Seeing each of these things will help us understand the natural world and feel part of it. Such looking changed as human culture underwent a series of revolutions. For nomadic people, an expanse of desert or grassland was something you moved through according to the seasons, in search of pasture or animals to hunt. Come the agricultural revolution, land was what you settled on, cultivated and marked off as yours. The space you saw was the thing you worked and, if you were lucky, owned. Then landowners began to think of land and landscape, not to be worked but to be admired. It was art, it was picturesque. Come industrialisation and capitalism, further and ongoing detachments took place: workers crammed into cities, and what was outside cities – the countryside – was seen from a distance. Landscape became estranged, it was no longer readable as nomads or farmers would read it. It caught the eye as before, but had become an object of desire.
LOOKING AND EMOTION
The most affecting looking connections a child makes as it develops are to the emotions of others. It enters the world of visible emotion. In New York, people were moved by Marina Abramović’s simple stare, but what happens early in our lives when people who are clearly feeling something stray into our field of vision? Maybe they are far away and their back is turned:
In this painting Pablo Picasso does not show us the woman’s face, but we can read her body language. Her head tilts left, on top of the child, and her left shoulder drops to create a scoop in which to hold it. Her body language is inward; she is hugging the child so tightly that we see nothing of her arms. The mood is blue, the pain is blue. The background, what is in front of her, is empty or obscured. As we look at her we might imagine that she has closed her eyes. She seems to cast a shadow on the ground, but also up the wall on the right, as if she is in a prison cell.
Which perhaps she was. Picasso had been visiting the Saint-Lazare women’s hospital-prison in Paris in the period before he painted this, and a close friend had, a year previously, committed suicide. It is hard not to read solitude and despair in this picture, and, by not showing the woman’s face, the painter leaves room for us to project emotions and scenarios onto it, to connect what we feel to what she feels.
Kenji Mizoguchi, whose misty lake scene we encountered earlier, understood this. Like Picasso, he portrayed women in his work more than men. In one of his best early films, Osaka Elegy, the woman, Ayako, has family problems so is forced into having an affair with her boss. In this scene, like the mother in Picasso’s painting, she turns her back to us to hide her pain, but stands upright, holding herself together.
We see this and are moved. We are not confronted with her sadness head-on, and so there is room for ours. But what if the suffering person turns around to face us? In this Mayan figurine from CE 600–900, the crying woman seems lost in herself.
Her eyes are closed and her right hand covers her left eye, a double enclosure. Yet she is not trying to hide from us. Her sadness has taken her beyond shyness, and so her chin is raised slightly, as if she is coming out of a spasm of tears. As we look, we think that this woman will survive. She is not crumpled. She has poise.
We would find it painful to look at a real woman crying, especially if she was someone we knew, so art in most cultures has allowed us to look at such sadness in a surrogate way. In Christianity, paintings of the lamentation of Christ – for example Giotto’s extraordinary fresco in the Scrovegni Chapel – depict those around the dead Jesus Christ in a wailing spiral, as if sadness is a vortex, a seen thing that spirals outwards.
In almost all of the lamentations, the bodies are shown full length, but many artists have felt that the discretion of Picasso and Mizoguchi in only showing the back, and the body language of the Mexican sculpture and the lamentations, were all too oblique. They wanted us to look directly, closely, at human faces to read the emotions in them. This silver-plated iron mask was found in Homs, Syria, and dates from the second millennium BCE:
The mask might have been worn in combat, but it is the teardrops that catch our eye. The central one below the man’s left eye is pulled downwards by gravity, into a globe, but on either side of it is another one – spherical, like a dew drop. Unlike the Mexican woman, this king’s tears do not seem momentary. They are stylised, as if a lifetime of sadness is being suggested. The face is not wrenched. It is in repose, the mouth slightly open like the eyes are slightly open. Looking at this face, we seem to see not the onslaught of emotion, but its memory.
In the twentieth century, when the Danish film-maker Carl Theodor Dreyer came to show the religious trial of the fifteenth-century French-woman Jeanne d’Arc, he did so by filming his actor – Falconetti – mostly in close-up. Here, as in the Syrian mask, tears fall from an unadorned face, seen almost square-on.
When we get to the late nineteenth century in our story, we will see that the close-up was one of cinema’s most distinctive visual strategies, but at this stage let’s imagine that this is not a still from a movie, but a moment seen by our developing child. She reads this face. The downcast eyes are not appealing directly to her for help. The muscles around the mouth and on the forehead are not contorted. The lower lip drops slightly. There is quietude in how the tears drop. The storm has passed, though another might be on its way.
It is important for us to learn to look at emotions for evolutionary reasons, of course. We need to be able to see if someone is going to help us or hurt us. But looking at emotion is not only self-interested. Take this painting, Susanna and the Elders, by Ottavio Mario Leoni.
The woman has been accused of adultery by the two men. She is condemned to death, but is eventually released when the men cannot agree on where the adultery took place. In the painting, though she is almost naked, Susanna is not perturbed. She looks up at the men, reaches out; she wears a pearl necklace, her hair is up and her make-up carefully applied. The scene is calm. She and the men seem to be discussing her fraught situation with relatively little emotion.
Then look at the same subject painted by Artemisia Gentileschi.
This Susanna turns away. Both her hands are up, gesturing to the men that they should leave her alone. Her brow is furrowed, the redness in her cheeks shows upset, shame maybe, and her hair is down. The first painter saw the subject as a theme, a discourse, a morality tale to consider. Gentileschi sees pain, perhaps abuse. In the first picture, the moment could go on for some time; in the second, Susannah wants it to end as quickly as possible.
Gentileschi is looking in a precise way. She was only seventeen when she painted the picture, and the records suggest that she had been raped a year earlier. As most painters until this time – the early 1600s – had been men, many artworks had a tendency to downplay the suffering in such mythic stories, or to present them in such a way as to allow the men who looked at them to imagine themselves as the men in the scene. Gentileschi does not quite allow this. She directs our eyes past the discourse, below its bonnet, into the suffering. She is putting herself in the position of Susanna, asking what she would have felt, closing the psychological distance that the story otherwise affords.
In other words, she is empathising with her, she is connecting. At its best, looking allows such empathy. It makes us travel along the z-axis, out of our own experience, into someone else’s. It requires an element of self-loss, a dialling down of our own