Light as Experience and Imagination from Medieval to Modern Times 9781683933632, 9781683933649, 9781683933656, 168393363X

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Light as Experience and Imagination from Medieval to Modern Times

Light as Experience and Imagination from Medieval to Modern Times David S. Herrstrom

FA I R L E I G H D I C K I N S O N U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

Vancouver • Madison • Teaneck • Wroxton

Published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Copublished by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom Copyright © 2022 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press gratefully acknowledges the support received for scholarly publishing from the Friends of FDU Press. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Herrstrom, David Sten, 1946– author. 

Title: Light as experience and imagination from medieval to modern times / David S. Herrstrom.  Description: Vancouver ; Madison : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, [2022] | Preceded by: Light as experience and imagination from Palelolithic to Roman times / David S. Herrstrom. [2017]. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This scholarly work focuses on encounters with light, telling the story of ‘seduction’ from the Middle Ages through our times, as revealed in works of literature and art, including architecture and film. Rather than the historical investigation of light’s ‘essential’ nature, its subject is our relationship with light”—Provided by publisher.  Identifiers: LCCN 2022023326 (print) | LCCN 2022023327 (ebook) | ISBN 9781683933632 (cloth) | ISBN 9781683933649 (epub) | ISBN 9781683933656 (paper) Subjects: LCSH: Light and darkness. Classification: LCC QC372 .H467 2022  (print) | LCC QC372  (ebook) | DDC 306.4/5—dc23/eng20220910 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022023326 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022023327 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

For David G. Massey 1946–2018

The first time we see light, . . . we are it rather than see it. —William James, Psychology: Briefer Course, 1892

Contents

Acknowledgments xi Introduction xiii Chapter 1: Houses of Light: The Middle Ages



Chapter 2: Instrumental Light: The Renaissance

1

49

Chapter 3: Untwisting the Shining Robe of Day: The Enlightenment

81

Chapter 4: Sublime Light: The Age of Revolution

123

Chapter 5: Fields of Light: The Age of Technology



Chapter 6: Eloquences of Light: The Age of Uncertainty Chapter 7: The “Thingness” of Light: The Age of Suspicion Conclusion



195

237

283

Bibliography Index

161

293

357

About the Author



363

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Acknowledgments

I am most grateful to David Massey, who fanned the sparks of this book struck decades ago and to whom this second volume is dedicated. My friend’s rigorous critique of successive drafts has been not only helpful but wonderfully sustaining. Without his casting a cold eye and being unafraid to slash and burn in the interest of brevity and lucidity, Light as Experience and Imagination from Medieval to Modern Times would have been twice as long, to everyone’s regret. What a pleasure to thank Andrew Scrimgeour, a friend with whom I’ve traded writings since we were young. His warm but clear-eyed encouragement has sounded throughout my life. And not only has his unwavering belief in my work sustained me always, but his sharp editing and questioning pen has been invaluable. Without his faith in the significance of and untiring commitment to this project of exploring light’s human history, seeing me through challenges and in the end enabling me to publish this book, it would not be now in your hands. Unending gratitude to my wife Constance Harmon Herrstrom, my constant support as well as door opener of the time to write. Also, I thank my friend Rebecca Mebert for her encouragement over a lifetime. And my colleague James Sherry’s probing, detailed critiques have been most helpful. As have Robert Friedman’s encouraging responses. I thank Emily Nguyen for her generous help with bibliographic, manuscript completion. Among those who have made this book possible, I owe a tremendous debt to the late Kenneth Stunkel’s astute comments and wise suggestions. My gratitude exceeds all words.

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Light is too simple to be described, too glorious to be embellished, too mysterious to be explained, and, alas, too common to be prized. —The Reverend Henry Hunter, 1793

If I were to tell you about an encounter with an invisible force, an experience of a reality that has no substance but is visible and material, accompanies me everywhere, fills me with joy and even ecstasy on occasion, and whose circumference is nowhere and center everywhere, you would assume, I suspect, that I’m talking about an angel or even God. But no, this is the ordinary yet beautiful light of a typical sunny day. And this book tells the story of light seducing individuals down through the ages. It is a book born from personal experience, my breath taken as I stand on the Northern California coast and look out on a bleached light that floats on the cold wind like a massive driftwood log, or as I stand at the edge of a tawny valley mesmerized by a lone live oak in the distance suspended in a crystal of light. Here is the presence of a cosmic gift, a chance act of grace in the everyday world. With every sunrise I feel, like the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, that this “time of day never took place before, nor did this light, nor did this being of mine.”1 Paradoxically, we do not actually see light. We see the glitter, glow, and shine that result from light interacting with objects in the world.2 Everyday, natural light is a force not only within our lives but within our culture. Common sense tells us that we notice light as we sit in our backyard or move about in the world, something found just as we would find a stone, a purely natural phenomenon. In reality, however, we “construct” light. It is, in fact, a complex cultural document embodied in artifacts such as poems and paintings that require interpretation. Just as my eye constructs an object by making a map of it, a prior act of imaginative construction takes place xiii

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when I encounter any light. My visual apparatus selects certain photons and not others, and my psychological and cultural inheritance predisposes me to select certain qualities and not others. It is these acts of construction, rooted in our physiology and extended by our imagination and culture, that we call our experiences of light. Visited by light while writing a sermon preached in London on November 14, 1793, the Rev. Henry Hunter confronts this light and points to its accessible yet paradoxical character: “too simple to be described, too glorious to be embellished, too mysterious to be explained, and, alas, too common to be prized.”3 Giving the lie to our inability to describe, let alone prize light are the individual testimonies of light experience that we will be hearing throughout my book.4 We will listen to witnesses from medieval to modern times and explore the relationships revealed, by turns disturbing and affirming. Tracing why light arises in our lives and how it has affected us throughout our history, I follow the ways of our appetite for light. Strangely, in the presence of glory and mystery, I have the sensation of belonging in some way to the light and the light to me. And I am convinced that this uncanny connection is not illusory. We are not simply light gazers. I am caught up by an optical tide as tangible as the trees, their leaves ingesting light, whom I’ve joined in some ancient reunion of light grazers. This desire is grounded in our physiology, for our eyes have been over the course of some three billion years created by light. Having co-evolved with light, it pursues us even as we pursue it.

Figure 0.1. Michael Frye, Orchard with Sunbeams and Fog, Sacramento Valley, California (January 26, 2014). https:​//​www​.michaelfrye​.com​/2014​/01​/26​/trip​-central​-valley​/

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The experience of a ubiquitous and personal light possessing the ability to effect wonder in us is my subject. In Light as Experience and Imagination from Medieval to Modern Times I tell the stories of how we’ve experienced the character of natural light throughout history, confronting and reflecting on it, asking not “What is light?” but “How does light affect us? What does it mean to us?”5 The answers to these questions expressed in many ways, from writing to painting, reveal the different valuations at different times that we have accorded light in our relationship with its stubbornly independent and utterly unique character.6 My book presents these expressions. This is the second of two volumes that together present personal experiences of light from Paleolithic to postmodern times. My first volume ended with Roman testimonies. The present volume picks up the story from the Middle Ages and continues into our own times. As we move into our own age we come to know light intimately, even as it remains elusive. It is both strange, radically different from any other phenomenon, and yet familiar. At times an alien and at others an intimate, I treat light as a character, even personifying it. Such a metaphoric strategy, I know, can be unsettling. However, this captures our historical dialog with light and our ongoing experience of it. Just when we arrive at a description, our words dissolve in wonder. I can identify light’s generosity, filling all the nooks and crannies of our world, its independence of our earthly home as well as of us, and its power to deny or sustain life, but these traits do not exhaust the character of light.7 The perceived moods and movements of this character are our subject in the chapters to follow. I’ll explore our intimate relations with light and its “social life” as it affects our senses and illuminates the people, places, and objects of our world. For the figures whose testimonies we will be hearing and for many others, it is not just daylight. Some are so “stunned” and “dazzled” by this light that they fear being “obliterated” by it. While many, such as the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, are so moved by it that, as he says, “I feel it almost as a spiritual quality. When the sun comes up in the morning” and “casts its light on things, it doesn’t feel as if it quite belongs in this world.” And I can say with the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, “The light reposes in my Soul as the bird / of the moon reposes on a tranquil lake.”8 Such testimonies, we assume, are true reports of a specific person’s relationship with light. But we cannot assume that they tell us anything about the fundamental nature of light, for we know that the mere act of “seeing” and “experiencing” changes what we see, even as it changes us. This is because light exists at the “interface of physical and perceptual reality.” We bring our values, of course, to the experience as well as cultural assumptions and the matrix of our language. In addition, as witness after witness testifies, the character of light exhibits a fundamental otherness. It is eminently

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familiar—common—yet it is stubbornly and inscrutably independent—mysterious. Its otherness, in short, is irreducible. The only certainty we can have is that it possesses being, one like none other in the world.9 In exploring our experience of visible light, I take inspiration from the eighteenth-century tradition of “natural history.” This is a history written by amateur “professionals.”10 And I take the naturalist’s approach in exploring the human experience of light. It is the reported encounters with light that are the objects of this natural history. These eyewitness testimonies of natural light down through history constitute my “specimens.” They were left by individuals who valued their experiences of light enough to want to tell us about them. We’ll see how in fulfilling this desire they create a personal portrait of light. And the language they employ, from architecture to film, to give expression to their personal encounters with light is one of image and metaphor. They found different ways of speaking, having been arrested before thought by a new image, the heart of their encounter with light, such as Abbot Suger’s captivation by the light of gems and Edward Hopper’s entrancement by the light from pure white walls. Such encounters imaginatively spawn new images and in turn generate fresh metaphors by which our witnesses interpret their core experiences of light. And it is by these imaginative interpretations that they reveal to themselves the existential meaning of their encounters.11 Their new language of image-metaphor not only altered their sense of being in the world but often changed culture itself, as did Monet’s and Einstein’s imagination of light. Both “aesthetic and referential,” Einstein’s interpretive particle-wave metaphor (model) sunk deeply into the consciousness of the modern age. New images and living “metaphorics” such as this routinely shattered the old language of dead metaphor, such as “the sun is the father.” But the new language often suffers reification by the prevailing culture as symbol, as did the God-is-light metaphor by the church. A new generation, then, having a new relationship rooted in the “primal” image of an individual’s core experience of light, once again had to shatter an inherited language.12 Each witness creates out of their light experiences their own specific portrait of light within what we could call the human light climate, each testimony as valuable as that of a previous or succeeding period. Change from age to age means a change in the relation to light, expressed by the sum of portraits made by individuals in that age. As an individual’s fascination with light finds its expression, their observation and interpretation is informed by their personal and cultural memories and inherited myths. From medieval to postmodern light, its character changes as a function of the experience of light

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within a culture, each age creating a legend of light that often captures the imagination of a whole society.13 We have explicit accounts of encounters with light in writings, such as poetic or philosophical meditations. And we discover implicit ones in buildings and paintings. Their creators all want to “read and repeat” the “eloquences of light’s faculties.”14 My history relies on these accounts, which become the “languages” of light. And of each I ask: What is, as I call it, the “core” experience? Why did this arise in the life of an individual, and how did it affect that life? To answer these questions entails exposing the individual’s fundamental encounter with light that commonly begins, as I have suggested, with a single image. This book, then, is not concerned with the “real” nature or “essence” of light but rather our relationships with its character. Given this character, its insistent otherness, whatever our experience of it may be, we see that for the figures we will be hearing from, finding a language to express their unique experience presents a challenge. And our witnesses know well just how difficult this is to meet. On the one hand, they feel the pressure of inherited ways of speaking about encounters with light, and, on the other, the pressure of light itself, inexpressible in any medium other than itself. But find a language they do, as we’ll see.15 Either way I pay close attention not only to the personal and historical circumstances that birthed a specific encounter with light but to the metaphoric interpretation an individual gives this incident. Encounters so interpreted can resolve personal contradictions inherited from the culture, forging a new identity, or create conflicts with a cultural tradition. My conclusions result from an exploration of the force and consequences of a person’s “core” experience, such as how it haunts the memory, becomes an obsessive symbol, or gets elaborated in a personal myth. Not only does the experience of light affect individuals in how they understand themselves but in how they understand the world and the universe itself. Reassuring or revolutionary, all witnesses to light’s character, from painters to scientists, employ the fundamental language of image, metaphor, and symbol for personal or social ends. And my project is to interpret this “rhetoric of light.” Painting, poetry, science, and philosophy, all are by the very nature of their language, whether pigment, verse, model, or treatise metaphoric. And all present metaphors, such as the light off an individual’s face depicted in a painting that reveals an inner character. Each witness relies not only upon discovery and invention but on their systematically recreating the light of their world in the imagination. Metaphor collapses our internal and external worlds as well as subject and object, such

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as the boulder on my lawn and its reflected light. Resisting cultural pressures to divide the human imagination, light thus stands at the crossroads of art and science. Its unique character drives the scientific as well as artistic and religious traditions that make us recognizably human.16 On the journey from medieval to modern times, then, we focus on encounters with light. Thus mine is a book of little narratives, personal testimonies of this experience. My aim has been to create a space for readers to access various relationships with light, a space free of a reductive thesis or the narrow framework of a single, overarching narrative. Focusing on the testimonies of individual encounters and their imaginative interpretations, I seek to foreground decidedly personal experiences.17 I provide historical context and comparisons with other experience in other periods but do not trace any inclusive, developing story over time. I am less a chronicler than curator, guiding the viewer through an exhibition of gemstone specimens. Episodes of individual experience over time do not build to any climax. Specific encounters and their unique interpretations may become those of a subsequent cultural tradition but do not approach over time any single truth.18 As age follows age, our relationships with light, wave on wave of testimonies to light experience, do not reveal some indisputable essence. But rather, we glimpse more facets of light’s character and inherit a greater understanding of its richness. Like wonder, my book does not make progress but celebrates an underexamined range of human experience.19 NOTES 1. “Time of day . . . being of mine,” Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, sec. 75, p. 69. It is worth remembering that we are affected by the sun from before birth. The womb itself is not totally dark because some light penetrates our skin. And postpartum we’re acutely aware that our lives are governed by the rhythm of light and dark, which is true at the most basic level since our pineal gland acting on light signals regulates our sleeping and reproducing. (We’re not the only creatures whose clocks are governed by light of course; a species of mosquito “reads” light, and a butterfly exists with light sensors in its genitals.) For studies of the physical effect of the sun on our lives and the world, see Howard Harold Seliger, Light: Physical and Biological Action (New York: Academic Press, 1965); Peter A. Ensminger, Life Under the Sun (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2001); and Peter Hegemann and Hartmann Harz, “How Microalgae See the Light,” in Microbial Responses to Light and Time, ed. M. X. Caddick et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998). 2. Our everyday experience is saturated with natural light. We succumb to it and walk into the meaning that light makes while giving interpretive, imaginative meaning to it. Light masquerades as a penetrating beam or, Hans Blumenberg exclaims, “a

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guiding beacon in the dark, an advancing dethronement of darkness, but also a dazzling super-abundance, as well as an indefinite, omnipresent brightness containing all: the ‘letting-appear’ that does not itself appear, the inaccessible accessibility of things. . . . Light is intrusive; in its abundance, it creates the overwhelming, conspicuous clarity with which the true ‘comes forth.’ . . . Light remains what it is while letting the infinite participate in it; it is consumption without loss. Light produces space, distance, orientation, calm contemplation; it is the gift that makes no demands, the illumination capable of conquering without force” (Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth,” 31). “All types of light experiences,” as Mircea Eliade says, have in common that they “bring a man out of his profane universe of historical situation, and project him into a universe different in quality, an entirely different world,” often “transcendent and holy.” But the meaning of this light, whether secular or holy, is, “on the one hand, ultimately a personal discovery; and, on the other hand, each man discovers what he was spiritually and culturally prepared to discover,” but either way it “produces a break in the subject’s existence,” often realigning the “world of the spirit, of holiness and of freedom” (Eliade, “Spirit, Light, and Seed,” 2; and see in this article his “Morphology of Photisms” found worldwide in experiences of “inner light,” 23–25). 3. Writing a sermon, Dictionary of National Biography, X, 287; “too simple . . . common to be prized,” Hunter, Sermons, 2: 279. 4. The progression from ancient to modern may suggest that light’s portrait changed in the imagination from a spiritual to a physical being. Northrop Frye, for example, concludes that the evolution of the historical experience of light passed through three phases: the first begins with God, an “articulated” light; the second with man, an inner light; and the third with nature, a physical light (“The Myth of Light,” 8). But such a generalization does not do justice to the contradictory portraits of light within the same light climate or to the lively variations of personal experience. More nuanced is Arthur Zajonc who sees an arc from what begins as a “lively, soul-spiritual” light that then divides into optics and psychology. We move in this scheme from the ancient “psychological space” to the later “mathematical imagination of light” and return to the modern “spiritual perception” of light in philosophy, e.g., Rudolf Steiner; quantum physics, Max Planck; and art, e.g., Robert Delaunay (Catching the Light, 24, 114, 216–24, 270). Clearly, along the way it was a disruptive “energy and force” when at various times, according to the architect Henry Plummer, “light itself was experienced in a new way” (Masters of Light, 20). The post-Paleolithic arc of history, at the highest level of generalization, appears to move from light as “divine Presence” to “material object,” as Arthur Zajonc concludes, from the “mythic” to the “scientific” imagination of light (Catching, 223, 324). But his divide between optical and psychological paths is less than strict, as the medieval philosopher, scientist, and Bishop of Lincoln Robert Grosseteste and the Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca bring a mathematical (geometric) imagination to their interpretation of encounters with light. And, conversely, the modern poet Wallace Stevens and light artist James Turrell explore light’s psychological space.

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5. Questions central to the anthropology of light, a discipline that adds another, “How is light used?” (see Bille and Sørensen, “An Anthropology of Luminosity,” 265). 6. The light we see and physically respond to is a narrow band (about 1 percent) of the broad spectrum of “light” that ranges from low-frequency infrared to high-frequency ultraviolet rays (electromagnetic radiation). All its visible frequencies vibrating together like the sun’s, to which our eyes are tuned, are known as “white light.” I leave it to others to explore light’s separate notes within this band—colors (frequency), an immense subject in itself, and polarization (angle), which unlike bees we are blind to without the aid of polarized sunglasses. Though colors carry luminance information, it does not matter for our purposes because the part of our brain that analyzes luminance is colorblind (Livingston, 38). For a history of color, see John Gage, Colour and Culture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), of color in painting Faber Birren, History of Color in Painting (New York: Reinhold, 1965) and of pigments Philip Ball, Bright Earth (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001); for an influential treatise, see Roland Rood, Color and Light in Painting (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1941), and for a useful bibliography, David Batchelor, The Luminous and the Grey (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), 105–7. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein makes suggestive observations on color (1950) in his Remarks on Colour (7e, 12e, 25e, 30e), as do John Ferren, “Statement,” It Is (Spring 1958), 45, and Edmund Burke Feldman, “Colour as Language,” in Varieties of Visual Experience: Art as Image and Idea (New York: Abrams, 1973), 244–45. And see the collection of essays Colour and Light—Concepts and Confusions, ed. H. Arnkil (Helsinki: Aalto University / Konstfack, SYN-TES, 2012). The physicist Frank Wilczek examines the experience of color from a physical and biological perspective in his book A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design (New York: Penguin, 2015), 151–62. And Ulf Klarén examines the experience from the perspective of “concept formation in the field of colour and light” in his paper “Catching the Aesthetic Dimension: On Aesthetic Experience of Colour and Light,” International Colour Assoc. 12th International AIC Congress, Proceedings 3 (2013): 989–92. 7. By “light,” to be more precise, I simply mean our common experience, such as sunlight sifting through leaves or glancing off snow, revealing and connecting us to the world of objects—natural or visible light. The light seducing us by inducing various moods, and connecting us to each other as well as to the eternal. This natural light is a mix of direct and indirect sunlight. The latter is most common in our experience and consists of skylight, which is light scattered from the air and clouds as well as reflected from the ground. We receive little direct sunlight because our atmosphere with its molecules of air and water absorbs much of a sunbeam’s light. It also scatters it. The natural light of the sun is largely brightness with variations of intensity, which is what the basic mechanism of our eyes responds to—luminance. The sparkle and glitter of white light being a fundamental human experience, it penetrates the deepest recesses of our soul.

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8. As the poet Mary Oliver says, “If you think daylight is just daylight / Then it is just daylight,” West Wind, 24; “obliterated,” Carole Maso, from “Notes of a lyric artist working in prose,” American Poetry Review (March/April 1995), 31; “I feel . . . Belongs in this world,” Peter Zumthor, quoted by Plummer, The Architecture, 13; “The light reposes . . . Lake,” Rubén Darío, quoted by Hirsch, The Making, 308. 9. “Seeing” and “experiencing,” Elkins, The Object Stares Back, 11–12; “interface . . . perceptual reality,” Grandy, The Speed, 4; fundamental otherness, Grandy, “The Otherness of Light,” sec. #7; only certainty, J. Ponzio, “Light, Being, and Time,” 64. 10. “Professionals,” for example, the clergyman Gilbert White’s (1720–1793) The Natural History of Selborne (1789). Though not a professional, he was a pioneering naturalist with a claim to being England’s first ecologist (Gifford, A Natural History, 10). On the meaning of “natural history” and on White and Thoreau as natural historians, see Gifford’s “Introduction.” 11. The languages used, listed roughly in their order of origin here, overlap and interact in time as each develops, such as architecture being shaped by religion and Western painting by optics. They also intermingle within an individual witness like the modern filmmaker Terence Malick in whose works myth, history, philosophy, and science cannot be disentangled. Any one language merges into the other: (1) painting/architecture/sculpture, (2) poetry/mythology-religion/philosophy, and (3) optics/ photography/film. These three clusters, the visual (or plastic), the verbal (or conceptual), and the formally coded, whether by mathematical diagrams or by light-sensitive media, enable experiences of light to be expressed. Each of these languages is shaped by the nature of its medium, whether words or plastic art, such as pigment or limestone; or composites, such as photography and film. Accordingly, they differ in the aspects of light’s character they best capture. Words differ greatly in their expressive ability, of course, from the surfaces of pigments or buildings. Whereas poets manipulate metaphors, artists convey their experiences by altering the way surfaces reflect and scatter light. Using the materials of their respective arts, that is, artists from earliest times have discovered ways of conveying their perception of light early on by “alterations” of (1) surface layout (i.e., sculpture, architecture) and (2) “surface reflectance (e.g., painting). Later, they discovered the possibility of (3) alterations of “surface illumination” (e.g., photography) and (4) alterations of what we might call “refractance” (e.g., film) (Gibson, The Senses, 224). These modulations, of course, only evoke the experience of light, which does not reside in the material itself but in our response. Pigments, that is, are metaphors. For a breezy and very brief sketch of light in painting from the Renaissance to our own age, see Victoria Martin, “A Short History of Light,” Artweek (October 1998): 12. Painters were not alone in developing a rhetoric of light, ways of persuading us to accept the power of their experience and passing their codes on in the teaching of traditional techniques as did the Greek and Renaissance painters. Newton interpreted his experience, rooted in methodical observations, using a powerful metaphor. In doing so he captured something of light’s formal character, its wavelength composition

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(colors) and particle nature, inventing a code that was easily leveraged for the expression of later experiences. 12. “Aesthetic and referential,” Haney, “Metaphor and the Experience of Light,” 237; God-is-light, we remember that for the philosopher Jacques Derrida, the sun is “never completely natural but always metaphorical,” Haney, “Metaphor and the Experience of Light,” 237; “primal,” Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 163–64. I use “image” and “core experience” to designate what Martha Blassnigg defines as an “action set out by, or in, (human) consciousness”; the metaphoric/symbolic transformation of the image is a “quality encountered in both visual perception and cognitive activity of imagination as a co-creative action.” Thus like her I want to focus “on the particularities of the quality of light in its interactions with imagination.” In this she follows Bergson, understanding the “image” as an “indicator of the full range of sensory and imaginative experience involved in image perception and creation,” situated between the “realist notion of a ‘thing’ and the idealist notion of a ‘representation.’” It recognizes, that is, the intrinsic entanglement of matter and mind, inside and outside, virtual and actual (Light Image Imagination, 12, 21). This accords with the illustrator Ulf Klarén’s “levels” of experience: the categorical, basic perception; the direct experience; and the indirect cultural experience. These are “interdependent and implicitly present in all perceptions” (“Catching the Aesthetic Dimension: On Aesthetic Experience of Colour and Light,” International Colour Assoc. 12th International AIC Congress, Proceedings 3 [2013]: 990). Jacques Roubaud succinctly, “What gives birth and what is born are together in all birth, in the same instant of time, that which makes and that which is to be made, light and image, image and light” (Exchanges, 47). 13. Cultural memories and inherited myths, Schama, Landscape and Memory, 14. From earliest times, for example, these legends often made light a conduit for power. Light was imagined as a manifestation of a transcendent realm or the gods themselves. Consequently, a major shift in value occurred when light was emptied of its divinity and became an inanimate object. This occurred at various times in the experience of individuals but was not culturally consolidated until the eighteenth century when the Western mindset took a turn from the religious to the secular imagination. Though as Arthur Zajonc reminds us, the “spiritual perception” of light rose again in the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner (Catching the Light, 220). The proof that we have always had an affair with light is not merely that we have always named light itself, but that we have named specific aspects of our experience of light. Anglo-Saxon leoht is allied with leoma, a gleam. This word, leoma, witness to an ancient preoccupation with one aspect of light’s character, its luminance or “gleam,” is a remnant as intriguing as the fossils of ancient clams that Leonard da Vinci found three hundred miles from the sea at the top of a mountain. This word’s history extends back to its Indo-European root *leuk-, which tellingly carries into the Greek, Romance, and Germanic language families (Dictionary of Untranslatables, 577). Our modern tongue, continuing the tradition, blossoms with words that strive to name just this aspect: shine forth, gloze, glint, glance, flash and fulgurate; bedazzle, glimmer, spangle or coruscate; glister, bicker and luminesce; lustrous, orient, aglow, fulgid, effulgent, garish; shiny, flashy; lambent and scintillant.

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14. “Read . . . eloquences of light’s faculties,” Wallace Stevens, “The Pure Good of Theory,” IV, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 333. 15. The French poet and art historian Yves Bonnefoy says, “Light’s otherness,” the reality of its “unseizability opens within language an absence,” one difficult to fill (Bonnefoy, quoted by Stamelman, “The Presence of Light,” 48, 50). This challenge is also that of the phenomenologist who seeks to find a way to describe phenomena as they appear in our experience and are “given to our consciousness.” The mind must be “cleared of its preconceptions and prejudices, and go straight to the phenomena themselves” (Plummer, “Light Matters,” pt. 2, n.p.). This struggle, as we will see, becomes self-consciously acute in postmodern times, as the philosophical writings of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty became influential with such figures as the light artist James Turrell and the poet Jackson Mac Low. For a specifically phenomenological approach to light in sites of architectural groupings, see Taylor Stone, “Think about Thinking about Light: A Phenomenological Investigation of Lighting in Built Environments,” MA diss., York University, Ontario, Canada, 2011. For an exploration of the phenomenology of light itself, see Gernot Böhme, “Light and Space. On the Phenomenology of Light” (https:​//​www​.researchgate​.net​/publication​ /273178220​_Light​_and​_Space​_On​_the​_Phenomenology​_of​_Light). 16. Metaphor collapses inside and outside as well as subject and object, Haney, “Metaphor and the Experience of Light,” 244. We satisfy certain needs by reimagining our encounter with light. While we live in the light, our constructed light lives within us. It can be intimate, even sexual, a manifestation of another world that comforts or challenges us. And this experience, as we explore its meaning for our lives, turning to metaphor and symbol, can either be sanctioned by tradition or subversive of tradition. Old religions have been bolstered in their authority, for example, or shattered. Philosophies were extended or upended, and artistic traditions have been revolutionized. 17. I do not consider mystical visions of light, such as the light appearing to the seventeen-year-old Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism) in his room one night (September 21, 1823), “which continued to increase until the room was lighter than at noonday” until, as he says, “a personage appeared at my bedside” whose “countenance” was “truly like lightning” (quoted by Richard Cavendish, “Light,” in Man, Myth & Magic: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Supernatural [New York: Marshall Cavendish Corp., 1970], 12: 1622). Likewise, I do not examine what Mark Fox calls “Lightforms,” unusual experiences of light, such as a teacher’s who, “settling her terminally ill aunt for the night, . . . is suddenly startled to see a strange and wonderful light in the corner of the bedroom she and her aunt share. It grows in size and brilliance and she feels overwhelmed by a comforting presence” (Fox, Spiritual Encounters, 1). This is one of almost four hundred accounts of visions of light that the biologist Alister Hardy gathered over a period of more than thirty years in an attempt to “reconcile the ‘worlds’ of science and the spirit,” accounts recorded in the twentieth century, collected in 1969, and now housed at the University of Wales (Fox, 3, 5; echoes Rudolph Steiner’s attempt). I refrain from considering these experiences of

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light because they lack the existential involvement and individuality of what I call “core-experiences,” being largely shaped by inherited cultural frames and thus in a sense conventional. Consequently, these experiences share not only cause, being triggered by a crisis, but a “number of common traits and patterns, despite the diversity of descriptions and the fact that a great many of the persons reporting . . . were widely separated in time and space” (Fox, 4). Also, though many report that they were “either filled with light (often from within) or wrapped in light (usually from without),” they do not testify to a relationship with light (Fox, 94; emphasis in original), nor do “near-death” experiences. 18. “Curator,” Max Rodenbeck, “The Power of Arabic,” review of Arabs by Tim Mackintosh-Smith (Yale U.P.), The New York Review of Books, November 21, 2019: 39. Bohr, “It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature” (quoted by Park, The Fire Within the Eye, 334; emphasis in original). And with Zajonc my concern is not what view of light is true, but what is the significance of the view to the individual and community (Zajonc, Catching the Light, 184), fully aware as Foucault suggests that we cannot separate light from statements about light (The Archaeology of Knowledge, 47). Nor, historically, do experiences of light become truer with passing time; each encounter and its interpretation stands uniquely valid. To paraphrase Niels Bohr, my task is not to investigate what light is but what we can say about light. Focused like a burning glass on our encounters with light and ways of making sense of these, I am concerned with the personal and cultural impact of light, then, not with tracing the development of optical science as it strives to discover its “essential” nature. 19. David Park’s The Fire Within the Eye, Richard Weiss’s A Brief History of Light and Those That Lit the Way, and Bruce Watson’s Light: A Radiant History from Creation to the Quantum Age all tell the story mainly, unlike mine, of progress in optical science with asides on personal experience. Each of these is more concerned with the question, “What is light?” than with “What is our experience of light?” Nonetheless, I am particularly indebted to Park’s absorbing history of the investigation of light’s behavior, as I am also to Arthur Zajonc’s exhilarating study of the “entwined history of light and mind,” Catching the Light. I’ve learned much from these two scholars. Like mine Park starts with experience, but his book is principally a history of “thought about light.” And like Zajonc’s mine is a biography of light, but tells via core experiences of light a different and complementary life story. Suspicious of the power of such experience, not wanting to “allow the sublimity” of light to “blunt our scientific objectivity,” John L. Heilbron offers a short, quirky history of light in the Western world (“A Short History of Light,” 3). In contrast, this book highlights the singular individual experience, exploring our conflict with, resistance to, and acceptance of light. I simply offer the diverse experiences of a community of past and present American and European “lighteaters.” Because it is like no other phenomenon in our universe—familiar yet profoundly strange, revealing itself as it hides itself—light is new for every generation. Individuals giving us rich reports of their personal encounters with light, revealing many unknown facets of its common and simple, glorious and mysterious character.

Chapter 1

Houses of Light The Middle Ages

If the pagan Greek luminaries and Roman refractors caught a wild light that challenged Sophocles and frightened Augustine, the medieval witnesses tamed it. The new age is less concerned with light’s psychology and biography, so important to the Classical Age, than with light’s uncanny presence. This is central to the experience of medieval writers like the Christian Robert Grosseteste (1168–1253) and the Muslim Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi (1154–1191). The medieval world was that of the True Light—Jesus in Christian and Mohammed in Muslim lands. Both Christianity and Islam inherit the Classical assumption of the divine in nature, and both drink from a stream of Neoplatonism,1 but in their insistence on the intersection of God and history, both break radically with the Classical tradition. A break reflected in their rejection of the Roman tradition of art and the creation of something new, namely a unique architecture. The cathedral with its walls of light rises throughout Christendom, as does the mosque with its arches of light in Islamic lands. These wonders of the Middle Ages that we’ll be exploring in this chapter arose during its height in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries. The medieval period roughly spans the time between the collapse of the Roman Empire (476 CE) and the end of the Byzantine Empire (1453). But our focus will be on the period when Christianity and Islam became intertwined (1220–1350) after their consolidation in the eighth century. Owing to a new confidence as the population increased along with agricultural production and trade, this was an age of extraordinary advances in art and science, particularly in architecture and optics, when Islam and Christianity were culturally bound up together.2 Seven disastrous Crusades (1096–1254), resulting in unspeakable bloodshed and personal ruin, ironically opened up European Christendom to the 1

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rich world of Islam and Byzantine Greece. The Byzantine Empire had been a buffer between Europe and the eighth-century Muslim assaults intent on overrunning Christian Europe, which ensured separate realms, each developing a distinctive culture. With the returning Crusaders, however, not only did twelfth-century Europe welcome new translations by Islamic scholars of Plato, Aristotle, and Euclid but new styles of dress as well as music and poetry, new games like chess, even customs like taking regular baths. And the father of the Gothic cathedral, Abbot Suger, had the Qur’an translated into Latin. Like all encounters with light, the medieval experience begins with the sensual, perceived image. This may be simply one of beauty, yet, as the philosopher-theologian Robert Grosseteste tells us, mysteriously expansive— “Light is beautiful in itself because its nature is simple and at the same time contains all within it.” And an arresting image triggers the need to invest the experience with personal meaning, which we do by imaginative interpretation via metaphor. While the image constituting the core experience of light cannot be separated from the body and its imaginative activity, the extension of this to symbol can break with the body. The perceptual giving way to the conceptual, concrete experience to abstract interpretation, even solidifying as ideology. Take, for instance, Abbot Suger’s experience of light refracted by gemstones. Passing by them, his eye receives a unique dazzle-darkness as light bounces off the facets and dims between them. This intensely personal encounter with light became metaphorically for him the realization of the New Jerusalem, which gave his initial experience existential meaning rooted in biblical texts. As the interpretation of this image becomes the community’s, owing to its imaginative force, it moves toward the purely conceptual, however, leaving the personal and becoming a cultural a symbol of political and religious power.3 Medieval thinkers seized on the “sign” as mediating between image and symbol. The sign is both perceptual and conceptual, blurring the distinction between them. And here we discover a new, reciprocal relationship with light. Medieval worshippers projected themselves into the light, moving from image to symbol, such as from radiance to God, but at the same time light as spirit enters them, moving from symbol to image. In Abbot Suger’s words inscribed on the cast-bronze doors of his abbey church, worshippers will see light from his doors (then through stained glass) that shines “bright,” literally, but will “brighten minds” spiritually, moving from the “true lights” of his gilded doors (and radiant windows) “to the true light,” Christ himself. They internalize the jewel light from the windows, that is, experiencing its radiance as filling their bodies, even as it remains an external, transcendent phenomenon. Such is the work of the sign, as Augustine maintained, enabling

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the light of the human mind to be “lit by light.” As worshippers enter the abbey church of Saint-Denis or the Alhambra, they are in a sense the object of the light’s “gaze,” just as the light is the object of their gaze. And because the sign is perceived as corporeal and spiritual at the same time, light has the power to reconcile personal and social contradictions, such as reason and faith in ray and radiance, or physical and spiritual in a kind of “ghost physics.”4 No matter how interwoven are image and symbol in sign, as light plays the role of reconciler, there is no doubt that all medieval interpretations, as the art historian Wolfgang Schoene observes, take their “bearings from the sensuous experience of light.” Grosseteste makes this clear, insisting that “even without the harmonious proportion of corporeal forms, light is beautiful,” simply “for its scintillating radiance.” This includes metaphysical interpretations of light as well. Yet as a sign, light is both a physical and mental phenomenon possessing what Robert Scott calls “holy radioactivity.” Buildings as well as treatises arose from an image, a “palpable light-experience,” their artists remaining in close contact with it even as they elaborate its meaning. We’ll keep returning to this core “light-experience,” whether its testimony takes the form of an architectural or philosophical work.5 The Middle Ages celebrated the marriage of light and architecture in Christian as well as Muslim lands. The “soul of the Gothic,” John Ruskin, the great nineteenth-century art critic and historian, observed, was shaped by the light of the north filtered “through clefts in grey swirls of rain-cloud.” Here is the “benignity of sunshine” in contrast, that is, to the Mediterranean Islamic world subject to “ceaseless sunshine.” We will see the impact of this reality as we turn from the architecture of the Christian north to that of the Muslim south, first continuing our exploration in France where the Gothic cathedral had its birth. The architecture initiated by Abbot Suger took root in a relatively short time from 1150 to 1250 during the consolidation period of Christianity in the northern provinces of the Roman Empire. And it blossomed in a relatively small area, the royal domain of French kings in Paris, a vicinity known as the Île-de-France.6 ABBOT SUGER’S HOUSE OF LUMINOUS DARKNESS, HIS ABBEY CHURCH (EARLY GOTHIC) Abbot Suger renovated the ancient abbey church of Saint-Denis in the Îlede-France so that it “would shine with the wonderful and uninterrupted light of most luminous windows, pervading the interior beauty.” In accomplishing this, he pioneered architectural innovations to the church, introducing large stained-glass windows, as well as ornamental complements within that featured an abundance of precious stones. Five hundred years after Augustine he

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clearly has no ambivalence about light, none of the great theologian’s suspicion. The sheer joy Suger takes in its beauty exhilarates. Not only in that of the windows but of the stones. Gazing on these shiny objects, overtaken by their “radiance,” he goes into rapture. A powerful aesthetic response, Suger interprets his experience religiously, creating “delightful allegories.” All the while, as he confesses, “sighing deeply in my heart,” the “loveliness of the many-colored gems” calling him “away from external cares.” Enveloped in the glittering light of precious stones on the high altar that reverberates with light from the stained glass on his high walls, he celebrates this light transporting him, as he testifies, into “some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven.”7 Suger was beguiled by the way light was captured and released by radiant gems. Also, he shared the belief of the age that they generated their own light like Christ himself. It is the “loveliness of the many-colored gems” that calls Suger away from “external cares” and does its work of “transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial.” The fact is that in his writings in defense of his new church Suger says almost nothing about its architecture. What he does speak about often and at length is ornament—gemstones as well as their gold-gilt and silver cousins. “Sighing deeply in my heart,” as he contemplates the gems of the “golden altar,” he quotes from Ezekiel, “Every precious stone was thy covering,” the “jasper,” the “onyx, and the sapphire.”8 His passion was kindled, then, by an experience of a particular image: the refracted light of precious stones, uniquely dark and at the same time bright. A paradoxical light; Suger understands this to be sacred or incarnational light, one that resolved for him the paradox of the Incarnation. His passion extends from precious stones to stained glass because glass is a natural extension of jewels, being regarded as a substance belonging to the family of precious stones. Stained glass shares with jewels the weather that determines what light enters his church, a bright-dark light uniting the “purity of heaven” and “slime of earth.” Even when full sunlight poured through the windows of Saint-Denis it appeared as bright-dark patterns of blue, red, green, and amber gold against the black of their lead frames. Partnered with architecture, gemstones and stained glass together create sacred space and become in the eyes of the worshipper “supernatural light.”9 Vain and drunk on beauty, driven by his short stature and lowly birth, having entered the monastery as a small boy, which became the mother he says who “had suckled me as a child,” Abbot Suger launched himself into the world. But he was not an egoist. Buffeted by powerful winds from the monarch and the Pope, which often blew counter to one another, Suger skillfully navigated the ship of his abbey across diplomatic waters, the spheres of empire and church seeming to merge. But he achieved independence from

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the bishops of Paris, which gave him freedom to renovate, establishing SaintDenis as the religious center of the kingdom, just as it was the political center, given its close association with the kings of France.10 Saint-Denis was envisioned and raised by the sheer determination and personal force of this one man, the monk Suger. And his church is a personal expression, in effect, of his light experience. He personally recruited workmen from all over the country, from stonemasons and painters to blacksmiths and goldsmiths. He collected jewels from kings and princes who stripped the rings from their fingers, eager to contribute. As personal expression, his renovations to the old Romanesque abbey church necessarily entailed the bright-dark light of gems and glass. Extremely self-aware, he understood this to be the defining aspect of the “modern” church. And it is Suger’s new emphasis on light that separates Gothic architecture aesthetically and theologically from twelfth-century Romanesque, specifically, his generous admission and deliberate manipulation of a paradoxical bright-dark light.11 To this end he effects architectural and ornamental innovations to invite light into the house of God. Architecturally, he relegates all the structural mass to the outside, and we stand in light from windows that are more like “translucent walls” of stained glass. Suger reminds us that while the king himself “laid the first stone” a verse from the Breviary was chanted, “All thy walls are precious stones.” Such were his windows. These fill the choir chapels (which fan out from the area that provides seating for the clergy and church choir) with colored light, which he called “light mirabilis” (miracle light). As a transparent and colored substance, glass was the perfect medium to express the clarity and opacity of his core light experience, recapitulating the paradox of the Incarnation.12 Similarly, his ornamental innovations exploit this light. He especially delights in a chalice made from a single sardonyx stone whose varying red hue, he observes, interacts so “keenly” with the onyx’s blackness that one property, its polished gleam, appears to be “trespassing” on the other, its opacity. He takes special joy in this gemstone creation, of course, because it embodies his bright-dark light. Worshippers lift their eyes to the chalice that resonates with the Gregorian chant and soaring stained-glass window behind the priest.13 During the renovations of Saint-Denis (c. 1135–1140), Suger found himself “carried away,” as he says, and added the choir to the east end of his abbey. This semicircular row of chapels was his signature accomplishment, an original innovation. Justifiably, he boasted that it causes the church to “shine” with “wonderful and uninterrupted light.” Given the number of windows that Suger mentions, however, this “shine” would have been his personal bright-dark light, an otherworldly and this-worldly light admitted through the sacred illustrations in the stained glass. Their “reciprocal coupling of hues”

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Figure 1.1. Abott Suger, Basilica of Saint-Denis, Axial Chapel of the Virgin (completed, 1144). Myrabella, photographer. Creative Commons Attribution-Share 3.0. Creative Commons

generated a bright-dark brilliance, “shine” being transformed in the transit and becoming new light (lux nova), which was Suger’s name for Christ. The unique light of his church, created by an ensemble of gems reverberating with

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stained-glass windows, not only reconciled the material and the immaterial but the human and divine at the heart of the Incarnation.14 If the New Jerusalem described by St. John in the Apocalypse, its light being “like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone,” was his architectural inspiration, his intellectual one was the reputed writings of Dionysius the Areopagite (c. 500 CE), whom Suger mistakenly took to be St. Denis the founder of his abbey (now known to be Pseudo-Dionysius, a Syrian mystic writer). Bringing Plotinus and Jesus together, Pseudo-Dionysius viewed God as a “superessential ray” by which man could ascend to the Godhead. But the flip side of this was what he called “luminous darkness.” He taught that ultimately the negative way to God was the superior way because mortal man cannot truly know God. Suger extols brightness in numerous inscriptions on a gilded door, such as “For bright is that which is brightly coupled with the bright, / And bright is the noble edifice with is pervaded by the new light.” Yet this alone cannot be sufficient because God transcends his attributes. With Pseudo-Dionysius he realizes that a true path to God must be found beyond this in the dark “inaccessible light” of God, which denies all attributes. Thus the “luminous darkness” of his windows was the Divine Presence in Suger’s church.15 This light is continuous, as Suger claims his choir’s to be, but “veiled” in effect, which Suger no doubt associated with Pseudo-Dionysius’s “sacred veils” adapted to our nature as human beings, admitting a singular filtered light, transfigured, charged with mystery but not itself a mystical light, being a paradoxically luminous darkness. Inside the church, gemstones refract the windows’ particular sun-cloud determined luminosity, being also bright-dark like the “solid sardonyx” chalice on the altar alternately catching and releasing light. Reds saturate the blues and vice versa, violets grow paler and darker with the fading and brightening outside light. His windows continue to envelop worshippers in bright-dark, whether the sun sends a “quiet light” or direct “crashing rays.” As a “sign” participating in the image at the core of Suger’s light experience—bright-dark gem light—and in the symbolic New Jerusalem inspiration born of this, his “luminous darkness” reconciles the mystery of the Incarnation.16 NEW HOUSES OF LIGHT, CHARTRES CATHEDRAL AND SAINTE-CHAPELLE (HIGH GOTHIC) So aesthetically compelling and psychologically effective was Suger’s abbey church light that this expression of his unique encounter with bright-dark gems became cathedral light. Beyond the personal, Suger’s light became a communal light. Accompanying this was the shift from abbey to cathedral,

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which reflected the increased urbanization of society. The masters of the rural estates, wealthy from the labor of their farm workers, moved to the cities wanting good wines and food and brought prosperity to the merchants. Furthermore, the new wealth was now portable—coins, ingots, spice shipments—which the bishops and lords of the city could draw on to finance their monumental cathedrals. Taller than the pyramids, the Gothic cathedrals dominated the skyline of Europe for nearly four centuries. Towering above the landscape, they could be seen for miles. And they held the imagination for generations, some taking one hundred years to build and probably seeming to medieval villagers as monumental an accomplishment as putting a man on the moon does to us. Imagine leaving your small, dimly lit hovel, wattle-and-daub walls having no paint or ornament, and after shouldering through the city crowd, coming face to face with a mountain of stone. You stand awed. Then you enter and as your eyes adjust, here is light, the perpetual twilight of your hut banished. And as hope wells up within, your eyes lift to celestial window-walls of light high above. The Gothic cathedral’s architectural expression of a specific relation to light unique to the age spread throughout most of Europe by 1400, only dying out in the middle of the sixteenth century. No longer derived from Rome, as Christian architecture had been in the early Middle Ages, the newly invented style celebrating light (and height) epitomizes the northern experience of raincloud filtered light, which is in part why it did not take hold in the southern Islamic lands of brilliant sunlight. And this new relation that began with an individual, the twelfth-century Abbot Suger at Saint-Denis, was heightened by subsequent developments that increased the luminousness of the churches, notably the thirteenth-century cathedral at Chartres (High Gothic), an expression of communal experience, and the king’s personal chapel in Paris, Sainte-Chapelle, with its “continuous sphere” of light. Together these represent the highest perfection of “Gothic light.”17 After a fire in the original structure, the choir and nave of Chartres some fifty miles southwest of Paris were completely rebuilt. The Bishop of Chartres, Peter, Abbot of Celle, who like Suger was a Benedictine abbot, took the opportunity to create a masterpiece based on his design—Chartres’s choir. And the master mason who directed the work, leading a team of masons and glaciers, some having worked on the renovation of Saint-Denis and the creation of its windows, knew Saint-Denis well and made Suger’s light his own. He and his employers, including the Abbot of Celle, other bishops, cannons, crown, and nobles as well as townspeople and guilds, were most ambitious and sought to increase this singular light in accordance with their experience of light given meaning in a communal yearning.

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To do so they increased the proportion of glass to stone, along with height to width, dedicating the entire upper level of the cathedral to light (the clerestory), which greatly increased illumination in the lower level (the nave). This astonishing rebuilding effort began with the glass intended for its windows devoted to creating a bright-dark “light-space” that Suger would have recognized.18 Pushing open the mammoth, carved wooden doors on its western facade, worshippers entered a “jeweled gloom.” And they felt the power of the Gothic cathedral’s shadowy luminousness as their eyes adjusted to the “coloured darkness” that D. H. Lawrence called an “embryo of all light.” The unearthly twilight ebbs and they’re bathed in a “filtered light.” Peering upward they see luminous pools of light, then a stunning rose window, while all around them are pockets of mysterious luminosity. Light changing minute to minute, darkening as a cloud passes over, creates a grand theater. Then through a row of high clerestory windows, the sun again and light pours down, a living light that depends on the stained-glass windows and at the same time “judges them,” as the sculptor Rodin has said, according to the time of day.19 This ensemble of architectural elements creates a light space alive with a dialog of light and dark tones from end to end and floor to ceiling. Worshippers find themselves in Suger’s luminous darkness, but unlike the abbey church, the light space of Chartres ascends heavenward from the rich ornaments below, making them participants in its new yet familiar light. The windows dominate, having become an expression of the aspiration for God’s forgiving light. Their eyes come to rest successively on individual windows, such as Our Lady of the Beautiful Window (Notre Dame de la Belle Verriére) in the south side of the cathedral at the entrance to the choir. Its bright-dark tones varying with the changing light, darkening one moment and then smoldering with a somber glow, the window seems to “vibrate softly in a fluid sort of light” as they would in the arms of God himself, and then melts “imperceptibly” away into obscurity or suddenly flames with “abrupt changes.”20 As Chartres was being completed, King Louis IX, as powerful and wealthy as he was pious and austere, began building a royal chapel. Constructed in the middle of his palace, Sainte-Chapelle was consecrated in April 1248. Climbing a narrow spiral staircase to the second-floor chapel, stunned by radiantly colored light from fifteen windows rising fifty feet, the king found himself suspended in a crystal. Suger’s luminous darkness, intensified and transmuted in Chartres Cathedral, has become a “shimmering translucence,” as the art historian Michael Camille observes. Instead of walls punctuated with windows, here are windows punctuated with slender structural ribs. And stained glass formerly intended to retain and release light like gemstones is now made to

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transmit light. We have moved to a light in Sainte-Chapelle so intense that it does not merely refract from the church’s glass walls, as in Chartres, but dissolves them. An expression of the king’s experience, such intensity, ironically, compromises the light. The shimmering translucence of the expanse makes it difficult to focus. And the light of the windows becomes strangely elusive, even disorienting, the elusive translucence of the king’s very soul. Strictly intended for the use of the king, his family, and his retinue, his chapel can be understood as the expression of a personal struggle. On the one hand, Louis IX is king, a divinely appointed master; on the other, he is a servant divinely commanded. Accordingly, he served as a diplomat, but he also served beggars. He fed them from his table, ate their scraps, and washed their feet. This reflected and exacerbated a personal conflict. For when he held up Christ’s crown of thorns from his reliquary in the chapel, wearing a hair shirt under his robe out of abject humility, the act itself contradicted his proud proclamation of the divine right of kings.21 How to reconcile these powerful emotions was his project. And Sainte-Chapelle was his resolution. Luminous and elusive, it is a sensual feast yet a derangement of the senses. A feeling evoked by a contemporary philosopher who justly called the chapel a “casket of light,” a chamber in Paradise, its beauty transcendent, yet achieved only in death. This phrase captures the king’s inner contradiction. He creates with his master mason a light that reconciles power and powerlessness, epitomized by Christ on the cross. Light transformed by his walls of glass into the light of God is the same light that bathes the humble. We are mired in the “slime of the earth” yet visited by the “divine ray” as Suger says, quoting Pseudo-Dionysius. So the king’s chapel reminds all who enter, including himself at daily prayers, that though they find themselves in a crystal of radiance, it is at the same time a casket of light.22 ROBERT GROSSETESTE’S OUTWARD LOOK Like Suger, the English theologian and philosopher Robert Grosseteste (c. 1168–1253) was born into a poor family. And like Suger he was a man of the church moved by beauty. Having an aesthetic view of the world, he was smitten by light, exulting in “physical light,” the “best,” as he says, “the most delectable, the most beautiful of all the bodies that exist.” Unlike Suger, enchanted by the refracted luminous darkness of jewels and stained glass, Robert delighted in the presence of direct light. His experience of light’s character begins and ends in its “delectable” beauty. But as his relationship deepens, moving from his delight in its beauty to an awareness of light’s action, it becomes for him a corporeal figure (lux “a simple being,” lumen “a spiritual

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body”). It is not merely a beautiful character but an actor, light creating the cosmos and all within, including him, “by the infinite multiplication of itself equally in all directions.”23 Delectable Light As Bishop of Lincoln in 1235 in the town of Lincoln, England, Robert experienced in its cathedral, which had little stained glass, natural light suffusing its space as well as penetrating it directly. No doubt drawn by the radiant light in the nave, he noted how it filled the space instantly and equally in all directions as the sun moved into position. At once palpable and ethereal, he basked in this light. Encountering its fullness in the cathedral, a presence beside him, he noticed at the same time light glancing off its floor and walls as well as off its slender, polished columns.24 Having established an intimacy with the character of the light inhabiting Lincoln Cathedral during the eighteen years of his episcopate (1235–1253), Robert wrote a book devoted to light, On Light (de Luce). Further meditation on light’s character was understandable because over these years he witnessed the rebuilding of Lincoln Cathedral, including the nave. Like Suger he was inspired by architecture, conceiving of God himself as an architect. Yet its beauty did not reside in proportions and measure, agreeing with Alhazen whose book on optics had recently been translated from the Arabic, but like the beauty of stars solely in light itself.25 Robert resonated with radiant light. At the same time, he maintained a certain distance from the phenomenon inhabiting his nave. Although Robert starts with beauty, then, unlike Suger he not only attends to what he calls the “texture of things,” the sensuous experience of light, but must push farther to the “essences of things,” from the palpable to the essential nature of light. For both these churchmen, light is incarnational, reconciling the material and the spiritual, human and divine. But Suger’s refracted, immersive, and wholly personal light does not raise questions beyond reconciliation, whereas Robert’s distanced light does. Not satisfied with the revealed “light of the Divine Essence,” as was Suger, he had to ask, What does this mean? What is light’s essential character?26 The experience of light’s beauty is at the heart of Robert’s essay On Light (c. 1225), where he makes his enthusiasm clear, asserting that “light is beautiful in itself.” At the same time, his is an observational habit of mind. Pleasure leads him to observation but both start with Robert’s encounter with the naked phenomena, images of light. This combination of sensuous appreciation and intellectual contemplation make On Light his masterpiece. Experiencing light as numinous, he can at the same time stand back and observe light.27

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And what he experiences most forcefully in Lincoln Cathedral is the way in which light spreads out in all directions instantaneously from a center, multiplying itself from a source, whether the sun or a lamp, equally everywhere. In “one instant,” as he says, “one point of light can fill a whole sphere with light.” Observing light closely, Robert realized that because light by its very nature propagates itself in three dimensions, it is the ground of materiality, what he calls the “corporeity itself.”28 Hence he opens his little book with the statement that “the first corporeal form . . . I consider to be light.” That is, light is an entity in itself, as much a part of the earthly realm as of the heavenly, reconciling the two. It could not be separated from matter in his experience, neither existing independently of the other. As a “bodily substance which is very subtle and close to non-bodiliness,” light cannot be separated from “form,” which defines matter, giving it extension and thus enabling it to appear to us as objects. But unlike things we trip over, light is not pure matter. Instead it is the fundamental principle of extension, the primal generator of matter.29 What most astonished Robert about light’s ability to spread out in all directions at once is the fact that it does this on its own without apparent cause. As he explains in his commentary on Genesis, light “has what I might call,” paraphrasing a point he makes in On Light, a “(1) self-generativity of its own substance.” It is self-sufficient, that is, not requiring any external force to realize its existence in the world. He continues, “and perhaps it is because light is self-generative by its nature, that it is also (2) self-manifesting. Perhaps its self-generativity is its manifestibility.” Simply by generating itself, he imagines, light makes itself known. Thus from formal impulse comes substance, which is why Robert considers light the “first corporeal form.” His is a radical understanding of light’s character, marking a major shift from the previous age.30 Light being self-generative and irreducible, Robert is taken by the self-contained nature of its delectable character. Thus to observe the behavior of light and study it was for Robert access to its “mind,” its “essence,” which is the mind of God for both Plato and Jesus (I Jn 1:5). Robert experiences light phenomenally and metaphysically at the same time. It is a sign, a corporeal and numinous subject. But more than this, light is at the center of all knowledge, physical (scientific) and metaphysical (theologicalphilosophical). Such an original relationship with light proved to profoundly alter what the physicist Arthur Zajonc calls the “imagination of light.” Given light’s manifestation in his cathedral and his imaginative interpretation, a creative conjecture, he concludes that light is the basic substance of the universe, which identity persists throughout all change, being itself the cause of this change.31

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Creational Light Such a bold interpretation of his core experience of light does not come all at once. From the image of its suffusion and penetration in the nave of Lincoln Cathedral Robert arrives via metaphor at its self-generating and self-manifesting character. He formulated this conjecture from thoughts written down here and there as he observed and contemplated images of light, recording “some noteworthy thought” triggered by them on a scrap of parchment when it “occurred to him.” And having piled up a heap of these scraps over time, so one of his disputants William of Alnwick tells us, he organized them (inventing the index) and made his book. Throughout the process, Robert found both the physics of light, its material energy, and the metaphysics of light, its transcendental reality, mingling in his mind equally. Furthermore, every existing form created by this engine in the beginning is “some kind of light,” including Robert.32 Experiencing light as primarily physical energy, Robert projects this as “physical, cosmic energy,” the “self-generative” matter-form. For him this power to generate itself is the very definition of light, its basic character. So forceful is light’s character that he comes to the conviction that it is the origin and engine of the creation itself. For Robert light is none other than the corporeal-spiritual corner stone of the cosmos, whose architect is God himself. Refracting Genesis as Aristotle and Pseudo-Dionysius look over his shoulder, he reimagines the beginning of the cosmos from this perspective generated by his core experience of light’s behavior.33 In doing so he gives the old story an unexpectedly daring twist. Light is not simply an element in the universe; the entire cosmos is an extension of light. Born of an explosion like the Big Bang and subsequently condensing, the single substance—light matter—generates the material body of the universe. The universe begins in light matter. His “metaphysics of light,” then, simply means that for him light is the basic stuff of the universe, irreducible to anything more basic, and constitutes everything in the universe. Astonishingly original, this was a radical anti-Aristotelian conclusion, which contains the idea of an expanding universe constituting creation.34 And now instead of light’s biography being the story of its origins, as it was in Roman times, it is itself the origin and fulfillment of its own story. Light for Robert writes its own biography. In effect, all material creation is “condensed light.” Robert’s conclusion reconciles his two personal impulses, seemingly in conflict as a bishop, toward physics and metaphysics. That is, for him this discovery establishes “continuity in nature” and in himself. It may seem that Robert has traveled far from the image that light offered him of delectable beauty, but in reality he has returned. We remember that he says, “Light is beautiful in itself.” But this

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consists in its “simplicity,” being the self-generated, basic substance of the universe. It also consists in its “harmonious proportion,” which is not why it is beautiful but why it is accessible to analysis and imaginative conjecture. He is taken by the “texture” of light as it behaves in his cathedral and plays out in every “visible creature,” all objects in the world, as well as over them. But at the same time he observes the structure of light as revealed by its angular rays in Lincoln Cathedral. And these enable a “pure understanding” of the essence of light because they can be questioned by mathematical methods (geometric, not quantitative as in later ages), reconciling physics and metaphysics.35 By bringing an extraordinarily creative mind to his experience of an immensely complex character, determined to give it not only personal but cosmic meaning, Robert accesses the “light inaccessible.” Whether the ray of sudden illumination in the morning cathedral or the sparkle of its columns, the accessible light of the world around him has such power in his experience that he is convinced it leads him to the inaccessible light of the eternal world. Suger expresses in stone and glass light’s luminous darkness, while Robert collects chance images, gathers his scraps of parchment, and cobbles together interpretive words to clarify light’s pure substance—the light matter cornerstone from which the cosmos and being itself rise. CATHEDRAL TO MOSQUE While Robert was laboring in Lincoln on his Hexaemeron, positing that light and being itself are one, his contemporary Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi (1155–1191) was working in Aleppo (Syria) on his Philosophy of Illumination. Known as Suhrawardi, having been born in the northwestern Iranian village of Suhrawardi in 1154, his book like Robert Grosseteste’s On Light would have far-reaching influence, not only on later interpretations of light experience but even on its architectural expression. Even as Robert’s book shaped the palace chapel in Paris to a degree, so did Suhrawardi’s the palace mosque in Granada, the famous Alhambra. However far apart they were geographically and religiously, the two theologian-philosophers had much in common. Christian and Muslim (Sufi), respectively, both were prolific authors influenced by Neoplatonism. Both conjecture a light metaphysics rooted in their observed aspects of light’s character and construct a cosmogony explaining how all comes into being from what Suhrawardi calls the “Light of Lights.” Yet their relationships with light differ as profoundly as their interpretations. Both men experience the self-evident nature of light, its sheer presence, but each responds emotionally to divergent character traits, Robert to its endless expansion and Suhrawardi to its “durationless instant.” And their respective interpretive approaches,

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analytic and discursive versus intuitive and poetic, lead to very different conclusions about the meaning of their encounters.36 Robert’s belief in knowledge by observation versus Suhrawardi’s in “knowledge by presence,” where knowing and being are the same, leads to a greater divergence. The Englishman looks outward, embracing empirical observation, and the Iranian inward, trusting to intuition. Both begin from an image of beauty, but Robert’s interpretation of his experience of light leads him outside himself as perceiving subject, finding a meaning in its being the foundation of the cosmos, while Suhrawardi’s interpretation leads him into himself, existentially changing the subject who perceives, meaning found as a participant in light, desiring to become one with it.37 Yet the paradox of “dazzling darkness” shared by individuals in both cultures and meditated on in the Kabbalah reminds us that as we travel from Christian to Islamic lands, the geographical and experiential continuity is tremendous. The singular interpretation of an encounter with predawn light by the Kabbalist Isaac of Akko (fl. thirteenth–fourteenth century), who traveled from eastern Europe to Muslim Spain, encompasses both aesthetic and mystic ends of an experiential continuum. And we see in moving west to east that the emphasis in the interpretation of light experience shifts from the aesthetical to the mystical, analytic to intuitive. But now we’re fully aware that this is, in fact, a shift in emphasis only. It is neither absolute nor comprehensive.38 SHIHAB SUHRAWARDI’S INWARD LOOK In the same year that Saladin the great champion against the crusaders and his Muslim forces faced King Richard the Lion-Hearted who had landed in Acre, he ordered Suhrawardi executed. At thirty-six Suhrawardi had written nearly fifty books and become a friend of Saladin’s son al-Malik al-Zahir, governor of Aleppo, who had brought him to court. But his father, threatened from the west by the Third Crusade and from the east by sectarian defiance in Egypt and Syria, was convinced by a jealous cleric that Suhrawardi’s writings, specifically his “Science of Lights,” which advocated the philosopher-king as ruler, posed a political threat, and ignored his son’s entreaties. While visiting al-Malik al-Zahir in his father’s palace situated on a hill within a citadel for protection, Suhrawardi noted that it courted the sun and the sun obliged. Full of light in its airy upper rooms, what Suhrawardi experienced as its prime character trait was simply that light is self-evident.39 This may not seem at first to be the most profound observation, but he returns to this perception again and again. On further contemplation he is convinced by this aspect of light that it is the starting point of knowledge, not simply a fact in itself but the fact that matters, namely that knowing and being are the same.

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He is driven to this conviction by the force of his experience, an immediate apprehension of light in itself, which he came to see is unique to this phenomenon. His seemingly unremarkable encounter with light, then, became the experience of “knowledge by presence,” which is at the heart of his extended interpretation of light in The Philosophy of Illumination. Along with this presence comes the mundane observation, on the face of it, that light is most intense at close proximity and, more profoundly, that light propagates itself instantaneously and does not, as Neoplatonism holds (Plotinus), emanate in time.40 The force of this threefold image at the core of his light experience—light’s utter self-evident presence possessing all space and all time in its “durationless instant” of propagation—generated his Illuminationist Philosophy. At its source, that is, light for Suhrawardi erases space and time. And he makes the intuitive knowledge of light obtained by the immediacy of its experience the heart of his interpretation. Light cannot be known, that is, discursively but only through its presence, the immediate experience of its luminosity.41 The Presence of Light Suhrawardi completed his most important work in 1186 at the age of thirty-three. The Philosophy of Illumination is an extended interpretation of experiencing light’s presence. In doing so, he moves deeper into his initial experience, his fundamental threefold image, probing light’s intuitive nature rather than analyzing its phenomenological state. He is more interested in how light operates in his body than in how light behaves in the world. The behavior of light apart from his psychology is in this sense irrelevant. What counts is light’s internalizing its presence within him, what we might call the “argument” of the light, and this is what he explores in his book.42 Inasmuch as no language lay at hand to communicate the meaning and significance of his experience, an immediate, intuitive apprehension of light, the sudden realization of a total grasp of its presence, he invented one. His “Language of Illumination” employs a symbolic vocabulary as well as familiar terms, such as the word “light” (Arabic nur), in a technical sense. This enables him to express his vision that all things, bodily or abstract, are in fact light. They differ mainly in their relative “luminosity” and “intensity.” And the degree of “luminosity” depends on their proximity to the “Light of Lights,” the supremely luminous thing in his cosmos, because as he observed the closer to light the greater its intensity. It follows from this that all knowing, whether sensed, reasoned, intuited, or dreamed, is a function of our “experience” of light. And by increasing the intensity of this experience, we may progress to a vision of the source itself—the Light of Lights.43

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Having created a language adequate to his task, Suhrawardi explores the meaning of his encounter with light’s presence, interpreting its self-evident and self-warranting immediacy in his experience. The heart of his interpretation (his philosophy) is simple: “If you wish to have a rule regarding light,” he begins straightforwardly, “let it be that light is that which is evident in its own reality and by essence makes another evident.” Returning to his experience, he underlines this, saying, “light is evident, and its being evident is its being light.” And he gives us an everyday illustration: “Some incorrectly argue that our vision makes evident the light of the Sun, whereas in reality its being evident is its being light. Were there no men and nothing at all possessed of sense, it would not cease to be light.”44 This evident light in turn generates being, as he extends metaphor to metaphysics, which is distinguished by degrees of luminosity determined by distance from the “Light of Lights.” Suhrawardi calls this the uncaused light, the “pure light” or “luminosity.” It is that “light beyond which there is no light,” an “All-Encompassing,” “Eternal” Light. Most significantly, it is “absolutely independent,” he states, “since there is nothing beyond it.” All else is dependent on this light. For all being, everything that is, flows from the Light of Lights. Each successive class of being receives its light from the more luminous one above it, all sharing thereby in the source of light. So a “thing either is light and luminosity in its own reality or is not light and luminosity in its own reality,” as Suhrawardi says. The Light of Lights, of course, is the only thing luminous in its own reality. And just as moving away from a lamp in a room diminishes the light received, so moving away from the Light of Lights diminishes the luminosity of being. And by definition, then, nothing downstream is luminous in its own reality, all the way down to conscious beings. We are dim indeed.45 Suhrawardi’s book, then, maps the way to move from dimness up the river of light flowing from the uncaused light, increasing our luminosity. Ultimately, the goal is to enter the “world of pure light, which is without the dimension of distance,” meaning that the entire hierarchy of light intensities disappears. Here he gains the ultimate knowledge, “ishraq,” a word derived from the Arabic for “radiance,” which refers to gaining knowledge from an act of unveiling the inner self, coming into an extraordinary self-awareness. This desire is a restatement of Suhrawardi’s intuitive experience of the immediacy of light in philosophical terms. He simply recasts his initial reaction to its presence, exclaiming, “Light is the very lodestone of nearness!”46 His excitement here is evident. And no wonder, because this is the foundation for the structure of his light metaphysics, which enables him to chart the mystical path to “pure luminosity.” He is committed to the correspondence between the felt experience of his relationship with light and the soul-searching psychological and philosophical project of its interpretation.

