes on her his lordly glance. Chastity and beauty, eternal enemies, are in her likeness and between her eyelashes the throne of the Graces is seen.

The flattery is obviously aimed at Eleonora as well as Titian, but its effect depends on the assumption that Titian’s painting displays her character rather than merely representing her appearance. According to Aretino, the painting opens a window into Eleonora's soul. Eleonora, the painting, Aretino's description: each of these things is, in some sense, identical with the others. There is no mediation. Everything is transparent.

Aretino claims to be ‘reading’ the portrait, but what he’s actually doing is interpreting it, and, as with Newton's description of the Paradise, reinscribing it: that is, writing meaning over it. I defy anyone to look at this picture unprepared and say, ‘I see the concord that reigns in Eleonora, her modesty, purity, etc., etc’. Aretino is trying to influence the way we read the portrait by annotating it, but at the same time insisting that his annotations add nothing that is not already there.

One way of clarifying this problem is to reverse the terms of the relation between word and image. Would someone who only had Aretino’s description of Titian’s portrait – or Newton’s description of Tintoretto’s Paradise – be able to visualise the paintings in question accurately on the basis of the description alone? The answer is surely, ‘No’.

I am interested in this question for practical reasons, because my collaboration with Dan involved writing descriptions of pictures that did not yet exist, which Dan then used to bring these potential pictures into actuality. In this case, the description generated the picture, rather than the other way round, but that actually makes the role of interpretation more explicit. Dan’s illustrations were always a loose translation of my instructions, inevitably, because they were rendered in a different medium by a different process and via a different sensibility. They always added something to the written description, no matter how exhaustive my instructions aspired to be. So I could never predict what they would look like.

One might argue that Dan was doing the same thing that Newton and Aretino were, but in reverse. I think it's a bit more complicated than that. We may see Tintoretto's and Titian's paintings in a new light as a result of their efforts, but Newton and Aretino are not actually attempting to open a conversation: rather, they aim to have the last word. The painter, or rather the painting, has no right of reply. In the classic version of connoisseurship, the definitive interpretive act is an attribution: 'Yes, this painting is an authentic Tintoretto'. But the authority of that attribution derives not from Tintoretto himself, who lacks the insight to understand his own talent (Tintoretto does not know what it is that makes him Tintoretto), but from the disinterested mind of the connoisseur.

What I was doing, by contrast, was inviting Dan to alter the meaning of my work, to divide the responsibilities of authorship with me (quite literally in the case of Five Wounds).

Five Wounds: Review at 'Transnational Literature'

The latest issue of the academic e-journal Transnational Literature includes a review of Five Wounds, written by Aliese Millington. An extract is below: Think back to your first trip with Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, or how it felt to enter the Matrix after Neo takes the red pill. Five Wounds: An Illuminated Novel takes you down a similarly twisting path and leaves you pondering the journey well afterwards. Pooling influences trans-national, trans-cultural, trans-temporal and transart form, authors Jonathan Walker and Dan Hallett spin the story of ‘five wounded orphans [who] must face their traumatic origins’ (blurb). These tales are told through the fascinating combination of Walker’s proclamatory prose, Hallett’s Goya and comic-book influenced illustrations, a Bible-like layout and handwritten notations. Described as ‘cruel and arbitrary’ (blurb) by the authors, the world of Five Wounds looks and feels at once early renaissance, modern and apocalyptic. I am particularly pleased to see a review in a journal on transnational literature, since many of the sources for Five Wounds are Italian: notably, Italo Calvino and Tintoretto. Below is a selection of transnational sources taken from a detail of an illustration (by Dan Hallett) on p. 100 of the novel.