Truth Cannot Exist - Part 2

On one level, the painting is not particularly noteworthy: it is a sixteenth century, half-length portrait of a woman painted in what is traditionally considered a representational style, like many others. Its fascination stems, not from the lack of consensus it has produced amongst critics, but from the wide range of possibilities it offers each separate viewer. Leonardo achieves this effect through a variety of subtle details and techniques that combine to give the painting its mysterious ambiguity. Through his use of sfumato (the subtle transition of tones that gives a hazy softness to the contours), the seemingly nonsensical landscape in the background, the asymmetricality of Mona`s face (her mouth is raised slightly higher on the left side - commonly a characteristic of forced smiles) and the lack of definite eyebrows or eyelashes, Leonardo creates a sense of ambiguity that has mystified and captivated viewers for centuries. The painting has the ability to represent simultaneously, on the same canvas, not one but several truths, each having equal validity. Mona is just as likely to be happy as sad or to be experiencing countless other (more nuanced) emotions. Numerous reasons for said expression are also viable - the context of the painting is left to the viewer`s imagination. The painting thus satisfies many essential truths at the same time. Through its stored memory of similar facial expressions, the brain can recognise in Mona Lisa the ideal representation of a plenitude of differing emotions and scenarios. The painting is powerful not because what it represents is uncertain, but because it accurately represents so much. Arthur Schopenhauer believed that painting must strive to `obtain knowledge of an object, not as a particular thing but as Platonic Ideal, that is to say, the enduring form of this whole species of thing.` Leonardo satisfies this condition because his painting conveys an expression that one would expect in a number of situations - this constancy makes it independent of the precise scenario and applicable to many. Indeed, in his book How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, Michael J. Gelb uses the term `stfumato` not just to describe one of the painting techniques that Leonardo employs, but also a mental attitude that the painter encourages: the ability to hold two paradoxical ideas in one`s mind simultaneously, without difficulty. The viewer becomes imaginatively involved in the artwork by trying to guess the thoughts of Mona. This underlines the painting`s fundamental similarity to cubism: Jean Metzinger`s assertion - in reference to cubism - that `certain forms should remain implicit, so that the mind of the spectator is the chosen place of their concrete birth`, could equally be applied to Mona Lisa. This is the case with many revered paintings, particularly those in which the situation depicted is not rendered entirely explicit. In Pieter de Hooch`s A Couple Walking in the Citizen`s Hall of Amsterdam Town Hall, for example, it is because the nature of the couple`s relationship is unknown (as is that of their conversation and circumstance) that the painting is so interesting. The curiosity of the viewer is roused further by the figure with the baby, watching the pair from the distant shadows. Works that are left unfinished can often have a similar effect, as the imagination is called upon to complete the picture. Gustav Klimt`s 1917 Portrait of a Lady, for instance, is compelling - like many of Klimt`s paintings - because of its very incompleteness. The face of the woman is all the more arresting for being the only detailed part of the painting and the viewer is sucked into it accordingly, left to imagine what the lady is wearing from the evocative, suggestive curves of the sketch below. As Schopenhauer notes, `something and indeed the ultimate thing, must always be left over for the imagination to do.` Such a statement is certainly also applicable to Michelangelo, whose choice to leave many of his works unfinished - including three-fifths of his marble sculptures - only adds to the imaginative and emotive power of his art. The incompleteness of his Rondanini Pieta, for example, contributes to the uncertainty (experienced when looking at the sculpture from certain angles) concerning whether Jesus is actually holding Mary up with his back - representing his spirit comforting her in her loss - or Mary is in fact cradling Jesus. The piece hence presents both possibilities, two truths. Charles De Tolnay explains how Michelangelo `subordinates the representation of physical beauty to the feeling of emotional life`, which `comes to represent in the personal life of the artist the fulfilment of his longings, that state of beatitude toward which his unsatisfied soul aspired`. The way in which Tolnay describes Michelangelo as achieving this is through his use of `flat surfaces, straight lines and the inertia of an amorphous mass lacking contrasts of light and shade`, all of which are at least partly the result of the sculpture`s being unfinished. Many critics presume that the artist`s given reason for (usually) refusing to execute portraits - believing that he was unable to represent all the beauty that his mind could conceive - can likewise be applied to his choosing to leave many of his sculptures incomplete. Giorgio Vasari claims that `Michelangelo`s non finito reflects the sublimity of his ideas, which again and again lay beyond the reach of his hand.