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He revels in this correspondence, calling attention to the literal weight of “light” and “luminosity” rooted in our common experience. He wants to make clear that his primary encounter with light informs all, grounding us continually in the initial image of light’s self-evident nature, its powerful immediacy, that generates his elaborate architecture of light metaphysics and its concomitant mystical path. The Imaginal World and the Light Guide But how to embark on this path, how to set out from our state of dimness and arrive in pure luminosity? We remember that Suhrawardi maintains he did not construct his philosophy by “thinking and speculation” but through an intuitive “knowledge by presence,” an “illuminationist vision.” This is an intermediary realm between the spiritual and corporeal, the “imaginal world” described by Suhrawardi’s younger contemporary al-Arabi (1165–1240). This does not mean that things “out there” are imaginary, however, or that “we ourselves are imaginary.” Only that “knower, known, and knowing are here one,” as Suhrawardi says. It is the world where signs have their being, one of immediate apprehension of reality by intuition. Here one immediately grasps the object without any need for mediation, as Suhrawardi did light. And this is why his experience of light becomes the paradigm for all knowledge.47 At the trail head of the mystical way leading to pure luminosity, one’s access to this world is aided by a guide. “Continuously moving and propagating its essence,” this figure of pure “activity” resembles light to such a degree that it cannot be distinguished from the light of Suhrawardi’s initial experience. Following this guide on the path to pure luminosity requires openness to intuitive experience like his own, he assures us, but also “patience” and “sincerity.” Anyone setting out from the darkness of the world can come to see the full richness of the character of light, but they must be “resolute in all matters,” Suhrawardi warns us, and “sincere in turning toward the Light of Lights.” Supplicating God helps ease the path, of course, but a quiet receptivity to experience is absolutely essential. The novice is encouraged as “divine lights” in a moment of illumination are “dispersed within him.” This entails an approach by experimentation and direct insight. And progress is confirmed as the five senses undergo transformation, becoming “organs of light,” such as the “light of speech” and “light of hearing.” They take on what the Persian Sufi Najm Kobra (1145–1220) calls the “physiology of the man of light,” who appears in the hermetic Arabic tradition—exactly what the Prophet, as we’ve heard, longs for in his supplication. In short, the novice on the mystical path begins to assume the form of the “man of light.”48

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The final goal is reached only as the traveler turns to specific images, aspects of light’s character, however, each considered in itself, from external flashing lights that descend on us and suspend us in rapt attention to internal “propitious” or arresting lights that stop us in our tracks. These “seize” and “tear” us mentally and emotionally. Thus the moment of illumination is achieved gradually through a succession of light encounters starting with a “flash of light descending upon the neophytes, shining and receding like the flash of a thunderbolt of pleasure,” and ending with a “light accompanied by the power to move the body so great as to nearly tear asunder the joints.”49 As Suhrawardi describes his experience of this long moment that reveals hitherto unknown aspects of light’s character, he first sees a “pleasant descending light” pouring on his head like “warm water.” Then in succession he sees a light that causes a “stupor in the brain,” a light “accompanied by a sweet and subtle joy,” a “burning light” and a “glittering light in a mighty blast.” Immediately following, he sees another “greatly” pleasurable “flashing light” during which he “seems to be suspended by the hair” for a “long time.” Although he is an emotional and physical participant in this action, the lights are fundamentally external ones.50 But now the drama shifts inward with lights that assault emotionally. In his encounter with these Suhrawardi seems to be “seized” by a “propitious light.” And they intensify “with a seizing that seems to be fixed in the brain.” Then releasing the tension an “extremely pleasant” light comes on him in such a way that it “seems as though something armors the body, and the spirit of the entire body might almost seem to have a luminous form.” He approaches transformation, that is, into the Man of Light. Yet light has not finished with him. His experience takes another turn with a “light that begins as an assault” and makes him “imagine that something is being destroyed.” Still trusting to his guide in the imaginal world, Suhrawardi continues to probe the darker dimensions of light’s character, facing one after another “propitious light negating the soul, in which the soul appears to itself as something utterly suspended.” Nearing his goal, he encounters a “light accompanied by the feeling of a weight almost too heavy to bear.” And, finally, the last light is “accompanied by the power” to tear his body apart.51 At once a thrilling and harrowing description of the emotional and psychological impact of probing deeply the full character of light, this is also an astonishing litany of observed light phenomena. What Suhrawardi achieves in the end is an extraordinary self-awareness. By this he enters into the Light of Lights, its own self-awareness that “encompasses all of reality.” From an intuitive awareness of light to an acute self-awareness, from the simple image of light’s sheer immediate presence to its manifold character unfolding before him in the imaginal world, we have in a sense come full circle. Suhrawardi begins with light experience, his threefold intuition, and ends

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with experience, returning to the specific effects of light on him physiologically, emotionally, and psychologically. And he internalizes these, interpreting them as a spiritual experience. With light as his guide, he has successfully navigated the harrowing “mystical” path to the Light of Lights, refusing to separate his philosophical quest from spiritual success. Beginning as dim man he ends as the Man of light.52 A SUFI HOUSE OF LIGHT, THE ALHAMBRA Like Saladin’s palace where Suhrawardi met light and his fate, the Alhambra in Granada, Spain (1333–1370), is a palace (Comares) situated on a hill with a citadel (Alcazaba). Built less than two hundred years after the philosopher’s book, this architectural wonder translates the “imaginal world” that Suhrawardi explored into stone and stucco. It arose at the confluence of Christian and Muslim lands. The Latin culture of Europe as well as the Sufi tradition of Persia had penetrated deeply into the Nasrid civilization of Andalusia that gave birth to the Alhambra.53 The Nasrid Kingdom, founded by Muhammad I in 1238, included most of what we know today as Andalucia (from Al-Andalus, the name Muslims gave their conquered lands in 711) and centered in Córdoba. At the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth centuries the Alhambra, a city within the city of Granada, was changed from a fortress to a palatine city. Within fifty years the Nasrid kings Yusuf I and Muhammad V transformed it into the glory of Muslim architecture. The final form of the palace complex was completed in 1369 or 1370, radiating power for a century until the last Nasrid king surrendered to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand in 1492 without a fight in order to preserve its beauty for the ages.54 One of the earliest structures of the complex was a small mosque built by Yusef I (1333–1354), the Oratory where, being a good Muslim, he prayed five times a day, as did his successor Muhammad V. As they did so, light reflected from its exquisite tracery and ceiling. Just as a century earlier while the pious Luis IX prayed daily in his chapel (Sainte-Chapelle), light radiated from its glorious stained-glass windows. For both kings, Muslim and Christian, this architecture of light was a personal expression intended for intellectuals and the mystically inclined like themselves. Louis IX attended to the chapel details, directing the work of his master mason and glazier, as did the Nasrid Muslim kings. Mohammad V was “always smothered in lime and plaster,” according to contemporary reports, while he “personally” supervised the building work.55 Where the Gothic cathedral was a light-filled, breathtaking space, however, the Alhambra reveals from room to patio to room its fluid glow and intimate

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spaces. Here is a ceiling of “air shaped like honeycombs,” as the Swedish poet Kjell Espmark says, from which he imagines the light “drips.” Also, “fading walls of air and light” surround him as the poet floats on “dissolving floors of light and water.” While the cathedral opens all at once, the Alhambra unfolds like the dawn, its passageways often ending in an ethereal light.56 Here we enter into the imaginal world. For the Alhambra is not the backdrop for mystery (the Mass) but the embodiment of mystery, its Sufi light the substance of “divine unity.” All the elements of its architecture aim at this, for the Islamic king’s relationship with light as Divine Light takes on within Nasrid culture distinctly Sufic associations. This ensemble of line and ornament is the garden of Paradise rather than the Gothic New Jerusalem. A desert rather than urban ideal, the Alhambra transforms the intense light of Spain’s vega, which the great Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca describes, looking across the plain to the Alhambra, as a “light so magical (and in fact, unique) that birds passing through the air here change into rare and noble metals.” The Alhambra’s dominant light, accordingly, is a transcendental light of the imaginal world in contrast to the incarnational light of the Gothic.57 Yet like Gothic light it also resolves a paradox. For the Muslim king this is the paradox of a transcendent God inhabiting an earthly art while maintaining divine unity. In other words, how to represent the unrepresentable? Transcendent Sufi light resolved not the Gothic paradox of God-man but the Muslim one of heaven-earth. And this the Nasrid king personally achieved in the Alhambra, maintaining the unity of the One God Allah by creating an imaginal world, the “light of the heavens and earth” as the Qur’an says (Sura 24:35). With his architect the king resolves this paradox by the alchemy of light coming full circle from his first encounters with light.58 The Alhambra transforms the body of stone and stucco into light, and this “spirit” back into body, dematerializing and materializing matter. As we gaze at the stone in Andalusia’s magical and relentless light, our senses perform alchemy. Shimmering before us, its solidity becomes light itself, a manifestation in accordance with the Qur’an of the divine. Conversely, under our continued gaze, this manifestation becomes again an object we can touch, stone. Likewise, within this imaginal world dematerialized bodies of water materialize by the alchemy of our senses as silver and jewels. Such high-voltage alternating currents transform matter into a “vibration of light,” which is the Muslim artist’s objective. By using the various aspects of light, the artist transformed the “heaviness of matter” into the “lightness of spirit.” Architectural forms are built up and given their dimensions by light, but they are also dissolved into dimensionless swarms of light. Thus they are heavenly and earthly at the same time. Ultimately transmuted into the alchemist’s “noble form” within Paradise on earth, the Alhambra itself, they do not represent the divine; they are themselves the highest expressions of God.59

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This vibrating Sufi light, modulated by arabesque window screens called jali, expresses what Muslim sacred tradition calls the “veils” of God. The Hadith, which gathers the teachings and deeds traditionally attributed to Muhammad, states that God who is Light “hides Himself behind seventy thousand” veils of “light and darkness; if they were taken away, all that His sight reaches would be consumed by the lightnings of His Countenance.” These veils protect from the intensity of God who paradoxically obscures and reveals himself. Both are required, light to hide darkness and darkness to hide light, the “filigree stucco” of the walls themselves “carved into unbelievable chiaroscuric spectacles.”60 Likewise, the Sufi architect fashions three-dimensional decorations called muqarnas inside arches and domes. These ingenious honeycomb cells capture and disperse the light in a “rich gradation of tones and shadows,” transforming itself in the process. The geometric arabesque patterns so prominent throughout the Alhambra, which he fashions into jali and muqarnas, are a combination of obscuring material and revealing voids. As such they not only modulate the brightness of the desert light that enters the inner rooms but also its quality, its gradation and tone. The jali, a dense (for our gaze) but porous (for the light) screen, creates a geometric pattern of light and shadow that moves across the room with the sun. As light becomes a function of geometry, symbol of infinity, it liberates itself from the material medium of the screen and pervades the room.61 Moving just off the Courtyard of the Lions into the Hall of the Two Sisters, “how much delight for the eyes!” the Andalusian poet Ibn Zamrak exclaims in an inscription that extends around the room. Archways become “agitated bands of pitted light” rippling in waves. Then a dome floats above us, and Zamrak continues, its “gleaming vault shines in a unique way, / with apparent and hidden beauties.” We find ourselves standing under an incandescent canopy. By employing muqarnas that form a cellular structure of stucco resembling honeycomb, the architect creates its “unique” shine. These are often combined with faceted or triangular pieces resembling miniature stalactites (mocárabe). The two can be joined together in an infinite number of curved, concave or convex honeycombs.62 Their honey, of course, is light that appears to drip from the muqarnas, which are sculpted into visions of paradise, a series of “luminous shells.” These ascend while gathering light from small windows just below the rim of the dome. The muqarnas trap and diffuse this and the light filtered by the jali reflected from the opalescent floors as well, which act as marble and tile mirrors. We find ourselves suspended in this earthly world vibrating in the light reflected from below and above. As this light shines on the varied surfaces from floor to ceiling and from all angles in continual movement, the hall seems to be recreated moment by moment. This melds our senses and

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Figure 1.2. Muqarnas dome, Hall of the Two Sisters (1345–1391). Alhambra, Granada. Sharon Mollerus, photographer. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0. Creative Commons

intellect into an intuitively receptive gaze, creating by the “alchemy of light” a “flow of cognitions,” suggestions offered by the inscribed texts and associations conjured by the myriad images, that establishes the imaginal world where the “rational” and “supra-rational” intersect. And this is the world of Sufi light where paradoxes are resolved, the light vibrating here with window screen and ceiling ornament.63 We are not subject to a Gothic sermon in the Alhambra but are subjects of a Sufi mystical experience, architecture meant to “display the nature of light,” not to feel awe but connection. The Nasrid kings Muhammad V and Yusef I in Granada like Louis IX in Paris discovered in light the means of resolution, constructing their houses to resolve personal paradoxes. Gothic light reconciles human and Divine in the Incarnation; Sufi light reconciles temporal and transcendent in the Divine Unity. And for each of these kings the light encountered by philosopher-theologians within their traditions pointed the way, respectively, Robert of Lincoln and Suhrawardi of Aleppo.64 But within their Muslim and Christian traditions each of them manipulated a different facet of light’s character to create their reflected vibrations of transcendental Sufic and refracted bright-dark incarnational Gothic light. The harsh light of Spain’s vega was transmuted by the “veils” of window jali in harmony with ceiling muqarnas (as well as by pools of water) into a reflected light of the imaginal world, while the blustery light of France

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was manipulated by glass to become the luminous darkness of a liturgical theater.65 Beauty and mystery lived in both houses reconciling personal conflict by the kings’ interpretation of their respective encounters with light. But in the imaginal world of the east the transcendent (mystical) dominates, whereas in the world of the west the corporeal (aesthetical) dominates. In both, however, spiritual cannot be separated from physical light. Neither is natural. The light of the place as sign fusing image and symbol creates a sacred space, whether mosque or chapel, but it is a light of the north or south created with the king’s architect to reconcile contradiction. DANTE’S CRYSTAL PORTAL At home in both houses, Muslim and Christian, Dante creates out of words the light that he needs as an exile in a time of continual war. Dante felt the winds of Muslim influence riffling the leaves of his Bible. And like Suhrawardi and the architect of the Alhambra he inhabits the imaginal world. In his Divine Comedy (1308–1321) Dante (1265–1321), living and working in a world of Arabic thought, constructs a crystal portal of light to the celestial house of Christian faith.66 Throughout the Purgatorio and Paradiso, second and third books of his great poem, Dante never loses sight of the physical, phenomenal light of everyday experience. It is his companion and guide as much as Virgil. It is ultimately transcendent, a light of the Middle Ages, but in his everyday interaction it is worldly, foreshadowing the light of the Renaissance. When at the end of his journey through Purgatory he exclaims, “Oh light, oh glory of humankind,” we cannot help but hear Dante’s pained farewell to the light of our earth (Purgatorio, XXXIII. 115–17; Merwin trans.), even though he is about to enter Paradise itself. Light is for him not only a comfort but a curious and wondrous phenomenon. He is fascinated by how light behaves as it reflects off different surfaces. “Enraptured” by the brilliance and splendor of this light he attends to its character, responding to its expressiveness. He lingers in the gleaming rays of a lamp, the translucent effects of a light filtered through water or glass or jewels and calls attention to reflections from clouds. The sun is at his side hour by hour in his progress through Purgatory.67 Dante saturates us in the glitter and brightness of light, demanding that we deal with its complicated character and feel its energy, experiencing its sensuousness and having a firm grasp of the physics of the physiology of the eye. Furthermore, he experiences his body as being penetrated by physical light. But he immerses us in “images of light until the incandescence” surpasses that of the physical phenomenon at its most intense. An “outrageous

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incandescence,” as the Dante scholar Irma Brandeis says, intended to precipitate our understanding and its consequent love; for this is as his muse Beatrice declares, “light intellectual full-charged with love” (Paradiso, XXX. 40; Hollander trans.). And though the earth’s phenomenal light has been his faithful companion, having its most visionary intensity as light that “flowed” like a river (XXX. 61), it is her light that Dante yearns for, which promises the world and Eternity, a light that remains inviolate despite battle and exile.68 Beatrice promises Dante at one point on their ascent through the heavens to “reshape” his “intellect” with a “light so vibrant / that your mind will quiver at the sight” (II. 109–11). She refers to the lesson on cosmology that she proceeds to give him. Namely, the way the “light of God so penetrates the universe, / according to the fitness of its parts to take it in, / that there is nothing can withstand its beam” (XXXI. 22–24) moving through the hierarchy of heavenly spheres.69 But she keeps her promise in another sense as well. After ushering him beyond the heavens, past the starry and crystalline spheres into the Empyrean, Paradise itself, that sets all the heaven in motion, his mind quivers, indeed, at sight of its pure otherworldly light. Here at the climax of the Paradiso Dante has passed not only beyond language, his words inadequate to his vision (XXXIII. 56, 106, 121), but beyond humanity. He has gained a mystical vision of light, the eternal light as “abiding in yourself alone, / knowing yourself alone, and, known to yourself” (Paradiso XXXIII. 124–26; Hollander trans.). But this is a light wholly cut off from the earthly light that had been Dante’s strength and delight. Achieving the promised vision, he loses sight of the very light that moved him throughout his journey and inspired him to this highest level of the cosmos. Here in the eternal home of spirit beyond time and space, here in the Empyrean Dante discovers that his vision freed of all human limitations can withstand the “pure light.” Here he sees into the Light of God, but at great sacrifice.70 Having been in thrall to the visible as a poet on earth, he trades it in the end for the invisible. In his visionary moment he cuts himself off from the brilliant character—the light of earth—who was a constant companion and encouragement on his journey, the “luminescence / that scintillates beside” Dante “like a sunbeam gleaming in clear water” (Paradiso, IX. 112–14). In Purgatory he addresses his imagination, asking, “who moves you if the senses give you nothing?” And he answers, “a light moves you, in the heavens forming / by itself” (Purgatorio, XVII. 16–17). That is, he trusts the pure light to move the cosmos and its inhabitants to love, so he is willing to sacrifice the senses. Accordingly, he abandons the senses at the end of his Comedy, which can give him nothing in the Empyrean because here his sight apprehends only “light intellectual.”71 Yet before abandoning language, Dante to our good fortune left us with the wondrous crystal portal he built—his luminous Comedy. Before sacrificing

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his senses and the light of earth and entering the “Heaven of pure light” (XXX. 33, 36, 39), that is, the Empyrean itself, which is the subject of his last lines (Paradiso, XXX. 13–XXXIII. 145), Dante leaves us with a gift. This is the poem of the Crystalline sphere, ninth and last of the visible heavens of the cosmos, before passing to the invisible heaven. He pauses in this portal to the Empyrean that is just beyond, invisible to human senses, having arrived at the end of his guided ascent through the spheres nesting within spheres of the medieval, Ptolemaic cosmology. Here in the Crystalline sphere on the threshold of the Empyrean the senses can still give him something, moving the imagination and ensuring that Dante possesses his full powers as a poet, able to match words to his experience. The words, that is, he has used to construct his Comedy, his formal threefold structure of elements interlocked like the atomic lattice of a crystal. The poem’s formal unity is unsurpassed, tempting us to comparisons with the Gothic cathedrals. More accurately, as the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam observed, it is a crystalline structure, a faceted crystal portal.72 Unlike Suhrawardi in whose imaginal world the earthly and heavenly coexist, Dante in the end divides them. As a result, the Christian poet loses faith in the power of language to describe his light experience, whereas the Sufi philosopher never does. Perhaps this is because Dante ultimately abandons his companion earthly light in the Crystalline sphere for the Empyrean‘s Eternal Light, the senses for the intellect, effecting a strange and costly estrangement for the poet. As he felt his powers diminishing at the end of his life, having completed the Paradiso in his last year, he yearned for promise. The horror for Dante who had experienced long exile from his beloved Florence was exile from heaven, the Eternal Light, the “light intellectual, full of love” (XXX. 40). And this is the light he presumably achieved, though as he admits, we do not have his actual testimony of this because his verbal powers failed him, having “reached his limit” as he starts to bring his “difficult subject toward its close.”73 What we do have is the Comedy, a gift abandoned by its builder. Dante’s experience of light expressed in his Comedy, a crystalline construction built of Christian and Muslim materials, brings us full circle from the mysticism of the Sufi theologian-philosopher to the aestheticism of the Christian writer, from the architectural “veils” of Islamic lands to the “jewels” of Christendom. His great poem of Gothic impulse and Islamic execution lives in both worlds. Yet in the end he rejects human light experience, which neither the previous Christian nor Muslim witnesses from whom we’ve heard testimony did. And he lets us know the despair that came with this. Dante knows God’s Unity (Allah) and his Incarnation (Christ), but ultimately trades the internalized reconciling light of the Middle Ages embodied in “sign” for

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a bodiless vision. And in this act rejects the relationship central to it with a sensual light. The light we’ve met north and south in the Middle Ages is essentially transcendent, as a “sign” the divine always being present within it, but in the next age it is fundamentally physical. We’ll leave the light experience we’ve known interpretively charged with symbolism that spills over into mysticism, then, to meet in the next chapter a light celebrated as image. As a result, we leave the mystery of light and return to its glory, the Renaissance being fixated on light’s beauty in a way that even Suger could not allow himself. Hand in hand with this, the Renaissance being obsessed with the glory of Classical art and bent on reviving it.74 And new testimonies of encounters with light find new means of expression, as we would expect, shifting from the mainly architectural expression of the Middle Ages, which invited us to enter and meet light in the houses of light, to the dominant framed panel in the Renaissance, which asks us to observe light and judge its character. It is paintings primarily that testify to the Renaissance light experience. Dante’s contemporary, the painter Giotto de Bondone (c. 1267–1337), whose fame he acknowledges in the Purgatorio (XI. 94–96), leads the way. The light he experiences is one to linger over and admire, decidedly the light of this world rather than the next. It is no longer an internalized “sign” but paint. NOTES 1. Christianity, in fact, as Arthur Herman notes, would have seemed very similar to Plotinus’s Neoplatonic mysticism (as the age understood his thought), and Plato via this became the “conceptual spine” of Christianity. Its spectacularly successful spread was largely due to its adopting Greek thought, which made Christianity intellectually respectable early on. And we remember that John’s Logos equated the Christian God with the Greek logos, the “word” (Herman, The Cave and the Light, 151–52). This Neoplatonic thought informed the Middle Ages via Proclus, becoming central to the cathedral builders, such as Abbot Suger, and providing the vocabulary, imagery, and mystical techniques to a range of medieval thinkers from Augustine in the fifth century to the Bishop of Lincoln Robert Grosseteste and the Muslim philosopher Suhrawardi in the twelfth and Dante in the fourteenth (Corrigan, Reading Plotinus, 230). 2. Agricultural production and trade (Lee, Stained Glass, 64); advances in art and science (LeGoff, Medieval Imagination, 10); Islam and Christianity were culturally intertwined, being distinctive cultures until the Crusades linked them (Bowersock, “Storms,” 68). 3. “Light is beautiful in itself . . . contains all within it,” quoted by Binding, High Gothic, 55. At the extreme, the symbol ultimately reinforces the ideology of the

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dominant culture, the institutionalized hierarchies in which medieval people lived their lives. Yet the cathedral and mosque as much as literary constructions, such as philosophical treatises, have their origin in an initial image at the center of a core experience of light. This image is not a “sharp or definite conception,” as its meaning is open ended (Bertrand Russell, quoted by Gonzalez, Beauty and Islam, 62). Experience-imagination is a matter of images, which are neither representation nor ideology, neither “pure” sense perceptions apart from language and history, their social and cultural context, nor distortions of sense data. Yet experience cannot be separated from interpretation. That is, following Henri Bergson, image is to be understood as encompassing the full range of sensory and imaginative experience (Blassnigg, Light Image Imagination, 21, n. 1.). The image is bound up with interpretative metaphor. And the movement from image to symbol is characteristic of our way of discovering the meaning of our core experience of light. Crossing to symbol is to move to a reference, according to Jacques LeGoff, to an underlying system of values, generalized and abstracted from a personal encounter as, for example, with light. This can evolve into an ideology that distorts the initial experiential image by imposing some conception of the world that alters reality (LeGoff, Medieval Imagination, 1–2). Following the Latin rhetorical tradition, Augustine defines the sign as “something that shows itself to the senses [image] and something other than itself to the mind [symbol]” (quoted by Stephan Meier-Oeser, “Medieval Semiotics”). The “sign” mediates experience and expression, things and words, the personal and social. In the second half of the thirteenth century an elaborate theory of signs developed, such as Roger Bacon’s who places the sign squarely in a mediating position and focuses on its pragmatic relation to the interpreter. Thus the medieval artist’s images were not merely to look at or passively receive but to actively embrace as image-symbols with power—signs—that offer help on life’s difficult journey. Medieval people took it for granted that paintings or sculptures of the virgin, for example, could actually heal (Simson, The Gothic Cathedral, 432). Light’s reconciling power stems from its power as a sign, being sensual and intellectual (or spiritual) at the same time. It could aid in resolving conflicts about how to relate to oneself, to God, and to the world. And in each the experience of light, as interpreted by various medieval thinkers within their respective Christian and Muslim cultures, seemed to offer the answer. Regarding oneself, the phenomenon of light offered a way to reconcile reason and faith, being subject to analysis and yet remaining a mystery. Regarding God, light because it stood outside the body yet at the same time entered the body, could reconcile the contradiction of God existing inside oneself in the heart as human and outside in a transcendent realm as Creator. Creature and Creator, which merged in the incarnate Word of the Christian Jesus and in the Muslim scripture (Qur’an) of historical experience, could become one as well in the incarnate God of personal mystical experience. 4. “Bright,” “brighten minds,” “true lights,” “to the true light,” Suger, On the Abbey Church, 47, 49; “They internalize the light, . . . transcendent phenomenon,” “lit by light,” Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor,” 43, 51; “ghost physics,” Scott, “Making Relics Work,” 216, 219.

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5. “Bearings from the sensuous experience of light,” Schoene, “Meaning of Medieval,” 143; “even without . . . , light is beautiful,” simply “for its scintillating radiance,” Grosseteste, quoted by Eco, History of Beauty, 127; “holy radioactivity,” Scott, “Making Relics Work,” 216. Grosseteste follows Alhazen: “proportions of the figure, but only the Beauty that derives from the splendor of the light” (Alhazen, Optics, II.3.2.202); “The sun, the moon, and the stars look beautiful, without there being in them a cause on account of which their form looks beautiful and appealing other than their radiant light. Therefore, light by itself produces beauty,” quoted by Belting, Florence and Baghdad, 108. Since it is easy to overtheologize or overmoralize medieval testimonies of light’s radiant beauty and their interpretations, it is important to keep in mind that “Medieval aesthetic experience is bound into human sensation” and “human knowledge is sense-derived, the agents of which are all corporeal” (Carruthers, The Experience, 8). The intense and spontaneous medieval response to the purely “sensuous properties of things,” such as glass and gems, however, raised another contradiction demanding reconciliation. The inherited view of beauty as “intellectual,” derived from the regularity of geometric forms, which Augustine accepted, needed to be reconciled with the new view of beauty as derived from the senses (Eco, Art and Beauty, 43–44), a dilemma the Arabic philosopher Ibn Sinā known in the West as Avicenna felt as well. Physical beauty must be reconciled with divine beauty, and sensory perceptions with intellectual perceptions (Gonzalez, Beauty and Islam, 7), which light as sign could effect. This power fueled and in turn was fueled by a “fundamental shift in the Medieval attitude toward nature” (Camille, Gothic Art, 134), and light as part of nature became more than a sign, a revelation of the supernatural. “It now had a status of its own” (White, “Natural Science,” 432). And with this shift came a greater faith in the senses, a faith endorsed by the fact of incarnation. That God became flesh, the Word on earth (the Incarnation), or became a word on the page of the Qur’an meant that the senses were endorsed (Soskice, “Sight and Vision,” 32). Thus attention could be paid to light’s sensuous beauty, such as the radiance of glass and gems for its own sake as well as its role as reconciler. 6. “Soul of the Gothic,” “vast belt of rainy green seen through clefts in grey swirls of rain-cloud,” “benignity of sunshine,” “ceaseless sunshine,” Ruskin, “The Stones of Venice,” in Prose of the Victorian Period, ed. William E. Buckler (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), 363, 366; “consolidation period of Christianity,” Murray, “Slippages,” 194. This royal domain, which became a cultural and intellectual center, boasted of being “the oven where the bread of the human mind is baked” by the Eudes de Châteauroux (Aubert, Art of the High Gothic, 16). 7. “Would shine . . . interior beauty,” Suger, On the Abbey Church, 101; “delightful allegories,” “sighing deeply in my heart,” “loveliness . . . gems,” “away from external cares,” Suger, 63; “some strange region . . . purity of heaven,” Suger, 65. 8. Captured and released by them (Duby, Age of the Cathedrals, 103); like Christ himself (Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, 145); “loveliness of the manycolored gems,” “external cares,” “transferring that which is material to that which

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is immaterial,” “sighing deeply in my heart,” “topaz, and the jasper . . . sapphire,” quoted by Panofsky, Suger, On the Abbey Church, 63, 65. The belief that gems generated their own light was espoused by Marbod of Rennes (1035–1123) in his Book of Gems (cited by McDannel, Heaven, 369, n. 26). Furthermore, it was commonly believed that gems had their origins in light itself (Gage, “Gothic Glass,” 47). For jewels were uniquely associated with the sacred, being mentioned in Ezekiel and Revelation. Meister Eckhard in the later Middle Ages going so far as to link “Christ” with “crystal” in a false etymology (Recht, Believing and Seeing, 84). 9. “Purity of heaven” and “slime of earth,” Suger, On the Abbey Church, 65; “supernatural light,” Jantzen, High Gothic, 69; bright against the black of their lead frames (Herman, Cave and the Light, 216–17). Suger understood stained glass to be an intrinsically rich substance like precious stones (Deuchler, “Gothic Glass,” 41). The association is a natural one because the medieval methods for making imitation precious stones and preparing stained glass were similar (Johnson, Radiance, 64). Also, rock crystal was used as glass in reliquaries (Recht, Believing and Seeing, 84). 10. “Had suckled me as a child,” Suger, On the Abbey Church, 51; powerful winds, political center, kings of France (Simson, Gothic Cathedral, 74, 76, 79; Kostoff, History of Architecture, 329). 11. Stripped the rings from their fingers, eager to contribute (Evans, Art in Medieval France, 48); deliberate manipulation of a specific paradoxical light (Kostoff, History of Architecture, 331). Notwithstanding the monk Suger’s determination and measure of independence (Duby, Age of the Cathedrals, 98), his church emerges from a specific political and social context (Toman, “Introduction,” 16). The system that supported it in the crown lands of France comprises complex relationships between the bishop, who initiated the building, the cathedral chapters, the people, and the king. Its construction was motivated by the shared interests of all these parties in limiting the power of the feudal nobility. Thus Suger’s architecture must be understood in “terms of the dialectical relationship of aesthetic and constructional, political and religious, economic and intellectual trends” (quoted by Toman, 16). Yet we should not overlook Suger’s evident feeling that in some sense his chapel is a personal expression, having included in the axial chapel of the Virgin two “self-portraits” (his figure appearing in the middle panel of the lowest row of panels on the left side, looking toward the altar, and in green ceremonial robes on the lower right side). I don’t want to exaggerate, however, his role and originality in design, which Madeline Caviness points out has been the drift of much twentieth-century scholarship, particularly that of the Erwin Panofsky and Emile Mâle (Caviness, “Reception of Images,” 66). 12. “Translucent walls,” Janson, History of Art, 388; “laid the first stone,” “All thy walls are precious stones,” Suger, On the Abbey Church, 103; called “light mirabilis,” Frankl, Gothic: Literary Sources, 22; clarity and opacity of his core light experience, recapitulating the paradox of the Incarnation (Raguin, History of Stained Glass, 13). Light passes by a transformation into sacred light (Gage, “Gothic Glass,” 45).

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Suger’s westwork entrance (1130/35–1140) and choir (1141–1144) incorporated monolithic columns in a “radically modernist design,” that is, anticlassical or antihistoricist. Self-conscious about this radical invention, his writing uniquely reveals a new set of mind as well as serves as an apologetic for the new architecture (Trachtenberg, “Suger’s Miracles,” 184, 186, 189). Driven by his desire to admit more light, this entailed a new structural system of pointed arches, ribbing intersecting with internal piers, and flying buttresses intersecting with external piers. By this he achieved higher and thinner walls, which accommodated larger windows (my gratitude to Kenneth Stunkel’s emphasizing this in conversation). He understood his church to be “original,” but in Suger’s world no value was placed on novelty or inventiveness, which deviations were considered heretical. Thus his praise of the new is “self-justificatory rhetoric,” a rhetorical ploy to gain acceptance of the new with his constituencies (Caviness, “Reception of Images,” 68), educating them in a new relation to light. He knew also that his “unnatural illumination,” an “imagined light” distinct from natural light, was an “unreal dimension” creating a new kind of sacred space (Nieto, La Luz, 14; trans. mine). 13. “So keenly . . . one property,” “seems to be bent on trespassing upon the other,” Suger, On the Abbey Church, 79 (see Fig. 29). 14. “Carried away,” quoted by Klein, “Beginnings of Gothic,” 32; “shine,” “wonderful and uninterrupted light,” Suger, On the Abbey Church, 101; “reciprocal coupling of hues,” Eco, Art and Beauty, 44; new light (lux nova), Suger’s name for Christ (Kostoff, History of Architecture, 331–32). The quality of this light in its original force evades us because only fragments of the twelfth-century glass survive. Yet we can respond to the sapphire blues in the center area of the preserved Tree of Jesse window in which Suger included his portrait, endorsing these blues that under typical weather conditions are bright-dark. This offers the solution to a problem in coming to terms with Suger’s achievement. He claims that it was a “continuous light” from the choir that filled his church. This has been assumed to be a shower of light, yet given the number of windows in the choir such light would generally not be available (see Gage, “Gothic Glass,” 37–38). We resolve this problem by looking more closely at Suger’s experience of light. For it is at core the bright-dark light of jewels, which he interprets in accordance with Pseudo-Dionysius’s “luminous darkness.” And herein was Suger’s strongest defense against his main critic, the founder of Suger’s reformed Benedictine order, his contemporary Bernard of Clairvaux (1090– 1153). Although Bernard respected, even revered Suger, he vehemently condemned his aesthetic enthrallment by all manner of jewels. Devastatingly, Bernard charges that the “church sparkles and gleams on all sides, while its poor huddle in need,” no doubt true (quoted by Duby, Age of the Cathedrals, 123). Bringing spiritual transformation through light, which he conceived of as satisfying a physical need as well, was Suger’s counter to this charge. And he could cite precedent. Suger took inspiration from the Hagia Sophia (Church of the Holy Wisdom), a Byzantine church founded by Constantine’s son Constantius II (337–361) in 360 CE. Vast in scale and unparalleled, the cathedral built across from the imperial palace in 537 CE was at the heart of Constantinople (Mathews,

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Byzantium, 21), which perhaps inspired Suger to partner priesthood with imperial power. The Hagia Sophia was to Emperor Justinian as Saint-Denis was to King Louis VI. Suger considered this church a rival, having heard in his conversations with travelers from Jerusalem back from the Crusades (Suger, On the Abbey Church, 65) about the church’s rich ornaments and no doubt about its famous windows with their glorious light, which was the “fundamental structural” principle of the edifice (Schibille, Hagia Sophia, 23). The church was “marvelous and terrifying” in the court historian Procopius’s words, “singularly full of light” in part because the “entire ceiling,” as he says, “is covered in pure gold, which adds glory to its beauty, though the rays of light reflected upon the gold from the marble surpass it in beauty” (quoted by Beckwith, “Byzantium,” 48–49). The church’s corona of windows that crowns it, seeming to rest on light and flooding the church with light, impresses Procopius greatly. But he also emphasizes its stunning marble, especially the relationship between the gold of the ceiling and light from the windows (Wickham, Inheritance of Rome, 233). Under the direction of the architects Anthemios of Tralles and Isidorus of Miletus, who in 537 restored it after a fire, the Hagia Sophia was a monumental embodiment of their relation to light. Suger would identify with this project as he would with the Byzantine aesthetic that viewed color as light materialized (Beckwith, “Byzantium,” 45). And it probably was not lost on Suger that the most beautiful light was that bounced off colored marble and thus necessarily bright-dark. As the contemporary poet Paul the Silentiary describes “the marble meadows gathered upon the mighty walls” in a poem recited at the church’s reconsecration in 526/563, they featured “slanting streaks of blood-red and livid white” and “spots resembling snow next to flashes (marmaryges) of black so that in one stone various beauties mingle” (Schibille, Hagia Sophia, 20). Here, God reveals him/herself as Wisdom (Sophia), “infinite light unmanifest,” in the poet Thomas Merton’s words, “not even waiting to be known as Light” (Merton, Emblems of a Season of Fury [New York: New Directions, 1963], 65). Manifest, that is, in bright-dark light, which the contemporary court poet Paulus described as “like milk poured out on glittering black” (quoted by Gardner, Art, 261; italics mine). 15. “Superessential ray,” “luminous darkness,” Schapiro, Late Antique, 99; “For bright is that . . . pervaded by the new light,” Suger, On the Abbey Church, 47; “inaccessible light,” quoted by James, Light and Colour, 100; “luminous darkness” was the Divine Presence in Suger’s church (Gage, “Gothic Glass,” 41–42). Dionysius the Areopagite was essentially an aesthetic theologian (Riordan, Divine Light, 13), one Suger would identify with. He found John Scotus Erigena’s Latin translation and commentary on Pseudo-Dionysius’s works in the abbey library, as well as Hugh of Saint-Victor’s commentary on Dionysius’s Celestial Hierarchy written in the 1120s (Zinn, “Suger, Theology,” 34). A number of the most influential postwar scholars of the Gothic cathedral like Erwin Panofsky maintained that Suger was steeped in “Neoplatonic light metaphysics,” a “mysticism of light” as interpreted by Pseudo-Dionysius and John Scotus, which constituted the major influence on Suger as he set about renovating Saint-Denis. In this view a theology of light is the guiding aesthetic and ultimately the

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essence of Gothic architecture. Otto G. von Simson, Gothic Cathedral (1964), views the Gothic as an instantiation of this aesthetic of light (105–109). And key scholars later aligned themselves with these notions of “symbolic intention” (Hans Sedlmayr) leading to the cathedral as “spiritual structure” (Hans Jantzen). But Roland Recht, Believing and Seeing (2008), argues forcefully that there is “no foundation for this.” Earlier scholars assumed that architecture was the realization of the “symbolic intentions of those who commissioned it” (27), a “fallacious starting point” leading to a false conclusion. Because of their assumptions they undervalued the building process, “the contingencies of site, materials, workmanship, and financial provisions” (Bauer, “Design of Space,” 3), as well as ornamentation, such as gemstone and goldsmith work. Recht directs us back to the motivation of the senses, Suger driven by delight in beauty. He was not primarily concerned with the light metaphysics of Pseudo-Dionysius but with gathering together the parts of his brightdark light ensemble like a “showman and curator” (Hanning, “Suger’s Literary,” 145). Suger in his “desire to champion light” requested that his master mason find technical ways of “transcribing light in space” (Recht, Believing and Seeing, 119; and see Charlotte A. Stanford’s review of Recht’s Believing and Seeing). And as Simson points out, Pseudo-Dionysius very likely provided him with an analogy for his Gothic luminosity (Simson, Gothic Cathedral, 106), the “luminous darkness,” though Suger charts his own way. (For an overview of the modern history of Gothic scholarship, see Toman, “Introduction,” 13–14 [1998], and Lindley, “Penetrating Ecclesia,” 22–23 [1996].) 16. “Sacred veils . . . human beings,” Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, 146; not itself a mystical light (Medina del Río, “La Luz Gótica,” 98); fading and brightening outside light (Recht, Believing and Seeing, 192); “quiet light,” “crashing rays,” Connick, Adventures, 148. Stained-glass windows respond with great sensitivity to changing light. In morning light there is a subtle blue “bloom” at the top of this window. But we see within it the “activity of reds—like smoldering coals in a glacier.” This hot-cold balance is an intrinsic property and manifests itself in all weather, as its bright-dark glow shifts toward one pole or the other with the shifting sun and muddling clouds (Connick, Adventures, 35, 50). 17. “Continuous sphere of light,” Simson, Gothic Cathedral, 4; “Gothic light,” Frankl, Gothic: Literary, 187. To a degree the cathedral (or church) was a personal expression not seen since the Pantheon. At the same time, the patron’s vision was shaped by the (1) master mason, who was often the “architect”; (2) master glacier; and (3) master painter, who also had some autonomy (Recht, Believing and Seeing, 185). They were conscious of the effect they were creating (319) because throughout the Gothic Middle Ages the status of artists improved, architecture and sculpture no longer being mere manual labor, as gifted artists and architects came into their own, having entered court service. And it was the architect or master mason who gained the most in status over the century (Camille, “Before the Gaze,” 175). Thus for the first time their names came to be recorded in inscriptions (e.g., those who built Amiens).

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As the relation to light shifted from Early Gothic (1140–1200/1210), the prototype of the Gothic style in Saint-Denis’s choir, to High Gothic (1210/1220–1270), Chartres and Sainte-Chapelle (Rayonnant style), and a rebuilt Saint-Denis as walls dissolve into light, architectural challenges had to be met (Binding, High Gothic, 131, 226). That is, master masons were in a continual quest for new ways of handling space and light to meet these challenges. Thus the renowned medievalist Jean Bony characterizes the stages of Gothic style in terms of solving the attendant problems that presented themselves in order to materialize these evolved and new experiences of light, such as expanding the area of stained glass in the 1230s (Rayonnant style; Bony, French Gothic Architecture, 357). The most valid definition of Gothic space entails “LIGHT AND FORM,” Louis Grodecki maintains. “Gothic space is not merely an enclosed volume”; it is a “function of light; it is transfigured by light,” as explicitly mentioned in medieval texts (Grodecki, Gothic Architecture, 14, 17, 20). The Gothic light of Christian architecture was an incarnational light. The cathedral’s window walls of light reconcile the material and the immaterial, human and divine at the heart of the Incarnation. And men like Suger drew more extensively from John’s preamble in the Gospel where Jesus is the figure of light than his predecessors. This drove the increased luminousness of the cathedrals as they developed (Duby, Age of the Cathedrals, 116). No part of the interior space was ultimately permitted to be undefined by light. The side aisles, the galleries above, and the chapels of the choir become narrower and shallower during the century until they cease to be distinct, merging into a “continuous sphere of light.” 18. Choir based on Suger’s design (Simson, Gothic Cathedral, 192); master mason . . . made Suger’s light his own (Mâle, Chartres, 153); as well as townspeople and guilds (Lindley, “Penetrating Ecclesia,” 19); began with the glass intended for its windows (Grodecki, Chartres, 140) devoted to creating a bright-dark “light-space,” Jantzen, High Gothic, 91. Chartres required a massive amount of resources, costing more and demanding more of the people than any other public project in the Middle Ages. An entire generation dedicated much of their lives and resources to this palace of the Virgin, a “cosmos of stone” that between 1194 and 1220 rose breathtakingly out of the town of Chartres just outside of Paris (Simson, Gothic Cathedral, 183). Its immense rose window featured the Virgin seated at its center. All the stained glass, in fact, honored the Virgin because light passing through glass without breaking it was identified with the Light of the Father, the Word, passing through the body of the Virgin in the Immaculate Conception (Mary Wilson, Gothic Cathedral, 74–75). 19. “Jeweled gloom,” “coloured darkness,” “embryo of all light,” quoted by Plummer, Poetics, 87; “judges them,” Rodin, Cathedrals of France, 117. In the sense that, as the stained-glass artist Narcissus Quagliata reminds us, “a stained glass window is completely dependent on circumstances for its appearance. It is subject to changes because of the hour of the day, the season, the exposure, the background behind it, because the weather is sunny or foggy, because of the specifics of its installation.” This is easy to understand when we consider that the “light from each of the four cardinal directions has a unique cycle of its own,” owing to the sun’s movement. We can share the medieval experience in part because the original windows of Our Lady

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of Chartres (begun 1194–1220), dedicated to the Virgin Mary, have been largely preserved (Quagliata, Stained Glass, 54–55). 20. “Vibrate softly in a fluid sort of light,” “imperceptibly” away into obscurity or that suddenly flames with “abrupt changes,” Connick, Adventures, 10, 13. 21. “Shimmering translucence,” Camille, Gothic Art, 46; made to transmit light (Gage, “Gothic Glass,” 48). Günther Binding asks if the symbolism of light by the thirteenth century had become simply an institutionally perpetuated convention, apart from any conscious experience (High Gothic, 55). As its symbolism was reified within a specific culture, this no doubt happened, a common evolution for a personal encounter that found powerful expression (such as in stained glass). Examining as we have Suger’s emphatically individual encounter with light, its symbolic resonance was clearly rooted in personal experience and interpretation (image/metaphor). And the variants of this realized in Chartres and Sainte-Chapelle were to a great extent driven by the personal visions, respectively, of a master mason (Peter of Montreuil) and a king (Louis IX) derived from individual light experiences, which in the king’s case satisfied his need to reconcile a personal conflict. This is not to say that their initial sensations were completely independent of the prevailing culture’s architectural theory and theological teachings, but both cathedral and chapel bear the mark of personal visions. 22. “Casket of light,” Jean de Jandun, Paris 1323, quoted by Reuterswärd, “What Color Is Divine Light,” 143. 23. “Physical light,” “best,” “most delectable, . . . bodies that exist” (i.e., Latin, “Lux est pulcherrimum et delectabilissimum et optimum inter corporalia”). But Joseph Mazzeo attributes this statement to St. Bonaventura (“Light Metaphysics,” 210). “being,” “body,” “infinite multipication,” Grosseteste, On Light, trans. Riedl, 6, 13. 24. These images no doubt captured him just as they had Hugh of St. Victor (St. Hugh) who ten years before had observed that each polished column “reflects a sparkling brilliance to the view” (quoted by Harvey, Medieval Architect, 237). 25. And while he did not oversee improvements to the cathedral, his writings reveal great familiarity with its design and probably influenced it (McEvoy, Robert Grosseteste, xi). John Hendrix argues that there is much evidence that Grosseteste’s model of a “geometrilized” luminary cosmology directly influenced the design of Lincoln Cathedral. But the reverse is also possible, that Gothic architecture shaped his model of the cosmos (“Architecture as Cosmology: Lincoln Cathedral and Bishop Robert Grosseteste [1235–53],” https:​//​www​.academia​.edu​/2627112​/Paul​ _Mellon​_Education​_Grant​_2012​_​-​_Architecture​_as​_Cosmology​_Lincoln​_Cathedral​ _and​_Bishop​_Robert​_Grosseteste​_1235​-53_). Nonetheless, after Suger, “the second-generation cathedrals,” which were illuminated to a greater extent than any of the churches from which they derived, were perhaps influenced as well by Grosseteste. It was to his geometry of and meditations on light, some scholars conclude, that thirteenth-century architecture “owed its character, both rigorous [optically] and radiant at the same time” (Duby, Age of the Cathedrals, 148). This is possible because for him light is a “numinous creature” but “works geometrically” (McEvoy, Robert Grosseteste, 79). And he knew the work of Alhazen (b. 965–1040, as Ibn al-Haytham

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came to be known in the west), the greatest optical scientist of the age, whose Optics (seven volumes) was translated into Latin and became a fundamental medieval text (Zajonc, Catching the Light, 28). 26. In contrast to many of his contemporaries who conceived of “carnal,” physical vision as bound up with opacity or darkness, Robert defines this as light itself (Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment, 67). Following these questions wherever they lead, he hopes to be rewarded with the “pure understanding of the essences of things.” He pushes “beyond the beauty of the harmonious texture of things, that is, into the mind of the divine mathematician,” as Plato says, “who dwells in light inaccessible,” I Timaeus 6:16, quoted by McEvoy, Robert Grosseteste, 85. 27. “Light is beautiful in itself,” Grosseteste, On the Six Days of Creation (Hexaëmeron), Part Two, chap X, 99; observational habit of mind (Riedl, “Introduction,” 37). On Light owes much to Christian Platonism, especially that of Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius, but this short masterpiece is, as James McEvoy the preeminent scholar of Robert Grosseteste avers, the “original creation of a bold and powerful mind that had arrived at its fullest maturity” (McEvoy, Robert Grosseteste, 88). He also wrote an influential book on the rainbow, On the Rainbow and the Mirror (De Iride Seu de Iride et Speculo). For a discussion of this book, see Carl B. Boyer, The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), 88–94. 28. “One instant,” “one point . . . sphere with light,” Grosseteste, On the Six Days of Creation (Hexaëmeron), Chap. X, 97; “corporeity itself,” Mazzeo, “LMDC,” 204. Aquinas later rejected the notion that light is “corporeal,” saying that it is instead a “quality consequent on the substantial form of the sun or of another body that is of itself luminous,” quoted by Watson, L, 59. 29. “The first corporeal form . . . I consider to be light,” Grosseteste, On Light, trans. Neil Lewis, 239; “bodily substance . . . close to non-bodiliness,” On the Six Days of Creation (Hexaëmeron), Part Two, Chap. X, 98; generator of matter, Mazzeo, “Light Metaphysics,” 204. 30. “Self-generativity of its own substance,” Grosseteste, On the Six Days of Creation (Hexaëmeron), trans. C. F. J. Martin, Part Two, Chap. X, 97; “perhaps it is because light is self-generative by its nature, . . . manifestibility,” On the Six Days, Part Two, Chap. X, 98; “first corporeal form,” On Light, trans. Lewis, 239. 31. “Imagination of light,” Zajonc, Catching the Light, 56; at the center of all knowledge (Luscombe, Medieval Thought, 87); basic substance of the universe (Crombie, “Grosseteste’s Position,” 111). Nonetheless, as Zajonc points out, the former aspect accessible by the methods of physics and the latter by those of metaphysics establish a fundamental split that sets the stage for what would become in the Renaissance the beginning of modern science. In using the metaphysics of light as the foundation of geometrical optics, Grosseteste takes an important step in establishing that mathematics constitutes the fundamental structure of nature (McEvoy, Robert Grosseteste, 85). And his further claim that the universe was engendered from light was not only an invitation to optics (light being

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a spherical, geometrical emanation) but to mysticism as well (being the link between Creator and creature), which for him were not separate pursuits. 32. McEvoy, Robert Grosseteste, 87, 91, 163; MacKenzie, Obscurism of Light, 38. Significantly, Grosseteste explores both using geometrical-mathematical methods, as when he develops an explanation of the rainbow’s spectrum and of the origins of the universe. The term “light metaphysics” (first coined by Clemens Baeumker in 1916) comprises many themes in the development of scientific and philosophical thought from the Classical age through the Renaissance. It includes ideas inherited from Plato passed on to Christian, Jewish, and Islamic thinkers that center on the notion that the physical universe is constituted by light, which all its aspects, space and time, stars and planets, and stones and trees and humans participate in. That is, space, time, living and nonliving things, and the heavenly bodies are all different forms of a single fundamental energy. And for Grosseteste, this energy is light (McEvoy, “Nature as Light,” 37; Robert Grosseteste, 87–88, 91–95). Grosseteste’s follower Roger Bacon (ca. 1220–1292) did not develop a full metaphysics of light. Instead he took the physics of light as outlined by al-Kindi (d. ca. 873) and Grosseteste and systematized it, defending vigorously the corporeality of light, which the authority of Aristotle, Grosseteste, and Bonaventure supported. And this set the terms for most succeeding European scholars (Lindberg, “Genesis of Kepler’s Theory,” 19–20, 22). For a history of light metaphysics, see David C. Lindberg, “Genesis of Kepler’s Theory” and the “Introduction” to his critical edition of Roger Bacon’s Perspectiva (1996), xxxvi–liii; Wolfgang Schoene, “Meaning of Medieval,” Art History, 134–40; and Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, “Light Metaphysics,” 192–95, 206–7 (a summary of Classical [Plato], Christian [Augustine], and Arabic [Avicenna] sources of light metaphysics). The father of the Christian philosophy in which light is the first principle is Pseudo-Dionysius who blends Neoplatonic philosophy with John’s theology of light (Simson, Gothic Cathedral, 51). In this tradition, which influenced Suger to a degree, “spiritual” light is the “true primal light,” which “corporeal” light is related to by analogy. Yet because corporeal light draws its essence from spiritual light, they are an identity. Thus “metaphoricity ultimately disappears insofar as light” as sign “brings about a true and literal designation of the intelligible object” (Corrigan, “Light and Metaphor,” 189). 33. Riedl, “Introduction,” 6; “physical, cosmic energy,” “self-generative,” McEvoy, “Nature as Light,” 38–39; power to generate itself (McEvoy, Robert Grosseteste, 92); Aristotle and Pseudo-Dionysius looked over his shoulder (Gaukroger, Emergence, 97; McEvoy, “Metaphysics of Light,” 131). 34. Light-matter (MacKenzie, Obscurism, 38); radical anti-Aristotelian conclusion (Panti, “Grosseteste’s De Luce,” 195). The centrality of light in Grosseteste’s account of the origin and structure of the universe is of the “greatest originality” (Lewis, “Robert Grosseteste,” online; Mary Wilson, Gothic Cathedral, 42). Opposing Aristotle’s radical distinction between celestial matter and earthly matter, Grosseteste insists that light unifies the entire universe, which he bases on Genesis (Miccoli, “Two Thirteenth-Century Theories,” 76).

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He was the first to synthesize the Augustinian tradition of optics employed in Christian theology and the Plotinian light metaphysics with the newly accessible Greek and Arabic Treatises, incorporating Islamic nature philosophy into Christian philosophy (Mary Wilson, Gothic Cathedral, 41). Grosseteste’s cosmogony begins, “I say that light by the infinite multiplication of itself made uniformly in every direction extends matter uniformly on all sides into a spherical form,” which expands, ultimately generating all thirteen spheres of the universe (nine celestial and four of the “sublunary” realm of “generation and corruption”) as conceived in the Middle Ages (On Light, trans. Lewis, 242–44). Grosseteste extends his observation that light diffuses, multiplying, saying that this action can be described in the language of geometry (optics), and thus we gain knowledge through angles, lines, and figures (Neil Lewis, “Robert Grosseteste”). Grosseteste produces the only “scientific cosmogony” and almost the only one between Plato and the present (McEvoy, Robert Grosseteste, 92). He uses the mathematics of relative infinities to explain its extension from a single point into the universe. For mathematics (proportion and ratio, not quantities as later with Galileo) is the bridge between metaphysics, concerned with the being of “unchanging simplicity” (lux), and physics, concerned with the multiplicity of “differentiated complex” beings in the cosmos (lumen) (Oliver, “Robert Grosseteste on Light,” 157). 35. “All material creation, then, is condensed light,” Zajonc, Catching the Light, 54. 36. Influenced by Neoplatonism (Cantarino, “Ibn Gabirol’s Metaphysic,” 50), filtered in Grosseteste’s case as we’ve seen through Pseudo-Dionysius, and in Suhrawardi’s through the Arabic philosopher Avicebron (Ibn Gabriol); “durationless instant,” Ziai, “Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī,” 444. 37. “Knowledge by presence,” Ziai, “Suhrawardī on Knowledge,” 26. Hence the Christian theologian communicates the significance of his encounter with light in ordinary language, such as a treatise, while the Sufi theologian uses a highly symbolic language. Grosseteste leans to an aesthetic interpretation of his experience as an observer of light, that is, desiring to transform his encounter with it to accord with his understanding. By contrast, Suhrawardi leans to a mystical interpretation as a participant in light, desiring to transform himself to accord with his intuition of it, to in a sense merge with light. Both men, after all, are transfixed by the utter self-evident presence of light. But herein is a paradox. Light is at a physical level indeed light, but at the same time, given the history we’ve seen, its interpretations (metaphor, symbol) clearly differ. And because there is no justification for “distinguishing too sharply between experience and description,” between the image and its interpretation by metaphor (Wolfson, “Hermeneutics of Light,” 106), we can confidently continue to say that light differs from age to age, place to place. Light often “figures metaphorically to refer to the modality of mind’s awareness of itself,” as we’ve seen with Grosseteste and will with Suhrawardi, in part because light merges subject/object and outside/inside experience. It “bridges” by its very nature the “physical and the spiritual” (Kapstein, “Rethinking,” 285–86), often becoming, as experience is invested with meaning, a mystical one. In this regard it is worth remembering Mircea Eliade’s insistence that “everything depends in the final instance on the theological or metaphysical value

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attached to the mystical experience of the Light,” and within a single religion, such as Christianity, these “valuations may be divergent and contradictory” (Two and the One, 59). Such divergence attests to the personal, core experience. Religious discourse is replete with literal and metaphorical references to light, but most often these are described almost reflexively as “mystical.” 38. “Knowledge by presence,” Ziai, “Suhrawardī on Knowledge,” 26. Hence the Christian theologian communicates the significance of his encounter with light in ordinary language, such as a treatise, while the Sufi theologian uses a highly symbolic language. Grosseteste leans to an aesthetic interpretation of his experience as an observer of light, that is, desiring to transform his encounter with it to accord with his understanding. By contrast, Suhrawardi leans to a mystical interpretation as a participant in light, desiring to transform himself to accord with his intuition of it, to in a sense merge with light. Both men, after all, are transfixed by the utter self-evident presence of light. But herein is a paradox. Light is at a physical level indeed light, but at the same time, given the history we’ve seen, its interpretations (metaphor, symbol) clearly differ. And because there is no justification for “distinguishing too sharply between experience and description,” between the image and its interpretation by metaphor (Wolfson, “Hermeneutics of Light,” 106), we can confidently continue to say that light differs from age to age, place to place. Light often “figures metaphorically to refer to the modality of mind’s awareness of itself,” as we’ve seen with Grosseteste and will with Suhrawardi, in part because light merges subject/object and outside/inside experience. It “bridges” by its very nature the “physical and the spiritual” (Kapstein, “Rethinking,” 285–86), often becoming, as experience is invested with meaning, a mystical one. In this regard it is worth remembering Mircea Eliade’s insistence that “everything depends in the final instance on the theological or metaphysical value attached to the mystical experience of the Light,” and within a single religion, such as Christianity, these “valuations may be divergent and contradictory” (Two and the One, 59). Such divergence attests to the personal, core experience. Religious discourse is replete with literal and metaphorical references to light, but most often these are described almost reflexively as “mystical.” 39. Although Saladin’s son al-Malik al-Zahir brought Suhrawardi to court where he was later executed (Ziai, “Suhrawardī on Knowledge,” 25), his encounter with light is undocumented. However, if not taking place here, Suhrawardi’s philosophy points to an initial core experience whose primary image was the self-evident nature of light. In experience, that is, its presence simply cannot be denied, and he clearly was moved by this realization. 40. “Knowledge by presence,” Ziai, “Suhrawardī on Knowledge,” 26; as Neoplatonism holds (Ziai, “Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī,” 444). 41. As he says, “I did not first obtain” the Philosophy of Illumination “through cogitation, but through something else, I only subsequently sought proofs for it.” He extrapolates this to knowledge in general, insisting that knowledge must be by the “intuitive total and immediate grasp” of a thing (quoted by Ziai, “Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī,” 451, 449). To support this, he points to the fact that seeing entails no material relation. There is no physical link between the one seeing and the thing seen

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that takes place in a durationless instant, which is the “moment” of Illumination (Ziai, “Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī,” 456–57), the immediate experience of its evident luminosity (Marcotte, “Suhrawardi”). 42. I borrow the term from Paul E. Muller-Ortega who uses it in reference to Abhinavagupta’s work (Muller-Ortega, “Luminous Consciousness,” 46). 43. Invented one (Ziai, “Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī,” 449); “luminosity,” “Light of Lights,” Ziai, “Suhrawardī on Knowledge,” 26–27. 44. “Rule regarding light,” “light is that which is evident . . . makes another evident,” “light is evident, and its being evident is its being light,” “Some incorrectly argue . . . possessed of sense, it would not cease to be light,” Suhrawardi, Philosophy of Illumination, 81. Suhrawardi did not, of course, invent this specialized language wholesale but borrowed for his interpretation of light’s presence concepts from the Qur’an and its interpretation in Sufi tradition. Muhammad’s famous prayer could not but be echoing in Suhrawardi’s head as he wrote his book: “O God, place light in my heart, and light in my soul, light upon my tongue, light in my eyes and light in my ears.” And God answered Mohammad when he continued, “place light in my nerves, and light in my flesh, light in my blood, light in my hair and light in my skin! Give me light, increase my light, make me light!” (quoted by Schimmel, And Muhammed, 125). And Suhrawardi’s book offers a way to achieve the Prophet’s desire, which he was granted. Legend reinforces this, claiming that Muhammad did not cast a shadow (Schimmel, 129). In the Islamic tradition the metaphysics of Light derived primarily from the Qur’an’s Sura of Light (and filtered through the Arabic refraction of Neoplatonism), “God is the Light of the heavens and earth. His Light is like this: there is a niche, and in it a lamp, the lamp inside a glass, a glass like a glittering star, fueled from a blessed olive tree from neither east nor west, whose oil almost gives light even when no fire touches it—light upon light—God guides whoever He will to his Light . . .” (Sura 24:35, trans. M. A. S. Abdel Haleem; and see the “light of God” passages, 4:74; 5:15, 44–46; 6:91, 122; 9:32; 24:35, 40; 39:22; 42:52; 57:28; 61:8). These “light verses,” as they’re known, have great significance, being regarded as the linguistic incarnation of Real Being, God himself, inasmuch as the Qur’an itself is the literal embodiment of God’s speech. Muhammad himself belongs to the “sphere of light,” which is the most common description of the prophet. He is the perfect manifestation of the primordial light, much like Christ the Logos (who is light), though Muhammad as a “shining lamp” (Sura 33:46) remains God’s servant and creature (Schimmel, And Muhammed, 124, 132, 142). An interpretation of the Qur’an’s “Light Verse” (sura 24:35) by the most prominent Sufi theologian and philosopher of the previous generation, Al-Ghazali (1058–1111), Niche of Lights (or Niche for the Lights), expounds the mystical illumination of Sufism. In it he identifies God with the Absolute Light, a conviction that Suhrawardi elaborates further (Knysh, Islamic Mysticism, 147). Building on this, and rooted in a different initial experience of light from his predecessor’s, he develops an original light metaphysics/ontology. Yet as Roxanne Marcotte cautions, Suhrawardi’s Illuminationist doctrine could owe more to Ismaili thought than to the Sufi doctrines that he

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claims to be following, even admitting that a number of Sufi echoes can be identified in his works. And medieval biographers attest Suhrawardi’s “association with mystics and ascetic practices” (Marcotte, “Suhrawardi”). We’ve seen this inward probing of experience before in the Vedas and Upanishads, so it does not come as a surprise that Sufism is not only influenced by Zoroastrianism (see Corbin, History, 208, 211, 220) and Neoplatonism as well as Jewish and Christian mysticism, and vice versa, but also given its intuitive mystical convictions, by Hinduism as well (and possibly by Buddhism, though debatable). In the mid-seventh century, Buddhist Iran, Afghanistan, and Western Turkistan came under the rule of the Arab Umayyad Caliphate. Consequently, a number of Muslim scholars began explaining Buddhist belief to Muslims. And the founder of the next wave of Sufism, the poet, theologian, and mystic Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, known as Rumi (1207–1273), tells a famous story about a contest between Greek and Chinese artists, which he interprets as an allegory of a theological versus mystical approach to achieving the spiritual life (Bann, True Vine, 205–6), which he seems to believe is endorsed by Buddhism. 45. “Pure light,” “luminosity,” “light beyond which there is no light,” “All-Encompassing Light,” “Eternal,” “absolutely independent . . . nothing beyond it,” Suhrawardi, Philosophy of Illumination, 87; a “thing either is light and luminosity . . . own reality,” Suhrawardi, 77; all the way down to conscious beings (Walbridge, “Introduction” to Suhrawardi, Philosophy of Illumination, xxvii). 46. “Light is the very lodestone of nearness!” Suhrawardi, Philosophy of Illumination, 106. 47. “Knowledge by presence,” “illuminationist vision,” “imaginal world,” “out there,” “we ourselves are imaginary,” Chittick, Sufi Path, 15; “knower, known, and knowing are here one,” quoted by Ziai, “Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī,” 454. 48. Full richness of the character of light (Marcotte, “Suhrawardi”); “sincere in turning toward the Light of Lights,” “divine lights,” “dispersed within him,” quoted by Ziai, “Suhrawardī on Knowledge,” 31; “organs of light,” “light of speech,” “light of hearing,” “physiology of the man of light,” Corbin, Man of Light, 14f, 82, 140. One of the most important Chinese Taoist classics The Secret of the Golden Flower, dating from the eighth century but edited by Suhrawardi’s older contemporary Wang Chong Yang (1113–1170) in the twelfth, begins like the Philosophy of Illumination in light experience and lays out a mystical path to understand this light. Also, like Suhrawardi’s this requires patience. Both books owe something to a common Persian source, most likely Zoroastrian. The goal of the Secret is to “make the light circulate” within the body until it “crystallizes itself,” which is the “natural spirit-body” (trans. Walter Picca, 1964, http:​//​alchemylab​.com​/golden​_flower​.htm, Sec. 1). This light is “not in the body alone, neither is it only outside the body,” although the great earth and everything in it is this light because it is experienced in the imaginal world (Sec. 3). To effect crystallization, “the circulation of the Light must be united with the rhythm of breathing.” And this entails the physiology of the light body as with Kobra, for the “Light of the ear is above all necessary” (Sec. 4). Confirmation of success along the way is a feeling of “great gaiety,” a “sign that the Light principle in the

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whole body is harmonious.” At this point the Golden Flower opens and “inside and outside, everything is equally light,” as the “fleshly body becomes quite shining like silk or jade” and one “really floats upward” (Sec. 6). The Golden Flower refers to the radiant image the practitioner will see at this point between the eyes, and it is associated with none other than the “Original Light” or “Essence,” reminiscent of the Light of Lights. The Chinese experience of the period centers on this light in the imaginal world to the virtual exclusion of that in the phenomenal world. This is reflected in Chinese landscape painting during its great age (Five Dynasties to the Northern Sung, 907– 1127). Artists strove for the emotional atmosphere, the rhythm of nature, rather than its appearance (Watson, Style, 72). They captured the “misty luminosity” of natural scenes, which they valued highly and equated with “natural spirit” (Maeda, Sung Texts, 32) and, consequently, were uninterested in capturing light from a fixed source in their paintings, such as from the sun or moon (Wong, Tao of Chinese Landscape, 60). Specific qualities of light are rarely noted, though the Chan Buddhist monk Huihong (1071–1128) observes the “shifting light amid trees” and the “golden threads” in the roadside willows (Hearn, How to Read, 56). One of the most influential books of the age, the eleventh-century An Essay on Landscape Painting by Kuo Hsi states that the great achievement of landscape painting is to “to fuse the spiritual and the material” (Essay, 13). To accomplish this, the landscape artist must “identify himself with the landscape and watch it until its significance is revealed to him” (38), a spiritual significance, the energy (tao) coursing through all of nature. This parallels the Taoist notion in the Golden Flower, of course, of the “circulation of the light” in the body effecting awakening. 49. “Propitious,” “seize,” “tear,” “flash of light descending . . . thunderbolt of pleasure,” “light accompanied . . . tear asunder the joints,” quoted by Ziai, “Suhrawardī on Knowledge,” 37. 50. “Pleasant descending light,” “warm water,” “stupor in the brain,” “accompanied by a sweet and subtle joy,” “burning light,” “glittering light in a mighty blast,” “flashing light,” “seems to be suspended by the hair . . . long time,” quoted by Ziai, “Suhrawardī on Knowledge,” 37. 51. “Light that begins as an assault,” “imagine that something is being destroyed,” quoted by Ziai, “Suhrawardī on Knowledge,” 37; “propitious light . . . suspended,” “accompanied by feeling . . . bear,” “by the power,” quoted by Ziai, 37. The character of the light that the Indian Abhinavagupta (c. 950–1014) encountered two hundred years earlier makes an interesting comparison. Like Suhrawardi this famous expositor of the Kashmiri Hindu Tantra believes that the “essential true nature of all existing things is indeed composed of light,” including space and time. In fact, “objective reality arises as the congealing of the light.” And “that light is unitary, because it is impossible for that light to become other than what it essentially is” (Muller-Ortega, “Luminous Consciousness,” 47, 54, 56). The key traits Abhinava singles out in his experience of light are that it is “one and its nature is freedom” as it “pulsates with power,” and it is “self-illuminating” and “self-concealing” as well as self-validating, and as such cannot be rationally proved (Muller-Ortega, 56, 60). Thus one’s sensory experience properly meditated by discipline can open into the

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supreme light of consciousness. Abhinava like Suhrawardi is acutely self-conscious of his own “activity of elaboration, clarification, and explication,” the interpretation of his sensory experience, even as he is “charged with a kind of white heat of mystical immediacy and intensity” (Muller-Ortega, “Luminous Consciousness,” 70–71). 52. “Encompasses all of reality,” Marcotte, “Suhrawardi”; harrowing “mystical” path (Corbin, History, 216). By contrast, Abhinavagupta’s (c. 950–1014) contemporary the Byzantine Christian monk and poet Symeon (949–1022) abbot of the Monastery of St. Mamas, according to his disciple and biographer Nicetas Stethatos, does not start with an experience of natural light but with vision. His teacher had described “divine illuminations sent from heaven to those engaged in the spiritual struggle, consisting in a flood of light.” And so great was Symeon’s “desire and longing for such a blessing” that he himself experiences this light (Symeon, Discourses, 198). Having fallen “prostrate on the ground,” he says, a “great light was immaterially shining on me and seized hold of my whole mind and soul,” and not knowing “whether I was in the body, or outside the body,” I “conversed with this Light.” A powerful experience, “all the perceptions of my mind and my soul were wholly concentrated on the ineffable joy of that Light” (Symeon, 200–201). Symeon’s fourteenth-century heir Gregory Palamas (1296–1359), theologian and Eastern Orthodox Archbishop of Thessalonike (Greece), takes Symeon’s experience as a model, starting not with the phenomenal but with the testimonial of a vision of the “divine light,” what he calls, as opposed to the unknowable “essence” of God, the “uncreated energy” revealed to Peter, James, and John at Christ’s Transfiguration on Mount Tabor (Mark 9:1–7). For both Symeon and Palamas, then, the light they apprehend is a second-order experience. It is almost wholly determined by the matrix of received tradition. Consequently, they do not begin with an image and move to metaphor and symbol but proceed in the reverse direction, starting from spiritual vision, an inherited religious interpretation, and ending with a sensual, literal light (image) that physically transforms them. Palamas appropriates the vision of a radiant transfigured Christ (1 Jn 1:5), “an illumination immaterial and divine” (Palamas, Triads, 57), by the “cessation of intellectual activity,” an intuitive rather than rational discipline. Yet as he takes pains to emphasize, this light is not a symbol but substantive (73), not a phantom or hallucination but with “subsistence” (75–76). And the intense “contemplation of this light is a union.” In this mystical state, Palamas testifies, “all is one, so that he who sees can distinguish neither the means nor the object nor its nature, but simply has the awareness of being light and of seeing a light distinct from every creature” (66). In short, “this mysterious light, inaccessible, immaterial, uncreated, deifying, eternal,” as he says, this “radiance of the Divine Nature, this glory of the divinity, this beauty of the heavenly kingdom, is at once accessible to sense perception and yet transcends it” (Palamas, Triads, 80). Above all, it is a transforming light, like the mirror that receives the sun’s ray and produces another from itself; likewise, he says, we “too will become luminous.” As Christ himself, “we will also be light” (90). 53. The “imaginal world,” accessed by the power of the imagination and hovering between the empirical and the abstract intellectual world, is as real as the world of the

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senses and of the intellect (Henri Corbin, “Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal,” //hermetic.com/Moorish/mundus-imaginalis.html, accessed November 5, 2014). Nasrid civilization (Gonzalez, Beauty and Islam, 13, 47). 54. Its Palace of Comares being built during the reign of Yusuf I (1333–1354) and its Palace of the Lions, including the courtyard, during the reign of Muhammad V (1354–1359/1362–1391); the palace complex completed in 1369 or 1370 (Moosa, “Light as the Manifestation,” 72). 55. Architecture of light was a personal expression (Irwin, Alhambra, 99); small mosque by Yusef I (Acedo, Alhambra in Focus, 139); “smothered in lime,” “personally supervised,” Alhambra in Focus, 104. The Nasrid like the Christian king desired to tie their authority to the central figure of their respective faiths. Louis IX by pious worship and deeds to Christ who is light, and the Muslim kings to Muhammad the Prophet who is light. The luminosity of Sainte-Chapelle and of the Alhambra derives at root from this desire (Robinson, “Towers, Birds,” 54). And from the evidence of our eyes the men who built the chapel and the oratory, respectively, worked as much with stone and glass, shadow and light, as they did with stucco and wood (Irwin, Alhambra, 127). 56. Architecture of light was a personal expression (Irwin, Alhambra, 99); small mosque by Yusef I (Acedo, Alhambra in Focus, 139); “smothered in lime,” “personally supervised,” Alhambra in Focus, 104. The Nasrid like the Christian king desired to tie their authority to the central figure of their respective faiths. Louis IX by pious worship and deeds to Christ who is light, and the Muslim kings to Muhammad the Prophet who is light. The luminosity of Sainte-Chapelle and of the Alhambra derives at root from this desire (Robinson, “Towers, Birds,” 54). And from the evidence of our eyes the men who built the chapel and the oratory, respectively, worked as much with stone and glass, shadow and light, as they did with stucco and wood (Irwin, Alhambra, 127). 57. “Divine unity,” Foret, “Reflections on Pleasure,” 26; Nasrid culture distinctly Sufic associations (Robinson, “Towers, Birds,” 35); “light so magical . . . rare and noble metals,” quoted by Stewart, Alhambra, 160. 58. To represent the unrepresentable (Gonzalez, Beauty and Islam, 67). 59. Alchemy, Moosa, “Light as the Manifestation,” 57; “vibration of light,” Villafranca Jiménez, “Alhambra Visited,” 32; “heaviness of matter,” “lightness of spirit,” “noble form,” Moosa, 57. 60. “Hides Himself . . . Countenance,” quoted by Moosa, “Light as the Manifestation,” 88. The veils of light, as Titus Burckhardt interprets them, “hide the divine ‘obscurity,’” and the veils of darkness obscure the Divine Light (quoted by Moosa, 89). The walls are produced by “special plaster,” which contains finely ground marble, and polished with “pumice and bone marrow” (Plummer, Poetics of Light, 31). 61. Muqarnas inside arches and domes (Moosa, “Light as the Manifestation,” 88); “rich gradation . . . shadows,” Moosa, 58, 62. Light becomes a function of geometry (Belting, Florence and Baghdad, 116, 254, 256; on the centrality of geometry to Islamic art, see Khemir, Light/Nur, 240–41). And as he works with this “veil,” the architect is no doubt mindful of the passage in classical Persian literature that surfaces the paradox at the heart of God’s “unrepresentable” nature: “He is hidden by

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His very brightness,” quoted by Moosa, 90. And we could say he is revealed by his very obscurity. It’s the paradoxical nature of this that distinguishes the Muslim from Pseudo-Dionysus’s Christian notion of the “sacred veils” that God “adapts to our nature as human beings.” Suger followed the philosopher in this because he accepted man’s weakness, mired in the “slime of the earth.” He focuses on this world. The Muslim architect, however, exalts God’s paradoxical nature, focusing on the other world. For this reason, the architect transforms brightness into a veiled light that man can handle, the vibrating light of the imaginal world that allows a mystical apprehension of the revealed-obscured God himself. Thus he manages to represent and not represent God in the imaginal world of the Alhambra, allowing the seeker to see and not see God. 62. “How much delight for the eyes!” “gleaming vault . . . hidden beauties,” www​ .alhambradegranada​.org​/en​/info​/epigraphicpoems​.asp (accessed June 12, 2014); “agitated bands of pitted light” (Plummer, Poetics of Light, 31); incandescent canopy (Kostoff, History of Architecture, 398); honeycombs (Acedo, Alhambra in Focus, 124). Suspended from wooden frames, their miniature stalactites have religious connotations because they celebrate the cave at Hira where Muhammad received the words of the Qur’an directly from Archangel Gabriel. The architectural, poetic critic Henry Plummer shares a more intense experience of this “vibrating” light: “each series of luminous shells” enwrap a “hot central core” that burns with a “gaseous and turbulent light.” The dome has been “chiseled into a magnetic storm of lights,” he continues, an “electrical field that spins and surges with energy snared from the Andalusian sun” (Plummer, Poetics of Light, 31). 63. “Luminous shells” (Plummer, Poetics of Light, 31); from small windows just below the rim of the dome (Moosa, “Light as the Manifestation,” 110); marble and tile mirrors (Kostoff, History of Architecture, 399); “alchemy of light,” Burckhardt, quoted by Moosa, “Light as the Manifestation,” 116; “supra-rational,” Gonzalez, Beauty and Islam, 54. 64. “Display the nature of light,” Burckhardt, quoted by Moosa, “Light as the Manifestation,” 116. 65. Pools of water greet us in almost every courtyard of the Alhambra. The interior refraction of the window jali and the dome muqarnas are complemented by reflection from outside pools of water. So important was this light that the tenth-century ruler Abdul-Rahman III intensified it by replacing the water in one pool with mercury, its light ricocheting off the palace columns and walls (Khemir, Light/Nur, 241). Paradise, of course, includes “fountains of running water” according to the Qur’an (Sura, 55). And the transmutation of natural to Sufi light in the imaginal world requires water. As light bearer, it is the catalyst. Water and light, in fact, are considered proofs of God’s existence (Shalem, “Fountains of Light,” 5). Water brings about the transmutation of light that allows man to see God. He is both hidden and revealed by the light vibrating with the water at dawn in the basin of the Courtyard of the Lions. And this was not unique to Muslim lands. Richard of St. Victor interprets the reflection of light off a pool of still water as the “mind recollected in a state of interiorization. Light is a sudden vision. As the water reflects the light upward, so the mind causes the divine light to ‘rebound,’” so that

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“something of the mind is caught up in the beam of light and is impelled beyond its own sphere of existence (Zinn, “Personification Allegory,” 207). 66. His Comedy breathes these winds, as did numerous mystical writings in Europe, which were influenced by Sufis such as Ibn Arabi (1165–1240). More important, personally, he shared Ibn Arabi’s response to the persecution and violence around them. Both promoted tolerance, compassion, and respect for others, though Dante’s response was grounded in the teachings of the fourteenth-century Christian tradition, of course, and the philosopher’s in his understanding of the Qur’an. Moreover, in his poem Dante treats Muslim philosophers such as Averroes (d. 1198) with great respect because he was directly indebted to the Islamic rationalist philosophy of Averroes and Maimonides (1138–1204), the great Jewish “Islamic” philosopher born in Córdoba (Stone, Dante’s Pluralism, 42). Yet we must acknowledge Dante’s condemnation of Muhammad whom he accuses of being one of the “sowers of discord” and places in the depths of hell (Inferno, XXVII. 25–36). At the same time, the “philosophy of religion” that is a fundamental component of his grand poem is “in large part,” as Gregory Stone maintains, a “legacy of the Arabo-Islamic philosophical tradition.” Dante’s condemnation does not, therefore, “nullify the presence in the Comedy of a formulation of religious pluralism that may rightly be called Islamic” (Stone, Dante’s Pluralism, 54). 67. “Enraptured,” Gilson, Medieval Optics, 1. 68. Grasp of physics and of his body as being penetrated by physical light (Rutledge, “Dante,” 151); “outrageous incandescence,” Brandeis, Ladder of Vision, 214. 69. Dante seems to reflect Pseudo-Dionysius’s hierarchy. However, despite Dante’s placing Dionysius at the pinnacle of his Paradiso (XXVIII. 130–32), there is no evidence that his writings directly influenced the poet, for his ideas had become a commonplace of the age (Gilson, Medieval Optics, 240–45). But Joseph Mazzeo maintains that “light metaphysics is the controlling conception in the architecture of the Paradiso” (Mazzeo, “Light Metaphysics,” 219). Simon Gilson denies this assertion of influence, dismissing Mazzeo’s “Platonising” reading of the poem. He states flatly that the ideas of Grosseteste did not significantly influence Dante. Unlike the theologian-philosopher, Dante did not equate the causal action of the cosmos with light or use geometrical optics in his treatment of radiation. Nor did he follow Grosseteste in viewing light as the main component of all bodies or assigning it a central role in sensation (Gilson, Medieval Optics, 165, 259). 70. “Pure light,” Mary Wilson, Gothic Cathedral, 166. Despite the fact that, as Monica Rutledge insists, Dante’s light links the material and spiritual realms, the eye-brain receives “sensory news” from this world and “intellectual or spiritual intuitions” from God (see the Convivio). When Dante enters the Empyrean, this dissolves; here there is a single transcendent light. Material and spiritual light are, in fact, only analogs (Rutledge, “Dante,” 153, 161). 71. Dante’s trading in the visible for the invisible, Allen Tate has written, possibly constitutes a serious “break in the symbolic structure” of Dante’s poem, and I believe it does. Until its last cantos the poem has been “committed to the visible,” and Tate wonders “whether Dante should have tried to give us an image of God, of that which is without image and invisible,” but concludes that this is an “unanswerable question”

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(Tate, “Symbolic Imagination,” 105). In the process of trading, Dante not only depersonalizes those he meets, such as the saints Peter and John, but depersonalizes himself by cutting himself off from his senses. Erich Auerbach realizes the “danger” of this “depersonalization,” which many critics “believe that Dante succumbed to,” thus diminishing the power of the Paradiso (Auerbach, Dante, 155). Auerbach, however, does not accept this. And although Irma Brandeis points out that when Dante witnesses God as light, it is a light “shorn of every physical attribute,” admittedly a potential weakness, she defends Dante. Because the poem has “crammed and crowded the reader’s mind with images of light, dazzled him out of sensuous response,” she says, he can by analogy come to “some fleeting sense of what it might be to be suffused with truth, yet not to see, feel, taste, touch or smell” (Brandeis, Ladder, 225–26). Yet I believe sacrificing the sensuous for the hope of “direct experience” undermines Dante’s relationship with light, weakening the poem. And his “passing beyond humanity” to the pure “light intellectual” of the Empyrean (Jacoff, Cambridge Companion, 209) leaves us diminished. Such a move betrays his earlier experience of light, which he testifies to up until his pivot in the last part of the Paradiso to the visionary (at XXX. 100). 72. Atomic lattice of a crystal (Auerbach, Dante, 169); crystalline structure (Mandelstam, “Conversation, 54, 66,79). Although Henri Focillon maintains that Dante is in the “lineage of cathedral builders” (Focillon, Art of the West, 116), Paul Frankl asserts that this is a false comparison. If the Comedy resembles any architecture, he says, it is not the Gothic but the Romanesque, even though Dante’s poem is Gothic in culture (Frankl, Gothic: Literary, 225). 73. To take Beatrice’s place on his last visionary step, whose beauty has increased beyond his ability to describe, having “taken in” the “general form of Paradise” (XXXI. 52–53), Dante chooses Barnard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) as his guide. This is fitting, for the “old man” had a century earlier described the perfect union with God “as air flooded with sunlight is transformed into the same brilliant light, so that it seems to be no longer lighted but rather light itself” (Barnard, Steps, 59, 89). 74. Next age (Schoene, “Meaning,” 132).

