Water and Art

David Clarke

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781861897411
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Restless, protean, fluid, evanescent—despite being a challenge to represent visually, water has gained a striking significance in the art of the twentieth century. This may be due to the fact that it allows for a range of metaphorical meanings, many of which are particularly appropriate to the modern age. Water is not merely a subject of contemporary art, but also a material increasingly used in art-making, giving it a distinct dual presence.

Water and Art probes the ways in which water has gained an unprecedented prominence in modern Western art and seeks to draw connections to its depiction in earlier art forms. David Clarke looks across cultures, finding parallels within contemporary Chinese art, which draws on a cultural tradition in which water has an essential presence and is used as both a subject and a medium. The book features a wealth of images by artists from East and West, including Fu Baoshi, Shi Tao, Wei Zixi, Fang Rending, Leonardo da Vinci, Bernini, Turner, Gericault, Klee, Matisse, Monet, Picasso, Mondrian, and Kandinsky.

Fast-paced, accessible, and comprehensive, Water and Art will appeal to the specialist and the general reader alike, offering fresh perspectives on familiar artists as well as an introduction to others who are less well-known.

1

The Place of Water in European Art

Water is the driver of nature (Leonardo).¹

Seeing as fountains are made for the enjoyment of water, they ought always to be made to play in such a way that it is really visible (Bernini).²

Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia (Laertes, in Hamlet). ³

This book examines the role of water in modern and contemporary art, where it has a particular centrality. The present chapter, however, will begin by offering a broader historical context against which that modern engagement with water can be placed. This will enable the historical specificity of the modern concern for water to be better understood through contrast, but will also aid in tracing its genealogy. While a deep concern with water was the exception rather than the norm in pre-modern European art (on which the earlier parts of this chapter will focus), certain tendencies in nineteenth-century art, especially of the Romantic period, will be shown to prefigure the modern attitude towards water that will be the subject of the rest of this book, and which will be selectively introduced towards the chapter’s end.

Leonardo

If one were to attempt to specify the moment within European artistic culture where water first became a subject of concentrated attention in its own right, one would have to point to the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. The sheer prevalence of water on our planet and its central importance to human life meant that it inevitably found its way into the art of all cultures, often represented in an extremely stylized way, and indeed schematic depictions of water proved perfectly sufficient for many artists of a quite later date than Leonardo. Although water was a major element of Canaletto’s Venice scenes, for instance, he rarely seemed to be troubled by questions of its representation and was usually satisfied with a repetitive schema for depicting the surfaces of his canals. With Leonardo, however, we encounter an artist with a profound personal interest in water in its own terms that amounts almost to an obsession.⁴

Leonardo’s interest in water was more than purely artistic, involving concerns that could best be described as hydrological or scientific. Indeed many of his drawings of water make most sense when seen as tools for a broader scientifically defined project of understanding this substance’s physical properties rather than as images produced with primarily aesthetic goals. In particular Leonardo was concerned with water as a force, wishing to gain an understanding of the logic of its movements and transformations, to discover pattern and predictability within its apparently ever-changing forms. He was aware of water’s immense energy, as demonstrated for example in the destructive force of the River Arno breaking its banks and flooding the city of Florence, as it did in 1466 and 1478. His primary motivation was to gain knowledge – including visual knowledge – that would enable mastery of this protean and potentially dangerous substance, and thus the harnessing of its power for human purpose. Water in his pre-electrical age, it should be remembered, was the primary source of usable energy (other than human or animal power), a centrality it was to retain even during the time of the Industrial Revolution, whether in the form of water mills or later in the form of steam. Even as late as the middle of the twentieth century steam power remained the dominant energy source for railway locomotives.

It is this desire for control, felt with an urgency that seems not to have been previously experienced, that led Leonardo to pay such close visual attention to the properties of water in motion. Previous attempts to represent water in art were of no help in such a project, and direct empirical observation – combined with the power of abstract reasoning – proved the only recourse. In his drawn studies of water in motion Leonardo represented in a clear diagrammatic way his understanding of the element’s properties. He appears to have set up experimental situations for observation and analysis, and the abstract linear language of drawing was the most precise tool available to represent with conceptual clarity what he was able to see and deduce about water and its motion.

