by Rik Smits
The Long March, Shao Shan Mao Zedong Museum, Changsha.
Not so. Instead of fewer accidents there were considerably more, and more mistakes were made too. After extensive investigation, some one eventually pointed out what was wrong: the cartoons were designed to be read from left to right. It hadn’t occurred to anybody that although this might be obvious to a Belgian, who had been to school and had grown up in a completely literate world, it was not at all clear to an illiterate Congolese, who had no idea where to begin. As a result the local miners regularly drew quite different conclusions from those intended.
Indeed it does turn out that the kind of rules of looking that we are discussing here depend to a great degree on the direction of writing. Wagenaar’s Tintin’s Law works the other way around with right-to-left writers such as Israelis and Arabs, as any cartoon strip created by them demonstrates. China has never had a true left-to-right tradition. Chinese characters were traditionally written from top to bottom in columns running from right to left, so the Chinese look at images differently from the way we do. In the Mao Zedong Museum in Changsha, for example, a painting is on show that depicts the Long March. It’s a fantastic piece of in-your-face propaganda, with a mass of strong, resolute fighters on their way to inevitable victory under the inspiring leadership of Mao Zedong. Or is it? To us it seems a strange image, since the entire stout-hearted company is marching ominously towards the left of the frame, in other words in the wrong direction. Such a picture would never be composed that way either in Russia or in the Western world.
Reading and writing, the skills that have done more than anything to make the tempestuous cultural and economic development of human ity over the past six to seven thousand years possible, turn out to influence us even in contexts that involve no words at all.
Rembrandt van Rijn, Abraham and Isaac, 1634.
18
Dead Men and Voluptuous Women
Some time between 1655 and 1658, Nicolaes Maes painted the sacrifice of Isaac. The patriarch Abraham is on the point of taking the life of his son Isaac for the greater honour and glory of the Lord when an angel restrains him at the very last moment. God has already seen enough to be convinced. It’s an extremely familiar subject, but Maes, supreme craftsman and artist that he was, has done his best to turn it into something extraordinary. The result is an uneasy, unstable picture, as becomes all the more clear when we compare it to the standard composition Rembrandt used some twenty years earlier to depict the same scene. Rembrandt’s painting somehow makes more sense. It seems more natural. This again probably has to do with the way we read.
Just as we see the sloping lines in graphs rise or fall, paintings have a rising and a falling diagonal. The rising line begins at the bottom left, the descending line at the top left. They are of crucial importance, as demon strated by the fact that they constitute the main difference between the sacrifice scenes painted by Maes and by Rembrandt. In Rem brandt’s painting, Abraham’s knife has threatened until a fraction of a second before to move down the falling diagonal and cut Isaac’s throat, but in Maes’s picture, should Abraham raise his hand the knife will meet poor Isaac’s throat by moving diagonally upwards, from right to left. This is highly unusual. Murder attempts in paintings usually happen from left to right along the falling diagonal, as in Rembrandt’s depiction. The weapon, whether a knife, sword, axe or club, usually strikes the victim from high on the left, and in most cases the victim too is aligned with the falling diagonal. He either lies along it, wounded or dead, or flees towards the bottom right.
An outstanding example of this use of the diagonal is Francisco Goya’s Highwaymen Attacking a Coach. It’s a dramatic scene, one that suggests there was nothing new about the cowboy films made many years later, but note the positions of the various characters. The leader of the highwaymen stands high on the coach-box, triumphant, pointing his gun downwards with studied nonchalance as he gazes along the descending diagonal at the distressed passengers. His accomplices, especially the one on the left, are busy dealing with a traveller who is still putting up resistance. He’s about to use his knife to silence the poor man for ever, and that knife too will strike home along the falling diagonal. Two women beg for their lives, on their knees, hands raised. The one whose face is visible looks back up along the falling diagonal at the highwayman on the left, who has his eyes fixed on her. The male passengers are dead, or soon will be, and all three are lying along the descending diagonal. Note too that Goya adheres to Tintin’s Law: on its doomed journey, the coach travels from right to left across the canvas.
