For a large part of human history, painting did not have to do directly with physical reality, but with the intellectual idea that the artist – or craftsman, depending on who and when – wanted to convey. The Valencian writer Martí Domínguez (Madrid, 1966) starts from the paradigm shift represented by Giotto, just before the Renaissance, and who began to paint directly inspired by what he saw, to build his new book, Del natural . A history of nature in painting (Editions 62), with which he won the III prize Good Letters for Humanistic Essay.
And as he himself writes, “what seems logical and obvious to us now, in those days was much more confusing and incomprehensible. Painting was more of a mental thing, an exercise in erudition and artistic craft that was carried out in the shadows of the workshops and that had very little to do with everyday life. The history of men in many ways is nothing more than an immeasurable relationship of tricks to avoid seeing things as they are”.
The book, as can be inferred from the title, becomes a defense of painting from nature and traces its history with a journey that begins between the 13th and 14th centuries precisely with Giotto – according to history, it was discovered by Cimabue drawing a perfect lamb, but then it turned out that when painting the Adoration of the Magi, as he had never seen a camel the result was ominous -, and he ends up with Paul Gauguin and Suzanne Valadon at the beginning of a twentieth century in the which the author did not want to enter “because it is very multifaceted”. Of course, it includes an epilogue in which it reaches the present day and stops in particular at Miquel Barceló, and at the same time recognizes that in recent decades “we have recovered nature, because to defend it you need to know it”. “I am very interested in contemporary art, but it is so intense that I would give for another whole book”, he explains.
Domínguez assures, however, that his intention “is not to do art history, but literature to convey a point of view”, also based on what Joan Fuster did when he wrote El descrédit de la reality in 1955. “I’m a tastaollettes, and here I do essays, neither history nor criticism, because I have a tendency to put adjectives and academia and journalism remove them”, says Domínguez. “It is a book that I have written all my life, because as a child we went to many art galleries with my parents, I got very bored, until after a while they stayed there and I went to the forest “.
These two simultaneous interests lead to the chapter dedicated to Albrecht Dürer’s beetle: “Until then, no one had painted a beetle in such detail, since these insects were considered beings of the underworld.” In a way, it is the beginning of entomology, which is the specialty of this doctor in Biology and director of the magazine Mètode, who throughout his work both in novels and essays or articles has approached the worlds of science and humanism, as he showed in his previous novel, Mater (Proa), based on science fiction.
The writer structures Del natural in two poles: on the one hand the Renaissance – especially the Italian, but also the Flemish – and on the other the art of the 19th century, starting with Goethe – to whom he assures that “it can discover as a precedent for Friedrich” and ending up in the mountains of Cézanne, going through Goya or Constable, analyzing one by one many of the works of each artist and extracting juice both from one’s own gaze and making use of the texts of other authors, with a scholarly facet that is not surprising. So, for example, when he writes about Théodore Géricault’s Epsom Derby – where he depicts a race in which the horses, with their jockeys, seem to fly rather than run – he quotes texts or paintings by Friedrich, Leonardo, Gozzoli or Josep Pla until landing on Ernst Gombrich, who remembers that the way the horses run has nothing to do with the way the painter portrays, no matter how much he tried to fix it: the limits of human vision that photography so well he grasped later. A book, after all, that discovers the reality we have seen through art.