Chapter 2

Instrumental Light The Renaissance

I begin this chapter with Giotto di Bonedone (c. 1267–1337), whom the first historian of Renaissance painters, Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), lauded as giving birth to the age—“born in order to give light to painting”—and end with Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) who, for this historian, embodied its maturity. In the course of the age, spanning roughly the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy as well as in the northern countries, we will examine Giotto’s initiating experience, and then the encounters of four prominent painters with a new light, more physical than spiritual. We’ll begin in the “Early” Renaissance with Piero della Francesca (1416–1492) of Florence, then travel north with Jan van Eyck (1390–1441) of Bruges; in the later or “High” Renaissance we’ll return to the south with Leonardo of Florence whom I compare with Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) of Nuremberg. By selecting these four I do not mean to suggest that they set a standard by which to judge other artists of the period, only that they figure prominently in the story I wish to tell.1 Each of these four artists was captivated by light in their own particular and personal way. Together they introduce framed canvases, windows of light that painters invited viewers to look through as they would their house windows. No longer primarily a divine manifestation as in the previous age, the character of light now came into view as a distinctly physical phenomenon, an instrument that could be used in painting to create the illusion of reality, a relation to light shared by the Venetian painters Bellini and Titian as well as the Florentine artists Michelangelo and Raphael working in Rome. These artists employed light prominently in their work, but their light experience is not as central or as fully documented as the four we’ll meet.2 I focus on painters exclusively in this chapter not only for reasons of space but because they consciously wrestle with their experience of light, attempting to find a visual language that adequately expresses it in ways that 49

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the architects and philosophers of the period do not.3 Giotto straddled the threshold between the essential light of the Middle Ages; the spiritual, transcendent essence of reality which is God; and what the art historian Moshe Barasch calls the instrumental light of the Renaissance, which was employed to convey a sense of an everyday, real space. In his desire to create a pictorial space we recognize as our own, Giotto swerves from the tradition of “undifferentiated” light in Byzantine and medieval painting, a conventionalized light dictated by the Catholic Church, toward a specific light. He is concerned with light as it radiates from surfaces (luminance), for example, which he expresses in his innovative placement of highlights.4 Thus the medieval experience of light interpreted in Neoplatonic terms as something intrinsic to matter and a transcendental emanation of God gives way in the Renaissance to an experience of light as a fundamentally physical phenomenon revealing the visible properties of an object or figure’s surface. So beginning with Giotto we’ll ask the question: How does each painter we consider assimilate and communicate their fundamental encounter with a physical instrumental light, finding an expression for this basically aesthetic rather than spiritual experience in the new naturalistic style that Giotto introduces? He renders objects washed by light that flows over them, that is, revealing luster and leaving shadow, a style that departs from medieval practice. In such approach Giotto at the dawn of the Renaissance birthed a new relation to light. This entailed an awareness as never before of a connection between light in a painting (pictorial light via pigments) and light in the world with the concomitant desire to merge and find expression for them.5 GIOTTO CREATES LIGHT SPACE Giotto goes beyond rendering the light reflected off objects such as armor and uses light itself as a tool to create a new pictorial space. When Enrico Scrovegni commissioned him to paint a series of frescos in his family oratory, the Arena Chapel in Padua, depicting the Lives of the Virgin and Christ (1305–1308), Giotto was faced with a problem: how to create scenes on his chapel’s interior walls that would involve Scrovegni and his family members, their principal viewers. Giotto solves this by creating a light space within his fresco that allows nearly life-size figures to move within these scenes. By his rendering of light so as to create its own space, bathing his palpably human figures with light, asking us to look at the light as it shifts from light to dark to light, he makes sure that we know this is the light of a specific place. His fundamental experience of light being its creation of place. Giotto invites his viewers, including the Scrovegnis, not so much to observe a medieval

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image of piety, then, as to step into the scene of the Virgin’s life and join the participants.6 His desire to create an illusion of space that we could step into initiated the Renaissance naturalistic style, which the experience of an instrumental light made possible. We know the Virgin is imagined, there being no record of what she looked like, of course, yet at the same time by means of Giotto’s embracing this style we experience her gestures and the space in which they exist as in some sense real, her body given volume and rooted in gravity. This new space derives from Giotto’s new relation to light and shadow, which is revealed in his exploiting the natural light that comes from the windows of the chapel and its shadows. Because Giotto establishes continuity between the ambient light of the chapel falling through its window and the depicted light of his fresco, he creates within the painting a space that his viewers feel they can enter.7 And such a use of light and shadow, which medieval artists shunned, associating shadow with sin and danger, derives from a familiar experience. For anyone who knows the streets of Florence with their jutting eaves, as the art historian Paul Hills reminds us, will realize that Giotto’s handling of light and shade in his frescos was “a response to the light and shadow” of the “townscape.” He renders the movement from light into dark and out again, that is, as he would have experienced it walking the city streets. This gives his figures sculptural depth, creating believable individuals in a recognizable, specific space constructed by light and shadow. In short, he realized that light could not be separated from space, discovering, as Hills says, that “pictorial light” is in effect “pictorial space.”8 By using light to create his fresco’s pictorial space, Giotto reveals his relation to an instrumental light that becomes central to the Renaissance. The Arena Chapel fresco embodies his personal experience of light because he had greater freedom than artists of the previous age to carry out his work. As long as his painting supported the narrative expectations of Scrovegni who commissioned it and the church who blessed it, Giotto had great artistic latitude. He was free to choose the colors of the fresco walls of the Arena chapel and to a considerable degree their interior light fall and brightness. And his choices attest his new realization that painting is about light even when it is about something else like the Virgin’s life. Driven to express this discovery, which later Renaissance artists made their own, Giotto even pioneered new techniques of fresco, enabling him to translate his experience of light into pigments.9 Thus his act of painting is itself an act of freedom—a liberation through and against tradition. No wonder we sense Giotto’s joy bursting into the light space of his Arena Chapel frescos. In part, I suggest, triggered by his light experience and discovery that he can use light as a tool to create an analog

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of the world, though not an imitation as with subsequent painters. Employing a naturalistic style, he creates a believable light space world of inclusive brightness and even emphasis of shade and light that reinforces the calm, profoundly human narrative of his Arena Chapel fresco series. And in convincing viewers that they could enter the scene he created, Giotto addressed the common man rather than priests primarily, to this extent releasing creativity from the sacred in keeping with a new Renaissance assertion of freedom.10 Paradoxically, however, he is not primarily interested in imitating things seen in the world, as his figures are to a great degree stylized. Similarly, in creating a pictorial light space that the viewer believes can be entered, he creates in his fresco a convincing though, we must remember, imagined light. This rendering of light is thus in a sense naturalistic, optically convincing in itself, but not realistic. For he does not primarily imitate the actual light outside his painting. He is more concerned about being true to the story depicted and its impact than to this light, though faithfully expressing his personal experience of light. Such a desire to imitate the light of nature as such, rendering its actual appearance faithfully, even obsessively, only emerges with the full flowering of the Renaissance in Giotto’s successors.11 After Giotto’s death in 1337 a series of disasters struck, ultimately creating the world in which the Renaissance artists flourished. Florence was attacked by a rival Italian city-state, which provoked an economic and political crisis. And a decade later the Black Death appeared in Italy, which spread as far as England. By the time it faded in 1350 one-third of the population between India and Iceland was dead, including 60 percent of the population of Florence. After such upheaval brought about the breakdown of traditional hierarchies, which undermined the power of the nobility and the church, people of all classes had no choice but to reconstruct their society in the face of disease and violence. Reconstruction entailed a shakeup of the old hierarchical society, liberating some to engage in commercial enterprise and others in intellectual exploration. Consequently, individual will and achievement moved to the center, and a new class of urban merchant bankers gained power, a class that included patrons of art whose desire for status and power was satisfied by a new generation of artists. The coming together of artistic talent and wealthy patrons, then, eager in fifteenth-century Italy to hire that talent triggered a wave of creativity that dazzles us yet. And as a result what Paris was to Gothic architecture, so Florence as the most dynamic of the Italian city-states was to Renaissance painting. And just as Gothic architecture radiated out of the Île-de-France, so Western painting radiated out from Florence and nearby city-states.12

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Artists’ personal visions entailing new experiences of light could find expression in a society where patrons were from a variety of backgrounds and where the medieval boundaries between clergy and laity were obscured by a diminished ecclesiastical authority. In addition, the will of the individual patron and artist became more important in the new age than the will of the community, principally the church, that had dominated the Middle Ages.13 This new culture possessed of a longing for visual “reality” was to go beyond Giotto’s desire to create an analog of the observed world, a light space that was believable but not to be mistaken for the “real” world. His was an imagined world that he invited his viewer to enter as they would a dream. The fifteenth- and sixteenth-century artists who followed yearned instead to recreate the real world with its actual light, even if they populated it with historical, mythical, or biblical figures. This desire to represent the world and consequent elevation of the visual arts, which emerged from social upheaval, completed a gradual shift from Gothic vision, the “spiritually seen,” as the art historian Michael Camille concludes, to Renaissance illusion, the “physical scene.”14 The passion to imitate nature became the principal purpose of Renaissance artists and theorists after Giotto. “We learn from Nature herself,” the great Renaissance architect and humanist Leon Baptista Alberti (1404–1472) says, for painting “aims to represent things seen.” And he specifies that this includes the outline or shape of objects, the composition or the arrangement of their surfaces, as well as their “reception of light,” noting that their variations of texture and brightness are wholly dependent on the light that objects receive.15 And this reception of the light includes the overall scene that contains these objects, as Giotto realized earlier. Alberti systematizes a method of creating the space of a painting’s visual field, however, a technique of naturalistic style called “linear perspective.” As when in the depicted interior of a church, for example, walls on each side of its sanctuary appear to converge on a point (i.e., “vanishing point”). Not Giotto’s light space, this is an optically prescribed light space. It is the illusion of a three-dimensional space that is primarily determined by the description of how our vision works in the language of physical geometry, according to the behavior of rays, that is, conceived as the lines of a Euclidian diagram. Alberti’s systematization of linear perspective, based on the underlying geometric laws of optics, transformed painting and influenced the next five hundred years of Western art.16 Developing the naturalistic style that Giotto employed in his creation of an imagined scene, then, artists of the next century succeeded in capturing the actual world of light and space in a new way, which accorded with their own light experience. But their interpretation of that experience owed much

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to Giotto. Underlying his art, in fact, was a naturalism they all embraced, which entailed a shift in focus from God to humanity and nature fundamental to the Renaissance outlook. And the naturalistic style generated by this new orientation served the individual expression of an instrumental light. In a medium, furthermore, that became fundamental to Renaissance artists, allowing greater personal expression than in the previous age—paintings.17 THE WINDOW AND THE MIRROR In answering our question about how Renaissance artists use this style to communicate their relationship with an instrumental light, we will see a subtle shift in their approach as we move from the Early to the High Renaissance, which I’ll touch on when we examine the experiences of Leonardo and Dürer (High). But throughout this period an aspect of their encounter with this light takes on a different emphasis in the north and south. This results in complementary assumptions about painting, as it gives expression to the reception of light, which I sketch here before introducing Piero della Francesca and Jan van Eyck (Early). This difference stems, possibly, from the generally stable light of the south, owing to its temperate and almost timeless weather, in contrast to the variable light of the “weather-whipped” north. Although the core experience of southern and northern light remains one of a physical rather than the medieval transcendental light, the respective artists view it differently. In short, at risk of oversimplifying, in the south painters welcome the direct light of the sky entering through a “window,” while in the north they reach beyond it to the intermittent light of scudding clouds and off rocks and trees as from a “mirror.”18 As a result, the southern artists, enamored of the sun’s direct rays, habitually though to varying degrees employed Alberti’s linear perspective and so conceived of their painting from its outset as a window on the visible world. If we imagine the wide world sending all its rays of light into the single point of our observing eye, then we can visualize the world as being the base of a pyramid and our eye its apex. And if we imagine that we are looking at the world through a window, as Alberti explains in his book On Painting (1435), we can visualize the window as a transparent “screen” that intersects this pyramid of light rays. Finally, if we imagine the window to be a painting, then we can see that there is no conceptual difference between this virtual “painting,” the screen that intersects our visual pyramid, and an actual painting. As Alberti concludes, “therefore, a painting will be the intersection of a visual pyramid at a given distance.” And so the painting substitutes in this sense for the window on the world.19

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The northern artists, in contrast, emphasized the apex of viewing, their eye, while the southern artists emphasized its base, the scene itself. The former tended to view the painting not as a way to receive the visible world, as if passive observers of what the window offers, but as a way to actively access it, as if entering a mirror to grasp its content. At the root of this difference was the Italian assumption of light rays being transmitted by nature as if directly through a window to them, in contrast to the northern assumption of light being reflected from nature as if from a mirror, nature itself being a mirror of the Divine. And, reciprocally, from the eye, Dürer stated that “every form brought before our vision falleth upon it as upon a mirror.” The painter then copies this “form” or image, which was reflected from the mirror of nature, to canvas.20 Hence Piero and his contemporaries’ “sense of the breadth and universality of light” was very different from the Netherlandish painters’ engagement with the “particularity” of light’s action, such as with Van Eyck (and earlier the Limbourg Brothers, c. 1399–1416). Though exploiting an instrumental light in both climes, painters in the south tended to experience natural light as a harmonizing instrument, bringing all things together in a shared “universal” light space determined by linear perspective. In contrast, the northern painters felt light to be a differentiating instrument, singling out the particulars of the world and revealing their specific qualities. The Italians, we might say, were enthralled by general illumination, using the constant light of their experience to define space; the northerners by fitful light from reflective surfaces. Whether the texture of cloth or rock, the surface of a rug inside or the topography outside, the northern artist savors its ever-changing light, that of minute particulars, each reflection ultimately a small revelation of God.21 Thus the artists who lived north of the Alps were the first to master the depiction of “luster, sparkle and glitter,” thereby being the first to convey the texture of materials. While the southern artists were the first to construct a space, such as a church’s interior, according to what they understood to be the optical, geometrical properties of light rays—their traveling in straight lines and appearing to converge in a distant vanishing point (i.e., linear perspective).22 THE EARLY RENAISSANCE: THE SOUTHERN GEOMETRY AND NORTHERN PARTICULARITY OF LIGHT Jan van Eyck (1390–1441) was Piero della Francesca’s (c. 1415/20–1492) older contemporary. Both of these Early Renaissance painters experience an instrumental light expressed in a naturalistic style. Piero, however, tended

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toward using light to define space and volumes, van Eyck to define textures, owing to their different traditions and assumptions about painting. A skilled painter of manuscripts in the Gothic tradition, van Eyck became court painter to Philip the Good and settled in Bruges, establishing himself as the greatest Netherlandish painter of the fifteenth century. In contrast, Piero, a skilled mathematician-geometrician in the Classical tradition, was an independent artist and theorist. Influenced by Alberti, he wrote a treatise in his later years on perspective, an interpretation of his feeling for the relentless rays of the Tuscan landscape, much as van Eyck had for the lustrous light of Bruges. Comparing Piero’s Baptism of Christ (1448–1450) and van Eyck’s Virgin and Child with Nicolas Rolin (c. 1433/1435), we see, respectively, Piero employing a distinctly universal Italian light whose radiance encompasses all objects and whose behavior follows invariable optical laws; van Eyck using a variable, seemingly local light reflected off objects and their particular surfaces. No doubt the former’s translation is of a “stark southern light,” which creates sharp shadows that suggest it comprises rays of geometric precision much like Euclid’s diagrams, while the latter’s translation is of a “moody” northern light subject to abrupt changes in weather.23 In his painting we can sense Piero’s Tuscany “under the bleaching summer sunlight of the Mediterranean,” and this may account for its clarity and sharpness, a certain hard-edged, seemingly unemotional quality of light that infused all of Piero’s work. Van Eyck’s country seen through the arches of the room, by contrast, lies under a varied, less predictable light, one by fits seeking out the details of landscape as well as of clothing. And we sense van Eyck’s enthusiasm for this light reflected off things, unable to get enough of it. No wonder van Eyck’s contemporaries “stood and gawked” at his variety and precision of details in depicting objects, from the frizz of curly hair to the folds of satin brocades, from the weave of carpets to the translucent dazzle of hand-blown glass, from a pool of light on the floor to the misty light skirting mountains.24 Piero della Francesca’s Isolating Light But how does Piero della Francesca use the impersonal Tuscan light to create a paradoxically personal, pictorial light space? We see the answer in his Flagellation of Christ (c. 1455–1460), one of his most famous and revealing paintings. A pillar supporting the roof of the temple in which the flagellation takes place divides the painting in two. On the left Christ is the center of a semicircle of men in the background, which echoes a semicircle of figures in the foreground on the right. Looking more closely, we notice that the light on Christ’s body, a natural light that Piero is the first to depict in painting, has

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Figure 2.1. Piero della Francesca, Flagellation of Christ (1460). Public Domain

a certain uncharacteristic “tenderness.” At the same time, paradoxically, we see that a stark impersonal sun reigns from the sky above the men in the foreground on the right. This light rules the architecture and the placement of the figures. It isolates the two groups of figures and seems to have less concern for Christ than for the central anonymous man in the foreground.25 Piero creates this impersonal space by a powerful imagination of the behavior of light’s rays that results in a rigorous use of linear perspective. After encountering the figures in the painting, this becomes clear as we find ourselves acutely aware of the architecture and the tile floor uniting inside and outside. And we notice three prominent lines in the floor extending from the foreground into the background, the central one being as wide as the pillar supporting the roof, and the one on the right appearing in part behind the central figure in the foreground. Piero employs these lines to construct the space of his painting and instruct us in his fundamental interpretation of his Italian light, what he intuits by training and experience to be the way light rays behave. This is a light so absolute that even Christ is subject in the Flagellation to its laws. He is smaller than the central figure in front and though ostensibly the subject of the painting, subordinated to him.26 At the same time, if this reveals the bones of light, its body is acknowledged in Christ’s body. And this is reinforced visually for us by the pillar rising behind Christ that supports a wonderfully illuminated bronze statue, its left hand pointing to the pool of light above him in a ceiling coffer. The bronze figure beckons us to participate in light, which of course Christ the “light of the world” incarnates, one that is absolute but also available. And it is in Christ’s subjection to Piero’s universal, geometrically determined

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light and his promise of radiance that reconciles a paradox—his use of an instrumental light at once “scientific and sensual.” We’re convinced, that is, by his light space that we are ruled by the impersonal light in the sky above the foreground figures and that we can access the personal light above the background figures given to us with a distinctly human gesture by the luminous bronze body.27 Jan van Eyck’s Light of Connection Jan van Eyck’s fundamental experience of light on the face of it is also paradoxical. His “rapture” at what Kenneth Clark called the “all enriching envelopment of light” that reveals the world’s minute particulars of texture, its sparkle and sheen, vies with his perception of light that reveals the grand unity of the whole world and universe, namely the light that is God.28 Yet the physical light of van Eyck’s world is not Piero’s universal light but a light wedded to its particulars, a distinctly local light. Although the reality of the world does not lie in geometry for van Eyck, which explains his indifference to linear perspective, but resides in a single source of light, which is God, he celebrates the world as world. With his penetrating observation van Eyck peers into it as if into a deep pool of water that reveals both itself, which he cherishes for its own sake but knows is ultimately God, and the viewer. For nature is a mirror revealing its inside and outside at once. Like Piero he depicts a unified light space, but unlike his older contemporary van Eyck reminds us that this “reality” is at the same time an illusion.29 To reconcile the dual character of his light experience, which is local and cosmic, van Eyck introduces a mirror in a number of his works, as in his famous double portrait for the marriage of Arnolfini and His Wife (1434). Here the large convex mirror on the wall behind the couple reconciles the portrait’s interior light space, in which the couple stands, and the painting’s exterior light space of the viewer (van Eyck’s and ours). In addition to the just-married couple in front of us, that is, we see two persons reflected in the mirror who look into the chamber from the door behind us, one of whom may be the painter himself.30 This painting is a secular dual portrait of the powerful banker and his bride in their bedchamber. Its prominent mirror in the background could symbolize God’s watchful eye blessing the couple. But more important than this possibility is the certainty of its doubling nature, reinforced by the light and shadow of Arnolfini’s face and his raised hand in contrast to the light of his wife’s face and fully illuminated extended hand with their complete absence of shadow. They remind us that the painting itself is a mirror. We’re not allowed to forget that this light space no matter how real it seems is an illusion. The light from the window in the picture describes in exquisite detail

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Figure 2.2. Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait (Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini [?] and his Wife) (1434). Galleria Nazionale delle Marche. Public Domain

the textures of the luxurious clothing and rich chamber curtains. We also see the gleam of the brass chandelier and luster of the dog’s fur, as well as the shine of the wooden clogs at the banker’s feet and the subtle play of light on

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the couple’s faces. Yet all the while we’re acutely aware of the convex mirror eye centered above the couple’s hands taking in the universal light outside the painting and gazing directly at us from within it. We half expect as viewers to appear in the mirror with our accompanying light. This mirror interrupts the light space, sucking in natural light from the sky and the garden outside as well as light from the floor and ceiling inside and transforming it into a representation—a reflection. Van Eyck’s experience of the reciprocity of light, shuttling between his eye and the world, is on display, indicated by his self-conscious intrusion into his own painting with a great flourish of signature above the mirror proclaiming that “Jan van Eyck was here 1434.” Shaped like the world, as is the artist’s eye, the convex mirror is in one sense the world. It reflects the world and gives it back to us. And this is precisely what the artist does in expressing his light experience in paint.31 In the atmosphere of absolute formal stillness, everything bathed in a steady light that diffuses through the room in the Arnolfini portrait, being variously reflected and absorbed by its contents, from face to fur, clothes to clogs, van Eyck pioneers such a use of light.32 This is characteristic of the early Renaissance, Piero favoring a steady uniformly distributed daylight as well, like that which rules in the Flagellation. These Early Renaissance artists used light mainly to create space, universalized in the south as absolute and localized in the north as particular. Leaving Piero and van Eyck, however, we jump a couple of generations to the High Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) virtually invents the High Renaissance style, considered the triumph of the period, which encompasses the artists Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian. The Northern Renaissance begins, as we’ve seen, with Jan van Eyck, but its triumph occurred quite suddenly when Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) broke with the Gothic style of his training.33 At the same time, the character of light in the experience of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century painters remains primarily an instrumental one throughout this shift, just as its principal mode of expression continues to be a naturalistic style. Yet the painters of the High Renaissance, as the interpretation of light’s character subtly evolved, moved away from a preference for a uniform light and preoccupation with light space. Emphasizing a different side of light’s instrumental character, they revealed luminosities of atmospheric conditions and nuances of illuminated and shadowed surfaces.34

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THE HIGH RENAISSANCE: SOUTHERN LIGHT SHADOW AND NORTHERN LIGHTSCAPE Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), born in what is now Germany, was the younger contemporary of the Florentine Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). Both painters experience a functional light and both continue the tradition of a naturalistic style. These artists were also uncannily sensitive to light, being especially taken by the interplay of light and shadow in nature. And both came to experience shadow as light’s complement, sharing in its instrumentality. So Leonardo modulates light with shadow in the folds of the sash and cloak of the angel he added to his master Verrocchio’s painting. And naturalistic painting could only be achieved in Dürer’s view by depicting the play of light and shadow on the objects and figures of the work, which was rooted in his experience, as he says, of “light and shadow on all things, wherever the surface foldeth or bendeth away from the eye.”35 Such intense interest in the natural world gave rise to a new genre, one hinted at by Piero in the background of his Baptism of Christ (c. 1448–1450) and by van Eyck in his Virgin and Child (c. 1433–1435)—landscape. In the High Renaissance Leonardo and Dürer both embraced landscape, though for different reasons. Leonardo was drawn to the play of light and shadow on it, presenting the alternating shallows and depths of the world to him (extending the “window’s” presentation). Dürer, in contrast, was drawn by light and shadow to the profusion of its natural forms whose depths reveal the Divine (extending the “mirror’s” depths). For Leonardo landscape was an encyclopedia of lights and shadows, which he received gratefully and with the objectivity of a naturalist; for the younger northern painter landscape was a sacred collection of emblems. Each natural particular revealed by God’s light and shadow was, if read properly, a physical element of God’s revelation.36 Dürer holds to the fundamental northern preference for the human “particular” under God’s governance as against the “universal” cause and effect governing nature, which Leonardo embraced. So as a painter observing the world the Italian painter has a dual focus. On the one hand, he revels in the details that nature presents; on the other, he must go beyond these, seeking the underlying law that unifies them. By contrast, Dürer’s looking has a unitary focus. He takes great pleasure in observing the minute particulars of the world but does not feel driven to go beyond these, trusting with his hero Luther that their unity lies in God’s original creative act.37

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LEONARDO DA VINCI’S LIGHT-SHADOW ENERGY Of “all the studies of natural causes,” Leonardo da Vinci confessed, “light gives greatest joy to those who consider it.” And so he invites us to “Observe the light and consider its beauty. Blink your eye and look at it.” Early in his career Leonardo depicts “light moving over the hills” with an almost reckless directness. And not only “sensitive” to the “slightest throb of light in atmosphere,” Leonardo had a “subtle feeling for reflected light,” imbuing paintings like the Virgin of the Rocks with a luminosity that was unique in the age, as if “light was emanating” from the figures and objects themselves, as well as a light-shadow that carries the narrative by its “powerful sense of flow,” which introduces a new era of art.38 Beyond this feeling for light’s beauty and its intimacy with shadow, he observes like a scientist that a specific kind of reflection can be more intense than direct light. Namely, “lustre is always more powerful than light” on an object, and “light is of larger quantity than luster,” noting also that luster moves as the observer moves, whereas shadow does not. In these observations we see Leonardo’s emotional response to light accompanied by intellectual curiosity. He continually shuttles between experience and analysis, light and optics. A master of the arts of painting and sculpture, Leonardo was grounded in the optical sciences and committed to the authority of experience.39 As a painter-scientist using light to probe light and its revelation of landscape’s shallows and depths, Leonardo becomes the first to express this experience in the language of pigments. In the Early Renaissance light was a function of color, as in Piero’s works where it was instrumental in creating form. Colors, that is, served to delineate the boundaries of figures and objects, which inevitably seem somewhat fragmented.40 But this is reversed in the High Renaissance. Based on Leonardo’s discoveries, color becomes in his hands a function of light in that it is subordinated to the light-shadow by which he creates form. Light and shadow’s primacy, in effect, enlarges his experience of light. Committed to “chiaroscuro” (literally light-dark), this conditions his treatment of color. He insists that lights and shadows dominate colors in order to establish a tonal unity. Having brought about this change, Leonardo virtually launches the High Renaissance. He introduces for the first time, then, the “presence of a true pictorial light.” This is a singularly dynamic light used to create the illusion of high relief and unify a painting as it modulates shadows and space in determining the visibility and invisibility of objects and figures.41 Although he wrote a mini treatise on perspective accepting Alberti’s “window,” a screen intersecting the visual pyramid of light rays, which is the

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painting, he went well beyond Alberti and Piero in using light to construct space. Leonardo devoted much of his energy to studying the actual effects of light as it falls on objects and casts shadows. Consequently, he rejects Alberti’s notion of absolute space determined by geometric rules, one that merely hosts rather than integrates objects and figures, being independent of them. For Leonardo light does not exist in the absolute space of Alberti but is constitutive of space; light and shadow, that is, cannot be separated from space.42 Light and space like light and shadow have a dialectical relationship, in fact, one implicating the other. By conveying surface and depth as well as the interdependence of physical forms, light implicates space. Leonardo realizes this as he observes a woman in the countryside. He notes that the relative brightness and darkness of the different “parts” of the woman’s form reveal its surfaces and depths. Also, seeing the woman “within a field illuminated by the sun,” Leonardo observes that her white dress continues to transform itself in response to the “luminous and non-luminous colours of adjacent objects.” Her light-constructed form is, he concludes, the field she occupies and, therefore, is not independent of space.43 We can intuit from the personal tone of his observations that the character of light for Leonardo possesses a certain “emotional tension,” as the art historian Moshe Barasch notes. This arises from his encounter with light’s relation to shadow. Leonardo’s central light experience occurred in the Florentine streets with their alternating lights and shadows, which struck Giotto as well. But what it revealed to Leonardo was anything but ordinary because it made light’s dual character. He discovered that he cannot speak of light apart from shadow, for as he says, “shadow is the means by which bodies display their form.” In the street Leonardo is moved by “the utmost grace” added by “shadows and the lights” to the “faces of those who sit in the darkened doorways of their dwellings.” Here the “face acquires great relief,” he observes, because in the “illuminated part the shadows are almost indistinguishable, and in the shaded part the lights are almost indistinguishable” as well.44 Shadow is thus a “mixture of darkness with light,” as Leonardo states. But this dual makeup means inherent tension. Each constituent is continually vying for dominance, so darkness “will be of greater or lesser depth according to whether the light that is mixed with it is of greater or lesser strength.” But the fact that shadow is more powerful than light because it “completely deprives bodies of light,” while light can never “wholly chase away the shadows of bodies,” affects Leonardo deeply. For he is acutely aware that our lives are lived in the intermediary realm, as he says, between the “universal light of the sky” and the “universal shadow of the earth.”45

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Whether viewed in a person’s face or in nature, the effect of this discovery of the dialectical relation of light and shadow as well as of light and space on Leonardo was physical. He felt the lights and darks of the world as depths and shallows, its constituent parts continually approaching and retreating from his presence. Nothing was inert, all vibrated with the energy of a universal light-shadow struggle, an emotionally physical as well as visual interaction. Such tension compelled him to find a visual language by which he could express this relationship with light and shadow. And what he created was a technique that “arises from light and shade,” as he says, “or we may say chiaroscuro” in which “lights and darks” model form by the tonal range from white to black. This enabled Leonardo to express in pigments the approach and retreat of lights and darks that he experienced. He translated this action in his paintings as relief (relievo), the illusion of depth, as if his figures and objects were palpable.46 By subtly modulating blacks and whites in his chiaroscuro, Leonardo gave us paintings possessing a dynamic never seen before. He did this by creating the illusion of relief, objects chosen and “touched” by light in all its variations as if by the hand. This was completely new to art and announces not only a new light experience but a new pictorial experience, such as the scene in the cave of Leonardo’s first version of the Virgin of the Rocks (1483–c. 1490; Paris version) in which light and shadow merge in one “expressive moment.” And apart from being Leonardo’s principle contribution to the subsequent tradition of Western art, this is a consummate expression of his unique relation to light.47 Leonardo achieves this because as he explains, “Lights and darks, that is to say, illumination and shadow, have an intermediate quality that cannot be called light or dark, but partakes equally of light and dark.” Going beyond traditional modeling, such as Piero’s, it is “at certain times . . . equally removed from both light and dark and at other times closer to one or the other.” Radically new, his light, shade, and color consequently assume a new relationship. Leonardo describes them purely in the tonal terms of chiaroscuro (i.e., using a scale between white and black). Such tonal unity triumphs in his later version of the Virgin of the Rocks (c. 1495–1508), which reveals a new “richness of orchestration” and greater subtlety, as the art historian John Shearman observes. By exploiting the light-and-shadow tension within the picture’s tonal unity, Leonardo gives this version greater energy than the earlier. And this use of paint to express a more dynamic light, working always in conjunction with shadow, marks the High Renaissance.48

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ALBRECHT DÜRER’S INTIMATE LIGHTSCAPE Albrecht Dürer had it all: “the eye of a Raphael, the brains of a Leonardo,” as Holland Cotter enthused in a review of a Dürer exhibit, and we could add the looks of an ideal Christian knight, as we can see in a stunning self-portrait at the age of twenty-nine. Although on his first visit to Italy he was in Venice at the same time as Leonardo, they never met. That they passed each other in the night is understandable, as Leonardo some twenty years older was at the height of his career in 1500 advising on defenses against an imminent Turkish attack, while Dürer was an unknown German journeyman painter.49 Son of a master goldsmith, he learned the craft but early on begged his father to apprentice him to a painter. Granting his wish, he sent Dürer at the age of fifteen to live with Michael Wolgemut whose thriving workshop produced the finest woodcuts of the time, using new effects of modeling. Here Dürer gained affection for “factual” landscapes, which he eventually freed from their traditional human context. After three years with Wolgemut, Dürer set out on his own as a journeyman artist, first in the north and then to Italy shortly after his marriage in 1494. On the way to Venice he painted Alpine landscapes that were pivotal in his development as an artist and reveal an extraordinary sensitivity to light.50 In Dürer the moody light of the north meets the intense light of the south. As much as he came to love the Italian sun, it is the inherited light of the northern landscape, which he captures in his superb watercolor Castle Courtyard with Clouds (1492/1493?), that never released its hold on him. And it is this light, notwithstanding the later influence of Leonardo’s atmospherics, that he captures in his work. For Dürer judges his success as a painter to the degree that he mirrors the light he was born to “more accurately” than his contemporaries and his predecessors, such as van Eyck whom he greatly admired.51 Traveling from Germany through the Alps on his first excursion to Italy, Dürer experienced the full impact of the light he was born to. This excursion and shortly after were a pivotal time in his life (1493–1505). Having just completed his artist’s journeyman tour of Germany, he turned his eyes toward Italy of which he had heard so much, its renowned artists such as Leonardo and its dazzling cities. At the same time, this was a personal journey, a time of answering for himself what it means to be an artist faithful to nature, to the northern light. On this journey Dürer found the measure of himself as an individual and artist, and it was bound up with his northern light. He did this by painting a series of very personal watercolors, landscapes that not only document his first trip to Italy and back but the discovery of his northern birth light whose

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reality he had not truly experienced before. This series done over the years from 1494 to 1500 (as Leonardo was finishing the second version of his Virgin of the Rocks) were of major significance in his artistic development, as the principal scholar of these watercolors says, an “absolutely unique phenomenon.”52 Painted with an exhilaration that came from being penetrated by the light spirit of the place, these watercolors virtually invented the art of landscape. Dürer was one of the first artists to render landscape for its own sake. These paintings exhibit a truly new relation to nature not least in perceiving landscape as lightscape. And they clearly mean something special to Dürer at a time of introspection. By them he succeeds in expressing the reality of his moody northern light, which was far more variable than he had realized. This is the fundamental light experience that, despite his subsequent discovery of southern light, remains with him the rest of his life.53 And it is the cold cast of this somewhat unsettling northern light that Dürer captures with great subtlety in his watercolor House by a Pond (1495–1496), a pond located near his home city of Nuremberg. The painting’s freshness is astonishing, but its revelation of northern light equally so, cold yet intimate. Yet even when Dürer encounters a brighter light, it retains its moody, cool quality as in his Pond in the Woods. The subject of the work is elusive until we realize that it is a moment of light itself. More than Dürer’s better known paintings of the time, it is emphatically the “expression of an experience,” Walter Koschatzky declares, an “emotion awakened in him.” Dürer experiences the force of this fleeting light as if he were dissolved in nature, his presence merged with its presence.54 Dürer thus makes the unpredictable power of northern light his own, as a phenomenon of nature and agent of emotion in its changeable quality. That he is moved by the sheer variability of this light is clear from his series of quarry watercolors. Over the course of five years (1495–1500), visiting and revisiting the particular nuances of light received from the walls of a quarry (much as Monet was to do some four centuries later with the facade of Rouen Cathedral), Dürer narrows his subject. It is as if he had to pause and plumb this aspect of light’s character before moving on. The content of these quarry paintings is inexplicable in the course of his work and art history as well until we understand that their subject is the light not the rock.55 Having come to a full understanding of his inherited northern light, Dürer employs it in differentiating the details of the world. In his hands this instrument enables him to accept the intimacy and receive the knowledge that landscape offers. He convinces us in his The Virgin and Child (with the Iris) (c. 1500–1510) that landscape is lightscape, framed by the stone arch calling our attention to this, and explores what physiognomy offers, as if the human form

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Figure 2.3. Dürer, House by a Pond (1495–1496). British Museum. Public Domain

itself were a type of landscape as Dürer recruits the ambient light to praise the Virgin in every particular, her hair transformed by the light of equal importance with the glow of her face. Likewise, the particulars of the garden, his attending to individual stalks and leaves that come forward as if the Virgin’s equals. By contrast, Leonardo clearly uses light and shadow to model form in the Virgin of the Rocks (c. 1495–1508).56 Whereas Leonardo’s overriding concern is to use light and shadow to unify his painting, as the Virgin delights in the Child and revels in their connection, Dürer’s concern is to single out each figure and its details. Consequently, in his painting the virgin and the child, held in the fecund bloom of her rose-red dress, cannot be separated from the stone wall, encroaching garden, and bold tree trunk. They are haunted by the unpredictable northern light lurking in the space we see through the arch. But ultimately this light works with Dürer to single out the minute particulars, which in later works he takes further than any previous artist.57

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This “particularizing quality” of Durer’s light as he interprets and uses it, a quality that betrays his deep indebtedness to the northern tradition of van Eyck, accounts for his departure from the Italian construction of light space. The perspective Dürer employs in his pictures, such as in his St. Jerome in His Study (1514), looks very different from the Italian. On the one hand, he uses the converging lines of Alberti and Piero’s linear perspective to focus us on St. Jerome, as if constructing an absolute space. But on the other, significantly, he uses the light streaming in through the bullseye glass in the window on the left to differentiate not only the unique material qualities of the objects and animals accompanying the saint, such as the hourglass on the wall behind him and the lion lying in front, but of St. Jerome himself. Thus Dürer’s space does not host the saint so much as the saint extends his capacious presence, creating space. Although Piero’s “geometrical vision” informs the work, that is, Dürer does not plot his space from any strictly ordered system of geometrical harmonies. This is belied by his unconventional shift in the vanishing point (just to the right of St. Jerome rather than in the center of the print).58 Having learned from his experience of light on the way to Venice, Dürer reduces the role of imagined rays determined by geometry and elevates that of light and shadow in his construction of pictorial space. He achieves an “atmospheric” as opposed to a geometrical perspective in this painting, much as Leonardo does. At the same time, his atmospheric northern light reveals its essential character, a variable light and shadow flux rather than Leonardo’s light-and-shadow struggle. Simply, as Dürer observes, “there is light and shadow on all things.”59 As the Renaissance gives way to the Age of Enlightenment, an instrumental light’s lingering symbolic charge from the Middle Ages of the Divine that moved van Eyck and Dürer dims, while its physical character that occupied Piero and Leonardo brightens.60 This renewed character attracts the later artists and scientists, such as Vermeer and Newton who live in a decidedly physical universe. The terrestrial and celestial, no longer separate but now united by law (gravity), carry a new conviction and emphasis. The analytic aspect of Leonardo’s response to light comes into prominence, while the worshipful aspect of Dürer’s response recedes after Caravaggio and Rembrandt in the next two centuries of experiment. Light’s instrumental character persists in artists and scientists alike, but they discover new aspects of this character.

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NOTES 1. A painter and architect himself, Vasari in his Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550, 1568) was the first to use the term “Renaissance” (rinascita). And he introduces Giotto as giving birth to this age, saying that the title of master imitator of nature’s “best and most beautiful features” should be owed to “Giotto, painter of Florence” who “alone revived art” (Vasari, Lives, I, 96, 109). Although not the most trustworthy historian, Vasari’s prescient belief that Giotto was “born in order to give light to painting” was true (Lives, I, “Giotto,” 44), metaphorically in Giotto’s reviving painting and literally in his creating a space of light. “Early” and “High” Renaissance, standard art history terms, “High” generally referring to the artists of the first quarter of the sixteenth century. But given the slipperiness of when it began and even to who belongs, such as van Eyck, I avoid fixing the Renaissance strictly between dates, Brunelleschi’s demonstration of perspective, c. 1412, for example, to Galileo’s demonstration of his first telescope in 1609. Also, this quartet of painters is especially influential—Leonardo not only on younger contemporaries but on Caravaggio and Rembrandt in the seventeenth century and beyond, and Dürer on subsequent Dutch art and Italian taste in art. In addition, their innovations in genre and technique proved to be central to Western art—Alberti-Piero’s perspective and Dürer’s landscape, van Eyck’s painting in oils and Leonardo’s chiaroscuro. The new media they invented to express their new relations to light, such as canvas paintings as well as oil pigments, are still in use. And these painters explicitly operate in the context of theoretical discussions, working out the principles of linear perspective in theory and practice. 2. Light as a physical phenomenon, Schoene, “Meaning,” 132. Vasari notes the skillful handling of light even in relatively minor artists, such as Jacopo da Pontormo’s depiction of Christ in the garden “counterfeiting so well the darkness of night illumined by the light of the moon, that it appears almost like daylight” (Vasari, Lives, II, 355). And while Masaccio (1401–c. 1428), whom Vasari considered the most significant painter between Giotto and Leonardo, employed for the first time a mathematically based perspective, its discoverer Brunelleschi was creating a uniquely Renaissance style of building, and Donatello was sculpting the first monumental freestanding nude in bronze since the Classical Age. Their buildings and sculptures were directly inspired by classical prototypes. But paintings were not, having originated with Giotto’s introduction of the naturalistic tradition, which followed no models from the Classical Age (Roman wall paintings not available until the fifteenth century). Painting was thus unique in its complexity (Oxford Companion to Art, 968–69). And the freedom from models combined with the greater desire to imitate nature in order to draw the viewer into the scene as a participant, which was required by devotional practice and humanist ideals, I suggest, encouraged a new sensitivity to the character of light that resulted in the painters’ discovery in the age of new relations with light. 3. Leonardo was, of course, an architect as well as painter. And for the philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) light constituted the connecting fabric of the universe;

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“everywhere,” as he says, “it is the image of divine truth and goodness.” His book De lumine is essentially a hymn to Plotinian light metaphysics, which he attempted to revive. But his obsession with light was driven not by an existential encounter with it but by his intellectual desire to synthesize Neoplatonic philosophy and Christian theology (Lindberg, “Genesis,” 23–24, 27). 4. Giotto straddled the threshold, spiritual (Schoene, “Meaning,” 146) and instrumental (Barasch, Light and Color, xii). “undifferentiated” light, Gombrich, “Light, Form,” 26; highlights, Hills, Light of Early, 38, 44. So engaged is Giotto with the fall of light (noticing and selecting this from the range of what his eye takes in), which Pietro Cavallini (fl. 1273–1308) had earlier called attention to (Hills, Light of Early, 39), that he introduces for the first time the rectangular frame to dramatize it. An innovation emphasizing its physicality and creating what we know as a “picture”; he observes the scene from a central point of view (e.g., “Christ’s Capture” in the Arena Chapel; i.e., from the witnesses’ point of view), inviting us to do the same so our relation as viewers is “entirely optic and spiritual” (Aubert, Art, 170). This central vantage point underlines the painter’s concern with luminance (the light radiated by a colored surface), which is a prerequisite for the new relation to light in the Renaissance (Hills, Light of Early, 38). This allowed his innovative positioning of highlights, not as in the past referring to the shape of an object but now referring to the direction of light, signaling as Paul Hills observes “a fundamental change in conceptual habits” (Hills, 44). 5. Fundamentally physical phenomenon (Schone, “Meaning,” 132–33); effects of light in painting (Gombrich, Heritage, 128). Vasari believed that the “rendering of light,” which Giotto revived from the Romans, was the principal challenge of the age. In his autobiography he often touches on his own attempts to meet this, admitting that on occasion, “I near went out of my mind” in getting the light “correct.” I do not treat color experience per se, but as John Shearman points out, “light, in painting, is absent, or present, or deployed, or characterized in this or that way, always as a result of handling colour, the primary visual constituent of the work, in a certain fashion.” One cannot discuss light, that is, as if it were a “self-sufficient element which arrived via the artist’s brush.” At the same time, Alberti discusses light separately from color as one of the central issues of painting (Barash, Light and Color, 14). And for Leonardo and his contemporaries there is no opposition between color, on the one hand, and light and shade on the other. Thus as a painter he refers to light and shadow as “color” (Shearman, “Leonardo’s Colour,” 13). And I follow his lead. 6. Life-size figures to move within these scenes, Gombrich, Story, 153; join the participants, Johnson, Renaissance, 130. 7. Exploiting the natural light, Martindale, Gothic Art, 185; Summers, Real Spaces, 469. Volume and gravity, Stubblebine, “Giotto,” 91. It is likely that the Arena Chapel was designed to Giotto’s specifications, namely having the “unusual feature” of a row of six windows along the south wall of the nave and none opposite. The chapel was constructed as a “kind of viewing box,” and the artist knew that south light meant excellent illumination of his frescoes (Stubblebine, 74). 8. “A response . . . townscape,” “pictorial light . . . space,” Hills, Light of Early, 51, 2. Giotto returned to the art of his native land—Classical. He rejected Byzantine art,

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that is, which was believed to express the aesthetic of the early Christians and was by order of the Pope the only valid medium for religious art in the Middle Ages (Kluckert, “Gothic,” 388). As the fourteenth-century painter Cennino Cennini said, Giotto “changed the art of painting from Greek to Latin” (at the same time that Dante turned to his native Tuscan dialect for his poem (Duby, Age, 215). Giovanni Boccaccio, poet and friend of Dante, said of this innovation that Giotto “brought back to light an art which had been buried for centuries.” Although an exaggeration, Giotto was viewed as reviving the magic of the Classical artists (i.e., a “naturalistic” style, which at first was suspect as “false” and “unbelieveable” [Kluckert, 388]) and investing his human figures with a great dignity and humanity. 9. Giotto had great artistic latitude, Kristeva, “Giotto’s Joy,” 27–28; light fall and brightness, Hills, Light of Early, 41; painting is about light, Vigna, “Resurrection,” 416. Drawing directly on the rough base coat of plaster with charcoal then brush, that is, he proceeded day by day with a coat of plaster and painting, which gave Giotto a freedom of expression unknown before (Schmeckebier, Handbook, 29). Giotto probably knew a version of this technique (called giornata), which Roman-trained artists had brought to Assisi by the end of the thirteenth century, but he exploited the medium in innovative ways (Hills, Light of Early, 61). 10. Liberation through and against tradition, participating in a familiar dialectical circle of the human experience of light, that is, his personal experience is both interpreted via and against an inherited tradition. He exploits the artistic practice of his training but transforms it by his new personal experience. He then expressed this and passed it on via paintings that reshape the current culture’s relation to light, which in turn becomes the inherited future experience. Giotto’s joy, Kristeva, 32, 41; analog of the world, Camille, Gothic Art, 183; new Renaissance assertion of freedom, Duby, Age, 219. 11. Does not primarily imitate the actual light, Hills, Light of Early, 41, 58. 12. Economic followed by a political crisis, Meiss, “Painting in Florence,” 473; new class of urban merchant-bankers gained power, Ruggiero, “Introduction,” 8; new generation of artists, quoted by Boas, Scientific, 17; wave of creativity, Brucker, “Italian,” 30; Paris was to Gothic architecture, so Florence was to Renaissance painting, Toman, “Introduction.” The essential foundation of Renaissance culture was the concentration of capital in the dominant families of the cities. And Florence’s economy, fueled by the cloth industry, took the lead (Brucker, “Italian,” 28). Yet the Renaissance was not monolithic, of course, but is best understood as historian Randolph Starn suggests in “terms of open-ended sets of practices and ideas to which specific groups and identifiable persons variously contributed or responded in diff times and places” (Starn, “European Renaissance,” 52). At the same time, many people regarded themselves as living in a new era, understandably, from religionists in monastic orders and country parishes to humanists-scholars in cultural areas as well as merchants in trade and manufacture. So a French physician in 1545 extols the “triumph of our New Age” as the “world sailed round, the largest of Earth’s continents discovered, the compass invented, the printing-press sowing knowledge,” and “ancient manuscripts rescued.” Yet it is worth remembering that for the rural poor, illiterate, and marginalized of Italy, there was no Renaissance (Brucker, “Italian,” 26).

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Aristocratic families still dominated. A full quarter of Florence’s wealth in 1427 was owned by only a hundred families. 13. Diminished ecclesiastical authority, Hsia, “Religious Culture,” 333. Certainly the humanists, such as Petrarch (1304–1375) and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), who were mainly laymen contributed to this rise of secular concerns and values (Brucker, “Italian,” 30), revolutionizing education at all levels by instituting a foundation of classical writers and prompting the spread of learning among ordinary people. A new desire arose to teach the artisan how to improve his craft by acquiring more knowledge and better theory in many arts, from painting (e.g., Leon Baptista Alberti’s On Painting, 1450) to astronomy (e.g., Robert Recorde’s The Castle of Knowledge, 1556) (Ruggiero, “Introduction Renaissance,” 17). Even public art now carried the individual imprint, created by and for individuals (Duby, Age, 204). Whether rulers, merchants, or church commissioners the work of art was more a personal expression of the patron and artist than previously prompted by a wider range of motives (Davidson, “Art and the Renaissance,” 34). The Florentine merchant Giovanni Rucellai testifies that his paintings (and other art works) give him “the greatest contentment and greatest pleasure because they serve the glory of God, the honour of the city, and the commemoration of myself.” In addition, he takes pleasure in spending money well, in expiating a certain guilt that possibly came from making money by charging interest (usury), which was condemned by the church, and in simply looking (Baxandall, Painting, 2). Even church commissions resulted from mixed motives, such as those in the Pope’s own residence and his private chapel the Sistine (like Saint-Chapelle), which established his primacy. This also fanned competitiveness among the artists who had to introduce something novel, but not too novel, in their bid for patronage, to get attention (Davidson, 35–36). 14. “Spiritually seen,” “physical scene,” Camille, Gothic Art, 183. Earlier in the age the theorist of art as well as artist and architect Alberti (1404–1472) reminded its artists that the “painter has nothing to do with things that are not visible. The painter is concerned solely with what can be seen” (quoted by Park, Fire, 135), which departs radically from the Scholastic medieval belief that visible form is only one aspect, often false, of the true nature of things. 15. “Aims to represent things seen,” “reception of light,” Alberti, On Painting and Sculpture, 67, para 30. 16. Alberti’s systemization as described, that is, by the medieval Islamic philosophers Al-Kindi and Alhazen. 17. Lines of a Euclidian diagram, shift in focus from God to humanity, Summers, Judgment, 3, 11. Linear perspective marked the fruition of a “relentless transformation in attitude toward the world, which became visible in terms of the meaning of naturalism, just as the development of naturalism concentrated and transformed these meanings, giving them new and potent cultural forms.” Thus the “characteristics of naturalism as the precondition for Renaissance painting regardless of subject matter were themselves both significant and value-laden.” And as a result, “naturalism is deeply implicated” not only in the “rise of the individual, even the rise of the modern state” in the Renaissance but in the rise of science in the seventeenth century (Summers, Judgment, 11–12).

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18. “Weather-whipped,” Foote, World, 14, 18 (reference to Bruegel). 19. “Screen,” Ackerman, “AL,” 19; “therefore, . . . distance,” Alberti, On Painting and Sculpture, 49, para. 12–13. Alberti’s exposition of the theory of linear perspective owes much to Giotto’s discoveries, but more to the drawings of the most famous Florentine architect of the fifteenth century Brunelleschi (1377–1446). He also extends, as he imagines rays to be lines, Euclid’s relation with light. When Brunelleschi (1377–1446) made in the service of naturalism the first drawing employing linear perspective, his contemporary Manetti reports of his demonstration, “the spectator felt he saw the actual scene” before him (quoted by Zajonc, Catching the Light, 59). For Alberti light is a tool to represent nature. But rather than an invention to further the naturalistic style, it was later assumed to be reality, the “realism” of Western art. Masquerading as the “real,” it proved to be extremely seductive. So much so that we easily forget that it is a technique of representation not a transcription of reality. This is because perspective “denies its own artificiality” in laying claim to being a “‘natural’ representation of ‘the way things look’” (Mitchell, Iconology, 37). But it is, in fact, a “symbolic form,” a “convention” constructed from an architect’s “intentions and expectations” (Belting, Florence and Baghdad, 255). Vasari intuits this from his experience as a painter, reporting approvingly that Donatello said to Uccello, “Paolo, this perspective of yours leads you to abandon the certain for the uncertain,” for Vasari insists that “things copied from life” must be improved by “giving them the grace and perfection in which art goes beyond the scope of nature” (Boase, Giorgio Vasari, 123). Even Alberti, reverting to his experience as a painter with light, admitted the limitation of the rays, which must pass through the atmosphere that has a certain “density and in consequence the rays get tired and lose a good part of their burden” (quoted by Ackerman, “Alberti’s Light,” 11), making colors that vary according to light secondary (13). As we saw in the Alhambra, it is not the window that dominates Islamic art but the screen, which is not transparent. Windows and the view from them are bound in Western culture. But this connection is not made in Arab culture because in the Islamic world the screen is “porous,” not for the “gaze” directed outside but for the “light” admitted inside. For when the light enters the interior as if through a “dense filter,” the screen “creates a pattern of light and shadow” inside that travels across the room as the sun passes overhead in the course of a day (Belting, Florence and Baghdad, 252–54). 20. “Every form brought . . . upon a mirror,” Dürer, Writings, 177. 21. “Sense of the breadth and universality of light,” “particularity” of light’s action, Hills, Light of Early, 2; differentiating instrument, Gombrich, Story, 178. 22. “Luster, sparkle and glitter,” Gombrich, “Light, Form and Texture,” 20. Texture is, of course, constituted by the physical qualities of an object’s surface, absorbing or reflecting light with varied degrees of intensity, which the painter attempts to depict. Thus texture is “intimately connected with light” because there is a clear “connection between the rendering of light and the representation of textures.” This marks a major shift from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Cennini’s late medieval artist’s handbook advises the painter wishing to capture texture to imitate it literally, such as roughening the picture’s surface to create the effect of wool or putting actual gold leaf

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on the picture to create the brilliance of gold, while Alberti advises the artist instead to depict the light, representing gold by capturing its luster, representing its light directly (Barasch, Light and Color, 112–30). Both Martin Luther (1483–1546) and Michelangelo (1475–1564), worlds apart, when they spoke of painting assumed there were only two schools worthy of note: Italian and Netherlandish-German. Luther revered the northern artists, however, while Michelangelo did not (Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, 1). He was not fond of their particularity, what he called their “view to external exactness.” But what he could not forgive was their painting “without reason or art,” it seemed to him, “without symmetry or proportion.” The northerners’ lack in Michelangelo’s view was the absence of “architectonic symmetry” that came with Alberti and Piero’s rules of linear perspective. More damning was the fact that in place of the proportional values that accompanied this, which Michelangelo took to be the standard of reason and art, the Flemish painters appeared to take the illuminated books and stained glass of Gothic art as models. So they “paint stuffs and masonry, the green grass” and the “shadows of trees,” as he contemptuously remarks, which “they call landscapes” (quoted by Goldwater, ed., Artists on Art, 68). But their work was popular even in the south, which recognized the virtuoso technique of van Eyck. In fact, so skillful at detail were the northern painters that a proverb of the time said, “they have brains in their hands” (Goodchild, Towards an Italian, 123). But Michelangelo retorted, “one paints not with the hand but with the brain” (quoted by Davidson, “Art and the Renaissance,” 41), being committed to reason and the geometric laws of perspective, which in the end, ironically, he had little use for. 23. “Stark southern light,” “moody,” Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, I, 193. This in turn gives rise in these paintings to treating light, respectively, as an optical phenomenon of philosophical import and as a revelatory phenomenon of metaphysical significance (Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti, 145). E. H. Gombrich sees this contrast in terms of Piero’s commitment to a “quantitative” light isolating objects and figures in an absolute space as opposed to van Eyck’s “qualitative” light creating space and connecting objects and figures (Gombrich, “Light, Form and Texture,” 32). 24. “Under the bleaching summer sunlight of the Mediterranean,” Witham, PL, 46; “stood and gawked,” Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, 2. 25. “Tenderness,” Venturi, Piero della Francesca, 20. 26. No painter, in fact, was more of a geometrician than Piero. We remember that he was a mathematician and author of a treatise on perspective. And a book by Leon Baptista Alberti (1404–1472), whom he may have met in Farrara in the 1440s, that appeared in Italian translation as Piero was working on Baptism caught his interest. As a painter he no doubt felt that Alberti’s new articulation of vision by the geometry of light (linear perspective) resonated with his own experience (Witham, Piero’s Light, 53). 27. “Scientific and sensual,” Kemp, Science of Art, 32, 34. 28. “Rapture,” “all enriching envelopment of light,” Clark, Landscape into Art, 18. 29. Looking at the world, van Eyck’s eye probing inside and outside thus acts as microscope and telescope at once. And his “joyful exuberance” seems to comprehend both, affirming existence itself (Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, I, 182,

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193). Perhaps this apprehension of the world owes something to his early career as an illuminator of manuscripts depicting a vast world in miniature. Van Eyck’s secret then, as Panofsky asserts, is his ability to reconcile two infinities, the “infinitesimally small and the infinitely large,” which eluded the Italians (Panofsky, I, 3). His relation to light, one of humility, a receiving attitude rather than a commanding stance, allows him to do this. Van Eyck desires to be part of the whole, not a privileged viewer adopting the egoism implicit in linear perspective, which places the artist behind his “window” at the apex of the visual pyramid, outside and at the center of a virtual world. 30. Two persons reflected in the mirror, Bialostocki, “Eye and the Window,” 89. The art historian Jan Bialostocki was puzzled as to why “reflections of light in mirror images and on other glossy surfaces” are confined in the fifteenth century to northern schools of painting. “And the painter employs these for both symbolic and illusionistic purposes” (Bialostocki, “Man and Mirror,” 93–94). I suggest that the north reveres the mirror of convex glass, echo of the convex eye, because it brought the outside world, our world, into the painting. We stand at the same time in the outside light as viewers and the inside light of the painting, the micro- and macrocosm united. Otherwise, how to explain the fact that the convex mirror shows up in paintings even when it is not warranted by its represented context within the painting (Bialostocki, “Eye and the Window,” 90). Or the use of oil paints enabled van Eyck to create his mirror, and the lack of this experience among the Italian painters may be why they did not “paint reflections of light or mirror images” (Bialostocki, “Man and Mirror,” 102). Oil paint allows for “continuous gradation” as well as new “glazing and layering techniques,” which featured an expanded range of more vivid and saturated colors than the traditional egg tempera of Italian fresco and panel painting. Also, oil paints dry much more slowly than fresco, which allows the artist to rework an image over an extended period of time, building up the paint in translucent layers, “glazes,” giving the effect of an intense glow (Stork, “Optics and Realism,” 83). For van Eyck realizing light in his pictures was inseparable from the development of the oil medium. In fact, the depiction of light became a function of the medium, and as David Rosand says, “it is not surprising that the later development of oil painting continued to inspire painters to investigate the expressive potential of light—and of its inevitable corollary, shadow” (Rosand, “Titian’s Light,” 58). Astonished by this oil-enabled intensity of color, the Italians stood before northern paintings in “open-mouthed wonder” and traveled north to learn the Flemish technique (Renaissance Art: A Topical Dictionary, XIII). A lesson Leonardo learned. The preparation for his Mona Lisa, for example, began with a primer coat of lead white, as his biographer Walter Isaacson explains. An undercoat that he knew would better reflect back the light that penetrated his fine layers of translucent glazes, giving a sense of depth and luminosity, the interplay we see between the light that bounces off the surface and from the depths of the painting (Isaacson, “How Leonardo Made,” 52). 31. Transforming it into a representation—a reflection, Emil Krén and Daniel Marx, Web Gallery of Art, “Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife,” accessed September 4, 2015. 32. Van Eyck pioneers such a use of light, Wood, Cambridge Companion, 119.

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33. Broke with the Gothic style of his training, Price, Albrecht Dürer’s, 68. 34. Luminosities of atmospheric conditions and nuances of illuminated and shadowed surfaces, Barasch, Light and Color, 44. 35. Angel he added to his master Verrocchio’s painting, Wasserman, Leonardo, 50; “light and shadow . . . bendeth away from the eye,” Dürer, Writings, 173. 36. New genre, but landscape, such as a stretch of countryside, was not simply translated into a painted image by the artist. That is, it is not the raw material that the painter transforms, because we select and edit the land before it is represented, favoring certain aspects over others. To look is to interpret, as we carry mental templates with us, and what we see and reflect on is continually fitted to these templates inherited from our culture and character as reexisting frames. The aesthetic “status of a landscape” is a product of culture over time (Andrews, Landscape, 3–4, 10). The art of landscape was as old as the Roman wall paintings, of course, but it had been forgotten during the Middle Ages. And the landscapes preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius were not excavated until the eighteenth century. Mark Roskill distinguishes between “encyclopedic” and the “emblematic” modes of landscape historically (Roskill, Languages of Landscape, 43). 37. Leonardo’s desire for knowledge, the “particular” over the “universal,” drives him. This he believes is “the natural desire of good men” (Leonardo, Notebooks, 58). Yet “while I thought that I was learning how to live,” he poignantly confesses, “I have been learning how to die” (Leonardo, 65). Dürer by contrast has the only knowledge ultimately needed, the true faith, which later in life was that of Luther, and thus he knows how to die, confident that God will receive him. For Leonardo “every act of looking and drawing” was an “act of analysis” (Kemp, Leonardo, 5). Not content to observe how light falls on objects, for example, he explores the nature of shadows in all their variations, which he catalogs methodically. 38. “Light gives greatest . . . consider it,” quoted by Reti, Unknown Leonardo, 293; “light moving over the hills,” Clark, Leonardo da Vinci, 25; “slightest throb of light in atmosphere,” Hartt, History, 457; followers could not replicate, Clark, Leonardo da Vinci, 52; both versions of the Virgin of the Rocks (1480s, Louvre; 1490s, London), “light was emanating,” “powerful sense of flow,” Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci, 228. 39. “Lustre is always . . . light,” “larger quantity than luster,” Leonardo, Leonardo on Painting, 95. “Engineer and painter” (Vasari, Lives, I, 625), his title in the court of Lodovico il Moro of Milan, considered almost superhuman—“truly marvelous and celestial was Leonardo” (Reti, Unknown Leonardo, 265). 40. Significantly, Leonardo discovered the fundamental nature of light rays: infinitely thin, nonmaterial rays of energy emanating from the center of luminous bodies and traveling in straight lines (Capra, Science of Leonardo, 226–27). And he refers to the radiance of light from a luminous body, for example, as comparable to a “stone flung into water,” which “becomes the centre and source for many circles” (Kemp, Science of Art, 47), a most suggestive analogy (which we now know to be more than mere analogy; for a full account of this discovery, see Capra, Science of Leonardo, 227–33). The combination of light experience and light analysis, a new mode of interpretation, is central to Leo’s nature. 41. “Presence of a true pictorial light,” Shearman, “Leonardo’s Colour,” 16, 18, 31.

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42. He accepts Alberti’s definition of perspective as a “rational demonstration by which experience confirms that the images of all things are transmitted to the eye by pyramidal lines” (quoted by Kemp, Science of Art, 44). But beyond Alberti, he distinguishes three kinds of perspective. The first called “linear perspective” concerned with the “reason for the diminution [of] things as they recede from the eye.” The second called “perspective of color” concerned with the “way in which colors vary as they recede from the eye,” and the third called “perspective of disappearance” concerned with “how objects should appear less distinct the more distant they are.” Also, a fourth called “aerial perspective” concerned with the “effects of the atmosphere on colors and other aspects of visual perception” (Capra, Science of Leonardo, 218–19). Space and light two exist, as phenomenology suggests, in a “reciprocal” or dialectical relationship in which the “presence of one implicates the existence of the other” (confirmed by Merleau-Ponty who insists that “light is space and not an appendage to space”), Girnius, Rembrandt’s Spaces, 204. 43. Light and shadow have a dialectical relationship, Girnius, Rembrandt’s Spaces, 204; “within a field illuminated by the sun,” “luminous . . . adjacent objects,” Leonardo, Leonardo on Painting, 75–76. This two-dimensional relief surface Walter Isaacson calls “dimensionality,” which “became the supreme innovation of Renaissance art,” Leonardo Da Vinci, 2, 266. 44. “Emotional tension,” Barasch, Light and Color, 56; “shadow is the means . . . form,” quoted by Isaacson, LV, 266; “the utmost grace,” “shadows and the lights,” “faces of those . . . dwellings,” “face acquires great relief,” “illuminated part . . . shaded part the lights are almost indistinguishable,” Leonardo, Leonardo on Painting, 215–16. It is telling that the reflections on light in Leonardo’s Notebooks have a more passionate tone than those on any other subject. And for twenty years he planned to write a treatise on light but never completed it, just as many of his paintings remained unfinished, testimony to a profound relationship with light as well as to a deep-seated personal restlessness (Barasch, Light and Color, 45, 55). 45. “Mixture of darkness with light,” “will be of greater or lesser depth . . . strength,” Leonardo, Leonardo on Painting, 90; “completely deprives bodies of light,” “wholly chase . . . bodies,” Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art, 447; “universal light of the sky” “universal shadow of the earth,” Leonardo, Leonardo on Painting, 162. Shadows are so important that Leonardo planned to write seven books or sections of a book (perhaps his light book) on shadows beginning with his “first proposition” on shadows: every “opaque body will be encircled and its surfaces clothed in shadows and lights,” (Leonardo, Leonardo on Painting, 97–98). 46. “Arises from light and shade . . . chiaroscuro,” “lights and darks,” Leonardo, Leonardo on Painting, 13. 47. Illusion of relief, objects “touched,” Summers, Real Spaces, 547; “expressive moment,” Shearman, “Leonardo’s Colour,” 41; new pictorial experience, Freedberg, Painting of the High Renaissance, 20. Leonardo observes with great acuity, as we’ve seen, but not content with seeing alone, he analyzes, developing a “tonal” system in which light and shade displaced color in depicting relief. He achieved in this unique modeling something close to “plasticity.” And this was Leonardo’s main objective, being in his eyes the “soul of painting.” It occupied him to such an extent that he

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worked out the details of how light behaves, describing the relative intensity of light as it strikes a surface and plotting the resultant rebounds from illuminated into shaded areas (Kemp, Leonardo, 64). 48. “Lights and darks, . . . partakes equally of light and dark,” “at certain times . . . other times closer to one or the other,” Leonardo, Leonardo on Painting, 88; tonal terms of chiaroscuro, Freedberg, Painting of the High Renaissance, 20; “richness of orchestration,” marks the High Renaissance, Shearman, “Leonardo’s Colour,” 31, 33. This relentless investigation no doubt led him to push his chiaroscuro farther than his workshop tradition or artistic inclination would have otherwise allowed. In his radical innovation, Leonardo picked up where Giotto left off. And the way he employed light and shade, with an informed emotional intensity, shaped the subsequent tradition of Western art (Clark, Leonardo da Vinci, 106–7). Leonardo experienced the complexities of shadow as a student drawing draperies in Verrocchio’s studio, which prompted his swerve from contemporary practice, such as his exploration of light and shadow in La Belle Ferronnière, and later became a “unifying force” in his paintings (Isaacson, Leonardo Da Vinci, 245–46, 267). Suger’s bright-dark was a theologically charged experience first, aesthetically second; Leonardo’s chiaroscuro was the reverse. That is, Gothic light was charged with symbolism and connotation; Renaissance light is largely stripped of connotation, restored to denotation, a celebration of the external. We get insight into this from Leo’s own explanation. Translating his subtle observations into paint, he advises the painter: first “lay a universal shadow over the entire area containing whatever is not exposed to light. Then put there the intermediate shadows and the principal shadows and compare these with each other. In the same manner lay the light which contains the intermediate light, adding the intermediate and principal light, likewise comparing them together” (Leonardo, Leonardo on Painting, 211). Piero had modeled forms using darks and lights, but Leonardo was the first to achieve tonal unity by using a common range of luminance values consistently across colors in accordance with his light experience, every object being invested by these (Livingstone, Vision and Art, 115). To create this effect, to be faithful to his experience of light is why he often shied away from strong light and rejected perspective. The former being, he believed, untrue to the fundamental nature of light inseparable from shadow and the latter proving to be irrelevant to his creation of no-geometrical lightspace. He extended his experience by experiment. Using a candle, for example, he discovered (the first to do so) that the eye undergoes “perpetual adjustment and continual equilibrium by dilation and contraction of the pupil.” As a result, he continues, the pupil of the eye cannot “see immediately on going from the light into the dark and, similarly, from the dark into the light.” He had discovered the existence of “dark-adaptation” by about 1492 (Filipczak, “New Light on Mona Lisa,” 518–19, 523). 49. “The eye of a Raphael, the brains of a Leonardo,” Cotter, “The Renaissance followed Him North.” 50. “Factual” landscapes, Hutchison, Albrecht Dürer, 25–26.

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51. Castle Courtyard with Clouds (1492/1493?), reproduced Koschatzky, Albrecht Dürer, pl. 6; “more accurately,” quoted by Panofsky, Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, 243. 52. “Absolutely unique phenomenon,” Koschatzky, Albrecht Dürer, 7. 53. Invented the art of landscape, Brion, Dürer, 54. Marcel Brion observes that these watercolors reveal the “fervent concord” subsisting between the landscape and Dürer’s observing eye. These owed nothing to the old masters or to Italian practice, for he “drew his landscapes from the most fundamental depths of his own being.” And in them we see the result of “direct and prolonged experience of the endless variety of nature” inseparable from light. Their “high value resides” neither in technical skill nor aesthetic principle but “in their immediate, involuntary, perhaps even subconscious quality” (Brion, 120–21). Making a work of art out of mountain scenery or even fields and ponds was nothing short of unprecedented, completely unexpected. The Alps were “fearful and frightening” in Dürer’s day, as a traveler in 1585 described them (Koschatzky, Albrecht Dürer, 16). 54. Pond in the Woods, Koschatzky, Albrecht Dürer, pl. 26; “expression of an experience,” “emotion awakened in him,” Koschatzky, pl. 26, commentary. 55. In one watercolor the rock face of the quarry floats freely in space confronting us with the sheer factual presence of numerous lights emanating from multiple rock facets (Koschatzky, Albrecht Dürer, pl. 19). In another the light is inseparable from the verticals, horizontals, and diagonals of the strata, as if it might deliver them to us (pl. 20); and in yet another Dürer lets the brightness of his paper express a delicacy of light that belies its glancing from hard rock faces (pl. 21). Dürer, like Bellini, whom he met in Italy, was born with what Kenneth Clark calls the greatest gift a landscape painter’s can have: an “emotional response to light” (Clark, Landscape into Art, 23). Not only did Dürer have, as we’ve seen, an uncannily sensitive perception of light, but like Leonardo he was also a close and patient observer. It could be said of Dürer as it has been of Bellini, from whom he learned much, that for him “landscapes are the supreme instance of facts transfigured through love” (Clark, Landscape into Art, 24). Landscape for Bellini, that is, was not merely a collection of trees and rocks and hills but a “living, breathing creature,” which he may have imagined shared his own human dreams (Brion, Dürer, 107). At the same time, we remember W. J. T. Mitchell’s thesis: “Landscape is a medium of exchange between the human and the natural, the self and the other,” good for nothing in itself, but expressing value (Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” 5). As Roland Barthes says, as a viewer of landscape, in “reading” a landscape, “I have already scoured the text which is generated by the light of the landscape” (quoted by Duncan, “Ideology and Bliss,” 34). 56. Praise the Virgin in every particular, Eichler, Albrecht Dürer, 33, pl. 29. 57. The same golden light, now enlisted six years later for secular purposes, falls from the left highlighting the ears and casting a mysterious shadow to the right, singling out each hair for praise in his famous Young Hare (1502), which cunningly adapts light and shade techniques to express his savoring of every natural detail. And

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Dürer cannot resist including a mirror—the hare’s shining eye reflecting the mullion and transom of a window not shown—its light coming from beyond the picture frame and from behind the viewer, reminding us of the fundamental objective of his northern naturalism. 58. Piero’s “geometrical vision” does not dictate. This is indicative as Martin Kemp has pointed out of the difference in the visual qualities of perspective in northern as opposed to southern art. Dürer accepted Alberti’s theory, saying, “I highly praise the Italians with regard to their nudes and, above all, to perspective” (quoted by Panofsky, Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, 247). In fact, Dürer took a special trip to Bologna in 1506, over a hundred miles from Venice, just to learn the “secret perspective” that a teacher had offered him (Panofsky, 248). And he agreed with Leonardo that this in its unity of knowledge of artistic practice and science (geometric mathematics) was the necessary “foundation” of art. Alberti as interpreted by Piero probably influenced Dürer who was the first northern artist to adopt and transform perspective (Kemp, Science of Art, 53, 55). Yet Dürer manipulates perspective and light sources in a somewhat disconcerting way (Iain Nash, “Ponderings: Essays / Melancholia I”). The lights and horizons in his copper engraving Melancholia I (1514), for example, are confusing, not unlike some of watercolors where we cannot determine whether the changeable light is that of dawn or dusk. 59. “Atmospheric,” Luber, Albrecht Dürer, 96, 113; “there is light and shadow on all things,” Dürer, Writings, 173. That he reduced the role of imagined rays is clear from Dürer’s preparatory drawings for this painting in which he explored the fall of light on forms. These drawings demonstrate that his practice, as we know, was “highly dependent” on his observations of light and their sources. A habit intensified after his exposure to Venetian practices that he saw on his visit to Venice in 1505–1507, where the “theoretical study of the effects of light on form and color in the depiction of space” was well developed. To Vasari’s eye, in fact, Dürer adopts a Venetian method of depicting light and shade, vestiges no doubt of Bellini’s influence (Luber, Albrecht Dürer, 87). 60. While Dürer subordinates the transcendental to the physical, his contemporary Matthias Grünewald (c. 1470–1528) reverses this in his Isenheim Altarpiece. In the right wing of the work, Resurrection (1515), Christ’s body is gloriously transfigured. For the first time in art, and the last time, Georg Scheja asserts, the Resurrection has been portrayed persuasively as a “miracle of light.” Significantly, it is not that “Christ appears in light. Rather He Himself has become the light,” symbol of divine existence yet at the same time substance of earthly existence (The Isenheim Altarpiece [New York: Abrams, 1969], 36). Thus, though both employ the naturalistic style, Grünewald leans toward the Middle Ages, Dürer into the Renaissance.

