William Shakespeare – Page 7

Rembrandt’s vision

The Netherlands celebrate four hundred years of Rembrandt’s genius.

While looking around for links I noticed this story for the first time:

Margaret S. Livingstone and Bevil R. Conway, neurobiologists at Harvard Medical School, say Rembrandt’s many self-portraits reveal that his eyes are focused in slightly different directions, depriving him of the “stereo” effect that makes vision three-dimensional. As a result, they argue, Rembrandt would have struggled with depth perception – though he may never have known he had a vision defect.

Rembrandt’s flat world view may have helped him more precisely capture reality on a flat canvas, where painters create the illusion of three-dimensions through techniques such as shading. In fact, Livingstone and Conway say that visual artists are far more likely to be “stereoblind” than the general public, suggesting that limited depth perception may actually be an advantage over normal sight.

“Art teachers often instruct students to close one eye in order to flatten what they see,” the researchers write in today’s New England Journal of Medicine, explaining their theory about Rembrandt. “Stereoblindness might not be a handicap – and might even be an asset – for some artists.”

Similar assertions from doctors about conveniently dead artists surface from time to time; we had Michelangelo suffering from Asperger’s recently and I recall a story about Shakespeare having a brain tumour based solely on scrutiny of very vague portraits. The Rembrandt story is significant for me because my eyes have always been mis-aligned and I don’t see stereoscopically. I have permanent double-vision as a result, something people are always surprised to hear, although I only notice this when I think about it. My brain treats the mis-aligned (and weaker) data from my right eye as redundant information and so ignores it.

The point is, whether Rembrandt had a similar defect or not (and I’m sceptical; how can you be so sure by looking at a few paintings?), it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to judge what effect this has on artistic ability without conducting a mass survey. Even then I doubt that you’d discover much. The doctors in this case want to imply that Rembrandt’s damaged eyesight gave him an extra edge with regard to depth perception but I find this incredibly difficult to demonstrate with any degree of certainty. What gives Rembrandt more of an edge (and keeps us looking at his work) is his exceptional drawing skill and peerless mastery of the oil medium, something that’s partly innate talent but mostly prodigious ability and the result of years of labour. Whatever assistance stereoblindness might lend him would be a very small thing next to this combination of natural gifts and hard work.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• “One measures a circle, beginning anywhere?”

The life and work of Derek Jarman

The Angelic Conversation, 1985.

An unseen woman recites Shakespeare’s sonnets—fourteen in all—as a man wordlessly seeks his heart’s desire. The photography is stop-motion, the music is ethereal, the scenery is often elemental: boulders and smaller rocks, the sea, smoke or fog, and a garden. The man is on an odyssey following his love. But he must first, as the sonnet says, know what conscience is. So, before he can be united with his love, he must purify himself. He does so, bathing a tattooed figure (an angel, perhaps) and humbling himself in front of this being. He also prepares himself with water and through his journey and his meditations. Finally, he is united with his fair friend.

History of the skull as symbol

Still-life with a skull (vanitas) by Philippe de Champaigne.

vanitas
think of the scene from shakespeare’s hamlet where the prince holds a skull of yorick, a former servant, bemoaning the pointlessness and temporary nature of worldly matters. certain themes characteristic of a specific philosophy have been commonly represented during an era, and an iconography has been developed to express them. an example is the still life vanitas vanitatum of the middle ages, a reminder of the transitory quality of earthly pleasure symbolized by a skull. pictorial arrangements are dealing with the vanity of the intellectual world (globe, books), and of the ‘vita voluptaria’ (musical instruments, smoking implements). often painters continued the old tradition of including appropriate captions or texts on their pictures. the favourite was the admonition from ecclesiastes I: ‘vanity of vanities; all is vanity’. the transience of human existence is often brought out also by other symbols like the candle and the hourglass.

David Rudkin on Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr

Vampyr, Der Traum des Allan Gray (1932) is one of the founding and defining works of psychological horror cinema, adapted from Gothic stories by Sheridan Le Fanu, a disturbing narrative of vampirism, obsession and posession of the soul. But it is also a film directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, the revered and legendary Danish director of La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1927). Shot in France with private money and a largely nonprofessional cast and primitive sound equipment, Vampyr is to some extent a ruin. There is no definitive print and English versions are marred by poor image quality and subtitles. And yet it is unquestionably extraordinary, a vivid and haunting manifestation of Dreyer’s power to make visible on screen the inner human state, and to convey a dreamlike imagery of textures of nature amidst which transient, solitary human figures pass, some illuminated by an inner light, others threatened by a malign or demonic presence. In relation to Dreyer’s long but often frustrated career, Vampyr is often thought of as an uneven or disappointing film. But, according to David Rudkin, this is to misunderstand what it sets out to do, which is systematically to set the spectator adrift in a mysterious world. In a meticulous formal analysis of Vampyr, Rudkin expands on this contention, pinpointing the sources of the film’s uniquely disquieting effect. And yet, however strange it is, Vampyr remains a profound and troubling artwork concerned at the last to communicate human meanings—and none more so than the essence of death—in remarkable filmic imagery.

David Rudkin is a dramatist and screenwriter of forty years’standing. His theatre work is mainly associated with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Having collaborated with Tony Richardson, François Truffaut and Fred Zinnemann, his recent screenplays include Testimony (1987), for which he was awarded the New York Film Festival Gold Medal for Screenplay.