Nicolaes Maes, The Sacrifice of Isaac, c. 1657.
It’s not particularly odd, when we stop to think about it, that blows and stabs take place along the falling diagonal. For a start, most thrusts of this kind are in a downward direction. Second, victims have a tendency to fall over and artists often anticipate this for dramatic reasons, so the murderer or would-be murderer almost automatically stands above the losing party. The preference for left-to-right thrashing and stabbing is explicable too, since for Westerners that is the standard direction in which such things are depicted. The murder weapon gains as it were extra speed and force when it moves from left to right. The same goes for flight. He who flees must be quick and the suggestion of speed is not helped by having him scrabble against the most natural direction of movement. Scenes of Adam and Even being expelled from paradise therefore almost always have the same composition: the Angel of Vengeance floats somewhere in the top left-hand corner, while Adam and Eve leave the Garden of Eden at the bottom right.
Francisco Goya, Highwaymen Attacking a Coach, 1786–7.
More striking still is the fact that the victims of lethal violence often lie along the falling diagonal, even in photographs. Take press pictures of mafia victims on village squares in southern Italy, which appear in the newspapers from time to time. They lie motionless, naturally, so the photographer can take his time choosing the angle that suits him best, which is very often one in which the body lies head first down the descending diagonal, precisely as in Manet’s Dead Matador. That painting in turn closely resembles the seventeenth-century Dead Soldier by an unknown Italian painter, currently in the National Gallery in London, which some people claim had a strong influence on Manet, al though Manet experts contest this. The experts may be right, since victims of violence posed in this way have simply been placed in the standard position.
Edouard Manet, Dead Matador, 1865.
The reason why the falling diagonal is so popular in these pictures of corpses cannot be a direct consequence of the way we perceive movement in pictures. After all, the dead do not move, so in paintings they shouldn’t give any impression of dynamism. Is it perhaps the descending aspect that’s relevant here? Could it be a way of indicating that the person depicted came to a bad end? Does the body almost literally slide out of the painting towards doom, dispatched by violence that apparently originates at the top left?
This is not such a ridiculous idea as it might seem. In Goya’s painting the power relationships coincide with the course of the violence, from top left to bottom right. The chief highwayman and his main accomplice look down with superior expressions at the pleading woman at the bottom right, who looks up at them submissively in the opposite direction. This slipping away downwards towards the right emerges even more clearly in Dirck van Baburen’s painting Prometheus Being Chained by Vulcan (1623), which can be seen in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Prometheus is lying in the worst possible position, chained up in the lower right-hand corner, against the frame. It seems as if but for that frame he would slide off the canvas completely. Like Manet’s matador and all those other prostrate victims, he lies head first, unable to see what he’s sliding towards. It’s a picture of utter powerlessness.
A victim of the Mafia photographed in 1992 according to the rules of visual art. Note the many falling lines.
Anti-Mafia demonstration in Naples, 2005.
Dirck van Baburen, Prometheus Being Chained
by Vulcan, 1623.
Most paintings of murders, assaults and torture adhere to the same pattern. Power, especially oppressive power, comes not only, as Mao Zedong would have it, from the barrel of a gun but in most cases from the top left, moving with gravity and in the direction in which we read.
Of course other considerations apply as well. Compositional difficulties or competing conventions and the desire to treat a subject in an entirely new way can lead to an image that appears to go against the grain. Nicolaes Maes’s The Sacrifice of Isaac is one example. But often the artist nevertheless submits to these laws of perception, perhaps without even being aware of it. Take for example Goya’s most famous painting, The Third of May 1808, which depicts the execution of 43 rebels in Madrid, one of a number of harsh reprisals by Napoleon’s occupying armies in Spain for the Madrid uprising against the French.
