JF Ptak Science Books Post 2713
If there is one thing that you can say about Renaissance art is that it was determined to represent nature--in form, color, perspective--as truthfully as possible. Except--so far as I can tell--in some cases, like, say, fog. And mist. I'm not sure why this is so, but once I started looking for examples of major and then minor cases showing fog in painting in the 1400-1550 period...and then later. Much later. Fog--and mist--seem to pop up regularly in the mid-19th century, along with the new genre of Impressionism, which seems to be when people became more more comfortable with nothingness and the suggestion of things that may or may not be present or in existence.
There are examples of suggested forms in the Renaissance where the outlines of forms come to life without their detail, as with the great Paolo Uccello (and the solids in the horses in the Battle of San Romano, ca. 1450s), but for the most part, where detail was supposed to be, there was detail.
Leaving elements of an artwork open to interpretation was not a problem with other cultures at this time, as in China and Japan, where fog and mist and rain and obscurity were very comfortable elements in artwork, and for centuries earlier than the Western Renaissance. The classic rendering say of a swath of fog obscuring everything but the top of a mountain was a "comfortable" mode of expression that can be seen in a number of landscapes that are listed as national treasures of Japan. For example, the "evening Bell from Mist-Shrouded Temple" and one of the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang is attributed to to Muqi Fachang (or Muxi Fachang) and was painted in the mid-13th century.
Another interesting example of countless others (and which like the Muqi Fachang is counted as a Japanese National Treasure) is that by Sesshū Tōy, in a landscape with broken ink/splashed ink ("hatsubokun, evolving an abstract simplification of forms and freedom of brushwork"--Wiki), and created ca. 1495. The dreamy landscape and the sparse and (somewhat aggressive) brushwork of the "broken ink" seem more a creation of Zen and meditation than anything else.
Like the rarity of the full-toothed, open-lipped smile, the image of fog and mist and the difficulty in representing what it is that they are mostly-hiding seems to be a not-at-all popular genre in Western art for hundreds of years. This is of course all conjecture on my part and is based mostly upon a little research and a lot of what is probably faulty memory, but it does at least seem to be an observation worth a little thought. After all, clouds had their many champions for long periods of time, though they served mostly to frame and accentuate the subject of the painting rather than being subjects in themselves (or at least so until the 18th century). Fog couldn't even exist in the West as a major part of paintings even as clouds-on-the-ground until the 19th century, when painting was catching up to work done by the Chinese and Japanese in the 13th century.
I suspect I've gotten a lot wrong in this speculation, and I'd like to hear about it as a form of conversation.
Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_National_Treasures_of_Japan_(paintings)
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