y enclosed by them. To acquire knowledge of aesthetic form is to acquire knowledge of man.
translator of Dante's Divine Comedy
At the heart of all art is the concept of form, form in the sense of Mr. Ciardi's primal concept, above, and form in the post-Medieval sense of relationship to reality. Renaissance painters discovered the essential "untruth" of their art: as the artists of their era strove to recreate lifelike images, something that sculptors and architects could do with exacting verisimilitude if they so chose, the painter had only a two-dimensional plane with which to work. It was necessary to employ a deliberate lie; that is, only by utilizing techniques of artifice could the painter create an illusion of three dimensions. If the Renaissance began as a 're-birth" of the Greek classical tradition, the new child's development of "vanishing point" perspective and chiaroscuro brush strokes to delineate subtleties of light and shadow soon outgrew the ancient model's limitations.
By the Baroque period, however, the pressure of the lie began to tell: after all, the general purpose of art was still to glorify God** - the illusions of artists were more than a little philosophically opposed to the concept of literal Truth.
In France, this was a tension that remained from the days of the Gothic and Romanesque art of the Middle Ages. A prime example of this tension is a curious tableau of bas-reliefs carved around the central altar in Chartres cathedral depicting the life of Christ as described in the Gospels. It is a typical Medieval work of craftsmanship, notable mainly for its unknown artisans' skill at creating realistic semi-sculptural figures. Nevertheless, like other such works of the period, these tableau are essentially flat, distant - until the Gospel in John 8:7 when "He lifted himself up and said unto them, he that is without sin among you, let him cast a stone at her." At that moment, in the bas-...