Chapter 3

Untwisting the Shining Robe of Day The Enlightenment

From Paleolithic times through the Renaissance, cave painter to Leonardo, we have thus far seen that regardless of what aspect dominates, all figures experience light as a whole, like a seamless robe. But as we enter the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an awareness that light is composed becomes central to subsequent experience. It remains “common” as Hunter reminds us, but light’s character is farther than ever before from being “simple.” For in Isaac Newton’s relationship with light it is “untwisted,” just as the threads of cloth can be. The English natural philosopher (1642–1726) arranges an experimental theater in which he encounters light breaking into its “least Parts,” while his younger contemporary the Dutch painter Jan Vermeer (1632–1675) experiences it decomposing psychologically. When James Thomson (1700– 1748) gave us his brilliant and telling metaphor in a memorial poem for Isaac Newton—the man who had “Untwisted all the shining Robe of Day”—the poet recognized the sea change that had occurred in the seventeenth century, a new age of intense and sustained attention to light.1 A heightened consciousness of light entailed a major shift from the past of looking through light, as one historian has characterized it, to looking at light. Light becomes a subject in and of itself rather than a sign of God or Neoplatonic essence. Leonardo begins this shift with his atmospheric light, while the painters who follow in his footsteps, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio in Italy (1571–1610) and Rembrandt van Rijn in Holland (1606–1669), bring it to the forefront. And Caravaggio’s harsh shadows in contrast to Leonardo place great emphasis on the effect of sunlight. The next generation confronts us with light. Vermeer in his paintings, his experiments, insists like a natural philosopher that we look at the light, just as Newton does in his writings. Light becomes a subject of investigation by painter and 81

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scientist alike, each actively engaging with light as a subject in itself, aggressively untwisting the shining robe of day.2 This results in a fundamental reinterpretation of the Renaissance light experience. Its instrumental light, a tool for Leonardo in the service of expression, becomes one of investigation. In the new age we find his immediate heirs Caravaggio and Rembrandt, instead, using light in the service of an internal investigation. Their relation to light is bound up with their own psychology born of a new self-awareness. And beyond this at the center of a new age, which these painters introduce, Vermeer and Newton use light in the service of an external investigation. Vermeer probes the relation of others, namely women, to light and vice versa, while Newton in the tradition of Euclid and Lucretius explores the relation of nature to light and vice versa.3 Curiosity coupled with doubt drives these seventeenth-century investigations of internal and external reality. What the philosopher Emmanuel Kant christened the Age of Enlightenment has thus been called somewhat more accurately the “Age of Skepticism.” This entailed not a program of “enlightenment” but simply and fundamentally a cluster of critical and skeptical attitudes that manifest themselves in varying ways on the Continent and in England and America. Caravaggio and Rembrandt as painters were skeptical about their inheritance from the Classical Renaissance tradition. But because this change from the previous age in habits of thought brought about an increased self-awareness, they also shared a profound skepticism about themselves. This questioning of their physical and spiritual beings permeated their experience of light, which found expression in their paintings where light calls attention to itself. Free of such doubts, Vermeer and Newton explored critically what the German poet Novalis in 1788 called the “insolence” of light. This character refused to behave in ways previously assumed, resulting in their skeptical view of light’s relation to the human (Vermeer) and natural worlds (Newton).4 At the outset of the new age Caravaggio and Rembrandt confront a light that insists on attention. Theirs is a passionate relation to it, and their paintings express this personal stake in light. We’ve seen passionate relationships with light in previous ages, but Caravaggio and Rembrandt’s light experiences insist on our not looking primarily through light to the Divine author of light but at the light of their experience. They deliberately thrust it into our consciousness. For Caravaggio this character displays alternately violent and innocent sides, while for Rembrandt it remains steadfastly elusive. These painters, then, constitute the first wave in my story of the Enlightenment, launching the skeptical age. In the second and overlapping wave of this age, epitomized by Vermeer and Newton’s dispassionate relation to light, we explore light experiences

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that by contrast seem impersonal. Their relationship with an “insolent” light, revealing itself only after the most rigorous investigation, is psychologically ambivalent, at once distant and intimate. Accordingly, Vermeer’s expression in paint of this is reserved and precise, yet emotionally moving, as is Newton’s in prose. Employing naturalistic painting and science, Vermeer and Newton present models of the world, systematic recreations of it in pigments and propositions, respectively, born from their investigative, skeptical imaginations, and thus share a disinterested attitude regarding light’s character.5 CARAVAGGIO’S LIGHT ERUPTING FROM WITHIN, INTERRUPTING FROM WITHOUT Seven years after the births of Galileo and Shakespeare, the artist Caravaggio was born in a small Italian town. At five he witnessed the ravages of the plague and at ten began his apprenticeship. A “precocious, stubborn, and independent” boy, he rebelled against his master Peterzano’s traditional paintings. Apprenticeship completed, he escaped to Rome in 1592 and soon established himself as a baiter and brawler, quick to quarrel with friends and assault supposed enemies, “prowling the streets” with thugs in the dead of night. Yet Caravaggio found himself searching always for opportunities to paint amid the chaos within and around him, never roaming without a sword and a palette. Both were in his hands aggressive instruments, which he knew how to handle. But such behavior ultimately ended in his exile after a street killing. As rival painter Giovanni Baglione said, “He died as badly as he had lived.”6 Prone to violence and living amid violence, Caravaggio expresses in paint his deepest fears about surviving in a world of darkness. The number of his works with figures who have lost or are about to lose their heads, returning twice to the biblical scene of “David with the Head of Goliath” (1607, 1610), belies his violent city as well as his deepest fear. But most revealing of his psychology is a self-portrait he did at twenty-six, the Head of Medusa (1597–1598), its decapitated head a disturbing image of his continual fear of personal violence. Found in his studio at his death, Caravaggio had kept this painting with him throughout his travels, fulfilling commissions and finally fleeing the law, perhaps as a talisman in order to keep him safe from losing his own head.7 In view of his explosive character we might not suspect that, paradoxically, Caravaggio possessed remarkable empathy. He is capable in his work of inhabiting the remotest person, such as the tax collector Matthew, and the most alien scenes, such as in his The Flagellation of Christ (1607). And his subjects are companions and ordinary people from the streets. He knows them

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from the inside and by his light exalts them. For Caravaggio the miracle, the ostensibly biblical content of his painting, is not supernatural but a natural phenomenon bound up with the true miracle of inviolable light itself, a transformative light, necessary because always violence lurks beneath the surface.8 Breaking and Raking Light Caravaggio’s relation to light, then, has its origin in his own violence and fear of violence. In his world of threat from within and without, he experiences light’s piercing rays as brutal and, at the same time, hopeful. A violently transformative light, this he believes has the power to ease the fear of his own violent nature and of those that threaten him continually from outside, not only the hot-headed Roman youth who slashed his face in response to an insult but the enemies he made when he killed Ranuccio Tomassoni in a fight. He had welcomed this fight but the result was a death sentence on Caravaggio and ultimately his flight. His works express his relation to a threatening and transformative light. We can be confident of this because Caravaggio is the first artist in history whose paintings, such as the Medusa, appear to be concerned with his own life. And ten years before Shakespeare invented Hamlet, they strike us as soliloquies.9 Caravaggio gives us his transformative light in two works painted between 1599 and 1601: The Calling of St Matthew—where it rakes the scene—and Conversion on the Way to Damascus—where it erupts into the scene. He was well known by this time at age twenty-nine, and together these paintings reveal the essential nature of Caravaggio’s light experience, the eruption of a personal revelation (incipient violence from within) and the interruption by an external power (threatened violence from without). The Calling done in the Contarelli Chapel speaks of his relation to the inexplicable visitation in the world of an inviolate light, its unexpected strike into a life like the sudden flash of a sword. The miraculous light sword that slashes the darkness in his paintings, as we will see, is not primarily God’s but his (as in the painting David with the Head of Goliath, c. 1610, the year he died), two-edged and powerful enough to transform a life to death and death to life. The Conversion (1601) done in the Cerasi Chapel marks the eruption into Caravaggio’s life of the light that becomes the core of his experience. More personal, this work differs from an earlier painting he did of the conversion scene, which was traditional in its depiction of the light, making the latter’s pivotal position at a threshold in his life clear.10 In the dark wood of his world Caravaggio seizes on light as offering personal transformation. The Conversion, which departs from Renaissance conventions of depicting the light’s appearance to Saul, records a very personal

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vision of a threatening yet transforming light as it erupts into his life before he becomes St. Paul. There is a “blinding, lightning-like flash” and Saul’s arms are flung out from his prone body as if to embrace this light. By emphasizing the bulk of Paul’s horse, Caravaggio calms and concentrates the space of the scene with

Figure 3.1. Caravaggio, Conversion on the Way to Damascus (1601). Santa Maria del Popolo. Public Domain

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its wondrous stillness of promise within violence. And we feel Caravaggio’s identification with St. Paul because he insists on the physical reality of this scene. We know light’s power as well as its innocence by its transformation of a life, one that Caravaggio no doubt desires was his. Clearly, he has internalized, via the “inward process” of painting, his paradoxical light.11 Turning to his vision of the Calling of St. Matthew, we experience Caravaggio’s process of projecting the light he has discovered, an externalized interpreted (imagined) light. In doing this Caravaggio built his first public commission around the personal meaning of light. Certainly a dramatic statement, it measured over ten feet long and almost four feet high. Viewers could not avoid its bold raking light striking diagonally from the right that pierces the gloom from some unspecified source, decidedly not from the window, and interrupts the men at

Figure 3.2. Caravaggio, The Calling of St. Matthew (1599–1601). Photograph by VivaItalia, 1974. San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome. Public Domain. Public Domain

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the table. It is not light from Christ either, who stands in the dark pointing at St. Matthew who in turn points at himself, as if to say, “Who me?” We can only believe that it is Caravaggio asking the question. Like his Conversion on the Way to Damascus this work is intensely personal, marking the end of Caravaggio’s youth spent at a similar table gambling, armed and itching for a scuffle in the streets of Rome.12 At the same time, the work is passionately public. Its burst of light caused a hubbub in Rome in the summer of 1600 as it was shown in the Contarelli Chapel (along with The Martyrdom of St. Matthew). In the chapel’s meager light, all assembled experienced a powerful psychological jolt.13 No one was prepared for the diagonal strike of light (nor for the utter blackness of the darkness that enabled it). Contemporary viewers would have understood its message as divine and eternal. But more important, Caravaggio downplays any sacred interpretation by obscuring Christ and announces that he has discovered a new side of light’s character. Light pierces the thick darkness without warning, a world of ordinary street people in an ordinary tavern, meaning that a life can be transformed. So shocking was the revelation of Caravaggio’s new light experience that an older contemporary, the painter Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), reacted in disgust: “Caravaggio was born for the destruction of painting.” Such an outburst testifies to the fact that Caravaggio’s relationship with light was a new one. The violent innocence of his light was immediately recognized as a new experience of light in the world. One strangely without pity and yet possessing great promise.14 A Rhetoric of Light and Dark As his fellow artists recognized, this new relationship demanded a new style of painting to express it, which came to maturity around 1600 with the two works we’ve just seen. With the advent of his erupting light from within and raking light of interruption Caravaggio introduces a style never “thought of, or done before by any other painter,” as a contemporary critic observed. This was a “startling naturalism.” We can call it “Naturalism” because Caravaggio embraces the material world, exalting the senses and the emotions, and “startling” because he invents a new light that is neither natural nor ideal but imaginatively real. By a radical reinterpretation he untwists light, separating natural from imagined light. A contemporary poet grasped this, addressing Caravaggio, “let someone else imitate things” (i.e., as did the Classical Renaissance painters), you “make them live and true.”15 Caravaggio’s “live” style startled his contemporaries because he virtually invented a new rhetoric of light and of dark. This enabled him to communicate the “turbulent energy” of his violently innocent, erupting and

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interrupting light. Contemporary critic Pietro Bellori singles out the essential elements of this rhetoric, observing that Caravaggio “attains a great force through the vehemence of his light and shade.” Bellori recognized the essential role of darkness in Caravaggio’s forceful expression of light. He pushes chiaroscuro to its limits, making darkness equal in importance with light. Having described Caravaggio’s “system of lighting,” the critic shifts to the viewer’s experience of the “force” of light by darkness. Thus we also learn from Bellori’s comments that Caravaggio is bent on expressing not a moment of representation but the moment of sight, a viewer’s act of seeing the light as light. Caravaggio is not attempting to imitate or represent nature, that is, but to ensure that his viewer receives the full impact of a natural and imaginative, transformative light that we might say is “magical” if the associations of such a term did not deny its turbulence.16 Caravaggio’s need to place this light before us is so great that he assumes the viewer’s position in The Taking of Christ (aka The Betrayal of Christ), becoming a witness of his own imagined light within one of his own created scenes (1602–1603). It is Caravaggio himself on the right in this painting who holds out the lantern for all, including us. By placing himself within his own painting he explodes any representational notion we might harbor. From within his own painting he reminds us as witness, in effect, that the light raking Christ’s face and erupting in a strip from the soldier’s armor comes from elsewhere, origin unknown, certainly not from the lantern. Caravaggio, that is, brings light to the scene, but not as the lantern suggests, literally, for the true light source is his imagination. He puts himself in this painting to better interpret and express his own core experience of light, evidenced by his arm’s gesture, for holding out the lantern within this scene of violence is that of the painter painting. He is the innocent witness at once contemplating and participating in the scene of actual and imagined light, which his witnessing as both painter and viewer produces.17 We feel here the full force of Caravaggio’s “vehemence of light and shade,” his rhetoric of dark fully developed in this painting. Caravaggio’s “deep and terrible shadows,” as Dominic, an art historian writing a century later reports, “shocked” the public as much as his light. In The Taking of Christ (1602–1603) the space of the event is a “black box” like a closed tomb. Caravaggio invites us to look at blackness to experience light. But as I’ve suggested, it is the blackness of the world of violence in which his body can be interrupted, raked at any moment and destroyed. Thus when light erupts or strikes from that space within, it has a maximum intensity inseparable from transformative power. And this produces within us the “effect of stupefaction,” dissolving any notion of representation. For Caravaggio’s light is as “real” as what the painter experiences within his own painting. To the end he

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clung to this violently innocent, imagined light of experience confident of its eruption into a life and power to transform his own body.18 REMBRANDT’S CALM LIGHT If Caravaggio’s light revealed its turbulent character, Rembrandt’s showed its elusive side. Revealing of this difference, at around age thirty each depicted Christ breaking bread with the disciples after his resurrection. In Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus (1602–1603), which shows Christ with his disciples at the moment they realize who he is, light strikes from outside the painting, exposing raw emotions, Jesus humbly vulnerable looking down and the disciples gesturing in astonishment. In Rembrandt’s The Risen Christ at Emmaus (1648), by contrast, light glows from inside the room, seemingly to emanate from the table, unrelated to the radiance around Christ’s head. He appears to be in reverie, eyes cast heavenward, and the disciples calm. The enigmatic glow of Rembrandt’s light, in such contrast to Caravaggio’s agitated light, is strangely elusive, for it cannot be explained either by naturalistic reasoning or spiritual exegesis.19 Rembrandt’s deft handling of chiaroscuro in this painting owes much to Caravaggio whose relationship with light and its expression proved to be one of the most influential in the history of art. And Rembrandt shared the conviction that the world is a fundamentally dark place interrupted here and there by snatches of light. More important, both painters have a specific and passionate relationship with light, which they use to explore their own psyche.20 Where Caravaggio’s light was bold, however, Rembrandt’s is calm. Caravaggio maps the agitated movement of his emotions as they flow into his subjects, while Rembrandt whose character was not belligerent but slow to anger captures the meditative movement of his mind in concert with his subjects. Consequently, Caravaggio, unconcerned with narrative, focuses on the depicted person seized by a single moment, Rembrandt on the subject participating in the story of their life. These differences arise from the artists’ dramatically different life stories. Unlike Caravaggio’s Rome, Rembrandt’s Amsterdam, where he established himself after 1631 as one of the most revered painters of the century, was a city of relative peace. Rembrandt was not born in Amsterdam, however, but Leiden, his father being Protestant and his mother Catholic at a time when there was fierce conflict between religions. Perhaps this is why Rembrandt seems not to have taken sides, never joining any religious community. Apprenticed at about age fourteen to the Leiden painter Jacob van Swanenburgh, Rembrandt saw many scenes from hell of which his teacher was a master, having perfected

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the depiction of fire and its reflections. More important, Swanenburgh had studied in Rome where he would have seen Caravaggio’s works.21 The Glow After establishing himself as an independent master in 1625, Rembrandt’s style changed radically (1627–1629). Within a year or so he developed what the contemporary artist and critic Gerard de Lairess called the “logic of the concentrated light.” This elusive “glow,” which emanates from within a painting rather than from any external source, became a constant in Rembrandt’s life. The light we see in The Supper at Emmaus (c. 1629), largely confined to a wall beside the risen Christ and surrounded by relative darkness, was no doubt inspired by Caravaggio (1602–1603). Beyond the earlier painter, however, Rembrandt created levels of light intensity that established a unique glow within his painting.22 But another early painting, A Young Painter in His Studio (c. 1629), demonstrates the origins in Rembrandt’s experience of this glow, so unlike Caravaggio’s turbulent light. Here Rembrandt records a psychologically profound experience of light, a virtual revelation. In this painting his studio is strangely uncluttered, empty except for a looming easel seen from the rear, whose black expanse dominates the foreground. And Rembrandt standing in the background seems about to be overcome by a large shadow approaching like a storm cloud across the wall behind him. But the main character is not the twenty-three-year-old Rembrandt or even the easel. A large gentle light dominates the expansive floor and rear wall of the room, a strangely massive but welcoming glow. Either Rembrandt has stepped back from the easel, perhaps to evaluate his work from a distance, or the canvas is blank, simply filled with the same massive, sourceless but native light. Either way his position and expression belie bewilderment and fascination with what he has recognized—the revelation of a personal aspect of light’s character.23 This threshold experience of light offers the means by which the painter will be able to probe his very soul and the reality of the world in the future. It divides Rembrandt’s life, youth from maturity and, at the same time, binds his past apprenticeship to future mastery. A revelation of the light that drives his life, it is a seam in his biography. We see its trace in the bold line of light illuminating the near edge of the painting on the easel, a line dividing the glow of the room from the darkness of the easel’s back. This signifies a gap he crosses, as he embraces a liberating relation to light, which enables him to integrate parts of his self, perhaps religious or social, ensuring his artistic power. Rembrandt no doubt associates this revelation of a glowing light with that which fills the wall in his The Supper at Emmaus. Significantly, this light is not radiated by Christ, who sits in profile, completely in shadow as

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the glow of promise vividly illuminates the wall beside him and falls on a disciple or innkeeper at the table. Revealed in his early experience of light, this darkness and luminosity, this gap and suture, which Rembrandt learns to manipulate with consummate skill, is by its very nature elusive. He is passionately devoted to a glow light never seen on land or sea, an imaginatively interpreted light experience. As the nineteenth-century French painter and writer Eugène Fromentin exclaimed, light “possessed” Rembrandt, “governed him, inspired him,” and “led him to the impossible, and sometimes betrayed him.” As such, light’s elusive nature derives from its inherent ambiguity. Caravaggio had a devoted relationship with a paradoxical light, being both violent and innocent. Rembrandt’s, instead, is an ambiguous light hinting of something beyond, unknown and invisible, and insisting on its presence here and now. Nothing exists, he implies, beyond the corners within the picture to which the rays reach.24 An Ambiguous Light Fromentin gave Rembrandt the title of “Luminarist.” He observed that Rembrandt “conceived light outside of the accepted laws” (i.e., the classical painterly tradition), attached an “unusual meaning to it” (i.e., a subjective interpretation), and made “great sacrifices to it.” Rembrandt’s conception of light is, as we’ve seen, bound up with his youthful, revelatory experience of its glow. Interpreting this experience, he invests the glow with a highly personal meaning. And he devotes his life, making great sacrifices in the face of grief, the death of his wife and son, and a bankruptcy, to the task of expressing this light.25 Rembrandt lives in a relationship with this light, which lies outside conventionalized, inherited experiences of light, their interpretations reified as “laws,” throughout his life. His light lies outside: both stylistically and psychologically. Like Caravaggio’s it is “naturalistic” in style, seeming to behave in much the same way that light does in our own common experience. But at the same time it is imaginative, clearly acting in ways that violate our visual sense, such as the unnatural glow of the table in The Supper at Emmaus. His light seems not to just fall on objects in many of his paintings, but in contrast to Caravaggio’s to penetrate their surfaces, making them glow, glitter and glimmer, and rest self-contained in their sheen.26 More important and bound up with its origin in his revelatory experience, his light is “liminal,” a psychological threshold of reverie and introspection (at the black/white gap). By pervading and unifying the lightspace of his painting, his glow light generates what has been called an “atmosphere of consciousness” (closing the gap). Expressing this light in paint makes Rembrandt, as the prominent art critic Robert Hughes claimed, the “supreme

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depicter of inwardness,” whether it is the self-reflection of Bathsheba in his Bathsheba (1654) or the meditation of Aristotle in Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer (1653). And this is the light he uses to probe his own character, his skeptical, ambiguous mind, both Protestant and Catholic and neither, in numerous introspective self-portraits at all stages of his life.27 His turning inward coincided with Rembrandt’s encounter with a glow light. Returning to The Supper at Emmaus, we notice that the setting consists of two planes, one light one dark. Between glow and blackness, Christ appears purely as a dark silhouette against the light wall, but the front of his body and his hands lighten, implying that he is between life and death, a liminal figure on the threshold. Rembrandt has here constructed a lightspace in which Christ is both “mere shadow” and “actual presence.” After Christ appeared to his disciples in this moment, according to the biblical account, he disappeared. This is reinforced by the massive column of blackness between the background and foreground glow, the threshold between dark and light, appearance and disappearance, uniting the two halves of the picture. Christ hovers, that is, between two states of being, caught in an ambiguous state, just as Rembrandt the ambitious young painter was in his self-portrait done about the same year. And by “reading” its elusive glow, a sacred or secular event we cannot know from the painting, feeling the full force of Rembrandt’s relationship with a unique light, we are able to construct Rembrandt’s relation to light.28 Interpreting this light experience, then, Rembrandt gives it an “unusual meaning,” which Fromentin calls “eccentric,” as we see in his famous Night Watch (1642). Here a somewhat less-than-human woman glows in the dark with “extraordinarily strange phosphorescence, which is not the natural light of things.” In concert with darkness (his chiaroscuro) this gives the painting an explosive energy but implies a certain futility in the lively movement of the group. Similarly, in his depiction of biblical scenes, although Rembrandt’s interpreted light experience was willingly sacrificed to the message of the Church, as was Caravaggio’s, neither sacrificed their passionate relationship with a personal light. For Caravaggio’s light experience resulted in his resurrection from the darkness of a violent world, while Rembrandt’s brought about his from the darkness of an interior world lost without the light of the Creation that glows here and there through its cracks. And as we have seen, both insisted on using it in the service of skepticism, not only directed at the institution but themselves. To this end Rembrandt’s naturalistic-imaginative glow light remained stylistically and psychologically outside the “accepted laws,” as Fromentin maintained, and preserved its uniquely subjective, “unusual meaning.”29 While Caravaggio used his turbulent, paradoxical light to project himself, Rembrandt used his calm, ambiguous liminal glow to probe himself, both

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artists investigating the unknown. The former painter’s violent-innocent rays and the latter’s arresting-elusive glow yields to their respective untwisting of light’s character that gave them life. Ultimately it was spiritual truth that broke through cracks in the world for both these painters. When we now consider, however, the painter and the scientist who embody Enlightenment culture, the spiritual doesn’t break through so much as wait to be summoned from its own domain. Jan (Johannes) Vermeer (1632–1675) and Isaac Newton (1642–1726) encounter a self-contained character, a light independent in the world of God (though ultimately authored by Him). In part, this is owing to the rampant rise of doubt that ultimately shifts authority from the laws of God to the laws of reason, God being gradually displaced by humanity just as Copernicus had displaced the earth at the center of our cosmos with the sun. Aware of this cultural sea change, the popular poet and playwright James Thomson confesses to “being born in an age more curious than devout.”30 But Vermeer and Newton as men of the Age of Skepticism, one of reasoned doubt, go farther. They are concerned above all with objective knowledge, not with their own psychology. Curious about the human and natural worlds, they commit to a more precise and above all disinterested observation and description than in previous ages.31 If Caravaggio and Rembrandt went beyond Leonardo and brought the actor light boldly on stage at the beginning of the age, Vermeer and Newton examine at a distance its gestures and actions as revelations of its inner nature. Hence in contrast to the former passionate figures, the latter investigators adopt a comparatively dispassionate stance as they observe light’s behavior.32 A stance coinciding with a new understanding of the word “experience.” Traditionally, the word had referred to a “universal statement of fact” arrived at by deduction, which was based on observation of the ordinary workings of nature. Knowledge of light’s character, that is, gained by available experience, as Caravaggio and Rembrandt gather from the psychological impact of light in their everyday life. But the new understanding of the word was knowledge gained by artificial experience. Namely, via Vermeer and Newton’s disinterested, aggressive experiments cajoling and probing an insolent light, which they “moulded” by the ingenious setup of a room’s interior. Vermeer’s embracing this new mode of experience, as does Newton after him, becomes the signature of the new age. Such an approach emerging from the Renaissance launched the modern world and its secularization as the material and the metaphysical, heretofore inseparable, part in human experience.33

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VERMEER’S WEIGHING AND BALANCING LIGHT An “investigator of visible nature,” a contemporary Dutch art critic dubbed Vermeer, for whom the science of painting intersected with natural science (as it had for Leonardo). And Vermeer’s “experimental method” resembled the pioneer in microscopy Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s in his returning repeatedly to the subject of interest. Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723), who lived across the square from Vermeer and very likely knew him, turned repeatedly to the minute animals he discovered in common liquids, such as pond water. Just as Vermeer turned to the lighting conditions in a controlled environment, such as a deliberately appointed domestic room, as he investigated how a woman’s relation to the light entering through a window changes. The artist approached this investigative mission passionately, returning again and again to similar setups. This combination of passion and distance is why Picasso once exclaimed, “I’d give the whole of Italian painting for Vermeer of Delft.”34 We see this combination in his Woman Holding a Balance (c. 1664). Clearly, Vermeer loves the sunlight that shines in the full height of the springsummer “light season,” which is virtually the only light that makes an appearance in his paintings. In the Dutch Republic of his time this season was brief. But its light, which he grew up with, became the character he probed again and again. The very fact that its annual appearance was brief, the weather of Delft being generally cloudy and wet, may well have heightened his attention. If we focus on the dominant weather, the “particular radiance” of Vermeer’s paintings, as Jane Jelley says, is difficult to explain. But if we attend to those special times when his studio hosted this strong sunlight, we can understand why its radiance became Vermeer’s core experience of light. And we see him returning again and again to this light, which he was determined to investigate, no matter how infrequently it appeared in the controlled environment of his studio. Taking great pains to observe dispassionately is perhaps one reason why his output was relatively small.35 In his Woman Holding a Balance we see this light, its source evident. We also see the subject that, after a youthful infatuation with Caravaggio, preoccupies him in his maturity when he turned to his own light experience and theme in the late 1650s: a young woman in relation to light. With great serenity she pauses, patiently observing her balance as it finally comes to rest. Oblivious of the painter, her viewers, and the painting on the wall behind her (of the Last Judgment), she is alone in a silent world, suspended in a moment of introspection. The utter stillness of the scene reveals his disinterested regard of this woman standing motionless in time, wholly absorbed in her act. And as we see from the contents of the balance pans, she is not weighing

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Figure 3.3. Johannes Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance (c. 1664). National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Public Domain

pearls or coins, neither of which can be clearly discerned, but what can be seen clearly by viewers—light.36 Vermeer’s paintings, then, are devoted to the “weighing and balancing of light itself.” A meticulous painter, working very slowly and producing less than two paintings a year at the height of his career, he abandoned mythological and religious subjects early on for light. His stance, however, toward the light and the subject of his paintings is, like an assayer’s, singularly detached. This allows him to examine the modulations of light, every nuance of its character, and his subject’s relation to these. In Caravaggio’s and Rembrandt’s

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paintings we sense a personal struggle, not in Vermeer’s. His seem extraordinarily intimate but without struggle. Perhaps as the son of a silk merchant who also kept a tavern and dealt in art, Vermeer from his youth learned to be an observer. From the dramatic chiaroscuro of Caravaggio and Rembrandt, we emerge with Vermeer into an ordinary room blessed by a wondrously diffused light of day.37 The woman holding the balance shares the serenity of the light that touches her. She seems to be pregnant, though we cannot be certain, and may be silently murmuring to her unborn child “The light so long beloved to me / Now I give, dear child, to thee,” as the Dutch proverb says. This gift of light, life itself is that which lingers on the wall, delicately touches the fingers of her right hand and caresses her left forearm. She has achieved a balance of spirit and action, which Vermeer as a child may have seen in his mother or later in his wife who is the model for many of his paintings. His subjects like the woman holding a balance simply find themselves with the light in his painting, no drama just silence. Vermeer does not project himself into the painting in the way that Caravaggio and Rembrandt did. Instead Vermeer is detached, as the painting is an independent investigation of light’s character and the woman’s relationship with this character.38 The Light Wall To explore this character, we need to examine Vermeer’s light more closely. In the Woman Holding a Balance our eyes trace a path of light entering from the window that begins and ends with the back wall of the room. Always, we return to the illuminated wall. Vermeer attends to this light wall carefully as an essential element in the majority of his major paintings, giving its half-matt, granulated surface of whitewash different accents, each one its own.39 The light lingers on the wall in this painting before blazing on the woman’s front and settling with exquisite delicacy on her balance pans. The fluid, dense but soft light on the wall asserts its independence, marking its own domain. His works, as we see here, “appear illuminated from within.” This is why we feel that light is his principal subject. Claiming its sheer self-contained presence, as if fastened to the wall by the nail (with its shadow), we see at the top of his painting (just to the left of the picture behind the woman). Only in its own time does the light select what we must attend to, such as her hands, and ultimately bear the meaning of Vermeer’s act of painting as it independently chooses her as its subject. And yet we return to the wall of light.40 We remember Rembrandt’s light wall. But Vermeer’s is different. His light conveys the wall’s substance but at the same time denies it. The painter returns to it obsessively as the necessary investigative tool for the revelation of a new aspect of light’s character. This light declares that its world, the room

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and the woman within, is the only one there is. Vermeer makes this clear in a deft move. He replaces the traditional painting of the Last Judgment on the wall behind the woman, a convention reminding his viewers that all is vanity, with his light wall. He implies by his nail and its hole, then, that this painting has been moved from its original position to its current one behind her to display the light wall. In other words, he replaces the “Last Judgment” with his judgment of light, an investigation, the weighing of light in the here and now.41 To do this Vermeer goes beyond the naturalism of Caravaggio and Rembrandt. To express his experience of a new aspect of light’s character demands a “realism,” the nail and nail hole, one that requires adopting a disinterested stance. He renders the interior of the room he returns to time and again with such “directness” that his light speaks to our immediate experience. Clearly, Vermeer has an “actual” though staged reality before him. Vermeer’s depiction of the distance from eye to the light wall, for example, is constant in many of his works. The room central to his paintings is his laboratory, which he adjusts by partially shutting it off with shutters or curtains in the windows or both. By his realism with its more “objective” viewpoint, Vermeer achieves a new verisimilitude of light, that is, a form of “scientific” directness, his claim on us having no greater depth than the “play of light” itself.42 Aware of the new developments all around them in lens technology and pioneering work with telescopes and microscopes, as well as the new trust of the age in vision as the primary sense by which to know the world, his patrons expected what could be called “realism.”43 The excitement of discovery filled the air, and patrons derived great pleasure from the consummate depiction of optical “reality.” Vermeer’s admirers were fond of the story of a viewer who went around one of his paintings to see where the light in his work came from. And the camera obscura, a box with its adjustable lens and mirrors that enabled one to project a scene onto a viewing screen in its top, was the rage. The nail and the hole in Woman Holding a Balance, which have no traditional iconographic meaning, are a feat of trompe l’oeil. But Vermeer, having a more profound purpose, goes beyond mere tricks of the eye and uses of the camera obscura for research into the effects of light.44 The aim of his realism was to present light for the study of its relations. Its brilliance in Vermeer’s paintings went against convention and the advice of contemporary handbooks because he persisted in manipulating this in a series of paintings, recording all the nuances of the “fall of light at a single moment.” Vermeer’s painting has all the visible appearances of realism, then, down to the nail in the wall and points of light on the left edge of the woman’s head covering, his distinctively lyrical “realism.” But it’s an illusion because the radiantly “warm, fluid sunlight that penetrates the room” in his paintings

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is not everyday light; it is the cherished, rare light season “light of childhood” invoking his core light experience.45 And here is the explanation of Vermeer’s preoccupation with the light wall. It is at the center of a field he creates where memory and consciousness play. It enables him to isolate a light of great psychological force in order to make it the subject of his study. This is why he goes out of his way, as we’ve seen, to expose the light wall. A field evoking his core, intuitive experience of light, he takes pains to ensure that it secures our attention in a number of his paintings as the essential subject of his disinterested, even objective contemplation.46 In the Milkmaid (c. 1658–1660), in which a nail calls our attention to the wall of light as it does in the Woman Holding a Balance, the morning light is unfiltered, and we are confronted with the force of Vermeer’s light wall. Its sheer white-plastered expanse and precisely differentiated light anchors the composition, gives the woman dignity and power, and grants presence to the objects in the room, such as the baskets and bread. Its luminosity goes beyond ordinary reality as a field of sense and sensation, that is, indicating that Vermeer presents this as light for study.47 But why does Vermeer place the light wall at the center of his greatest works? The answer, I suggest, lies in his childhood. The light wall appears in a series of over a dozen paintings, emerging in Vermeer’s consciousness with full force in the late 1750s through 1760s at the height of his powers.48 Decidedly not religious, never “otherworldly,” the light wall is held out for study. And it originates, I suspect, from Vermeer’s childhood spent in a large Delft house (the Mechelen inn) fronting on the Market Square where his father moved when Vermeer was nine. A typical bourgeois dwelling with rooms resembling to an extent those depicted in his paintings, this childhood house was where perhaps the wall of a room in the back, its window giving on the Voldersgracht canal, came alive. The scene, that is, of a spring or summer day’s sunlight entering and falling on the wall of a room, creating an unforgettable vision.49 This light of Vermeer’s childhood reasserted itself in his thirties, possibly triggered when he was twenty-eight by the death of a child. Revisiting his childhood vision of the light on a wall, I suggest, inspired the most powerful works of his major phase. Over half his paintings depict a person alone in a room engaged in a domestic task, just as very likely he would have observed as a child a servant, the milkmaid, or even his mother, and behind them a wall of light. Then a mystery, which now demanded a solution, Vermeer resolves to investigate its character. And he realized that the light wall was the laboratory tool of its own investigation. Thus like a natural scientist he restricts his variables, controlling the light (a bright sunlight), the subject (a woman), and the environment (a domestic room with a light wall). Simplifying the scene to a woman and light in their private realm allows Vermeer to isolate light in

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order to examine the relationship of his subject with it. Hence he returns to his childhood vision but perforce as an adult contemplates it from a distance. Women and Light In this laboratory of a domestic setting, Vermeer views light and his women as subjects. His relation to light is the same as to women, disinterested but obsessively attentive. They exist in a world apart, as self-possessed as the light wall itself. Distanced by time and enshrouded in mystery, the same mystery that the women of his household had no doubt presented to him as a child, but now become the object of Vermeer’s investigation. At the heart of the mystery, he is convinced, is their relationship with light. If he can understand this, he can understand the light wall and thus light itself. The light wall and the woman belong to the same world, coequals. So he regards his women as subjects, albeit tenderly and with great respect, just as he does the light of the room, which is their light. They belong to the light as the light belongs to them. Both are inviolate, self-contained.50 Ostensibly Vermeer depicts a woman engaged in a domestic task. The portrait he paints is not, however, of the woman but her relationship with light. Like a natural scientist he attends to his coequal subjects, women and light, working with great care and patience in order to record the subtle nuances of their relations.51 Paramount for Vermeer is to be faithful to his experience of the varied character of light interacting with specific, individual women who in turn interact with it. With self-awareness, the woman in Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (c. 1664–1665), as in many others in this series, finds herself in a relationship with light. She experiences a twofold character: the light in the painting, originating outside it, and the light of the painting, originating it seems within it.52 Although these mingle in her experience and in ours, to understand another’s relationship with light, Vermeer must investigate each. The painting shows us light from the outside reflected from the pitcher she grasps with her left hand, and the plate it rests on, and from the inside of the window frame she grasps with her right. This is the external light from the window that illuminates her face as well as her contemplative act. She is not looking out the window but observing the light itself. At the same time, the painting has the internal “self-contained luminescence” of the light wall. This appears to “come from the painting itself” and not to “illuminate anything other than itself,” creating no shadows and simply being present.53 As she contemplates the arrival on the window frame of an external light, the internal light of the dazzling wall, one she is hardly conscious of, affects her being, the stance she assumes, the moment of life she savors. It imbues her we might say with humanity. Rather than being distracted momentarily

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Figure 3.4. Johannes Vermeer, Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (c. 1664–1665). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public Domain

or waiting for someone, as one critic wonders, the woman with the water pitcher is clearly fixed for a moment in the luminosity of the light wall. Its liquid light holds her, her pose itself having fluidity as she holds the window frame, contemplating the light that enters. At the same time, we experience the muted radiance of the light wall as it heightens the charge that the entering light gives her right shoulder.54 In this painting Vermeer conveys the unconscious exchange between the woman in her reverie and the internal light, a light that modulates her experience of the external light and vice versa. Her self-possession lies in

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this experience, her conscious and unconscious relation to a double light. Vermeer’s painting demands in its quiet way that we consider the woman’s twofold experience of a light larger than the light he shows us—the wave of sunlight and the presence of the light wall. We can’t avoid this because the room, as the art critic Arthur Danto observes, seems to contain more light than it receives.55 The young woman’s open gesture welcomes the window’s radiant light as the light wall welcomes her contemplative being. Herein we find the essence of the woman’s relationship with light. Vermeer discovers in his investigation a light we know and have never considered and places this squarely in front of us. The woman interacts with her environment by the “flowing rhythms of her arms,” a wave extending from the window frame to the jug handle. This is reciprocated by the wall hosting her body, which Vermeer emphasizes by placing the map so that the light wall can continue actively and unobstructed behind her. And as she stands poised between the window and the water pitcher, her reverie suspended in time, it is a moment of interaction between her and the light that seems will last forever. She does not look outward but inward, an act revealing the existence of an inner life.56 She communes with herself in a silent, private world closed to us (in contrast to the map world), preserving her integrity of self, bound up with the light wall, that yet preserves its own integrity. We feel her reverie deepened by the subtle vibrations between the light she welcomes from outside and that possessed by the light wall, as well as between the sheer quiet life of her body and the self-contained light of the wall drifting on and about her.57 A woman and the entering light, the light wall and a woman, this quiet dynamic cannot be characterized as a message, a specific meaning transmitted to us, but rather as a mood determined by the woman’s relation to light’s intensity and distribution in Vermeer’s painting. It is her light experience that the “mood” of his painting expresses. It incarnates a strangely distanced and static yet lyrically suggestive light. She receives the light as if expecting it and is about to be transfixed by it. Caught in this moment of expectation, we feel in these paintings a faint “undertone of suspense.” This is why they seem to mean more than they reveal. They hint at what may have been a mystery that Vermeer carried from childhood. Seeing his mother or a maid in the kitchen against a stark sunlit wall could easily have suggested a drama beyond his comprehension. And as an adult Vermeer solves this mystery by expressing precisely the relationship of a specific woman to a specific light wall. This requires returning again and again to the phenomenon as any investigator would, such as his geographer (The Geographer, c. 1668–1669) and astronomer (The Astronomer, 1668).58 But unlike the natural scientist, he does not in the end generalize. Vermeer’s investigation results in the expression not of conclusions but of a specific

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mood. Thus the relationship of the woman with the pitcher to the entering external and the hovering internal light conveys no fixed meaning any more than it tells a story or illustrates an anecdote. Vermeer is satisfied to solve a childhood mystery, to reveal via this specific woman’s relationship with a specific daylight and light wall that she achieves, we sense, a completeness of knowing that became a goal of Vermeer’s projects.59 What Vermeer accomplishes is astonishing. For the first time in the history of the experience of light, a painter rather than primarily projecting his own experience of light investigates the light experience of his subject. The Young Woman with a Water Pitcher is an extraordinarily moving work because we see not only the woman’s dialog with the light it shows us as an observer, such as the reflections off the pitcher and plate, but with the light it possesses from and within the light wall. Yet we cannot but feel that Vermeer examines his own experience in the act of creating the light wall as a painter, just as the woman examines hers. In this the young woman with the water pitcher and the painter with his brushes share a contemplative, disinterested investigation of their own relationships with light. And he does this repeatedly in his domestic laboratory, using a room’s light wall to manipulate sunlight, just as in theirs Leeuwenhoek uses the microscope and Christiaan Huygens the telescope. We find ourselves engaged, then, in Vermeer’s recognition of another person’s light experience as it questions his own and vice versa.60 NEWTON’S MOST SURPRISING AND WONDERFUL COMPOSITION While Vermeer caught the fluid sun on a room’s wall, Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1726) tracked the sun in time on the wall of his childhood room. Both these men admired the “marvels of Light,” in Christiaan Huygens’s phrase. And both shared a dedication to precision and clarity, performing repeated “experiments” in their respective investigations to solve a mystery of human and physical nature. The light Newton experienced in a childhood room triggered his life-long investigation of the nature of light. From this experience, extended by experiment, emerged his major scientific contributions, including his discovery that light consisted of elements rather than being an integral entity (Optics, 1704). And his relationship with light seized the imagination of the age, not only natural scientists but poets. Alexander Pope famously declared, “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night; / God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.”61 Born on Christmas Day, 1642, Newton became early on obsessed with the sun. As a child alone in his room he was mesmerized by its light creeping along a wall. And outside, he tracked the sun across the yard, the walls, and

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the roof of Woolsthorpe Manor where he was born. Here he extended his experience of sunlight. Loving to tinker, he fashioned a number of sundials and mounted one on the nearby Colsterworth church when he was nine. And he filled William Clarke’s house, where he lived while attending the King’s School at Grantham, with “dyals of divers forms,” as he later said, including in the entry, his room, and wherever he could capture the sun’s movement. Measuring the shadows cast by the dial’s gnomen (its metal or wood finger), he learned to tell the equinoxes and solstices so accurately that his family and the neighbors came to consult with him.62 At age nineteen in his third year at Trinity College, Cambridge, Newton made a fateful visit to the fair on Stourbridge Common where many curious toys were sold. Here he bought a prism. Taking it back to his room, he placed it in the path of light rays streaming through a hole in a shutter and displayed a spectrum on the wall across the room. In effect, this act becomes his first experiment. And to the “time of his death,” his friend John Conduitt reported, “he retained his custom of making constant observations in the rooms he chiefly used where the shade of the sun fell.” Initially he responds to the beauty of the spectrum, admitting that it was a “very pleasing divertissement, to view the vivid and intense colours produced thereby.” But he then moves from this response to an analytic one, saying, “after a while applying myself to consider them more circumspectly, I became surprised to see them in an oblong form.” Surprised, theoretically, because he assumed it would be a perfect circle as Descartes said it should be. Existentially, however, his imagination of light having its birth in the sundial’s shadow image, embraced the oblong.63 Just as Newton was fascinated by the shape of the shadow cast on a wall by the sundial and what it told him, so he was struck by the shape of the spectrum cast by the prism. Everyone knew it projected colors (though it was generally assumed that the prism creates them), but Newton was the first to conjecture about their oval shape on the wall (and imagine that they were constituents of light itself). And this proved to be a pivotal observation at the heart of Newton’s instrument-extended light experience. So powerful was this that as the newly appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at twenty-seven, his shoulder-length hair already turning silver, his first lecture did not treat mathematics but light. This obsession with the projected shape, the footprint so to speak of sunlight, remained with Newton the rest of his life. Working with sundials as a child, he had trained himself to attend to a shadow’s shape, but now he wonders if this tells him something profound about the nature of light. He must solve this mystery. And here Newton took a giant step for mankind. He performed a second experiment, this one involving two prisms. As with the former experiment he arranged the first to project a spectrum. But

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he places a card with a slit in front of its projected spectrum, allowing only a single narrow band of color to pass, which he directs through the second prism. He then observed that the second prism simply changed the direction of the narrow beam, not affecting its color at all (thus color not derived from the prism but from light itself). “And so” he concluded that the “true cause of the length of that Image,” the oblong shape that the spectrum of white light from the first prism cast on the second prism, was “detected to be no other, then that Light consists of Rays differently refrangible” (i.e., refracted).64 Triumphant, the twenty-six-year-old called this his “crucial experiment” (experimentum crucis). For his first prism experiment yielded the phenomenon, the spectrum’s shape, something to be explained, but this second yielded the explanation (of shape as well as colors). His initial response to the beauty of light was now enriched by “the most surprising, and wonderful composition,” Newton exclaimed, “that of Whiteness. There is no one sort of Rays which alone can exhibit this. ’Tis ever compounded . . . of Colours.” Furthermore, he knew that the clincher experiment was necessarily completed in his perception, insisting that the spectator achieve the rainbow image as they would a work of art.65 So like Vermeer we can call the scientist, of course, an “investigator of visible nature.” He shared the painter’s conviction that light can be used as a tool to investigate light, and both men adopted a dispassionate stance in their regard for light, being committed to disinterested observation. The difference between Newton and Vermeer, however, is that the painter moved from an experience of light to the investigation of its effects, while the scientist moved, as we’ve seen, from an experience to the investigation of an effect’s cause. A move we saw earlier with Robert Grosseteste, but he did not extend his experience by systematic experiment. Also, Vermeer and Newton employed optical tools, the former a camera obscura and the latter a prism. For Vermeer the tracks of light, its trace in the world, were its reflections, while for the scientist the tracks were its shadows, much as they had been for Leonardo. But where he had experienced shadow in conflict with light, Newton interpreted it as the trace of light, revealing its deepest nature. This is a revolutionary leap that introduced to the world a new human experience of light. Newton interpreted the experimental extension of this as revealing that light is no longer pure and elemental. His relationship is with a “compounded” whiteness. Classical writers as well as Christian and Islamic writers in past ages had experienced light as an integral entity, impossible of constituents. But now Newton experiences it as a substance comprising colors and traveling in streams of particles (i.e., rays). Specifically, he says, “I understand light to be an entity, or power of an entity (whether substance or some force, or action, or quality of it) which proceeds directly from a bright body and is able to excite vision.”66

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Later in his life he referred to this shift in his experience as the “oddest detection yet made in the operations of nature.” Odd because his relationship with light, though deceptively and scientifically simple, is existentially complex, rooted as it was in his childhood experience of light.67 This is partly why he refused to be dogmatic and why his Optics is a profoundly personal book in its reverent tone and “intimate style,” his devotion to the character of light that appeared before him from youth, that is, and his “gentle” English for general readers. And the more he returned to this rational yet “odd” character, a composed “substance” and indeterminate “force,” the more convinced he was that light was the link between the living and inanimate worlds, which question preoccupied him in his life-long study of theology and alchemy.68 Newton’s material imagination of light is in the tradition of Euclid’s geometric imagination yet differs greatly from the Classical writer. Newton pushed geometry into the physical, as Descartes had recently pushed it into the mathematical (i.e., a geometrical shape such as a circle can be translated to an algebraic equation). Where Euclid’s rays were without substance, remaining diagrammatic entities, the scientist’s rays were streaming particles, and white light itself composed of discrete rays. And it is this relation to light as composed that seized not only the eighteenth-century natural scientists and clerics but the poets as well. A relationship internalized despite Newton’s “impersonal naturalism,” which fostered this, being a “shock.” For it completed the divorce between physical science and religion.69 James Thomson’s metaphor describing Newton’s untwisting the light goes right to the heart of the new relationship. In his poem written at Newton’s death in 1726, he declared that “Ev’n Light itself, which every thing displays / Shone undiscover’d, till his brighter mind / Untwisted all the shining robe of day.” Thomson is right that light was in a sense “undiscover’d” before Newton, so powerfully seductive was his interpretation of light experience. The untwisting of light that reveals its “gorgeous train” of colors was an immensely influential metaphor, changing attitudes toward the traditionally accepted “fact” of light and thus the experience of it. In Newton’s wake an entire culture shifted its imagination of light and underwent a new experience.70 More than any other eighteenth-century poet, however, Thomson internalized Newton’s experience of light. Standing on Greenwich Hill, the poet watches a sunset and is moved by its “beauteous” light. Of course, we say, but this is a new aspect of light’s character, for Thomson is moved at once by the light and its changing colors, which are bound up intellectually with “how beauteous the refractive law” is that Newton had demonstrated. His admiration for the sunset’s beauty, that is, now shot through by an intellectual vein, as it had been in previous ages by a spiritual one. He can’t separate his

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emotional response to light from his intellectual response, a new pattern of beauty derived from the new experience of light. Equally moved by light and color, his response to sunlight is at once ecstatic, being moved by the entire white “shining robe,” and at the same time prismatic, being moved by the knowledge of its threads “untwisted.” Thomson’s eye was, therefore, as he acknowledged, a “sage-instructed eye.”71 If the Romans gave light a biography, as we saw earlier, the Enlightenment exposed its psychological and physical anatomy. In the next chapter we’ll see reactions to this exposure, as the revolutionary poets and artists attempt to heal the rupture of metaphysical and physical, making nature a projection of the human imagination in a “natural supernaturalism.” And we’ll explore their new transformations of light experience. We’ll free ourselves from the concentrated scenes of Caravaggio and Rembrandt’s psychologically turbulent and ambiguous light, and we’ll step out of the domestic interiors of Vermeer and Newton’s dispassionate investigations of light’s relation to human and physical nature into the landscapes of J. M. W. Turner and William Wordsworth. Light for them is no longer a tool, as it had been since the Renaissance, but becomes a companion of sublime character.

NOTES 1. “Untwisted all the shining Robe of Day,” from James Thomson, “A poem sacred to the memory of Sir Isaac Newton” (http:​//​ota​.ox​.ac​.uk​/id​/4846 via http:​//​ writersinspire​.org​/content​/poem​-sacred​-memory​-sir​-isaac​-newton​-james​-thomson). And this new age of sustained attention to light also brought a serious study of shadow. Early treatises with the exception of Leonardo’s rarely discuss shadow, but this situation changed dramatically around 1600. This century saw a proliferation of works treating shadows and the distribution of light and shade in a painting, which was echoed in alchemical works as well. Moreover, in the eighteenth century shadow had important implications for basic human knowledge, such as how in our perception of the world we see a shaded circle as a three-dimensional object. The tone of this century’s attention to shadow, in fact, as Michael Baxandall observes, is “serious and pertinacious to a degree that is sometime hard to understand” (Shadows and Enlightenment, 28, 32, 103). Nicolas Largilliere systematically described subtle distinctions of shadow in his experience, and Privé Formey in his article on “shadow” in the Encyclopédie, discussing reflection as a factor in shadow intensity, observes: “Unvarying laws” make the “light of one body spring back onto another body” and on to a third. But by an “operation” of its “powerful springiness . . . this nimble substance” light

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“pushes against every body [sic] upon which it arrives and is pushed back again, as much by its own bounce as by the resistance it meets” (quoted by Baxandall, 81). The age viewed shadow as a “physical hole in light,” neither stable nor continuous, and it was experienced as uncanny. Painters such as Jean-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779), who belonged to the tribe that Baxandall calls the “Rococo-Empiricist shadow-watchers,” attempted to express in paint this experience of an “active, determined and structured field in which consciousness plays” (96, 144–45; e.g., The Olive Jar, 1760, and The Young Draughtsman, 1738). 2. Looking through light, . . . looking at light, Frohlich, “Locations of Light in Art,” 48. 3. And what these Enlightenment explorers discover when they succeed in untwisting the robe of day, beyond “least Parts,” is that in nature there is more to reality than meets the eye. In previous ages this had always been suspected, but all assumed that the hidden reality was spiritual, even when light was experienced as a substance. In Thomson’s new age of curiosity, however, the shock was to discover that the reality behind nature’s reality, rather than being spiritual, was material. Nature all the way, Lucretius’s atoms and void return. Here Vermeer discovers an unsettling silence; Newton discovers an “infinite” space whose silence “frightens” the mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–1662). The spiritual is and is not there for both (quoted by Shapin, Scientific Revolution, 28). 4. Barzun, From Dawn, 359; Bronowski and Mazlish coined the term “Age of Reasoned Doubt” (1630–1760). For its varied manifestations in France, England, and the United States, see Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity. Even the very word “light” is subject to questioning. John Locke in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), a book central to the age, finds the word “light” confusing (Book III, chap IV, sec. 10). Increased self-awareness, Porter, Enlightenment, 10; “Insolence” of light, quoted by Cassin, “Light/Enlightenment,” 579. 5. “Insolent” light, models of the world, . . . pigments and propositions, Kemp, Science of Art, 338. 6. “Precocious, stubborn, and independent,” Friedlander, Caravaggio Studies, 34, 37; without a sword and a painter’s compass, Spike, Caravaggio, 6, 255; aggressive instruments, Fried, Moment, 216; “died as badly as he had lived,” quoted by Spike, 6. 7. Safe from her deadly gaze, Marin, To Destroy, 127, 130. 8. Companions and ordinary people from the streets, Friedlander, Caravaggio Studies, 16. Reconciling violence and empathy personally: his fondness for androgynous figures, such as the Lute Player (c. 1600), with its diagonal ray piercing the sensuous darkness, was perhaps his attempt to reconcile a contradictory, or paradoxical character. For in the sixteenth century androgyny was regarded as the “achievement of a superior condition through the reconciliation of opposites.” The violent and transformative character of light revealed to Caravaggio explains his penchant for symbols that carried diametrically opposed meanings, which he used to reconcile violence and empathy in the world and, at the deepest level, within his own character (Spike, Caravaggio, 60, 88). 9. Death sentence on Caravaggio, Spike, Caravaggio, 255, Langdon, Caravaggio, 309–14; strike us as soliloquies, Spike, 15.

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10. Pivotal position at a threshold in his life, Wilson-Smith, Caravaggio, 18; Langdon, Caravaggio, 186–87. Earlier conversion scene, that is, the Odescalchi Balbi version. 11. “Blinding, lightning-like flash,” Fleming, Arts and Ideas, 328, 399; wondrous stillness of promise within violence, Friedlander, Caravaggio Studies, 19; “inward process,” Langdon, Caravaggio, 187. Also, by so deliberately illuminating the horse’s flank (a horse modeled on Dürer’s Large Horse), which receives the greatest amount of light, he produces in us a sense that the light of the scene is miraculously radiating from the horse itself (Friedlander, 9–10). Its symbolic charge would have arrested contemporary viewers as well. Caravaggio’s light and dark take on a symbolic charge, of course, from a long Christian tradition, as Helen Langdon points out in her biography of the artist (Caravaggio, 188–90). But this does not negate their distinctly personal meaning for him. And see John Rupert Martin (Baroque, 54–55, 57) for the impact of St. Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises (1548), which was widely read in 1599, encouraging the worshipper to call on the experience of the senses in order to make the contemplated scenes of Christ’s life real. 12. Personal meaning of light, Robb, M, 128; as if to say “Who me?” WilsonSmith, Caravaggio, 64; scuffle in the streets of Rome, Langdon, Caravaggio, 175–76. 13. Psychological jolt, Friedlander, Caravaggio Studies, 13. 14. “Caravaggio was born for the destruction of painting,” quoting Poussin, Spike, Caravaggio, 6; without pity . . . great promise, Dupont, Seventeenth Century, 23. Poussin’s pupil Félibien, however, was strongly ambivalent, reacting in a way that Caravaggio would surely have understood. Félibien, who could “not bear Caravaggio,” admits that the “fullness and marvelous force” of his painting gives pleasure. On the other hand, his paintings are unpleasant, having no “agreeable light” (quoted by Marin, To Destroy, 99). According to Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1613–1696), Caravaggio “despised” the classical tradition, including Raphael, and “nature alone became the object of his brush.” He considered the only authority to be nature, claiming that each of his brush strokes was not his but the “work of nature” (i.e., simply paying lip service to the ideals of the past or perhaps being ironic). Yet the young painters of the day were understandably mesmerized by Caravaggio’s light. This group, the “Caravaggioi,” appeared to embody Giordano Bruno’s dictum that “the artist alone is the creator of the rules, and rules exist just so far and are just so many as there are artists” (quoted by Spike, Caravaggio, 13). Ironically, however, Caravaggio restored central Renaissance human values (Spike, 7). In asserting his “individualism, sensuality, and unfettered inquiry into scientific and religious issues,” which were values central to the Renaissance, he invented a revolutionary style. Like Galileo he was a protégé of the philosopher and mathematician Guidobaldo del Monte Marquis del Monte, and like Galileo he collided with the church, his works accused of being profane, being committed as was Galileo to “raising one’s eyes to examine the works of Nature itself” rather than just “poring over the writings of others” (quoted by Spike, 130). 15. “Thought of, or done before by any other painter,” Mancini quoted by May, “Artifice,” 38; “startling naturalism,” Graham-Dixon, Caravaggio, 92–93; exalting the senses and the emotions, Martin, Baroque, 39. Light neither natural nor ideal but

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imaginatively real, Caravaggio found the rationale for this naturalism in Leonardo’s “Treatise on Painting.” (Caravaggio and Galileo were the “two minds that took the most stimulus from Leonardo’s manuscripts” after they came again to light in the 1580s.) However, he departs from Leonardo in rejecting the unity of tone and continuity of modeling, which was his principal innovation. That is, Caravaggio rejected gentle transitions from shadow to light that dominated Renaissance painting (Janis Bell, “Light and Color,” 141). Leonardo’s relation to light, that is, gives way to a new relation. “Let someone else imitate things . . . live and true,” Marzio Milesi, quoted by Robb, M, 175. 16. “Turbulent energy,” Plummer, Architecture, 8. Its innocence is deep. For example, in painting the Burial of Saint Lucy (1608), Caravaggio would have seized on the words of Saint Lucy’s chapter in The Golden Legend (a thirteenth-century collection of lives of the saints), which as John T. Spike says, “meant everything to an artist who held light sacred.” The chapter states, “Lucy means light. Light has beauty in its appearance; for by its nature all grace is in it, as Ambrose writes. It has also an unblemished effulgence; for it pours its beams on unclean places and yet remains clean” (quoted by Spike, Caravaggio, 216). And the light filtering through the penumbra of the Burial of Saint Lucy carries the same message as the beam of light in the painting that most resembles this one, the Calling of Saint Matthew. It is the “light of grace” (Spike, 216). Clearly, Caravaggio meditates in both on the theme of personal transformation. Bellori “attains a great force . . . light and shade,” quoted by Friedlander, Caravaggio Studies, 14 (cp. translation by Hibbard, Caravaggio, 364). Bellori reports that Caravaggio “painted all his figures with a single source of light and on one plane” and, second, “never showed any of his figures in open daylight, but instead found a way to place them in the darkness of a closed room, placing a lamp high so that the light would fall straight down, revealing the principal part of the body and leaving the rest in shadow so as to produce a powerful contrast of light and dark” (quoted by Hibbard, 344). Caravaggio’s art, that is, does not owe anything to the aesthetic of imitation. He does not intend for his light to compete with nature, evident from the fact, for example, that he does not account for the sources of his light (Bersani, “Beauty’s Light,” 25). The light of his radically naturalistic style is, in fact, as the art historian Suzanne May says, “relentlessly artificial”; it is an imagined light invented out of emotional need (but clearly not the ideal light of the Neoplatonists) (May, “Artifice,” 41). And Caravaggio’s paintings are “scandalous” for their rejection of the traditional representational goal. In his painting lies the “paradox of a type of representation that at once reveals and cancels its own law while the painting becomes simulacrum and thus ceases to be a re-presentation” (Marin, To Destroy, 102). That is, Caravaggio “made himself a slave to nature and not an imitator of beautiful things,” as Pietro Bellori said (1672) (quoted by Marin, 102). His painting is not about depth but surface; design is secondary (108) in Caravaggio’s “representing things as the eye sees them” not as the “geometrical mind conceptualizes them” (155), which is the opposite of Poussin’s Classical Renaissance aesthetic of imitation. Caravaggio’s work is an “excess of mimesis,” a radical naturalism. Representation or “imitation maintains the

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distance between the copy and the model,” while Caravaggio collapses this; there is no distance (like trompe l’oeil) (Marin, 100). Instead of copying the model, Caravaggio works at inhabiting the model, being light (identifying completely with his light sword). 17. For the true light source is his imagination, Graham-Dixon, Caravaggio, 232; within this scene of violence . . . painter painting, . . . actual and imagined light, Bersani, “Beauty’s Light,” 18–19, 21. 18. “Vehemence of light and shade,” Rzepinska, “Tenebrism,” 100, 106; “deep and terrible shadows,” “shocked,” “black box,” Marin, To Destroy, 162; “effect of stupefaction,” Marin, 160. Caravaggio’s style, which depends for its effect mainly on darkness interrupted by highlights that single out specific details, came to be called “tenebrism.” It had many imitators and is considered a distinguishing feature of the Baroque period in art. Caravaggio who virtually invented tenebrism was its most radical practitioner. For the roots of this and a theory about why tenebrism became so widespread, see Maria Rzepinska, “Tenebrism,” 100, 106, 112. For its centrality in Caravaggio’s work, see Louis Marin, To Destroy, 156–61. In a painting done the year before he died, The Raising of Lazarus (1608–1609), in which a “bitumen black” dominates the entire work (90 percent), the eruption of a low almost horizontal light into this “great pit of darkness” transforms the dead body into the living. Because Caravaggio had complete freedom in conception and execution in this painting, we know it was an extremely personal statement (Graham-Dixon, Caravaggio, 405; Robb, M, 450–51). 19. Four years before Caravaggio died he did another version of this scene, Supper at Emmaus (1606), which is more subdued and employs a light that has both an erupting and raking character free of violence. Hiding from his vengeful pursuers, Caravaggio had perhaps in his last days come to terms with the turbulent light haunting and giving hope throughout a besieged life, now appearing with uncharacteristic calmness. For a full treatment of this “peculiar linear radiance by which the figure of Christ is surrounded in some of Rembrandt’s works,” see H. M. Rotermund, “The Motif of Radiance in Rembrandt’s Biblical Drawings.” 20. Caravaggio’s relation to light, expressed with great power by the rhetoric of light and darkness he developed, “proved to be one of the most propelling forces in the history of art for centuries to come” (Friedlander, Caravaggio Studies, 14). His experience of light, that is, came to be that of the young artists who flocked to Rome from different parts of Europe and, more than imitating him, adopted his relation to light as their own. This had a greater personal impact on them than even his “social realism”; they were captured by his “luminarism” (14). For example, Georges de la Tour, like Caravaggio “ambitious, hard-dealing, violent, fairly unscrupulous and successful,” but unlike him never in the scene he paints (Berger, “La Tour,” 106–7), Diego Velázquez. Caravaggio’s relation to light extended into the Enlightenment with painters such as Joseph Wright of Derby and had an impact on later ages as well: the Romantic Age (e.g., Theodore Gericault) and the Modern (e.g., Scorsese’s Mean Streets) (Graham-Dixon, Caravaggio, 418). Fundamentally dark place . . . snatches of light, Arnheim, Art, 304.

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21. This could be a factor in Rembrandt’s lifelong fascination with the workings of light not only in the imaginary but in the actual world (Ernst van de Wetering, “Rembrandt van Rijn,” Encyclopedia Britannica). 22. “Logic of the concentrated light,” Field, Rembrandt, 10; levels of light intensity, Wetering, “Rembrandt van Rijn,” Encyclopedia Britannica. 23. The Rembrandt student D. M. Field reads his expression as “tentative,” other critics call it “timid” or even unsure, revealing uncertainty about his future as a painter (Rembrandt, 90). 24. “Possessed” Rembrandt, “governed him,” sometimes “betrayed him,” Fromentin, Masters, 202. Rembrandt’s ambiguous light hinting and insisting; Rudolf Arnheim notes, for example, that in The Holy Family (c. 1634) the light seems to emanate from the book that Mary is reading, not from any external divine source (Art and Visual Perception, 314). 25. “Luminarist,” “conceived light . . . laws,” “unusual meaning” “great sacrifices to it,” Fromentin, Masters, 202. 26. “Laws,” “naturalistic,” penetrate their surfaces, Frohlich, “Locations,” 52. 27. “Atmosphere of consciousness,” Martin, Baroque, 246; “supreme depicter of inwardness,” Robert Hughes, “The God of Realism,” The New York Review of Books (April 6, 2006): 10. Rembrandt expresses this ambiguous liminal light, using mere pigments, as a “textured light.” Appearing as both material and ephemeral, it is substance (paint) and reverie (dream). He accomplishes this by employing thick impasto to “describe light,” the real imaginative light of his experience, a white built up in thick layers to reflect natural light and cast shadows (Guirnius, Rembrandt’s Spaces, 231, 243, 245–46). Rembrandt habitually reveals the materiality of his glow light by layers of scumble, glazes, and impastos, so that the painting becomes almost heavy with “elaborate substance.” This creates a “dialectical tension” between an immaterial light and the material of the oil paint. We feel the light struggling with objects and vice versa, which tend to catch and hold the light, to violate its very nature as fleet and render it static (Frohlich, “Locations,” 52). 28. “Mere shadow” and “actual presence,” Girnius, Rembrandt’s Spaces, 236; “reading” its elusive glow, Girnius, 237–239; relation to light, Bal, Reading Rembrandt, 166. 29. “Unusual meaning,” “eccentric,” “extraordinarily strange . . . not the natural light of things,” Fromentin, Masters, 188. Rembrandt’s placement of glow and the distribution of its levels are inseparable from its “unusual” meaning. In Susanna and the Elders (1647), for example, the distribution of lights and darks determines the line of sight from one elder to the other, then his eyes to Susanna (Bal, Reading Rembrandt, 166), telling us that we as viewers are participants. And Rembrandt was able to produce the appearance of large shifts in luminance not actually present. A naturalistic-imaginative light, that is, with major implications for meaning, as in Joseph Accused by Potiphar’s Wife (1655), where the woman and the young man are illuminated but not the older man in the shadows. Joseph and the wife look intense but inwardly not at anyone. She stares at the “inner vision” of her desire, while Joseph’s eyes are turned slightly toward the viewer. The story becomes her fantasy as the painting drifts away from the biblical story (Bal, 46–48).

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Rembrandt expresses his “glowing luminosity” by manipulating relative brightness and minimizing shadow. This is possible because the language of light is primarily about the handling of luminance. By varying luminance contrasts and modulating luminance itself, the painter can express nuances of his experience of light (Livingstone, Vision and Art, 115). Giving an object a certain absolute brightness, for example, but in addition placing it in context of even greater brightness, a level beyond that set by the overall field. “Providing more brightness than we’d expect,” that is, “given the light distribution overall in the field,” as well as being “associated with a lack of surface texture.” So we experience objects as receiving light, as if from some outer force, at the same time as radiating light, being the light source itself (Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, 314–15). 30. “Being born in an age more curious than devout,” quoted by Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse, 12, 55. Within the period we move from the Jesuit scholar and natural philosopher Athanasius Kircher’s assertion derived from Aristotle that colors are the “deeds and afflictions of light” (quoted by Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, 338) to Newton’s conviction, derived from the extension of his experience by experiment, that colors are simply the rays of light bending variably (i.e., refracted). Yet Newton’s commitment to the light of reason, as well as to the Christian faith and biblical prophecy, is paralleled during the same period by the Quakers’ to the “inward light” of God. 31. William B. Ashworth maintains that this was largely owing to a shift in mindset away from the “emblematic natural history” that dominated the Renaissance, the “belief that every kind of thing in the cosmos has myriad hidden meanings and that knowledge consists of an attempt to comprehend as many of these as possible” (quoted by Bono, “From Paracelsus to Newton,” 49). Nothing could be isolated for study, that is, and inquiry could not be limited to the phenomenon itself, assumptions that both Vermeer and Newton rejected. James J. Bono corrects and broadens Ashworth’s thesis, saying that they participated in a transformation of the “culture of the ‘Word.’” The Book of Nature for them is more and less than the language of God. It was reconfigured so that the “‘World’ no longer ‘reflects’ the divine Word as a mimetic image. It is now a “contingent expression of an all-powerful Word,” which is “not constrained to reflect its (incomprehensible) essence.” While Newton’s “world is a world ‘beyond’ the emblematic world view, it is nonetheless a world of symbols, biblical narratives, and prophecy.” Although Newton “had crossed the great divide separating emblematic natural history from modern science, his is still a culture of the Book,” as his “work and practices remain embedded in the metaphoric contexts of the ‘Book of Nature’ and the ‘Word of God’” (Bono, 73, 75). 32. Their renewed commitment to disinterested observation also leads to a diminishment in the status of received authority and the elevating of the human and natural worlds. Not that Newton was a thoroughgoing materialist, for he considered his writings in alchemy, scriptural interpretation, and theology as important as his work in natural philosophy (see Robert Iliffe, “Newton’s Religious Life and Work,” The Newton Project, http:​//​www​.newtonproject​.ox​.ac​.uk​/view​/contexts​/CNTX00001; and Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017]). And, analogously, although Vermeer turns from biblical scenes to

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everyday domestic scenes to extend his experience of light by experiments in paint, he hints at spiritual dimensions imbricate within these. Caravaggio and Rembrandt had shared the skepticism of their contemporaries Galileo (1564–1626), who elevated the “humble reasoning of a single individual,” and Francis Bacon (1561–1626), who insisted that men “must go to the facts themselves for everything” (Varriano quoted by Hunt, Caravaggio, vii). To a large extent this accounts for their going outside accepted laws in the interpretation of their light experience and creating its personal, seemingly “unusual” meaning. 33. “Universal statement of fact,” Shapin, Scientific Revolution, 81–82. Vermeer’s acquaintance Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695), the famous Dutch mathematician and scientist who lived about ten miles from him, exploited artificial experience gained by the ingenious use of lenses, which resulted in his Treatise on Light (1690). He was a friend of Leeuwenhoek’s (Huerta, Giants of Delft, 106; Snyder, Eye of the Beholder, 173–74), whom Vermeer probably knew, and Christiaan’s father Constantin (1596– 1687) the poet and diplomat had been one of the first to champion Rembrandt’s work. This new understanding of experience involves a necessary and concomitant cultural change in the status of the natural world and how to “read” it. These changes, as Steven Shapin suggests, ultimately brought about the mechanization (increased use of mechanical metaphors for natural processes) and depersonalization (increased separation between the human subject and natural object) of nature. Also, the formalization of method “aimed at managing or eliminating the effects of human passions and interests” played a major role in this shift, as well as the related aspirations of using results to achieve “moral, social, and political ends,” based on mutual agreement that the knowledge was useful but above all “disinterested” (Shapin, Scientific Revolution, 13; emphasis in original). This combination of historical changes gradually brought about in his view a scientific mindset, though not what he would call a “revolution.” But what occurred, in fact, was a revolution as David Wootton demonstrates. The changes that Shapin notes were the result of nothing short of a revolution roughly between 1600 and 1733 in which magic gave way to science, myth to fact (Wootton, Invention, 11). Wootton shows us that a “revolution in ideas requires a revolution in language,” such as the introduction of the pivotal new word “discovery.” And this revolution in language, including new notions of the word “experience” and “fact,” is thus the best “evidence that there really was a revolution in science.” This new science being principally about one thing, “the triumph of experience over philosophy,” which gave the scientists tools for “handling evidence,” called at the time “experience” (Wootton, 48–49, 567; for an overview of Shapin’s and the relativists’ position who claim that the history of science is “constructed” purely within a particular social community, rather than an actual historical occurrence, namely, the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century, see Wootton, 43–48). 34. “Investigator of visible nature,” Samuel Van Hoogstraten, quoted by Snyder, Eye of the Beholder, 8, 310–311; Huerta, Giants of Delft, 106. Vermeer’s studio was a laboratory, in effect, for investigations. A room in his home, it faced north with some light being reflected from a little canal beside the street, “ideal conditions” for a painter desiring “steady light,” a controlled environment (Jelley, Traces, 19). “I’d give the whole . . . for Vermeer,” Picasso, quoted by Pops, Vermeer, 99.

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35. “Light season,” Swillens, Johannes Vermeer, 148; “difficult” to explain, Jelley, Traces, 158. 36. Vermeer presents here a woman in thought as earlier Rembrandt had presented a man in Portrait of Jan Six (1654), but who is looking outwardly at the painter in contrast to Vermeer’s subject. Although Caravaggio was an early influence, Rembrandt the master of introspection became an enduring influence. Vermeer’s The Milkmaid (c. 1658–1660), his most innovative early work, initiates his mature phase in the 1660s (Westermann, “Vermeer,” 221, 225, 229). His works from the end of the 1660s to his death in 1675 are less contemplative and detailed, more stylized and abstract (Alejandro Vergara, “Vermeer,” 207). 37. “Weighing and balancing of light itself,” Snow, Study, 62; wondrously diffused light of day, Dupont, Seventeenth Century, 107. 38. Seems to be pregnant, though we cannot be certain, Wheelock, Vermeer & the Art of Painting, 100, 196 n. 9–11; “The light so long . . . / . . . dear child, to thee,” quoted by Lisa Vergara, “Perspectives V,” 61; Vermeer does not project himself . . . the way that Caravaggio and Rembrandt did, Wheelock, Vermeer & the Art of Painting, 2. 39. Swillens, JV, 143. Significantly, the painting by his contemporary Pieter de Hooch (1629–1684), A Woman Weighing Gold, on which Vermeer bases his painting depicts a papered wall behind the woman. Vermeer replaces this with a light wall and de Hooch’s gold with light itself (Wheelock, Johannes Vermeer, exhibition catalog, 142–43). 40. Dense but soft light, Bal, “Light in Painting,” 53; “appear illuminated from within,” for example, his contemporary Gerard ter Borsch (1617–1681), known for the light of his interior scenes; light is his principal subject, Jelley, Traces, 162. 41. Wall’s substance, but . . . denies it, Gowing, Vermeer, 25; the only one there is, Blankert, Vermeer, 10; all is vanity, Snow, Study, 132; moved from its original position, Bal, “Light in Painting,” 57. 42. “Realism,” “directness,” Gifford, “Painting Light,” 185; “actual,” Swillens, Johannes Vermeer, 71–72, 115; verisimilitude of light, Pops, Vermeer, 98; “play of light,” Gowing, Vermeer, 61. Vermeer’s light speaks to our immediate experience, as it did to the character Bergotte in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past who, knowing he was about to die, seeks out a favorite gallery and one of Vermeer’s paintings. Staring at a remembered light in it, he repeats, “this little patch of yellow wall . . . little patch of yellow wall” (quoted by Koerner, “First Among Equals,” 11). 43. The aim of Vermeer’s “realism” is in part to deceive the eye, providing patrons with a different pleasure than the imitation that produced naturalism, and instead the recognition of the familiar and wonder at its recreation, such as the behavior of light. He presented them with his own delight in the “sheen of silk fabrics, the gleam of metal and pottery,” his eye captured by the “bright frosting” of the panes in the windows and the “glint on the surface of a pearl” (Jelley, Traces, 162). It is interesting that contemporary Chinese painting moves in the opposite direction. Wu Li (1632–1718) said at the time that Chinese painting “does not aim at likeness.” Rather its goal is “spiritual” and is thus not concerned with “shadows and

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light” (quoted by Cahill, Compelling Image, 35). The European painting’s chiaroscuro shocked the Chinese painter. There were exceptions, such as Chang Hung (1577–c. 1652), who could have been influenced by European painting and who pursued a descriptive naturalism counter to tradition (e.g., his Wind in the Pines at Mount Kon-sh’u, 1650). But his practice was rejected by painters to follow owing to the powerful antinaturalistic tradition in China, which had discredited the “faithful rendering of nature” centuries before. Artists who attempted naturalism were condemned as “slaves of nature.” Though “objective investigation” had arisen in the tenth and fourteenth centuries, they turned from it and cultivated “subjective experience and intuitive knowledge” (Cahill, 13, 34–35). 44. To see where the light in his work came from, Pops, Vermeer, 26. But as Svetlana Alpers points out, this can be misleading because the “reality effect,” so fundamental to Dutch art, is intended to be central: “Painters make paintings, not meanings.” The wall map, for example, in Vermeer’s Art of Painting is not an allusion to the vanity of the world but a “piece of painting.” Painting and mapping were closely related at the time (“Picturing,” 57). And Arthur Wheelock reminds us that although “realism” was an “all-pervading concept” in Dutch art of the time, lying at the heart of practice and theory, it is more and less than Vermeer’s precisely accurate description in paint of maps and musical instruments, his meticulous rendering of textures and the effects of light and shadow. These are bound up with mood and the viewer’s psychology. Although the idea was to “simulate reality in painting,” such as the shadow of a nail in the wall of a room, Vermeer is selective. He doesn’t depict in his painting all the shadows that the curtain, for example, in the foreground of a couple of his paintings would cast in reality (Wheelock, Jan Vermeer, 28, 30, 32–33). Vermeer, in fact, often subordinated “reality” to truth, violating the optical logic of light in order to manipulate it in expressing the relation of women as well as himself to light, as in The Milkmaid (Wheelock, Vermeer & the Art of Painting, 65). In the interests of manipulation for investigatory precision and accurately expressing his discoveries in paint he also employed a popular device of the day, the “camera obscura,” precursor of the modern camera (for a full discussion of its relation to painting in the age, see Delsaute, “Camera Obscura”; and specifically to Vermeer, Snyder, Eye of the Beholder, and Jelley, Traces). As Vermeer searched for the means to capture his relation to light and express its nuanced character, this device with its adjustable lens and mirrors that enabled him to project a scene onto a viewing screen in its top provided suggestions as to how the eye perceives, such as the constricted framing of an image and the activity of “specular highlights” flickering across the surfaces of objects, which at times he imitated (Wheelock, Vermeer & the Art of Painting, 68–69). But he did not employ the camera obscura directly in his making of a picture (Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-Century, 169). 45. “Fall of light at a single moment,” Blankert, Vermeer, 94; “warm, fluid . . . the room,” “light of childhood,” Charles De Tolnay (1953), quoted by Blankert, 219. 46. Even objective contemplation, Swillens, Johannes Vermeer, 147. In Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (c. 1657), for example, Vermeer originally included a large painting of a standing cupid on the wall but in the final version removed it. Thus

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he deliberately exposes the wall of light, creating an unbroken vision of luminance behind the window, girl, table, and curtain (Netta, “Phenomenon,” 260). 47. Rembrandt’s most gifted student Carel Fabritius (1622–1654), who may have taught Vermeer, in The Goldfinch (1654) places the bird against a luminous wall that dominates, but pits the stillness of the wall against the live bird. An uncharacteristic work of his, this drama is far from the interaction of Vermeer’s liminal wall and his silent women. Some of Vermeer’s contemporaries include a light wall in their paintings, as does Pieter de Hooch (1629–1684) in his Woman with a Baby on Her Lap (1658) and Caspar Netscher (1639–1684) in The Lacemaker (1662). But the former’s wall recedes in sections, as it does typically in his work, thereby deemphasizing it, and while light enters the interior space it seems that the woman is unrelated to the light and vice versa. And the latter’s wall, nearly unique in his work, is interrupted by a wrinkled print carelessly attached to it, a distraction. By contrast, Vermeer in his Woman with a Pearl Necklace removes a map he had on the wall in a previous version (see the autoradiograph, Wieseman, “Vermeer’s Women: Secrets and Silence,” 14; white-plastered expanse, Wheelock, Vermeer & the Art of Painting, 67). The light wall in De Hooch’s Soldiers Playing Cards (c. 1657–1658) could well have been influenced by Vermeer, though lacking the self-contained radiance of his. Such walls were rare in seventeenth-century paintings with bourgeois interiors. But about 20 percent of Vermeer’s works feature this wall and dominate the 1660s when he did his most important paintings, which requires an explanation. Most of these works present the light wall boldly and share a “luminous, silvery tonality” while including a woman engaged in a domestic task (Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-Century, 170, 172). 48. See Arthur Wheelock, Vermeer: The Complete Works, plates 5–6, 9–12, 14–20, 22, 27–30, 34–35: A Woman Asleep (c. 1657, more than one wall), Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (c. 1657), The Milkmaid (c. 1658–1660), The Glass of Wine (c. 1658–1660, wall darkened), The Girl with Her Wineglass (c. 1659–1660, darkened), Girl Interrupted at Her Music (c. 1660–1661, darkened), A Lady at the Virginal With a Gentleman (aka The Music Lesson, c. 1662–1664), Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (c. 1663–1664), Woman Holding a Balance (c. 1664), Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (c. 1664–1665), Woman with a Lute (c. 1664), Woman with a Pearl Necklace (c. 1664–1665), A Lady Writing (c. 1665–1666, darkened), The Concert (c. 1665–1666), The Geographer, (c. 1668–1669), The Astronomer (1668), The Lacemaker (c. 1669–1670, textured wall), The Guitar Player (c. 1670, shadowed wall), A Lady Standing at the Virginal (c. 1672–1673), and A Lady Seated at the Virginal (c. 1675, darkened). 49. We must keep in mind that the houses of the urban elite, such as Vermeer’s father, were “constructed side by side in deep narrow plots with windows only at the front and rear of the building,” which admitted natural light through tall leaded glass windows. What light reached the inner rooms was by means of windows cut in their walls through which light from adjacent, better lit rooms could enter. Although sometimes a small interior courtyard provided light to rooms in the middle of the house (Wieseman, “Vermeer’s Women: Secrets and Silence,” 20, 21, 23, 26).

