Short History of the Shadow

Victor I. Stoichita

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9781861898296
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte generale

Stoichita's compelling account untangles the history of one of the most enduring challenges to beset Western art - the depiction and meanings of shadows."discriminating, inspired interrogation... dazzling analysis"—Marina Warner, Tate Magazine "Ambitious and a pleasure to read... a thoroughly worthwhile book."— Times Higher Education Supplement

1 The Shadow Stage

ORIGINS

Let us begin by turning to Pliny:

The question as to the origin of the art of painting is uncertain and it does not belong to the plan of this work. The Egyptians declare that it was invented among themselves six thousand years ago before it passed over into Greece – which is clearly an idle assertion. As to the Greeks, some of them say it was discovered at Sicyon, others in Corinth, but all agree that it began with tracing an outline around a man’s shadow and consequently that pictures were originally done in this way, but the second stage when a more elaborate method had been invented was done in a single colour and called monochrome, a method still in use at the present day (Natural History, XXXV, 15).¹

He retraces his steps a little further on:

Enough and more than enough has now been said about painting. It may be suitable to append to these remarks something about the plastic art. It was through the service of that same earth that modelling portraits from clay was first invented by Butades, a potter of Sicyon, at Corinth. He did this owing to his daughter, who was in love with a young man; and she, when he was going abroad, drew in outline on the wall the shadow of his face thrown by the lamp. Her father pressed clay on this and made a relief, which he hardened by exposure to fire with the rest of his pottery; and it is said that this likeness was preserved in the Shrine of the Nymphs . . . (Natural History, XXXV, 43).²

Let us endeavour to summarize Pliny’s assertions. The very fact that in his book he twice returns to the same myth is thought provoking. In the first extract the author discusses the origins of painting and in the second that of sculpture. It would therefore seem likely that artistic representation in general can be traced back to the primitive shadow stage. These origins (initiis) are defined as ‘uncertain’ (incerta), in other words he acknowledged their mythical nature. History (6000 years) and geography (Egypt) appear to cast doubt on the origins. Pliny’s aim was to shed light on this ‘uncertain’ origin through a founding account free of any precise temporality. In the first fragment (XXXV, 15), which deals exclusively with painting, we are told how it began (picturae initiis) with the encircling of a shadow (umbra hominis lineis circumducta). This example is evoked in order to weaken, if not invalidate, the hypothesis that the roots of Greek art were to be found in Egypt. According to legend, both to the Egyptians and the Greeks (omnes), painting originated ille tempore from shadow. Reading between the lines, what Pliny said was this: the Greeks discovered painting, not by looking at Egyptian works of art but by observing the human shadow.

The primitive nature of the first act of representation described by Pliny resides in the fact that the first pictorial image would not have been the result of a direct observation of a human body and its representation but of capturing this body’s projection. The effect of the shadow is to reduce the surface volume. In Pliny’s opinion, this first and fundamental method of transposition and reduction was therefore restricted to nature itself. Initially, there was no intervention on the part of the artist. A representation of a representation (an image of the shadow), the first painting was nothing more than a copy of a copy. In Pliny’s text, the Platonism of this conclusion is, however, only implicit.

It is not difficult to detect in the myth recounted in the Natural History a kind of three-part theory: early Greek painting, Egyptian painting, the shadow. If the author is able to play around with these three parts by inverting their relationship, it is because of the presence, within the three elements of the theory, of representation through two-dimensional projection. It is through this that Pliny interprets the conventions of the early image. The perfect profile of the Egyptian painting (illus. 1) and that of the archaic Greek one (illus. 2) are the product of a projection that excludes foreshortening and which involves conventions such as that of the shoulder in the background being level with the one in the foreground or that of the face being represented in profile but with an eye seen from the front.

The first conclusion to be drawn from this interpretation is that Pliny’s approach can be placed at the crossroads of history and artistic mythology. The author, no doubt familiar with an advanced pictorial form such as that found in Pompeian art (Pliny died in AD 79, the year Vesuvius erupted), explained early art, I mean Egyptian art, then ancient Greek art and the black figures on a red background through the fable of the outlined shadow. The fable uses a myth of origin to interpret a historical fact (early painting).