The firing squad carries out its bloody work from right to left, giving Goya the opportunity to portray the soldiers from behind as an ano nymous killing machine. At the same time he allows us to look straight into the emotional faces of the victims, who meet their tragic fate no less conventionally along the falling diagonal, as further emphasized by the angle of the hillside in the background. Goya has the next group of condemned men approach from the distance on the right. They are mov ing leftwards against the falling diagonal, trudging up towards the place of execution, high on a hill.
It’s very different for women. Not many women die in paintings, aside from the occasional Lucretia or Cleopatra. They far more often lie naked in charming postures, draped across chairs and settees, or slumber quasi-innocently in delightful groves. At best they have a good time with a swan, like Leda, or in the case of Europa lovingly embrace a tempting bull. But does this mean that the effect of the diagonal direction, so powerfully present in scenes of violence, is irrelevant in portraits of women?
Francisco Goya, The Third of May 1808, 1814.
Not when it comes to violence or unwilling submission, which often means sexual violence. When Gustav Klimt depicted Leda yielding to the swan, in a painting tragically lost to fire in 1945, he showed her on the point of being penetrated from left to right. In the strange painting Scorpion by Norbert Tadeusz there’s a particularly powerful suggestion of subjugation and sexual assault. On the face of it nothing is happening, but the sunbathing woman looks even more tormented than Baburen’s Prometheus. Here too the victim lies head first along the falling diagonal.
Gustav Klimt, Leda and the Swan , 1917. The painting was lost in 1945 when German troops set fire to Immendorf Palace.
Norbert Tadeusz (1940–2011), Scorpion.
Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538.
These compositions are fairly exceptional, however. Most female nudes appear to be in fine fettle. Nevertheless, the diagonal is of importance in their pictures too, if rather less prominently so.
The best example of a recumbent nude is perhaps Titian’s Venus of Urbino, a painting that was a source of inspiration to dozens of later artists. The Olympia that helped make Manet famous is directly derived from it. Despite the fact that Venus is lying along the falling diagonal, the painting is not ominous in any way, if anything quite the opposite. Titian’s beauty resolutely looks us in the eye, clearly the mistress of the situation, and partly for this reason she seems a little naughty. The lapdog at the foot of the bed – such a powerful symbol that even today many prostitutes go around in the company of a similar animal – is an additional indication of her boldness.
Impertinence seems to be a hallmark of nudes depicted along the descending diagonal. They often seem rather less virtuous than average, making eye contact with the viewer more often and with a slightly cheekier look. This is almost inevitable, since to make the light, which usually shines from the left, fall softly on her face, the artist has to turn the woman’s head slightly towards us. This suggests she’s deliberately looking at us. Nudes that lie along the rising diagonal more often sleep the sleep of the virtuous, or imagine themselves unobserved. It’s as if they are protected from sliding towards moral turpitude by looking from the right side of the painting towards the left. This outcome is far less obvious than the effects we’ve noted in scenes of violence, and there are far more exceptions to the rule, but it’s difficult to avoid the impression that for female nudes too, the falling diagonal is a slippery slope – the difference being that they find themselves not in a physical danger zone but in a moral one.
19
Mary’s Little Troublemaker and Other Portraits
Anyone who has regularly examined depictions of the Madonna with child in galleries and museums must surely have wondered why painters so rarely manage to portray an agreeable-looking divine infant. Instead of a podgy little pink delight that sends everyone into ecstasies, we are generally treated to a horrid, blubbery, prematurely aged dwarf. There may well be entirely prosaic, practical reasons for this. Real infants are as intractable as they are endearing. They refuse to sit still, cry at the most inappropriate moments and need almost constant care. In short, they’re incapable of posing properly. A great many painters must therefore have done most of the job from memory or with the aid of a doll.
What those painters probably didn’t know is that they were responsible at least in part for their subjects’ objectionable behaviour, at least if we’re to believe the research published by Canadian child psychologist Lee Salk from 1960 onwards. Salk investigated how mothers prefer to carry their offspring and discovered that over 83 per cent of right-handed women in his study held the child with their left arm. This appears logical, since it leaves the right hand free for other tasks, but there seemed to be something else going on, since even of the left-handed mothers Salk studied, almost 80 per cent preferred to use the left arm to carry an infant.