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Vermeer participates in a Dutch tradition of painting domestic interiors, the cultural space assigned to women, but he is original in that he reduces the iconological signs and moral allusions in his paintings, keys to interpretation that his audience was accustomed to, rejecting anecdotes and focusing on the “psychological state of the figure depicted” (Alejandro Vergara, “Vermeer,” 206) For this reason, his interiors do not necessarily match the typical bourgeois room, such as his depicting a floor of marble tile in The Art of Painting (c. 1666–1667), which was rare and then generally found only in the entranceway (Vergara, 215). He is most original, of course, in his absolute focus not only on women, “prosperous, private, morally upstanding, and self-aware,” but on their relation to light (Westermann, “Vermeer,” 228). 50. Self-possessed as the light wall itself, Alpers, Art of Describing, 224. While Vermeer, at the height of his powers in the 1660s, was investigating light and its relation to a woman within the confines of a domestic interior, his contemporary Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/9–1682) in Amsterdam during the same period was exploring the sky over the flat countryside near Haarlem. His skies were, among others, what Gombrich had in mind when he said the Dutch were the first in the history of art to discover the “beauty of the sky” (Gombrich, The Story of Art, 329). Beauty owing to its light, as Ruisdael explores light under different weather conditions, as in Wheatfields and Mill at Wijk bij Duurstede (late 1660s). His concern is with light in relation to cloudscape and landscape. In the Wheatfields earth and sky converge on a pool of light where a distant woman and child stand holding hands. This could be merely a vehicle for sentiment and to a contemporary audience would invoke the grace of God as it penetrates the darkness of the world, creating spaces of comforting and redeeming light (Walford, Jacob van Ruisdael, 146). However, Ruisdael avoids sentimentality and goes beyond conventional symbolism by expressing an earned serenity as he brings the light on the clouds into relationship with the light on the wheat fields. In the Mill he also goes beyond the emblematic in the way the sails of the windmill seem to send light into the sky, a light that returns to them (151), as if the windmill mediates the light on our behalf, despite threatening storms. His is a reassuring light generously dispersed, in contrast to Vermeer’s strictly focused self-contained light. Ever the relentless investigator, Vermeer is more interested in revealing unknown aspects of light’s character than in comforting himself and his audience. 51. Painstakingly putting down various grounds, that is, complexly layering his paints, often applying one over the other before the previous has dried (“wet-in-wet”) as well as using impastos and translucent glazes. On technique, see Arthur Wheelock on individual paintings (Vermeer: The Complete Works, 24; Vermeer & the Art of Painting, 66–68) and Gifford (“Painting Light,” 190, 194–95). 52. Arthur Danto makes this distinction (Madonna and the Future, 187–89). 53. “Self-contained luminescence,” “come from the painting itself,” quoted by Blankert, Vermeer, 216; “illuminate anything other than itself,” Danto, Madonna and the Future, 188. 54. As one critic wonders, Danto, Madonna and the Future, 186; pose itself having fluidity, Wheelock, Vermeer: The Complete Works, 38. 55. contain more light than it receives, Danto, Madonna and the Future, 187.

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56. “Flowing rhythms of her arms,” Wheelock, Vermeer & the Art of Painting, 105–6; act revealing the existence of an inner life, Wieseman, “Vermeer’s Women: Secrets and Silence,” 40. 57. Self-contained light of the wall drifting, Wheelock, Johannes Vermeer, exhibition catalog, 148, and Vermeer & the Art of Painting, 110; light wall welcomes her contemplative being, Wheelock, Vermeer: The Complete Works, 38. It is this experience we are confronted with. At some remove from its light this painting may be a religious metaphor or simply a scene from domestic life, but what we can’t avoid is the relationships with light before us. The meaning of Vermeer’s paintings is inseparable from this relationship. Arthur Danto insists, however, that the light in Vermeer’s interiors is “close in kind and meaning” to the “church light peculiar to the Netherlands.” This is a “bestowed light—light through which some higher being makes itself palpable and present” streaming through the clear glass of the Dutch Reformed churches (although Vermeer was a convert to Catholicism) and captured in the paintings of Saenredam and de Witte (Madonna and the Future, 188). 58. “Undertone of suspense,” lyrically suggestive light, Dupont, Seventeenth Century, 108–10. 59. No fixed meaning any more than . . . anecdote, Bal, “Light in Painting,” 49, 54. 60. For Vermeer’s linking of science and art in their “common focus on the techniques of observation” and his embracing of the geographer and astronomer who remind us that science and art join in the new culture of “reliance on the mind,” see Stone, Tables, 3–5, 14–18. Leeuwenhoek’s words about optical devices, namely his microscope, would have resonated with Vermeer: “By diligent labor one discovers matters that could not be discerned before.” Also, Leeuwenhoek was passionate about the camera obscura (Westermann, “Vermeer and the Interior Imagination,” 226–27), a portable version of which became available in the sixteenth century. The image of a scene was projected via a converging lens on a ground glass screen where it could be viewed (Delsaute, “Camera Obscura,” 111). Vermeer’s paintings from c. 1660, when he was twenty-eight, demonstrate that he used this device (Snyder, Eye of the Beholder, 144). He did not trace the image, but he learned from it new ways of looking. His paintings show evidence of this in his differentiation in the depth of field and use of “hazy halos” of light around natural highlights that can’t be seen by the naked eye, such as those he indicates by little touches of impasto white on the loaf of bread in The Milkmaid (151). Huygens whose discovery of a satellite of Saturn (published 1656) affected Vermeer “profoundly” (Huerta, Giants of Delft, 106) was so excited about the camera obscura, he declared that “the art of painting is dead,” for its projected image is “life itself.” Vermeer may have taken these words as a challenge, pushing him toward a “greater optical realism” (Delsaute, “Camera Obscura,” 115). Huerta regards the work of Christiaan Huygens as one of the “most important factors” in Vermeer’s “choice of the optical way” (Huerta, Giants, 106). 61. A presence isolated from past and future, Blankert, Vermeer, 11; “marvels of Light,” Huygens, Treatise on Light, 552. Light consisted of elements and gravity united the heavens and earth (Principia, 1687), which established the authority of science. Experiment was one thing but following Bacon and Descartes, Newton crystallized an essential investigative approach, which constituted the ethos of science:

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conjecture, experiment, criticism. So powerful was this and so radically influential that he has been called the “chief architect of the modern world” (Gleick, Isaac Newton, 3). “Nature and Nature’s laws . . . all was light,” Alexander Pope, “Epitaph, Intended for Sir Isaac Newton” (1730). 62. “Dyals of divers forms,” quoted by Levy, Newton’s Notebook, 23; neighbors came to consult with him, Westfall, Never at Rest, 62. 63. There is considerable debate about when Newton got his prism and first conducted his experiments (see Westfall, Never at Rest, 156–57 and n. 47 and 50; and Gleick, Isaac Newton, 214, n. 5). For a full discussion of Newton’s two pivotal prism experiments, see David Park, Fire Within, 198–203, and David Wootton, The Invention of Science, 381–83. “He retained his custom . . . where the shade of the sun fell,” quoted by Christianson, In the Presence, 14, and related by Westfall, Never at Rest, 62; “very pleasing divertissement, . . . produced thereby,” “after a while applying myself . . . surprised to see them in an oblong form,” quoted by Park, Fire Within, 200, emphasis in original, and see Fig 7.8; perfect circle as Descartes, Christianson, Isaac Newton, 31; embraced the oblong, Wootton, Invention, 382–83. 64. “And so . . . length of that Image,” “detected to be no other . . . differently refrangible,” quoted by Park, Fire Within, 202. 65. “Crucial experiment,” Clegg, Light Years, 100. He resolved to move in this direction, from observation to explanation, in his first year as an undergraduate at Trinity when he purchased a notebook that he devoted to “Certain Philosophical Questions,” areas of investigation, which included the entry “Light.” Its “divertissement,” “The most surprising, . . . composition,” “that of Whiteness . . . Colours,” quoted by Sabra, Theories of Light, 240; achieve the rainbow image as they would a work of art, Epstein and Greenberg, “Decomposing,” 117. 66. “I understand light to be an entity, . . . able to excite vision,” quoted by Park, Fire Within, 207. 67. “Oddest detection . . . operations of nature,” quoted by I. Bernard Cohen in Kepes, Light, 7. Newton consistently blurred the line between “strictly experimental propositions and the particular interpretation of white light which he attached to them” (Sabra, Theories of Light, 233). This caused confusion in his critics, such as Robert Hooke (1635–1703) and Christiaan Huygens, and criticism to be lodged that was not entirely justified. But his tendency to blur fact and interpretation demonstrates the force of interpretation framed by core experience and received tradition. The complexity and power of his experience of light revealed in his metaphoric interpretation of it, posing in the Optics of 1706 a question, rather than making an assertion: “Are not light rays very small bodies emitted from shining surfaces” (Bk. III, Pt. 1, Qu., 29). Granted, his question is rhetorical, and he gives it force by several arguments to support the “projectile theory,” rejecting the wave hypothesis, but he is acutely aware that this interpretation of his experience is metaphoric. An interpretation that does not harden and lodge in the general imagination until four years later with John Harris’s Lexicon Technicum where Newton’s query becomes a positive statement about the nature of light (Cantor, “Weighing the Light,” 132). Clearly, as Geoffrey Cantor concludes, metaphor is “constitutive of scientific discourse” (Cantor,

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142, emphasis in original). Blake almost a century later understood this, using another metaphor, saying that “Newton’s Particles of Light” are grains of sand (The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970], 469). And we will see about a century after Blake that Einstein understood the interpretive, constitutive role of metaphor. 68. “Intimate style,” “gentle English,” Bronowski, Common Sense, 14; composed “substance” and indeterminate “force,” Ponzio, “Light, Being,” 60. Newton read widely in historical and contemporary alchemical literature, pursuing this study as methodically as his scientific research. By the early seventeenth century, the alchemical use of celestial rays and sunlight was in practice a religious and theurgical ritual, such as Ficino had devised, based on what the alchemists called an “alchemy of light,” a mix of philosophy and mystical thought from Pythagorean geometry, Neoplatonism, medieval optics, and Paracelsian alchemy and cabbalism. Ficino had ignored Plotinus’s rejection of hermeticism as superstition and integrated both Neoplatonism and hermeticism in his vision as an anticipation of Christianity (Szulakowska, Alchemy of Light, xi–xii, 33), which no doubt would have had some appeal to Newton. 69. Newton pushed geometry into the physical, Bronowski, Common Sense, 25. The fullest discussion of this history is Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s in Newton Demands the Muse (1946; 1966). And John Arthos documents the influence of science on the poet’s vocabulary in his Language of Natural Description. For the discourse of scientists and theologians following Newton, see Geoffrey Cantor, “Light and Enlightenment: An Exploration of Mid-Eighteenth-Century Modes of Discourse” (1985). “impersonal naturalism,” being a “shock,” Weinberg, To Explain the World, 245–46. Abraham Cowley (1618–1667) foreshadows the new relationship with light and the psychological conflict that accompanied it in his “Hymn. To Light” (1668) (Complete Works, 166). Newton does not give his first Optical Lectures until 1670, but in the penultimate stanza of Cowley’s poem light’s stream is of “Colours mingled, Light, a thick and standing Lake” (25) on earth, which reflects the “unbounded Day” of heaven. The poet echoes Milton’s proem to Book III of Paradise Lost published the year before, but Milton looks back to the light- \ experience of an earlier age, while Cowley proleptically looks forward to a new experience. For the pre-Newton experience, reprising that of the Middle Ages, see John Donne’s sermon written forty-seven years earlier (St. Paul’s, Christmas day, 1621) on the text of John 1:8 (Sermons, 132, 134–35, 143, 146–47, 150, 153). Cowley’s contemporary the physician-poet Henry Vaughan (1621–1695) in the opening of his famous poem “The World” (from Silex Scintillans, Part I) looks back farther, incorporating elements of the Neoplatonic cosmology of light (Hamilton, Three Worlds, 164): “I Saw Eternity the other night / Like a great Ring of pure and endless light, / All calm, as it was bright, / And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years / . . . Like a vast shadow mov’d.” Yet Newton would have fully understood his theological interests as well as his brother Thomas’s alchemical pursuits. Like Henry Vaughan, the scientist suspected that light was the life force animating the cosmos (Hamilton, 165). 70. “Ev’n Light itself . . . / Of parent colours,” quoted by Nicolson, Newton Demands, 12; changing attitudes, Turbayne, Myth of Metaphor, 214. The poet Richard Savage (c. 1697–1743) in The Wanderer, influenced by Thomson, reveres the

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dazzling “promiscuous white” light of the sun, but experiences it as fundamentally composite, extolling its prismatic colors in and of themselves (quoted by Nicolson, Newton Demands, 25). That is, taken as was Newton by the “Whiteness” of light, but one necessarily “compounded.” 71. “How beauteous the refractive law,” quoted by Nicolson, Newton Demands, 43; “sage-instructed eye,” The Seasons, II, 209. In the “Summer” section of The Seasons Thomson is “concerned not only with light, but with excess of light,” a pleasure-pain experience. The “parent sun” of summer can “tyrannize” with its “ardent blaze,” a “beauty blasting” (quoted by Nicolson, 112). That is, his light experience is a “sublime” one in eighteenth-century terms, “awesome” in the sense of terror mixed with wonder. The experience of summer light’s beauty is a mix of “majesty and terror” (Nicolson, 113).

Chapter 4

Sublime Light The Age of Revolution

Newton wrote his book on light in English rather than the traditional Latin because he wanted to reach a wide audience. And at the turn of the seventeenth century, Optics (1704) took the Age of Enlightenment by storm. His experience of light became that of many philosophers, divines, and poets. Newton’s dispassionate, disinterested relationship with light came to dominate the age among the educated classes as only religion had previously. Yet this distance from light with its implicit alienation from nature caused unease in some. The English divine William Law (1686–1761) adamantly sought to retain the “magical power” with which the word “light” had long been charged. He opposed the mechanical view of Newton as well as the philosophy of John Locke (1632–1704) in which the word was stripped of any transcendental import.1 Law’s defense of mystery against reason reflected a deep divide in the eighteenth century, and by the turn of the next century this alienation broke into the open. With the industrial and political revolutions between 1760 and 1850 came a revolution in the relation to nature, including light. THE SUBLIME LIGHT A hundred years after the Optics was published the English poet and painter William Blake (1757–1827) countered Newton’s experience with his “first Vision of Light.” The poet-painter regarded Newton’s system as a purely physical entity constructed by reason rather than imagination. Blake in agreement with Law rejects Newton’s material world, light accessible only by the senses. Feeling the force of Newton’s mechanical metaphors, promulgated by the “Schools & Universities of Europe,” Blake reacts. Turning Thomson’s untwisting-of-the-robe metaphor against Newton, he proclaims in his Milton 123

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(1804–1808), we must be able to “cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration” and “clothe” ourselves “with imagination.” By “memory,” antithesis of imagination, Blake means the chaos of unconstrained reason that posits the machinery of an empty universe blindly revolving in obedience to “laws.” This is why Newton’s “Particles of light,” Blake says, are just dead grains of sand on the seashore where reality, the living imagination, pitches its “bright tent.”2 William Blake and Francisco Goya Pitching their bright tent, together these artists, the poet in an England fearing war with France, the painter in a Spain seeing an invasion by France, “announce” by the force of their imagination a “major turn” in Western history and a new relationship with light. William Blake counters Newton with his “first Vision of Light.” The poet experiences this while living at Felpham (1800–1803), a village on the south coast of West Sussex. Sitting on the sandy beach in the “Light of Morning,” he sees “In particles bright / The jewels of Light” that shone “distinct” and “clear,” an imaginative transformation of what Blake considers to be Newton’s “dead” particles and a liberation from his powerful scientific metaphor. “Amazd & in fear,” Blake “gazed” at “each particle.” And in a letter to Thomas Butts (October 2, 1800) he says that he was “Astonishd Amazed / For each was a Man / Human formd.” An intimate engagement, his relationship with light is with a friend, not an alien.3 In Blake’s view Newton’s philosophy causes a split in the era between nature and man, the perceived and perceiver. The poet counters this with “vision,” which is not another “world” but this world viewed differently. Blake’s visionary mode of perception assumes the union of observer and observed, a relation embraced by the Revolutionary Era. As one contemporary admirer of his poems, S. T. Coleridge, said, “in looking at objects of Nature,” such as the “moon dim-glimmering” through a “dewy window-pane,” he feels that the act of perception consists in “something within me that already and forever exists” than in “observing anything new.” There is in his “brainfibres” something that seems to him like the “visible Light” he often sees in the phosphorescence emitted by “rotten mackerel.”4 What Coleridge experiences as an activity “within” his brain prior to the act of observation Blake calls “Imagination.” For without this, he says, nature has no “Outline,” nothing “Distinct” as in his vision of light. For Blake our relation to nature is bound up with seeing, for “to the eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination Itself: As a man is, So he Sees.” Newton the experimental scientist, Blake believes, discounts the fact that perception is an imaginative activity.5 This had been intuited earlier in the century, as I’ve hinted, but it is now self-consciously acknowledged, marking a major turn in

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history and shaping Revolutionary-Era consciousness.6 For Blake, Newton’s abstract and mechanical reason splits nature from humanity, the perceived light of day from the light in the perceiver’s “brain-fibres.” To heal this split inherited from the Enlightenment, the Revolutionary Era embraces an engaged rather than dispassionate relationship with nature. In so doing the era encounters a light whose character makes what the age would call a “sublime” impression. Its manifest energy is the heart of this experience of light, having the power to connect the physical and the human worlds. This is an indirect, unstable vibrating light, which J. M. W. Turner calls a “light reactive of Reflection,” such as we see from a running stream or dewy sky. Its reflected/refracted character thus exhibits what he terms a “double property.” By contrast, as we saw in the last chapter, the Enlightenment experience was of a stable direct light of day (Vermeer’s and Newton’s) that entailed a disinterested relationship.7 Emotionally affecting, the era called this experience of a “reactive” light “sublime,” demanding engagement rather than forcing alienation. Its engine was a manifest energy never before experienced. Unsettling in its beauty and force, it kindled in the observer powerful emotions. Edmund Burke (1729–1797) in his extremely influential essay Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) says such emotion is the mark of the sublime. Anything that “operates in a manner analogous to terror,” he declares, is a “source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” The sublime, then, does not reside in objects or events but in their effect on us. The uncanny brightness of grains of sand produces in Blake a sublime experience.8 It is this energy of imaginative response, as in his vision of light as a human figure that redeems the physical world, connecting us to nature, as it does the poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and the painter J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851).9 William Blake’s experience in England is complemented by that of the Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746–1828). The beautiful energy of Blake’s visionary, sublime light promises to heal the Enlightenment’s alienation from nature. The fearful energy of Goya’s sublime light, however, threatens to plunge him deeper into separation from nature as well as alienation from humanity. Both artists transform Enlightenment metaphors, as we would expect, revising the Enlightenment commitment to objectivity and reason. Just as Blake transformed Newton’s “particle” metaphor, Goya transforms the “En[light]enment” metaphor itself, calling into question “reason” by revealing its inner darkness. In consequence, history takes a turn. As the renowned early twentieth-century art historian and critic Bernard Berenson exclaimed on seeing Goya’s work for the first time, “And now modern painting begins.”

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Begins in the Revolutionary Era, that is, with Blake’s light vision answer to Newton’s vision of the cosmic machine and with Goya’s new experience of light born of personal and social crises.10 Where Blake’s vision of light was triggered by an internal psychological crisis, Goya’s central experience of light was triggered by an external physical one. The disastrous invasion of Spain by Napoleon in 1808 when Goya was sixty-two that killed many of his countrymen and threatened his own life precipitated a radical change in his painting. The early “theatrical lighting” of his tapestry cartoons disappears and his brushwork becomes “harsh and jagged,” suggesting his engagement with a new light. This shift arises from a deepening experience of alienation, which began with his total deafness at forty-six, fueled by his impotent rage at Spain’s descent into violence. Blake admits to a “nervous fear” of the war that France threatened, but Goya found himself in it. The fearful energy of his light is thus “merciless.”11 In Goya’s famous painting Third of May (1808), a scene of execution, he expresses his experience of this fearful light. The autonomous energy of this sublime light “hunts the victims in the darkness,” as Goya’s biographer Fred Licht observes, and “delivers them to the pitiless muzzles of the French riflemen.” An emphatically secular and brutal glare, this is not Caravaggio’s sword light, which influenced Goya, striking our world from outside with the promise of transfiguration, as if the light of God; nor is it Rembrandt’s trembling glow, which Goya so admired, appearing from within a face or space carrying the promise of freedom from the world and mortality. Both these lights are “victorious”; Goya’s is not. His sublime light is born of his being an intimate witness of war and confronts us with the fact that war is killing and killing again.12 And where Blake experienced light as seizing and haunting his imagination, directing its energy within, Goya experienced it as “h[a]unting” the world, tracking down its terrifying irrational reality and seizing it. Theirs are visions, respectively, of a world redeemed by the imagination (sublime of Beauty) and of an irredeemable world of fear (sublime of Terror). If Blake’s core interpretive imagination of light was its human energy, a vision of beauty showing the possibility of transcendence, Goya’s was of its inhuman energy, a nightmare of terror. Clearly, the light of Blake and of Goya is no longer the stable light of Vermeer and Newton but the unsettling sublime light of a new era, vibrating with beautiful and fearsome energy. Both Blake’s and Goya’s new experience of light evolved in interaction with profound social changes brought about by industrial and political revolutions, which precipitated a human revolution. In farm villages there were limited energy resources until the Industrial Revolution changed all this, as factories employed what seemed like unlimited amounts

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of mechanical energy in the production of everything from household goods to steel. England was roiling with the energy of machines in factories, “Wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic,” as Blake said. Even light was industrialized with the introduction of gaslight in 1802, a “luminous spectacle” being staged in Birmingham that one eyewitness exclaimed was “as novel as it was astonishing.” Sublimely so because this violated the traditional stability of a light’s alternating between mutually exclusive day and night as well as its comforting domestic place in the home.13 Such a spectacle accelerated the era’s reimagining of light. An energy unleashed, light has no circumference now. Meanwhile, Spain was reeling from Napoleon’s invasion and the “disasters of war” (1807–1814). And with these social and political revolutions came a new self-understanding. This human revolution, a crisis of consciousness that entailed a profound sense of the loss of cultural unity, haunted the age.14 Blake and Goya’s complementary encounters with the sublime energy of light pivot us into the those of the era’s central figures, Wordsworth and Turner, and as Berenson pointed out, our modern age. Enlightenment reason and order being challenged, respectively, by Blake and Goya, it remains for this next generation, poet and painter as well scientist, as the crisis in consciousness deepened, to go beyond this and probe what Rev. Hunter called light’s “agitation,” the energetic heart of sublime light. By this act Wordsworth and Turner ultimately come to terms with their experience of its energy and find a language for it. The experience of light as energy, that is, caused a crisis: how to find a way to interpret this as poet or artist, or scientist. The representation of light in the previous age was confident, defining a stable light. But in the Revolutionary Era this confidence has dissipated, and the suspicion pervades the times that the representation of light falls outside representation itself. Consequently, we’ll see the struggle of poets and artists to solve this problem of expressing their experience of light’s agitation, striving finally not to represent sublime light but to enact it.15 In contrast, such probing of light’s agitation does not compel the painter John Constable (1776–1837) or the scientist Thomas Young (1773–1829). For they engage in an intense and sustained observation of the light of their experience. Unlike Wordsworth and Turner, their primary tool in their imaginative interpretation of this as well as its expression is experiment, for Constable the act of painting itself and for the physicist Young the deployment of experimental apparatus. William Wordsworth and J. M. W. Turner If Blake and Goya’s revision of the Enlightenment experience of light launches the era of revolution, that of another poet-painter pair, William

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Wordsworth (1770–1850) and J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), epitomize it. They participate in the energy of sublime light and probe its character in an era exploding with political and industrial energy. For as muscle power was replaced by coal-burning steam engines, the population of towns and cities increased and human energy took center stage in social unrest, mob violence, and increased crime. Neither poet nor painter could avoid this whirlwind of energy.16 And their being swept up by it, resulting in a unique relationship with light, one their contemporaries, Edmund Burke, called “sublime,” constitutes the experiential and expressive axis of the age. This light may be experienced as beautiful or fearful, but either can merge into the other, as for example when the sun’s light (positive) at its extreme overpowers the “organs of sight” (negative) and “obliterates all objects, so as in effect exactly to resemble darkness.” Their experience evoked by what Matthew Brennan calls the “positive” or “negative” sublime. Both possessing a unique energy, this became central to Wordsworth’s and Turner’s participation in a sublime light.17 For these artists, poet and painter alike, this energy is manifest in light’s agitated motion, most commonly in their experience of “flakes of radiance” reflected/refracted from disturbed water but also in diffused radiance, such as Wordsworth’s witnessing the beauty of moonlight that suddenly “fell like a flash” on a “huge sea of mist” at his feet on Mt. Snowden. He also encountered its sublime complement, the fearful experience of fractured sun off an Alpine mountain face during a harrowing descent. Both experiences involve agitated reflection rather than the mirror image we see in the still surface of a mountain lake. This agitated light, as when a lake rippled by wind distorts the mountain’s reflection or a sunset shatters on a mountain’s sheer rock face, is a figure of the mind reflecting and of the body’s participating in light’s energy.18 The agitated light of radiant reflection-refraction and of fracture is also the object of Turner’s exploration. Pointedly, he refutes Joseph Priestley’s treatment of water as essentially a mirror. “Water has hitherto been said to be the same as polished bodies,” but Turner insists that it is distinct in its color, motion, and “reflections, which admit of such endless variety incomprehensible contrarieties and exhibit such phenomena, that it imperiously demands more attention than the dismissal it has generally received,” namely Priestley’s. This he explains is because “water has the double property of absorbing the rays of light and reflecting and refracting.” The results of such exploration, which we find in the major poems of Wordsworth and the late paintings of Turner, present us not with a stable event in their art’s disturbed reflections and unpredictable reduplications but with an agitated light that requires an imaginative response.19 Their struggle to find expression for their experience required the invention of new genres. In poetry this was an epic of the “Growth of a Poet’s Mind,”

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as the subtitle of Wordsworth’s The Prelude puts it, which entails a psychological landscape. The parallel genre in painting that most fully enabled expression of the encounter with an agitated light, enacting the “richness of water-borne reflections,” and with a fractured light in various ways, was the “landscape of fact,” which replaced the portrait as the dominant genre of the times.20 Countering the traditional Dutch-English picturesque landscape, the poets and painters of the Revolutionary Era approached landscape as imaginative naturalists, from the psychological investigations of Wordsworth and Turner to the disinterested, “objective” ones of Constable. In his Prelude the poet cannot speak of the growth of his mind apart from landscape, so he was forced to invent a genre best suited to conveying his experience of nature infused by light energy.21 By means of these new genres Wordsworth, Turner, and Constable, as we’ll see, redefine the very experience of reflected/refracted light’s “contrarieties,” the doubling and superimposition of a light constantly in motion. One persisting into our modern era—light as energy. By this Wordsworth and Turner restore us to nature but under new terms. Nature is no longer a mechanism but an organism, no longer separate but one with the poet and painter. From “her,” Wordsworth says, he “receives / That energy by which he seeks the truth.” The truth, that is, of his core light experience.22 THE WORDSWORTHS’ EDEN LIGHT OF BEAUTY William Wordsworth with his sister Dorothy experiences sublime light. The arc of his experience is from the radiant light of Eden (positive sublime) to the fractured light of Apocalypse (negative sublime) and return to the Edenic. Dorothy like a spirit guide aids him in completing this arc, one that Turner does not complete. We get a hint of this relationship in Wordsworth’s sonnet “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802.” The poet seems to participate in the energy of sublime light steeping the valley in “splendor,” which in the end produces calm.23 Dorothy describes in her diary this same scene but it leaves her uneasy. She places it within the context of accompanying her brother to France to see his illegitimate daughter, mindful of the “troubles and disorders” in France that he had encountered on a visit to Paris in 1791, where William had fallen in love with the mother. Dorothy declares, as does her brother, that “it was a beautiful morning.” But she reminds us of the cloud of smoke that typically hung over the city and contrasts it to the sun, which “shone so brightly with such a pure light.” The Edenic sublimity of the “pure” light is quietly qualified by the personal and political context of the ever-present threat of apocalyptic disorder, her memory of war between England and France.24

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Wordsworth’s Edenic childhood experience of light glints from the cracks of this Westminster Bridge sonnet. He grew up with his sister in the Lake District among rocks and mountains, as he says, having “every possible embellishment of beauty, dignity, and splendor, which light and shadow can bestow upon objects so diversified.” They spent their childhood exploring this world where he “loved the sun,” especially as it lay its “beauty on the morning hills,” as well as the moon with its “peculiar light.” He defines here the positive sublime, an experience of light he will always return to, one for which he desires his sister’s collaborating experience.25 This takes an important turn on a walk he took between Hawkshead and Ambleside when he was about fourteen. The “moment,” as Wordsworth remembered at seventy-five, was “important in my poetical history; for I date from it my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural appearances,” an experience of the negative sublime. He recorded his impression in “An Evening Walk,” a poem written at school a couple of years later in which he addresses his companion, Dorothy. As the “mellow light” of the setting sun emerges, he observes “Strong flakes of radiance on the tremulous stream.” Its distorted reflections capture him. In contrast to the ambient “mellow light,” the energy of reflected light, its “strong flakes,” takes his eye and mind, so he repeats his observation a few lines later: “plots” on the lake of “sparkling water tremble bright / With thousand thousand twinkling points of light.” Then gone as the lake in “deep repose” returns to its state under the mellow light and “glows” like a “burnished mirror.” But it is not the calm reflection of a mirror that captures his mind. It is the energetic reflections/refractions of trembling water, their “flakes of radiance,” that seize him.26 The Crisis Wordsworth had not only fallen in love with the mother of his illegitimate daughter in Paris but with the French people and their cause. So having witnessed on his return in 1793 the execution of the first Girondist to be guillotined, he was shattered. All his hopes of liberty for mankind and England were dashed, leading to a nervous breakdown in 1796. As he describes in The Prelude, which he called a poem about the “formation of my own mind,” he was “inwardly oppressed,” suffering “sorrow, disappointment,” and “confusion” that resulted in his “zeal decayed” and worse, “utter loss of hope itself / and things to hope for!”27 But how to regain hope? We find that the answer lies in sublime light and Dorothy’s presence. The Prelude charts Wordsworth’s crisis of imagination in which he despaired at restoring hope but by which he ultimately recovered from his breakdown. Significantly, following Book X in which he acknowledges his sister’s lifting him from the depths of his crisis, the poem’s central

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Books XI and XII are titled “Imagination, How Impaired and Restored.” In these we find that the restoration of imagination required Wordsworth to return to his childhood experience. As Wordsworth remembers, “I grew up / Foster’d alike by beauty and by fear.” And these became the two faces of one sublime light that the poet had to engage with for his own redemption.28 His restoration by the sublime light of beauty and fear, its positive and negative sides now split, however, required Dorothy. We might say that whether physically present or absent she became a “spiritual” catalyst to his realization that these were the “workings of one mind, the features / Of the same face” (VI, 551–53). And no doubt they were rooted deep in his psyche, being the antithetical faces of his biography and wellspring of his response to what he calls an “agitated” light. On the one hand, he was orphaned at the age of thirteen and rebelled against his guardians, using a whip to slash a family portrait. On the other, he was the son of a wealthy peer of England; became the friend of one of the great minds of the age, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834); and was appointed Poet Laureate, achieving world fame in his sixties. Yet he was haunted all his life by his youthful fear of abandonment that merged with his sensitivity from childhood to the beauty of nature and, particularly, his love of the sun.29 Nature and her light, Wordsworth knew in his heart of hearts, was salvation. And he knew as well in his state of hopelessness how much he needed Dorothy, “Nature’s inmate” as he called her, a communicant with nature, as the catalyst enabling him to draw on the healing energy of sublime light. Her eyes “shooting lights” as he says in “Tintern Abbey” (1798), Dorothy can be effective because she is always mindful of light’s total imaginative context, as we saw in the contrast of her view from Westminster Bridge with her brother’s. She never loses sight of the two faces of the sublime, that is, the gentle sunlight shimmering on the morning hills and the fearful “bursting light of the sun that flashed upon the crags” after an Alpine storm near Grindelwald. Aware of light’s fearful energy, that is, accompanying its positive energy, it was in the imaginative merging of these two faces of sublime light that the energy of light lay to heal her brother.30 Ultimately, it is only by the power of imagination that hope is restored. Wordsworth must enter into an interchange of his mind with nature, allowing sublime light to restore hope. Nurtured by the two faces, by “beauty and by fear,” that were one in his childhood experience of sublime sunlight, Wordsworth can recover hope only by restoring their imaginative unity in adulthood. In his crisis of hope the one face had divided. The light of “thoughtless youth” (the Beautiful) had split from the light of “disturbing” joy (the Fearful). And Dorothy realizes that Wordsworth must first confront the latter, clarifying his despair in order to defeat it and ultimately unite the two faces of sublime light. This he accomplishes by “pure” imagination,

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“another name for absolute power” and “amplitude of mind, / And Reason in her most exalted mood.” But it is his experience of sublime light that makes possible the “flash of the Imagination.” And fed by his sister’s presence, this enables Wordsworth to achieve the union of beauty and fear in one face.31 The Saving Light But this double face of light’s sublime character, which in the end effects Wordsworth’s recovery, bears looking at more closely. It reveals itself earlier, as I’ve suggested, in two aspects of light’s character, “features,” as Wordsworth says “Of the same face”: radiant (reflected/refracted or diffused) and fractured, neither being direct light, such as that of noontime, but both being an agitated light. Wordsworth’s recovery of hope and health required him to move from the Edenic light of childhood, “flakes of radiance” evoking in him the positive sublime, through an apocalyptic experience in the Alps on his descent, fractured light of the negative sublime, and return to a renewed and deepened experience of the sublime light of his youth. Clearly, he had to confront the fractured light of adulthood to reclaim the radiant light of childhood. And in so doing, he found himself transformed, restored to health by the one face of this double light. “An object of delight” and of “love” reexperienced and restored “Once more in Man,” Wordsworth himself regaining hope.32 The radiant “Sublimity” produced in Wordsworth from childhood by sunlight or moonlight in disturbed “bodies” of water is for him an Eden. His encounter with light from flowing streams and ruffled lakes, such as a wind creating a “thousand thousand sparkling waves,” an “agitated scene before his eye,” echoes the “gentle agitations of the mind.”33 Wordsworth relates a central experience of this light in the first book of his Prelude. “The moon was up,” he says, “the Lake was shining clear.” He is moving across it in a boat, leaving behind on both sides “Small circles glittering idly in the moon, / Until they melted all into one track / Of sparkling light.” This sublime experience of reflected/refracted light leads Wordsworth into a deeper reality, one of “mighty Forms that do not live / Like living men.” These are the forms of “nature” that he can now, owing to his experience of the sublime light of the moment, engage with and from which he ultimately comes into a renewal of the imagination. His encounter with the character of this Edenic light has such power that it “Appeared like something in myself, a dream,” Wordsworth says, “A prospect in my mind.”34 Such power is not confined to the Edenic experience. The other face of light, its apocalyptic manifestation in fractured reflections, proves to be ultimately redemptive as well for Wordsworth. An experience of the negative sublime, the complementary aspect of light’s character, this is his

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encounter with the fractured mountain light he believes is “peculiar” to the Alps. Wordsworth describes a “Sudden burst of overpowering light!” from an Alpine sunset on his descent from Simplon Pass that he cannot look at directly. He can only turn and look eastward at its “long perspective glittering,” a “shine” on distant cliffs, which is fractured into a “hundred streams.” And then in the moisture-laden atmosphere that lingers after the storm, it is again shattered as the cliffs “flame with gold,” reflecting the sunset in the west. In contrast to an experience on Mt. Snowdon of Edenic sublime,35 he faces here the terror of apocalyptic nature, “torrents shooting from the clear blue sky.” Descending the Alpine pass, Wordsworth encounters a “Deluge of light.” Its hundred streams culminate in a fearfully narrow chasm, a total vortex evoking the negative sublime, Wordsworth’s “most terrifying and alienating experience of the Sublime.”36 Only after experiencing both faces of sublime light, then, positive and negative, can Wordsworth be assured of hope renewed. He comes into knowledge that these experiences “Were all like workings of one mind.” His vision of the “Apocalypse” in the Alpine pass recapitulates Wordsworth’s internal apocalypse of transformation, the renewal by restored imagination of the “hope that can never die.” After his failure of imagination and loss of hope, he emerges victorious, transforming the disturbing characters of his apocalyptic vision, such as the “raving stream,” into personal “symbols of Eternity” that appear in sublime “radiance.”37 In doing so, with the restoration of his imagination and creative powers, Wordsworth succeeds in finding poetic expression for his experience of the character of light as energy, of its one double face of agitated light—its radiant and fractured reflections. The energy of reflected light in constant motion whether from disturbed water or striated cliffs precludes traditional representation, but Wordsworth finds a way of enacting this energy in his poetry. His struggle to regain hope is at the same time, then, a struggle to find the means of expressing his unique experience of light. Wordsworth gives us enactments of his sublime light, such as using a verb like “irradiate” or “melt” in such a way that his light gathers energy from the context of movement. And this language enacts the movement of a mind entering into nature as nature enters into him.38 J. M. W. Turner as we’ll see does not succeed in regaining hope, having no spirit guide at a pivotal point in his life perhaps, as did Wordsworth. The artist remained in the apocalyptic vortex that Wordsworth got a disturbing glimpse of as he descended Simplon Pass. But Turner did succeed in finding artistic means to enact his experience of apocalyptic light, paintings that repelled the fundamentally Edenic poet. Attending the 1830 Royal Academy exhibition, Wordsworth paused before one of Turner’s pictures (Jessica) and growled,

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“it looks to me as if the painter had indulged in raw liver until he was very unwell.”39 The painter’s principal subject like Wordsworth’s was light’s energetic character. And although Turner like the poet also experienced its manifestation in the agitated light of reflection/refraction from water as well as the fractured deluge from sun become fire, he was the poet’s contrary. Where Wordsworth ultimately derives hope from light’s manifest energy, Turner’s optimism falters in face of its immense power. Wordsworth emerges from his apocalyptic vision in Simplon Pass (1805, 1850) restored, while we cannot help but see Turner in his apocalyptic painting Angel Standing in the Sun (1846) as one of the figures on earth being obliterated by the sun’s energy. Here Turner enacts a fragmented light that manifests a radiant “paradisiac” sphere, but even more powerfully a fractured, “apocalyptic light-storm.”40 J. M. W. TURNER’S THE APOCALYPTIC LIGHT OF FEAR If Wordsworth reveals the “light of Being,” Turner reveals the “Being of light,” enacting in his paintings an experience of sublime light never captured on canvas before. His was an encounter with a violent being, and the painter obsessed about kindling the viewer’s engagement with “light energy in itself.” An agent of transformation for Wordsworth, light was for Turner a revelation of being itself. The arc of his career was shaped by devotion to this being of light, finding a way by whatever means to come to terms with its sublime character and confront his viewer with its full power.41 We see Turner’s determination to do this even in the way he addresses his canvas. On “varnishing day” in 1837 at the Royal Academy where he often exhibited, a day when the featured artists could apply the last touches to their work before the annual show was opened to the public, we catch a glimpse of his passion. Attracted by an unfolding drama, his fellow artists had gathered around him. What they saw was a high-stakes “competition,” as Alexandra Harris describes it, “between sunlight and paint.” Revising a painting he had exhibited a decade earlier (Regulus), Turner pitted white paint against the sun itself, a supremely “moving force” that we feel in his paintings. “Inflamed by the white-hot vision of an artist obsessed by light,” Turner flung the paint against his canvas with seeming abandon. The room held its breath, asking, could white paint alone “be made to appear as radiant as the sun itself?” And Turner’s canvas answered with a resounding “Yes.” His fellow artists stood shaken, having felt in what they had just witnessed the “savagery in Turner’s desire to blind the viewer with his painted light.”42 Turner reveals his sublime experience of the light of the sun with a ferocity never before seen because he fears its energy, the negative sublime. But

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Turner also expressed in the 1830s and 1840s his experience of the positive sublime of beauty. John Ruskin, friend and champion of Turner, who became the foremost art critic of the era, saw this early on. He praises Turner for taking the “greatest step of all” in the history of art: “we are in sunshine—” and “what sunshine!” This is the “white, flashing fullness of dazzling light, . . . bounding and burning in intensity of joy.” Turner, he realized, “loved sunshine for its own sake,” its “radiant mystery, inexhaustible as indistinct, beautiful, but never all revealed.”43 And yet there is in Turner, always, the disturbing awareness of nature’s elemental violence. Disturbing because he had encountered light as the beginning and the end, an experience of its terrifying energy that burned within him. Turner’s dramatically physical approach to his art, such as flinging paint on his canvas, was an act of identifying with the being of light, merging his own body with it. A short robust man, he was all energy, able to cover “20 to 25 miles a day,” a friend observed, “with his baggage at the end of stick, sketching rapidly on his way.” And he “worked standing all day” to make his sketches into paintings, as a fellow artist often saw, boasting that he “could outwork and kill any painter alive.”44 The energy of his circumstances also drove Turner’s painting. Living in London all his life meant being continually caught up in social forces never known before. In his lifetime during what has been called the “apocalyptic phase” of the Industrial Revolution, fire becomes the “source and origin of force,” supplanting wind and water as well as horses and men. Turner boldly celebrated this energy in his late painting Rain, Steam, Speed (1844). Wind and water could be tamed by geometry, diagrammatic drawings of windmills, for example, translated into gears and wheels. But with fire everything changes. “Matter transformed by fire” reveals the violence of the being of light that Turner confronts us with in his Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October, 1834. In his late works, which express his deepest experience, this being will inhabit the whole visible world, buildings, rocks and waters, even people.45 Engulfed by this energy in the streets, Turner’s personal circumstances were violent as well. From the time he was a child, Turner was caught up in the vortex of madness devouring his mother, who was finally committed to an insane asylum in 1799 when Turner was twenty-four. By this time, he had become the foremost artist of the day, albeit a rather conventional one, though Fishermen at Sea (1798) promised things to come. And they did. His mother’s confinement liberated him, and his genius burst out a couple of years later in paintings of immense light energy. In Calais Pier (1803) an indifferent light whirl sucks man into his fate.46 Yet a quiet energy manifest early on in the ever-changing sunlight scattered from the Thames in London, by which Turner was born and died, shaped his

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life as well. He adored the English sun in a country given to a daily drama of air and water, which he said in a lecture offered “an endless variety” of atmosphere. As we’ll see, this experience of variable agitated light deepened as he probed farther and farther its light energy manifestation in the “double property,” as he says, of water’s “absorbing” and “reflecting and refracting” light, a radiant water light he encounters first on the Thames, then in Venice, and later back in London where he encounters a fractured fire light. Their common element is the sun, the ultimate source with which early on Turner became obsessed, proclaiming from his sick bed shortly before he died: “The Sun is God.”47 But whether it was the former reflected/refracted radiance or the latter fractured light, Turner found expression for his experience of sublime agitated light in the image of the vortex—the wind-water-light vortex of the storm as in Calais Pier (1803) and the fire-water-light vortex of the sun. After his mother’s commitment and beginning with this picture Turner’s visions are wholly his own, not those of previous artists. And these are centered on a vortex of energy that depends entirely on light, such as in Snowstorm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps (1812). Ultimately, the vortex of the sun subsumes the storm’s, as it begins to do in Snowstorm. And this vortex became Turner’s central expression of the being of light, a “violent vortex of swirling light spiraling out from a white-hot centre” in many of Turner’s paintings. These confront us with the sun, that is, giving us no escape.48 We find ourselves “face to face” with the being of light, the infinite roiling truth of the universe perpetually on the move. Nature and Turner’s apprehending mind meet in this vortex of light energy on the whirling frontier of creation and destruction. This is why the artist, a basically irreligious man, called the sun God.49 The Being of Light We’ll return to Turner’s fiery vortex of sun in his late paintings, but first a sketch of his evolving experience of sublime agitated light, which culminated in this vortex of light. Like Wordsworth, as we’ve seen, Turner participates in the energy of sublime light, similarly held by the beauty of reflected/refracted light and by the terror of fractured light. But where Wordsworth returned to an earlier experience, Turner never returns. Wordsworth, that is, revealed the light of being, its power in the world for self-renewal, but Turner presents the being of light, a character all energy that offers no possibility of redemption. He does not turn back but pushes on and explores his relation to a sublime agitated light to the fullest extent possible, always pushing deeper into its apocalyptic vortex.50

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Turner’s experience of light was a continuing revelation of light’s restless character, beginning with the reflected/refracted light of wind-in-water and culminating in the fractured light of fire-in-water, ultimately a sun-storm vortex. From Turner’s childhood and youth, living a short walk from the Thames, he was affected by the light of wind-in-water. Having to escape the few dark rooms, in which he lived above his father’s barber shop in the heart of London, and the violence of his mother, he often took refuge in the river’s light. Just as Wordsworth was captivated by reflections in moving water, Turner’s experience as a boy of the movement of water and of light buried itself in his psyche.51 Always, Turner strove to get at what he called in a lecture the “truth of the climate” (c. 1810). He loved the sublime beauty of England’s constantly varying atmospherics. And its light-in-water culminated in Calais Pier (1803). A shock, Turner’s paint laid on with a palette knife, leapt out at the viewer, ensuring that his agitated light agitated the viewer. The picture’s churning white-light water, the beginnings of Turner’s vortex, violated painterly tradition, and academic painters dubbed him the “over-Turner.” This did not deter him, however, for in Snowstorm: Hannibal (1812) Turner took the churn of water even further, sweeping the sun into the whirling white-light storm.52 But Turner was jolted in 1819 by Venetian light-in-water. His first visit to the city at the age of forty-four proved to be a “hinge” in Turner’s experience of light. Here he was seized by the “infinite interpenetration of natural radiance,” which in the contemporary critic William Hazlitt’s words revealed a “different order of reality” to the painter. Here, in his evolving relationship with light, were not the sparkle reflections of the northern climate but “water’s liquid melting reflection” of the southern climate. So profound was this encounter with light as energy in Venice that the experience seemed to intensify over the following years.53 Yet Turner was to receive another shock, the light experience of sublime fear. Having been shaken by the death of his father, he returned to London after a last trip to Venice and witnessed at fifty-nine an event that became a second hinge in his life—the Houses of Parliament on fire. Watching from across the Thames, this conflagration of flame and water resonated deeply within the artist, as if it had been playing out before him his entire life. This experience beyond reflected/refracted light was one of a disturbingly fractured light. The spectacle turned the water and sky into a mosaic of light shards, the fury of light’s energy unleashed. So personal was this drama that for the first time Turner worked in color directly from his subject, now being concerned only with the inherent light generated by color in his picture. Such an encounter released a “fantastic force” in Turner’s work, a shift to pure and lucid color that he insists is light. And his painting Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October, 1834 convinces us.54

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With this painting Turner moved from his experience of the sublime beauty of wind-water-light to the fearful sublime, a fractured fire-water-light.55 And he dares go farther into the apocalyptic, shifting from the observational to the existential. Turner’s experience evolves, that is, from observing fractured light across the Thames to entering it. This entailed a shift from precise observation of the energetic motion of light in Snowstorm: Hannibal (1812) to physical participation in its energy. He asks sailors to lash him to a mast. Facing the fury of a Channel snowstorm in mid-January at sixty-seven, he subjects himself firsthand to nature’s forces. This is a vortex of white light that he expresses in Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842). We are meant to lose our bearings in this picture, participating with Turner in light’s energy. The vortex of light whirls toward us, its spiraling yet substantial form envelopes us in its energies as it threatens to devolve into chaos.56 Enacting the Being Ultimately Turner was to enter the vortex of the sun itself. This required a new language of paint for its expression, and he began to construct from color what one of his biographers Peter Ackroyd calls “structures of light.”57 No doubt this move had its psychological origins in Turner’s feeling of estrangement from the public taste after 1833. He increasingly painted for himself and accepted the fact that the public would not comprehend his pictures. And as he enters the 1840s this becomes more acute, giving himself to the vortex of light expressed in Snow Storm—Steam-Boat (1842) that culminates the next year in his entering that of the sun in two paintings, Shade and Darkness: The Evening of the Deluge (1843) and Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory): The Morning after the Deluge (1843).58 The first of these structures of light, its shade and darkness, draws us into a vortex of water-sun, much as Snow Storm—Steam-Boat did. But its companion picture, Light and Colour, engulfs us in its vortex of fire-sun.59 We’ve seen a real shift, then, in Turner’s evolving light experience from an observational to existential phase. And as that of an energetic, agitated light evolved from water’s reflection/refraction (positive sublime) to the fractured light of fire on water (negative sublime), he plunges into the vortex of the sun. Turner’s early experience of light-and-water in the Thames deepened with his southern encounter in Venice but found its true energy center back in London in his observing fire-and-water at a distance and, existentially, in that of a Channel storm while lashed to a mast. With his final plunge into the vortex of light in his painting Light and Colour, Turner makes his compositions pivot around an “incandescent central axis.”60 This light vortex had become after 1840 a basic form for him, possessing an energy that “exceeds form; it transforms.” It is in his mind the sun whose

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Figure 4.1. J. M. W. Turner, Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory): The Morning after the Deluge (1843). Tate, London. Public Domain

energy of fire light that in his last years will consume buildings, ships, and horses, as it does in Norham Castle, Sunrise (c. 1835–1840) and Seascape, Folkestone (c. 1845). The same vortex of his painting Light and Colour enacted in color that is for him equivalent to light—white and yellow. Turner states explicitly in one of his Royal Academy lectures that “light is color,” necessary for the “most energetic and sublime” forms, for he desires above all the “quality of force.” And we see the full impact of this apocalyptic violence of his late work. In The Angel Standing in the Sun (1846) light is not only “glorious,” as we’ve seen earlier, but it is in the artist and critic Lawrence Gowing’s eyes “voracious, carnivorous, unsparing.” It devours “impartially” the “whole living world.” In his apocalyptic vortex, then, Turner finds the “energetic pattern” in paint to enact his experience of light in motion.61

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But how to translate this into paint? His solution is the transforming vortex, his fundamental structure of light, and agitating color, his impasto white and yellow. In the process he broke with traditional landscape painting.62 To enact light energy on canvas, Turner embraced the sheer energy of color that is light.63 The physical act of painting intensified as his light experience evolved, for in the end he brought into question the very conditions of painting, surfacing the traces of his means, the paint and brushstrokes by which his picture had been produced. He confronts us with paint applied, a colleague observes, “almost entirely with his palette knife.” As if Turner were wrestling with the forces of nature, he enacts his light experience in paint itself projecting from the picture’s surface. Clearly, paint had intrinsic power for Turner, incarnating light energy to which he in turn imparts power.64 As he says in one of his notebooks, his is the meeting with “light reactive of Reflection.” “Reactive,” that is agitated, the “double property” of reflected/refracted water light (sublime beauty) and the fractured fire light (sublime fear) that, intensifying, evolves to the sun-vortex as in Regulus (1828–1837) where the central sun is a “lump of white standing out like the boss on a shield.” Thus the substance of paint enacts Turner’s light experience that is Apocalypse and paint at the same time.65 THE EMPIRICISTS’ LIGHT When John Constable (1776–1837) first met Turner at the annual Royal Academy dinner in 1813, he found Turner “uncouth,” but admitted that he had a “wonderfull [sic] range of mind.” They saw each other frequently at the Royal Academy where each of them lectured and exhibited paintings, but their relationship was fraught. After viewing the 1826 exhibit at the Academy, Constable remarked that “Turner never gave me to [sic] much pleasure—and so much pain—before.” And six years later he pronounced one of Turner’s paintings the “most complete work of genius I ever saw.”66 Turner did not return the compliment. Sneeringly, in fact, he remarked at one time that Constable “perceives in a landscape that the grass is wet, the meadows flat,” that is “to say about as much as, I suppose, might in general be apprehended between them, by an intelligent fawn and a skylark.” Constable’s relation to nature, in fact, was antithetical to Turner’s; a natural philosopher’s relation to nature versus a visionary’s, respectively, though both were empirical in their careful observation of the physical world.67

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John Constable’s “Skying” Both artists, who shared with Wordsworth the sublime experience of what Turner called “light reactive of Reflection,” created revolutionary testimonies of a new light in the world. But Constable encountered a “light-drenched” one in contrast to Turner’s light-driven world. Constable experienced the energy of light as what he calls “freshness,” a character manifest in his Waterloo Bridge from Whitehall Stairs (c. 1819). He expresses his encounter with light’s “freshness” in a watery sparkle that was revolutionary. A cloudy sky scatters the light, which appears to condense in brilliance on the patch of water in the background near the bridge at the right where the Thames gathers energy into a froth of light. While the source of this energy for Turner was the sun, we see in this painting that for Constable it was the sky.68 Constable returned like Wordsworth obsessively to his boyhood relationship with nature. His fundamental light experience was inseparable from his “careless boyhood” roaming the banks of the river Stour, scenes that he says “made me a painter.” Here were “formed” not only his “ideas of Landscape” but with them his relationship with light. Like Turner’s pivotal visit to Italy, Constable’s return to his native Stour Valley in the summer of 1813 and 1814 when he filled two sketchbooks with keenly observed drawings was a watershed in his artistic life. Intensified, no doubt, by the fact that in this valley he fell in love with a local girl Maria Bicknell whom he married after a long and determined courtship in 1816. This triggered an astonishing celebration of the Stour Valley with a series of six-foot canvases based on his earlier sketches, all evoking sites within three miles of where he lived. Not surprisingly, these paintings achieved the highest emotional pitch of all his work.69 Constable’s light in these most personal paintings is the common light of day, not the redemptive threshold light (e.g., sunrise) of Wordsworth or the apocalyptic vorticular light of Turner. Constable dwells in Edenic, sublime beauty, never having to experience Wordsworth’s sublime terror, let alone Turner’s violent vortex. Constable is after “freshness” with its “lightness and brightness,” the fundamental character of the light that he met in the Stour Valley as a child. This possessed, above all, “Zest,” a freshness of liquid vibrations that Constable never forgot. “Zest” epitomizes Constable’s relationship with light as vibrational energy in which color and light are one. He finds vivid expression for this in The Hay Wain (originally entitled Landscape: Noon; 1821). In this “six-footer,” the sun directly overhead, earth and sky become a vibrating plenum of reflected-refracted light. We cannot take our eyes off the sky because it is the “force of light in nature,” as Constable declares, “and governs every thing [sic].”70 The sky becomes the emblem of Constable’s light experience, as the sun was of Turner’s. His sky sets the landscape vibrating with its light energy, the

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“power which creates space” that Constable names in a lecture at the Royal Institution: “Everywhere and at all times in nature; opposition, union, light, shade, reflection, and refraction” occurring. In fact, “all effects of light and dark,” nature’s inherent “chiaroscuro,” are “but modifications of reflection and refraction” (except sources of light, such as fire and the sun). This is why the sky, source of continual “modifications,” is the emblem of his light experience. That is, “perfect stillness never occurs.” So light always on the move with its “innumerable reflections” and “refractions” reveals its energy in the “spaces between each of these lights.”71 These conclusions—light as sky-generated vibrational energy creating space—follow from Constable’s “experiments.” He studies the sky like a natural philosopher and is very explicit about his objective, declaring that “painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature.” It is a “branch of natural philosophy,” pictures being “experiments.” He called this experimental science “skying,” which consisted of extensive cloud studies that he did in 1820/1822, experiments in probing “zest,” reflection/refraction’s color light. And constable’s fundamental finding was that skyscape and landscape, as we have seen, cannot be separated; for “Zest,” the energy of light, unites them. These experiments yielded a larger conclusion as well: nature is an “assembly of interdependencies” (a rather ecological view).72 The result of Constable’s “skying,” his picture The Hay Wain (1821), then, is at once an artistic and scientific experiment. River, meadow, and sky are found to conspire in expressing the energy of Constable’s light experience. And by dabs of lead white applied with the palette knife, he expresses the motion of light—its “freshness” and “zest”—as do sparks from the flecks and palette knife that create a roughness in the pigment.73 The sky throbs with light and everything is “chiaroscuro” in Constable’s specific sense, continual movement, which fires the entire painting alive. The intense light on the meadow and river, heightened by the force of clouds cascading to the tree line in the background where meadow and sky meet, our eye moving “almost turbulently” with the vibrating light in the copse behind the horse, epitomizes Constable’s relationship with a sublime “zest” light.74 Thomas Young’s Undulatory Imagining The physician-scientist Thomas Young (1773–1829) experienced light’s fundamental character as vibration, as did Constable. Beyond the painters’ techniques of observation and imagination, however, Young’s experiments as a working scientist required imagination and apparatus.75 Growing up in a Quaker household, the precocious Thomas Young, who had read through the Bible twice by the age of four, would have heard much conversation about

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light. Not only the “inner light” of the believer, a personal, direct experience of truth that transforms the individual, but undoubtedly of its echo in the light of nature. And just as the Quaker pursuit of truth with its insistence on experiential verification had great affinity with the scientific pursuit, so the Quaker obsession with the character of inner light had affinity with Young’s intense interest in the character of natural light. An interest that blossomed after discovering the cause of astigmatism and becoming a physician in 1799.76 As a youth having mastered a variety of musical instruments and as a doctor having studied the human voice, he had long been fascinated by the properties of vibrating strings. And he was, as he says, “forcibly impressed” with the likely, close “analogy” between patterns of music and light. When organ pipes produce beats in which two sounds coincide, an instant of silence occurs; and when thin plates, such as mica flakes, reflect light, they generate bands of color alternating with dark (like those we see from an oil slick on a wet street).77 But how did he move from the vibrations of strings producing sound waves to light waves? The answer was a further analogy by which he made a breathtaking imaginative leap. He had often observed the pattern made by wave fronts that meet on a lake at a narrow channel leading out of it. Neither series of waves will “destroy the other,” he says, “but their effects will be combined.” The resultant pattern being bands of higher waves, some peaks added together, alternating with lower, some canceled by the other waves’ valleys.78 Young imagined waves of light behaving in the same way as waves interfering with each other on a lake. And here we see his sublime experience of light. New vistas opened up, that is, Young’s feelings revealed by his excitement at this imaginative leap from patterns in colliding waves of water to those in light. If light was composed of particles streaming in straight lines, Young realized, as Newton the sage of the age maintained, this pattern would not be the case. We would see only more intense light, not alternating color and no color. He had seen in his mind a most important side of light’s character.79 Now he had only to make his experience of light available to skeptical colleagues, just as Newton did a century earlier in his experimentum crucis. Young generalized his experience as the “law of interference,” which the influential British statesman Henry Brougham declared, “one of the most incomprehensible suppositions that we remember to have met with in the history of hypotheses.” Yet Young succeeded in making his imagined character of light available to all by devising a simple and ingenious experiment, his famous “two-slit” experiment. He shone a beam of light onto two closely spaced slits in a piece of cardboard and allowed the emerging twin lights to fall onto a sheet of paper behind it. When he examined that resultant pattern of light on the paper, what Young found was the same pattern he saw

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produced by colliding waves on a lake. This was a shocking revelation when in 1803 at the age of twenty-eight he presented it in a Royal Society paper and public lecture.80 Thomas Young understood light as a form of energy, an essential aspect of its character, as did Wordsworth and Turner as well as Constable. Poet, painter, or scientist, all employ what a vituperative contemporary’s attack on Young called his “vibratory and undulatory mode of reasoning.”81 Though intended as a slur, the label fits and could be claimed as praise. This was Young’s analogical method of investigation, a personal and imaginative one that he shared with the artists and poets. All leaped between disparate areas of natural philosophy and proceeded in their investigations of light’s character by analogical imagination, from Constable’s paintings to Young’s apparatus. Both painter and scientist took an empirical approach to nature, Constable’s (like Goya’s), as we have seen, in contrast to Turner’s visionary approach (like Blake’s). The Stour Valley painter focused on the particulars of nature, being wary of the sublime, in contrast to Wordsworth and Turner who turned the focus on themselves, the nature of their perception and emotional responses, wholly embracing the sublime. The true experience of light for them was of imagined light, respectively, its transformative and its vorticular energy. For Constable it resided in observed effects, its energetic vibrations uniting sky and land. Similarly, Young’s conclusions derived from observed wave patterns on water.82 The languages poets, painters, and scientists found, however, to express their unique encounters with light differed. All had to create a way to make their new, observed, and imagined experiences, which were essentially theirs alone, available to skeptical contemporaries accustomed to accepting without question those of the past. Poets had words, artists had paints, but what means did Young have? He had demonstration, such as his two-slit apparatus, which mainly differed from word and paint “experiments” in its replicability. J. M. W. Turner’s light vortex bridges the Revolutionary Era vibrating with an unstable light and that of the later nineteenth century enmeshed in fields of light. As we have seen, the earlier era’s painters as well as poets and scientists encountered a sublime light, one whose character of agitated refraction and fracture demanded they participate in its energy, enacting it in word, paint, and demonstration. The field of light that captured the imagination over roughly the next half century was a new all-pervasive tactile experience of light analogous to a magnetic field.

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NOTES 1. William Law was totally opposed to Newton’s theory of light as particles of swiftly moving material because this denied light’s “essential divinity.” In Law’s view not only is “light not material,” but it “exists independently of material bodies” (Cantor, “Light and Enlightenment,” 70, 72–73, 76, 78, 81). Yet light after Newton took center stage, the relation to light being profoundly informed by Newton’s “sage-instructed eye,” as was the case with the enamored James Thomson. 2. “First Vision of Light” (Ault, Visionary Physics, 162); “Schools . . . Europe,” “Cast off . . . by Inspiration,” “clothe . . . with imagination,” “Particles of light,” “bright tent,” Blake, Poetry and Prose, 157, 25, 469. William Wordsworth also rejects Newton’s relation to nature but has great respect for his “mind for ever / Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone” (The Prelude, 1850, III, 62–63). And Keats is hostile to Newton’s mechanical natural philosopher, regretting, “There was an awful [awesome] rainbow once in heaven” (Lamia) but now just one of the “common things.” But S. T. Coleridge was delighted “with the beauty and neatness of his experiments, and with the accuracy of his immediate deductions from them” (quoted by Cunningham, “Introduction,” Romanticism and the Sciences, 4). 3. “Announce,” “major turn,” Bernard Berenson, quoted by Schickel, World of Goya, 9; “Amazd & in fear,” “gazed,” “each particle,” “Astonishd . . . Human formd,” Blake, Poetry and Prose, 683. Blake’s “vision” is the intimate living light that Job shares with the natural world, his body engaging with the body of light in Blake’s Job illustration, Job’s Sacrifice (#18, c. 1805–1806) (Butlin, Paintings and Drawings, pl. 714). For an interpretation of this vision in terms of Blake’s system of fourfold vision and within the context of contemporary optical theory, see Donald Ault (Visionary Physics, 143–47). As much as Blake reacts to Newton he has absorbed his conclusion, speaking of the “particles” of light. In his “experiments” Newton assumes a different relation to nature, as Blake infers, but the scientist makes explicit in his exposition that the viewer must complete the experiment in his perception. Newton insists, for example, that the spectator achieve the rainbow image, as they would a work of art (Epstein and Greenberg, “Decomposing,” 117). In fact, the rainbow emerges in the Revolutionary Era as “process” rather than a “fixed . . . divine product.” The mark of the age is this sense of phenomena in time (Epstein and Greenberg, 128). 4. “Vision,” “world,” Raine, Golgonooza, 24; “looking . . . Nature,” “moon dim-glimmering,” “dewy window-pane,” “something within me . . . exists,” “observing . . . new,” “brain-fibres,” “visible Light,” “rotten mackerel,” Byatt, Passions, 254. 5. “Outline,” “to the eyes . . . So he Sees,” Blake, Poetry and Prose, 268, 677. The poet is acutely aware that perception is to some degree creation, which is why he says that “Where man is not nature is barren” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 10; Blake, Poetry and Prose, 37). Kathleen Raine observes that Blake is the only English poet whose “central theme is the confrontation of science and imagination.” To him the “radical error” of Western civilization is the “separation between mind and its object.” And he called for the “restoration of the original unity of being in which outer and inner worlds are one” (Raine, Golgonooza, 9). Blake does not reject

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science, however, knowing its potential to be “equally instrumental” in separating us from nature and restoring nature to us. It can lead to both “mental fragmentation and renewal” (Greenberg, “Blake’s Science,” 117). It can alienate us from nature, and it can unite us with an imaginative nature. This he calls “sweet science” (The Four Zoas, 139:10; Blake, Poetry and Prose, 392). 6. In 1798 Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey refers to the “mighty world / of eye and ear—both what they half create, / And what perceive,” acknowledging that the act of perception is also to some degree an “act of creation.” I’ve alluded to this throughout my book in my discussion of light experience, but at the turn of the eighteenth century this is self-consciously acknowledged and, in fact, shapes the Revolutionary Era. Part of this revolution, as Don Gifford makes clear, was the “way the eye was being trained to see” (Farther Shore, 18). The “education of the vernacular eye” took a new turn in 1807 with William Wollaston’s camera lucida, an apparatus employing an eyepiece, prism, and lens attached to a drawing board or table. With this instrument the viewer’s hand on the paper and object in view can be seen at the same time as the object or scene is being traced. Widely and instantly popular with both amateurs and professionals, this demonstrated a new preference for an interpreted reality, the camera lucida centering and framing the object, its outline sharpened by the lens. This gave a feeling, as one contemporary described it, of “magic & beauty,” which influenced viewers’ expectations of what landscapes should look like (Farther Shore, 20–22). 7. “Light reactive of Reflection,” “double property,” quoted by Gage, Turner: Rain, Steam and Speed, 62. 8. “Operates . . . to terror,” he “source of the sublime; . . . feeling,” Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, Pt. 1, Sec. 7, p. 39 (italics in original). Blake’s fondness for the word “bright” is significant. A word rarely seen in the previous age, “bright” appears nearly two hundred times in his writings. This shift to the use of “bright” by the Romantic poets demonstrates, as Josephine Miles concludes, that a “great alteration in poetic substance and sensibility” occurred at the turn of the century (Miles, Major Adjectives, 417). An alteration, I suggest, reciprocally related to a new experience of light. 9. Blake reacts to Burke’s association of sublimity with obscurity, the opposite of the poet’s insistence on clarity of vision. That is, we know the sublime by vision directly and with clarity even if we don’t fully understand. Though Blake’s experience of light is sublime, he subjects Burke’s book to “scorn” because he believes it to be “founded on the Opinions of Newton & Locke” who mock “Inspiration & Vision,” which he declares is his “Element” (Blake, Poetry and Prose, 650). The concept of the “sublime” was introduced in the first century CE by the Greek author known as Longinus who praised among other works the opening of Genesis “Let there be light” as “sublime.” By which he meant they possessed a grandeur conveyed by a spark that leaps from writer to reader. The Romantics took this as their mission, which was central to Burke, to “summon rational man back to the role of a participant in the events and processes of nature” (Appleton, Experience, 40). 10. “Now modern painting begins,” quoted by Schickel, World of Goya, 9.

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11. “Theatrical lighting,” “harsh and jagged,” Schickel, World of Goya, 99; “nervous fear,” “merciless,” Berger, “Honesty,” 58. Goya probably saw prints by Blake in his wine merchant friend Don Sebastián Martinez’s extensive collection of prints, which Goya had access to when he was recovering from an illness in his house during the late 1790s (Hughes, Goya, 128). He also knew Rembrandt who influenced his Caprichos (23). 12. “Delivers them to . . . riflemen,” “victorious,” Licht, Goya, 119, 180. Goya’s Disasters of War (1810–1813; not published until 1863) is a series of etchings that come out of his personal experience on the battlefield (Hughes, Goya, 287). In these he focuses a chillingly sublime light of fear on the dying, dead, and mutilated bodies themselves. Goya confronts us with the fact that war is killing and killing again, both sides committing atrocities, torturing and butchering each other (Hughes, 289). He internalizes this light in his last so-called black paintings, a series of fourteen works with which he decorated two rooms in his house between 1820 and 1823. In these darkness supplants light, possessing an equal energy. It is a power unto itself, unmoored from light (179) but inseparable from Goya’s light experience. Yet straddling the times of Enlightenment and revolution, we glimpse Goya’s sublime light of beauty as well. For the drama of light and darkness throughout his Disasters is the drama of truth and hypocrisy, reason and superstition. And we can read the radiant light in this work as testimony to all that was “positive in liberal and enlightened ideas.” In plate 79, for example, the Constitution is being buried, but her light refuses to die, becoming more intense in plate 80, offering hope (Pérez Sanchez, “Introduction,” 361, 363). 13. “Wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic, / Moving by compulsion each other” as opposed to his wheels within wheels of Imagination, “wheel within Wheel in freedom” that revolve (like the prophet Ezekiel’s) in “harmony & peace” (Jerusalem 15: 18–20, Blake, Poetry and Prose, 157); “luminous spectacle,” “as novel as . . . astonishing” (quoted by Penzel, Theatre Lighting, 30). The Industrial Revolution changed lives and outlooks, society and relations. People moved from the country to the city as the production of everything from nails to hats moved to the factory, a radically new way of organizing production that changed the way they lived and congregated. And this in turn created a middle class who gained political power (Bronowski, Western Intellectual, 309, 316, 324). Hence Blake’s elevation of the unifying imagination became central to the period. Thus the era is often called the “Romantic” period,” a term coined by the German poet Friedrich Shlegel in 1798. The German Romantic poets and philosophers who influenced Coleridge explored light’s role as mediator between imagination and reality. And light became central as well. The philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) in an 1804 lecture emphasizes the idea of absolute Being as Light, an idea going back to Plato. But Fichte maintains that “this living Light in its radiation is said to divide itself into Being and Thought.” He also says that “Being and Life are one and the same” (Copleston, History of Philosophy, VII, Part 1, 111). And in a lecture on aesthetics in the 1820s G. W. F. Hegel says that light is “pure identity with itself”; “primordial ideality”; “the original self of Nature” (G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975]).

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And the objective world is that which confronts light, and therefore dark. “In this direct relation to objectivity light is no longer asserted simply as light, but as essentially particularized brightness and obscurity, light and shadow” (quoted by Zucker, “In the Light,” 162, n. 28). 14. Light has no circumference, Brox, Brilliant, 66–68; crisis of consciousness . . . sense of the loss of unity, Cunningham, “Introduction,” Romanticism, 2. 15. “Agitation,” Hunter, Sermons, VI, 284; representation of light falls outside representation itself, Foucault, Order of Things, 240. 16. Human energy . . . increased crime, Trachentenberg, Architecture: From Prehistoric to Post Modernism (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), 387. 17. “Organs of sight,” “obliterates, . . . darkness,” Burke quoted by Brennan, Wordsworth, Turner, 80; “positive” or “negative,” Brennan, 22. Edmund Burke distinguished between the “beautiful” and the “sublime” in the title of his essay, but in the consciousness of the age these became two aspects of one sublime. 18. “Flakes of radiance,” “fell like a flash,” “huge sea of mist,” Wordsworth, Prelude, XIII (1805), ll. 40, 43. Unless otherwise indicated, I use the 1850 version of the Prelude. Wordsworth’s experience of sublime light epitomizes the era’s shift in consciousness from a fundamentally stable world to one on the move. Captured by the French writer Mme de Stael who remarked in 1809, “The eighteenth century believed in the nature of things, [stable, unchanging] the nineteenth will only believe in the force of circumstances [unstable, changing]” (quoted by Thorlby, Romantic, 155). The force of time and causality, as in the disturbing geological discovery of deep time, which penetrated the mind of poet and painter alike, dismantled previous assumptions about a fixed, unchanging world. 19. “Water . . . polished bodies,” “reflections, . . . generally received,” “water has the double property . . . reflecting and refracting,” quoted by Gage, “Turner: A Watershed,” 124; disturbed reflections and unpredictable reduplications, Kroeber, British Romantic Art, 172. 20. The “richness . . . reflections,” “landscape of fact,” Kenneth Clark maintains, was created for and by the new middle classes in seventeenth-century Netherlands (Clark, Landscape, 29). But in the Revolutionary Era it was resurgent with a widening audience. To appreciate landscape in the national galleries became, in fact, a mark of citizenship (Daniels, “Politics of Landscape,” 97). This was largely due to the growing conviction that landscape painting should not only “embody the fruits of a penetrating study of the natural world, but should also present the truths about this world as exposed by science” (Gage, Colour in Turner, 15). 21. Thomson’s description of the landscape in The Seasons inspired Wordsworth and Turner as well as Constable, but Thomson conceived of it exclusively in terms of personification, nature wearing a robe of light and revealing her “shining face” (Nicholson, “Naturalizing Time,” 31–32). 22. “Contrarieties,” Heffernan, Re-Creation, 202; superimposition . . . motion, Kroeber, British Romantic Art, 168; “receives . . . seeks the truth,” Wordsworth, Prelude, XIII, 1–8; emphasis added. 23. “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802,” Wordsworth, Complete Poetical Works, 284. Dorothy’s brother is overcome by the city in the morning lying

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open to the fields and the sky, “All bright and glittering in the smokeless air, / Never did sun more beautifully steep / In his first splendor valley, rock, or hill; / Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!” (ll. 8–10), viewing the scene as a connoisseur under the influence of Thomson’s Seasons and Thomas Whately’s (1726–1772) Observations on Modern Gardening (Morgan, “Light in Wordsworth,” 124), which Wordsworth consulted in designing his own garden. 24. “Troubles and disorders,” “it was a beautiful morning,” “shone so . . . pure light,” quoted by Morgan, “Light in Wordsworth,” 125. Dorothy could not help but remember that when they lived at Alfoxden, delightful as it had been, they came under suspicion as French spies in 1797—living together as brother and “sister,” having no visible means of support, and wandering the hills day or night taking notes—when the country was at war with France. 25. “Every possible embellishment . . . diversified” (1810), Wordsworth, Guide Through the District (1835), 173; Wordsworth, “peculiar light,” Prelude, II, 178, 184, 191. 26. “Important in my poetical history; . . . variety of natural appearances,” Wordsworth, Complete Poetical Works, 3; “Strong flakes of radiance . . . stream,” Wordsworth, Prelude, ll. 106, 110 (emphasis added); “mellow light,” “strong flakes,” “plots,” “sparkling water . . . points of light,” “deep repose,” “glows,” “burnished mirror” (Prelude, 120, 125). 27. Execution of the first Girondist, Wordsworth, Prelude, “Table of Dates,” 9; nervous breakdown, Trott, “Wordsworth,” 5; “formation of my own mind,” quoted by Maxwell, “Introduction,” Prelude, 17. Wordsworth came to regard his loss of hope, a “spiritual crisis,” as not just personal but as a crisis of his generation ignited by the energy unleashed in political and cultural revolution (Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 77); “inwardly oppressed,” “sorrow, disappointment,” “confusion,” “zeal decayed,” “utter loss of hope . . . hope for!” Wordsworth, Prelude, XII, 1–7. 28. Crisis of imagination, Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 118–19; lifting him . . . crisis, Woodring, Wordsworth, 102; “I grew up . . . by fear,” Wordsworth, Prelude, I, 301–2. 29. Achieving . . . sixties, Trott, “Wordsworth,” 5–6. 30. Needed Dorothy, Lindenberger, On Wordsworth’s Prelude, 158; “Nature’s inmate,” Wordsworth, Prelude (1805), XI, 214. Wordsworth knows how much he owes to her: “She gave me eyes,” he confesses, as well as “love, and thought, and joy” (1801; Gill, William Wordsworth, 17). An integral part of his life, “the very thought of her,” he exults, was “like a flash of light” (Gill, 182); “bursting light . . . upon the crags,” Dorothy Wordsworth, Journals (August 11, 1820). Tellingly, Dorothy sees this light in an emotional context of “threatenings” and notes in her journal entry that it was only seen by “glimpses between the dispersing clouds” (Journals, II, 207). 31. An interchange of his mind with nature, Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 95, 118–19; “thoughtless youth,” “disturbing” joy, Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” ll. 90, 94; “another name for absolute power,” “amplitude of mind, . . . exalted mood,” Wordsworth, Prelude, XIV, 189–92; “flash of the Imagination,” Brennan, Wordsworth, Turner, 117.

