To see a god in the Sun, to see in it a god’s mythic journey and intent, Akhenaten had done abstract looking. He had seen something physical and turned it into something metaphysical, allowing what he had seen to explain the conundrum of consciousness and the agony of death, and to be the source of life and the patterns in nature. God was light. Akhenaten photosynthesised light. He turned it into awe. Visible light, the tiny bit of the electromagnetic spectrum that human beings need in order to see became, paradoxically, the great symbol of the unseen. By the time of the Middle Ages, this abstract light was seen as distinct from the everyday light actually perceived by human eyes. The former was lumen, the latter was lux. The road of looking led from lux to lumen. This idea, this visual pun, these two types of light, held sway for centuries.
In the sixteenth-century Italian paintings of Caravaggio in particular, light was both lumen and lux, divine and optical. He became famous for his realistic light which also, in its drama and clarity, transcended realism. Shards of light suddenly seem to fall upon street people in his large paintings, enacting sacred or profane stories. The light dimmed in his work as the painter aged, but it did not lose its duality. Jump forward to the twentieth century and you get artists still interested in using light to refer to something beyond the material world. There are numerous examples. American artist James Turrell has us look up to the sky in his works, through open discs in ceilings. He frames Klein’s sky, like the roof of Rome’s Pantheon does. In the annual Fête des Lumières in Lyons in France, new computerised light animations seem to make buildings buckle or bend at the knee.
On a hill close to Lyons there stands a building that is made of concrete and looks like a beehive or a Star Wars battleship, but which controls light exquisitely. Seen from the outside of Le Corbusier’s La Tourette priory, these blunt stumps of concrete give little indication of their function.
But here is what happens on the inside. The stumps are the tops of light tubes or barrels, into which sunlight enters then bounces down, softening as it does so, lux becoming lumen. Through a circular aperture in its ceiling, they descend into a dark chamber, and here fall upon a concrete block, painted deep red.
In front of the block stand three pedestal altars on which monks could practise mass. The whole composition seems to combine Akhenaten’s sacred light (we could be inside a pyramid here) with Arnheim’s reduction of form. Also, perhaps, the image makes us think of the Tarkovsky image of the home with the children at the door – dark inside, the luminous beyond. Design, colour, light, shelter: a feast of looking. La Tourette focuses the theme of this chapter, how looking at something concrete, or of the real world, can lead to more abstract things. These altars in the convent are like David or Bacall.
But looking at light is not the only way in which human beings have seen the unseen. This Russian panel from the 1200s gives Jesus Christ an attenuated nose, tiny mouth and large almond eyes, framed with multiple curves. Two strands of hair add a hint of realism into this otherwise geometric portrayal, but what is relevant here is where Christ is looking.
At first it seems that he is staring directly out at us, but judging by the asymmetry of the whites of his eyes, he is actually looking slightly past us, over our right shoulder, to a place adjacent to where we are but not the same. We look at him, and then with him, past ourselves, to something other. In the Christian tradition, this place is heaven. He is saying, It is close. Paradise is not lost. He is doing the abstract looking for us. It seems a jump to go from a Russian icon to a Japanese film, but Yasujiro Ozu makes his third appearance in our story here. His scene of red flowers and walking girls showed how an image can take our eyes for a walk, and his balanced domestic interior showed how rooms can contain looking. In this shot, from his most famous film Tokyo Story, a woman looks in exactly the way that Christ looks in the icon: apparently at us, but then subtly not. Our eyes do not look with hers. Is she looking through us, beyond us, or again, slightly over our right shoulder?
Ozu was not overtly Buddhist, but he certainly wanted his film to gesture towards the metaphysical. His gravestone carries neither his name nor details of when he lived, just the symbol mu,
A converse abstraction related to looking is evil, or the devil. In ancient Greece, the Arab world, Iran, India and North Africa, iniquity is represented by, and then repelled by, directly staring eyes. In ancient Egypt, this image of the Eye of Ra represents the destructive and malign aspects of the sun god.
Across the Middle East, nazars are talismans which reflect the satanic look back onto itself.
Reflection is a key point: mirrors are sometimes the harbingers of wickedness. The vanity they fuel is, it seems, damnable. The Russian icon painting could almost be Christ looking at his own image, but look too long into a mirror and you see the beast. The godless queen in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s ‘Little Snow-White’, who became the Evil Queen in the film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, stared into her mirror and saw a green, demonic version of herself.
And the idea that malevolence lies within a looking glass continues. In Candyman, based on Clive Barker’s short story ‘The Forbidden’, the eponymous angry and vengeful presence can be summoned by looking into a mirror and saying his name five times. Three subsequent films dramatised the story which, in turn, became an urban legend.
God, emptiness, abstraction, the void, the devil, the metaphysical: human beings have always convinced themselves that they could see such things, and have had ways of seeing them: in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, brutalist architecture, Orthodox icons, Japanese film frames, Middle Eastern talismans and horror fiction. In India, the Hindu god Shiva is pictured dancing the world into existence, surrounded by a ring of flames, his hair flung outwards into the universe. The image somehow manages to tell a story of creation, of destruction, of the circularity of the cosmos, of the centrality of god, and of the power of dance – a journey around the world.
Hinduism is strikingly figurative. The gods take many human and animal forms, as if the looking journey is not from the material here to the abstract there, but in the other direction: from the divine and the invisible to the tangible. In another one of the world’s great religions, Islam, there is a different kind of visual exchange between the human world and the god world. The centre of worship in Islam is as abstract as Le Corbusier’s red block. The Ka’bah in Mecca was a place of pilgrimage for pagan polytheists before the Prophet Muhammad had his first revelations in CE 610 and made his migration – hejira – in CE 622. Soon he declared it the holiest shrine in Islam – a visual sun, as it were, made of black stone, to which all should look when they pray, and around which faithful pilgrims should process. The image on the next page from a 1500s Persian poetry manuscript shows the black square in a blue horseshoe, surrounded by the rectangular walls of the al-Haram mosque, which are surmounted by forty-seven domes resembling the flames in Shiva’s dance.