Tipos de Balanced Scorecard

First then, let us consider how trompe l‟œil „works‟. In this respect, it is important to note that we never normally confuse a picture with a real three- dimensional scene, even if, as Willats argues, we draw on our perception of the latter to make sense of the former. For the theorist, representational pictures instead constitute a „third domain‟, which means that they are neither perceived as fully flat nor as possessing the substantive spatial dimensionality seen in the

96

The claim that Cubism inspires a sense of movement has often been justified by referring to the artist‟s synthesis of multiple viewpoints. This interpretation was first advanced by Gleizes and Metzinger in their 1912 book Du Cubisme and has been common in the literature ever since. The theme of touch has also been invoked to support the claim that the Cubists picture the „idea‟ or the perceptual synthesis of the object instead of its partial visual appearance. For instance, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler makes this suggestion in his 1920 book The Rise of Cubism (Der Weg zum Kubismus). For two accounts which are closer in spirit to the argument I develop see Edwin Mullins, Braque (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), esp. Chapter Four „Analytic Cubism‟, pp. 52 – 71and Paul Smith, „How a Cubist Picture Hangs Together‟ in Art of the Twentieth Century, ed Jason Gaiger and Paul Wood (London: Yale University Press/Open University, 2003), pp. 62 – 89.

world. 97 The reason for this, or so he claims, is that the coherence of representation depends on a limited range of drawing and denotation systems which can only be combined in certain „grammatical‟ ways.98

Therefore, counter to the claim about „twofoldness‟ made by Richard Wollheim,99

Willats insists that we experience the third domain as a space that is sui generis since pictures are granted their own phenomenology by virtue of the artist‟s particular arrangement of marks. Or to put this another way, while a two-dimensional image may look to have depth, this differs from the experience of depth that we have in real life.

This third domain conspicuously announces its presence for several reasons. For one thing, the material qualities of the medium and the support are often visible – the texture of oil, for example, or the weave of the canvas – not to

97

Willats refers to trompe l‟œil as an „exceptional case‟ and excludes it from consideration in his paper (p. 5). For full discussion see „The Third Domain: The Role of Pictorial Images in Picture Perception and Production‟, Axiomathes, 13 (2002), p. 1 – 15. To describe the third domain – which Willats refers to as the „pictorial image‟ – the author cites an earlier publication in which he and Fred Dubery claim that „pictures can be regarded as special cases of relief sculpture, compressed until they lie wholly within two-dimensional space‟, p. 5. See also Dubery and Willats, Perspective and Other Drawing Systems (London: The Herbert Press; New York: Van Nostrand Reinold,.1983), p. 19.

98

While Willats does refer to a pictorial „grammar‟ several times in Art and Representation and also hints that this may be comparable to the universal grammar proposed by Chomsky, he is nevertheless cautious about expressing this analogy in unequivocal terms. In a forthcoming paper, 'Pictorial Grammar: Chomsky, John Willats, and the rules of representation' to be published in Art History in 2011, Paul Smith considers this association in a more explicit way. For Willats‟s discussion of the common pairings of drawing and denotation systems see Art and Representation, pp. 149 – 167.

99

For Wollheim, „twofoldness‟ characterises the phenomenology of „seeing in‟ which representational pictures evoke and which is sometimes also produced by accidental

configurations in nature. This experience is marked by a dualism since we can either attend to the marks on a surface or we can concentrate on the illusory forms to which they give rise.

Accordingly, this is similar to Gombrich‟s concept of „projection‟. But while Gombrich claims that that we cannot see the picture surface and the depictive content at one and the same time, Wollheim claims that we see the depictive content in – and therefore, at the same time as – the marks. For Gombrich‟s account of projection see Art and Illusion, 5th ed. (London: Phaidon, 1977), especially part three „The Beholder‟s Share‟, pp. 154 – 246. For Wollheim‟s account of seeing-in see „What the Spectator Sees‟ in Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxley (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), pp. 101 – 150 and Art and its objects, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1980), Essay V „Seeing-as, seeing- in, and pictorial representation‟, pp. 205 – 226.

mention the way that the individual marks are applied – as strokes or blobs of paint, for instance. Of course, there are many cases when the artist effectively conceals his or her labour, as the immaculate finish of many Dutch still lifes like Jan de Heem‟s Still Life with Parrots exquisitely show (fig. 19). But nonetheless, the frame that brackets the pictorial space from the surrounding environment usually advertises itself in obvious ways.100

Subtract this frame and we would still be left with a space that was phenomenologically disjunctive from the space experienced in life, since the fact that we move about and possess two eyes will normally inform us when two- dimensions are contrived to masquerade as three. If an artist represents volumetric objects close at hand, for example, a shift in position will not reveal a new perspective as it does in real life. And since there will be no difference between the views afforded by our left and right eyes – the cue known as binocular parallax – the depicted items will give away their flatness by yielding a single, monocular view. On the other hand, if a deeper space like a landscape is represented, unless all the items are sufficiently distant, the absence of motion parallax will instruct us as to the artificial nature of the scene.101 In sum, it seems

100

For a discussion of the function of the frame in pictorial art see Meyer Schapiro, „On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs‟, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, 6, No. 1 (1972 - 1973), pp. 9-19. However, Schapiro‟s argument that the facility of artists in using linear perspective made the frame necessary to clarify the distinction between art and reality seems untenable due to the (normal) availability of perceptual cues.