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32. “Features,” as Wordsworth says, “Of the same face,” Wordsworth, Prelude, VI, 637; “An object of delight,” “love,” Prelude, XIII, 49–51. Wordsworth in returning to his boyhood experience was not interested in retreating to what Hugo Walter calls a “sanctuary of light,” one of “luminescence and tranquility,” but in retrieving past power for his present need. Wordsworth shuns, in fact, the sanctuary’s “powerful radiance during the day” for the agitated light of sunrise and sunset (Walter, Sanctuaries, 203–4). 33. “Bodies” of water, Wordsworth, Guide to the Lakes, 110; “thousand . . . waves,” “agitated . . . his eye,” Wordsworth, Excursion, VII, 411, 414; “gentle agitations of the mind,” Wordsworth, Prelude, II, 298. Wordsworth’s contemporary the French poet Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) shared a variation of his light experience, observing the “shifting path of the waters . . . a river of air and light,” calling these “folds of clarity” (Notebooks, 1800, 34). He interprets, saying that “it is not ray by ray, but through facets, that the light shines for us” (Joubert, 70), the “waves of light and layers of brightness” (102). Not direct light, but light in facets and folds. Also, like Wordsworth he has a reciprocal relationship with this light, claiming that “if objects shine toward us, we shine toward objects” (71) as if they were cognizant of us, a twist on Plato’s belief that our eyes emitted light. He declared, “Light. I cannot be satisfied with little” (62). 34. “The moon was up,” “the Lake . . . clear,” “Leaving behind her . . . sparkling light,” Wordsworth, Prelude (1805), I, 383, 391–94; deeper reality, Lindenberger, On Wordsworth’s Prelude, 71; “mighty Forms . . . living men,” Prelude, I, 425–26); “Appeared . . . a dream,” “A prospect in my mind,” Prelude, II, 369–71. So powerful are these personal experiences that the poet refuses, countering literary convention, to make their light symbolic (Cosgrove, “Wordsworth’s Moonlight-Poetry,” 30). So powerful and transformative for him, in fact, that he wants others to share his experience of this positive sublime. The light of sunset, for example, discovers the light of “high endeavors” in Wordsworth’s “glimmering” view, and he feels a reciprocity with nature so that he believes anyone can experience such if he “but live within the light.” And from this relationship with nature fostered by sublime light it “spreads abroad / His being with a strength that cannot fail” (Wordsworth, Prelude, IV, 159–61). Sublime light, in short, is not only personal salvation but redemptive for all. 35. A related experience, one of diffused light, occurs as he finds himself on the summit of Mt. Snowdon in the Lake District. He is transfixed by a brightening and “brighter still” moonlight that “Fell like a flash” on “a huge sea of mist” with the “backs” of a “hundred hills” all around him in the distance thrusting up through the “still Ocean” of fog (Prelude, XIII (1805), 36–47). This is why mist, “hazy and luminous,” having the effect “like that of magic” (Wordsworth, Guide, quoted by Mead, “Light and Colour,” 90), plays a prominent role in Wordsworth’s poems. Wordsworth experiences this diffused light as well in a sunrise, which possesses an “obscure sense / Of possible sublimity” (Prelude, II, 336–37), and sunset, telling his sister that “the light of setting suns” is the “dwelling” of the “sense sublime” (“Tintern Abbey,” ll. 95–97). 36. “Peculiar,” “sudden burst,” “overpowering light,” “long perspective glittering,” a “shine,” “hundred streams,” “flame with gold,” Wordsworth, “Descriptive Sketches,” Complete Poetical Works, 274–84; terror of apocalyptic nature,

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Lindenberger, On Wordsworth’s Prelude, 74; “Deluge of light,” Wordsworth’s note, quoted by Brennan, Wordsworth, Turner, 54; narrow chasm, a total vortex, Bois, “Natural Sublime,” 66; “most terrifying . . . Sublime,” Brennan, Wordsworth, Turner, 82. Thus fulfilling the earlier promise of “Imagination! Lifting up itself / Before the eye” when the “light of sense / goes out in flashes that have shown to us / The invisible world” that “harbours” our “destiny, our nature, and our home,” which is “infinitude” (Wordsworth, Prelude, VI, 525, 534–39). 37. “Were all like workings of one mind,” Wordsworth, Prelude (1805), VI, 549– 72; “Apocalypse,” VI, 632–38; “hope that can never die,” VI, 606; “raving stream,” “symbols of Eternity,” VI, 639; “radiance,” XII, 267. 38. “The moon was up, the Lake was shining clear,” but then observes that the small circles left in the wake of the boat’s progress on the lake were “glittering idly in the moon, / Until they melted all into one track / Of sparkling light” (Wordsworth, Prelude, 1805, I, 383, 392–94). By this he enacts the processes of his personal experience, using verbs to recreate the principal movement of his mind (Lindenberger, On Wordsworth’s Prelude, 43, 61, 65). Brennan interprets Wordsworth’s enactments of his experience differently, claiming that the visible world disappears rather than participates in a reciprocity: “blinded by light to the visible world and grasping to comprehend an immeasurable ‘something.’” Then “the light of the imagination flashes, blinding him to the sensible world but revealing the invisible world.” In the “sublime moment light fails to illuminate external reality” and is internalized (Brennan, Wordsworth, Turner, 23, 54). 39. “It looks to me . . . very unwell,” Gill, William Wordsworth, 353. 40. Energetic character, Kroeber, British Romantic Art, 182; “paradisiac,” “apocalyptic light-storm,” Jack Lindsay quoted by Brennan, Wordsworth, Turner, 83. Turner visited the Lake District in 1797 while Wordsworth and Coleridge were creating the Lyrical Ballads, published the next year (Ackroyd, Turner, 15). And he sketched the same landscapes that the poets did for the same reasons, being awed by their sublime presence. Living in the Lake District with meadows and mountains, however, Wordsworth returns to the sublime, Edenic beauty of light, only being forced to internalize its terror. By contrast, Turner living in London his whole life ultimately embraces the sublime, apocalyptic terror of light. 41. “Light of Being,” “Being of light,” Raval, “Light as a Romantic Positive,” 99; violent being, Berger, “Turner and the Barber’s Shop,” 143; “light energy in itself,” Kroeber, British Romantic Art, 184. 42. “Moving force,” Wilton, Turner and the Sublime, 102; “Inflamed by . . . obsessed by light,” “be made . . . the sun itself?” “Yes,” “savagery in Turner’s . . . painted light,” Harris, Weatherland, 268–69. 43. Experience of the positive sublime of beauty, Harris, Weatherland, 274; “greatest step of all,” “we are in sunshine,” “what sunshine!” “white, flashing fullness . . . joy,” “loved sunshine . . . sake,” “radiant mystery, . . . never all revealed,” Ruskin, Lamp of Beauty, 25–26, 84. Ruskin observed that in his century the light experience of the “chiaroscurists,” such as Dürer, Leonardo, and Rembrandt, had changed with a shift to the expression of what he labeled the “colorists,” lauding Turner as the supreme colorist (“Of Turnerian Light,” 59).

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44. Elemental violence, Harris, Weatherland, 274; “20 to 25 miles a day,” “with his baggage . . . on his way,” “worked standing all day,” “could outwork . . . painter alive,” respectively, Robert Leslie and E. V. Rippingille, quoted by Gowing, Turner, 42. We saw how in “Tintern Abbey” and the Prelude Wordsworth’s mind actively interacts with external nature, penetrating it until he imagines the reality behind (Woodring, Wordsworth, 113). But where he saw the beauty in this violent probing where the “light of sense / Goes out in flashes that have shown to us / The invisible world” where hope “can never die” because “our destiny, our nature, and our home / Is with infinitude” (Wordsworth, Prelude, VI [1805], 534–39), Turner fears this invisible world behind natural appearances. The infinite terrifies him. So we move from Wordsworth’s sublime, Edenic light that powers his entire life, grounded in the positive sublime, to Turner’s later paintings, which consolidate his life-long intuitions, and their sublime apocalyptic light manifesting a terrifying energy, such as that in Regulus, evoking the negative sublime. 45. “Apocalyptic phase,” Berger, “Turner and the Barber’s Shop,” 144; “source and origin of force,” “Matter transformed by fire,” Serres, “Turner Translates,” 54, 56; inhabit the whole visible world, Berger, 144. Works like The Slave Ship (1840), Sunrise with a Boat Between Headlands (c. 1835–1840), and Sun Setting Over Sea (c. 1840–1845), the kind of paintings that Hazlitt called “portraits of nothing” (quoted by Clark, Romantic Rebellion, 196), as well as Mercury Sent to Admonish Aeneas (1850). 46. Artist of the day, Ackroyd, Turner, 15; indifferent light whirl sucks man into his fate, Clark, Romantic Rebellion, 237. Growing up with violence in the city and in the home is perhaps why as a habitual traveler, the more violent the scene the more powerful Turner’s observation and its emotional impact (Clark, 234). His experience of the Swiss Alps, like Wordsworth’s, was crucial in revealing the raw, extreme power of nature. And his experience of Venice, revealing the sheer force of light in the intensity of an Italian sun, as in Regulus, was pivotal. 47. “An endless variety,” “double property,” “absorbing,” “reflecting and refracting,” quoted by Harris, Weatherland, 272; “The Sun is God,” John Ruskin recalled hearing, quoted by Gage, “J.M.W. Turner and Solar,” 39. 48. Wisions are wholly his own, Clark, Romantic Rebellion, 230; “violent vortex . . . white-hot centre,” J. Hillis Miller, Illustration, 130. We take in the whole scene but the artist does not allow us to take refuge in the foreground of the picture or in the middle distance, leaving us exposed without any firm ground to stand on. As a result, the sun penetrates to our “inner-most refuge” (Miller, 130). 49. “Face to face,” Paulson, “Turner’s Graffiti,” 180; called the sun God, Ackroyd, Turner, 63, and see Hamilton, T, 318. On Turner’s relation to the sun in the context of eighteenth-century mythologizing, see Gage (“J.M.W. Turner and Solar,” 41–47). And on the evolution of the association with the sun from the beginning of the eighteenth century through the Romantic poets, see Paulson (“Turner’s Graffiti,” 174–77). 50. No possibility of redemption, Berger, “Turner and the Barber’s Shop,” 146. 51. Light buried itself in his psyche (Clark, Romantic Rebellion, 224). After being appointed the youngest member of the Royal Academy at the age of twenty-seven (1802), Turner devoted a lecture to the complex reflective properties of water, insisting that because of water’s motion, such reflections differ radically from a mirror’s

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(Heffernan, Re-creation, 206–7). Even at seventy, attending a farewell dinner for Charles Dickens, a friend reported that Turner enjoyed the “changing lights on the river” more than the speeches (Lloyd, “Being There,” 192). Just as he had been earlier more fascinated with the effects of light-and-water in Venice than in its historical sites (Clark, 192). 52. “Truth of the climate,” Gage, Colour in Turner, App. III: “A Note on Reflexes and English Landscape” (c. 1810); “over-Turner,” quoted by Hirsh, World of Turner, 59 (emphasis in original). Turner’s technique was denounced as a “vicious practice.” But like Caravaggio’s work this appealed to the young painters, subsequently known as the “white painters” because they rejected the conventional blacks and browns. Predictably, Turner was accused of having “debauched the taste of the younger artists by the empirical novelty of his style” (quoted by Hirsh, 59). The background of this violence was public agitation. Turner no doubt felt the tremors of war with France that made the English tense and did not end until 1814 (Hirsh, 85). 53. “Hinge,” “infinite . . . radiance,” Gowing, Turner, 21; “different order of reality,” quoted by Gowing, 16, and see Ackroyd, Turner, 96, 98; “water’s liquid melting reflection,” Gowing, 51. Turner stayed in Venice only five days but filled 160 pages of his sketchbooks with watercolors, feverishly making color notes: “Blue—Mass of Light—White” (quoted by Hamilton, Turner, 240). 54. Generated by color in his picture, “fantastic force,” Gowing, Turner, 33, 45; insists is light, Hamilton, T, 263. Watching from across the Thames, Turner did a series of rapid watercolors (later worked into two oils). In these fire, sky, and water merge in an apocalyptic vision (Hirsh, World of Turner, 155). 55. Yet his light experience does not evolve in a single arc, for at the same time, he paints Norham Castle, Sunrise (c. 1835–1840) with its dissolving yet peaceful light in contrast to his earlier brilliant colors of Burning of the Houses of Lords and Common, 16th October (1834 or 1835). 56. The vortex must be “faced and mastered.” As Turner explained, “I did not paint it to be understood, but I wished to show what such a scene was like. . . . I was lashed for four hours, and I did not expect to escape; but I felt bound to record it if I did” (quoted by Hamilton, Turner, 355). Whether this is a literal experience or imagined, as Turner’s biographer James Hamilton believes (355), this was Turner’s existential probing of the boundary between form and chaos (Mitchell, “Metamorphoses,” 139). His picture is not a representation of a storm observed, then, but an enactment of being in it (Gowing, Turner, 48). 57. “Structures of light,” Ackroyd, Turner, 102, 127. 58. Shade and Darkness (1843) employed what the German poet and color theorist Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) termed “minus” colors—blues, blue-greens, and purples. Light and Colour (1843) employed the “plus” colors—reds, yellows, and greens. Although Turner endorsed Goethe’s “harmonious juxtaposition” of the prismatic scale of color and was sympathetic with his belief in polarities (Gage, Colour in Turner, 175), he disagreed with the German on the nature of color, siding with Newton. Turner criticized Goethe polarities in his paintings, restoring the equality of light and darkness as values in art and nature (Gage, 185). And although Turner nods toward Goethe in his title, he reacts to his theory of colors. Turner could not agree

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with his proposition that colors arise from the merging of light and darkness, which these paintings refute. Instead he showed that they come “wholly out of light” (Jack Lindsay, quoted by Heffernan, “English Romantic Perception,” 143). Goethe like Wordsworth and Turner was entranced by agitated light reflections. He called these the “actions and sufferings of light” (quoted by Gombrich, Heritage of Apelles, 4). This reveals his experience of light as a force and as an organism. True not only in perception, Goethe maintaining that the “eye may be said to owe its existence to light, which calls forth, as it were, a sense that is akin to itself,” but in its irreducible nature (Goethe, Theory of Colours, liii). Reacting emotionally to Newton’s reductive and abstract (mathematical) approach, which had become the “universal creed,” Goethe declares, “I discovered light in its purity and truth, and I considered it my duty to fight for it” (Goethe, Conversations, 55). Contrary to Newton, that is, Goethe insisted on this existential relationship, rejecting the Enlightenment Age’s “mechanical” imagination of light and embracing the Romantic Era’s light of natural supernaturalism, a “spiritual” but not religious imagination of light (Clegg, Light Years, 132; Zajonc, Catching the Light, 192). Turner’s fundamental experience of light was as a “dynamic force,” whose “special vibrancy” and emotional potency was increased by his hours and days of close observation as well as his knowledge of its scientific study (Kemp, Science of Art, 159), having made a friend in Scotland of the physicist David Brewster whose writings on optics were displacing the theories of Newton (Hamilton, Turner, 261). Turner’s early painting Buttermere Lake (1797–1798), however, in its depiction of the rainbow departs from Thomson’s Newtonian experience of light. The painter used lines from the poet as a caption: the rainbow “emulous of light, / Reflected her lost forms, each in prismatic guise.” But the painting represents the rainbow as a continuous arc of white-yellow light (Heffernan, “English Romantic Perception,” 143) whose shimmering seems to fountain out of the lake and pass into the mountain peaks. Turner was acutely aware that light was motion, always changing, marking time’s passing, as his fondness like Wordsworth’s for sunrise and sunset attests. 59. For a discussion of Turner’s having found a “perfect thematic ‘match’ for his formal experiments with vorticular form in mythic subjects,” such as the Deluge and the Apocalypse, see W. J. T. Mitchell, “Metamorphoses,” 145–51. He also offers an interpretation of how Turner’s painting Light and Colour . . . The Morning of the Deluge departs from orthodox renderings of the Deluge, saying that Turner presents an “apocalyptic transformation,” placing himself in “the position of Moses as the seer and recorder at the center of the vortex” (150–51). 60. This was condemned by artist’s manuals of the time, such as Frank Howard’s The Sketcher’s Manual, 1837 (Gowing, Turner, 27). 61. “Exceeds form; it transforms,” Serres, “Turner Translates Carnot,” 56; “light is color,” “most energetic and sublime,” “quality of force,” quoted by Gage, Colour in Turner, App. II, 200, 206–7; “glorious,” “voracious, . . . unsparing,” “impartially,” “whole living world,” “energetic pattern,” Gowing, Turner, 48, 53. 62. Turner broke with the Dutch landscape tradition, as he does in Calais Pier (1803), and with the classical landscape, whose conventions expressed a gentle light of calmness and balance. Though he learned much from the French painter Claude

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Lorrain (c. 1604–1682), he also broke with this classical tradition. Neither tradition could accommodate his own experience of a turbulent light, the “felt” rather than merely seen. Responding to the light energy revealed by wind-in-water, he pays little attention to the sheen from the water’s surface, which had charmed earlier painters, and focuses on its sublime force, not allowing us to separate from its light. He knew better than any previous painter the interaction of light-water-atmosphere, and later flame-water-sun, expressed by colors that became in his mind pure light dematerializing forms not only outside in nature as in Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus (1829) but also inside as in his Interior at Petworth (c. 1837). Up until Turner’s late Italian pictures Claude was a profound influence. He was the first to include in his paintings an image of the sun, which became a “shining talisman for Turner himself” (Ackroyd, Turner, 23). Also, as John Ruskin observed, “he was the first who attempted to realize “actual sunshine in misty air” (Lamp of Beauty, 35). Early on Turner much admired the “luminous serenity” (Ackroyd, 23) of Claude’s atmospheric light, saying in an 1811 lecture that his pictures are “pure as Italian air, calm, beautiful and serene.” But in Turner’s late work he virtually repudiates Claude’s idea of art, with its fusion of nature and the ideal (Oxford Companion to J.M.W. Turner, 48–49), when he turned to the apocalyptic sublime by which he undermined the eighteenth-century understanding of nature as an “idealized or Providential order,” to which the popular Claude glass, a rage in the 1790s, contributed (Harris, Weatherland, 191–93), as well as the nineteenth-century artist’s assumption of their objectivity (Nicholson, “Naturalizing Time,” 43). In short, Turner repudiated the received “principle of traditional landscape,” as John Berger observes, the “principle that a landscape is something which unfolds before you.” In The Burning of the Houses of Parliament the scene begins to work its way around the viewer, outflanking and surrounding us. This becomes a fact in Snow Storm—Steam-Boat where we find ourselves in the center of the vortex: “there is no longer a near and a far” (Berger, “Turner and the Barber’s Shop,” 147). 63. And to enact light energy he left behind the chiaroscuro that Rembrandt used to express his experience of the glow, which Turner admired, and seems to have taken Goethe’s assertion to heart that yellow is the “colour nearest the light” (Goethe, Theory of Colours, 306). Rembrandt remained, however, the most important influence on Turner. The “whole question” of lights and darks for the painter is thus, as John Ruskin maintained, “whether you will lose yourself in light or in darkness” regarding the light the artist wishes to “imitate.” But Ruskin’s elevation of Turner flows from his conviction of the “sacredness of color”; or from Turner’s handling of color, especially white and yellow, which convinces him of its sacredness (“Of Turnerian Light,” 52, 62). 64. Surfacing the traces of his means, Gowing, Turner, 10; “almost entirely with his palette knife,” Robert Leslie, quoted by Gowing, 42–43; picture’s surface, Hamlyn, “‘Sword Play,’” 124. William Hazlitt (1778–1830) put his finger on this in 1816 when he said that Turner’s paintings did not represent the “objects of nature” but the “medium through which they were seen” (quoted by Gowing, 13), which inspired Monet.

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65. “Light reactive of Reflection,” quoted by Gage, Turner: Rain, Steam, 62; “lump of white . . . shield,” quoted by Miller, Illustration, 134. One of Turner’s colleagues in the academy described his method of working with a “huge lump of flake white: he had two or three biggish hog tools to work with, and with these he was driving the white into all the hollows, and every part of the surface” (Hamlyn, “‘Sword Play,’” 124). Turner had learned from Rembrandt, as a contemporary critic remarked, who was fond of using the palette knife to “lay on masses of solid colour,” which, “in some instances, is [sic] made to project like the real objects on the canvas” (quoted by Gage, Turner: Rain, Steam, 57). Rembrandt’s “glow,” however, is not Turner’s light experience. As early as Buttermere Lake (1797–1798) Turner records the sublime light that seemed to exclude all else. But as the light fell it “scattered shining flecks, sprinklings of incandescent pigment,” suggesting that one other thing was real to Turner, the “paint itself” (Gowing, Turner, 7). 66. Oxford Companion to J.M.W. Turner, 61. 67. “Perceives in a landscape . . . meadows flat,” “to say about as much as . . . fawn and a skylark,” quoted Rees “Constable, Turner,” 253. The chemist Humphry Davy (1778–1829) and physicist Thomas Young (1773–1829), as well as the poets and painters, all shared the friendship of the scientist Mary Somerville (1780–1872). Thomas Young was a close friend of Mary and her husband, who like Young was a physician. His lectures at the Royal Institute were, she said, “a mine of riches to me,” and he spent many evenings in their home (Somerville, Personal Recollections, 131). Davy was also part of her London social circle as well as a good friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge, who worked with him on his experiments with nitrous oxide. Turner met Davy in Venice, finding much in common such as writing poems and fishing, Davy having written a book for anglers (Hamilton, Turner, 243). And Davy’s assistant was Michael Faraday (1791–1867) (Hirsh, World of Turner, 148), greatest experimentalist of them all and close friend of the Somervilles (Hamilton, 272). Furthermore, Constable’s son John was a student at the Royal Institution Laboratories under the eminent Faraday, and Constable gave a series of lectures here (1835–1836), stating in the first that “imagination alone never did, and never can, produce works that are to stand by a comparison with realities” (emphasis in original, quoted by Hirsh, World, 149). His experiments in coming to terms with his experience of light’s character, as we’ve seen, bear this out in stark contrast to Turner’s visionary explorations. Yet Turner’s imagination of light was that of, what we might call, an empirical realist, having a vision of fire/light that was new in the world expressed in his work as a tension between light and energy, dismissed by one contemporary critic as “absurd extravaganzas” (quoted, Warrell, “Into the Light,” 203, 228). He was the first to give expression to the essential nature of the colossal historical shift from “simple machines to steam engines” by way of the Industrial Revolution, “from mechanics to thermodynamics.” Experiencing a new light ablaze, he knew that fire’s “energy exceeds form; it transforms.” Expressing this relationship in his paintings, Turner introduced “fiery matter into culture.” No longer interested in representation, his “painting is a furnace, the very furnace itself,” the engine for “going back toward chaos,” a vison of “stochastic disorder.” He was, then, as the philosopher Michel

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Serres claims, the “first true genius in thermodynamics” (Serres, “Turner Translates Carnot,” 56–57, 61–62). 68. “Light reactive of Reflection,” “light-drenched,” gathers energy into a froth of light, Heffernan, Re-creation, 209. 69. “Made me a painter,” quoted Leslie, Memoirs, 93; “formed,” “ideas of Landscape,” quoted by Hill, Constable’s English Landscape, 99; within three miles, Clark, Romantic Rebellion, 270; highest emotional pitch, Clark, Landscape, 79. 70. Deep into his career, Constable took great pride in a remark of his engraver, Reynolds, who said Constable’s “freshness” of daylight exceeded “any painter that every lived.” He explains: “for to my Zest of ‘Color’ I have added ‘light.’” For Constable as for Turner color equals light equals energy (letter to Rev. John Fisher, November 17, 1824, emphasis in original, in Goldwater, Artists on Art, 269); “force of light in nature,” “and governs every thing [sic],” quoted Leslie, Memoirs, 92. Constable’s common light of day is the “splendor of sunshine” that Henry James Richter (1772–1857), an illustrator whom Blake knew, called in his pamphlet Day-Light (1817); simply “DAY-LIGHT, as distinguished from the direct light of the Sun.” And he agreed with Constable that the “light of the SKY,” which “SHINES DOWN PERPENDICULARLY,” has a “peculiar quality” (Richter, Day-Light, 3, 8; emphasis and capitalization in original). 71. “Power which creates space,” “Everywhere . . . and refraction,” “all effects of light and dark,” “chiaroscuro,” “but modifications,” “perfect stillness never occurs,” “innumerable reflections,” “refractions,” “spaces between each of these lights,” Constable quoted by Leslie, Memoirs, “Third Lecture at the Royal Institution,” 1836, Ch. XVIII, p. 347. 72. “Painting is a science . . . laws of nature,” “branch of natural philosophy,” “experiments,” quoted by Thornes, John Constable’s Skies, 51; “skying,” quoted by Leslie, Memoirs, 92; “assembly of interdependencies,” Rees, “Constable, Turner,” 260. Experiments in probing as well as questioning Luke Howard’s (1772–1864) cloud classification in his Essay on the Modification of Clouds (1803), which named the three basic types—cumulus, stratus, and cirrus (Thornes, John Constable’s Skies, 52). Constable understood Howard’s work and, in a sense, he and Howard together invented clouds. They created a studied awareness of their formations, defined not merely as forms (Howard) but as having distinctly different lights (Constable). 73. The dabs of lead white we see in this huge painting are Constable’s language for his experience of light’s character of “freshness” and “Zest.” This technique was radical. He worked with “short, brisk strokes” going every which way, often piling paint into ridges with his palette knife, as Turner did, to achieve “freshness.” Likewise, Constable rejected the traditional high gloss and somber colors of uniform tone, using instead bright pigments and varied tones and daringly applying paint in vibrant little dabs, making no effort to blend them, even at times strewing his canvas with flecks of white (Hirsh, World of Turner, 114). Constable captures the water-sparkle energy of the sunlight by applying his flecks of white and yellow paint. These were mocked at first by viewers as “soapsuds,” just as Turner’s blazes of white and yellow had been mocked as “yellow fever.”

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74. “Almost turbulently,” Storch, “Wordsworth and Constable,” 124. The sky is more than luminous because its sublime light descends and imparts its energy to the terrestrial. More dramatically, it permeates the air above the meadow and creates behind the foliage of the copse a “luminous space at the center of the world, a ‘bridal of the earth and sky’” (Storch, 124). Constable’s oil sketches and preliminary canvases for The Hay Wain show him working toward this light-filled space. We see in these Constable’s clarification of the vibrancy of his luminous space. His first sketch, in fact, shows the brilliance on the meadow and the darkness of upward thrusting trees before the “sky throbbing with light” (Storch, 124). 75. This did not mean, however, that Turner was no less conversant with the light science of his day than Constable, or that Constable was no less given to a personal imagination of light than Turner who kept up with contemporary scientific research. He owned a copy of Newton’s Optics (1704), optics being his favorite science. He also knew the scientist Mary Somerville and owned her Mechanism of the Heavens (a rendition of Laplace’s Mécanique celeste, 1831). More important, her experiments convinced him of the hidden powers of light, such as the apparent ability of blue and green to magnetize a needle (later disproven). Yet Turner and Constable were not working scientists, despite the fact that they viewed themselves as engaged in the scientific project, Turner exploring cause and effect and Constable carrying out “experiments.” By “contemplating and defining qualities and causes, effects and incidents,” Turner says, he “develops by practice the possibility of attaining what appears mysterious upon principle” (quoted by Rees, “Constable, Turner,” 264). He probes light’s character, that is, until he achieves an imaginative interpretation of his experience, a true vision. And these studies did lead to paintings of Venice and Norham Castle, for example, in which Turner elevated light and color over form. By dissolving “objects into light” he “challenged the view that solidity conferred reality,” and nineteenth-century science vindicated his intuition (Rees, 264). In contrast, Constable revealed objects as composed of subtle but observable light and color, which constituted his experimental conclusions. His humility before nature was not Turner’s. Conversely, Young’s contemporary the visionary chemist Humphry Davy (1778– 1829) who employed empirical methods, experiencing a sublime light. Since nature is constituted by light, he proclaimed that the “worshipper of Nature is a worshipper of light.” And because it is the very heart of chemistry, he dubbed this the “most sublime” science. By the same token, Young could call his physics sublime as well. Trained as a doctor, this would have been encouraged by the fact that physiology was known as a “sublime science” (as was astronomy). Central to all Humphry Davy’s investigations was light. This commitment derived perhaps from his experiment with nitrous oxide. After inhaling it, he “beheld a rapture-wakening form” and his eyes filled with “sparkling lustre” (Davy, Memoirs, vI, 97). He experienced, that is, sublime light. Consequently, in an early essay he states unequivocally that “what we mean by Nature is a series of visible images: but these are constituted by light. Hence the worshipper of Nature is a worshipper of light” (quoted by Holmes, Age of Wonder, 254).

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Davy was convinced of its importance in his chemical investigations. Light entered into chemical combination, he believed, and thus into the composition of living bodies. And “on the existence of this principle in organic compounds,” he concludes, “perception, thought, and happiness, appear to depend” (quoted by Levere, Poetry Realized, 22). He goes further, saying, “we cannot entertain a doubt but that every change in our sensations and ideas,” driven by “light combined with oxygen,” which he called phosoxygen, “must be accompanied with some correspondent change in the organic matter of the body.” Triumphantly, he therefore pronounces chemistry the “most sublime” of all sciences (Levere, 23). A science rooted in the sublime light phosoxygen of his empirical-imaginative experience as a light “worshipper.” 76. Affinity with the scientific pursuit, Wood, Thomas Young, 2–3. 77. “Forcibly impressed,” “analogy,” quoted, Dictionary of Scientific Biography, “Young,” XIV, 565. For an explanation of alternating sound and silence when two sound waves cross, see Alexander Wood (Thomas Young, 154–55). Regarding the alternating colors and darks we see from an oil slick, some of the light reaching the surface of the oil is reflected from it, but some passes through to be reflected from the surface of the water beneath. Two rays then reach the eye at the same time, interfering with each other. So Young suspected, as Huygens had a hundred years before, that light behaved more like a wave than a bullet, the prevailing assumption inherited from Newton (Park, Fire Within, 246). His particles could not explain how light added to light resulted in darkness (Watson, Light, 134). 78. “Destroy the other,” “but their effects will be combined,” quoted by Wood, Thomas Young, 161. 79. To be sure, Huygens, Hooke, and Euler, whose vibrational theory of light and a universal luminiferous ether influenced Young (Zajonc, Catching the Light, 110), had postulated some form of wave motion. But it was rejected on the grounds of the simple observation that sound waves turn a corner but light does not. And such resistance was mightily reinforced by the God-like authority of Newton’s conclusions (Park, Fire Within, 245). 80. “Law of interference,” “one of the most . . . the history of hypotheses,” quoted by Zajonc, Catching the Light, 110. If light’s character was bullet-like (corpuscular) as Newton maintained, we would expect to see on the paper a bright spot in the middle where the light from the slits overlapped and dimmer areas on each side giving way to darkness on the edges. Instead Young saw a pattern like that formed by the waves meeting each other at the channel of the lake. Just as the peaks of two waves coinciding with each other create a higher wave, he realized, and the peaks of two opposite each other, one rising and one falling, cancel each other out creating calm water, so light does the same (Clegg, Light Years, 136). What he was seeing in the alternation of light and dark paths intersecting the bands on the sheet of paper were the footprints of light waves interfering with each other, alternately reinforcing and canceling each other. For an extended discussion of Young’s arrival at the hypothesis of light as a wave derived from its “interference” footprint and a lucid description of the two-slit experiment, see Tony Rothman (Everything’s Relative, 15–20) and David Park (Fire Within, 245–51) as well as Alexander Wood (Thomas Young, Chapter 12, 143–78). However,

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Rothman is skeptical about Young actually carrying out this experiment, claiming that the “evidence is less than equivocal” (Rothman, 20). 81. “Vibratory and . . . reasoning,” Young, “Reply,” 195. Young was the first to use the word “energy” in the modern, technical sense as the property of a system, organic or mechanical, that enabled it to do work. Humphry Davy’s poems like those of his fellow visionary Turner reveal his fundamental experience of light as sublime energy. Rev. Hunter echoes this, saying that the beautiful and fearful “majesty” of light lies in its “force,” an inexplicable energy. He knows how profound this is because he had read (later translating) the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler’s (1707–1783) Letters to a German Princess (1760–1762) in which he asserts that “light is nothing else but an agitation.” Hunter’s experience of light, its “every luminous particle,” was informed by Newton’s, but also in the new age by Euler’s experience of it as a wave form in constant energetic motion that, as we’ve seen, Thomas Young later demonstrated (“majesty,” “force,” Hunter, Sermons, VI, 275; “light . . . agitation,” quoted by Clegg, Light Years, 127; “every luminous particle,” “motion,” Hunter, VI, 271, 281, 284, 289). 82. Wholly embracing the sublime, Brennan, Wordsworth, Turner, 120–21; character as energetic vibrations, Hamilton, Turner and the Scientists, 65.

Chapter 5

Fields of Light The Age of Technology

The man who was lashed to a mast during a storm, so he could probe his experience of light more deeply, bridges two ages. J. M. W. Turner’s light vortex spans a profound shift between the previous age’s unstable light vibrating erratically with great energy in the experience of poets, painters, and scientists, and the Age of Technology that enmeshed later artists and scientists in force fields of light. These fields, analogous to magnetic fields, formed an all-pervasive web of light that captured the imagination of many in the mid- to late nineteenth century, profoundly shaping their light experience. This shift in experiencing light as primarily energy, sporadic agitations, to light as constituted by forces, continuous vibrations enmeshing us, means that light is not a phenomenon wholly experienced at a distance, affecting us emotionally with sublime fear or beauty as in previous times. Rather, it is a web of forces embracing us as we embrace it. And affected by its vibrations, seemingly infinite in their influence, we experience a new sense of sublimity. Turner accepts the energy, the power of light to unite mind and nature, as did Wordsworth, but shifts focus from nature to the perceiving subject in his later work more explicitly and radically than the poet, thereby ushering in the new age. Whatever notion the poet clung to that light is an independent phenomenon with its corollary that the viewer is separate from the light, which Vermeer and Newton assumed, Turner overturned.1 As an artist Turner anchors himself to the observable, such as his sun, but strives to capture it not as an end in itself but as it appears to him, refracted and reflected by the air of England, adopting what Charlotte Klonk calls “phenomenalism,” a complex of attitudes that came to dominate the Age of Technology. Neither empiricism nor naturalism, this entailed the rejection of religious and philosophic presuppositions. In his visionary relationship with the sun, captured in his later works, that is, Turner undermines the notion that light can be represented as something apart from the observer, calling into 161

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question the assumptions of Young’s empiricism and Constable’s naturalism. He collapses any distance between himself and the experience of light itself, as forms give way to forces. His eye and the sun fuse, in fact, existing in a single field of light.2 Turner’s phenomenalism implicated perception. And by 1840 the activity of perception itself had become a primary object of interest in the study of vision, which in turn became a major characteristic of the new age, contributing to a new self-consciousness about the presence of light in the world. This ultimately resulted in a new light experience, as we’ll see, not just for individuals such as artists predisposed to be sensitive to the effects of light, but for the public. AN OCULAR AGE: SUN-FORCE The shift to perception itself as subject is one reason the American writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) refers to his age, mid- to late nineteenth century, as the “ocular age.” He recognized the involvement of perception in what is given as appearances (phenomenalism) with its attendant self-consciousness about the mechanism of vision, which implicates the body and technology. Emerson intuited this “crucial systemic shift” implicating the body. For in the new age the “individual as observer became an object of investigation.” By mid-century it became obvious that the body’s physiology played a “constitutive role” in the “apprehension of a visible world” and their light. Reinforcing this self-consciousness about the experience of light was the fact that the second half of the nineteenth century, like none other, fostered a widespread revolution in camera and lighting technology.3 The emblem of this ocular age of technology was the Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibits of 1851, the year Turner died, a date that may serve as the beginning of the new era. Erected in London and devoted to “science, art, and productive industry,” its marriage of light and technology offered the visitor a new experience that produced a self-consciousness about light. Owing to the architecture of the Crystal Palace, visitors were confronted as never before by interior light. The palace was a “ridge-and-furrow” construction resembling a long prism made possible by new technology (cast iron and plate glass), which enabled a huge open space admitting abundant sun onto eight miles of tables stocked by 1,300 exhibitors. Its vast expanse of glass walls and ceilings left visitors in awe. Enclosing fields of natural light, this democratic palace announced the new age of progress (often named for Queen Victoria, 1837–1901). Free to all classes of people, its exhibits included the new optical rage—cameras and stereoscopes. Palace visitors moving through this immense space, experienced a total environment of interior natural light.

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Never before had light been a presence that dissolved boundaries between inside and outside, body and nature. Unlike earlier and limited individual experiences, this was a communal one of interior natural light, analogous to that later in Paris of exterior artificial light provided by electricity (i.e., industrial lighting). At the same time, the Crystal Palace’s focus on exhibits of new tools and inventions signaled a future of workers become captive to the relentless rhythms of machines. Such a contradiction, as we’ll see, shaped the new experience of light, as the exhibits foretold. These featured advances in science, Turner’s vortex become the model of thermodynamics. And Palace booths displayed wondrous new technology, such as cameras and their photographs, giving expression to encounters with light never known before. Thus by mid-century many shared a new experience of light as a continuous field (not Leonardo’s tiled chiaroscuro or Vermeer’s walled light). A shift from previous experience accompanied by that from the “corpuscular” character of light (Newton) to “wave-motion” (Young). The premier experimental scientist Michael Faraday (1791–1867) had by mid-century intuited this from experiment as a “field” of light. The field was for Faraday a 3D “spider’s web” that filled the universe, which though invisible, he felt as a concrete physical reality not a mathematical one. Thus he comprehended visible light as vibrating lines of force (like those formed by iron filings on a sheet of paper with a magnet beneath). Rivaling Charles Dickens’s celebrity, Faraday’s talks were such a hit with the public and his “field” such a powerful metaphor that by 1850 they made it amenable to experiencing the new aspect of light’s character.4 As we shift from the experience of the Revolutionary Age to the later Ocular Age, we shift from a fundamental experience of light as an energy outside us (agitation) to light as a force(s) embracing us. Faraday’s field surrounds and infuses us. As we swim in it, though we never see it directly, it tugs at us, letting us know its presence by its force on us. The discovery that we participate in fluid force fields of light was underlined by popular science as well. Andrew Steinmetz in his Sunshine and Showers (1867) argues for what he calls, revealingly, “sun-force” pervading the cosmos as well as the earth. All connected by sunshine. Hence the field of light pervaded the age. Its impact on the experience of artists like Claude Monet, as we’ll see, and poets like Emily Dickinson is evident.5 This new experience shared by artists as well as scientists entails a new awareness of atmosphere as mediator. And their popular works sensitized the public to this field of light, which Walt Whitman called “an amour of the light and air” in which he wants to “gallivant.” It is less the observer’s as a receiver of light (Newton’s particles) than as a participant in the atmospheric “mediation” between the observer and a world on the move (Young’s field).

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This airy arena of light action, then, mediates the gap between the painter or photographer and their landscape.6 The most influential English theorist of the age, John Ruskin (1819–1900), articulated this after becoming acutely aware that we live in “an atmosphere through which a burning sun shines thwartedly.” The key word here is “thwartedly.” He realized what Humboldt had—the presence of atmosphere as mediator of the light experience. Ruskin knows that “pure white light” is mediated by the perceptual imagination working on what the atmospheric appearance gives his eye. Light does not belong to the landscape; it belongs to the body as the thwartedness of light’s perception due to a mediating atmosphere.7 By mid-century and the London Expo of 1851 in the Crystal Palace, the systemic shift we’ve discussed was evident. This age saw a self-consciousness about light previously “out there,” separate from the observer, now become light “in here,” bound up in a field of force with the process of seeing. As we examine individual experiences of the light field in the Age of Technology, we’ll see them driven by an increased desire to honor fact and logic, which was fanned by Friedrich von Humboldt’s widely read works and Faraday’s popular lectures. And this mindset was reinforced by the rise of industrial engineering, particularly as it introduced citywide lighting. The wholesale introduction of industrial electric lighting banished night and arrested the public. And the camera seduced it with photography. The experience of light in the United States was bound up with its beginnings, its Edenic eastern bays and harbors, and expansive western wilderness areas. A loose association of artists dubbed “luminists” discovered a new facet of light’s character in New England, as the Impressionists a decade later would in the countryside of the Île-de-France. And the photographers who went west discovered a new light. Having embraced photography with a passion, as did the entire country, Carleton Watkins (1829–1916) used it to describe the special character of Yosemite Valley’s light. We’ll begin with the New England luminist Fitz Hugh (aka Henry) Lane (1804–1865), then, and his experience of a preternaturally still, infinite light, which the anonymous Shaker architects shared, and end a decade later in France with the Impressionist Claude Monet (1840–1926) alive to a vibrating field of light. But before leaving the States, we’ll explore Emily Dickinson’s (1830–1886) astonishing encounter in the arena of light action with a most ambiguous character.

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THE SILENCE OF LIGHT, LUMINISTS AND SHAKERS A number of New England painters called luminists, including Fitz Hugh Lane, developed a distinct style of “glowing atmospherics,” their “negotiations” between water, shore, and sky, in the poet Edward Hirsch’s words, giving expression to a new experience of light. Lane created an “infinitely luminous space into which the eye penetrates without being required to explore.” And in so doing he redefined the sublime as bound up with a calm sense of the infinite rather than an awed response to spectacle as we saw in the previous period. This American sublime was one of silence (mirror lake, wilderness expanse) in contrast to the English sublime of drama (disturbed water, mountain storm). Ruskin paved the way, broadening Burke’s sublime by declaring that “anything which elevates the mind is sublime,” which he says is “only another word for the effect of greatness upon the feelings.”8 One of the “most truly indigenous styles” in the history of art, luminism was a native expression of light’s character in the northeastern United States. The luminists were not a school of painting, having a common theory, or even a group of artists banding together, as did the Impressionists a decade later. But all felt the pull of eastern light, as the photographer Watkins, whom we’ll meet later, felt that of western light. All exhibit in their light experience, a certain reflectiveness, an aspect of the self-consciousness that pervaded the Ocular Age in which with the rise of experimental psychology, perception becomes a primary object of study. And Humboldt’s popular science of Voyages and Cosmos: Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe (translated late 1840s) encouraged this attention to perception by overtly calling for artists to respond to atmospheric light. In line with this, the luminists valued factuality and scientific observation, appearances, as well as technology, rejecting overt religious symbolism, a phenomenalism in short. This chimes with Emerson’s claim that the “eye is the best composer.”9 Fitz Hugh Lane and Appearances And for Fitz Hugh Lane appearances are all. Driven by their need to reconcile factuality and spirituality, the objective and subjective, which in Emerson’s experience of light was the “reappearance of the original soul” when “the universe becomes transparent, and the light of higher laws than its own shines through it,” Lane discovers eastern light and finds unique expression for it. In his painting Ship in Fog, Gloucester Harbor (c. 1860), for example, he presents us with his field of light, arena of fact-and-spirit union. Fog-diffused sunlight, which constitutes for Lane the arena of light action, is the primary subject of this painting. All happens within it, what Henry

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Figure 5.1. Fitz Hugh Lane, Ship in Fog, Gloucester Harbor (c. 1860). Princeton University Art Museum (DSC06946). Public Domain

Tuckerman, a contemporary critic, identified as the “atmospheric phenomena of color, light and shade, density and transparency.” The action is one that draws us into Lane’s field by an “indefinable attraction” that reconciles fact and spirit. The hyperclarity of the ship’s rigging (fact) and the sun’s eye blaze (spirit, reminding us of Turner), which is not that of God but of an autonomous eye of reassurance planted by nature, live at peace in the same painting.10 Corollary to this, Lane reconciles objective and subjective responses to the light. Emerson could be describing Lane when he observed, writing about Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), “none knew better than he” that it is not the “fact that imports, but the impression or effect of the fact on your mind.” The arena of appearances, that is, actions presented objectively along with their emptiness of action, such as the man in a skiff poling in the foreground of Ship in Fog. We know that the man will not follow the path into the sun’s eye laid out by its sunglade on the water, an axis balanced by a ship that clearly will not sail any time soon. The palpable stillness here, expressed by Lane’s “distillation of light,” an act that creates a silence in the field of Lane’s painting, belies inaction.11 This silence evokes Lane’s subjective self, repressed in his refusal to reveal any evidence of the painter, such as his hand’s movement in brushstrokes. The appearance of light is all, Lane allowing light its own integrity, light presenting itself but remaining silent. Exploring the potential of this character,

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he suspends the measured landscape format of his carefully ordered composition in a silent atmosphere of light, which he achieves by “infinitely careful gradations of tone” and precisely rendered direct and reflected rays. It is a “primordial void of light and space” where light seems to banish forms. And within this arena exists a suspended moment of timelessness in which Lane’s subjective self and the objective facts of the harbor are one.12 An emotionally moving silence, this is perhaps rooted in a deep yearning for reconciliation. Lane lost the use of both legs in childhood, probably from polio, and depended on crutches the rest of his life. So having grown up on the waters of Gloucester, Massachusetts, seeing these stretching from his feet into the harbor and beyond with ships sailing out at will, his yearning was no doubt near unbearable at times. Thus he offers himself to light, reconciling the fact of his physical immobility with his limitless mobility of spirit as an artist. Accepting light’s invitation to infinity, subordinating both the temptation of subjectivity and his loyalty to objectivity, he finds expression for this in a profound stillness. Hence light does not “circulate” in his paintings as it does in Turner’s vortices. It simply is and does not have to act because its field is the arena of light action itself, expressed by a series of planes, parallel to the surface. These proceed in ordered steps toward the back of the painting (from foreground of dark waters to horizon of the sun’s eye) but lack movement—immobility one with mobility.13 Shaker Architects and Mansions of Light The Shaker Meeting House was an arena of light action harboring the anonymous Shaker architect’s field of light. An interior phatic light, of course, rather than the luminists’ exterior atmospheric light, at the core of its character was power, being like the painter’s a field of forces and silence. But where Lane looks into light stretching beyond the horizon to infinity, a primordial void of light, the Shaker architect nests the worshipper within a finite space of light, a primordial plenum of light. Both painter and architect suppress their personality, leaving no tracks in their respective expressions of this experience, but Lane gives himself to light as reconciler, while the Shaker architect gives the self to light as to God. The Shaker manifesto clarifies this: “there is nothing in God but what is light.” Yet luminists and Shakers, in contrast to Abbott Suger’s experience in his Gothic chapel, freed light from any previous religious dogma. This despite the fact that Shakers were driven by the religious desire for light, seeking it as the state of holiness, while luminists were animated by an existential acceptance of light, its cool, hard silence yet promise of transcendence.14 The Shakers originated in early eighteenth-century England as the “shaking Quakers,” named for their ecstatic dancing in worship. After they broke

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away from the Quakers, Ann Lee their founder who was regarded as the female Christ (God in their community being male and female) fulfilling the Second Coming emigrated to America in 1794. Early on they held meetings in open fields, as had the Quakers, but soon built Meeting Houses in the countryside from Maine to Kentucky. The purpose of the Meeting House dictated that it wed the factual and the spiritual. This follows from the fact that the houses known as “mansions of light” on earth modeled those in heaven. The “mansion” consisted of simple rooms with immense amounts of light admitted by many large windows, as we see in the Ministry Hall of the Sabbathday Lake Meeting House in New Gloucester, Maine (1794). That is, the Shaker interior was a “construct of light as much as matter,” the wedding of the heavenly and earthly, one that could satisfy the “pleading” of the shaker “soul” for a nearer relation to its Creator who is light. The architects honored the “factual” in their attention to the texture of carefully finished reflective white plaster walls. And they celebrated the spiritual in the tranquil serenity expressed in “luminous rooms that were empty and pure,” unique in American architecture.15 This plenum of light embodied the architect’s experience of light as a field of spiritual force. Its light action expressed by a creation ensuring maximum penetration of natural light into the interior. The interplay of large exterior windows and “subtle reflections” on white plaster walls gave the mansion a “soft inner glow,” enhanced by glazed openings cut into interior partition walls. Light pouring in through the exterior windows is ushered by these openings farther into the building. The architect let it “seep from room to room” through this “porous network” of corridors and doorways. It was welcomed from four directions, corridors interrupted by vertical stairways to usher in light, forming a quietly luminous field of spiritual force. Silence being this light’s fundamental character, the village Meeting House was a “still point of light” beckoning the worshipper and encouraging participation. By contrast, we never get an unalloyed sense that we can enter the luminist silence, no matter how calm and tranquil its field of light.16 EMILY DICKINSON’S WAYLAYING LIGHT The “waylaying Light,” as she calls it in a letter, never let Dickinson alone. It was as primary to her as it was to the Shakers and the luminists, some of whose work she knew. But unlike theirs, her relationship with light was painfully ambivalent and its “peculiar” character, even possessing a certain “lunacy,” as she says, profoundly ambiguous. This relationship was forged and tempered by a crisis midway on her life’s journey. Only after a last

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“interview” with light near the end of her life, making a final attempt to come to terms with it, can Dickinson bid it “Adieu.”17 Its character masquerades throughout the poet’s life as a calm, self-contained light, “sufficient to itself,” asking for nothing, implying only silence, and giving her infinity. This luminist light acts as “Preceptor of the whole—/ Coeval Cardinal—.” It encompasses all as an equal with the Creator God. And for Dickinson its “Silence is Infinity.” Here she takes a cue from John Ruskin whom Dickinson greatly admired and who in his Modern Painters said, “there is one thing” that distant space has, “which no other object of sight suggests in equal degree and that is—Infinity.” This suggestion, fundamental to the luminist painter and the American sublime, haunted Dickinson.18 Unlike the luminists, however, for whom silence was positive, for Dickinson it is negative. As she says, infinity yes, but at the same time, “Silence is all we dread.” Hers is the silence of Lane but in contrast to this painter who exalts infinity (as a passage to the transcendent), she fears it because it might be the true state of nature (i.e., not offering passage to a transcendent God). Hence light’s silence in Dickinson’s experience can “haunt the world.” By continual perceptual “experiment,” she struggles to keep these discoveries about light’s character in balance. Namely, its silent infinity and her religious awe of the “Preceptor” who is “coeval” with the Creator of light. An elusive balance, but insisting on appearances, she puts her trust in “experiment.”19 A Lunacy of Light Dickinson’s unease about the world is bound up with her unease in the company of light’s character. About midway on her life’s journey in 1862 at the age of thirty-two, she admits at the height of her poetic powers, “And whether it was noon or night / . . . For very Lunacy of Light / I had not power to tell—.” In three succeeding stanzas of disorientation, such as mistaking bees for butterflies, she compares with difficulty her experience of light here to a “Conversion of the Mind,” perhaps religious, but then, modulating to a bitter tone in contrast to her opening stanza, turns the tables: “’Twas a Divine Insanity.” Not hers, that is, as in the tradition of spiritual ecstasy, but that of the one who inflicted this “Lunacy” of perceptual disorder upon her. Her reversal in this poem reveals a spiritual and physical crisis bound up with the character of light and the role it played in her life. In the early 1860s Dickinson suffered an acute illness that attacked her eyes, which escalated to a personal crisis in 1862 in which her relationship with light was violently changed. Already reeling, having found two years before that her inherited Calvinist theology failed her “experiments” and having rejected the notion that nature demonstrates God’s design, the illness strikes (retrospectively diagnosed as “exotropia”). Undergoing serious

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treatments in Boston during 1864 and 1865, her eyes are bandaged. And once removed, her exposure to light is limited to early dawn, and twilight and sunset. This is why she has no “power to tell” noon from night. And why she endures a “Lunacy of Light,” which in her state of rejecting traditional theology and suffering physical crisis she equates with “Divine Insanity.” In short, God and light withdraw at the same time.20 Her illness was devastating for a poet whose eye every morning she said, “begins its avarice,” greedy for the visual appearances of nature. She despaired, being cast into perpetual twilight, unable to look at the sun directly without pain and risk, in effect being forced to adopt a “Curtain” that filters appearances. Banished to the half-dark, her twilight became a refuge, however, a light of creativity and freedom from domestic duties that gave her time to write. Out of her despair came her commitment in that pivotal year of 1862 to become a major poet, producing an extraordinary number of poems, which she conceived in visual terms as fields of words that embodied her experience, including an ambiguous light. Her fundamental relationship with light, which pivots on her physical crisis, becomes fraught and deeply ambivalent.21 Fraught because in crisis, having to live in a veiled and twilit world, she has become acutely aware of nature as a tentative “Experiment in Green” and thus of light as an experiment in “Tint,” which is “best” but “Graspless.” The experiment of light with its scientific associations, she knows, renders provisional whatever appearances she receives. Because her own senses do not exhaust its reality, any discoveries about light’s character are necessarily uncertain. Her relationship with it then is perforce ambivalent. Because it does not matter how great the impact of light or the depth of her feeling, in the end, given the experiment that constitutes her relationship with light, she is left with “Discontent.” Even a “certain Slant of light” in winter and a unique light that “exists in spring / Not present” at any other time, normally thrilling to her, now evoke sadness. At the very moment when light “speaks to you,” she laments, it recedes.22 The Peculiar Light Admittedly, as she acknowledges, hers is a “peculiar” light. Or, rather, she senses that her relationship to light is not Wordsworth’s or Lane’s but uniquely hers. First, she cultivates an unprecedented closeness with twilight, going beyond their fondness for the light of dawn and twilight. And second it is unique in her reversing the traditional symbolism of light and dark.23 Having a most conflicted relationship with the sun, brought on by the crisis of her eye ailment, she turns inward to imagination, the twilight country. Her relationship with the sun became problematic early on but intensified as she came to associate the sun with the “men of noon,” the Calvinist

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God of relentless judgment and a father of conventional expectation. It was Dickinson’s duty daily to clean house and prepare meals for the entire family as well as numerous guests who often stayed for days. Thus she was kept from her vocation, as she said, by “broad daylight, and cooking stoves, and roosters.”24 As a result of her resentment and fear exacerbated by physical affliction (exotropia), she embraced the light/dark of twilight and mitigated light of sunrise/sunset. This is her creative and productive time free of domestic demands in which her poems become gems illuminating the dark and emerging from it. Consequently, her ambivalence about light’s character ebbs at twilight. For it is as she says, “The Parlor—of the Day—” a “stupendous place” into which she is welcomed as a “Guest.” A place of “Vastness” and “wisdom,” this is where she accepts appearances and their ground in the unknown. Twilight is light and not light. And she revels in the freedom of this place where her “imaginative energy can emerge when masculine solar power has retreated.” As she says, identifying with Christ, “I wear the ‘thorns’ till Sunset / Then my Diadem put on.” She is in paradise after the death of the sun, where she is crowned with light-dark imagination.25 Having entered this vast “Parlor,” Dickinson reverses traditional light/ dark associations, transcending their inherited dualism as she creates her own “Blaze” in twilight. “We grow accustomed to the Dark—/ When Light is put away,” she says, and triumphs knowing that “Either the Darkness alters—/ Or something in the sight / Adjust itself to Midnight.” In this creative space of light-dark, that is, her path to poem making is now clear. Forced by her serious eye affliction and by domestic expectations, she dwells in the half-light-dark room of her creative inner self. So she greets midnight: “Good Morning— Midnight—/ I’m coming Home,” the “one ray” of her “peculiar light” that she seeks in order “to clarify the sight,” physically and imaginatively.26 Owing to these physical and spiritual trials, Dickinson became “something of a specialist on light,” as her biographer Richard Sewall says, confident in her power to enlist light’s character for her own creative ends. As she says in “There’s a certain Slant of light,” it’s the “internal difference” that the experience of light leaves within her “Where the Meanings are.” Appearances and perception are all. She refuses the seal of “Despair,” loss of hope that the “certain Slant” teaches, and holds her breath in the “Shadows.” At the same time, oxymoronic phrases voice her consciousness of the internal difference—“Heavenly Hurt” and “imperial affliction.” Here is the pain of despair, and yet “Heavenly” and “imperial” suggest that light may be welcomed. She recognizes the integrity of light’s character and at the same time that of her own imagination, meaning she must dwell in light-dark, embracing twilight and even darkness over noon light, which is to reject the traditional moral and spiritual symbolism of light-darkness.27

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Nearing the end of life, Dickinson comes to terms with light’s character, having found an aspect of its constancy, one she can accept fully—twilight. She is at peace with this light as the luminists were with the silent character of their light. She may have longed for the “Certainties of Sun” but it was not to be. After interrogating light, her experiment in self-making by means of her light experience proves that twilight-sunset-darkness is certain, possessing the certainty of the truth of imagination (as it did for Keats). So at the end of her life she thanks light for the interview and bids it “Adieu,” hoping that perhaps after death (only three years away), she will be awarded a “Rendezvous of Light.” But she has no assurance, living yet in the ambiguity of light’s peculiar character.28 PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE MINERAL LIGHT OF YOSEMITE Unlike Dickinson the photographers of the West enjoyed an unambivalent relationship with light, an unambiguous character. Carleton Watkins (1829– 1916) first entered Yosemite in 1861. Comfortable with phenomenalism, trusting to appearances, he shared Dickinson’s conclusion after her decades of close observation that “nature is a stranger yet.” At the same time, in his experience there was nothing ambivalent about the character of California light. Nor did it resemble the eastern light of the luminists. This became clear when the landscape painter Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) visited Yosemite, and under the influence of luminism attempted but failed to capture the valley’s light.29 The Sunshine of Yesterday Photography, literally “light-writing” as Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877), inventor of the positive-negative photographic process, christened it, occupied the Ocular Age like no other technology. Introduced in New York in 1839, the “daguerreotype” (light-sensitive silver on a copper plate), named for its French inventor Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851), quickly became more popular in America than abroad. Fundamental to its appeal in the States was its perceived commitment to fact and its democratic appeal, as anyone could own an example of this “art.” Talbot in The Pencil of Nature (1844–1846) regarded light as simply nature’s pencil and advertised his book as the first to present pictures “executed by Light alone,” saying that it could “hand down to future ages . . . the sunshine of yesterday.” Photographs had memory and an “angular factiness” that America celebrated.30

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Having said that photography represented a new analysis of light, Turner proved to be its prophet. It would “revolutionize painting,” he said, and “help painters to a new knowledge of light,” which in fact it did. Not only did photography give us for the first time in history the direct trace or footprint of light, but it implicated its practitioners in a new relationship with light revealing further knowledge of its character. The photograph, Lady Eastlake asserted in 1857, “traced by light is the impress of one moment, or one hour, or one age in the great passage of time.” And the fact, as she adds, that it imitates “minute light,” indirectly “cognizant to the eye, but unattainable by hand” (i.e., the painter’s), necessitates a new relationship, both an objective and subjective experience.31 Daguerre himself said that the daguerreotype is “not merely an instrument which serves to draw Nature; on the contrary, it is a chemical and physical process which gives her [i.e., fundamentally light] the power to reproduce herself.” A deeply objective act, which Eastlake seizes on, noting photography’s revelation of “minute light” unavailable directly to the unaided eye. But Talbot, fascinated with the physiological workings of the eye, was fully aware as well of the camera’s entanglement not only with process but with subjective perception. This awareness reflects an ocular self-consciousness in which appearances escape the “timeless incorporeal order” of nature and become lodged in the “unstable physiology” of the human body embedded in time. That is, the process that photography insists on is a deeply subjective act “experienced in time.” The photograph, being necessarily a moment snatched from passing time by an individual person, became “synonymous with the act of seeing.”32 Daguerre’s discovery established a threshold in the human experience of light. Never in history had light’s portrait, “the sunshine of yesterday,” been taken with all its “minute” light, revealing its independent and insistent factiness. For painters who attempted to capture the character of western light this was a jolt. Albrecht Bierstadt broke with the American mainstream of landscape painting and found himself in Yosemite Valley at roughly the same time as Watkins. Here he painted The Domes of the Yosemite (1867). The picture was a big hit in the East as had been many of his western paintings that featured expanses of light. But it was not California light as Mark Twain, writing for the San Francisco newspaper Daily Alta California the same year, pointed out. He praises Bierstadt’s snow peaks and pine trees, and he even admits that the “atmospheric effects” are “startling” and “charming,” but then dismisses them in the same sentence as “more the atmosphere of Kingdom-Come than of California” (August 4, 1867). And with this he pivots into pure sarcasm about “dreamy lights and shadows,” so “enchantingly beautiful” that “I am sorry the Creator hadn’t made it.” All this in the picture, he says, instead of the “bald” rocks reflecting

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Yosemite’s “glaring” light. Then indignant, Twain declares that the mountains in California are “painfully bold and sharp, because the atmosphere is so pure and clear,” but Bierstadt’s are “soft and rounded and velvety.” Twain can’t excuse this painter’s failure to convey the unique character of California light, of which he is incapable because intent on poeticizing, eschewing “factiness” and beautifying its mineral sharpness. Carleton Watkins and Clarity After arriving in the Bay Area nine years earlier, Watkins loaded nearly a ton of photographic equipment on a sturdy team of twelve mules in 1861. This included an enormously heavy and cumbersome custom-built camera as well as mobile darkroom tent that would enable him to produce “mammoth” eighteen-by-twenty-two-foot glass plate negatives. Then he headed seventy-five miles into the Sierra Nevada and the Yosemite Valley and began taking photographs. The resulting suite became internationally famous, exhibited in various expos and owned by prominent men, such as Emerson.33 With astonishing clarity Watkins expressed his discovery of this new character, a glaring mineral light off faceted rocks. Like the luminists the photographer made “pure ineffable light his object of attention,” but the character of the Yosemite light for which he found expression was not their soft plane of hovering light but facets of a hard light. While the luminists strove to reconcile fact and spirit, Watkins simply chose fact. For Yosemite was a different arena of light action. Comparing Bierstadt’s painting to Carleton Watkins’s photograph from a year earlier, Pompompasos the Three Brothers, Yosemite 4480 ft., 1865–1866, we’re struck by his bold mountain peaks stabbing into the sky, each of its rock faces one with the hard light, convincing us that his is a new relationship with light, one that finds a new aspect of its character.34 His mountains in stark contrast to Bierstadt’s featured an edgy light. In his Lower Cathedral Rock, 1865–1866, Watkins confronts us with the new sublime of America, utter clarity, the shock of hyperappearance. He is in awe but wedded to the crystalline light. Even the air appears as “truly objective” fact and worthy as a subject in itself independent of the earth on the far side of the water strewn with fallen trunks. We’re not focused on the vast scale of the rock but on the character of its light in vacant space around and above. We are taken up, accordingly, not by God but by hard mineral light into an inert blank sky. Watkins reconciles preternatural clarity with silent mystery. He could “hew diamonds” of light from rough rock forms, as in his Lower Cathedral Rock, and “distill quicksilver” light from falling water (e.g., Yosemite Falls, 1878–1881) in pursuit of clarity. The “mystery” of his field of light resides in the immediacy of Watkins’s clarity, its factiness. One so powerful it feels like the light of Watkins’s experience that “shone on Yosemite Valley” in

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the second half of the nineteenth century had “burnt directly into the photographic print.”35 DAY FOR NIGHT, INDUSTRIAL LIGHT It is nearly impossible for us in our age to imagine the sheer wonder that people felt at seeing photographs for the first time, miracles of natural detail or of loved ones immortalized. It is equally difficult to imagine how the public felt experiencing in a city center, for the first time, electric light literally turn night into day, one so bright that some carried umbrellas to shield themselves from its glare. This was a communal experience of artificial light in the same way that the sun offered a communal experience of natural light. Painting and photography were individual encounters with light presented after the fact to the viewer; city lighting, by contrast, was a shared experience of light in real time. After the mid-nineteenth century, artificial industrial light (i.e., light fueled from a central source) was everywhere. Beginning with city gaslight about 1815, it intensified and spread in the following decades. The period from the Crystal Palace of 1851, where sparkles and fountains of light attracted huge crowds, to Chicago’s White City of 1893 (Columbian Expo) saw the advent of electric arc lighting (London and Paris in 1878) and the ultimate success of incandescent lighting (including neon). The grounds of the 1889 Paris Exposition featured almost nine thousand incandescent bulbs. Urban residents experienced a light no one in history had encountered before.36 And just as the new experience of light in Gothic cathedrals demanded new interpretations, new meanings, so did that of industrial light. Light from electricity rather than from the sun is associated not with the transcendent but with the democratic and progressive. Being available to a cross-section of society, it represents social improvement, discouraging criminals and inviting people to share a common space. The Council Committee of Flint, Michigan, made this explicit when it justified its decision to introduce public lighting by arguing that “it may be justly called the poor man’s light,” by “reason of its penetrating and far-reaching rays” making all parts of the city “equally well lighted.”37 The impact of this radical, communal light was immense. “Strollers out near the Chateau Beaujou yesterday at about 9 p.m.,” two Parisian engineers reported in 1855, “suddenly found themselves bathed in a flood of light” when the arcs came on, and it was as “bright as the sun. One could in fact have believed that the sun had risen. This illusion was so strong that birds, woken out of their sleep, began singing in the artificial daylight.” Some were

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awed by such “dazzling white” light; some like Robert Louis Stevenson were terrorized, calling it “a nightmare!”38 But the core emotion generated by encounters with this new light in the world was ambivalence at its uncanny character. Electric light’s “intense brilliancy” was wondrously “startling” and “beautiful,” as John Rutter wrote in 1878. But it could also be disturbingly threatening while thrilling. A strange light, which to look at was dangerous, while to look in, he goes on to say, as working or strolling in the city entailed was uncomfortable. Yet some “people stood overwhelmed with awe” in the “dazzling” light “as if in the presence of the supernatural.” An experience, we could say, of the industrial sublime. Its unearthly quality derived in part from the fact that here was a light whose source was not obvious. Now for the first time light equaling the sun was separated from its source of production. No sun at night, yet “sun” brilliance. This could not be emotionally assimilated easily. Given the fact that the sun’s and electric light’s brilliancy were equal, it was disorienting to experience a light that involved no obvious origin.39 A new “sun” thus entered the world. And this urban, public experience of artificial illumination created a new individual relationship with light. Threatening and exhilarating in its democratic and technically progressive nature, it was more unsettling than any previous experiences. This “strange weird light,” as one reporter called it, by reinforcing the speed and inevitability of radical change, thrust urban citizens into the future. It also equalized in experience the natural and the artificial. And it entangled individuals in a new social field composed of invisible physical forces transmitted by wires, intellectual forces spread by new lighting inventions, and social forces propagated by complex, bureaucratic urban lighting projects. Resulting in a “weird,” communal industrial-supernatural light, the city stroller could not shake this day-for-night oxymoron. In short, theirs was an experience never known on earth before.40 The Ocular Age saw the retraining of the eye, an industrialization of light experience. This was accomplished by the camera, product of mechanical and chemical technology, and by the light grid, product of technical systems, establishing a relationship with light that is still with us. The New York Times predicted in the 1880s that the effect of the “intensity” of the “powerful white rays” of electric light “will be modified by time and by constant use.” And so it was. We take industrial light for granted and with it the communal experience of day-for-night, our individual experience assuming the social field of light, which the Impressionists who furthered the eye’s retraining were first to understand.41

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CLAUDE MONET’S STUDY OF LIGHT Into this new field of light created by the urban light grid and the photographic plate, enter the Impressionists. A loose but fiercely determined band of painters, they mounted their first collective exhibit in 1874 and last in 1886. They came from various classes of society, but all were the first generation in their families to pursue professional careers as artists. It was a group of iconoclasts that included such artists as the haughty Manet, easygoing Renoir, and “one rude, outspoken, defiant, and domineering egotist,” Claude Monet. The most aggressive, Monet (1840–1926), became the dominant and longest lasting of the Impressionists. And his light experience, which will be our focus, transformed the eye of the Ocular Age.42 Monet’s landscape was largely the region around Paris, known as Île-de-France. This included the river Seine and environs but excluded mountains with their more unpredictable weather conditions. This allowed him and his fellow painters to place light and atmosphere (air) front and center, his true subject. In finding expression for his light experience, Monet made the most salient Impressionist innovations in the 1860s, such as a luminous, high-keyed palette and loose brushwork, because he was wholly committed to nature and light. Because he did not paint interior scenes, art itself ends for him at nightfall, belying a new relation to light. In addition, he did not refer to subjects in discussing his work but rather to certain effects of light in different seasons and weathers. Detachment from his ostensible subject such as a trees, eschewing anecdote and personal revelation, became a powerful method and put off many viewers initially. As a result, he had to create his own audience, as did his colleagues, one that could receive their new experience of light and mode of its expression. This meant reeducating the eye of critic and gallery-goer alike.43 Such a project derived from the fact that his relation to light, whether natural or artificial, which Monet shared with his colleagues, was to “stand squarely” before it. Objects, waters, fields, subordinate to all, were coincident with nature and by extension light and atmosphere were part of and constitutive of the visible world. Appearances were all, central to Monet’s phenomenalism that seized on objectivity as a concentrated, active force. Monet and the Impressionists were not interested in nature “as she is,” then, but in “how she appears” to them; that is, their true subject was the experience of light, how the phenomena of atmosphere and light presents to the eyes. To accomplish this, these artists found themselves using “pigments as if they were spectral light itself.”44 Giving expression to a new relationship with light, reeducating the public eye, encountered resistance. Because art had lost its religious and political

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purpose, Monet and the Impressionists could employ it as an independent means of individual expression, direct testimony. And in the end they succeeded in making their relation to light that of many artists to follow in numerous countries. But in the mid-nineteenth century what the public saw was controlled by the Academy of Fine Arts, which sponsored annual juried exhibitions called “salons.” Jury members, loyal to classicism in art (e.g., Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres), were not receptive to the Impressionists whose paintings were usually rejected or, if accepted, badly placed. The Impressionists found this unsatisfactory and defiantly opened their own independent exhibition in 1874.45 In the same year Watkins revisited Yosemite and established a separate gallery for the sale of his photographs, Monet exhibited in the independent Paris exhibition. This was held in a friend’s photographic gallery and included his painting Impression, Sunrise 1872. The result of ten years of practice as an artist beginning from Monet’s youth by the waters of Le Havre, the painting’s field of light immediately struck its viewers as revolutionary. The title was a casual, last minute thought but brought a storm of criticism from the critics, much as Turner’s later paintings had done earlier. Monet’s “study of light” expressed in a play of “thousands of decompositions and recompositions,” as his friend the novelist Emile Zola observed, was positively baffling. A few stood stunned, others simply puzzled by its innovations. And yet others were angry, one critic spluttering that it was “executed by the infantile hand of a school child.” Its “unfinished” quality and its replacement of geometrical perspective with vibration, the field of light itself, was condemned.46 Monet had made his first foray into his reeducation project, establishing himself as the center of the Impressionist group. This was his initial attempt to change the public’s very way of looking in order to accept the new side of light’s character that he knew. They reeled from the first blow, but ultimately Monet succeeded in introducing the public to a “new” light. He and his fellow painters’ assertion of the “visual field” rather than the “visual world” that the public was accustomed to in traditional art produced a new way of seeing and ultimately a new experience of light. He had found, in short, a new mode of expression, enabling him to testify to a new encounter with light. To Monet’s mind, he simply recorded the appearance of this light, jettisoning geometric space and linear perspective for “optical reportage.”47 In this field or arena of light action, nothing is constant. Monet experienced a “fluctuant, light-filled atmosphere,” which he expressed as “microstructure,” the dispersal of pigments woven together in a “colored fabric,” his field of paint recapitulating the field of light. Not a rendering of the light, as a critic in 1874 said, but rather of the “sensations produced by” the light (nature), the “impression of a moment felt” before it. While the light Vermeer experienced was independent but possessed no ephemeral quality, Monet encountered a

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light whose character exhibited a “fugitive quality,” continually “drifting and undulating,” a vibrating light field that demanded a new mode of expression. He created, then, a fabric of pigments, rendering his experience of light by a “thousand little dancing strokes in every direction like straws of color—all in vital competition for the whole impression,” as the poet Jules Laforgue observed.48 Born out of the artist’s eye and enacted on the canvas, light was reborn in the viewer’s eye as they looked at the painting. In Monet’s relentless effort to find expression for a new light experience, he attempted to “reproduce” the “ensemble of all the rays” that strike the earth. And when he succeeds as in Impression, the viewer senses the field of light “vibrating and palpitating.” This was the revolutionary implication of painting in the open, plein air. The act itself, when “one must reckon with the flow of air,” was the “final blow” for classical and romantic painting. For Monet and the Impressionists the atmosphere was a “physical reality,” and light its “binding factor.” The Impressionists’ experience of such light dominated the 1870s and 1880s just as the luminists’ had the previous two decades, all “drunk on light.”49 But while Lane had a poetic response to the “felt sensation of light,” Monet and the Impressionists had an analytic response to the “visual sensation of light.” The luminists experienced a cool, palpable light, planar rather than “atmospherically diffuse”; it radiates, gleams, and suffuses on a “different frequency than atmospheric light.” Monet experienced, instead, an atmospheric light, optical; “air circulates between particles of strokes” rippling throughout by the force field of light, which was not possible between particles of luminist light. Constable and Turner also responded to atmospheric light, but Monet experienced a light not mediated by the atmosphere but inseparable from the atmosphere between painter and subject. In contrast to Lane’s cool luminousness, Monet and the Impressionists had an affair with atmospheric light, what Whitman called “an amour of the light and air,” which he wanted to “go gallivant” with.50 The Envelope After a decade of struggle, Monet had discovered a mode of expression for his early light experience. Like Turner he spent his youth by the water. His father moved to Le Havre, a harbor town on the coast of Normandy at the mouth of the Seine, in 1845 when Monet was five. This begins his love affair with light in and on water inseparable from their matrix of air. The deep impact of this is evident in his View of Rouelles, done when he was just seventeen (exhibited in Le Havre, August 1858). In this sophisticated work his encounter with light-water-air is the subject, making the atmosphere tangible. The small boy who sits on the streambank is no doubt the painter himself,

