The History of Painting

At the dawn of art the image does not contemplate — it conjures, and it immortalizes. The Egyptian canon locks the figure into an immutable formula: shoulders frontal, head and legs in profile, scale by rank rather than by the eye; this is how tombs and the "Book of the Dead" are painted — to defeat death by repetition. Assyria lines the palaces of Nineveh and Nimrud with alabaster reliefs of the lion hunt, where the king's strength is the strength of the realm. In Babylon the Ishtar Gate of Nebuchadnezzar II glitters with glazed bulls and dragons — a celestial order brought down into brick. And on Crete and at Mycenae the frescoes of Knossos breathe with sea and dance — a brief drawn breath of freedom within the palace wall.

Greece lifts the spell from the image and sets man in its place — beautiful, proportioned, free in his movement. Attic red-figure vase painting discovers foreshortening and gesture: bodies come alive, myths are staged like drama. The sculpture of Phidias on the Athenian Acropolis (the Parthenon, the statue of Athena) gives the age its face: divine order in human form. Rome inherits this idol and adds the sobriety of the portrait — and at its far edge, in the Fayum portraits of Roman Egypt, wax encaustic looks straight into the eyes of a mortal for the first time. That direct, enormous gaze will become the bridge to the icon.

When the ancient cosmos crumbles, painting goes underground — into the Roman catacombs, where the first Christians paint not gods but signs of hope: the Good Shepherd, Orpheus, Jonah, the orant with upraised hands. Then the image steps out into the light in mosaic: Ravenna under Justinian (San Vitale, the processions of Justinian and Theodora; Sant'Apollinare) floods its walls with gold, a space no longer earthly but eternal. So the icon is born: the body loses its weight, the gaze grows enormous, gold abolishes depth — because what looks out at us now is not the world but the Kingdom. The Sinai "Saviour" of this period is already all but the mature countenance.

The Middle Ages nearly lose the image altogether: Byzantine iconoclasm (726–843) forbids and destroys the icons, and only the Triumph of Orthodoxy in 843 brings them back — now understood, vindicated by the dogma of the Incarnation. Thereafter the icon ascends: Theophanes the Greek carries the austere Byzantine fire into Rus', and Andrei Rublev, in "The Trinity" (c. 1411 or 1425–27), gives it its highest stillness and love. In the West the Gothic bursts the wall open with the stained-glass window (Chartres, Sainte-Chapelle) — light becomes theology. And at the very end of the epoch Giotto, in the Scrovegni Chapel (c. 1305), restores to the figure weight, feeling, and space — the crack out of which the Renaissance will emerge.

The Renaissance restores the ancient idol on a new plane: Masaccio, in "The Trinity" (c. 1427) and the Brancacci frescoes, builds space by linear perspective, and the world becomes measurable. Leonardo ("The Last Supper," 1495–98; "Mona Lisa," c. 1503–19) and Michelangelo (the Sistine Chapel ceiling, 1508–12; "The Last Judgment," 1536–41) raise man to titanic stature — and, in the same breath, to trembling before judgment. In the North, Dürer cuts "The Apocalypse" (1498), where the age hears the gathering storm; Bosch paints hell from within. Then the light breaks: Caravaggio ("The Calling of Saint Matthew," c. 1600) sends a single shaft out of the darkness, and Rembrandt ("The Night Watch," 1642; "The Return of the Prodigal Son," c. 1668) turns the light inward, into the human being — from pride toward repentance.

The Enlightenment raises a new idol — Reason, and the Virtue of the citizen — and painting gives it austere form. Jacques-Louis David casts the revolution in the cold marble of classicism: "The Oath of the Horatii" (1784) and "The Death of Marat" (1793) turn politics into a cult. But where the idol of Reason becomes guillotine and war, the brush is the first to see the truth. Goya paints "The Third of May 1808" (1814) and etches "The Disasters of War" (c. 1810–1820) — no heroics, only the cry of a man facing the guns. Here, for the first time, the Enlightenment looks upon its own collapse.

The century seeks a replacement for the fallen cult of Reason and casts about. Romanticism stakes everything on passion and the infinite: Delacroix paints "Liberty Leading the People" (1830), and Caspar David Friedrich sets man with his back to the abyss ("Wanderer above the Sea of Fog," c. 1818) — the soul before the boundless. In Russia the Peredvizhniki restore conscience to art: Repin ("Barge Haulers on the Volga," 1870–73), Kramskoi, Surikov paint the people and history as a judgment. And in France the Impressionists (Monet, "Impression, Sunrise," 1872) renounce the idea altogether — what remains is pure sight, light, and the instant, out of which the whole of the twentieth century will later grow.

The World War tears the visible world apart, and the avant-garde drives the disintegration to its limit: Malevich exhibits "Black Square" (1915) as the "zero of forms" — the end of the old image and the founding claim of a new religion of non-objectivity. The Cubism of Picasso and Braque splinters the object; Kandinsky's abstraction drives colour toward pure music; utopia promises a new man. But the idol of utopia turns into war, and painting cries out again: Picasso paints "Guernica" (1937) — a black-and-white scream over a bombed city, the loudest anti-war image of the century. Expressionism (Munch's "The Scream," 1893, as its prologue) and the art of the postwar years keep that raw nerve of horror, and of hunger for meaning, exposed.

With the fall of the ideologies the great shared idol vanished, and the picture of the world broke into a multitude. Art turned plural: conceptualism, installation, video, and the digital image crowd painting to the margins, while the market and irony often occupy the place where meaning once stood. It is an honest, understated epoch — it has, as yet, no "Black Square" or "Guernica" of its own by which it might be recognized. But for that very reason the law's old question sounds in it again: after the collapse of every idol, what does man live by, and where does he return. The answer is still being written.