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Titian, Leonardo and the Blue Hour

At the Lucerne Festival of this summer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucerne_Festival) the German writer Martin Mosebach (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Mosebach) has given a lecture on the subject of the human soul (in a shortened version this text has also recently been published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung: http://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/die-seele-1.18377891). One ingredient of this lecture has been a contemplating and interpreting of Titian’s painting, commonly known as Sacred and Profane Love, and one detail of the writer’s description of that painting particularly aroused my attention. Because Mosebach referred to the time of day, respectively night, that the painter translated into an image as the blue hour. And this might be our point of departure of shedding some light onto the cultural history of twilight.

ONE) To be precise: the writer Martin Mosebach did use, within a German text, the French term »heure bleue«. And what is fascinating about this phenomenon is that we have to deal with something that must have been in existence since the creation of day and night – and still it is something that has to be perceived and to be named by people (in French or in whatever language) that are children of their time, and as such the »heure bleue« is obviously also a cultural product, whose history, however, awaits to be written as such (while the physical phenomenon might have been already satisfactorily explained, if only in the 20th century).
And if it is a cultural product of modern times, not known to Renaissance men (since Renaissance men were possibly not interested to perceive and to name the phenomenon, or to think about it), remains to be clarified.
We are not going to write that history, as we are writing onto a blue background (picture: Wladyslaw), knowing that it is a blue hour sky above the Dreiländerbrücke at Weil (Friedlingen) nearby Basel, and knowing also that the very phenomenon of the blue hour is not least associated with photography, and also with electric light. Because photographers know that pictures taken at this particular time, when the sun has sunken beneath the horizon, or has not yet come up, allow to combine artificial lights and a deep blue sky, and that the combination of yellows, oranges and deep blue can make such pictures remarkably colorful.

TWO) I don’t know if the very term ›blue hour‹ actually makes sense in relation to the picture by Titian. Because I am not certain at all if a rational approach, here, makes sense at all. What if the rationality that helped to create this picture aims at stepping back, disguise itself and have the poetic and visionary take over? In other words: what if a Renaissance painting, despite its inherent rationality, would still demand a mystical approach of its beholder, and what if the art historical approach of deciphering meaning and identifying representational strategies (like for example the allegedly deliberate approach of rendering a ›blue hour‹ atmosphere) is completely mistaken, or at least would only serve to help us to some degree to emulate a Renaissance mentality, that, all the same, does not require the rational approach, at least not in the first place, but a having us sink into the contemplation of the notion of love in its various dimensions? (Or did Renaissance people demand to be presented with art historical exams as wedding gifts?)
What if the allegedly hyper-rational Giovanni Morelli was right in calling the landscape background »the most poetic landscape background that one only could dream of« (Morelli 1890, p. 310)? What if the whole scenery is not to be thought as a rendering of nature but as a dreaming of nature, including men’s place within nature and as nature (that dreams of itself within nature)?
And what if the calling of the allegedly hyper-rational Leonardo da Vinci as a witness would not help us either?

»O, grim-looked night! O, night with hue so black!
O night, which ever art when day is not!
O night, O night! Alack, alack, alack, (…).«
W. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

(Picture: DS)

THREE) Still, I believe, that it makes sense to call Leonardo as a witness. Not as a mystical beholder of a Renaissance painting by Titian though, but, with all due respect, as the living encyclopedia of Renaissance mentality. Which means that a glimpse into Leonardo’s notes, that seem to cover almost every phenomenon that one might think of, might possibly help us also to at least understand, despite the gap of a 500 years of change in human mentality, how a particular phenomenon could be seen (or, respectively, not seen) at about the times of early Titian, and at the times without electric light (that, nonetheless, were times with artificial light, and also times, as it were, not without poetic light).
A brief tour into Leonardo’s notes is always helpful, even if in the end it would turn out, that Leonardo, all in all, knew nothing of a phenomenon called the ›blue hour‹ (or ›ora blu‹), and even if in the end we would only know that there is a gap also in Renaissance culture, and also in Leonardo, between the merely rational and scholarly approach to things and the poetic and artistic approach, and that these two languages do not translate into each other without one’s being lost in translation.