In the final part of Pliny’s text there are clues to the crucial stages in the evolution of painting from the early ‘shadow stage’ to its great achievements. We learn that the basic contour of the shadow was quickly replaced by a monochrome painting that was gradually perfected, although the signs of its mythical origins were never completely erased. Somewhere else (XXXV, 11), Pliny tells us that it would not be until the advent of the great artists that the stereotype of the flat projection would at last be replaced by relief and that shading would abandon its primary function as a matrix of the image to become a means of expression:

Eventually art differentiated itself [se ars ipsa distinxit], and discovered light and shade, contrasts of colours heightening their effect reciprocally. Then came the final adjunct of shine, quite a different thing from light. The opposition between shine and light on the one hand and shade on the other was called contrast [tonon], while the juxtaposition of colours and their passage [commissuras] one into the other was termed attunement [harmogen].

In Quintilian’s opinion, it was Zeuxis (Institutio oratorio, 12, x, 4) who was responsible for inventing the rational relationship between light and shade (ratio umbrarum et luminum).

While in the first passage (XXXV, 15) Pliny considers the shadow as the origin of pictorial representation, in the second (XXXV, 43) he omits the discourse on the two-dimensionality of pictorial representation in order to concentrate on the art of volumetric shapes, that is that of sculpture. The second extract of the Natural History offers a rich scenario able to provoke a chain reaction in the mind of the reader. But in the final analysis, nothing in this account is certain; it is mysterious and nocturnal, leaving everything in it wide open to conjecture. The author does not explain why the young woman moulds the image of her lover, why her father gives it the volume it lacks, or, finally, why this likeness is placed in the temple. Equipped with the tools of the myth’s hermeneutic, we can however hazard a hypothetical interpretation focused on the magical function of the process depicted.

The event that inspired the first semblance to be created was the departure of the loved one. The legend does not tell us why he was leaving nor where he was going, it only tells us that he had to travel a long distance (abeunte illo peregre). The shadow helps the young woman capture (circumscripsit)the image of her departing lover by creating a replacement. The issue raised here is considerable, for in fact it highlights a metaphysical quality of the image whose origins should be sought in the interruption of an erotic relationship, in a separation, in the departure of the model, hence the representation becomes a substitute, a surrogate.

It should come as no surprise therefore that a century after Pliny, another author, Athenagoras, recounts the same story thus:

The manufacture of dolls was inspired by a young woman: very much enamoured of a man, she drew his shadow on the wall as he slept; then her father, charmed by the extraordinary likeness – he worked with clay – sculpted the image by filling the contours with earth.³

What is fairly apparent from both texts is that the primary purpose of basing a representation on the shadow was possibly that of turning it into a mnemonic aid; of making the absent become present. In this case the shadow’s resemblance (similitude) to the original plays a crucial role. Another possible function stems from the fact that the image/ shadow is somebody’s image; it both resembles and belongs to the person whose image it is. The constantly changing real shadow of the beloved man will escort him on his travels, while the image of his shadow, captured on the wall, will remain a memento opposed to the movement of the journey and therefore will have a propitiatory value. The real shadow accompanies the one who is leaving, while his outline, captured once and for all on the wall, immortalizes a presence in the form of an image, captures an instant and makes it last.