Among Leonardo’s analytical water drawings one in particular stands out: Studies of Flowing Water from the Royal Collection (illus. 4), a page containing several images together with writing, catalogued by Kenneth Clark as no. 12660 verso. The top of this page is taken up with two studies of the turbulence caused when a rapidly moving flow of water is interrupted by an obstacle. These belong to a series of images exploring the variety of effects that can occur with variations in the placement of the obstruction, and indeed two further studies of that kind can be found on the recto of the same sheet. Below the studies of water’s response to solid obstacles, and accorded a greater prominence through size, is a study of water pouring into water. Effects of turbulence are to be seen here as well, with a complicating factor now being the presence of air bubbles in the water, struggling to make their way to the surface. Again with this theme of water pouring into water there are other related drawings that can be identified (such as 12659 recto, 12661, 12662 and 12663 recto, all in the Royal Collection), but rather than the version on this page occupying a position in relation to the others of being one variation amongst many, this more detailed drawing occupies instead (as Martin Kemp points out) the position of being a summary or final synthesis of the other studies, much as the Composite Study of the Respiratory, Vascular and Urino-genital Systems in a Female Body (c. 1508, black chalk, pen and ink and wash on paper, Royal Collection, 12281) offers a synthesis of Leonardo’s anatomical studies.⁵

As Ernst Gombrich points out, the elaborate study of water impacting on water given in Studies of Flowing Water is a carefully thought-through analysis rather than a simple visual notation of a particular instance of observation:

It is clear that Leonardo’s drawing is not a snap-shot of water falling upon water but a very elaborate diagram of his ideas on the subject. No waterfall or whirlpool permits us to see the lines of flow with similar clarity, nor do bubbles in turbulent water ever distribute themselves so tidily.⁶

The vortices of water depicted here are clearly discriminated by Leonardo into two types. On the one hand there are those that occur under the surface, and that involve only the interaction between the moving water that has arrived from above and the lower-lying body of water, which has no apparent current or flow of its own. On the other hand there are those that involve air bubbles and are therefore carried upwards by air’s desire to find its rightful place above water, ending their short life by breaking at the surface.⁷ The surface itself is not otherwise represented in its own right, and thus the effects of reflection that might obscure our vision of what is happening beneath the water are removed as irrelevant and merely accidental with respect to the phenomenon being analysed. Instead we have the equivalent of the cutaway studies of muscle, bone and internal organs that are found in Leonardo’s anatomical studies, where skin is not allowed to play an obstructing role. Although the lines in the anatomical drawings describe static structures potentially visible to the eye, the lines of the underwater vortices in this water study have a less direct link to anything observable, attempting instead to record the trajectory Leonardo believed this transparent medium would take. To make such patterns in the movement of water indirectly visible to the observing eye Leonardo recommended adding small particles such as grass seeds or making use of dye as a marker.⁸

The examination of other drawings by Leonardo on the theme of water pouring into water only serves to confirm that Studies of Flowing Water is a more complex representation that must surely post-date them, drawing on the thinking done by means of the earlier images as much as on any new direct observations made. In 12659 recto, for instance, there is not yet an attempt to deal with the question of the air bubbles, merely to document the whirlpool-like effects. In the top of two similar studies in 12662 the same is also true, but here the eddying movement of the water is indicated not by individual lines but by three-dimensional corkscrew-like forms. Three-dimensional forms are also used in 12663 recto, where the water pours down from the left rather than the right, although here the pattern of the eddies resembles more (to the modern eye) the form of a curled-up telephone cord, and a churning motion seems identified through the horizontally orientated spirals rather than the vertically orientated ones of the top image in 12662, which describes water rising upwards. The bubbles do make an appearance in 12661, arranged in the same characteristic forms found in Studies of Flowing Water, but there is much less clarity than in that later image, particularly as regards the distinction between water action at the surface and at depth. The greater spatial and formal clarity of Studies of Flowing Water make it both a clearer exposition of Leonardo’s thinking and at the same time a more aesthetically pleasing image.

Leonardo tended to think by analogy, often exploring parallels between natural and man-made phenomena, for example when he looked to the flight of birds as a model in his explorations into the possibility of human flight. With respect to his understanding of water the same process was also at work: we see him, for instance, exploring the relationship between the shape of fishes and their movement through water and the lessons this may offer for boat design.⁹ The very abstractness of his drawings of water enable such analogies to be expressed. The turbulent wakes produced by obstacles in water are very similar for Leonardo to the patterns of hair (which he took a particular interest in representing), while, as Kemp points out, the image of water pouring into water resembles his Star of Bethlehem flower study (c. 1506, red chalk, pen and ink, Royal Collection, 12424).¹⁰ Such parallels were also explored in words by Leonardo. A note on 12579 recto (Royal Collection), for instance, which features four studies of water turbulence caused by obstacles in moving water, notes the resemblance between the movement of hair and that of water.¹¹ Indeed, a significant part of Leonardo’s writing is given over to analysis of water and he appears to have struggled as intently with finding a way to explain its properties in words as he did in images, at one point making a list of 67 terms that can be used to describe water flow.¹² A comprehensive treatise on water was planned, which drawings such as Studies of Flowing Water would perhaps have accompanied, although (like so many of his other projects) it was never to be completed.

