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Naturalism and Nature in Art

In the ancient world, the Greek philosopher Aristotle evaluated works of art on the basis of how faithfully artists recorded what they saw in the natural world. But we need to be aware that when painters working in a naturalistic style make images that seem like untouched snapshots of actual objects, their skill can also render lifelike such fictions as a unicorn or a dragon.

Like many people today, ancient Greeks enjoyed the work of especially skilful naturalistic artists (the Greek word for“art,” techne, is the same as the Greek word for“craft”). Their admiration for naturalistic depiction is illustrated in a famous story about a competition between rival Greek painters named Zeuxis and Parrhasius in the late fifth century B.C.E. Zeuxis painted a picture of grapes so accurately that birds flew down to peck at them. Then Parrhasius took his turn, and when Zeuxis asked his rival to remove the curtain hanging over the picture, Parrhasius gleefully pointed out that the curtain was his painting. Zeuxis agreed that Parrhasius won the competition since he, Zeuxis, had fooled only birds but Parrhasius had tricked an intelligent fellow artist.

In the seventeenth century, painter Adriaen van der Spelt and his artist friend Frans van Mieris paid homage to the story of Parrhasius’ curtain with their painting of a blue satin drapery drawn aside to show a garland of flowers (a decoration made from many flowers joined together) in Flower Piece with Curtain (1658). The artists not only re-created Parrhasius’ curtain illusion but also included a reference to another Greek legend that was popular in the fourth century B.C.E. that told of Pausias, who painted the exquisite floral garlands made by a young woman, Glykera. This second story raises the troubling and possibly unanswerable question of who was the true artist-the painter who copied nature in his art or the garland maker who made works of art out of nature. The seventeenth-century patrons- the people who bought such paintings-knew those stories and appreciated the artists’ classical references as well as their skill in drawing and manipulating colors on canvas.

The flower garland in Flower Piece with Curtain also symbolizes the passage of time and the fleeting (temporary) quality of human riches. The brilliant red and white tulip- -the most desirable and expensive flower of the time- symbolizes wealth and power. Yet insects creep out of the flowers, and a butterfly- -fragile and transitory-hovers above a flower. Today, after studying the painting in its cultural context, we, too, understand that it is much more than a simple flower piece, such as the type of still life with flowers popular in the Netherlands in van der Spelt and van Mieris’ time.

Just as Dutch flower pieces were perceived as ideal expressions of naturalism in the seventeenth century, so today modern photography seems like a perfect medium for expressing the natural beauty of plants. In his photograph Succulent (1930), Edward Weston did just that by using straightforward camera work, without manipulating the film in the darkroom. But Weston did more than accurately portray his subject. He made photography an expressionistic medium by perfecting the close-up view to evoke an emotional response. He argued that, although the camera sees more than the human eye does, the quality of the image depends not on the camera but on the choices made by the photographer-artist. Many people even today think that naturalism represents the highest accomplishment in art. But not everyone agrees. First to argue persuasively that observation alone produced“mere likeness” was the Italian master Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), who said that the painter who copied the external forms of nature was acting only as a mirror. He believed that the true artist should engage in intellectual activity of a higher order and attempt to capture the inner life- -the energy and power- of a subject. Georgia O’Keeffe, like van der Spelt and Weston, studied living plants; however, when she painted the canna lily in the painting Red Canna (1924), she, like Leonardo, sought to capture the flower’s essence. By painting the canna lily’s organic energy, she created a new abstract beauty, conveying in paint the pure vigor of its life cycle, rather than producing a realistic image.

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►In the ancient world, the Greek philosopher Aristotle evaluated works of art on the basis of how faithfully artists recorded what they saw in the natural world. But we need to be aware that when painters working in a naturalistic style make images that seem like untouched snapshots of actual objects, their skill can also render lifelike such fictions as a unicorn or a dragon.