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enthralled by the play of light in the water and poplars. And in his subsequent paintings, as Monet says, “light is the principal person in the picture.”51 This realization derives from his earliest experience of water light. But in part it also stems from that of his Le Havre teacher, a local artist Eugéne Boudin (1840–1926), who admitted that “sometimes . . . I gaze on this light that inundates the earth, that quivers on the water,” and “I grow faint to realize how much genius is needed to master so many difficulties.” Monet, who admitted that his “eye” began with Boudin, possessed this genius and seems to have taken up this project, as he signaled with Impression, which proved to be a burden weighing more heavily as his career progressed, almost defeating him as we’ll see in his Rouen Cathedral series (1892–1894).52 Monet was well aware of what a challenge this represented. “I see that a great deal of work is needed to achieve what I seek—‘instantaneity,’ above all the ‘envelope,’ [enveloppe] the same light spread everywhere,” he reflected years later in a letter to his friend, the critic Gustave Geffroy. Landscape, he said, does not “exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every ‘moment,’” but within its envelope of “the air and the light, which vary continually.” Objects have value only by virtue of the “surrounding atmosphere.” Monet’s preoccupation with the envelope became central to his art, intensifying in the late 1880s and 1890s. Impression, Sunrise 1872 enacts the envelope, but later Monet goes farther, as we’ll see in his Rouen series of the early 1890s. After Impression he aimed in his “colour-weave” of the light field to reach beyond descriptive color (i.e., beyond any naturalism) and “get brilliant colour” that is not “merely surface colour, but with solidity and envelopment besides.” As his career developed, Monet’s pursuit of light revealed increasingly more of the richness and substance of its character.53 In a sense, then, Monet’s primary subject was empty space—air and light—the field of light, which had historically been taken for granted by artists. This marks a threshold in the experience of light, the subject being purely relative, its integrity not consisting in outline but in its participation in the field. The essential nature of the light he experienced was a continually varying field of vibrations carried by the atmosphere. Writing to Geffroy in 1890, Monet confessed, “I’ve become so slow at working that I despair,” frustrated by the rapidly changing light, “but the more I go along, the more that I need to work a great deal to capture what I’m trying to get across,” namely the envelope. For this was a complex “component” of visual reality that continually transforms over time how and what he sees. What he had begun in his Grainstacks (aka Haystacks) series, he continued in his Rouen Cathedral series. It is in these watershed paintings that Monet achieves at last full expression of the envelope in which he captures the experiential charge of a single instant of light’s appearance. In May 1891 at the age of fifty-one Monet exhibited fifteen of his Grainstack

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series, which present ostensibly the same “subject,” stacks of grain, in a succession of moments of light, that are clearly the real subject. These are a turning point in his career, as he came to an understanding of his paintings as creations in themselves, not in any sense “descriptions” of places or objects but enactments of the light enveloping him and a stack of grain at a particular time of day.54 As his experiments continued Monet became more determined, obsessed with capturing each instant of light’s appearance. He became, in fact, not just a painter but a “hunter” of light. As his friend Maupassant observed, he spent hours with stacks of grain in a field and with cathedral stones in Rouen, in an effort to track down this light. “Face to face” with the stacks, he would “sit and wait,” gather up a “falling ray” in several quick “dabs of paint,” then as the light changed put the canvas down and take another from the hands of one of the children who had trailed him into the field carrying his canvases, often more than a dozen.55 Monet never loses the joy he found in the envelope that he enacts in his Impression, Sunrise, but instead of a quick sketch, he now worked intensely for long periods. At each time of the day, that is, Monet worked on the canvas connected with it so as to corner the same light. But nature mocks his failure to capture it on canvas. There are “days when, in a blind rage, furious with himself and with the ineffectiveness of his colours,” which kept him awake at night, “he tears his canvas in pieces and treads it into the snow.” Yet he “always starts again,” as his friend Henri Bang reported.56 To express fully and precisely the nature of his project, Monet uses the word eprouver (experience). “I know only” that “I do what I think best in order to express what I experience [eprouver] in front of nature,” his sensations face to face with light. Having a richer connotation than the English word, the French captures the complexity of his attempt to find expression in paint for the envelope, as he says, “what I experience” (eprouver) or “feel,” “undergo,” “sustain,” “suffer.” His Grainstacks series initiates his experience of light’s character in full—“the inexorable passage of light which moved on regardless of any human presence”—where as we see in his Grainstack (Sunset), 1891, yellow has a fleetingly “tangible presence” as if the sunlight were “caught in the thatch and piled up there.”57 The Rouen Cathedral Series In May 1895, crowds lined up outside the Durand-Ruel Gallery a few blocks from the Louvre, waiting to see fifty paintings by Monet, twenty of which were of a single subject—Rouen Cathedral. Monet’s reputation had grown, and the Impressionists had succeeded in expanding the eyes of viewers, but their excitement was also due in part to a revival of interest in Catholicism

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and a renewed appreciation for one of the best gothic cathedrals in Europe. Once admitted, the crowds wandering through the gallery were perplexed, the same cathedral appearing on canvas after canvas. Only the light differed in each according to the time of day. Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series of paintings (c. 1892–1895), his meditations on light, are in fact meditations on time. The one cannot be separated from the other. His series of paintings creates light time instants. Monet suggests this by his including the modern clock face over the church’s central portal in each painting. He transforms the clock into a disc of color, suggesting that measured time is irrelevant because each instant is new, peerless, and vanishing with the light.58 This plunges the viewer deep into the paradox at the heart of his series: owing to the action of light, Monet’s Rouen Cathedral is both real and unreal. It exists in an instant of time, Monet’s experience of the light time moment to moment, day to day; and in a place in space defined by stone, his experience of the light space. Yet both the instant and place are denied a fixed reality, denied by Monet’s insistent succession in time, each painting in the series giving way to another, and by his persistent “liquification of stone,” each painting revealing in his fluid palette and brush strokes a vibration of stone that cannot be assigned a fixed place. Monet’s fundamental relationship with light, then, is with a character that creates the time and space of his light-air field.59 The so-called empty envelope “between” painter and subject, that is, calls into question traditional Newtonian notions of space and time. By focusing on the changing light over a succession of days at specified times, which he notes in their titles, Monet suggests that time is central. But at the same time the series denies its reality in the distortions of the clock, as in his Rouen Cathedral. Façade., 1892–94, undercutting any conventional notion of time. Furthermore, the viewer is invited by the title to observe an enduring monument of stone, yet Monet transforms the revered Cathedral into a “fugitive” and “ambiguous” field of light challenging any traditional notion of material reality. Instead he renders the true reality, one revealed to him by a light he encountered early on—the “envelope” that makes visible while being itself invisible.60 Monet knew from the outset that in his cathedral project that he was “undertaking,” as he said, a “tough job.”61 Installed in an empty apartment and then a nearby shop facing the cathedral, he spent six months of his life (two springs) just looking at the cathedral at close range with dogged concentration and a keen, discerning eye. He had learned much about the character of light from his Grainstacks in which he expresses fully his experience of light space. Essentially one man’s relationship with a character of light exhibiting multiple manifestations, namely fifteen. He had found expression, that is, for his envelope’s “same light spread everywhere,” the sense of its

Figure 5.2. Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, Facade (Sunset), from his Rouen Cathedral series of paintings (c. 1892–1895). Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris. Public Domain

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vibrating waves in space affecting each part of his painting. But he realized that he still has not fully probed nor found a way to render fully his envelope’s light-air “instantaneity,” the moment within moment of felt light time. This challenge still eluded the hunter of light. And he resolved to capture this aspect of his experience of light’s instantaneity at last. Daguerre had captured instants of past sunshine on his copper plates but not the envelope itself, the light coming from “everywhere and nowhere” at once, a vibrating force field of air and light between painter and cathedral. Monet must find the means to render his experience of a specific instant of light vibrating among the panoply of light effects that appears in a single brief moment, not in a day but in a moment within a moment of the particular time period that he names. To accomplish this, he no longer anchors color to the object, as with the stacks of grain, but frees it to float on the cathedral and at the same time to seep from the stone.62 He finds expression for this all-knowing light, independent of time flow, by turning the Rouen Cathedral, as the philosopher Gaston Bachelard said, paradoxically, into a “sponge of light.” Monet in his determination to express light’s instantaneity crushes light on vibrating stone and squeezes light from it, successively through twenty instants of west façade light time. As his fellow artist Camille Pissarro observed, Monet “needed the sunlight to be crushed on the stone façade,” freed, in order for him to embody it in his painting. And by the power of his eye and uncanny perception, along with heroic persistence, he tracked down at last the “instantaneities” he had been hunting for, as we see in his Mornings 8:00–9:00, for example, which ostensibly sharing a time of day, renders two different envelopes. And these light transformations thus sabotage the time period announced in Monet’s title.63 So after decades of development as a painter, he finds the means to give substance to the complexity and richness of his experience (eprouver) of the envelope of light. Monet’s brushstrokes in Rouen Cathedral Façade. (Sunset) (1892–1894) define the atmosphere, “criss-cross, disheveled, hesitant” strokes that close up seem to be “positively truculent,” fighting off any notion of a fixed light space. Thus in his perceiving and dreaming and painting he managed to corner light’s “instantaneities,” at least provisionally. More than the luminists or photographers, or even any of the Impressionists, Monet was obsessed with light. His relationship with a vibrating light field became the engine of his life. It was a drive enabling him to succeed in his personal and public program, capturing the envelope of light and reeducating the public eye across the continent and the ocean. Monet never lets us forget that light is the “principal person in the picture.”64 The Age of Technology, which as we’ve seen brought with it a preoccupation with the ocular, intensified by the omnipresent uncanniness of electric

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lights, revealed new aspects of light’s character. Its manifold silence was expressed by luminist painters (Lane), Shaker architects, and haunted poets (Dickinson), and its manifest “factiness” was of a mineral clarity revealed by Watkin’s camera. Each of these artists found themselves testifying to an experience from within fields of light whose most determined witness was Monet, dedicating a lifetime to a single instant of light’s felt appearance. In finding expression for varied experiences in the arena of light, these figures succeeded in reeducating the eye of the times. We’ll see in the next chapter how this reeducation continues and takes on new significance; for light’s “industrialization” in the Age of Technology takes a new leap with the advent of films and lasers. And in the next age, doors of perception are flung wide open by painters like Edward Hopper, scientists like Einstein, architects like Louis Kahn, and poets like Wallace Stevens who introduce us to new “eloquences of light.” NOTES 1. New sublimity, Summers, Real Spaces, 582; Whatever notion . . . Turner overturned, Crary, Techniques, 40, 43–46. 2. Rejection of religious and philosophic presuppositions, Klonk, Science and the Perception, 5; single field of light, Crary, Techniques, 138, Summers, Real Spaces, 551. The term “phenomenalism” does not refer to the “phenomenology” of modern philosophy, which is a study of the structure or experience or consciousness as things enter it. The artists and scientists of the Ocular Age, that is, strive to confine themselves to appearances, solely what is given to the perceiving subject (Klonk, 5). 3. “Ocular age,” Emerson, Journals, 5: 328; “apprehension of a visible world,” Crary, Techniques, 16. 4. “Corpuscular,” “wave-motion,” Crary, Techniques, 86; “spider’s web,” Williams, Michael Faraday, 388; “field” such a powerful metaphor . . . light’s character, Summers, Real Spaces, 566–67. 5. Presence by its force on us, Musser, Spooky Action, 72; “sun-force,” Steinmetz, Sunshine and Showers, 17; connected by sunshine, Winslow, Light, Pt. 1. 6. “An amour of the light and air,” “go gallivant,” Whitman, “The Sleepers,” sec. 7, ll. 1,3 (Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, The Library of America, 1982, 548). In his widely read Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent (1814), the immensely influential German scientist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) discussed at some length the “diminution of light during its passage through the successive strata of the air” at different elevations of the “New Continent” (i.e., America, v. 1, sec. 1.1.4), spending much energy on “observations of light and atmosphere.” He was fascinated by light in its passage through various types of atmosphere under various conditions, noting its refraction, diffraction, and diffusion in detail. The American artist Jasper F. Cropsey (1823–1900) commented in 1855, looking at the horizon, that it is not flat “but a luminous palpitating air, in

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which the eye can penetrate infinitely deep” (quoted by McShine, Natural Paradise, 87). And the luminists took this to heart. Although hinted at by the first American landscape painter Thomas Cole (1801–1848) in his Lake Scene (1844), they forged their own singular expression, rejecting his bright sky, eschewing drama, and instead achieving an “atmospheric luminism” (Wilton, American Sublime, 26). 7. “Mediation” between the observer and a world, Nisbet, “Atmospheric Cameras,” 135; “an atmosphere . . . shines thwartedly,” “pure white light,” Ruskin, Lamp of Beauty, 141, 27. 8. “Glowing atmospherics,” “negotiations,” Hirsch, “Luminist Paintings at the National Gallery,” Earthly Measures, 69–70; “infinitely luminous space . . . explore,” Wilton, American Sublime, 27; “anything . . . sublime,” “only another word . . . feelings,” quoted Ruskin, Novak, “On Divers Themes,” 74, 77. 9. “Most truly indigenous styles,” Novak, American Painting, Chapter 5. Perception had been known since the Renaissance to be a complex process. But it was assumed to be one largely beyond conscious awareness until the rise of nineteenthcentury experimental psychology. The physician and philosopher Wilhelm Wundt, the first to differentiate psychology as a science from philosophy and biology and to call himself a “psychologist,” founded the first psychology laboratory (Leipzig, Germany). “Luminists valued . . . appearances,” Wilmerding, “Introduction,” 17; “eye is the best composer,” “plants an eye . . . fall,” Emerson, “Nominalist and Realist,” Essays, 2nd series, para. 9. Luminists expressed a certainty that was neither grounded in the real nor in the ideal but, paradoxically, in both (Novak, American Painting, 262). By 1860 Frederic Church (1826–1900) had become America’s “national artist” with paintings such as Twilight in the Wilderness (Hughes, American Visions, 162). Though he learned from Thomas Cole (1801–1848), he shared the luminists’ atmospherics on occasion. Conversely, his sense of “vast stillness verging on an imminent crescendo of light” had a great impact on the luminist movement (Wilmerding, “Luminist Movement,” 121). And much influenced by Alexander de Humboldt’s books (and Turner’s art), he values an objective perception. However, his main “concern is for nuances of expression,” while the luminists rely on “essentially optical perception of nuances of tone.” The luminists, that is, paint what is offered by nature, its appearances; Church manipulates nature to articulate the “typology of Creation.” And light is an “expressive character” of God rather than as with the luminists nature, which is incidentally “itself God.” This means that where Church looks at nature for the revelation behind the fact, the luminists look innocently at nature, trusting fact (Huntington, “Church and Luminism,” 184–87). 10. “Reappearance of the original soul,” “the universe . . . shines through it,” Emerson, “Nominalist and Realist” (1844), para. 9; “atmospheric phenomena . . . transparency,” Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, 353. The Luminist “spirituality” is not faith revealed as did Lane’s teacher Thomas Cole (1801–1848) in his paintings, but as Tuckerman says, “in the spirit of faith” (Tuckerman, 353, emphasis added). Lane was possibly a spiritualist. Widespread in 1850s and 1860s America, spiritualists embraced light as standing for a “spiritual and ideal feeling that transformed the real

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world into another manifestation of God” (Gene E. McCormick suggestion, Novak, American Painting, 122). 11. “None knew better . . . fact on your mind,” Emerson, quoted Novak, American Painting, 123. . . . Luminist art is clearly related to Emersonian transcendentalism in its “calm, glassy clarity,” and “sharp clarifications of objective form” reconciling fact/ spirit and objective/subjective (Wilmerding, “Introduction,” 17). And Novak refers to the “transcendental luminist landscapes.” In these the “spirituality of light signals the newly Christianized sublime,” extending the Romantic sublime to a “religious attitude,” though “maintaining a distance from Deity” (Novak, Nature and Culture, 41–42). But as Wilton insists, the luminists were not transcendentalist, though their practice had connotations of the transcendental, as is clear from Emerson’s statement that “the health of the eye seems to demand a horizon,” which became a key element of John Frederick Kensett’s (1816–1872) paintings (quoted Wilton, American Sublime, 26). 12. Hand’s movement in brushstrokes, Gertz, American Luminism (n.p.); “infinitely careful gradations of tone,” Luminous Landscape: The American, 3; “primordial void of light and space,” Robert Rosenblum, quoted by Adams, “Luminist Walt Whitman,” 4. 13. Light does not “circulate,” Novak, American Painting, 122. This static series of steps arrests a moment in what Emerson’s calls the “concentrated eternity” (quoted by Novak, 105) in which subject and object are united. Despite the hazy atmospheric distance in suspension with the controlled clarity of the foreground, the receding planes are “affirmed by the very palpability of light,” and thus becomes a “wall,” a finite termination that paradoxically suggests the infinite (Novak, 105–106). Lane makes clear in this painting that his relationship with light is not simply repression of self but the offering of self to light, which goes to the heart of his core light experience. This is why in his Ships and Approaching Storm Off Owls Head, Maine (1860) we sense no fear, nothing ominous, only a calmness as silent as the line of light across the water in the foreground. We are stunned by the approaching storm’s light that silently suffuses the entire painting. Its silence in face of what we would expect to be impending turmoil seems to be “preternatural” (Wilmerding, American Light, 80). 14. “Freed light . . . religious dogma,” Plummer, Stillness and Light, 3. 15. “Mansions of light,” “construct of light as much as matter,” “pleading,” “soul,” “factual,” “luminous rooms . . . pure,” Plummer, Stillness and Light, 15, 2, 7. 16. “Subtle reflections,” “soft inner glow,” “seep from room to room,” “porous network,” “still point of light,” Plummer, Stillness and Light, 8, 5. 17. “Waylaying Light,” quoted by Farr, Passion, 247. Such as Sunset with Cows (1856) by Lane’s contemporary John Frederick Kensett (1816–1872), her sister Sue’s favorite (Farr, 256), which hung in her brother Austin’s art collection across the path from her Homestead. Having a visual imagination, she may have been unconsciously influenced by this work because she notes in some of her poems, as might a luminist painter, every minute gradation of light that could be “discerned in the changing veil of the atmosphere,” Armand, Emily Dickinson, 270 (e.g., #304, #1278, all poem numbers refer to Dickinson, Complete Poems). At times she wished she was a landscape painter, even adopting “Cole” briefly as a pseudonym.

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18. “Sufficient to itself,” Dickinson, Complete Poems, #862; “Preceptor . . . Cardinal,” #1556; “Silence is Infinity,” #1251; “there is one thing,” “which no other . . . —Infinity,” quoted by Farr, “Dickinson and the Visual Arts,” 72. 19. “Silence is all we dread,” Dickinson, #1251; “haunt the World,” #1004; “experiment,” #1073. Although with Emerson and the transcendentalists she kept asking, “How much can I be sure of?” and shared with them an abiding interest in the mechanics of perception and a skepticism about the result, she rejected their assumptions. She rejects Emerson’s merging with the Over-Soul, insisting on clinging to her “self,” her “Shaggy Ally, like her pet Newfoundland, Carlo” (Sherwood, Circumference and Circumstance, 235, 225). Her bent was an empirical one, having admired Darwin and questioned the Bible in line with the new Higher Criticism (Brantley, Emily Dickinson’s, 153). As she says, “Experiment escorts us last,” (#1770, c. 1870) and four years before she died, looking back to an earlier faith, she says “God’s Right Hand” is “amputated now / And God cannot be found” (#1551). 20. “And whether it was noon or night . . . For very Lunacy of Light / I had not power to tell—“ Dickinson, #593; rejected the notion . . . God’s design, Sherwood, Circumference and Circumstance, 27; limited . . . and sunset, Guthrie, Emily Dickinson’s Vision, 9–11. 21. “Begins its avarice,” Dickinson, #1682; “Curtain,” #375; extraordinary number of poems, Sherwood, Circumference and Circumstance, 230. Each poem was a “landscape,” her array of dashes constructing a field of shimmering words. And not just a single poem, for it was also a textual field that extends backward and forward between poems (Sally Bushel quoted; Armand, Emily Dickinson, 1615), which is especially evident in her hand-sewn packets of poems that begin in 1861 (called “fascicles”). For her the poem is a field of forces, a vibrating constellation of words (as the French poet Mallarme viewed his own [Sypher, Literature and Technology, 115]). 22. “Experiment in Green,” “tint,” “Graspless,” Dickinson, #1333; “certain Slant of light,” #258; “speaks to you,” #962; do not exhaust its reality, “Discontent,” Anderson, Emily Dickinson’s Poetry, 80, 82. 23. Wordsworth and Coleridge along with the luminists and Whitman all favored the light of twilight, dawn, and sunset. For most it was the light most conducive of imagination. However, Dickinson’s intimate relation to twilight goes deeper and proves to more complex than the common Romantic one. For Whitman’s debt to the luminists, see Adams’s overview (“Luminist Walt Whitman,” 3–5) and Reynolds’s discussion of his “prismatic refractions” (Walt Whitman’s America, 296–97), which he associates with luminist painting, such as Kensett’s study of these in his Sunset, Camel’s Hump, Vermont (1851); and for Whitman’s echoes of open-air painting, see Matthiessen (American Renaissance, 599–601). 24. “Broad daylight, . . . and roosters,” Barker, Lunacy of Light, 2–3, 32–33, 54–55. Thus the sun could be the “blonde assassin” (#1624), seductive (#1675) but dangerous. Yet she knows that whether it be “supercilious” (#950) or “superfluous” (#999) depends on her: the “Sun is gay or stark / According to our Deed” (#878), her act of perception. But though she can revel in its radiant light, she resents it as father and fears it as God’s eye (Barker, 66). Whitman found a solution to the sun’s danger, pitting sun against sun: “Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sunrise would kill

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me, / If I could not now and always send sunrise out of me” (“Song of Myself,” section 25). 25. Mitigated light of sunrise/sunset, e.g., Dickinson, #757; her creative and productive time, #308; “The Parlor—of the Day—” “stupendous place,” “Guest,” Dickinson, #304; “vastness,” “wisdom,” #1104; dark and emerging from it, “imaginative energy . . . solar power has retreated,” Barker, Lunacy of Light, 109, 113; “I wear the ‘thorns’ . . . put on,” Dickinson, #1273 (emphasis in original). 26. “Transcending . . . own ‘Blaze,’ half-light-dark . . . inner self Barker,” Lunacy of Light, 102, 133 (and see Dickinson, #581); “We grow accustomed to the Dark—/ . . . And Life steps almost straight,” Dickinson, #419 (1862); “Good Morning—Midnight / . . . Home,” #425. For a review of the traditional light-dark symbolism in literature in ancient times as well as its employment by writers from the Greeks to Wordsworth and Melville, see Barker (4–10, 12–20, 26–29). 27. “There’s a certain Slant of light,” Dickinson, #258; “something of a specialist on light,” quoted by Ruddick, Emily Dickinson’s Spectrum, 203; “Pain of despair,” Bloom, Western Canon, 302. 28. “Certainties of Sun,” Dickinson, #646; “Adieu,” #1556; “Rendezvous of Light,” #1564. 29. “Nature is a stranger yet,” Dickinson, #1400. 30. “Light-writing,” Howells, Visual Culture, 153; “executed by Light alone,” “hand down . . . yesterday,” quoted by Boorstin, Creators, 530 (emphasis added); “angular factiness,” “cold,” “spirit world,” Muir, quoted by Worster, Passion for Nature, 205. Dickinson abhorred the portrait photograph, including her own. But Walt Whitman celebrated photography as a metaphor for his democratic aesthetic (Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 285). And if Dickinson saw her poems as paintings, Whitman saw his as photographs, saying that in his Leaves “every thing [sic] is literally photographed. Nothing is poeticized” (quoted by Reynolds, 281). That is, he is committed to “factiness.” 31. “Revolutionize painting,” “help painters . . . light,” quoted by Vitz (quoting Theodore Reff), Modern Art, 53; “traced by light . . . passage of time,” “minute light,” “cognizant . . . hand,” Eastlake, “Photography,” 93, 94. 32. “Not merely an instrument . . . reproduce herself,” quoted by Batchen, Burning with Desire, 66; “timeless incorporeal order,” “unstable physiology,” “experienced in time,” “synonymous . . . seeing,” quoted Crary, Batchen, Burning with Desire, 83. 33. For a description of the challenging process Watkins mastered, see Current (Photography, 21–25). Watkins’s Yosemite photographs inspired Congress to pass the Yosemite Grant Act in 1864, making the valley the first nationally protected wilderness area. 34. “Pure . . . attention,” Wilmerding, “Luminist Movement,” 142. Even though Watkins gravitates toward classic luminist themes of “still water” and “measured spatial recession” in this photo, the hard luminance itself is a new aspect of light’s character, and this is not a luminist photograph. Even allowing, as Wilmerding claims, that he was capable of the “purest luminist photographs” at times, given his immense output as a commercial photographer with many eastern buyers (Wilmerding, 142).

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35. “Truly objective,” Wilmerding, “Luminist Movement,” 142; “hew diamonds,” “distill quicksilver,” quoted by Hambourg, “Carleton Watkins,” 16; “shone on Yosemite Valley,” “burnt directly . . . print,” Perl, “Discoverer.” And it was his “masterful” expression of this light that distinguished his Photographs of the Yosemite Valley from those of competitors, none his equal, and gained this album international success. These images were a powerful influence in getting the Yosemite Act to the desk of Abraham Lincoln who signed the bill in June 1864, officially preserving the valley for posterity (Current, Photography, 30). Entering the valley eight years after Watkins, John Muir was also beguiled by Yosemite light. He called the Sierras the “Range of Light,” but in contrast to Watkins, decried his praise of fact as creating a “cold” distance from the “spirit world” (Worster, Passion for Nature, 205). 36. Beginning with city gaslight it intensified, Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, 40; sparkles and fountains . . . huge crowds, Blühm, Light!, 29; advent of electric arc lighting, nine thousand incandescent bulbs, Brox, Brilliant, 103, 130. At the same time, various kinds of light overlapped. As technologies are integrated into the society, they form layers; even as late as 1900 the citizen might “routinely have encountered electric, gas, and oil lamps as well as candles over the course of a day” (Otter, Victorian Eye, 261). 37. “It may . . . poor man’s light,” “reason of . . . far-reaching rays,” “equally well lighted,” quoted Schivelbusch in Brox, Brilliant, 107. 38. “Strollers out . . . about 9 p.m.,” “suddenly found . . . flood of light,” “bright as the sun . . . artificial daylight” (engineers); “dazzling white” (about St. Petersburg lighting), “a nightmare!” (Stevenson), quoted by Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, 54, 115, 134. 39. Strolling in the city entailed was uncomfortable, Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, 134; “people stood overwhelmed with awe,” “dazzling,” “as if . . . supernatural,” quoted by Brox, Brilliant, 105–106; first time light equaling . . . production, Blühm, Light!, 216. Likening the arc light to the sun was not just metaphoric. Spectrum analysis shows that it really does resemble the sun’s light (Schivelbusch, 54). 40. “Strange weird light,” Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, 185. 41. “Iintensity,” “powerful white rays,” “will be modified . . . use,” Brox, Brilliant, 108. 42. Professional careers as artists, Belinda Thomson, Impressionism, 74; “one rude, . . . Claude Monet,” John Rewald, Studies in Impressionism, 190. 43. Light and atmosphere . . . without distraction, Brettell, “Impressionist Landscape,” 33, 37; salient Impressionist innovations, Belinda Thomson, Impressionism, 89; high-keyed . . . loose brushwork, Broude, “World in Light,” 9; art itself ends . . . relation to light, Licht, Goya, 183. For their debt to Édouard Manet (1832–1883) and other artists, such as Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), and Constable (his Hay Wain exhibited in Paris, 1824, whose convincing light and air, particularly their clarity astonished French artists such as Delacroix), see Brettell and Schaefer (“Impressionism in Context”) and John Rewald (History of Impressionism, chap II). For Turner’s anticipation of impressionism in his “dynamic engagement with light” and his expression of the “activity of light itself,” see Blassnigg

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(“‘Delightful (l) Mind,’” 124, 126, 133). Monet and Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) greatly admired Turner’s paintings, having studied them in London in the early 1870s. A letter signed by Monet, Pissarro, Edgar Degas (1834–1917), and Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), et al., acknowledged their debt: “A group of French painters . . . applying themselves with passion to the rendering of form in movement as well as the fugitive phenomena of light, cannot forget that they have been preceded in this path by a great master of the English, the illustrious Turner” (quoted by Graham-Dixon, History, 158). 44. “Light and atmosphere . . . visible world,” Brettell, “Impressionist Landscape,” 37; seized on . . . active force, Herbert, Impressionism, 304; how the phenomena . . . presents to the eyes, Belinda Thomson, Impressionism, 247; “pigments as if . . . light itself,” Birren, History, 9. 45. “Independent . . . expression,” Gombrich, Story of Art, 398. 46. “Study of light,” “thousands of decompositions and recompositions,” quoted by Broude, Impressionism, 28; “executed by . . . a school child,” quoted by Clarke, Lighting Up the Landscape, 20; “unfinished,” Callen, Art of Impressionism, 2. 47. “Visual field,” “visual world,” “optical reportage,” Sypher, Literature and Technology, 113. 48. “Fluctuant, light-filled atmosphere,” “microstructure,” “colored fabric,” Novotny, “Reaction,” 305; “sensations produced by,” “impression of a moment felt,” Broude, Impressionism, 28; “fugitive quality,” Licht, Goya (emphasis in original), 183; “drifting and undulating,” Plummer, Masters of Light; “thousand little . . . whole impression,” quoted by Nochlin, Impressionism, 17. In creating this field of color the impressionists took a cue from Michel-Eugéne Chevreul (1786–1889), Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors (1839), who in accordance with Faraday’s fields substitutes an “optical mixture for the mixture of pigments” because the optical expresses the intensity of the experience light, its extreme luminosities, in a way never seen before (Chevreul letter to Durand-Ruel, dealer, November 6, 1886; quoted Nochlin, Impressionism, 55). Rather than mixing pigments on the palette, Monet applied pure colors in close juxtaposition, relying on the eye to mix them. Thus the colors in the painting danced in the viewer’s eye. Such as the contemporary Irish writer and art critic George Moore who felt that Monet’s canvas threw its light “in the face of the spectator” as no canvas had before (Moore, Modern Painting, 84). As a result, form is light and light is vibration not “out there” but “in here” in our eyes, as we see in his Impression: Sunrise 1872. His secret in accomplishing this was “division of colours,” not mixing them but juxtaposing them for maximum brightness and radiance (e.g., pure red beside pure blue, not mixed on the palette as purple), and depending on the retina to mix them, which generated an “optical mixture, rather than pigment” (Gillet in Kapos, Impressionists, 294). 49. “Ensemble of all the rays,” “vibrating and palpitating,” Broude, Impressionism, 125–26 (emphasis added); “one must reckon . . . flow of air,” “final blow,” Kapos, Impressionists, “Letter from Paris, 134; “physical reality,” Novotny, “Reaction,” 315; “binding factor,” Nochlin, Impressionism, 19; “drunk on light,” Novak, American Painting, 91. As we’ve seen, the Ocular Age saw a fervid preoccupation with the

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visual experience of light, an area of investigation that the Impressionists with the photographers and scientists were developing together. The Impressionist’s eye possessed an “optical delicacy,” an analysis of light that is “altogether extraordinary” with which no physicist, such as Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) whose work was the first modern treatment of perception, would find “fault.” He said about the perception of landscape, and this was not lost on the Impressionists, that “the first thing we have to learn is to pay heed to our individual sensations.” He separated, as did Monet, the perception of brightness from that of color and form, analyzing these elements in terms of “relative rather than absolute brightness of objects” (Vitz, Modern Art, 46–47). Monet’s friend Clemenceau observed this even at the time, saying that the painter “has made us take a great step toward the emotional representation of the world and of its elements by distribution of light corresponding to the vibratory waves that science has discovered” (quoted by Broude, Impressionism, 169). 50. “Visual sensation of light,” Novak, American Painting, 91 (emphasis in original); “atmospherically diffuse,” “different frequency than atmospheric light,” “air circulates . . . strokes,” Novak, “On Defining Luminism,” 25; “enveloped . . . and air,” quoted by Nochlin, Impressionism, 108–9. 51. “Enthralled by the play . . . poplars,” Tucker, Claude Monet, 9; “light is the principal person in the picture,” quoted by Barazov, Landscape Painting, 128. 52. “Sometimes . . . I gaze on this light . . . quivers on the water,” “I grow faint . . . so many difficulties,” quoted by Pissarro, Monet’s Cathedral, 23–24; “eye” began with Boudin, Clarke, Lighting Up the Landscape, 17. From early to late, Terrace at Sainte-Adresse (1866) to Water-Lilies (1918–1920), Monet studied and learned from the water-light-air, responding to its ever-changeable character. This was not Turner’s agitated light but varying states of interactive light, water and air. And Monet carried this over to landscape, making it “waterscape,” what could be called a “metaphorical water,” land transformed into light-water-air by his brush (Taillandier, Monet, 40). Later, as we’ll see, he extends this to the “liquification of stone” in his Rouen Cathedral series. Throughout, Monet’s sky becomes an “upper ocean” barely distinguishable from the lower ocean. And it is atmosphere that binds them together, reflected light interacting in the field between sky and water (Taillandier, 46, 61). Like Turner, his aim was to paint light itself, but what Turner knew implicitly, the field character of light, Monet explores and expresses explicitly. And Monet sensed Turner’s losing himself in light and as a result felt that he had abandoned appearances, direct observation of light effects, thus challenging him as he did Boudin. It was precisely this atmosphere, this field of light forces, that disturbed the critics when he exhibited Impression, Sunrise 1872, painted two years after he had seen Turner’s Sun Rising Through Vapour on a visit to London. As he embarked on his series painting, Monet undergoes a renewed interest in Turner’s art. 53. “I see that a great deal of work . . . above all the ‘envelope,’ [enveloppe] the same light spread everywhere,” “exist in its own right, . . . every ‘moment,’” “the air and the light, which vary continually,” “surrounding atmosphere,” quoted by Belinda Thomson, Impressionism, 249; preoccupation . . . late 1880s and 1890s; “colour-weave,” “get brilliant colour,” “merely surface colour, . . . besides,” quoted by House, Monet: Nature Into Art, 29, 133, 127. The term “envelope” was widely

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used in the nineteenth century to describe the tangible, unifying atmosphere surrounding an object. Boudin used it, and Monet adopted it from him. In 1889 Hugnes le Roux following Monet, defined it, describing Monet’s work as “the painting of the envelope, of the movement of the ether, of the vibrating light that pulses around objects” (quoted by House, 221). In her novel Light, Eva Figes dramatizes a day in Monet’s life as he attempts, surrounded by a “luminous envelope,” to catch the “luminous cloud of changing light” within it (New York: Pantheon, 1983; 59). 54. “I’ve become . . . I despair,” “but the more . . . to get across,” quoted by Groom, French Impressionism, 88; “component” of visual reality . . . what he sees, Stuckey, Claude Monet, 9; enactments . . . time of day, House, “Monet in 1890,” 133, 136. House insists that this is Monet’s subject to the exclusion of the meaning of these grain stacks to the local people. In comparison with previous depictions, such as Millet’s Autumn, the Grain Stacks (1887), Monet’s paintings “conspicuously lack references to their social and agricultural function.” He seems “deliberately to have avoided making this context explicit” (House, Monet: Nature into Art, 28). Tucker agrees that Monet’s stacks eschew workers, animals, and specific locale, thus fostering contemplation and reverie. Forms, yes, but most prominent air and light, the “atmosphere and rays of the sun,” all “suggested with greater amounts of paint than the stacks” would seems to bear (e.g., Grainstack (Sunset), 1890–1891 [pl. 32]). And this accords with what Monet told a viewer in 1891, a “landscape hardly exists as a landscape, because its appearance is constantly changing; it lives by virtue of its surroundings—the air and light—which vary continually” (quoted by Tucker, Monet in the ’90s, 94, 96). Yet Tucker insists that Monet chooses his “subject,” such as stacks and cathedrals, with care (Tucker, Claude Monet, 4). The stacks themselves carried meanings, being images of the nation’s reverence for the countryside and having associations with the stages of life and seasonal changes (Tucker, Monet in the ’90s, 103). Also, the stacks sum up the labor of making the earth produce bounty, just as the church in Monet’s Cathedral series sums up the mystical aspiration of the people, the cathedral becoming human, as one critic said (Tucker, Claude Monet, 4). There is no question that stacks and cathedrals in 1890s France carried with them strong associations, but if we take Monet at his word, these were not the true subject of his series. In contemplating the Cathedral series, Monet said, “I felt it would not be trivial to study a single motif at different hours of the day, to note the effects of light which, from one hour to the next, modified so noticeably the appearance and the coloring of building.” And he would say the same for stacks of grain; it is all about light and appearance. 55. “Sheer visual joy . . . of light,” Danto, “Monet’s Serial Paintings,” 85; “hunter” of light, “Face to face,” “sit and wait,” “falling ray,” “dabs of paint,” Maupassant quoted by Gache-Patin, “Impressionism and the Sea,” 288, n. to pl. 119. 56. Worked intensely for long periods, House, Monet: Nature into Art, 225; “days when, . . . colours,” “he tears . . . into the snow,” “always starts again,” Henri Bang, quoted by Denvir, Impressionists, 180. 57. “I know only . . . that I do what I think best . . . in front of nature,” quoted by House, Monet: Nature into Art, 133; “what I experience,” “feel,” “undergo,”

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“sustain,” “suffer,” quoted by Moffett, “Monet’s Haystacks,” 145; “tangible presence,” “caught . . . piled up there,” “phenomenon of sight,” Spate, Claude Monet, 205. 58. Only the light differed . . . time of day, Bruce Watson, Light, 157; irrelevant . . . vanishing with the light, Stuckey, Claude Monet, 9. 59. “Liquification of stone,” Stuckey, Claude Monet, 9. 60. “Undercutting . . . notion of time,” Tucker, Monet in the ’90s, 149; pl. 48 (cat. 56); “fugitive,” “ambiguous,” Spate, Claude Monet, 225. And, incidentally, a reality making both the faithful and the skeptical, conservative and liberal uneasy. For the controversy ignited by Monet’s choice of Rouen Cathedral as subject, see Paul Hayes Tucker (Monet in the ’90s, 180, 185). Clearly, in selecting the Rouen Cathedral as his “subject,” Monet is not concerned with spiritual or traditional matters. “I simply gear my efforts,” he insisted, “on a maximum of appearances in narrow correlation with unknown realities,” rather than on “searching for the world in itself.” Appearances matter, not whatever might lie behind them (quoted by Pisarro, Monet’s Cathedral, 25; emphasis added). The stone is a pretext to express Monet’s experience (eprouver) of light, something invisible. Abbot Suger the theist had experienced this as metaphysical, pure white light mediated by stained-glass windows; Monet the atheist experiences this as physical, prismatic light mediated by the envelope. Implicating perception, it is a fundamentally human and immanent light rather than transcendent. For Suger this was God’s creation; for Monet it is what lies between—the envelope—what makes the real visible, while remaining invisible. For neither Suger nor Monet was light an ornament, but the fundamentally real (Pisarro, Monet’s Cathedral, 25–26); for the relation of Monet’s series to Gothic architecture, see Pisarro (“The Significance of the Gothic,” Monet’s Cathedral, 23–27). The real, so his paintings imply, that gives reality to time and space themselves. In his fifties, Monet knows that there is no permanence in the world. Reality is becoming not being, which is what his encounter with light in and on the façade of Rouen Cathedral is about. 61. “Undertaking,” “tough job,” quoted by Pisarro, Monet’s Cathedral, 15. 62. “Rverywhere and nowhere,” Bruce Watson, Light, 155–56. 63. “Dponge of light,” Bachelard, Right to Dream, 31; “needed . . . the stone façade,” Pisarro, Monet’s Cathedral, 27; “instantaneities” he had been hunting for, Hamilton, Painting and Sculpture, 36; light-transformations . . . announced in Monet’s title, Pisarro, Monet’s Cathedral, pls. 15 and 16. Pisarro arranges eight of the paintings in his book according to location and time of day (inferred from Monet’s letters and pictorial effects), all dated 1894 (pls. 2, 5–8, 15–17). 64. “Criss-cross, disheveled, hesitant,” “positively truculent,” Masson, “Monet le Fondateur,” 349.

Chapter 6

Eloquences of Light The Age of Uncertainty

The Columbian Exposition just outside Chicago, larger than any world’s fair up to that time, burst on the world in 1893. Its centerpiece, the futuristic Court of Honor, became known as the White City. No one had ever seen so much light in one place before—two hundred thousand hand-fashioned incandescent bulbs. Here were more lights than any city in the country, creating, as one visitor reported, a “brilliance almost too dazzling for the human eye to rest upon.” As a recent young immigrant from Poland who had known only kerosene lamps exclaimed, “this was like getting a sudden vision of Heaven.”1 This lightscape was a vision of the future, for within one generation popular demand for such light spectacles transformed main streets into “Great White Ways.” The more lights, the higher a city’s status. Beyond this, the White Way became a symbol of the modern and of the city itself.2 The key to this transformation was Thomas Edison and his company. Only about a dozen years before the Expo, after thousands of experiments, Edison had welcomed visitors to his New Jersey lab to see a display of fifty incandescent bulbs. And within a couple of decades, the electric distribution system provided by Westinghouse that brought his incandescent light into cities and homes across the land became a fact of life, reaching every segment of American society, which had crossed a threshold. The most popular offspring of electric light—the cinema—which Edison introduced at the Chicago fair with his kinetoscope, featuring thirty seconds of street boys fighting, created not only great excitement but more important, new human meanings. Grasping this, the American poet Vachel Lindsay in an essay on the cinema dubbed his contemporary the “new Gutenberg,” and so Edison proved to be.3 As modernism opened all traditional norms and values to question, this invention of flicker and flux, like the age itself, transformed cultural and institutional conventions. On the one hand, cinema’s storytelling fit in with the old assumption of the world’s continuity. On the other, it 195

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contradicted this assumption in its frame-by-frame art. An art that its first audiences found disconcerting, as it mirrored the modern sense of the world’s fundamental discontinuity.4 Cheaper than the theater and more accessible, the movies reached across all classes and had immense impact. Not just a new technology of production consumed in a new public space unlike that of theater, sports, or places of worship, cinema’s light-in-motion invested light itself, its very essence, with new meanings. Strange, the experience of a dark room transformed by a wall of light alive with moving images. A light not mysterious in a metaphysical sense, as in earlier eras, but in a purely physical sense generated by the scientific revelation of microcosmic and macrocosmic infinity. This experience of what David Summers terms the “new sublime,” which demoted the beautiful of the nineteenth-century sublime, revealed new facets of light’s character, one of action.5 We’ll be exploring these in this chapter, from the White City of 1893 to the laser light shows of the 1960s, a new imagination of light expressed by F. W. Murnau’s (1888–1931) films, Albert Einstein’s (1879–1955) science, Wallace Stevens’s (1879–1955) poetry, László Moholy-Nagy’s (1895–1946) light design, Carlotta Corpron’s (1901–1988) photo light, Edward Hopper’s (1882–1967) painting, and Le Corbusier’s (1887–1965) architecture. All expressed a relationship with light not merely as illumination but as a subject in itself. These figures in their breaking with the past and exploring new forms of expression in the arts were shaped by an Age of Uncertainty; and in their striving for a new certainty, they in turn shaped the new age.6 Reacting to the frightening fact that the beginning of the modernist era saw a greater amount of change culturally, politically, and intellectually than in the previous two thousand years, a French social commentator characterized the age as one of “fever and laughter, of violence, ruin, electricity, and oblivion.” It may at first sound strange that he includes “electricity” in his list, but its inclusion is a measure of what an impact the heroic and mundane electric light had on society.7 Embodied in technical innovations, electricity redefined time and space as the telegraph knit the world and industrial light remade the city. And with its child of light—cinema—remade the imagination. Its unfolding succession of flickering, unfamiliar views entered the human consciousness for the first time.8 Even people in far-flung towns found themselves remade by screens of flickering light. Embracing the modern, cinematographers as well as painters took the lead in their search for new certitudes, in the process redefining their culture. For a new relationship with light as expressed by these artists embodied a new hope.

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THE AGE OF CINEMA: LIGHT ADDICTION AND F. W. MURNAU “We all suffer from light addiction,” Mrs. Hortense asserts in Paul Scheerbart’s The Light Club of Batavia (1912), who regards it as the “the most modern of diseases.” In fact, the “hunger for light is the most outstanding sign of our times,” she says. And we could say that in a sense the new relation to light invented the twentieth-century imagination, just as Freud did the modern mind. Light addiction, which flowed from the crisis of personal meaning that the new age precipitated, was moderns embracing a new yet provisional truth. And there was hope in the gifts of light offered by electrification and embodied in film as well as in revolutionary painting, science, poetry, photography, and architecture. Each medium became a lever of personal redefinition. Each work of art became a testimony to a shift in the individual’s experience of light. With Einstein’s imagination of light in 1905 as packets of energy, what emerged in our consciousness was nothing short of a new light (certainly by 1923), a modern light. Its character offered a future (its energy boundless) and a hope of certainty (its speed a constant) in the new age and was accorded a new status by scientists as well as by artists. Equaled by the brilliance of the electric, artificial light of the great white ways in the urban night, the light of its rival the sun was unmoored from its natural source. Light thus took on a new, independent character and for some a curative, transformative power (Le Corbusier and László Moholy-Nagy) that it had not previously been granted.9 If the agent of change creating the modern “mechanical and urban consciousness,” in the poet Stephen Spender’s phrase, was incandescent light— its engineered distribution and magical presence, the driver of change was the cinema. Inseparable from the technology of light, it was quintessentially modern from its first regular distribution in 1905. The painter Edward Hopper considered film to be the “emblem” of modernity. A product of electricity, as the name of one cinema house announces, “Cooke’s Electric Theatre,” it embodied an industrial light stimulating intense responses. Moreover, it gave light substance, consolidating its independent character. The light of the movies is not so much an observed light, as it is in photography and art, but a light that happens to us. It awakens and enfolds us. We contemplate photographs and paintings, but sitting in the twilit space of the movie theater and reading a new light, as images move continuously before our eyes, we absorb film.10 Epitomizing this encompassing light early in the century is Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, a song of “no place and every place” (1927), directed by the German Expressionist filmmaker Friedrich W. Murnau in California, his first in America. The electrification of the California studios in 1915 was pivotal

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because at this point light moves beyond simply illumination and becomes atmosphere, whose sources could be manipulated to express the emotion of a given scene. In this silent black-and-white film, having only a few titles, light and movement are supreme, as it foregrounds a light that not only “flows but melts.” And having almost complete control over its making as its designer, artistic director, and cameraman with his unequaled sense of lighting, Murnau exploited light and shade. For him directing a film was about the camera angle and framing of the image, but most of all about the lighting devoted to intensifying a scene’s emotional effect. Murnau eschewed symbolic lighting with its conventional associations as contrived. Instead his light acts as a character (as does Hopper’s) that forwards his story and heightens its drama.11 Murnau was a “strong-willed director,” as a colleague said, putting his personal imprint on the film, which he insistently viewed as a total work of art whose power was inseparable from the character of its light. Furthermore, as a decidedly personal act, Sunrise is nothing less than an expression of Murnau’s deepest experience of this character.12 And what we experience is Murnau’s new relationship with a light continually on the move, underlining the subtle shift from a character’s action to their unconscious idea behind it. It is a light of independent action in its rhythmic character, whether legato or staccato in the director’s layering and overlaying of noisy city lights bursting all around, and quiet country lights gliding across water or illuminating night mists. In keeping with this fundamental relation to light, his film unfolds with a lyrical intensity, though the story is a simple one. A somewhat melancholy young farmer living with his wife and child in a village by a lake meets an attractive woman tourist from the city who seduces him and persuades him to kill his wife by drowning her. But as he is about to do the deed, he remembers how much he loves her and cannot carry through. Instead he takes her to the city where he begs her forgiveness, which she grants.13 The arc of this psychological melodrama is from human failing to human forgiveness and reconciliation. Murnau’s challenge is to convince us emotionally that a woman can accept and forgive her husband, reconciling with him after he has made a move to murder her. To achieve this, the director elevates light as a fourth character in effect (husband and vamp; wife and light). It is this character that reveals the essential depth of the forgiveness we’re promised when, after the husband in their boat on what was to be a fateful lake changes his mind. We see his wife and her dress as a body of light spread in the bow. And what we’re asked to accept in the end is the gift of light itself, proffered by the “silky moonlight” on the wind-rippled lake as they sail back home from the city.14 The wife’s conflict is expressed by the shifting angles of light in the scene where her husband begs her forgiveness, and by the profound radiance of

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light become her shared character in the subsequent acceptance and reconciliation scenes. The profundity of her forgiveness expressed in her being all light. Its active character revealed by its rhythm, bursts of light increasing as the movie shifts between city and country scenes, from city lights—sparkles, beams, spots, and window glares at first disorienting the couple, then embracing and protecting them in the midst of chaotic traffic—to lightning strikes over the country lake on their return. And in the final scenes celebrating with them the restoration of their love, where an early shot of her sleeping in the moonlight becomes her radiating presence in the sunrise. It is this rhythmic movement of light and its uncanny fluidity as an independent agent that emotionally persuades us her act of forgiveness is possible, dispelling our earlier doubts. Finding expression for his unique relationship with light, Murnau uses it to reveal the characters’ outward actions and at the same time their inward conflicts, and ultimately their peace—the wife having forgiven her husband and he in turn forgiving himself. An emotionally compelling film, the strangely objective character of light that Murnau experiences does not simply heighten its emotional intensity but appears to initiate action in bringing about its dénouement.15 ALBERT EINSTEIN’S AND WALLACE STEVENS’S BENDING LIGHT Einstein who was fascinated by all aspects of film, having taken out a patent on the self-adjusting aperture and lens in one of the first automatic cameras, attended the 1931 premier of City Lights in Los Angeles with Charlie Chaplin. The scientist resonated with the filmmakers’ imagination of light that drove film and science alike. Both shared the act of imagination that preceded experimentation. According to one of his assistants, Einstein described his method, though rooted in a profound knowledge of physics, as “essentially aesthetic and intuitive.”16 Einstein’s Race When Einstein was sixteen, having been entranced by light phenomena from an early age, he wondered what a person who ran at light speed alongside a beam of light would see. He imagined that having caught up with the light, it would appear to stop, just as his friend seemed to be relative to Einstein running alongside him. But imagining this in view of Maxwell’s elegant field equations derived from Thomas Young’s double-slit experiments, which we touched on in a previous chapter (Revolutionary Era), he realized that this could not be the case. No matter how fast he ran he could never catch up

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with light (the paradox spawning his General Theory of Relativity). Clearly, Einstein’s relation to light, in contrast to Maxwell’s abstract calculations, was “experience-based”; that is, one from which he could not separate himself from his subject. With this epiphany, Einstein declared to himself that “for the rest of my life I will reflect on what Light is!”17 Ten years later in 1905 a rocket burst out of a small Swiss Patent Office into the night of the new century. This was a paper on the interaction of light and matter sent off by twenty-six-year-old Einstein to the premier German physics journal in Berlin. In it, three days after his birthday, he rather humbly launched an idea whose explosion was shortly to be heard around the world, saying, “It seems to me” that light is discontinuous, consisting of packets of energy (now called photons). It is both wave and particle, one independent entity, a completely “auto-referential phenomenon” indifferent to time and space. This intuitive act, as far-reaching as that of the filmmakers at the outset of the century, initiated a profound change in our imagination of the nature and constitution of light. And two years later, having wrestled with the nature of gravitation, Einstein realized that rays of light “passing close to the sun are deflected,” bent by its gravitational field.18 Both science and film are, of course, formations of culture that express profound experiences, such as that in which one is “touched suddenly by the universal flare,” as the American poet Wallace Stevens says, in which we read “the eloquences of light’s faculties.” And Einstein’s light quanta spoke eloquently indeed, at times showing its face as a wave and at others as a particle, yet presenting itself as both wave and particle. Even his fellow scientists had trouble with this new imagination of light, not coming completely around until 1923 when it was accepted as the basis of quantum mechanics. This discontinuous character of light whose wave aspect was a sort of “probabilistic guide” telling its particles where to go, Einstein called a “ghost field,” meaning that the exact positions of its particles cannot be known. The implications of these waves of probability, which meant the necessary abandonment of determinism, the “law of chance” replacing that of “cause,” appalled even Einstein. But such proved to be the case.19 Einstein’s new imagination of light, derived from his experience as a boy trying in his mind to catch up with light, took the public by storm. As the prominent astrophysicist of the time Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) pointed out in his immensely popular book Space, Time and Gravitation (1920), the reason the boy could not catch the light was because the closer he gets the more that distance and time contract. The evasiveness of the beam of light is in its very character. In short, the speed of light is “the speed at which the mass” of his body “becomes infinite” and “clocks stand still.” So when in 1919 Eddington’s experiment to test Einstein’s belief that light has “weight”—that a stream of photons will follow the curvature of space created

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by a mass such as the sun’s, as they approach and pass by it—proved that his imagined light was in fact a scientific reality (the first solid evidence of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity), the world was ready.20 A lucid writer, Eddington was largely responsible for the new imagination of light as wave and weight capturing the popular imagination. Summing up his 1919 experiment, the writer’s wit helped: “Oh leave the Wise our measures to collate / One thing at least is certain, LIGHT has WEIGHT, / One thing is certain, and the rest debate—/ Light-rays, when near the sun, DO NOT GO STRAIGHT.” Einstein became a household name, and for many, science took on the authority that religion had previously enjoyed.21 A profound result of this new imagination of light as a “swarm of quanta” (wave particle probabilities), changing a centuries old relation to light (since Newton), was the solidification of an increasing awareness that physical light has no metaphysical significance. True not only among scientists, such a conviction was accepted by a large portion of the general public.22 Stevens, Man of Sun Unconsciously absorbing Einstein’s redefinition of the physical, Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) experiences the sun as “something seeming and it is.” Physical, of course, but at the same time “seeming” as it participates in the poet’s imagination. With the scientist Stevens is an experimentalist, their laboratory being the imagination, both bent on finding the true language for their experience of light, respectively, mathematics and poetry.23 Born under the sun of Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1879 to a stern and demanding lawyer father and schoolteacher mother who read a chapter from the Bible every night to her five children, light fascinated Stevens from an early age. While attending Reading Boys High School, he wrote a poem contrasting calm nature, its “Long lines of coral light,” with his own adolescent despair in a crisis of faith. Later, walking in the woods over nearby Mount Penn at nineteen, he was “struck by the curious effect of the sunlight on the tops of the trees” and where along the creek the “trunks of the trees shook with light reflected from the rippling water.” Prepared by this early experience, he had at twenty-four a revelation that proved to be central to his life’s project. On a six-week hunting trip to British Columbia through rough country it was revealed to him that place was inseparable from the light of that place. An experience confirmed by an epiphany on his seeing Vermilion Pass in the Canadian Rockies—“faintly blue and white like a gate into the sun.” For it was this gate that Stevens passed through when he returned home, opening himself for the rest of his life to the sun’s eloquences.24 Such was Stevens’s “sense of the world,” which as he said was “born with him and persists” the rest of his life regardless of later education and

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experience. Looking back on his life he reflected on his “old affair with the sun,” his fraught dialog with it, a “battle” that at one point he claimed to have “finished.” But he found himself later in his career “once more doing battle” with the sun. Identifying with it as the source of creativity and, as “Master Soleil” of instruction about how to be in this world, he desired to be the sun. “Let this be clear that we are men of sun,” and in a thought experiment of his own, conjectures, “It could be that the sun shines / Because I desire it to shine or else / That I desire it to shine because it shines.”25 The true subject of his poems is this dialog between reality and imagination. Neither can exist separately. And in his last decade he arrives at a tentative fusion of the imagination and reality. Like Ariel, “His self and the sun were one.” Like the sun his job was to create colors (poems) out of himself. Yet to be the sun as a poet and man was not easy. It proved to be, in fact, mental warfare, which in his poem “Esthétique du Mal” he plays with, telling a wry parable of the “clownish yellow” sun and “bony . . . insatiable” bird (VI). He admits it is not “clownish” in reality, quite the opposite, his relationship with the sun being ambivalent. At the same time serious, for he came to view himself as the “major man,” humanity itself in “battle with the sun” for what it means to be in our world.26 This struggle constitutes Stevens’s fundamental relation to the sun of material and imagination, the all light. He desired in his deepest being to face the light and “be unable to tell / How much of it was light and how much thought.” This lifelong “battle,” Stevens admits, is the “difficultest rigor.” Difficult because this entails redeeming his initial core experience of an “unreasoning” sun, the light image we “catch from that / Irrational moment” when the sun rises, such as he saw in Vermilion Pass. His project was to resurrect an experiential image, the sun’s true self, which in the past “never could be named.” Knowing he must find a name for it true to his core experience. The old crumbling fictions must be replaced, not by remnants of some transcendental realm in a futile hope to ground the self, because no such “ground” is available, but by new fictions—his poems he claims being parts of reality “itself and not about it.”27 His first task, then, is to discard the old names that crowd his imagination as an inheritor of a long history of acts of naming the sun, which have subsequently parted from the experiential and hardened as abstractions. This was the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten’s project as well, feeling even in his time that the inherited names of gods falsified his own encounter with the sun. So he determined to free himself from the layers of interpretation of light experience that had petrified over the years. As does Stevens in order to see the sun without evasion, as if for the first time. Like the Pharaoh, that is, the poet must as a modern man “become an ignorant man again,” as he says, and see the sun “again with an ignorant eye.” This is the starting point for going

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“beyond the rhetorician’s touch,” which is a false naming, to “see it clearly in the idea of it.” The “project for the sun,” then, which requires it to simply be “In the difficulty of what it is to be,” becomes the poet’s project as well. To see the sun as dynamic rather than static is the battle to possess nothing short of a “new knowledge of reality.”28 Yet one he can win. By his profound imagination of the being of light he can succeed in being true to his deepest experience of the sun, his personal light image. Having discarded the false names, such as “Phoebus” or “gold flourisher,” Stevens can take up the task of giving the sun a new name that is true to his core experience, what he calls a “supreme fiction.”29 To find this true name, Stevens attends like a pilgrim in our world to the “eloquences of light’s faculties,” such as “the exceeding brightness” of the “early sun” in March, a core image of his light experience. Although the sun as he experienced it at twenty-four is the country wherever we are, its eloquences, however, were for him loudest in “radiant” Florida. Here the great dialog between the sky and its clouds reflected by the sea, the continual change in the quality of light and thus in their reflected image, as he makes clear in his poem “Sea Surface Full of Clouds,” was most dramatic. All elements determine each other, including the imagination of the spectator poet watching the play of reflections, which became the central emblem of his dialog between imagination and reality. Delicate changes in the quality of light change the reality, the mind submitting to it. We can’t say whether imagination or reality dominates in “Sea Surface.”30 The poet calls this mapping “half earth, half mind; / Half sun, half thinking” of the sun. We see Stevens merging with light’s eloquences, its sensual impact. To accomplish this has been the “difficultest rigor,” the struggle we have seen. But Stevens succeeded in his project of getting beyond the “vernacular” with its clichéd, “wormy” metaphors to the real language of light, becoming in their shared project one with the sun. From an old “gold sun” to the “spillage” of light in the year of his death, its “green-edged yellows and yellow and blue and blue-edged green—/ The trouble of the mind,” Stevens’s experiments yield a sensual, liminal language. Announcing as the poet himself, Ariel, in one of his last poems, “His self and the sun were one / And his poems, although makings of his self, / Were no less makings of the sun.” Its physical reality and imaginative reality both are “out of this same light, out of the central mind.” This note of triumph sounding a year before Stevens died in 1955 was the celebration of a lifetime of poems that together found for the sun the unnamable, the true name of his relationship with light—his supreme fiction.31 This dialog and Stevens’s ultimate fusion of imagination and reality, a complementarity dear to moderns, signals profoundly changed habits of mind. This change was forcibly expressed in photography and painting as

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well. They have no “beyond” to which they refer, no transcendence expressed. Stevens’s poems are their own reality, natural objects among natural objects. This is why he resonated with contemporary painting, such as Edward Hopper’s, and photography and spent many evenings in the salon-studio of Walter Arensberg in New York. A group of avant-garde artists gathered here where he saw photographs by Steiglitz, founder and editor of the avante garde magazine Camera Work, and may also have met Edward Hopper as well as seen works by László Moholy-Nagy and Carlotta Corpron.32 LÁSZLÓ MOHOLY-NAGY’S AND CARLOTTA CORPRON’S LIGHT DESIGN On seeing the modern photography in Camera Work, Stevens would have intuited that the photograph by its very nature points to the action of light itself, being a “confrontation with sublime force,” as was the poet’s struggle with the sun. This is the truth of light, an aspect of its sublime character revealed to the camera, rather than to the eye.33 The way in which photography appropriates what is photographed, showing us details we do not otherwise see, allows us access to the optical unconscious, as painting does not. And in so doing, it expands our potential relations to light. This was not lost on László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946). In addition, enamored of Einstein’s relation to light, he experienced its fundamental nature as kinetic.34 And Carlotta Corpron (1901–1988) exploiting the optical unconscious, surfaced aspects of this nature from her own experience. Moholy-Nagy’s Photograms and Light Space Modulator “This century belongs to light,” Moholy-Nagy announced, admitting his light addiction. Born in 1895, the love of light became his life’s theme. Raised on a farm in the agricultural center of Hungary, he found himself at twenty-four in Vienna “lost,” as he lamented, “among the depressed conformists of the postwar period.” Before the war he studied law but had since become a painter, photographer, and metal worker, joining the Weimar Bauhaus in 1923 at thirty to direct the Basic Course in design and the metal workshop. Here he met the artists Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee and published his first book, Painting, Photography, Film (1925). After leaving the Bauhaus to set up a design office, he organized a Bauhaus exhibit in Paris where he showed his film A Light Play: Black White Gray (c. 1926). These expressed his belief in the redemptive power of light to create new ways of seeing that would bring about a more just society.35

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On the Galician front as an artillery officer in 1917, Moholy-Nagy recorded in his notebook a poem he had written three years earlier expressing his “Longing for the old ecstasy—light.” And suffering from a war wound, isolated from people, he recorded between deliriums his life’s mission: “Learn to know the Light-design of your life.” He asks, echoing Einstein, “space, time, material—are they one with Light?” Two years later the answer was clear, as the physicist was proven correct. And the artist exhorts himself: “Search desperately—what is Light as essence,” what for him personally. Moholy-Nagy admits his own search, saying, “I cannot kill my thirst nor even lessen it,” and addresses light itself: “Light, ordering Light, where are you? Far away.” Then begs, “Come over me, proud Light, fierce Light.” Knowing it to be a “Ferocious Light,” yet he yearns for it, asking, “spread through me, cleanse my eyes.” After such an intense encounter, he seeks grounding and invokes Einstein, “Material space and time to Light contours, / to Light eternal, Light the striding life.” And ends the poem with a new conviction: “Light, total Light, creates the total man.”36 This poem proved to be, as his second wife Sibyl said, the “creed of his life.” And his art, then, was a quest for the light design of his life. Thus it was dedicated to cleansing the eyes of all, ushering in a new age of justice. To carry this out, Moholy-Nagy made his direct involvement with light itself the center of his life and work as an artist. Light for him was sensual energy, the driver of all his static work, his innovative photographs, called “photograms,” as well as the kinetic images of his Light-Space Modulator and of his films. He spent his life determined to paint by means of light itself. Rejecting all mimetic aims, he insisted on freedom from representation and imitation. Furthermore, he eschewed hidden meanings, exploring exclusively the domain of total Light’s “luminous intensities.”37 The “cameraless photography” of photograms was his initial way to explore this. That is, the “patterned interplay” of light that Moholy-Nagy captured on a sheet of photographic paper without using any mechanical aid and developed in sunlight (and later in his studio). By placing objects on sensitized paper or lifting and illuminating them from different angles, he created contoured projections of objects and evoked “pure spaces of light,” which blazed a radically new path in photography.38 Before the photogram, he said in 1929, it was not possible to express “radiance in space” in all its “immateriality.” His photograms made this a reality, capturing his unique relationship with light, because light was not only the means of their substance but their reason for being. In this world “light is space and space is light,” neither existing separately, as Einstein insisted.39 Although he was well aware that making photograms rests on the “concretization of light phenomena” via the optical unconscious unique to photography, they were new in the world. In these “cameraless” works

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Moholy-Nagy was fixing spatial rays in “black-white-gray, in their immaterial, non-pigmentary effect” that derived from “relationships of contrast between deepest black and brightest white,” as he said, “with the intermediation of the subtlest gray tones.” This new language enabled him to express his hard-won experience of light given him by suffering. In perfecting the photogram Moholy-Nagy created a language of light “devoid of representational meaning,” in his words, “yet capable of eliciting an immediate visual experience.” The “spatial tension” of its black-white-gray writing with light, which in its profound optical experience expresses the self, reflected the struggle to find his life’s light design.40 He dreamed that his “infinitely subtle subtle [sic] gradations of light and dark” would “establish a new kind of seeing, a new kind of visual power.” An intense seeing that exploited the optical unconscious, a heightened “power of sight” beyond photography in “terms of time and space,” one that includes “abstract” and “exact,” “rapid” and “slow,” “intensified” and “penetrative,” simultaneous and “distorted” seeing. A large order, and Moholy-Nagy extended this to society in a utopian vision.41 Because photograms are “direct light diagrams recording the actions of light over a period of time,” as he said after a lifetime accumulation of photograms, they promulgate a “completely new form of space articulation.” No longer a record of an “existing space (or space-time) structure,” he maintains, but a new structure. The photogram accomplishes this by articulation on the plane of his sensitive paper where he carefully orchestrates “advancing and receding values of half-tones in black and grey.” Made possible, he explains, by the “radiating power of their contrasts and their sublime gradations.” And these relationships of adjacent light-shade forms “signalize” in his view a new “Spatial Order.” Fundamentally, this new articulation of space leads in his mind to “biologically right living” that moves toward equality and “city-land unity.”42 So motivated, wholly dedicated to giving expression to his experience of light in his photograms, Moholy-Nagy lived in Berlin with no heat, subsisting on crackers and apple butter. In 1922 he lived in a “spirit of self-sacrifice,” obsessed with the creation of his light compositions and laboring under the weight of great responsibility because he felt that light must be “sovereignly handled as a new creative means.” In order to discover the light design of his life he had to be faithful at all costs to a sovereign light. In accordance with his calling, as he composed his designs he composed himself with the hope of enabling individuals in the modern age by his experience of light as expressed in photograms to compose themselves. Although static designs, his light compositions were projections of what he desired to be his life’s light design. Witness his avowed determination to discover the true nature of light and shade, brightness and darkness light values, time and proportion, in short, the

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very “notion of light.” Photograms were thus both a means to discovery and its end. But not quite, he realized, for there was a dimension missing—time.43 Only a kinetic work of light art could supply this dimension of total light’s character, one that met a challenge: the “manipulation of moving, refracted light (color).” It was not enough, Moholy-Nagy realized, to paint with light, he must paint with “flowing, oscillating prismatic light.” Accordingly, he invented his Light-Display Machine (aka Light-Space Modulator) that could animate any space in which it was placed. Having evolved from a 1922 sketch of a light manipulating machine for the theater, it was first presented at a 1930 exhibition of German design, his chrome-finished Light-Space Modulator being itself a work of art.44 As a three-dimensional object to be appreciated as sculpture in itself, it differed from Thomas Wilfred’s Clavilux, which he used to project light directly on a screen. The Light-Space Modulator embodied Moholy-Nagy’s conviction that the experience of light rendered by his art must be “transmitted and transformed through materials—not projected at the viewer.” We see light directed onto moving metal plates, chromium grills, wires, and rods, reflecting it onto surrounding walls. We see light, that is, playing in continual movement over time. A “beautiful” sculpture sculpting light, his wife agreed, but as she said, it became her “problem child” because in their travels it delayed them with puzzled Customs authorities. When it finally came to rest in Chicago it had been “declared a mixing machine, a fountain, a display rack for various metal alloys and a robot.”45 What Moholy-Nagy inaugurated in his photograms, he concluded, reached its “highest development” in his Light-Space Modulator (and film).46 By means of this machine he extended his static manipulation of light to include the dimension of time, ultimately expressing his fundamental experience of light. One rooted from beginning to end in his longing for the ecstasy of total light and enabling him to create the “light design” of his life. Corpron’s Light Flow Born in Blue Earth, Minnesota, Carlotta Corpron spent her childhood in India where her father was a missionary surgeon. She returned to the United States to attend college and after graduation in 1935 moved to Denton, Texas, to teach advertising design and art history at Texas State College for Women (now Texas Woman’s University). Corpron became Moholy-Nagy’s assistant when he came to give a workshop at the University. Two years later in 1944 György Kepes, Moholy-Nagy’s associate at the Institute of Design (The New Bauhaus) in Chicago, arrived to teach at North Texas State University where he completed his book, The Language of Vision, which included some of Corpron’s work. Although she said that “the only influence” on her work

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was Kepes, Moholy-Nagy taught her and her students to make photograms, which she admitted was a turning point in her life. She learned from him to view the entire world as a collection of light-modulating forms. What distinguished this new photography from the old was that light replaced objects in the world as its subject matter. While working on her “Light Patterns” and “Light Follows Form” series, she visited Stieglitz’s gallery in New York. Significantly, given this photographer’s stature at the time, he told Corpron that her “photographs changed the way he saw the world.”47 Moholy-Nagy’s influence on Corpron’s work is evident, but as she charged he did not understand her desperate need to do something “original” in photography. Nonetheless, as an independent character and determined, driven artist, she took a page from Kepes with whom she shared the belief that photography could “offer important aspects of a poetry of light,” and pushed beyond the photogram into new dimensions. “I want my photographs to be mine,” she vowed, saying that she made the photographs she did because “I had this intense desire to create light.” And create the light character of her experience she did. Extending the abstract aesthetic of Moholy-Nagy’s “static” photograms, she achieved a kinetic poetry of photography. Light had become a “plastic element,” in her phrase, of “ever-changing possibilities for creative work.”48 A self-admitted “maverick,” in creating her poetry of light Corpron’s precision and compression—a radical project—make her the Emily Dickinson of photography. As early as 1936 Corpron had traveled to Los Angeles to study photography at the Art Center where she experimented with different ways to use light in revealing the structure of natural forms in her flower studies (e.g., Amaryllis and Solarized Amaryllis, preexposed negatives exposed to light). Here, as she said, “I wanted all my experimentation to be with light only.” Thus light itself became the central focus of her work. And here she began the intense investigation of light as “both the creator and subject of her photographs,” evident in the “Light Drawings” she did upon her return to Denton (1940–1943).49 But the beginning of her fascination with light as flow derived from her light experience in local amusement parks. There she “captured moving lights,” as she told her students, and created her first “abstract light drawings” (e.g., A Walk in Fair Park, Dallas, c. 1943). Her immersion in the moving lights of amusement parks proved to be an “awakening.” She was thrilled by the possibilities of “LIGHT as a creative medium,” not just an “exciting experience,” as she said, but a core light experience. For the rest of her career she let the character of the light with whom she had a relationship determine the character of her photographs, trusting to her optical unconscious. But she patiently prepared for its manifestation. Before taking a single photograph, she would explore the forms in and out of light for hours, studying the tonal

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variations and shifting patterns of light and shadow. The result was, as Kepes exulted, some of the “finest” works of contemporary photography.50 The “wonderful use of light as a fluid medium” that awed Kepes was her revelation of a natural light he had never seen before because hers was a new relation to light. Corpron moved from the park where she traced the flow of lights, but the light of flow had not moved from her. Her challenge was how, using natural light to express her deep sense of the wave character of light, which was integral to her relationship with it, to go beyond the inherently static photograms that had influenced her. Because light in her later work does not “model form or illuminate space,” as she testified, but is “simply itself—a line of light”—her challenge became greater. Respecting its integrity, she had to express in her photographs light’s “line rhythms,” its character of flow, which captivated her above all. She had been prepared for this in her study of light’s interaction with the “purity” of the shape of eggs. Not planning to do anything with these, as she said, “but let the light guide me.” And she extended this “exploration into the unknown,” her probing the character of fluid light. About the result, which gave full expression at last to her relationship with light, she got so excited, she says, “I almost jumped out of my skin.”51 Taking a cue from Moholy-Nagy’s going beyond his static photograms, she captures light flowing over forms (e.g., Light Follows Form, 1946) or spreading before our eyes (e.g., Fluid Light Design, c. 1947), after spending hours studying the ways in which natural light caresses various objects. Light’s flow in time seems a quality of the object itself, inseparable from its reality, and reveals an intimate familiarity with the inherent nature of her light’s character. In her astonishing photograph simply titled Flowing Light (1946), where “light is still, yet appears to move,” as Martha Sandweiss observes, she expresses having entered into this very character, the companion she had lived with for decades, letting it take her into another dimension of immense purity. Especially since her abstract designs, unlike those of contemporary photographers (e.g., Ansel Adams, Edward Weston), appear to be independent of any structural source, whether rocks or nudes. Finding expression for her experience of light’s sculpted flow, Corpron produced a unique and entrancing body of work.52 EDWARD HOPPER’S AND LE CORBUSIER’S LIGHT ARCHITECTURE Instead of making paintings out of nature or cathedrals out of God, the modern artist makes them, as Barnett Newman said in 1948, “out of our own

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Figure 6.1. Carlotta M. Corpron, American, 1901–1988, Light and Space, 1946, Photograph, gelatin silver print. Sheet: 27.3 x 34.5 cm (10 3/4 x 13 9/16 in.). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Samuel Putnam Avery Fund. 2010.636. Photograph © [1946] Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

feelings.” Redefining themselves, then, the painter and architect’s images carried their own authority, their own “truth.” And as we will see, their new relationship with light became a “form of life” that sustained them in the face of shattered spiritual and political absolutes, providing provisional continuity in a world of discontinuity.53 Finding personal truth in the sun, as we have seen, Wallace Stevens echoes this, quoting Simone Weil who observed that within modern reality, “our revelations are not the revelations of belief” but of our own powers. Powers confirmed by the expressions in painting and architecture of the personal encounters with light, respectively, of Hopper and Le Corbusier.54 Hopper’s Light Wall Edward Hopper (1882–1967) spans the whole of our chapter’s period from the time when America made the transition from a largely rural country to a new urban America of movies, skyscrapers, automobiles, and airplanes. He was one of the first to comprehend how radical the impact of electric light