101

As we change position, motion parallax operates as a powerful depth cue by revealing that further away objects move more slowly across our visual field than ones which are closer. Other cues that could be cited in this connection include accommodation and convergence. The constraints of factors such as motion and binocular parallax on picture perception were first theorised by Hermann von Helmhotz in an essay entitled „On the relation of optics to painting‟ of 1876. See Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, trans. E. Atkinson (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1891), pp. 73 – 138.

that the act of becoming immersed in a picture requires at least a partial suspension of disbelief.102

But let us suppose for one moment that the story about Parrhasios and Zeuxis is true. What makes Parrhasios‟s picture the more successful illusion and what does this indicate about the nature of trompe l‟œil? Now, while we are only told that Zeuxis painted grapes, we may assume that but for their highly mimetic quality, in all other respects his picture was fairly conventional. That is, while the colours, shapes and play of light over the grapes were represented as faithfully as they could be and while Zeuxis suppressed all the evidence of his own craftsmanship, his work still contained all the other telltale signs that announced its separation from the space of the real. In other words, as a flat, delimited surface bounded by a frame or a noticeable edge, his picture – to paraphrase the words of Nelson Goodman – resembled other pictures to a much greater degree than it resembled real grapes. 103

In comparison, Parrhasios wins, not as a consequence of his technical skill – although this must also come into play – but as a consequence of his strategic manoeuvring: through the fact that he tailors his picture so that it is maximally obscures the difference between the illusory and the real. Let us imagine that his picture is something akin to this trompe l‟œil by Adrian van der Spelt and Frans van Mieris (fig. 20). From this we may suppose that his decision

102

By this I mean that we must ignore the cues which signal the picture‟s artefactual nature in order to fully engage with its referential content. This is different from – but is not incompatible with – Kendell Walton‟s claim that picture perception entails an act of make believe. See Mimesis as make-believe: on the foundations of the representational arts (Cambridge, Mass., & London: Harvard University Press, 1990).

103

Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1976), p. 5.

to represent curtains serves several roles at once. First, they toy with our expectations,104 for, on the one hand we would not expect them to be the exclusive subject of a painting and, on the other hand, we would not find it amiss to see them covering one – that is, they do not look out of place under the „reality guise‟ of protective or revelatory accoutrements.

Second, the nature of the subject will act to selectively flout and exploit the perceptual laws governing the „third domain‟. In one respect, the chiaroscuro afforded by the folds in the curtains and the specular highlights evoked through the rendering of silk will be perceived as evidence of three-dimensional form.105 While in another respect, since the shallow dips into depth of real curtains and their smooth curvature does not present much in the way of binocular or motion parallax, the fact that the picture does not yield these cues does not significantly alert Zeuxis to its virtual space. Indeed, if the strength of the first cue is played off against the unnoticed absence of the latter ones, it may appear that the curtains actually occupy a space in front of the picture plane.

From the (presumed) character of Parrhasios‟s picture, we might therefore deduce a set of general criteria for producing a trompe l‟œil painting. First, the differences between the look of the picture and the look of a real scene must be kept to a minimum. So, for instance, the material qualities of the marks, the medium and the support must not be visible and depicted items must be

104

Gombrich also makes this point in Art and Illusion when he claims that trompe l‟oeil painters rely „on the mutual reinforcement of illusion and expectation‟, p. 173.

105

For an analysis of how the human visual system recovers shape from shading and surface reflectance see David Marr, Vision (New York: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1982) pp. 239 – 250. And for a discussion of how these factors relate to tonal modelling in pictures see Willats, Art and Representation, pp. 133 – 135 and Patrick Maynard, Drawing distinctions: the varieties of graphic expression (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 160 – 170.

rendered as naturalistically as possible.106 Second, the artists must choose to represent a scene which in reality would be lacking in cues that signal volume and which indicate the relative position of objects in depth – a distant view, for example, or something that is more or less flat. And finally, the pictorial space must seem coextensive with that of our own. This means two things. First, the projected sizes and shapes of depicted objects must be seen as in accordance with visual perspective, either seeming to recede behind or protrude in front of the plane of the picture.107 And second, the space that they occupy must be perceived as continuous with the surrounding environment; no borders or frames must mark it off, or if they do they must somehow ease rather than emphasise the transition between zones. Indeed, this latter strategy is perhaps more common since frames and architectural surroundings are highly amenable to illusionistic rendering and their materials tend to be less responsive to the contingencies of light and other environmental factors. For this reason, many (particularly Baroque) trompe l‟œils are site specific, drawing on the architectural vocabulary of the space. To cite a particularly spectacular example, consider Baldassare Peruzzi‟s Sala delle Prospettive in the Villa Farnesina in Rome (fig. 21).

Consequently, we might end this section by saying that trompe l‟œil is like a sleight of hand or a conjuror‟s trick: it obscures, suppresses or diverts attention away from anything that speaks of the actual flatness of the picture

106

However, this does not mean that represented objects have to have a real world counterpart – for example, it does not excluded the possibility of representing fictional entities such as cherubs – so long as their appearance conforms with the look of the real.

107

In this respect, there would be no need for the artist to take into account the effects of perceptual constancy since if the projective geometry of the picture was sufficiently alike the projective geometry of a scene, then the viewer‟s visual system would compensate in the same way.

plane. For this reason, therefore, its representational strategy might be summarised as one that deceives.

2.3 THE SPACES OF TROMPE L’ŒIL AND THEIR RELATION TO