The desire to control and harness the power of water is not only expressed in Leonardo’s studies of water in motion, but can also be seen in his technological endeavours, much evidence concerning which can also be gleaned from his drawings as well as his texts. The sheer range of his interest is vast, and cannot be fully indicated here, but it included for example an apparatus for raising water, dredging mechanisms, a device for swimming underwater (which he kept secret for fear of its military applications), a water-regulated alarm clock, fountains, siphons, lock gates, and floating shoes for walking on water. Leonardo was involved in a plan by the Florentines to divert the flow of the River Arno from Pisa (at a time when they were besieging that city), and he developed a proposal for making the Arno navigable to the sea by means of a canal that would alter its route of flow. He was also involved in other canal projects (and in the design of machines for their excavation), as well as in plans for the draining of marshland. For the Venetian Republic, as a military consultant, Leonardo advised on how the River Isonzo might be turned into a defence barrier against possible Turkish invasion, and on another occasion he did work on the excavation of a moat.

In addition to his involvement with technology Leonardo also made more purely scientific explorations of water’s properties, looking at everything from the way a drop of water changes shape depending on the angle of incline of the surface it is on to the place of water as one of the four elements within nature as a whole. This broader intellectual enquiry is more evident after his move from Florence to Milan and entry there into the environment of the Sforza court. Thinking through analogy, Leonardo saw parallels between the human body and nature as a whole, with veins playing an equivalent role to rivers in sustaining life, and his studies of turbulence found relevance for his investigation of the functioning of the heart valve.¹³

His hydrological activities were a particularly important focus for Leonardo during his later years, and it is to this period of the early 1500s that Studies of Flowing Water belongs. It is possible therefore to speculate that the drawing was produced in the context of his practical work. Carlo Zammattio does so, for instance, stating that the study of water pouring into water was probably made in connection with a particular hydraulic project in Milan.¹⁴ Certainly an image of water pouring through a sluice into water is visible as one (admittedly minor) part of the design for a machine for mixing mortar (silverpoint on light blue paper, gone over with pen, Royal Collection, 12668). The studies of turbulence caused in water’s flow by obstacles could also be linked to practical projects. Although such effects appear disorderly, Leonardo believed that an understanding of them would enable the course of a river to be diverted using only a few stones.¹⁵ More specifically, on another occasion, he proposed a method of protecting a house on the bank of a river from erosion by placing obstacles upstream that would alter the patterns of turbulence in the river.¹⁶

Leonardo’s visual engagement with water, then, stems in large part from his wider intellectual interests and perhaps above all from the various practical tasks such as canal construction with which he was engaged. Purely visual or painterly concerns could probably never have led an artist of his era to develop such a deep-rooted commitment to investigate water since there was no representational task that required water to be foregrounded and was pushing artists to refine their ability to represent it. Only in a much later, nineteenth-century moment, with artists such as Joseph Mallord William Turner and Claude Monet, would a need be felt for such refinement in the painterly presentation of water in motion. Whereas the equally scientifically motivated investigations of Leonardo and other Renaissance artists into human anatomy can be said to have had a direct yield for the practice of painting, given the importance of the human body in the most culturally central art of that time, the study of water’s movements Leonardo made in his drawings had no major significance with respect to his paintings. Landscape remained a secondary element within his painted works, as it did in the case of most European artists of his time, only really gaining autonomy as a genre in the seventeenth century. Admittedly there are wonderful, evocative landscapes with water in the background of certain of his paintings, most particularly perhaps The Madonna of the Rocks (c. 1491–1508, oil on wood panel, National Gallery, London) and the Mona Lisa (c. 1505–14, oil on wood panel, Louvre, Paris), which embody Leonardo’s understanding of water’s place in the natural world.¹⁷ But in both those two cases the landscape remains subsidiary in importance to the figures. Even if Leonardo had wanted to make use within his paintings of the insights he had gained in his drawings about water’s properties there would have been considerable problems of translation. The diagrammatic language of his drawings would not have solved in advance the questions posed by the painterly representation of water.

The Baptism of Christ (c. 1476, oil on panel, Uffizi, Florence) produced by Verrocchio and his workshop has a background detail of a cascade of water pouring into water that recalls in some respects the topic treated in the central image of Studies of Flowing Water, as well as a sophisticated treatment in the lower foreground area of the water in which Christ stands ankle deep. Martin Kemp attributes these areas of the painting to Leonardo.¹⁸ However, because of its early date we cannot talk of an influence of his drawn studies of water’s movement on this work, and perhaps we should instead think of the influence as here going from the painting to the later drawings, of the painting as helping to specify one issue in the understanding of water that he would later examine more closely.

Although Leonardo’s painting shows relatively little direct influence from his hydrodynamic studies, he did produce a number of drawings on the theme of the deluge that embody his thinking about water but which have more of an aesthetic motivation. In a sense these works, such as the Royal Collection’s A Deluge (12380, illus. 5), are a further meditation on the theme of turbulence, but treat that issue on a larger cosmological scale rather than in relation to particular experimental situations. Whereas so much of his effort had been devoted to the mastery of water, in these works he demonstrates what happens when water moves beyond the human control with which so much of his technological investigations are concerned. In A Deluge, the swirling water jets that emerge from the cloud forms at the top of the image (and which are also seen again in its centre) are represented in an extremely styl...