Painting and photographing the sunlight.
A comparison between old-school and avant-garde techniques
Painting and photographing the sunlight.
A comparison between old-school
and avant-garde techniques.
Daniele Torcellini
Università
degli Studi di Siena, Accademia di Belle Arti di Ravenna, Italy
Daniele
Torcellini
Università degli Studi di Siena
Accademia di Belle Arti di Ravenna
ABSTRACT: The works painted by the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood in the mid-nineteenth century and the
pictures taken through high dynamic range photography in
recent years have the intent of representing the real world
with images as accurate as possible. These two types of
image-making share some features. The main aim of this
paper is to discuss these techniques and their visual
features and to highlight their similarities.
1. REALISTIC INTENTIONS: Italian renaissance art gave
rise to the idea of considering a painting as an open
window, through which one sees the real world. The
possibilities of perspective, developed up to the beginning
of the ffteenth century by Filippo Brunelleschi, Leon
Battista Alberti, Piero Della Francesca and others, supports
this idea, enabling the credible rendering of a three
dimensional space on a two dimensional canvas. The
development of photography seems to expand these
possibilities; currently, three dimensional computer
animation, having recuperated that dimension lost centuries
ago, seems to open windows on unknown but believable
worlds.
Hence, one of the main goals of several schools of painters
or movements is that of rendering what the artist sees as
close as possible to its actual appearance. Different
strategies and tools have been developed over the
centuries to achieve this goal [1]. Different results have
been obtained and the degree of realism in these results
has been judged differently by art critics. For example,
Giotto’s results were considered closer to real life than
Cimabue’s, until one century later when Masaccio’s results
were considered closer to real life than Giotto’s.
Considering the painter’s point of view, rendering the
appearance of the real world through brushstrokes on a
canvas was one of the guiding principles of the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood in the mid-nineteenth century. This
movement was founded in London in 1848. Its most
important members include John Everett Millais, Dante
Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt. On the other
hand, considering the photographer’s point of view, the
development of the High Dynamic Range (HDR)
photographic techniques uses, as a reference, the eye-brain
function and its visual interaction with the real world. The
main goal of this technique is to overcome the limited
sensitivity of a single photographic exposure to the
dynamic range of the luminance of a real scene by means of
the superimposition of three or more photographic shots
taken at different exposures. This procedure imitates the
function of the human visual system which, within certain
limits [2], can easily manage the information coming from
both the low brightness areas and the high brightness
areas. Both of these techniques may thus be considered as
two stages of the same ideal, of rendering the appearance
of the nature visualised before the painter or photographer
on a two dimensional space. Obviously, neither can be
considered as a faithful reproduction. Instead, they are
interpretations of reality. The question lies in evaluating
how close to the real perception of that scene these
interpretations are.
2. WHEN SUNLIGHT APPEARS: Painting or photographing
sunlit scenes can be considered as a subset of realistic
scenes and this is the main objective of this paper.
When different images are displayed, whether paintings or
photographs, it is quite easy to determine a ranking
according to the amount of sunlight seen in each of them,
in terms of realistic rendering of the light. This is quite easy,
even though in many cases it is not equally easy to explain
why one image appears more sunlit than another one.
An interesting comparison can be made by putting the
series of paintings and the series of photographs side by
side. In order to translate the real impressions received
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from nature to the canvas, the works by several of the PreRaphaelites show interesting similarities to images created
using the HDR technique, when the photographer’s
intention is to achieve realistic results.
Fig. 1William Holman Hunt, Our English Coasts, 1852, Tate Gallery,
London
Fig. 2 Cédric Mayence, Abbaye d’Aulne, Belgique, HDR photograph,
www.fickr.com/photos/cedm80be
We can summarize the main, shared features of the two
types of images as follows: coloured shadows, colour in the
shadows, low global contrast, high local contrast, high
colour saturation, well-represented refections of light and
colour. All of these features contribute to creating images
showing a strong sense of light, especially sunlight, and a
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sort of vivid, bright, sharp lighting that conveys the
presence of a breathable atmosphere.
Indeed, the representation of sunlit scenes is one of the
favourite subjects in both methods of creating images.
Again, if we consider the painter’s perspective, the
intention expressed by William Holman Hunt to paint the
brightness of sunlight may be joined to the famous
analogous comment frequently made years later by Edward
Hopper, relative to painting a ray of sunshine on the wall of
a house, an interesting topic in art history.
