Art in Person

Personally viewing art is paramount to fully appreciating it. Although the reproduction of artwork for study provides students with an opportunity to see art it does not provide an opportunity to fully interact with it. The reproductions of paintings from the “Renaissance to Rococo” exhibition at the Mint Museum of Art automatically and indiscriminately reduce the original works to smooth, two-dimensional symbols. The photographs and slides of this exhibition insert another degree of separation between the viewer and the art by transforming the work into a new object and contaminating the visual experience of the original paintings. In the same way that photographs can often trigger memories without replacing them; pictures depict things in their own way, often ignoring the presence, texture, and detail of the paintings they portray. Viewing artwork in person allows art to encroach upon the viewer’s world and relate to them without filters.

The scale of artwork is easily relayed, quantitative information, but the overwhelming presence of most of the work in the “Renaissance to Rococo” exhibition is not so easily conveyed. Giovanni Paolo Panini’s mise-en-abyme painting, “Interior of a Picture Gallery with the Collection of Cardinal Gonzaga (1749)” makes the distinction between size and magnitude abundantly clear. The smaller paintings within the work are vigorous in their multiplicity, and the painting as a whole is magnetic as it forcefully pulls the viewer through space despite the two-dimensional nature of its form. A photograph only pretends to do justice to the intensity of this image and serves to entrap this painting in its own two-dimensionality rather than facilitating the subtle surrender of this restraint which is readily apparent in person. Paintings such as Panini’s draw the distinction between interpretation and representation by moving stealthily into the real world through it’s depiction of space and light; a characteristic that is lost through reproduction.

Brushstroke also allows artists to depict the world more accurately. The development of painting becomes evident through the progressively substantial interaction between paint and canvas in the “Renaissance to Rococo” exhibition. Each country has taken their own approach to portraying the world throughout the centuries, but as the layers of paint build so do the layers of visual interest in many of these paintings. Artists slowly become aware that they are working over paint not simply canvas and the emergence of variation in brushstroke becomes visible. Several of these painting's textured, matte surfaces develop an infinite variety of perspectives with a new one becoming available with every infinitesimal change in the viewer’s position. Joseph Wright