We do not only perceive space when we climb mountains, of course. We want a room with a view. A house or flat with such a view will sell for more than one without. As we will see later in our story, the drive to invent hot air balloons and tall buildings comes, in part, from the desire to see space. Images are no longer things that appear on the blank pages. They appear in them. In terms of geometry, where an x-axis is left–right and a y-axis is up–down, in–out is the z-axis – that line in space that links us with everything in front of us.
In southern Scotland, on raised moorland overlooking this view, the artist Ian Hamilton Finlay built six small stone walls which carry the words
LITTLE FIELDSLONG HORIZONS LITTLE FIELDS LONGFOR HORIZONS HORIZONS LONGFOR LITTLE FIELDS
The first line captures the smallness of the looker and the distance of the looked-at – the length of z. By moving the word ‘long’ in the second line, he doubles its meaning – far and wanted. We want the afar, that which stretches into the distance. The z-axis is implicated in desire; it is our sense of adventure, our wanderlust and the way that we visualise the future that lies ahead.
Reprinted by permission of the estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay
The story of z-ness, of the journey from in to out in the visual arts, has been shifting and dramatic. In this fourteenth-century Persian illustration, four military tents, four people and distant hills are all pushed up against the picture plane, distinct from each other because of their colour or pattern. There are no shadows, a frequent sign of z-lessness.
For much of the Middle Ages, Western artists followed suit, cramming their characters, stories, incidents and symbols into a shallow, almost z-less space. But a new movement – the Renaissance – became beguiled by z, depth. As early as 1278–1318, the painter Duccio tilted the top of this Last Supper table backwards, away from the picture surface, breaking the spell of flatness and inducing a kind of vertigo, a teetering visual drama in which, to our eyes, it looks as if the cutlery and plates will slide off, onto the apostles who are in front of – or is that below? – it.
It looks as if the back wall is recessed, that the ceiling brackets are pointing towards us and that the artist has taken a step backwards out of the room, and that, as a result, he is viewing it through a window. Our child’s perception of z is analogous to this growing visual separation.
From here onwards, z – the illusion of three-dimensional space – was one of the tricks and pleasures of Western painting. Northern European artists showed us rooms seen through rooms; Mantegna made us feel as if we were sitting at the feet of Jesus Christ; allegorical or religious scenes were set in architectural spaces to make them feel touchable, real, or similar to our own lives. Z had poetics, but politics too. In his television series and book Ways of Seeing, John Berger said that paintings with such an appearance of depth, with single vanishing-point perspective, arranged the visible world as if it is centred on the spectator, ‘as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God’. He was right to draw attention to this assumption that Western lookers made that they were the centre of the universe, but the z-axis is political in another sense too. As we will see, the line from me – here – to you – there – is the line on which sympathy and empathy take place.
LOOKING AND COLOUR
Let’s imagine that we have moved forward in history from the earliest days of Homo sapiens. We are in Egypt now, at the time of Cleopatra. Another baby is looking. After seeing blurs and space, like its ancestor, our new baby starts to see colour. Her pages become tinted and more complex. In nature, the recurrent colours are the green pigment chlorophyll, in plants and algae, and the skin pigment melanin, but the biggest sheet of colour that humans ever see is sky blue. Each of the colours has its own history, but let’s focus on blue. The complexity of its story is mirrored in the stories of the other colours.
Looking at a cloudless sky is z-less. We have no sense of distance. The painter Yves Klein was born in Nice in the south of France, so in infancy would have often seen the blue-sheet sky. In his late teens, he lay on a beach and signed that sky. Will he have understood that the blueness comes from what is now called Rayleigh scattering, sunlight bouncing off particles in the atmosphere? Will he have noticed that if he dropped his eyes from the intense blue above him, to the horizon, it will have looked whiter? In Milan in 1957 he showed a series of paintings, each entirely ultramarine, mixed in a resin to make it more luminous, more intense. They echoed the infinite scale of his childhood sky-watching, the saturation of his field of vision.
Yet the story of looking at blue is not as direct as Klein’s experience might suggest. It weaves in and out of human consciousness and culture. There is no blue in the 17,000-year-old Lascaux cave paintings, perhaps because no animals have blue fur. The semi-precious stone lapis lazuli, which gave Klein’s ultramarine paint its intensity of colour, was probably first mined in Afghanistan in the seventh century BCE. In ancient Egypt, where our baby is, it was a symbol of daybreak. Women – perhaps Cleopatra amongst them – painted their lips blue-black. As it could not be mined in Europe, for example, lapis lazuli was as precious as gold in the ancient world, but from around 2000 BCE there was another blue, cobalt, which was lighter and less intense than lapis.
It was used to colour glass in the Middle East, and much later, in the 1300s, to tint the underglaze in Chinese pottery.
Given that these and other blue pigments existed, and that the Egyptians had a word for blue, and that the biggest visible things in the world were blue, it comes as a surprise to hear that not once is the sky or sea called blue in the writings of Homer, or in the Bible, or in the 10,000 lines of the Hindu Veda. Unlike Jewish culture which values the verbal more than the visual, Greece was a place where looking was prized – ‘Knowledge is the state of being seen,’ wrote Bruno Snell in The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought – so we would expect Homer to have a broad lexicon of looking. He describes the sea as bronze or ‘wine dark’ and writes of its sheen, but not what we would call its colour. As Homer and the Bible’s authors lived around the Mediterranean, they will have seen it on many sunny days as it reflected the clear blue sky above.
Explaining this leads us into the subjectivity of colour, how it relates to our thinking and values. There was no word for blue in ancient Chinese, Japanese, Greek or Hebrew, so when the speakers of those languages looked at the sky they did not see something on the colour spectrum so much as the light spectrum, or the space spectrum, or the divine spectrum. Most languages had words for dark and light from their earliest times, and then came red, then green or yellow. The last principal colour was blue. Little that was solid was blue. When you looked to the sky, you did not see something material; you saw where your god was. It is impossible to understand how Homer looked when he wrote The Odyssey, but he was writing about war and homecoming in a country that had no way of quarrying anything blue. Perhaps his themes favoured their own image systems. Tenebrous contrasts in tone occur throughout The Odyssey; his is a visual world of conflict. Blue is hard to fit into that paradigm.
We will return to how the