Considering the photographer’s perspective, the different
exposures of the HDR technique make it possible to shoot
sunlight without underexposing the rest of the image.
Hence, landscapes illuminated by the sun become a
frequent subject.
3. THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD: The interest
in nature and in its more detailed depiction by the PreRaphaelites has been long investigated by art critics. Among
others, it is noteworthy to mention Allen Staley's early
book [3], the studies carried out by Martin Kemp [4] and
John Gage [5], and the recent exhibition held in 2004 at the
Tate Gallery of London, Pre-Raphaelite Vision: Truth to Nature.
In his essay published in the catalogue of the Tate
exhibition, Allen Staley, quoting William Holman Hunt,
writes: “Closely observed natural detail was a cornerstone
of Pre-Raphaelite practice from ever before the formation
of the Brotherhood. In February 1848 William Holman
Hunt announced to his friend John Everett Millais his
resolution to produce ‘an out-of-door picture ... painting
the whole out of door, direct on the canvas itself, with
every detail I can see, and with the sunlight brightness of
the day itself’” [6]. The interest in “the mere look of
things” is also well documented by the intentions
expressed by Ford Madox Brown and by his paintings such
as The Pretty Baa-Lambs, 1851-1859.
Nevertheless, as the previous authors remind us, John
Ruskin is the frst source of inspiration for the
Brotherhood's attitude and one of the few critics to
consider the validity of its works in terms of the real
perception of nature.
Ruskin states that Our English Coasts, painted by Hunt in
1852, shows “For the frst time in the history of art, the
absolutely faithful balances of colour and shade by which
actual sunshine might be transposed into a key in which the
harmonies possible with material pigments should yet
produce the same impression upon the mind which were
caused by the light itself” [7].
It might be also useful to consider some criticisms made of
Pre-Raphaelite paintings, like that of being extremely
detailed, comparing them with contemporary photography,
a technique that seems to guarantee the same precision
with the advantage of being less time-consuming. The PreRaphaelites vainly attempt to “delineate by hand that which
the sun himself paints for us in the photograph which such
exquisite detail” [8]. It is noteworthy that these critics
forget to assess the issues of colour, reading a picture only
as a drawing [9]. However, in addition to these critics, other
commentators, such as John Ruskin, show their awareness
regarding the misrepresentation of the colours of nature
through the black and white of silver halides which
“violently exaggerate shadows and thereby lose all truth except of drawing” [10].
These criticisms and the refusal of those paintings as
realistic images may also suggest a parallelism with some
comments, currently made regarding HDR images, often
judged too pictorial and unnatural. The results of both of
these methods of creating images have been considered as
being beyond reality.
4. HIGH DYNAMIC RANGE IMAGES: As John McCann
observes, “The discipline of reproducing scenes with a high
range of luminances has a fve-century history that includes
painting, photography, electronic imaging and image
processing” [11]. Rendering a high dynamic range scene
through a low dynamic device has been achieved by
modern art painters thanks to the chiaroscuro technique,
and by photographer Henry Peach Robinson in the midnineteenth century thanks to his empirical multiple
exposure techniques and by Ansel Adams thanks to his
“dodging and burning” development of negatives. The digital
capture devices and image processing are currently used in
order to create HDR images. The procedure may be
described as follows. Multiple exposures of the same scene
are merged in a single fle. The dynamic range of the image
obtained cannot be displayed by the traditional output
devices, hence the image has to be processed. The wide
range of intensities found in an HDR image has to be
compressed into the limited range generated by a
conventional display device. This procedure may be
achieved in several ways, one of the most frequently used is
Tone Mapping. An important distinction may be made
between global tone mapping operators that apply a single
function to all pixels, and local operators, the
transformations of which depend on the different areas of
the image. Another important way of mapping the images is
through perceptual operators which treat the information
according to the actual function of the human vision
system.
In the recent years, in addition to the academic research
carried out to improve the possibilities of this technique
and its feld of application, a lot of user-friendly software
packages have been developed for merging the fles with
different exposures and map the tones of the images. This
implies increased creation of HDR images, the circulation
of which is encouraged by social networks for photosharing, such as Flickr [12].
The possibility of considering this kind of photography as a
form of art is currently being discussed, but not well
defned. It seems to once again revive the famous debate
on the artistic quality of the black and white photography
versus painting, of colour photography versus black and
white photography, or of digital photography versus
analogical photography [13].