FOUR) Can we spare us to speak about the sfumato notion here?
No, we can’t, but we spare it for the end.
In that we enter the world of Leonardo’s notes again, a zone of twilight of its own kind, we face (once more) what I would like to call the Leonardo paradox:
About the things that Leonardo da Vinci has become famous for, immersing objects and persons into mysterious atmospheres, a mysterious smile, a smooth modelling of contours, in brief: phenomena of transition (as twilight is a phenomenon of transition) – he does hardly speak about. At least not very explicitly. And once again one might be tempted to ask: Did he remain silent about the really important things? Or have the really important notes not come down to us?
In section 467 of his Treatise on Painting Leonardo discusses a phenomenon that could be associated with the notion of the blue hour. He speaks about blue shadows, seen at a time of day, when the sun has sunk, and the shadow (that is not »seen« by the sun, though is »seen« by the sky, appears therefore to be blue).
Leonardo also quite often speaks of smoke phenomena, of blue smoke, for example, and he does speak once, rather extensively, of how a landscape does look at break of day.
All in all: if we imagine Leonardo looking at Titian’s painting, we can easily imagine him as looking at various details, the incense pot for example, i.e. the smoke, seen against the sky, and these king of phenomena Leonardo da Vinci, judging by his notes, was obviously obsessed with.
But still it appears as if his notes keep us, in some sense, away of addressing actual artistic, poetic strategies and away of actual artistic questions, as for example: Why render phenomena of transition? To what purpose? In what context? In what relation, yes, to spiritual things? And in relation to the work by Titian: Why showing one woman twice (or why using one and the same model for two different roles; and what roles)?
And if we look for answers to such kind of questions in Leonardo’s notes, these notes are rather disappointing (but, surely, one might develop any mysticism out of his natural philosophy, out of his ›point‹, but still, one has to built this bridge oneself, a bridge to the effects that, actually, works of Leonardo have had in terms of affecting inumerable beholders over many centuries. And Leonardos notes do not translate into what his works of art have been for its beholders.
Yet the Leonardo paradox may resolve if we think about the following: in spite of any cult of genius – as soon as the genius operates in service of a mystical Catholicism, any rationality inherent to a work of art does function within that context. In other words: a mystical Catholicism is the author of Leonardo’s religious works as it is Leonardo himself. And what Leonardo has been to the world is Leonardo’s achievement, plus a Renaissance Catholicism, plus what the response to Leonardo, in any century has made out of this conglomerate.
And even if we think Leonardo as a hyper-rational person (which he probably was not), any rationality that also speaks out of his notes on painting has to be seen in context because it does work in context (and people are free what to do with their experiences, instigated by a work by Leonardo). But about this context, and about what a work of art actually is for a beholder (and for himself as a beholder) Leonardo himself remains, to put it mildly, rather reserved. It’s as he seems to accept that what interests him (the explanation for blue smoke, for example; and the lessons to be taken as to the representation of atmospheric phenomena) works in a context (that may interest him or not), and what people do with the result, is up to them.

(Pictures: DS)

»Trip away. Make no stay.
Meet me all by break of day.«
W. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

(Picture: wallpaperhi.com; background picture: DS)

FIVE) And finally as to the sfumato notion: This notion, interestingly, is a phenomenon of the Leonardo reception, as, one may say now, the blue hour notion is now a phenomenon of the Titian reception. It is not a notion that Leonardo did invent nor did he use it, even if we give him credit to have invented what the notion is referring to: a smooth modelling of contours, a smokey effect.
But if Leonardo, in his notes, does speak of smoke – this refers to actual smoke.
While the notion of sfumato describes what some works by Leonardo do confront us with. And if we consider the sfumato as one signature element of Leonardo’s style, we have to admit that what Leonardo does in his art has been named by someone else, which is: one does not find everything Leonardo does or thinks about in Leonardo’s notes that, all in all, do not show him as being especially interested in the phenomenon of twilight, even if we find, for example, that the Virgin of the Rocks does confront us with a mysterious twilight that has inspired, in the 20th century, for example the writer J.G. Ballard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._G._Ballard), whose short story The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon had to be considered in a future cultural history of twilight, and of the blue hour, respectively.

MICROSTORY OF ART
ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM

(Picture: DS)

MICROSTORY OF ART
ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM
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