Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1905 (Heft 12))

Botticelli probably also thought that his drawing and modeling were
true to nature, and being a friend of Leonardo, who invented the camera-
obscura, very likely played with that instrument, and even believed his work
to be almost photographic, and in some ways it is. There are things about
his head of Spring, Figure IX, which are very photographic, but there are also
things which the camera could not do if it would, and others again it would
not do if it could. Parts of the leaves in the background and around the girl's
neck are much as the camera tells us nature is, but on the other hand the light
flowers in the hair, the hair itself and the jaw-line and the eyes are written.
It was at this period of the world’s history, during the life of da Vinci
and Botticelli, that our inherited savage pictorial sense was most subdued,
for it was during the period of the Renaissance that the Greek ideals (sculp-
turesque) were assimilated by the painters. The desire to introduce the per-
fection of these marbles into their pictures forced them in large part to drop
their expressive, but unclassical outlines; the ambition to model like the
Greeks made them more closely study values and imitate them in their
paintings, with again a loss of picture-writing feeling. It was during the
Renaissance that the artist began to turn from himself to nature, that he
began to see and feel its beauties, comprehend its large relations, and to
understand what we to-day call " envelopment ” and " tone.” It was in this
fifteenth century that there was sown the first germ of the photographic atti-
tude toward nature : it was then that nature began to be seen with naked
eyes and not through inherited feelings and traditions. Of course, I mean
first seen pictorially, for long before the Greeks had seen correctly in a
plastic way. But this overthrowal of the past, the past within themselves as
well as without, this struggle against the savage, was only partly complete ;
even the Venetians, who pushed the fight far beyond the Florentines, seem
to us to-day to be unatmospheric, academic, segmental and picture-writing-
like as compared with Velasquez. Velasquez, the result of the Spanish
version of the Renaissance, a century later than the Venetians, carried the
Venetian art a step further from the prehistoric and a step nearer that of the
camera. In his paintings (last period) we find the most civilized expression
of figure-painting and drawing that has yet been put on canvas. I say the
most civilized, for it can not possibly be denied by any one who has studied
the evolution of the art of any country, that this evolution unfolds itself in
but one manner : from literature (picture-writing) at the one end, to full
tonality (photography) at the modern (more civilized) end. Nor do I feel
that I am rash in placing photography at the modern end of the series, for
by photography in its fullest sense I understand light-painting; by photog-
raphy I understand the drawing of an image of nature through the means of
light without the intervention of the personal mannerisms, tricks and distor-
tions of the artist (many of which are inherited, as we have seen); in other
words, the reproduction on canvas or paper of such an image of nature as
might fall on the retina of the eye. I presume that it is hardly necessary
to explain that the translation of color into black and white is in no wise de-
structive to the conception of painting, for it is quite conceivable to imagine

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