Obviously, the artistic quality of an image does not depend
on the medium chosen but on its capability of
communicating an aesthetic experience (or a breaking or
original experience). Whether it is art or not, this kind of
image belongs to - and will probably increasingly belong to,
in the near future - our visual culture and it contributes to
defning our perceptual thought processes.
5. SHARED FEATURES: As stated above we can summarize
the main shared features of the two types of images as
follows: coloured shadows, colour in the shadows, low
global contrast, high local contrast, high colour saturation,
well-represented refections of light and colour. These
features may be analysed according to theoretical and
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scientifc knowledge, image-making techniques and stylistic
approaches used at the time.
Shadows may be coloured mainly for two reasons. The frst
is related to the colour of the illuminant: the shadow takes
the complementary hue of that of the illuminant. The
second is related to the colour of the object on which the
shadow is cast. Coloured shadows and, especially, colour in
shadows in the Pre-Raphaelite images are adopted for
different reasons. One of them is the painters’ intention to
overcome academic standards which follow the dark
shadows and the golden light of the school of Rembrandt,
creating a strong global contrast [14]. The main points of
reference became the early Italian Renaissance painters and
the technique explained by Cennino Cennini, where the
shaping of the fgures is not realized by means of
chiaroscuro. The shadowed recessed areas of a body are
depicted by their own colour, in a more saturated form.
Also, as Martin Kemp observes, an important role is played
by scientifc and philosophical research. Up to the
eighteenth century, investigations of the relationship
between colours and shadows increased; the essay
published by Michael Baxandall in 1995 is a welldocumented report of this research [15]. This phenomenon
is widely discussed by authors such as Charles Nicholas
Cochin the Younger and his postscript to the CharlesAntoine Jombert handbook on drawing, Méthode pour
apprendre le dessein (1755), George-Louis Leclerc and his
Histoire naturelle (1749), Johann Wolfgang Goethe and his
Zur Farbenlehre (1810), Henry Richter and his Daylight. A
recent discovery in the art of painting (1815).
Frederic George Stephens, an art critic and one of the
members of the Brotherhood, in describing the Hireling
Shepherd, painted in 1852 by Holman Hunt, writes “He was
absolutely the frst fgure-painter who gave the true colour
to sun-shadows, made them partake of the tint of the
object on which they cast, and deepened such shadows to
pure blue where he found them to be so...” [16]. He
explains that the main point of the landscapes painted by
Holman Hunt in 1852 is to render the visual effect of the
coloured shadows as they occur on the eye’s retina.
The feature of blue or blue-violet shadows may be found,
some years later, in the paintings of Monet and other
impressionists, sometimes improperly described as their
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invention. Edward Hopper, a careful observer of Monet’s
paintings, also adopts this expedient, reaching magnifcent
effects of the illumination of sunlight [17].
If we compare traditional photography and HDR
photography, we would see a considerable increase in the
rendering of colour in shadows. This is mainly due to both
the multiple exposures that guarantees the correct
exposition of each luminance areas of the scene, avoiding
the underexposure of the less illuminated areas, and to the
tone mapping processing which favours highly saturated
colours.
Another visual effect that sometimes characterises HDR
images, as a result of the local tone mapping processing, is
the halo around the shapes. This effect may be explained by
human vision system mechanisms. The detection of the
edge between two areas of almost the same luminance is
made easier by brightening the border of the lighter area
and darkening the border of the darker one in order to
accentuate the difference between them. When the two
areas have the same luminance, the area with the
brightened border appears brighter and vice versa. This
visual effect, frst described in detail by Tom Cornsweet is
similar to the Mach Bands phenomenon, where by joining
two areas of slightly different luminance, the brightened
border in the brighter areas and the darkened border in
the darker area are perceived, even if they are not present.
These phenomena depend on the lateral inhibition which is
described in neurobiology as the capacity of an excited
neuron to reduce the activity of its neighbours.
This effect can be adopted in order to guarantee the local
contrast between areas of different colour and same or
almost the same luminance [18].
It does not clearly appear in the Pre-Raphaelite paintings,
but it can be easily recognized in many paintings by George
Seurat (whose main interest was that of creating images
through the application of a scientifc method. In his
attempt to depict the real light of a scene through little
dots of colour in order to get an additive mixture, he
defnes his painting as chromo-luminarism).
