The central preoccupation of the visual arts from The Renaissance on is the study of the visual and spatial world with increasing sophistication of its representation. One major shift in the interest of visual artists comes from Masaccio’s first experiments in the 15th Century with the observation and depiction of visual perspective. Italian Renaissance artists became aware of and even obsessed with the reproduction of the affect of three-dimensional space on two-dimensional surfaces. Where it could simplistically be said that Medieval European art dealt with types and symbolic models of the world usually focused on religious figures and their theological significance, Renaissance art becomes more and more intrigued by the physical world of nature and its three-dimensional appearance. The importance of the individual portrait of a patron grows as a documenting of the particularity and social importance of the subject as we see in so many of the canvases of Rembrandt. Such trends in art could be said to relate to Aristotle’s conception in poetics of art as mimesis or the imitation of the natural world. Consequently as the geographical and literal exploration of the natural world expands at the time of the scientific revolution, starting with Copernicus and Galileo, art takes on a more and more documentary impulse to convey both new places and new peoples. By the time of the French Revolution, starting in 1789, European art quite often aspired to claims of realism, detailed, sharply rendered depictions of peoples and events. Of course, the growing interest in the natural world of landscape also began to expand in Romantic art and the world of fantasy also began to draw greater and greater attention.

In attempting to depict the world of perspective, artists used lenses and dark boxes called cameras to project the image they wish to draw in proper perspective onto a grid that could be traced. This device, the Camera Obscura, was evolved into a means of fixing these images with the beginnings of photography, starting around 1827. By the mid-19th Century, the technology of fixing images through photography became extremely widespread and the documentary function of painting and prints was eclipsed by the technical detail available through photography. While painting did not lose all of its documentary impulses, it faced a competition through technologically more precise and economically cheaper means available through photography. A landmark example of the power of photography, are Matthew Brady’s Civil War photographs from the early 1860s. No painting was able to convey the particular and distressing effects of war in the way that Brady’s photographs could.

Spurred on by both the interest in fantasy of Romanticism and challenged by the documentary precision of photography, painters and other artists began to shift their attention from literal surfaces to the process of the eyes perception and its interpretation. While such impulses can be seen in early art, the new schools of painting, particularly the impressionists in France in the second half of the 19th Century, participated in a reimagining of the nature of art in relation to the changing material circumstances of Modern economics and society. With the work of Manet and Monet, as well as their colleagues, painting began to turn to psychological and physiological processes of perception and the rendering of such processes in painting. This innovation in painting affected both the subjects of art, and the technical means of applying ink to canvas. Monet, for instance, would paint railway stations, bridges the wives of friends with parasols, an attentiveness to daily life apart from aristocratic or traditional subjects. Manet shopped the world with his canvas “Picnic on Grass” with three men in full dress and a naked woman partaking of a picnic in a public park. The question of the female figure was thus placed in a Modern and shockingly contemporary setting, thus playing off of traditional idealized and abstracted contents of the female form. Manet also painted people in taverns at pantomime performances as well as family members and friends who had little importance in the political world, but clear relevance to his own experience.

In some ways Monet was the most visionary of these artists, and followed the impulse to experience perception to its most impressive lengths. Near the end of the 19th Century, Monet produced significant series of paintings that studied aspects of the natural world through multifaceted experiences of perception. He created groups of twenty or thirty paintings of the same subject as seen in different lights and different times of the year. While the depiction of the noble façade of the Rouen Cathedral, are imposing in their radiant monumentality, equally fascinating are his canvases of haystacks as seen in different lights and at different times. The culmination of his series paintings, are the fabled canvases of the lily pond at his country home at Geverny. For more than twenty years, Monet worked on both single and multiple panel canvases of the water lilies that remain as astonishing today as when they were first created.

A major characteristic of Monet’s canvases, are the apparent dissolving of surfaces and objects in rays of light and the perception of them. Particularly with the water lilies, individual blossoms or lily pads seem to dissolve into an energy flow of light and color that involves the sun, the air, the lilies and the water all in a dynamic and poetic interplay. Much as Van Gogh has scenes of dynamic energy of the world, as in his famous “Starry Night”, so Monet seems to create a bridge between the artists eye and hand and the cosmic flow of existence that he pursues in the subjects of his paintings.

The recreation of visual art continues strikingly in the intense canvases of Van Gogh and the explorations of the malleable depiction of space in Cezanne. Van Gogh’s intense psychological complexity bursts forth in his visionary canvasses of sunflowers, fields and the night Sky. Almost completely cut off from any successful art market, Van Gogh brought a visionary radiance and anxiety to the world around him. His broad, heavy brush strokes and his psychologizing of the world that he sees with such immediate feeling, clearly mark a major break from the model of the artist’s relationship to an objective world. Van Gogh will paint homely people, peasant shoes, a spare and tawdry chair with a pipe on it. He paints the postman, the billiard hall in a local tavern, as well as haunting scenes of sowers of wheat at twilight. In his famous “Starry Night”, a little town with cedar trees, seems almost on fire with the cosmic energy of the night which dances in stars, in crescent moon, in waves of energy and vision. Van Gogh becomes the type of the alienated and isolated artist whose eccentric work becomes a central illumination of the modern world. He is an underground man, who has broken through his isolation in his art to visions of personal and natural existence, never before seen by others, but once seen, never forgotten.