In support of this interpretation it should be noted that Pliny’s text describes an authentic method of projection capable of verticalizing the shadow. Unlike the other variations of the myth (see the first extract from Pliny and the one from Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria), this last one says that the beloved’s face (fades) was projected onto a wall (in pariete) with the help of a lamp (lucerna). Two vital functions of this surrogate image are thus brought together: the likeness (which is essentially a question of ‘face’) and its verticality. The projection casts the shadow and it is the cast shadow that provides the support for the final resemblance (similitudo ex argilla). This first creation therefore (in Athenagoras’ case, the first doll) is not, at least as far as Pliny is concerned, a recumbent figure of any sort (a notion, in fact, alien to the spirit of Greek art). On the contrary, it is a statue (statua), i.e. an upright figure. The lapidary details pertaining to the mechanism of verticalization are extremely important, since Pliny would certainly have been aware – as more than one passage from his work indicates – of a whole early metaphysics on the shadow (particularly on the shadow recumbent on the earth) and of its links with death.⁴ On close examination the text reveals its hidden meaning: on the eve of her beloved’s departure, Butades’ daughter ‘captured’, so to speak, the image of her lover in a verticality meant to last forever. Thus she exorcized the threat of death, and his image – making up for his absence – kept him for ever ‘upright’, i.e. ‘alive’.

It is easy to see these lines as a mixture of erotic exorcism⁵and propitiatory practice, undertaken to avert the death of the departed loved one. But Pliny’s text immediately raises an additional question, for it specifies that the potter’s daughter outlined only her beloved’s face on the wall (umbram ex facie eius); it makes no mention of the outline of the whole body. Is this an oversight or, at this stage of the representation, is the ellipsis of the body intentional? For it is a well-known fact that Pliny combined several sources without always having understood them completely.⁶ Consequently, any attempt at interpretation is fraught with serious difficulties. We should also take into account the fact that, to Athenagoras, the statue/doll seemed to reproduce the whole of the young man’s body, that in the first of Pliny’s extracts (Natural History, XXXV, 15) it is generally stated that painting ‘began with tracing an outline round a man’s shadow’ (umbra hominis), and that, more or less at the same time, Quintilian specified unequivocally that this procedure involved bodily shadows thrown in the sunlight (umbrae quam corpora in sole feciessent). It would seem, therefore, that the Plinian scenario illustrates a particular variation that gives us no opportunity to explain changes that might be attributable to chance or, on the other hand, that might be concealing a particular meaning. Be that as it may, let us attempt to examine this text more closely.

Pliny tells us that the enamoured (capta amore) young woman’s initial idea (primus invenit) was to capture the image by outlining the shadow. The representation at this first stage is comparable to a double ‘un-realization’. We are told, in fact, that the young woman did no more than keep her lover’s shadow near her. The shadow projects the model onto the wall and reduces the being to an appearance. This shadow is not ‘the body’, it is by double virtue the other of the body (like a ‘spectre’, like a ‘head’).

The intervention of the father (the potter Butades) endows this fantasy with a new reality. These lines, which would probably have been of great interest to Freud, are however not without ambiguity. The father gives the spectre a consistency. He places clay where there was nothing but the outline of a shadow; he gives the shape a relief (typum fecit) and then hardens the form in the fires of his kiln (induratum igni). The first level of realization of this early un-realization is thus attained. The shadow now has consistency.⁷ What Pliny does not state clearly, though, is whether in the course of this process of ‘completion’ Butades gives his daughter’s fantasy a body as well as volume. A literal interpretation of Pliny’s text (contradicted, however, by Athenagoras’ ‘doll’) would lead us to conclude that Butades created a kind of medallion in relief portraying the head of his daughter’s lover. In the following sentence Pliny goes on to specify that this figure (typus) was placed in the kiln ‘with the rest of his pottery’ (cum ceteris fictilibus), as though it were a pot. This scenario would indicate that the birth of clay modelling and that of the painted image are one and the same, the link being the potter’s workshop.⁸ A moment later he goes on to formulate the following interpretational hypothesis: not only is Butades’ intervention a tangible step (the potter gives volume to the flat image of the attached shadow) but it is also a symbolic step. The ‘clay likeness’ (similitudo ex argilla) made by Butades conforms to a famous poetic topos, reliably illustrated by Cicero in his Tusculan Disputations (1, 52):

the body is as it were a vessel or a sort of shelter for the soul (corpus quidem quasi vas est aut aliquod animi receptaculum).

In his classic study on the cult of the soul, Erw...