Painted Shadows
The fabled beginning of the Western art tradition starts with a shadow. Pliny the Elder tells us that Greek potter, Boutades, and his unnamed daughter, discovered how to model portraits in clay. Distraught at the departure of her lover, the daughter traced the outline of his shadow on the wall, which Boutades filled with clay to create the young man's portrait. Yet Plato used the shadow, in his Republic, to argue for man's understanding of reality as reliant on the senses. In his parable of the cave, prisoners chained behind a wall, unable to see the cave's entrance believe that the shadows that they see cast by people entering and leaving the cave are reality.
Thus shadows represent both presence and absence: a fleeting, ephemeral vision of the unseen body that blocks the light. They are metaphors for unreality - the 'shadow' cabinet, the shades of the underworld, describing someone as a 'shadow' of their former self. But shadows are also part of what makes reality. In Peter Pan, Peter's shadow seems to have a materiality all its own, being snapped off by the window, then rolled up in a drawer, and Wendy has physically to sew the shadow back on. Without it, Peter is less real.
In 1995, the influential art historian Ernst Gombrich curated an exhibition at the National Gallery, exploring the response of Western painters to the enigmatic shadow. A short book titled The Depiction of Cast Shadows in Western Art is the show's legacy. It is a highly personal piece of writing, in which Gombrich considers how rarely the cast shadow has been represented by Western painters, what effects its inclusion produces, and how the shadow has appealed to different schools and artists.
The shadow is, of course, crucially different to shading - the modelling of a 3D shape with dark and light effectively revolutionised the Western art tradition in the Renaissance. Yet painters seem to have been shy of the shadow. As Gombrich records, Leonardo da Vinci commented on the challenge they posed in his Trattato, 'light too conspicuously cut off by shadows is exceedingly disapproved of by painters ... contrive a certain amount of mist or of transparent cloud ... thus - since the object is not harshly illuminated by the sun - the outlines of the shadows will not clash with the outlines of the lights.' In fact, shadows made shading more difficult.
But shadows did present various opportunities. Holbein's shadows add to the sense of presence of his sitters. In trompe l'oeil, shadows are crucial to the deceptive trick of the objects: a paper attached to the frame, or a fly poised on the painted surface. Shadows add to the sense of building depth in a Guardi, or of mellow morning with low light in a Corot. Caravaggio was, perhaps, the master of shadows. See how every element of the Supper at Emmaus casts it's dark shape, giving the resurrected Christ a brooding reality. Shadows add drama to the artificially-lit rooms of Rembrandt or ter Brugghen, and the natural realities of light and colour to an impressionist landscape. They add to the mystery of the surreal visions of De Chirico, or can show the true moral identity of a figure in the satirical cartoons of Grandville.
Illusive but evocative, it seems a shadow can make or break an image, and is a particularly significant and personal inclusion, or exclusion, by the artist. Gombrich's very personal literary response is eminently appropriate then, as is his choice of jacket image. The back of the book shows simply his on shadow picture Self-portrait of the Author in the Setting Sun. I wonder if he'd donate it to my museum?