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E y e s t o S e e
Spontaneity by Design
By Michael Schrauzer
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This Rock
Volume 19, Number 7
 September 2008 
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Resurrection (1584-1594) by El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopulos). Located in the Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.
Even before The Da Vinci Code phenomenon there was an extensive library of books—both fiction and non-fiction—purporting to have deciphered the "secret meaning" encoded in some seemingly insignificant feature of a famous work of art that had somehow escaped the notice of countless viewers and scholars up until then. Needless to say, that library experienced tremendous growth after the success of Dan Brown’s novel, and it now embraces many pages on the Internet as well. Much of what is asserted by the practitioners of this cryptological sport goes well beyond the boundary of rational speculation into what can only be called "kookdom." One Web site claims to "explain" the genius of Vermeer’s paintings by finding a "secret" and "forbidden" compositional geometry in them that points to the Templars and the Holy Grail.
I don’t intend to venture into this dubious territory, but I do agree that art really does make use of several "hidden languages" to encode meaning; to that extent, the Dan Browns of the world are right. These artistic idioms include the language of form, the language of meaning and symbolism, and the language of feeling and aesthetics, among others. Art communicates to us through them, each one encoding a different part of the entire message, and while they and the visual statements they make may well be "hidden" in some sense, they are hidden in plain sight, right before our eyes. The problem for us is to recognize them for what they are and to understand what they’re saying.
Art Is Multilingual
Fortunately, as a rule, the languages art communicates with are not too difficult to interpret, especially since most of us can count ourselves native speakers of at least some of them. We have been exposed to them from the moment we first began to look at the world of light and color around us, with fluency developing through experience and education. Indeed, our appreciation of the lyrical expressions of aesthetics is probably to some extent innate and intuitive, and most of us accumulate a substantial inventory of words from the poetic vocabulary of symbolism by the time we are adults. There is always more to learn, of course, but in general we are able to recognize what is beautiful or what a halo is supposed to mean with little difficulty.
On the other hand, proficiency in the language of form, which speaks through the composition and design of a work of art, is less commonly or easily acquired: It remains a mysterious jargon even to many who value and esteem what the other languages are saying. Naturally, artists must be well-versed in it—they need it to understand how to organize the fundamental shape and structure of their work. In art classes and the works of the masters, they study the secrets of its alphabet, its grammar and syntax, its styles and accents; they may well invent variants of their own. But because it operates at a low level, the voice of form can be so overpowered by the others—at least in pre-modern art—that it may be virtually inaudible to the non-artist. (Modern art frequently speaks only in the language of form, and very loudly, but that’s another story).
In fact, many artists don’t want this language to be "heard" at all. They hide what it says beneath the melody of the other voices, lest its comparatively prosaic and rational utterances detract from their high poetry. Indeed, when the formal structure of a work of art becomes more noticeable than its meaning or beauty, it is liable to be criticized as being contrived, stilted, or too "thought out." Form is supposed to sound at the subliminal level, a deep bass rhythm that supports but does not interfere with the rhapsodies of the singers. And this is just fine with many viewers of art, who are more interested in what a work of art is "about" than in how it was put together: Reading a novel is more entertaining than watching it being written or analyzing its typographical and linguistic design.
So when we approach a painting like El Greco’s Resurrection, in which the aesthetic, emotive language speaks especially powerfully, as does, for the Catholic viewer, the language of religious meaning, we may not immediately realize—or in many cases, care—that it is speaking formally as well. Passionate, energetic works like El Greco’s hardly seem as if they have been carefully thought out and planned beforehand. They appear to have the spontaneity and freedom of the Spirit—not the steady beat of the rational Logos. Yet the formal language is there, speaking of many things, if quietly, and offering us the chance to converse with art in what is really its most intimate and natural voice. Here we will try to discern the quiet language of form, though it will be best in this limited space to focus on just one strand of its discourse, compositional geometry.
Composed Harmony
In simplest terms, compositional geometry describes the relationship of the parts of a composition to the whole. It tells artists who listen to it how to resolve some of the most basic problems they face when composing any work of art: Where should the forms and figures be placed within the picture plane? How big should they be? What positions should they take? The possibilities are infinite, but choices must be made. One could adopt random or intuitive approaches, as some artists do, trusting the aesthetic spirit and hoping for the best, but compositional geometry offers a more rational and deliberate system, founded on the inherent beauty of number and proportion. It uses simple shapes—squares, circles, triangles—and regular patterns, often determined by the format of the picture plane, to trace an invisible framework or grid on which the artist can harmoniously dispose his forms.
El Greco, for instance, here has the problem of arranging his figures in an unusually tall and narrow format, awkward from a compositional point of view, but one he evidently enjoyed using, judging from his many similarly proportioned works. But compositional geometry provides him with clear guidance about how to proceed.
To understand what it told him, I invite you to take a ruler and draw the two diagonals connecting the corners of the picture plane. It is no coincidence that Jesus stands on the exact intersection of these lines, at the center of composition. But that’s only the beginning. Take the width of the painting as a measure and draw a horizontal line that same distance down from the top, making a square. Now draw the diagonals of that square to discover that they intersect at Jesus’ navel. The locations of these two intersections precisely specify the dimensions of Jesus’ body. Many additional lines may be sketched in to reveal how El Greco similarly developed the postures and proportions of the other figures; the accompanying illustration shows some of them. The angle or contour of an arm or leg, the placement of a knee or elbow, the orientation of a sword—most have been aligned according to a pattern suggested by the geometry of the composition. The alignments aren’t necessarily exact: They are guidelines, not rigid boundaries. Similar analyses could be conducted on many other works of art.
The Sublime Word
This use of such a systematic procedure might strike us as disappointing. In the popular imagination, "true" art is improvised in real time by the unerring creative genius of the artist. And so it happens—sometimes. But art is as much an expression of feeling and intuition as it is an act of reason, worked out in the language of form. Hours of plodding, methodical preparation, practice, and experimentation may have preceded the final result. Canvas and pigments had to be prepared, models scheduled, preliminary drawings made. There may have been numerous failed efforts, erasures, over-paintings, and new beginnings, which the public never sees. If artists like El Greco are able to give their paintings an air of spur-of-the-moment effortlessness—an effect El Greco explicitly aimed for—it is because they have worked at it for years in their studios.
In this dramatic portrayal of the triumph of life over death—the most astounding event in the life of Christ, yet undescribed in the Gospels and a surprisingly uncommon subject in art—aesthetic grace builds on the firm foundation of formal nature. The passionate El Greco clearly evidences his belief in the primacy of imaginative and mystical vision over classical orderliness, with his famously elongated figures and the indeterminate, flickering background, which takes the action out of the real world and into the abstracted realm of the Spirit (El Greco has no use for the strictures of linear perspective), but even he does not make random and arbitrary gestures. Chaos does not reign at the heart of Creation, which was given form by the Word. Order and meaning are encoded everywhere, strong emotions can be guided by reason, and art of every description is constructed with the language of form.
Fifty days after the Resurrection came Pentecost, when everyone heard the other speaking in his own language. Art too speaks many languages, but its voice is universal. It engages us at every level of our being: our senses, our hearts, our minds, and our souls. It speaks the sublime language of God, with tongues of fire and the words of the Logos.
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Catholic Answers
