light in art history

Jacopo Tintoretto
The Last Supper
1592-94, Oil on canvas, 365 x 568 cm
San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice

Light, in both its form-defining and symbolic functions, remained central to the increasingly dramatic naturalism of Venetian painting, never losing its character as the carrier of divine significance that was its special role in the history of Christian art. And to this continuing tradition - which runs from the golden mosaics of Byzantium through the windows of the Gothic cathedrals and the subtle pictorial explorations of the early Flemish masters to the profound radiance of Rembrandt - Titian contributed, literally, a new dimension.

Jan van Eyck had explored the suggestive world of religious symbolism and poetic metaphor but, simultaneously and as part of the same creative impulse, he explored and expanded the limits, expressive and formal, of his own art of painting.3 Indeed, in the art of Jan van Eyck the worlds are mutually dependent. The visual realization of the imagery of light occurred within the technical context of the development of the oil medium, a development that not only made possible the new pictorial iconography but that in turn surely received inspiration from the demands that iconography made upon the painter's imagination. The iconography of light became a function of the oil medium, and it is not surprising that the later development of oil painting continued to inspire painters to investigate the expressive potential of light - and of its inevitable corollary, shadow. Light assumes a particularly full and supple role in the art of Titian, distant but definite heir to the Eyckian heritage as well as to the more immediate models of Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione.

The best survey of light in art history remains in Wolfgang Schone's Uber das Licht in der Malerei, Berlin, 1954. For particular aspects of the tradition, see the useful essay by John Beckwith, "Byzantium: Gold and Light," in Light in Art, ed. Thomas B. Hess and John Ashbery (New York and London, 1971), pp. 67–81, and especially Erwin Panofsky, "Abbot Suger of St. Denis," in his Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, N.Y., 1957), pp. 108–154, and Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral (New York, 1962), pp. 50–58 and passim; also Hans Peter l'Orange, "Lux aeterna: l'adorazione della luce nell'arte tardo-antica ed alto-medioevale," Atti della Pontificia Accademia romana di archeologia, Rendiconti 47 (1974–1975): 191–202. For the later development of the theme, in addition to Meiss, "Light as Form and Symbol," see Jan Bialostocki, "Ars auro prior," in Mélanges de littérature et de philologie offerts à Mieczyslaw Brahmer (Warsaw, 1996), pp. 55–63, and E. H. Gombrich, "Light, Form and Texture in XVth Century Painting," Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 112 (1964): 826–849 (repr. as "Light, Form and Texture in Fifteenth-Century Painting North and South of the Alps," in his The Heritage of Apelles [Ithaca, 1976], pp. 19–35). And see especially the suggestive study by John Gage, "Colour in History: Relative and Absolute," Art History I (1978): 104–130, and his larger survey, Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (Boston, Toronto, London, 1993). Matters of color are treated on a more prosaic level by Paul Hills, The Light of Early Italian Painting (New Haven and London, 1987).

Millard Meiss's essay on "Light as Form and Symbol"

• David Rosand, Titian's Light as Form and Symbol, in: The Art Bulletin 57, N. 1, 1975, pp. 58-64