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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 26 Oct. - 1 Nov. 2000 Issue No. 505 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 26 Oct. - 1 Nov. 2000 Issue No. 505
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Palestine International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Losing the steamer trunks
By Nigel Ryan
Grisaille -- painting in shades of grey -- developed in tandem with various Renaissance theories of perspective till it could be used to give the illusion of sculpture, stuck way up in the air, in those colossal decorative schemes favoured by wealthy cinqocento Italians. These statues that are not statues hold on their broad shoulders balustrades that are not balustrades over which peep painted cherubs and peacocks. They frame the edges of ceiling openings that give on to a perfectly azure sky that is not sky, the vista heavenwards broken only by a few, vaporous clouds. In the most ambitious schemes the polychromatic marble floor over which the whole painted edifice towers often contains a stray tile of plain black marble, a discordant note in the otherwise regular patterning of the floor intended to indicate the place the viewer should stand in order to receive the most convincing, the most perfectly realised illusion. Undoubtedly, it is a style of painting that shouts to the painted rafters the illusionistic skills of its perpetrator, skills that had grown from a thorough reading of the huge number of treatises on perspective that graced that particular century.
To the modern eye such illusionistic extravaganzas -- the endless vistas the painted statuary frame -- are often in danger of appearing facile, meretricious exercises that, while we can admire their scale and even receive a vicarious thrill at the sheer ambition of it all, otherwise leave us cold. Why paint a sky on the ceiling? No matter how well painted, in the end we all know it is the ceiling and not the sky? Spending years of one's life on such an enterprise simply rubs against the deeply embedded utilitarian grain of our modern, utilitarian sensibilities.
Everything has its fall-out, though, and the distant descendants of those extravagant Renaissance interiors can be seen in any number of restaurants -- usually Italian or Greek -- boasting wall murals of peaceful piazzas, or views across the ocean to a distant Grecian isle. A strange pedigree, a mocking twist of fate, that da Vinci's Last Supper should have spawned so many murals on which today's less exalted diners can gaze as they struggle with the chewy mozzarella on top of the chewy pizza base.
The restricted tonalities of grisaille painting -- employed most famously, perhaps, to articulate divisions in Michelangelo's design for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel -- are perhaps less alien to contemporary taste than the sometimes lurid scenes they were intended, originally, to support. They can still appeal to those thoroughly immersed in minimal chic. And in the end you need only introduce a little black and white to the shades of grey and, hey presto, you have a complete and fashionable graphic range.
Currently, it is being put to good use in the painted hoardings advertising a film entitled What Lies Beneath. I should confess to knowing nothing about the film, beyond what appears in the Listings section overleaf, which I consulted after seeing the hoardings. "Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer star in a thriller about a peaceful marriage that turns nightmarish," runs What Lies Beneath's blurb -- none of which I could have possibly guessed from the two heads on the poster. The male head lolls to its right, eyes rolling, the pupils gone, leaving only the vacant whites, looking eerily -- though perhaps appropriately, given the roots of this monochromatic style of painting -- like one of those eyeless Roman portrait busts, though of a subject who is, clearly, stark raving mad. It looks as much like Harrison Ford as I do. I look as much like Michelle Pfeiffer, for that matter, as the second head on the hoardings -- a face wearing an expression of pinched complacency, certainly when compared to the death throes going on next door.
The painted hoardings, of course, are an attempt to reproduce the film's printed posters in paint and the element of grisaille, I suspect, creeps in because the original posters blew up black and white photographs of the two stars. The plot summary certainly gives the impression that this is one of those Hitchcockian domestic dramas beneath whose surface lurks an unconscionable evil, an impression that the original posters would be keen to reinforce. Hence the black and white photographs of film stars -- always evocative, in a forties, Hollywood kind of way -- and, by a further process of transformation, their reappearance on painted hoardings in Cairo's streets as images that appear determined to achieve an unlikely mix between the certainties of quattrocento statuary and the 20th century neuroses of Munch.
I doubt if I will be rushing off to the cinema -- Harrison Ford in a domestic drama needs no additional plot twists to complete the nightmare for me. Yet I find the painted hoardings particularly compelling.
One knows, instinctively, that copying is never a simple process, whatever the intentions of the copyist. It was not simple in the past, and in our age of mechanical reproduction it has certainly not become any more simple. Images that cross borders, even those well-demarcated boundaries between media, lose and assume a multiplicity of meanings that no one can ever know they possessed. And images that seek to cross continents can set out armed with as much baggage as the wife of a Victorian high commissioner, but they will always discover that the steamer trunks somehow didn't quite make it, got stuck in customs, or were deemed expendable ballast to be ditched at sea.
What Lies Beneath, incidentally, has been translated into Arabic as Al-Haqiqa Al-Khafia , The Hidden Truth. And truth, notoriously, is never black or white. Famously, they knew a thing or two, those old masters. And one of the things they knew was how to handle the grey.
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