As expected, this conception of the painting that needs to express the spiritual than the material influences the style of artists and how they present the content of the works. Poussin's paintings reveal a very thin pigmentary layer and rather dry, without any oily embankment or agglomerations, and the outline route is extremely precise, each work being preceded by very detailed drawing sketches; No one can have the feeling. In front of these works, as they were worked in a hurry, in a momentum and the speed of the gesture. In turn, the subject of the paintings is designed in such a way as to value a vast intellectual content. To paint nature is not enough to Poussin: refuse to be portrait, there is no dead nature made by him, and the landscapes he likes to paint in the last years of life hide their motivation under allegorical pretexts (those Four seasons) or mythological (Landscape with Orion Orb) that accepts the introduction of characters in nature. The tendency to strengthen the intellectual content of painting also explains the multiplication of savante works, representations that extract the subject of legends and erudite fables or the allegors that the eighteenth century tastes in particular. In this era, the painter is considered unworthy of his mission if he is waiting from the Comanditar (as often made his predecessors) to indicate how to treat a subject.
His own culture must tell it. Nothing forbids them instead consult books. From now on painters' libraries, works are regularly intended to feed them erudion, sometimes insufficient: in bulky folio, whose engravings are visual inspir ation , dictionaries or savante toms providing mythological subjects, as well as symbol repertoires with their interpretation , Indispensable keys to imagine allegories, at the same time svante and the meaning of the trained audience. The belief that from now on the spirit must illuminate the hand is also seen in the composition of works, whether it is space or bodies. Thus, the perspective is more than ever the queen of the painting. Some artists develop a passion that goes to the obsession for this discipline. In France France, Gravor Abraham Bosse, a prospect teacher at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, then the founder of his own prospective school, multiplies the scientific treaties and satires against his colleagues more relaxed in terms of studying, to support a way of approaching a art in mathematical.
The titles of his works - the universal manner of Mr Desargues to briefly practiculate the perspective as in geometry (1648) or the painter converted to precise and universal rules in art (1667) - Say enough about the sobriety of content and the scientific character of the theories illustrating theories. In the 17th century Holland, the results of optical and geometric research, undertaken by a highly cosmopolitan scientific community, find their echo in works with a complex perspective. At Dordrecht, Samuel van Hoogstreten, at Delft, Gerard Houckgeest and Carei Fabritius paint stunning panoramic landscapes or interior views that involve the use of scientific instruments, such as the lenses or obscure camera (Oscuro Chamber). Another Delft painter, the great Vermeer himself, also uses this appliance, a box having a minusable opening by which it is left to pass the light coming from the scene in front of the opening - otherwise certain visual effects could not be explained Early in his paintings, color splashes that highlight the reflexes of light or blurred contours of objects that seem to escape the deep view of the field.
* Note: Nadeije Laneyrie day -Painting from the secrets of workshops, Rao Publishing House, 2005