The modern concept of culture stems from this public access to historical-political identifying signs and to their collective interpretation. The modern concept of state-the republic or the democracy-is foreshadowed by this commoner, who in perceptual union with the monarch is a “virtual prince” and who will later become the citizen. Exhibited in the churches and the great halls of seignorial or civic palaces, these representations allowed every member of the community the same possibility as the monarch or the painter for an identity within and mastery over that universe. In turn, the eye of the monarch registered a well-ordered universe all the way to the vanishing point. The narrative, urban, architectural, religious, and ethical components of these communities were given order on the pictorial plane by the painter’s eye, according to Leon Battista Alberti’s costruzione legittima (broadly, the laws of perspective). Optical geometry, the ordering of colors and values according to a hierarchy of Neoplatonic inspiration, and the pictorial rules that captured and crystalized the heydays of religious or historical legend helped instill a sense of identity in the new political communities-the City, the State, the Nation-by allotting them the fate of seeing all through reason and thus making the world transparent (clear and distinct). In the centuries that followed it contributed its share toward realizing the metaphysical and political program of visual and social order. Painting won its noble imprimatur, was ranked as a Fine Art, and was awarded almost princely privileges during the Quattrocento. The momentum of this world brought with it the decline of the so-called “noble” professions which had belonged to the previous world, as well as the contraction of that earlier world. ![]() Painting’s impossibility arises from the industrial and postindustrial-technoscientific-world’s greater need for photography than for painting, just as that world needs journalism more than it does literature. ![]() IT IS NOT JUST PHOTOGRAPHY that has rendered the profession of painting “impossible” to claim that it was would be like saying that Stéphane Mallarmé’s work,or James Joyce’s, were simply responses to the development of journalism.
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