That preference, Salk decided, is the result of what he called ‘imprinting’. In the womb the child had become used to hearing and feeling its mother’s heartbeat and after birth that same auditory input had a calming effect. He played the sound of a normal heartbeat to 100 infants in a hospital maternity ward, at the volume they would have heard it before birth, and compared them to a control group. Sure enough, the first group turned out to cry less, to go to sleep more easily and even to grow more quickly than the children deprived of heart-music. It’s true that our hearts are only a fraction to the left of the centre of the chest cavity, but because of the greater pressure in the left ventricle and therefore in the left breast, the pumping of the heart sounds louder on that side. If you hold your child on the left, Salk concluded, it will make less noise. Which is exactly what mothers like to hear.
Painters generally don’t know a great deal about baby-care. Their concern lies with the composition of the painting, which doesn’t always coincide with the interests of mothers and children. This was demonstrated in 1973 by Richard Uhrbrock, an American psychology professor with a great interest in Madonnas. Of the more than 1,100 Madonnas he examined, 45 per cent held the Christ child in the left arm, 38 per cent in the right. The remaining infants, some 8 per cent, sat in the middle of the lap. Uhrbrock felt the percentage of left-arm-sitters was remarkably high, but if Salk is right it’s actually remarkably low. It means that in at least 20 per cent of their sittings the painters of the pictures examined by Uhrbrock must have personally ordered the model to place the child on her right arm. Infants are creatures of habit, whose behaviour is unlikely to improve when they’re made to comply with unfamiliar whims, so there must have been good reasons for all those painters and models to have insisted on their choice in the face of the inevitable grouching and whining.
One of those reasons is demonstrated by the famous painting Las Meninas, or The Maids of Honour, by the Spanish painter Velázquez. It’s an artfully arranged composition that nevertheless manages to look like a domestic snapshot of part of the personal entourage of King Philip IV of Spain. The subject is ostensibly the little blonde princess in the splendid white outfit at the centre. She is Philip’s only surviving child, t
he infanta Marguerita, and she is accompanied by her two maids of honour, Maria Augustina Sarmiento, who holds her right hand, and Isabel de Velasco. But there is a great deal else of interest in the painting, including Velázquez himself, who stands to the left of the canvas, busily painting a large picture, so large in fact that his canvas has been plumped right down on the ground. It’s as if we, the viewers, are ourselves the subject of his next painting, although, as we will shortly see, we are not.
Clearly the painter is right-handed. If we imagine that the infanta and her entourage were not in the picture, then Velázquez is using the most simple standard composition for a portrait by a right-handed artist. The easel stands in front of the painter slightly to his right, the subject slightly to his left, in the same direction as the viewer. As we can tell from the patch of light on his forehead, the light is shining from the painter’s left, so that the unfinished painting will be well lit, but this also means the light is falling from his left onto the subject.
Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656.
Las Meninas is therefore painted from the position of the model for this fictional canvas, so from our perspective the light falls from right to left, making the work an exception to the rule. In traditional portraiture the light shining across the canvas is far more likely to fall from left to right, exactly as Velázquez shows within the painting. In collections held by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Mauritshuis in The Hague, for example, this is true in more than 80 per cent of cases. The fall of light has consequences for the position of the person or persons in the picture. If they turn slightly to the right (from our perspective), away from the source of light, then their faces remain in shadow. If they look towards the left of the picture instead, their faces will be lit up. That effect too can be seen in Las Meninas, but in reverse. The infanta looks in the direction of the beams of light and her face is not only well lit, it’s clearly a point of special interest in the picture. She is the most important figure among the group of girls, more important than Isabel de Velasco, whose face is in shadow since she is looking away from the source of light, and more important than the dwarf María Bárbola who, even though she is closer to the window, is looking almost directly at us and therefore catches the light rather less.