` Yet for hundreds of years critics and viewers alike have professed that Michelangelo`s paintings and sculptures are indeed sublime, implying that his ideas are in fact well within the reach of his hand. It is perhaps only when he stops striving to be entirely figurative that this is achieved, however. It is the ambiguity that Michelangelo`s non finito generates that results in said sublimity. By this reasoning, as it does not contain images of the external world at all and is thoroughly ambiguous by its very nature, abstract art should be the most sublime art form. Piet Mondrian, for instance, declares that art `shows us there are also constant truths concerning forms`, and that to `create pure reality plastically it is necessary to reduce natural forms to the constant elements`. Thus it is clear that the most powerful abstract art - just like that of figurative and cubist paintings alike - is that which contains the most essential truths. Mondrian`s paintings, for example, have a great emphasis on vertical and horizontal lines, such as his 1930 Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow which consists of a white background upon which is painted a grid of black lines, with a large red square painted in the top right corner, a smaller blue rectangle in the bottom left corner and an even smaller, yellow one in the bottom right. Mondrian believes that such lines `exist everywhere and dominate everything`. He wished to `discover consciously or unconsciously the fundamental laws in hidden in reality`, and thus sought to reduce the complexity of all external forms into their simple essence and to represent the constant elements of form and colour, rather than one particular form. Indeed, scientific experiments that have scanned the brain`s response to different types of art have shown that there is a definite neurological difference between the brain`s response to figurative and abstract works. Viewing paintings that correspond to visual reality activates the same areas as those that are stimulated by abstract works, as well as additional areas. Zeki uses this information to claim that such experiments are `an important neurological vindication of the efforts` of abstract painters` to simplify visual form to its purest state. Although such an argument certainly contains elements that are valid, Zeki`s analysis is ultimately too focused on `visual reality`. Abstract art forces viewers to analyse their very conception of reality in a modern world in which that which was once considered `real` is now thought extremely unstable - a world in which the once assumed bond between the senses, perception and the concrete world is broken. Physics has situated reality beyond the perceptive faculties and - in the words of Max Planck - has `not ceased to move away from the world of the senses`. For, as Planck explains, sight is fundamentally limited: `it only perceives radiations within a short region of the spectrum, extending over barely an octave.` Hence perceptions are misleading and images of the external world are no more than an illusion. As Dora Vallier professes, the space and time which `order our daily experience are shams, pure conventions`. Conceiving must replace seeing. Thus the conscious or unconscious aim of all art is fundamentally the same: to represent as many truths as possible upon one canvas in an attempt to capture the essence of reality, rather than - as Plato feared - merely its appearance. However, the way in which different movements have sought to achieve this varies greatly and has changed in accordance to shifting scientific and philosophic attitudes to reality. The great painters of the European Renaissance recognised that the most powerful artworks are those which are completed within the mind, an accomplishment achieved predominately through various forms of ambiguity. In an environment that lauded the ability of the human intellect to understand the external world, direct observation, linear perspective and figurative representation prevailed in paintings. Indeed, at the time of Aristotle`s writing imitative painting was the art form most suited to aid `realistic representations` and gather `the meaning of things`. However, as our conceptions of reality have changed, so must our art. Wassily Kandinsky`s Composition VII, for example, is a sheer flight of the imagination, revelling in the liberation of colour and forms, exalting in its own unrestrained freedom. As the idea of objectivity has steadily become unsettled, so subjectivity has taken the reigns in art. Mondrian claimed that art has two main `human inclinations`, one that aims at `the direct creation of universal beauty, the other at the aesthetic expression of oneself`. Painting has progressively moved towards the latter, offering an art that is just as truthful as figurative painting once was, but that represents a conception of reality that has become increasingly concerned with that which lies beyond sight.