Representing a shadow has not been as easy as we think now: the artists who risked painting or drawing them before knowing how they work did what they could, that is, what they did not know they invented, especially in perspective and shape. . without cutting Thus, we have a wide repertoire of attacks against the most elementary laws of logic, physics, chemistry and nonsense and that, nevertheless, look very good because we don’t even realize it.
Roberto Casati and Patrick Cavanagh examine in their recent publication The visual world of shadows (MIT Press) the difficulties faced by the courageous artists who decided to show them, something that has only happened in traditional Western art; in other cultures, such as those of Asia, they have given rise to shadow theaters and plays on paper. The catalog of shadows that do impossible things offered by Casati and Cavanagh, on which this report is based, shows that there is nothing that resists human creativity. Although the result has quite a bad shadow.
The Romans were the first to dare to show shadows, although the Greeks had already developed studies on the “geometry of light”, the effects of a continuous light source on objects. But the highly influential Plato was in charge of warning against them, warning that the shadows deceive us about reality, and through the painter’s brush, also the human eye, something that those who seek the truth reject. So they left for their successors, Rome, this visual deception.
The Roman Villa of Casale, from the 3rd-4th centuries AD, is famous for its mosaics, especially for one that shows a group of young women practicing sports in rudimentary bikinis, but also for the hunting and fighting scenes, in which they have They were very generous with the shadows: everyone, humans, animals and even carts and wagons have their own, we were going to say corresponding, although some figures get what they get.
Most of these Roman shadows are short and stubby, that is, they look more like a club or a club, but you have to admire their attempt to show reality as it is, for example, each of the four legs of a tiger or of a horse have theirs. It is a pity that, in pursuit of the impression, they go too far, as in another of the mosaics of the Villa Romana del Casale: the man’s right leg has two shadows, one of which wraps itself around and passes in front of a stick that holds.
And it’s a pity that, in pursuit of aesthetics, liberties are taken such as painting them white. Indeed, in a mosaic in Lyon, as the background is black, the shadow of the child represented changes color so that it can be distinguished. And in a recently discovered third-century BC mosaic in Antakya, Turkey, a skeleton advises viewers to enjoy life. Since the background is black again, the shadow of the skeleton is white.
The Middle Ages preferred to focus on light and shadow was rarely treated until the advent of the Renaissance, with its new obsession with exploring perspective. And this is when the creative fury is unleashed. In their book, Casati and Cavanagh show with erudition but also with a good sense of humor a whole catalog of freedoms for artists and the ability of shadows to overcome all kinds of obstacles in their path, science says what it wants.
Shadows that magically pass under a figure to reappear again on the other side. This is the case of the figure of Saint Catherine in the painting by the German Konrad Witz Santa Magdalena y Santa Catalina (1440): the saint’s dress, of an intense red, folds and unfolds showing the magnificence of the fabric and the skill of the painter. How was he going to see himself overshadowed, worth the redundancy, by a shadow? The artist passes it under and holy Easter. As the book’s authors state, “in many cases, the rules of physics that apply in a real scene seem optional in a painting; they can be obeyed or ignored at the discretion of the artist to enhance the desired effect.”
Witz himself did his thing again in The Adoration of the Kings (1444): the shadows of the Virgin and child fold the corner wall to continue on the next one as if nothing had happened. “If some shadows don’t climb walls and they should, others go around corners and they shouldn’t. The problem with corners and walls is that the surfaces impose constraints that some shadows don’t.”
There are shadows that appear and disappear as the artist sees fit, but others simply cut their losses. An example: in a scene from the Polittico di Sant’Antonio (1460-1470) one of the friars seems to apologize for the visual attack perpetrated by Piero della Francesca, since the shadows, which begin on the red carpet, are cut as is. upon reaching the wall.
Quite the opposite of what happens with the shadow of a page in Scenes from the Story of the Argonauts (1465) by Biagio d’Antonio and Jacopo del Sellaio: the shadow does not start on the floor, but directly on the wall, raised of nothing. “Cut shadows simply stop and fade when they reach a surface where continuation of shadow shape and color would create pictorial difficulties for the painter,” the researchers state.
Plato did very well alerting us to the deceptions that well-manipulated images can lead us to. But the artists who, during the Renaissance and before, sought a way to show shadows without making them too obtrusive, weren’t driven by a desire to distort reality, and they didn’t do much harm either: few if not none of the viewers realized that the shadow was not where it should be. And neither do we, unless we look closely, and not like that.
As Roberto Casati and Patrick Cavanagh conclude, some deviations from the physical description of people and objects are bound to be immediately recognized by the viewer, such as the impossible color of the Fauvists or the deformations of the Cubists. But here they go unnoticed by the viewer: “the transgressions of science reveal that our visual brain uses simpler and reduced physics to understand the world.”
