Navez, Balance, and Shape

I, like Emma, was very pleased with this weeks reading of Arnheim (unfortunately due to poor scheduling I was not able to do a complete enough reading of Stafford or Wade to make any sort of intellectual comment). The chapter that caught my attention most was the chapter 1 on balance through lines, forms, vertical weight, and the reading of a painting from left to right. I have always been familiar with talk referring to the weight of an image and the idea that a composition should be balanced, but I never knew what it meant. Immediately upon reading the first few pages on the example of the black disc in the square I began to feel the tension of the images, the forces of the different lines and vertices. I became acutely aware of the margins on the page and how the space between the edge of the paper and the beginning of the black letters create the exact format that we consider to be the page of a book. I would like to attempt to apply what I learned from that chapter, as well what we have talked in previous classes, to a striking image I saw this weekend at the Met.

In wandering around galleries, still thinking about Rodin’s “Hand of God” I was suddenly stopped in my tracks by a large painting with filled with bright colors and gently lit female figures; Navez’s The Massacre of the Innocents My eye was immediately drawn to the central female figure whose yellow bodice, green cape, and jeweled gold necklace demand your attention. And indeed the eye is manipulated in a very specific pattern in this painting, in a sort of spiral. The eye is drawn quickly down by a stark contrast, to the ghostly pale flesh of the beautiful young boy in her arms. The light seems to fall directly on the boy’s shoulder and face, ignoring all others except the gently wash over the woman in yellow’s face. One looks at his face first, as it is of biological importance, his cherubic beauty and flowing golden hair make him seem almost female. He appears to be a child, before the age of changes voice or facial characteristics towards one gender or another, suspended in sleep. His shoulder and chest are equally illuminated, but do not at first seem as important as his face. This changes however when one notices the trickle of dead red coming down his chest, his slumber is interrupted and a sense of urgency comes over the viewer. Seeking more information you move to the hand (the actual center of the canvas) reaching out to touch his wound and travel down the arm attached to arrive an a kneeling woman whose face is in shadow. Because her face is not a readable the viewer moves on to her blue dress and then to the subtle equilibrium of her red hat and the mothers green cape. A yellow sleeve then catches the eye and we move for, perhaps not the first time but for a more in depth look, to her face that is held in profile. She seems to paralyzed with sadness, her eyes gazing downward, which I believe brings and slight weight to the bottom of the image. We follow the line of her face back to her sleeve, up her arm, to her hand. Her fingers indicate that the viewer must now move to the far right of the canvas, muted brown negative space is interrupted but the illuminated hand of a small child. We then notice the bright red of a turban worn by a woman whose face indicates extreme fear; a glance is taken at the child in her arms who is the first openly crying figure in the painting. The inclination however is to follow the red turbaned woman’s gaze to the background of the image, which reveals the massacre in progress. The intensity of her gaze brings weight back to the left side of the painting thus giving so much pain and suffering a context. As Arnheim mentions a right to left motion can give a viewer the sense that whatever is moving back to the left is working against a currently, facing a kind of struggle.

When put through a grey scale it is revealed that the yellow bodice of the mother and white flesh of the son are equiluminant; as are the deep red turban and green of the mother’s cape. To me this indicates the importance of these three figures to the viewer; their positions, emotions, and placement in the image take us through the layers of the scene. The four women in the scene create a triangle weighted at the bottom, which exists in the foreground. As the image is weighted to the right of the frame a balance to the left is struck by the strength of the red turbaned woman’s gaze and the line of primary colors of the left line of the triangle. While the muted colors of the background action is rendered present and some distance away by the grey column in the bottom right hand corner and by the viewer’s ability to see through the archway in the background.

I believe that because of this week’s readings I can now not only break down an image into its most important components, but also have a better understanding of how to read an image (long winded though it might be). So my question for the class is, have you been able to begin to break down images and the world around you? Does it inspire you?