The ratio between the global contrast of the PreRaphaelite painting and that of the academic “brown style”
is similar to the ratio between the global contrast of the
HDR images and that of traditional images. Painting the
outdoors, fooded by strong sunlight, makes the colours of
nature appear in their most saturated state; the diffusion
and the refections of light also play a role in the scene’s
appearance. These may be some of the causes of the low
global contrast and of the high local contrast in those
paintings. On the other hand, the multiple exposures and
the tone mapping, as previously explained, are the reason
for the relatively high level of luminance in the differently
lighted areas in an HDR image, determining the low global
contrast.
6. CONCLUSION: Although it may never be possible to
achieve a complete match between a two dimensional
reproduction and its three dimensional model, the fact that
two different techniques in two different historical periods
attempting to capture the real impressions of human
perception reach similar results may lead us to think that
we are on the right track. However, our perception of
realism is a historical question, destined to change in the
future just as it has changed in the past. So this kind of
realistic image-making can be considered to be at least one
of the best of recent centuries, but obviously not the fnal
one. Moreover, the similarities themselves between the
paintings and the HDR images mentioned above are
probably destined to be no more than a witness to a past
way of seeing.
REFERENCES:
[1] See Gombrich, E. H. (1959). Art and illusion : a study in the
psychology of pictorial representation. Washington, Bollingen
Foundation.
[2] McCann J. J. and Rizzi A. (2007) ‘Camera and visual veiling glare
in HDR images’. J. Soc. Information Display. Vol 15(No 9): 721-730.
[3] Staley, A. (1973). The Pre-Raphaelite landscape. Oxford,
Claredon.
[4] Kemp, M. (1990). The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western
art from Brunelleschi to Seurat. New Haven; London, Yale University
press.
[5] Gage, J. (1989). George Field and his Circle: From Romanticism to
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum.
[6] Staley, A. (2004). “Rejecting Nothing, Selecting Nothing”. In
Staley, A. and Newall, C. (2004). Pre-Raphaelite Vision: Truth to
Nature, London, Tate Publishing.
[7] Ruskin, J. (1883). The Art of England, London, George Allen.
Regarding the question of the painting’s subject see Ribner, J. P.
(1996). “Our English Coasts, 1852: William Holman Hunt and
Invasion Fear at Midcentury”. Art Journal, Vol 55 (No 2): 45-54.
Jacobi, C. (2006). William Holman Hunt: painter, painting, paint,
Manchester, Manchester University Press.
Lochnan, K. and Jacobi, C. (2008). Holman Hunt and the preraphaelite vision, Toronto, Yale University Press.
[8] Journal of the Photographic Society, London 1858.
[9] The relationship between drawing and colour are well
documented, up to their renaissance dispute between Venetian
and Florentine way of picture making. The former is characterized
by a strong use of colour, the Venezia’s port in one of the frst
destination of the pigments trade between east and west. The
latter considers colour as a secondary element in the creation of
the image, coming after the delineation of the forms by means of
the drawing and the chiaroscuro. See also Batchelor, D. (2000).
Chromophobia. London, Reaktion.
[10] Ruskin, J. cit. in Staley, A. (2004). “Rejecting Nothing, Selecting
Nothing”. In Staley, A. and Newall, C. (2004). Pre-Raphaelite Vision:
Truth to Nature, London, Tate Publishing. 28.
[11] McCann, J. J. (2007). ‘Art Science and Appearance in HDR
images’. J. Soc. Information Display. Vol15 (No 9): 709-719.
[12] http://www.fickr.com; a lot of groups dedicated to the HDR
photography can be found.
[13] Black and white photography, indeed, has been long
considered a mechanical way of image-making and thus lacking in
artistic qualities derived from the actual intervention of the artist
and from his or her artistic intentions (today we are completely
aware of the range of possibilities that the photographer has in
creating images). Once black and white photography was
accepted as a form of art, criticism regarding the lacking in artistic
quality was successively shifted to colour photography and, more
recently, digital technologies.
[14] Frederic George Stephens describes this way of imagemaking as brown style.
[15] Baxandall, M. (1995). Shadows and Enlightenment. London,
Yale University Press:132-139.
[16] [Stephens, F. G.] (1861).William Holman Hunt and his works,
London, James Nisbet & Co.
[17] For a correlation of this phenomena with the opponent
theory of colours see Jameson, D. and Hurvich, L. M. (1975).
“From Contrast to Assimilation: In Art and in the Eye”. Leonardo.
Vol 8 (No 2):125-131.
[18] Ratliff, F. (1971). “Contour and Contrast”, in Proceedings of the
American Philosophical Society. Vol 115 (No 2): 150-163.
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