Painters of Fantasy [antikvár]

Painters of Fantasy The word 'fantasy' sums up the nature of many remarkable works of art produced at various times and not confined to any particular country or period. It could be defined as the free exercise of the imagination, without deference to what we normally think of as reality. In painting it is the opposite of the realism sought after by the French Impressionists, who were mainly concerned with the optical effects of light and colour on the surfaces of objects visible to the eye. The spirit of fantasy, on the other hand, gives shape to the marvellous, the mysterious, the unknown. It has appealed to the sense of wonder in every age. The philosophy of the painter of fantasy was succinctly stated by the nineteenth-century French painter, Gustave Moreau, in describing his own attitude. 'I do not believe', he said, 'in what I touch or what I see. I believe only in what I do not see and above all in what I feel.' Moreau's contemporary, the philosopher of the fantastic, Josephin Peladan, went into more detail in the rules he drew up for his society designed to promote imaginative art, the Salon de la Rose-Croix. He called for a sweeping rejection of the many realistic categories of painting: patriotic and military subjects; representations of contemporary life; portraits; rustic scenes; all landscapes ('except those composed in the manner of Poussin'); seascapes; picturesque orientalism; all humorous themes; all pictures of domestic animals and those related to sport; and of flowers and still-life. After this comprehensive ban, what remained? Whimsical as it might seem the list of exclusions had the use of pointing to the separate existence and virtues of paintings inspired by legend, myth, allegory, dream and poetry, especially in its lyrical form, all modes in which fantasy has its part. It is even possible to include certain types of rehgious subject, though a distinction needs to be drawn between those that affirm essentials of belief and those that allow of a free interpretation. Fantasy is a term that does not apply to the pictorial rendering of Madonna and Child or the essential meaning of the Crucifixion. But there is a great amount of Christian legend which artists have been able freely to make use of without infringing basic tenets of faith, as for example the story of Salome (Plate 59) or Belshazzar's Feast (Plate 43). The visions that tormented St Anthony are variously suggested by the masters of fantasy (Plates 12,13, 17 and 83). Hell is a conception, tremendous but undefined, that has inspired different interpretations. Fantastic indeed are the monsters assailing the saint as the German master, Griinewald, imagines them. Hell is a weird psychological dimension as pictured by Hieronymus Bosch (Plate 9) or Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Plate 16). Fantasy had a fruitful source in the accretions of legend that had grown up round the memory of some of the saints, such as the miracles attributed to St Nicholas of Bari, for example his stilling a tempest at sea, an occasion to which a Florentine or Sienese master could give delectable shape. Often artists have identified the marvellous with the unknown. The islands of fantasy described in the Odyssey were those of a sea still unexplored. Geographical mystery took supernatural shape in the Homeric creations of the alluring sirens, the magically endowed Circe, the gigantic one-eyed Cyclops, themes that painters from the ancient Greco-Roman mural decorators to Turner in the nineteenth century have made their own. In a similar way medieval bestiaries include the fanciful beasts presumed to inhabit unknown lands, and early maps attach to such regions the warning notice, 'Here be monsters'. There are subjects of a fanciful kind that have been so painted as to give the impression of a beautiful reality. The Renaissance masters took pleasure in the idea of a classical 'golden age' and in episodes of classical mythology that enabled them to represent the human body in a perfection that might be deemed godlike. It is possible to regard a scene of Bacchanalian festival painted by Titian as a kind of ideal fantasy. Yet the grotesque had its place also in the scenes from classical fable that delighted learned patrons. There were the fauns, satyrs and centaurs to be pictured in their various diversions (Plate 4). The disguises of Jupiter in his amorous relations with humanity were a series of fantasies. Many masters have celebrated his appearance as a shower of gold to Danaë, to Antiope as a satyr, to Leda as a swan, to Europa as a bull. The grotesque was a necessary element in such a favourite subject as Perseus's rescue of Andromeda from the sea monster, where Beauty was heightened in effect by the ugliness of the Beast. The post-Renaissance centuries in Europe were on the whole less fanciful, the eighteenth century especially. Portraiture flourished, realism in landscape was growing, the rational rather than the mysterious was favoured. Yet there are always exceptions to be reckoned with. Witchcraft, a punishable offence, evidently fascinated artists and pubhc alike (Plates 27-9). In the fetes galantes of Watteau, the formal graces of the French court acquired a visionary charm; Watteau held an exquisite balance between the real and the unreal (Plate 31). Fantasy was sometimes an escape for the eighteenth-century view-painter from the repetition of familiar scenes that was his regular task. He found relief in the transformations of reality that had their sanction in a special genre, the capriccio. In paintings of this kind the artist could devise an architectural dream-world made up of fragments of reality rearranged as capriciously as he might choose.