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and film (as well as the auto) would prove to be, transforming the American landscape. But he had no interest in documenting the “American Scene” in his painting; he only wanted, as he said, “to do myself.” And in contrast to his contemporaries, he eschewed realism as well as abstractionism, though each of these labels was applied to his painting. His “realism” was that of the theater, his abstractionism that of architecture.55 He merged these sensibilities of the virtual and geometrical, as did his contemporary Wallace Stevens with whom he shared much physically and emotionally. Both were tall men isolated early on by their height, Stevens self-conscious about being the “ten-foot poet among inchlings,” Hopper shooting up to six feet by the age of twelve. And both were emotionally reserved, light-besotted philosophical artists creating works that seem on the surface to respect convention but actually subvert it. Both also subscribed to Stevens’s dictum that could serve as a gloss on Hopper’s paintings: “Not that which is, but that which is apprehended,” asking, “of what is this house composed if not the sun.”56 Hopper ultimately gives this “apprehended” light the lead role in his paintings, not in landscapes but on stage. These were picture theaters. And on the screen in these, the star character constructed of angles and planes is a quadrilateral of pure light. Not that he doesn’t give it supporting roles as well, such as a relentless early morning light that commands the attention of a woman in Cape Cod Morning (1950) or the hard glare of light that electrifies a corner luncheonette in Nighthawks (1942). Masterful though light is in these roles, it does not dominate the stage. However “beautiful” a light was, such as the “very luminous” Cape Cod light, for example, there was something about it, as he admits, “something soft” that Hopper didn’t like. For him the Academy Award role that he finally accorded a veteran light in the latter part of its career was simply a plank or ingot of light presented in a most dispassionate manner that pretended to be nothing other than itself, owing nothing to outer “reality” and everything to the inner geometry of Hopper’s imagined light. But, paradoxically, a plank charged with emotion.57 The painter cherished two vivid memories of light from his childhood— light on water and later on a wall. Hopper like Monet spent his youth by the water. Born in Nyack, New York, in 1882, he grew up on the Hudson River and spent many hours on the water. Unlike Monet, however, his fascination was not with light interacting with water but simply with light finding itself on water (e.g., Five A.M., 1937).58 Hopper’s transition from this world pivoted on the lighthouse, of which he did a series of paintings. He spent many seasons in South Truro on Cape Cod where the summer light is especially intense, but in his lighthouse paintings light’s appearance is totally independent of water. Here was the sentinel of water, the light broadcaster; and here

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confronting us, as is the lighthouse in his Light at Two Lights (1927), a tower wall of light. As he grew away from this world on returning from Paris in 1910, he remembered, as he told Katherine Kuh over forty years later in an interview, being as a child entranced by the light on a house wall. As he said, “there is a sort of elation about sunlight on the upper part of a house.” In this sense he was, as he claimed at one time, “a realist and I react to natural phenomena,” simply light on a white wall. Significantly, at forty-three he poses himself in his Self-Portrait (1925–1930) before a conspicuous wall of light, each entity vying with the other. He defines himself, that is, by its geometry, a plane of light. His face at its center, he becomes a function of the wall of light itself. Clearly, his central ego is bound up with the light wall. On this screen Hopper does himself like a director in the movies he dearly loved.59 In this self-portrait he is both an actor within light and a projector of light. We will see how this film unfolds. Giving expression to a deepening relationship with light in his Summer in the City (1949) where dazzling rectangles of light upstage the figures, he achieves a light of “planar simplicity.” This light vies continually with Hopper’s human figures, balancing, questioning. It is a light free of objects, not interacting but simply an “evanescent force” on stage. At times his figures “commune” with it, other times not. But increasingly it takes center stage as a geometric figure redolent with feeling—rectangle, rhomboid, trapezoid— and ultimately displacing all other actors, as in Rooms by the Sea (1951), on becoming the key player in his work.60 At the same time, his psychological intimacy with sunlight gave rise to self-doubts, admitting, “Maybe I am not very human, what I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house,” as he does in Second Story Sunlight (1960). He was no doubt aware of being “absolutely self-centered,” as his wife Jo said in 1949, though she averred that this was a requisite for being “great.” And there was a “loneliness about him,” as his friend Raphael Soyer observed, “a sadness to the point of anger.” This melancholic temperament and withdrawn nature reinforced Hopper’s misgivings about his deeply subjective relationship with light, feeling closer to light, perhaps, than to his fellow humans.61 His loyalty to light then, as a natural phenomenon, is not that of the realist, impressionist, symbolist, or even abstractionist, but to the character of light as only he knows it. All is subordinate to finding expression for this knowledge. His real aim, he claims, is the “exact transcription” of this, not an outer world but decidedly an inner world phenomenon, no less natural for that. Only Hopper could have it both ways. Concerned about getting the light right in his High Noon (1949), he makes a cardboard model of the house, positioning

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it in the sunlight so he could study precisely how the light fell in order to transcribe it accurately. Yet the light we see in the painting is no transcription. It is Hopper’s light, a subjective “reaction” having almost no loyalty to the appearance of actuality. The light on the woman’s breasts invites; the hot light on the wall bites. This is the character he brings on stage in his paintings that evokes in us feelings of intimacy and, at the same time, a certain alienation. Hopper embraced light’s subjective and objective nature, trying to exorcise the doubts that came with this, vowing as he painted his People in the Sun (1963), “I would like to do sunlight that was just sunlight in itself.”62 Hopper directs light in many strong roles before it distinguishes itself in the lead role as “just sunlight in itself.” Neither luminist nor impressionist, the character of Hopper’s light in the theater of his paintings, occupying the ground between observation and imagination, comes to present itself in its later career, the last fifteen years of Hopper’s work, as an independent actor in the world.63 Meanwhile, whether its source is natural, artificial, or indeterminate, its direction evident or ambiguous, even contradictory or mysterious, its integrity as presence on Hopper’s theater screen is never in doubt. Light can be raw, even ruthless, “unsparing” in its cruel revelations, yet reviving. A woman stands in a doorway pummeled by the sun yet becomes by its force more determined as a woman while we watch her in the sunlight of Carolina Morning (1955). Or light can celebrate a young woman’s dawning sexuality, as she steps on the city street in Hopper’s Summertime (1943).64 In each of these scenes, we are not so much given a light observed, as we are Hopper’s staging of a “reimagined” event of light. This implies a narrative while defeating any anecdotal drama, for he insists, “none is intended.” Hopper simply asserts in his theater by his passionate directing of light’s body, whether natural or artificial, in the country or the city, its presence in our lives. It is a character who insists that we deal with it on its own terms, neither mitigating nor exacerbating the isolation of his figures but rather simply asserting its presence. Hopper’s light is not there for them nor are they there for it, both figures simply finding themselves together in our world.65 And on the threshold of his greatest period, as was Rooms by the Sea (1951), we see the solution to this challenge in his Morning Sun (1952). Hopper distills his earliest experience of the light wall to the quadrilateral of light in his theater. We are drawn to the woman staring down the light presence, but our eye comes to rest on the parallelogram of light projected on the wall behind her.66 In this event of light materialized as a geometric figure equal in significance to the figure of the woman, Hopper directs light in what will become its leading role as the chief protagonist in his painting. Here it dedicates itself, as he said, to “conveying the structure of reality.” In Morning

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Sun that light asserts its presence, giving a mysteriousness to an otherwise rather mundane scene. We feel a certain tension in her looking out the window, as she recognizes in the sunlight’s presence the true foundations of the world, yet being relaxed and receptive, as if sitting on a beach.67 Which returns us to his fundamental desire as an artist: “all I wanted to do was paint sunlight on the side of a house.” We could dismiss this as humility, but in fact it proved to be more a boast because he managed, paradoxically, to convey the deeply personal by trusting to the profoundly impersonal light. It is no accident that the quadrilateral presence of Hopper’s light, as he reached the height of his career, became inseparable from the “elation” he felt early on by a house’s wall of light. We saw this in his Morning Sun (1952) but, tellingly, he eliminates figures altogether and relies on light itself in its lead role as the true structure of reality, which we see in one of his first major paintings, Rooms by the Sea (1951).68 The importance of this is clear. For he goes so far as to imply that light in this role would accomplish independently what he wanted regardless of his ability. So all he had to do was construct the theater for light, turn it loose on stage, and it would construct reality. Giving it a lead role again in his last major painting, Sun in an Empty Room (1963), enables Hopper to reassert in a grand finale his deepest desire—the

Figure 6.2. Edward Hopper, Rooms by the Sea, 1951. Yale University Art Gallery. Bequest of Stephen Carlton Clark, B.A. 1903. © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

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presentation of “sunlight in itself.”69 Hopper’s independent light determines the reality of a room, not vice versa. Fundamentally, the light quadrilateral is not placed on a room’s wall; rather, determining its structure, it is the wall. Whether it is exterior walls of light that determine the architecture, such as in Second Story Sunlight (1960), or interior walls, light finds its form, asserting its independence. His quad-light serves to liberate because it is the form in his experience that light itself takes, nothing less than a manifestation of the structure of reality. This enables him to simply present light, rejecting the pictorial tradition that historically strove to represent it.70 Attesting to this is the fact that his imagined light is not a literal or photographic light, as demonstrated by a comparison with a photographed restaging of Morning in a City (1952) at the same time of day as Hopper’s painting.71 As he stood back from the easel, looking at his last major painting Sun in an Empty Room (1963), his wife asked him, “What are you after in it?” Turning to her with a slightly exasperated smile, he said, “I’m after ME.” He found himself, that is, within its planes of light, where his whole being resides. She was entranced by the painting’s light, its taking the lead role, but Hopper’s response is revealingly personal. Here is the embodiment of the long-desired pure expression of his mature relationship with light. The emotional intensity of this painting resides in the dramatic agency of light’s performance, its sole protagonist.72 As in film where, according to the poet Vachel Lindsay, a former classmate of Hopper’s who had written a book on the movies, “light is as strong in the eye as whiskey in the throat.” The authority of Hopper’s light is not bestowed by realism or symbolism, nor by tradition, such as the Dutch painters, or contemporary abstractionists or surrealists, but purely by light’s own assertion. As Hopper said of Sun in an Empty Room when asked about its meaning, “The whole answer is there on canvas.”73 The man-made light of this painting, neither the earthly light of nature nor transcendental light of God, is one fashioned from Hopper’s memory and imagination. This is not a metaphorical or symbolic light but “unadorned slabs of light,” quadrilaterals of light in which the poet James Hoggard discerns that Hopper’s “self is / if self itself ever is.” A light given the lead role in the theater of his paintings. And under Hopper’s direction of this light, which in the end asserts its own independence on the stage, his paintings teach us a new way of seeing in the twentieth century. We experience what it feels like to be in the world alone and not alone, where light is an alien and an ever-present companion revealing the very architecture of reality. This is an unsettling experience of light as an equal character with the people in his paintings and with Hopper himself as well as with us the viewers, which he confirmed despite his doubts, as profoundly human.74

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Corbusier’s Light Composition Like Hopper, Le Corbusier (1887–1965), the nom de plume he adopted for his given name Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, was captivated by white walls, in his case the white-washed walls of Greece. Also, like the American artist, the French architect’s mission was to surface the structure of reality. To accomplish this, Corbu, as he came to be known, announced, “I compose with light.” For him this is a light “visible in itself not just a vehicle for making things visible,” just as it was for Hopper who was himself drawn to architecture.75 By employing steel and glass that opened up buildings to a fluid light, which dissolved boundaries and expanded space, modern architects like Corbu made this reality part of the modern consciousness.76 Corbu published Toward an Architecture (1923), a milestone in his life and the development of modern architecture in which he championed the architecture of space and light. On the first page he announces that in his age “There exists a new spirit!” And it is in this spirit that he declares, “I compose with light.” Corbu pioneered an architecture of light flowing in all directions, which he believed would initiate in society the “rebirth of the human body” and ultimately human society.77 Yet he was inspired not by nature but machines, saying that the house is a machine made for living, a special light and space machine that generated the interchange in airy space of inside and outside light, which Corbu believed, in contrast to Hopper’s social isolation, would bring about a new openness of human relationships. As it was for Moholy-Nagy, sunlight and health were intertwined in the architect’s outlook, optical hygiene being the ultimate purpose of his architecture, which was dedicated to satisfying the human need for sunlight. Having had a “rapport with light effects” at twenty, as he said, fascinated by the “decomposition of light and shadow” on a sphere, vase, or other object, this relation of shape and light became the core of his light experience, reinforced by Scheebart’s Light Club of Batavia, which had a great influence on him. Reinforced by a pivotal experience four years later in Greece (1911) where he was taken by the lively interaction of Classical architecture with the Mediterranean light, which he called the “plastic drama” of Grecian light and shadow. He exclaimed that never before in his life had he experienced his whole being “gasp,” body, mind, and heart suddenly “overpowered.”78 The basic source of his architecture’s humanity was its interaction with natural light, the key to “well-being.” Each of the buildings that sprang from his artist-engineer’s imagination, by its ingenious treatment of daylight, became an expression of a human light, most eloquently in his chapel at Ronchamp (1954) and the Monastery of La Tourette (1960). At the same time, his engineer’s aesthetic, governed by economy and mathematics, grounded his buildings in the very structure of reality. This is why like Hopper he celebrated

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what he called the “White World,” that of the “whitewashed Aegean walls” and “crystalline sea-light,” which so influenced him. This was the domain of clarity and precision, an order that “we feel to be in accordance with that of our world,” as Hopper had intuited, and that “determines the various movements” of our heart and our understanding. For it is only then, as Corbu says, that we experience beauty. This from a man who wrote “Poem to the Right Angle.” In short, Corbu deploys forms and shapes and light in such a way, as he proclaims, “THAT THE SIGHT OF THEM AFFECTS US IMMEDIATELY” and rewards the “DESIRE OF OUR EYES.”79 Natural light for Corbu was fundamentally a moral character. It works not only to satisfy our desire for beauty but, more fundamentally, for personal freedom as well as social change via what he called the “Radiant City.” And he invented a new architectural language that broke with the past in order to express this new relationship with light, an individual one that he hoped would be collective. His fullest expression of this was his Chapel of Notre-Dame-du-Haut, Ronchamp. One of the most influential buildings in modern architecture, it is also one of Corbu’s most personal buildings. Having complete professional freedom in its design and execution, the Chapel is a confession of his deepest relationship with light. This masterpiece at the top of the Notre-Dame-du-Haut hill in East France near the village of Ronchamp was five years in the designing and two in the making (inaugurated June 25, 1955). And it was for Corbu, as he told himself, “the finest commission you can ever have, the one which corresponds to your deepest being.”80 Powered by the sun’s movements, Ronchamp is in one sense a “light Machine.” It is fitted together out of “shapes of light,” such as that occupying private prayer niches under light towers with their personally transformative light and the nave with its communal light. As Henry Plummer testifies, these shapes “stir us emotionally, possess us entirely,” made alive by the moving sun. Light brings renewal every day, its light-dark cycle being for Corbu architecture’s beginning and end, which he internalized as his own birth and death. As the sun rises in the east, it enters the chapel through small openings in the east wall. Higher in the sky, it enters from the east tower, becoming stronger until, near noon, a “blazing file of light bursts” between the east and south walls, its rays finding the cavities of the south wall and exulting. These “crescendos of light” within the chapel are life but also Corbu himself, his very purpose as an architect and as a man in his time and place, responsible not only for his personal happiness but communal happiness of all who stop at this pilgrimage chapel.81 In another sense, the chapel is a work of “kinetic” sculpture that instead of manipulating light like Moholy-Nagy’s Light-Space Modulator is manipulated by the sun’s light. The difference lies in Corbu’s desire to express a “signifying light,” a moral light of meditation, rather than a healing light of

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motion. His chapel’s tenderly responsive exterior walls reflecting light, and gently inviting interior niches capturing the light of sunrise and sunset ensure self-contemplation. At the height of his powers, finding himself in a transformative relationship with natural light, the most intense of his life, Corbu invents a language to express this. He creates a space of “CONTEMPLATIVE LIGHT,” as he said, by a balance of moving and resting as well as bright and dim light. At the same time, the architect creates a bold brightness, such as the Virgin Mary Statue lit by morning light from the east façade, or shadowy light like that of the glimmers from discrete wall openings, evoking a different mood at different times of day. Each splayed and tapered wall niche, glowing as the light of the passing sun is captured. Sky glare avoided as these niches transform it into a luminous meditative light. For the emotional possession of the chapel’s light, as Corbu knew, relies on the “shadowed dimness of indirect lighting” that creates a contemplative mood and ensures the presence of his moral light.82 So intense was the moral character of Corbu’s natural light, rooted in the mathematical cycle of the sun and in the sheer beauty and power of a meditative light, that it was recognized immediately by even the most skeptical critics. His chapel is the consummate expression of his fundamental relationship with light, one that lifts the soul. Pointing to the horizontal, thin luminous crack between the shell of the chapel’s roof and the vertical “envelope of the walls” that seems to float the roof on light itself, he said this “makes possible the arrival of signifying light.” The arrival of the character he knew, that is, the moral light declaring itself that had transformed him as a young man and would transform the pilgrims, as he told the archbishop on handing over his chapel at its opening in 1955, who entered what he declared to be his contemplative space of “inner joy.”83 Each of the figures whose testimonies we have heard has a uniquely personal relationship with light, yet they share a fundamental sense of light in the modern world as fundamentally a character of action, owing to the advent of electrification and its offspring, the cinema. By these inventions the experience of light was forever changed. Einstein’s imagination of light as packets of energy (photons), “mysterious” collaborations of wave and particle, shaped the age. As the French writer, artist, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau acknowledges in his Journal, exhorting himself to keep “braiding” his “wavelengths back into himself” (August 30, 1951). But the character of light that emerged in the modern period was not only that of scientists and artists; it became that of the general populace, who could not escape light’s activity. For them light embodied energy, not only in its blaze from great white ways in the city but in its incandescence from living room lamps and in its flicker from screens across the land. And we have seen

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variations of this in the individual experiences of light. For Moholy-Nagy and Corpron its character was kinetic. And arguing with the sun, Stevens assumed its active character. To become the desired “major man” of reality-imagination, he had to accept this relationship. Just as Moholy-Nagy had to accept light’s activity within him to achieve his life’s “light design” and become the “total man.” With the industrialization of light revealing itself as energy also came an experience of light beyond illumination. Acting as an independent entity of substance, as from searchlights, it stabbed night skies and from projectors danced across screens. Light verged on declaring itself an independent character. Hopper’s light asserts itself, taking a lead role in his theaters of paint. His is a relationship with a character standing apart from objects and figures, a paradoxically intimate and alien presence. Similarly, the character of light that enters Murnau’s film, Sunrise, asserts its independence, always inscrutable whether comforting or condemning. And the character with whom Corbu is enamored explores the theater of his chapel without subordination to religion or institutions, answering only to the chance elements of the cycle of days and seasons. This implicit movement toward asserting itself as a character of independence, even substance, accelerates in the next chapter, as uncertainty gives way to suspicion of certainty. With the 1960s dawned a time of counter-revolutions calling all into question, such as the explosion of the civil rights movement, as the modern age evolves into the postmodern age. NOTES 1. “Brilliance almost . . . to rest upon,” “this . . . vision of Heaven,” Brox, Brilliant, 128–31. 2. “Great White Ways,” became a symbol . . . city itself, Nye, Electrifying America, 29. 3. “New Gutenberg,” Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture, 224. On March 22, 1895, the Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis, debuted in Paris their movie, La Sortie des usines Lumiere, which featured a train arriving at a station; here was light in motion. 4. Audiences found . . . fundamental discontinuity, Everdell, The First Moderns, 10. This shift was reflected in Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1886), a huge painting composed of little dabs of pigment, revealing and extending the implicitly discontinuous nature of Impressionism (Everdell, The First Moderns 63, 74), and later in Georges Braque’s (1882–1963) and Picasso’s Cubism (1908–1911). 5. Transformed by . . . moving images, Friedburg, The Virtual Window, 152; “new sublime,” Summers, Real Spaces, 582–86. 6. Modernism died, Gay, Modernism, 8, 30.

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7. Greater amount of change . . . from the time of Lucretius, Hughes, The Shock of the New, 12; “fever and laughter, . . . and oblivion,” quoted, Charney, “Intro,” 3; “heroism . . . electric light,” Summers, Real Spaces, 633. We think of the Italian artist Giacomo Balla’s Street Light (1910–1911), a painting that expresses his powerful experience of its energy. More than a tribute to Edison, this testifies to a change in consciousness. He encounters a new kind of light in a new world, perhaps alluding to Einstein’s “complementary,” as Heisenberg later described it, wave particle light (postulated five years earlier to explain the photoelectric effect), having come a long way from the atmospheric light of Monet. And see Joseph Stella, Battle of Lights, Coney Island (c. 1913–1914). 8. Urban culture and its people were remade by new cinematic mappings of light as major streets became white “bands of light” in the night, and luminous bridges hovered magically in mid-air, the city seemingly transformed to a “purified world of light” (Nye, Electrifying America, 60; Hughes, The Shock of the New, 12). 9. “We all suffer from light addiction,” “the most modern of diseases,” quoted, McElhenny, The Light Club, epigraph, “hunger for light . . . our times,” 27; new age . . . new status, Plummer, Masters of Light, 74. 10. “Mechanical and urban consciousness,” Spender, The Struggle of the Modern, 81; “emblem” of modernity, Fischer, “The Savage Eye,” 334; “Cooke’s Electric Theatre,” Hartmann, The Valiant Knights of Daguerre, 155; stimulating intense responses, Charney and Schwartz, “In a Moment,” 10; ceremonial space of the movie theater, Thompson, Film Light, 165; reading a new light, . . . we absorb film, Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 239. Redefining themselves and their culture, this new relationship with light was for moderns a necessary individual and communal act of emancipation from the fever and oblivion of the new age (Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, 615). Film owed much, of course, to an earlier technology, photography. Edward Muybridge (1830–1904) was the bridge to cinema. After all, the germ of Edison’s kinetoscope came from the work of Muybridge’s stop action motion studies (e.g., Animal Locomotion, 1887; Weiss, A Brief History of Light, 68). And his photographs, such as the studies of clouds, expressed an “emerging sense of light as a form of energy,” “a new understanding” with “effects of blur,” in fact, of “light as both visible presence and transformative source of energy” (Nisbet, “Atmospheric Cameras and Ecological Light,” 131, 149; for contrast to Watkins, both working in Yosemite, see 142–46). In changing the way people perceived the world of variability over time he prepared the way for motion pictures. He had, in fact, arranged single images in a narrative sequence to create the illusion of movement (Ball, The Inventor and the Tycoon, 18). An idea that Edison translated ultimately into what he called his “tape of light,” which became a narrow celluloid strip (Weiss, A Brief History of Light, 69). Muybridge’s analysis of movement, then, morphed into the synthetic photography of film (Summers, Real Spaces, 620). It was a small step from his stop action to this art form that introduced the viewer to a new experience of light, the modern experience in general—electric light in motion. 11. Electrification . . . studios in 1915, emotion of a given scene, Baxter, “On the History and Ideology of Film Light,” 96–97; light and movement are supreme, Eisner,

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Murnau, 171; “flows but melts,” Jim Hoberman, “Sunrise”; character . . . heightens its drama, Eisner, Murnau, 78, 80, 85–86. 12. “Strong-willed director,” Edward Kubat his colleague who worked on “Nosferatu,” quoted, Eisner, Murnau, 72. Murnau had complete control of his film, including the final cut. Not even the head of Fox Studio was allowed to watch the rushes, which were viewed only by Murnau, his editor and cinematographers, Charles Rosher and Karl Struss, who received the first Academy Award ever given for cinematography (Sadowski, The Semiotics of Light and Shadows, 208). The Hollywood cinema of the 1930s–1950s with its realistic style that followed the era of silent film, 1890s–1920s, was largely the “result of economic calculation,” controlled by many in the studio hierarchy and allowing for little personal expression. The studios subsumed by large corporations in the 1920s were forced to standardize film production and thus minimize the risk of any individual design, which in a sense was “established by decree” (Blank, Film & Light, 190). 13. Subtle shift . . . idea behind it, Jones, “Sunrise—A Murnau Masterpiece,” 252. Murnau admitted that Sunrise was a “very difficult film,” and in some scenes where the camera had to move in a complete circle, it “created enormous lighting problems” (quoted, Eisner, Murnau, 185). His persistence in solving these is a testimony to his unwavering faith in the character of the light he knew so intimately. The strength of his faith is also evidenced by his using very few titles compared to other silent films and by his departing from the film script. Written in German by Carl Mayer expressly to create scenes featuring light, such as one in a hair-dressing salon with bright expanses of shining glass and a metal used for heating towels that casts a subtle light over the wife’s face (Eisner, Murnau, 173). 14. Reconciling with him . . . murder her, Jones, “Sunrise—A Murnau Masterpiece,” 245; “silky moonlight,” Eisner, Murnau, 171. 15. The emotional force of the great conflict that propels the film and is ultimately resolved is heightened by Murnau’s insistence on the vertical divide of light and shadow, which he takes beyond chiaroscuro, restating the divide of husband and wife. Only when forgiveness prevails does this line blur, contributing to our belief in the possibility of such an act. The great Spanish cinematographer Nestor Almendros (1930–1992) regards Sunrise as a “dialectical movie” (quoted, Sadowski, The Semiotics of Light and Shadows, 209): city woman in black versus peasant woman in white; the vamp’s home a space of sensual darkness, while the wife’s is a luminous village. This opposition could have been milked for its melodrama, but Murnau invests the contrast with complexity and ambiguity by subtly manipulating the proportions of black and white. The director’s framing of the scene where the husband meets the vamp from the city by moonlight is foreboding. They are clothed in black against a dark background yet nuanced by a small moon pasted on the night sky like a coin. By contrast he frames the pivotal scene of the husband’s move to murder his wife by isolating his black-clothed hulk looming before a white-clothed wife against a radiant sea. These are real spaces but we experience them, due to the changing measures of darkness and brightness, as psychological spaces. 16. “Rode forth . . . phenomena of light,” Zajonc, Catching the Light, 271; “essentially aesthetic and intuitive,” Banesh Hoffmann, quoted, Clark, Einstein, 535

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17. Realized . . . not be the case, Park, The Fire Within the Eye, 299, Zajonc, Catching the Light, 254, Fölsing, Albert Einstein, 46; “experience-based,” Grandy, The Speed of Light, 26; “for the rest of my life I will reflect on what Light is!” quoted by Zajonc, 256. 18. Third-Class Technical Assistant . . . journal in Berlin, “It seems to me,” Everdell, The First Moderns, 228–229; “auto-referential form,” Grandy, “The Otherness of Light: Einstein and Levinas,” #42; “even if it has to wear different faces,” quoted, Park, The Fire Within the Eye, 318; “passing close to the sun are deflected,” Clark, Einstein, 141. 19. “Touched suddenly by the universal flare,” “The eloquences of light’s faculties,” Stevens, “The Pure Good of Theory,” Wallace Stevens, 333; wave and particle, Park, The Fire Within the Eye, 317; “probabilistic guide,” “ghost field,” Calaprice, Einstein Encyclopedia, “Photon,” 186; “law of chance,” “cause,” Bronowski, The Common Sense of Science, 76. This marked the radical shift to a modern awareness of the “fundamental uncertainty” of the nature of physical reality (Bais, In Praise of Science, 37). For the age becomes aware that we are made of “probability waves of matter linked by wave-particles of light” (Perkowitz, Empire of Light, 90). Such was the “discovery of ignorance” that rocked the confidence of nineteenth-century Europe and America (Ronchi, The Nature of Light, 264). 20. “The speed . . . the mass,” “becomes infinite,” “clocks stand still,” Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, 55 21. “Oh leave the Wise our measures to collate / . . . DO NOT GO STRAIGHT,” Douglas A. Vibert, The Life of Arthur Eddington (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1956), 44; authority that religion had previously enjoyed, Hobsbawn, The Age of Extremes, 531. Sharing scientific discovery with the public was a Victorian tradition (though not in the United States). And a major expansion of the publishing industry, making cheaper magazines, newspapers, and books available, coupled with the rise of scientists who were also writers, meant that in 1919 hardly anyone could not have been aware of Einstein’s new light and the confirmation of it by Eddington. Even Welsh miners in the street were overheard arguing about relativity (Bowler, Science for All, 1–3, 9–10, 22, 89), and the artist Salvador Dali was inspired to respond in his painting Agnostic Symbol (1932). 22. “Injected into the thought-life of the world,” Zajonc, “Light and Glass,” 6. But robbing light of its metaphysical dimension also prompted a reaction, such as that of Einstein’s contemporary Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) a Goethe scholar, popular lecturer, and writer. Harking back to John’s Gospel (the Logos) and Grosseteste’s On Light and expanding his core experiential image—“we feel enriched when we are in a light-filled space. We breathe in the light” (Steiner, The Light Course, “Sixth Lecture,” 100)—Steiner imagined light as “extrasensory.” This spiritual imagination of light was a contrapuntal theme to Einstein’s (Zajonc, Catching the Light, 218). Although Steiner did not succeed in uniting scientific and spiritual knowing, his reviving the mythic imagination of light became that of many, who felt the force of his statement that “the purest appearance of the outer physical body of the Logos is the light of the sun,” alluding to the transformation of Jesus’s body in Matthew (Catching the Light, 220). But his evocation of our common experience of light also resonated:

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“We float in light, as bodies float in light.” We cannot float in it with our “so-called body, but we do float in it with our etheric body,” reflecting his acceptance of an ether (Steiner, The Light Course, 92). He viewed this as the latest stage in the evolution of human consciousness, as man’s imagination of light moved from “Physical-material” to “Sub-physical” theories (Zajonc, “Light and Glass,” 13). 23. All references within parentheses to Stevens’s poems, “CPP,” are to Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997). 24. “Long lines of coral light,” quoted, Voros, Notations of the Wild, 27; “trunks of the trees . . . rippling water,” Mariani, The Whole Harmonium, 17; “faintly blue . . . into the sun,” Richardson, Wallace Stevens, 1879–1923, 192. 25. “Sense of the world,” “born with him and persists,” quoted, Lombardi, Wallace Stevens and the Pennsylvania Keystone, 9; “old affair with the sun,” “battle,” “finished,” “once more doing battle,” Richardson, Wallace Stevens, 1923–1950, 159, 242. In 1918 Stevens translates a poem by Jean Le Roy, “Instant of Clearness,” in which he asserts, “I am the whole of light” (CPP, 546). 26. He arrives . . . imagination and reality, Lawrence Kramer, “‘A Completely New Set of Objects,’” 216; “clownish yellow,” “bony . . . insatiable” (CPP, 280); “major man,” “battle with the sun,” Richardson, Wallace Stevens, 1923–1955, 242. In a poem by Jean Le Roy, which Stevens translated, he resonates with the poet’s moment of clarity: saying, “I am the whole of light” (CPP, 546). For Stevens light makes visible the “motions of the mind,” which is why the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa declared that “sunlight is worth more than the thoughts / Of all the philosophers and all the poets” (Pessoa, Keeper, “V. There’s metaphysics enough in not thinking about anything,” 15). 27. “Ground,” “itself and not about it,” quoted, Richardson, Wallace Stevens, 1923–1955, 353. Like van Gogh, whose “total subjection of reality” impressed the poet, as he said in one of his letters (Richardson, Wallace Stevens, 1923–1950, 225), the sun was pivotal at a time of crisis of faith, though his was early in life (Richardson, 523). 28. Akhenaten’s project as well, Herrstrom, Light as Experience and Imagination from Paleolithic to Roman Times, 49–54. 29. Stevens knows that the image by its nature is interpretation, his core experience of the noon sun an image-metaphor. However, he rightly distrusts metaphor, knowing what the touch of the rhetorician does to it (CPP, 371). It is tempting, he well knows, to move by metaphor from his core light experience to assigning a false name. Instead the poet must “trace the gold sun about the whitened sky / Without evasion by a single metaphor” (CPP, 322). He can do this because he knows that “sense exceeds all metaphor.” It even “exceeds the heavy changes of the light” (CPP, 370). 30. Emblem . . . reality, J. Hillis Miller, “Wallace Stevens,” 239–40. His solution to the limited brilliant days of the north, then, was to map its changes in Connecticut where he lived much of his life by the southern light of his imagination (CPP, 439), achieving “new redactions of reality” day to day as the seasons changed. The “climates of his landscapes are also the climates of his consciousness” (Macksey, “The Climates of Wallace Stevens,” 187), what he calls his “ecstatic identities” (CPP, 232). Because it offered few brilliant days, he was often somewhat morose in Connecticut

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(J. Hillis Miller, “Wallace Stevens,” 297). Nevertheless, he was alert to the eloquences of its “thin lights” and its “sunlight never too full” (CPP, 895). And to the light “on bed-clothes” or on the “apple on a plate,” or to the “crisping light” along a statue’s rim (CPP, 152). 31. “Idea” of it . . . preconception, J. Hillis Miller, “Wallace Stevens,” 248. 32. “Beyond” . . . transcendence expressed, J. Hillis Miller, “Wallace Stevens,” 228; salon-studio . . . New York, Richardson, Wallace Stevens, 1923–1955, 31. 33. “Confrontation with sublime force,” Summers, Real Spaces, 604; “other,” “sense that a space informed by human consciousness,” “unconscious,” “optical unconscious,” Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography,” 243; access . . . painting does not, Sontag, On Photography, 3, 35. A truth of light within our imaginative perception divined early in the history of photography. The daguerreotype artist Holgrave exclaims in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The House of Seven Gables (1851), “there is wonderful insight” in the “broad and simple sunshine. While we give it credit only for depicting the merest surface, it actually brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon, even could he detect it” (quoted in Rudisill, “Mirror Image,” 74). 34. The pioneer light artist Thomas Wilfred, equally influenced by Einstein’s relation to light, declared in 1930: “Through twenty years of research work I have helped to lay a foundation for an independent Art-form of Light,” first by “establishing its three basic factors as Form, Motion, Color—second by inventing and building a number of Instruments” employing the “medium of Light project on a white screen from an instrument that gives” the artist “control over Form, Motion and Color” (Stein, Thomas Wilfred, Lumia, 60). This instrument was his “Clavilux.” And he called his art “lumia,” saying it was “akin to painting with the rays of an electric light bulb” (quoted in Orgeman, Lumia, 23). Like music it was “built upon a basic foundation of silence” and like film built on a foundation of darkness (20). Wilfred was the first artist in the century to use light as his sole medium of expression (“Press Preview” release from MOMA, August 10, 1971 [about a retrospective exhibit of Wilfred’s work, August 9, 1971–September 20, 1971]), and thus a new art form was born. The Clavilux enabled him to control light and its movement with a keyboard, which he played like a concert organ, creating his lumia art (though he did not associate colors with musical notes and performed his recitals in silence). As a performer he was able to modulate delicate nuances of light intensity, color, and shape, which were projected on an enormous auditorium screen (anticipating the psychedelic light show of 1960s California). Forms moved across the screen in a cycle of consecutive patterns, each varying endlessly and repeating every twelve minutes. Some reveal an organic form, others waves of light that merge and disappear like fireworks in slow motion (Borgen, “Lumia and Postwar Art,” 50, 52). Using nothing that resembled a musical score, he modulated like a jazz artist in performance according to his own emotions and the audience reactions (Kranz, Science and Technology in the Arts, 34). This gave him the “greatest possible latitude for personal interpretation,” he bragged, each concert a unique expression in real time and motion of his relationship with light. A character he regarded as embodying “a greater reality.” By this relationship with light, “the silent universal expression of the greatest force our senses can grasp,”

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he seeks to find balance in the “universal rhythmic flow” of the cosmos (Orgeman, Lumia, 66). Entangled with its totality, Wilfred becomes intensely aware of light’s essential nature as motion. And unlike the photographer or painter, Wilfred immerses the spectator and himself in his own projected experience of light. In the same year that Wilfred debuted his Clavilux, 1922, László Moholy-Nagy began developing his kinetic sculpture, Light Prop for an Electric Stage, which became known as the Light-Space Modulator. In their determination to express a new relation to light, they effected in the new age, as Moholy-Nagy pointed out, the transition from “pigment to light” and beyond to light art itself. Influenced by Einstein’s imagination of light, both Wilfred and Moholy-Nagy embraced his discoveries in resonant ways. Their art was in a sense a field of inquiry, suggesting that the Clavilux and the Modulator were partners in an interdisciplinary exploration of space and time as functions of light (Orgeman, Lumia, 33, 42). 35. “This century belongs to light,” quoted, Marien, Photography, 245; “lost,” “among the depressed . . . period,” László Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision and Abstract of an Artist, 72 36. “Longing for the old ecstasy—light,” “Learn to know the Light-design of your life,” “space, . . . one with Light?” “Search desperately— . . . essence,” “I cannot kill . . . lessen it,” “Light, ordering Light, . . . Far away,” “Come over me, . . . fierce Light,” “Ferocious Light,” “spread through . . . my eyes,” “Material space and time . . . striding life,” “Light, total . . . total man,” Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality, 11–12. 37. “Creed of his life,” quoted in Molderings, “Light Years of a Life,” 20; “luminous intensities,” Rubio, “The Art of Light,” 14. 38. “Cameraless photography,” László Moholy-Nagy, “Photography in Advertising,” 89; “patterned interplay,” László Moholy-Nagy, “From Pigment to Light,” 344. As his wife Sibyl said, the first to experiment with “cameraless” photography had never been conclusively identified, but Moholy-Nagy was probably not the first. The Swedish playwright August Strindberg had experimented with this process in the early days of photography (Heyne, “Light Displays: Relations So Far Unknown,” 28). Moholy-Nagy only claims to have reinvented it (Kaplan, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 44, 46), making his first ones in 1922. And he was aware of his contemporary Man Ray’s (1890–1976) experiments in America, who published his “photograms” in the same year. 39. “Radiance in space” in all its “immateriality,” “light is space and space is light,” Molderings, “Light Years of a Life,” 22–23. This is contrary to the assumption of Renaissance perspective that space exists before things and before light. In Moholy-Nagy’s world of the photogram’s non-Euclidean space, the geometry of traditional perspective has no validity. 40. “Concretization of light phenomena,” László Moholy-Nagy, “From Pigment to Light,” 339; “black-white-gray, . . . effect,” “relationships . . . black and brightest white,” “with the intermediation . . . gray tones,” Sybil Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality, 27; “devoid of representational meaning,” “yet capable . . . experience,” László Moholy-Nagy, “Photography in Advertising,” 90. László

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Moholy-Nagy provides an annotated chronology of his photogram production in Moholy-Nagy: The Photograms, 32. 41. “Infinitely subtle . . . light and dark,” “establish . . . visual power,” László Moholy-Nagy, “Unprecedented Photography,” 83, 85; “power of sight,” “terms of time and space,” “abstract” and “exact,” “rapid,” “slow,” “intensified,” “penetrative,” “distorted,” László Moholy-Nagy, “From Pigment to Light,” 346. 42. “Direct light diagrams . . . period of time,” “completely new . . . articulation,” “existing . . . structure,” “advancing . . . black and grey,” “radiating power . . . sublime gradations,” “signalize,” “Spatial Order,” “biologically right living,” “city-land unity,” László Moholy-Nagy, “Space-Time and the Photographer,” 32. 43. “Spirit of self-sacrifice,” Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy, 30; “sovereignly handled as a new creative means,” “notion of light,” László Moholy-Nagy, “From Pigment to Light” (emphasis in original), 341. 44. “Flowing, oscillating prismatic light,” László Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision and Abstract of an Artist, 40; Having evolved . . . chrome-finished . . . work of art, Kostelanetz, “Moholy-Nagy: The Risk and Necessity of Artistic Adventurism,” 12. 45. “Transmitted . . . viewer,” Burnham, “On Moholy’s Light-Display Machine,” 160; “beautiful,” “problem child,” “declared . . . and a robot,” Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, “The Light-Display Machine,” 148. 46. “Highest development,” László Moholy-Nagy, “Light: A Medium of Expression,” 284. To extend the power of his light-in-motion sculpture, Moholy-Nagy made a film as well, experiencing the seduction of its “Light-palpability, light-movement,” which triggers by its “light-distance and light-proximity” new “charges in our brain.” He viewed film as the “strongest visual experiences that can be granted to man” (“Unprecedented Photography,” 85). “Movement and montage” being for him the essential features of film. And he exploits these in his Light-Play-Black-White-Gray (1930), starring his Light-Space Modulator, to reveal the “dimension of space-time” (Vision in Motion, 288). In this film he eschewed anecdote and narration, as we would expect, in the service of educating the “perceptive organs” (Rubio, “The Art of Light,” 15). He succeeded in this, shooting the sculpture from above as it turns, making various motions forward and backward, extracting us from our accustomed frame of space-time with, as he describes it, “normal, accelerated, retarded, reversed motion.” The scene ends in “blinding moving light flashes. Revolving spiral, reappearing, again and again. Rotation increases; all concrete shapes dissolve in light” (“Light Display, Black and White and Grey” [1928–1930], 150). Our optical organs exhausted, we have entered a new dimension indeed. The American photographer Francis Brugiére (1879–1945), aware of Moholy-Nagy’s work, also produced an experimental film in the same vein, Light Rhythms (1930). Running eight minutes, the film “presents a highly abstract meditation on the power of light to change perception of forms” (Horak, Lovers of Cinema, 40). 47. “The only influence,” light-modulating forms, “photographs changed . . . world,” Sandweiss, Carlotta Corpron, 11, 13–14; turning point in her life, Waugh, “‘Designing with Light,’” 16; light replaced . . . subject matter, Adlhock, “The Synaesthetic Experience of Light,” 82.

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In the 1950s Kepes sketched proposals for public light sculptures, created by powerful lights and, later, lasers refracted through mirrors or patterned by water sprays, called “tree of light,” a “garden of light,” and a “light tower,” Jed Perl, “Hell-Bent Idealists” (review of Jennifer Josten, Mathias Goeritz, and John R. Blakinger, Gyorgy Kepes), The New York Review of Books (October 10, 2019): 14. 48. “Original,” “offer important aspects of a poetry of light,” Waugh, “‘Designing with Light,’” 31–32; “I want my photographs to be mine,” I had this . . . create light,” Sandweiss, Carlotta Corpron, 7; “plastic element,” “ever-changing . . . work,” Corpron, “Designing with Light,” 10. 49. “Maverick,” Waugh, “‘Designing with Light,’” 97; “I wanted . . . light only,” “both the creator . . . photographs,” Sandweiss, Carlotta Corpron, 8–10. For the six “main groups” of her work and a chronology of these, see Sandweiss (Carlotta Corpron, 7). The American photographer Francis Brugière (1879–1945), influenced by Wilfred’s lumia, in a series of photographs he called “Light Abstractions,” done as early as 1925, created arresting portraits of light-shadow. But unlike Corpron’s, this character was a static light (see his 1929 light abstraction, a toned gelatin silver print, J. Paul Getty Museum, http:​//​www​.getty​.edu​/art​/collection​/objects​/36818​/francis​ -bruguiere​-light​-abstraction​-american​-1929​/). The work of both Brugière and Corpron, however, dramatizes the principal difference between what could be termed the “old” and “new” photography, as a friend of Brugière defined it: while the “old sought to give significance to form by means of light,” the “new seeks to give significance to light by means of form” (Oswell Blakeston, quoted by Adlhoch, “The Synaesthetic Experience of Light,” 82). 50. A Walk in Fair Park, Dallas, Sandweiss, cat #14; “awakening,” “LIGHT as a creative medium,” “exciting experience,” Corpron, “Light as a Creative Medium” (capitalization in original), 5; the tonal variations . . . and shadow, “finest” works, Waugh, “‘Designing with Light,’” 33–34. 51. “Wonderful use . . . medium,” Waugh, “‘Designing with Light,’” 34; “model form or illuminate space,” “simply itself—a line of light,” “line rhythms,” “purity,” “but let the light guide me,” “exploration into the unknown,” “I almost jumped out of my skin,” Sandweiss, Carlotta Corpron, 11, 15. 52. Light Follows Form, Sandweiss, cat #25; Fluid Light Design, Sandweiss, cat #41; “light is still, . . . move,” Sandweiss, Carlotta Corpron, 16; independent of any structural source, . . . nudes, Mann, Women of Photography, n.p. 53. “Out of our own feelings” quoted in McShine, “Toward the Abstract Sublime,” 123; “truth,” “form of life,” Bell, “The Metaphysics of Modernism,” 10. Experimenting wildly, modern artists took Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) seriously who had earlier declared that truth was “a movable host of metaphors” (“On the Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” 84). Here he touches on why painting along with film became the medium of the age. Truth as metaphor shatters any spiritual or political absolutes, but invests art with a new authority because only art, he says, “treats illusion as illusion.” Therefore, because “it does not wish to deceive; it is true” (96). Before this age we could view ourselves as apart from nature but not in the modern era. Whether using or being used by machines or walking through the country, as Werner Heisenberg makes clear, in some sense “we always meet only ourselves,” for

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we share with nature the same laws (“The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics,” 227). As Picasso said in 1935, when asked about his painting of the Dieppe Cliffs, “I did not copy this light, I was simply soaked in it,” an objective and subjective light (quoted in Artists on Art, ed. Goldwater and Treves, 420). 54. Modern art brought about by a transformational shift in our experience of light itself with Einstein’s imagining light as packets of energy in 1905, whose character was simultaneously wave and particle in motion. His contemporary the painter Arthur Dove (1880–1946) did not want simply to describe this sensation in paint, but like Einstein running with the light, to know light in a profound sense. He wanted to talk with Einstein, in fact, whom he believed had made him particularly sensible to matter and energy, profoundly influencing his own “sensation of light.” Hence he called each of his sunrise paintings (1936–1937) “self-creative in its own space” (quoted in Turner, “Going Home: Geneva,” 106). The “patterns of vibration and undulation” in his Sunrise series (I, II, III; 1936), a ray of light in Sunrise I bending to the sun, present us with a space and light corresponding to discussions in the Stieglitz circle of the implications of Einstein’s heuristic metaphor. The painter’s “force lines” are the scientist’s, whose works Stieglitz had on his shelf. Dove’s composing of this potent space, then, was informed by a direct knowledge of Einstein’s work. Each element in Dove’s series participates in the energy-space force field of every other (Cohn, Arthur Dove, 41–42). Hence his relationship with light was the savoring of participation in its character, as was Einstein’s. If light’s character for Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), whom Dove had met in the Stieglitz Group, is one of waves revealing waves of creation itself in her series Light Coming on the Plains (I, II, III; 1917), Dove’s is one of rings vibrating without end. Both sensing a sublime infinity, respectively, in the microcosm and macrocosm. 55. Transforming the American landscape, Hobbs, Edward Hopper, 16; “to do myself,” Hughes, American Visions, 423. Gail Levin, Hopper’s premiere biographer, calls him the “foremost realist painter of twentieth-century America” but qualifies this, saying that he rejects narrative, creating “more than representations of reality” (Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, 5). And the art historian Rolf Renner concludes that he merged both representation and abstraction, rediscovering what “lay on the surface,” an “art that often resists psychological or symbolic decoding. A surface is a surface is a surface: the signs mean nothing beyond themselves” (Edward Hopper 1882–1967, 28). Hopper questions the very distinction between a picture and reality in Rooms by the Sea (1951) in which the “real and the imagined merge (Renner, 60–61). 56. “Not that which is . . . apprehended,” “of what is this house . . . if not the sun,” Wallace Stevens (CPP, 397, 399); “to do myself,” Hughes, American Visions, 423. Gail Levin, Hopper’s premiere biographer, calls him the “foremost realist painter of twentieth-century America” but qualifies this, saying that he rejects narrative, creating “more than representations of reality” (Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, 5). And the art historian Rolf Renner concludes that he merged both representation and abstraction, rediscovering what “lay on the surface,” an “art that often resists psychological or symbolic decoding. A surface is a surface is a surface: the signs mean nothing beyond themselves” (Edward Hopper 1882–1967, 28). Hopper

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questions the very distinction between a picture and reality in Rooms by the Sea (1951) in which the “real and the imagined merge (Renner, 60–61). 57. A relentless early . . . or the hard glare of light, Mellow, “The World of Edward Is Hopper,” 19; “beautiful,” “very luminous,” “something soft,” Wells, Silent Theatre, 194. 58. Hopper would have understood Eakins love of water, whom he believed was “our greatest American painter,” an “objective painter” (Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, 377). Eakins wrote to his father from Paris, saying that the artist learns what nature “does with light the big tool . . . and appropriates” it to “his own use” (quoted Sewell, “Thomas Eakins and American Art,” xvii). 59. “There is a sort of elation . . . house,” “I’m a realist . . . natural phenomena,” quoted in Wagstaff, ed., Edward Hopper, 225. Given Hopper’s two core childhood experiences of light on the water and light on a wall that shaped his adult life, we are not surprised to hear him admit that without being “too consciously so,” light is a “natural expression for me” (Wagstaff, “The Elation of Sunlight,” 26). This begins with Summer Interior (1909), a painting he did in Paris, in which he captures a glow from the arms and legs of the woman on the floor, as well as from the rug at her feet, that seems to counter her melancholy mood. In this city Hopper began his methodical yet sensuous investigation of light, a light he recalled later, “different from anything I had ever known.” In Paris even the shadows were luminous (Nicholas, “The Third Dimension,” 64). As an adult Hopper, a regular theater- and movie-goer, was much influenced by film, having begun his career as a publicist for a film company, drawing and coloring posters (Wollen, “Two or Three Things I Know About Edward Hopper,” 74). For him film was the “paradigmatic emblem of modernity” (Fischer, “The Savage Eye,” 334). And his paintings are the world of performance, the “key” to the relationship Hopper established with reality, as the critic Didier Ottinger argues (“The Transcendental Realism of Edward Hopper,” 40). His premier biographer concludes that Hopper’s “composition, content and lighting” come out of his fascination with the cinema (Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, 350). Many of his compositions are clearly cinematic, as if he had in mind close-up shots, perhaps suggested, as he said, “by glimpses of lighted interiors seen as I walked along city streets at night” (Levin, Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist, 1984, 60). And his strong theatrical light was no doubt inspired by film noir movies (Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, 408), employing the “oblique cut of light across a background wall,” which was a noir signature (O’Doherty, “Hopper’s Look,” 92). Not surprisingly, he in turn influenced film directors like Alfred Hitchcock, who modeled his “haunted house” in Psycho (1960) on Hopper’s House by the Railroad (1925), and Wim Wenders (Ottinger, “The Transcendental Realism of Edward Hopper,” 302). 60. “Planar simplicity,” “evanescent force,” “commune,” Plummer, The Architecture of Natural Light, 11; geometric figure redolent with feeling, Nicholas, “The Third Dimension,” 64. 61. “Maybe I am not . . . side of a house,” quoted, Renner, Edward Hopper 1882– 1967, 85; “absolutely self-centered,” “great,” “loneliness about him,” “a sadness to the point of anger,” Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, 555.

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62. “Exact transcription,” quoted, Souter, Edward Hopper: Light and Dark, 13; how the light fell . . . accurately, Hobbs, Edward Hopper, 134; “reaction,” evokes . . . intimacy, Strand, Hopper, xiv; “alienation,” Parker Tyler, quoted in Hilton Kramer, “Edward Hopper,” 697; “I would like to do sunlight . . . itself,” quoted, Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, 531. The character light in Hopper’s experience and imagination is fundamentally paradoxical; on the one hand, it is radically independent and impersonal, yet on the other, it is sensuous and personal. And we can sense the simple pleasure Hopper experiences in the sheer emotional intensity of sunlight “falling on brilliant white walls” (Barr, “Edward Hopper,” 13), from the outside walls of his early Ryder’s House (1933) to the later Second Story Sunlight (1960), as well as inside walls along the way. 63. Growing up on the Hudson, Hopper’s early paintings show some influence of the Hudson River School, particularly Albert Bierstadt, but more important that of the luminists, such as Stanford Robinson Gifford. Hopper participates in the “luminist” tradition with his overtones of silent, “luminist mystery” in his treatment of an almost depopulated urban landscape (as does Mark Rothko later) and his carefully measured light and geometry (Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth-Century, 277, 285), as in his Railroad Sunset (1929) with its strong “horizontal format” (Levin, Edward Hopper: A Catalogue Raisonné, 65). Also, we recognize traces of the magical silence and arresting clarity of Martin Johnson Heade and John Frederick Kensett, but their light is “temporal,” as Mark Strand points out, a single “crystalline” instant in which nature reveals purpose and mortality. This is not the character we find in Hopper whose light is “atemporal,” not confined in a moment of time (Strand, Hopper, 32). Nor is their silence that of Hopper’s; his is a “theatrical silence,” each instance of “uncanny stillness” being a suspended moment, engendering a sense of “unease or unsettling dislocation” (Wells, Silent Theatre, 224). It probes silence persistently, approaching what the narrator of George Eliot’s Middlemarch calls the “roar which lies on the other side of silence” (chapter 20). Although Hopper saw Impressionist painting while in Paris in 1906, which lightened his palette, and at eighty mused, “I think I’m still an Impressionist” (Levin, Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist, 23). But he also admitted that although he was “somewhat influenced by it,” by 1909 he said, “I got over that” (Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, 66). The theatrical aspects of Degas and Manet stayed with him to some degree, but not the light of Monet. Hopper’s light has almost nothing to do with atmosphere, as Mark Strand points out; it is in the world but not of the world. It “materializes rather than dematerializes” as does Monet’s, such as the stone façade of Rouen Cathedral become an “airy wedding cake” (Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist, 30–31). 64. Integrity as presence . . . never in doubt, Goodrich, Edward Hopper, 83; “unsparing,” . . . we watch her in the sunlight, Gettlein, “The Legacy of Edward Hopper, Painter of Light and Loneliness,” 66. We see her coming into an awareness of her sexual powers as light glances off her breasts and plays on her filmy dress, while announcing her presence by being the front of the building (Wells, Silent Theatre, 66, 70). One critic interprets this scene biographically as capturing the frustrations and

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anxieties that the Hoppers felt in their mid-sixties. The paintings carry overtones of mortality (Wells, 73). 65. “Re-imagined,” “none is intended,” quoted, Wagstaff, “The Elation of Sunlight,” 22. Hopper’s light itself is both event and advent, an “annunciation” shorn of its theological meaning. It announces at once a luminous “advent”—the revelation of the structure of reality—and a luminous “event”—the materialization of “presence in a fleeting moment of existence” (Stamelman, “The Presence of Light / The Light of Presence,” 45–46; emphasis in original). We get a hint of this annunciation in Pennsylvania Coal Town (1947), where the man’s looking up at the light filling a corridor between two houses seems more than simply distraction. Rather, a light suggestive of transcendence, as “if some revelation were at hand” (Strand, Hopper, 27, 35). Certainly, this is confirmed in Morning Sun (1952), where the woman staring straight into the presence of the light appears to accept a message intended exclusively for her. She bares her sexuality before the light, as if offering herself, but demurely, her thighs closed. 66. This is the light body that captures us, asking that we offer ourselves to its presence expectantly. In Hopper’s drawing for this picture he downplays this, while in the painting itself the light becomes a “formidable presence.” Perhaps it is, as John Hollander suggests, an image of the meditative gazer’s mind, as the shadow cast on the bed is of her body, though he admits that the fall of light sweeps away anecdote and announces the “act of painting itself” (Hollander, “Hopper and the Figure of Room, 159). So its presence is not for her; it is for us. Yet it is not the annunciation of paint but rather the sheer presence of light’s body behind her body. This parallelogram of light does not simply fall on the wall it visits, its advent, but creates for us a meditative space, an event, one of presence that includes us as spectators. We see the beginning of light’s dominant role in his early quad-lights: Summer Interior (1909), Morning in a City (1944), and Conference at Night (1949). But it takes the lead in Rooms by the Sea (1951), Morning Sun (1952), Sunlight in a Cafeteria (1958), Excursion into Philosophy (1959), New York Office (1962), and its triumph in Sun in an Empty Room (1963). For the paintings that his foremost biographer Gail Levin believes reveal the core meaning of his art, its major themes, see Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist (42–63). 67. “Conveying the structure of reality,” Renner, Edward Hopper 1882–1967, 77. 68. With this move he departs from Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) with whom he engaged in systematic dialogue. He saw A Girl Asleep at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, 201), charting a self-consciously modern parallel over the course of his career. They share an intimate relationship with light; however, where Vermeer’s light advances a narrative, Hopper’s light restrains it, suggesting but blocking the anecdotal. Also, as we have seen, Hopper’s light is a singular one, suspicious of the symbolic, rather than Vermeer’s inclusive light symbolizing a “propagative life” (Leider, “Vermeer and Hopper,” 97, 101). More important, where a room’s space is subordinate to light in Hopper (post Einstein), in Vermeer it is the opposite, his light being subordinate to its space (Newton). Though both put the light wall at the center of their work, herein lies their difference. For Vermeer it is a subject of investigation, a place where memory and

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consciousness play; for Hopper it is a given in the world, a place of anticipation and expansion of consciousness. Mark Strand believes Hopper’s Room in New York (1932) is the most suggestive of Vermeer (Hopper, 48). Both artists drawn to the portrayal of women in rooms (cp. Vermeer’s Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window, 1659, and Eleven A.M., 1926) and to silence, but where Vermeer’s is a meditative silence, Hopper’s is an alienated one (Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, 249). More important, the light in Vermeer’s Woman with a Pearl Necklace is like an embrace, while that almost three hundred years later in Morning in a City is like a radiation wave (Leider, “Vermeer and Hopper,” 101). Women and light in Vermeer are partners, in Hopper competitors. In his Morning Sun (1952) the light wall commands the room, while in Vermeer’s The Milkmaid (c. 1660) the wall glow enriches the woman’s space. A space necessary to bring her into focus as a subject of investigation, which is never the case for Hopper. This contrast dramatizes the artists’ respective relationships with light: light for the women and light for itself. 69. Increasingly preoccupied with light, Hopper gets more confident and his light more independent as its career progresses, moving from supporting roles in Early Sunday Morning (1930) and Morning in a City (1944) to lead roles in Rooms by the Sea (1951) and Sun in an Empty Room (1963). Obsessed with the character of the light in his experience and as it related to him, he achieved its triumphant expression in these two paintings (Levin, Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist, 64). We feel Hopper’s elation about sunlight on the walls in these paintings, certainly, but we also sense the confident assertion of light’s protean independent character itself. As his relationship with light deepens, he finds more effective means in the last decade of his life to give expression to it. The result is that, making a companion of his light, we experience in its performance more emotion than can be explained by any specific aspect of the painting. Without being conscious of it, we internalize by the actions of his wall-light-quads a structure of reality we had never before known, at once a lonely and exhilarating sensation. 70. Fundamentally, the light-quadrilateral . . . it is the wall, Strand, Hopper, 31; simply present light, . . . strove to represent it, Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, 531. By these walls and ultimately his quad-light Hopper subverts the whole idea of representation (Renner, Edward Hopper 1882–1967, 61). The wall entered his painting early (e.g., Écluse de la Monnaie [1909] and The Lonely House [1922]) but did not dominate until the last phase of Hopper’s career launched with the 1950 Whitney retrospective. Appropriating not just exterior walls but mainly interior walls, his quad-light walls call into question reality itself. He feels the pressures that nature and civilization put on each other. And his quad-light walls blur if not erase the line between them. Yet because he cannot ignore these pressures, which he feels personally, he is suspicious of abstraction as well, which lacks intimacy in his view (Renner, Edward Hopper 1882–1967, 65). Rooted in an American tradition, such as Jefferson’s Monticello and the White House with their “immaculate” exterior walls “blanketed by a uniform coat of white paint,” these bodies of light “express a love of reason and clarity of thought” but also

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a love for “sheer radiance and the eloquence of a single, luminescent mood.” Herein is a “unity of feeling” (Plummer, Masters of Light, 70), as in a Quaker Meeting House. 71. Richard Tuschman’s reconstruction after Hopper; https:​//​www​.flickr​.com​/ photos​/richardtuschman​/8271388772. 72. “What are you after in it?” “I’m after ME,” O’Doherty, “Edward Hopper’s Voice,” 293. It is telling that he originally included a figure in Rooms by the Sea, Alias The Jumping Off Place (1951), which he removed from his completed painting. Inviting us into his inner realm, this canvas and Sun in an Empty Room (1963) harbor the emotional intensity of thresholds in Hopper’s life. But in Rooms with its rhythmically repeated quad-walls the threshold is one of promise, while in Empty Room with its doubled but fixed rectangles and shards of light on the floor, it is as Mark Strand observes, one of “finality” (Hopper, 58; Wells, Silent Theatre, 53). The former, its hard brilliant light strangely austere but conveying an openness, is cheerfully welcoming. While the soft shimmer-light of the latter, the last of Hopper’s great paintings without any opening into the future, conveys a certain unease, having an almost “terminal” character (Strand, Hopper, 57). Both paintings harbor the silence and isolation that Hopper valued, but the light of Rooms by the Sea seems about to speak, while it remains mute in Empty Room. In either case, however, light’s assertive and dramatic light fall works to maintain its independence. 73. “Light is as strong . . . throat,” Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture, 208; “The whole . . . on canvas,” Wagstaff, “The Elation of Sunlight,” 29. Peter Schjeldahl calls Hopper’s style “non-realism,” as he is fundamentally not an observer of the visible word but a film director fired by his imagination, who understood the “metaphysic of film” better than any other artist. His rectangle of canvas is like a “blank movie screen” (Edward Hopper, 6), not the window dear to painting since the Renaissance, which was intended to convince the viewer that they were observing a real visual event. Hopper’s walls, like his windows, are “existential, not functional” (Ward, American Silences, 183). His painting is a “window turned inside-out.” You don’t look into it, as Schjeldahl says; “it looks out at you” (Edward Hopper, 8). Hopper seems to dramatize his affection for the theatre and cinema in People in the Sun (1960), giving us a scene of formally dressed people, Hopper among them, gathered to watch the performance of light itself. 74. “Unadorned slabs of light,” “self is / if self itself ever is,” Wells, Silent Theatre, 240; ever-present companion . . . reality, unsettling experience, Strand, Hopper, 23, 59. 75. “I compose with light,” “visible in itself . . . things visible,” quoted, Plummer, The Architecture of Natural Light, 10. For example, his rural houses like Captain Upton’s House (1927) and urban buildings, such as the apartments seen in From Williamsburg Bridge (1928), singling out their “going in and out of planes, shapes, angles,” as his wife described it on seeing his House on Pamet River (1934). 76. Dissolved boundaries and expanded space, Plummer, Masters of Light, 28. Architecture and light have, of course, been wedded from their beginning. For “every built form,” as Henry Plummer asserts, is a “form of light,” and buildings can be considered light modulators (“Light Matters,” part 1, n.p.). But the growing fascination

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in the modern period with daylight in architecture reflects the light addiction of the twentieth century (Plummer, The Architecture of Natural Light, 9–10). 77. “There exists a new spirit!” quoted in Blake, The Master Builders, 30; “I compose with light,” quoted in Plummer, Cosmos of Light, vii; “rebirth of the human body,” Plummer, Masters of Light, 50. In the modern “machine-age society” he believed that the housing of the city if “placed under the masterful government of natural conditions: sun, space, greenery” will result in his dream of social and economic revolution—the “Radiant City,” a vertical, ordered metropolis with abundance of light and open space (Corbusier, The Radiant City, 3). Which is why he calls on architects to “flood the home with the sun’s rays,” advocating that the “glass wall” of the façade take up one “entire side of the home” so the “rays will penetrate . . . very deep into the home.” For this makes it a “place to live in,” rather than at present “a cage.” Here in a new age the “human animal can feel at ease” (Corbusier, 53). 78. “Rapport with light effects,” “decomposition of light and shadow,” quoted in Weber, Le Corbusier, 63; “plastic drama,” quoted in Tzonis, Le Corbusier, 26–27; “body, the mind, . . . overpowered,” “adoration, and then annihilation,” quoted in Weber, 95. Glass was the key, and the prophet of glass was the poet Paul Scheerbart whose book Glass Architecture (1914) claimed that in order to raise culture to a higher level, architecture must change. This required that the rooms for living must be freed from their historically enclosed character. And this can be done by introducing a glass architecture, which is why he dedicated his book to the architect Bruno Taut whose Glass Pavilion in the Werkbund Exhibition, sponsored in 1914 by industrialists and artists in Cologne, was inscribed with Scheerbart’s aphorism: “Light wants crystal.” Fulfilling the poet’s prophecy, the pavilion was a dazzling crystalline structure, a building that “admits the light of the sun, of the moon, and of the stars” (quoted in Frampton, Modern Architecture, 116). Soon after it opened, however, the darkness of World War I descended on the pavilion. But after the war the Bauhaus in Dessau championed the marriage of light and glass in architecture, as did Corbusier. 79. Eloquently in his chapel at Ronchamp . . . Monastery of La Tourette (1960), quoted in Plummer, Cosmos of Light, xi; “White World,” “whitewashed Aegean walls,” “crystalline sea-light,” quoted in “White World,” Hughes, The Shock of the New, 191; “by his arrangement of forms,” “an order . . . spirit,” “gives us the measure of an order,” “we feel . . . our world,” “determines . . . our understanding,” “we experience the sense of beauty,” Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, 11; “Poem to the Right Angle,” Blake, The Master Builders, 137; “THAT THE SIGHT . . . IMMEDIATELY,” “DESIRE OF OUR EYES,” Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (capitalization in original), 16. His Villa Savoye (1929–1931) was a “pristine white box” set in twenty-six delicate columns, with stucco walls of “skinlike tautness.” This came to be known as the International Style of architecture (Hughes, The Shock of the New, 191). The “smooth, stucco planes” of this house “painted a uniform white,” a “calm undifferentiated whiteness” (such as Hopper revered), served as projection screens for the changing colors of natural light and shadow. For him the wall was “primarily a receiver of light.” Likewise, white stucco interior walls allow the inhabitant, as he says, to “live in full daylight.” Continuous whiteness everywhere gives uniform reflections to all

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surfaces (Plummer, Masters of Light, 232), as did the white walls of the Quaker Meeting House. 80. “The finest commission . . . deepest being,” Weber, Le Corbusier, 663. As a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary, which remains a pilgrimage chapel, his contemporaries regarded Corbu’s acceptance of this commission with suspicion, one critic saying the project was a “pact with the devil” (Tzonis, Le Corbusier, 174). Although raised a Protestant and being an outspoken agnostic, knowing nothing of the miracle of faith but much about the miracle of light, Corbu was not concerned about religion, only emotion (Tzonis, 176). He knew light’s transformative power. What the celebrator of architectural light, Henry Plummer, puts his finger on, saying, “Instead of serving as a tool of religious persuasion, as it generally has in the past, light has become a quiet force to visually resist and elude, erode and outshine, the Church’s mandate. Light eats away and weakens institutional discipline, while exerting its own dazzling powers to draw attention out to the sky and its commonplace marvels—in effect using light to consecrate the natural universe” (Plummer, “Light Matters,” Part 2). 81. “Light Machine,” “shapes of light,” “stir us emotionally, possess us entirely,” Plummer, Cosmos of Light, vii; “blazing file of light bursts,” “crescendos of light,” McKay, “Light,” 119. In contrast to the incarnational light of Abbot Suger’s Saint-Denis, the light of Corbu’s Ronchamp Chapel is not so much a spiritual revelation as a secular moral presence, a force for self-examination. Suger’s light-dark jewel light gives way to Corbu’s shadowy meditative light. 82. “Kinetic,” “signifying light,” Kaimakliotis, “The Poetics of Contemplative Light,” n.p.; “CONTEMPLATIVE LIGHT,” balance of moving and resting as well as bright and dim light . . . Sky-glare avoided . . . luminous meditative light, “shadowed dimness of indirect lighting,” quoted, McKay, “Light,” 109. 83. “Envelope of the walls,” “makes possible . . . signifying light,” “inner joy,” quoted in Weber, Le Corbusier, 668, 680. At the opening, after Corbu’s words, the Marseilles was sung, the event and the new chapel being a commemoration of the French soldiers who had died when the previous chapel was destroyed by German bombs. A somewhat ironic event because, while the dead being honored were fighting France’s invaders, Corbu was thriving in Vichy (Weber, Le Corbusier, 682). The architect worked with many powerful leaders of the twentieth century, even despots, regardless of their values or politics as long as he could build their monuments. Yet at Corbu’s public farewell more than three thousand people braved the cold and wind waiting for the entrance of his coffin (Weber, 3–4). An entire country honored this revolutionary who had liberated the home from being a cage to being a space of light and air.

Chapter 7

The “Thingness” of Light The Age of Suspicion

Invented in 1960, the ruby laser’s extraordinary purity of light became an eyeworm, burrowing into the consciousness of the late twentieth century like no other light. The laser’s concentrated beam of light, its intensely focused, seemingly rigid stream of photons gave it an uncanny objecthood, as if we could reach out and touch it. In short, the laser’s “thingness” was disturbing yet exhilarating.1 This chapter explores the contemporary period from the invention of the laser to laser art like Mike Gould’s 2014 lluminatus Lasers at the FoolMoon art celebration in Ann Arbor, Michigan, or the current popular enthusiasm for laser spectacles like the “Pink Floyd Laser Spectacular.” That this light never experienced before in the world captured the imagination of the current age is evident, inspiring many expressions from the entertaining light sword of Star Wars to the deeply affecting laser-like beams of the memorial honoring victims of 9/11, Tribute in Light. Projected nearly a mile into the sky over New York, seen by an entire city and neighboring areas, it resonated with a new imagination of light, heightened by the memorial’s emotional impact.2 The early twentieth-century experience of light derived from Einstein’s imagining that energy (wave) and particle (photon) are interchangeable. “Light pouring into matter,” as the poet Marsha de la O exclaimed; “let us praise their equivalence.” In the modern consciousness light was experienced primarily as a force, a fluid energy not only in the vacuum of space but within physical things, its intensity a function of the interaction of light with matter. Emphasis in the early part of the century, then, was on energy, most visibly manifest in the incandescent light built into our lives. As we saw in the previous chapter, industrial light began to remake the city as well as the country, a process virtually complete by the 1960s. Such light is so commonplace in our late twentieth-century world that it takes a blackout to notice it. Jasper Johns’s 237

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1959 sculpture, Light Bulb I, consisting of an opaque lightbulb affixed to a brick-sized base, called attention to just this.3 In the late twentieth century, however, we see the earlier imagination’s emphasis on light-as-energy shift to light-as-matter. Light as more than a substance composed of energy rather a thing unto itself asserting its irreducible otherness, a character at once familiar and foreign. But rather than a dance of energetic eloquences as earlier in the century, it is a thing indefinably separate from us that, paradoxically, locks our mind with it. The architect Louis Kahn, with one foot in the modern of the early twentieth century and one in what came to be called the “postmodern” contemporary world, identified this shift in emphasis, saying that “material is spent light.” In his story “Desire” (1977), William S. Wilson imagines this historical shift to thingness: “Turning and climbing, the double helix evolved to an operation which had always existed as a possibility for mankind, the eating of light.” As this ability developed, we came to comprehend even ourselves as “thickenings of light.”4 And it is this light that emerged as a new character in the world, seizing the postmodern imagination. Who can forget Bob Shaw’s story “Light of Other Days” (1966), in which “glass farmers” cultivate “great frames of slow glass.” It reaches perfection, he tells us, none of it “less than ten years thick” when “it takes light ten years to pass through it . . . —more than twice the distance to the nearest star.” Or how to shake the presence in Mark Helprin’s novel Winter’s Tale (1983) of the light bridge conjured by master engineer Jackson Mead. The “great catenary” from Manhattan’s Battery to an unknown place—light of all frequencies “refracted, tuned, arranged, and focused so that it builds on its own strength.” Its separate rays coalescing in a “cool and solid beam” to support cars and trucks. So much a part of our postmodern imagination is the thingness of this light that the artist Guy Billout evokes a knowing smile with his drawing of a man walking on a beam of light between lighthouses.5 Artists, filmmakers, and poets were the first to find expression for their experience of this new light. The shift from the material energy of modernism’s light to postmodernism’s riddle of light’s “thingness” meant that the new artists expressing this shift set out not to manipulate light but to open themselves to the sheer presence of an independent light. And it is their encounter with this light for which the artist James Turrell (1943–), the poet Jackson Mac Low (1922–2004), and the filmmaker Stan Brakhage (1933– 2003) find powerful expression. Turrell celebrates the autonomy of light’s thingness, Mac Low despairs at its “otherness,” and Brakhage embraces it. Turrell stands in the forefront, pioneering the expression of light’s thingness. He felt a strong, “primal connection” to light derived from liminal experiences. But at the same time he knew the Southern California light

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Figure 7.1. Guy Billout, Man Walking on a Lighthouse Beam. Permission from artist.

of “powerful substance.” Light no longer a “carrier of content” as it was in the earlier modern imagination but a presence unto itself. The light artist meditating with Wallace Stevens on a light that “adds nothing, except itself to reality.” An uncanny light, a character exhibiting thingness and autonomy.6 He knew it could be actinic, as if its white glare in late July created within him photochemical reactions he was not prepared for. Then again, there was the “nostalgic, golden light of late October,” and the seemingly autonomous

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assertion of hard “gunmetal-gray light” between December and July. Yet what we will see is that his experience was not that of “illumination so much as luminosity,” its “thickness” in the world having an autonomous “sense of presence.” One that the painter Richard Diebenkorn who lived a block away from Turrell also felt.7 The main axis of postmodern light established by Turrell extends through Mac Low and Brakhage. With them dawns a new imagination of light, further explored by the light artist Dan Flavin (1933–1996) as well as by the filmmakers Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) and Terence Malick (1943–). The architect Louis Kahn (1901–1974), one of whose greatest works was being built on the California coast just a few hours south of Turrell’s Los Angeles, was a pivotal figure in the gradual shift from the modern to postmodern imagination of light. Earlier twentieth-century figures, as we saw in the previous chapter, shared a relationship with light as energy-substance, focusing on it as energy. In contrast, the artists, poets, and filmmakers of the later twentieth century reverse this, experiencing it as fundamentally substance. They testify to a relationship with an independent light, insisting on its “otherness,” yet entangled with our perceptual innerness. This experience of light as an autonomous other chimes, of course, with the culture of the 1960s, which saw many alienated from authority, a decade of counterrevolutions—the explosion of civil rights and emergence of the women’s movement. Widespread suspicion of institutions and questioning of all authority prevailed—political (Vietnam protest, 1964–1973), social (Civil Rights Act passed 1964), and cultural. In art, suspicion of the modern relationship between the viewer and the viewed, the assumed separation between the perceiver and the perceived, comes into doubt. Modern art abandoned representation, but postmodern art challenged the status of the work itself as well as that of the gallery in which the work was displayed, its “situation,” forcing redefinition of what constituted a work of art and its exhibition space. The figures with whom we will be spending time were to some extent inevitably shaped by the Age of Suspicion calling all into question, including science and the modern imagination of light, and in turn they shaped the age. This was in part because Einstein imaginatively encountered a light that was in the later part of our century discovered to be more independent and alien than anyone had ever thought. One he could not accept, in fact, given his inherited assumptions about the nature of science, namely the principle of “locality,” which, if rejected, he believed would violate the law of cause and effect. But nonlocality, which he called “spooky actions at a distance,” light particles on opposite sides of the universe being “entangled,” was later

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verified. Moving from the early to late twentieth century, from modernism to postmodernism, we see light not so much as revealer of itself to the world but as radically independent of us. “Light is essentially present to itself,” as the French poet Jacques Roubaud declared; “it is the revelation of the self to the self. It has no need, no way of knowing itself outside itself.”8 The character of light experienced in the postmodern world, then, is the long-familiar taking on an unfamiliar air. Light becomes an “other,” that is, standing unto itself beyond our grasp. We have come to recognize this experience as characteristic of our times, even giving it a name, “alterity,” the sense of “otherness.” Although at about the time of the laser’s invention within the cultural swirl of the 1960s we cross a threshold in consciousness, there is no clear break, the postmodern being in part an extension of the modern desire for a dialog, as we will see in Louis Kahn’s work. This is what the figures whose testimonies we will be seeing and listening to in the following pages attest.9 MODERN TO POSTMODERN, LOUIS KAHN’S “SPENT LIGHT” Architecture was at the forefront of this transition. The notion of the “postmodern” surfaced as the age self-consciously broke with the architectural modernism of Corbusier. And light came to Louis Isidore Kahn (1901–1974), desiring simply “to be manifest,” a light he recognized as “really the source of all being” (echoing Robert Grosseteste). But he internalizes this light of his experience as a “movement” of the original light toward its manifestation. He insists that the “mountains and the streams and the air and we, are made of Light which has been spent.” The meeting of this primal light with his conscious body occurs, he says, “at a point which may be called your singularity.” He finds expression for his own singularity of light by molding “space heavy with light like the first light ever loosed on the world,” as his fellow architect Vincent Scully observed. Such is the triumph of his Salk Institute.10 The modernist Corbusier, as we have seen, experienced natural light as a fundamentally moral character. It works not only to satisfy our desire for beauty and personal freedom but to instigate social change, for which Corbu found expression in his “Radiant City,” a vertical, ordered metropolis with an abundance of light and open space. Whether social or personal, light acted in the world; it effected something. This imagination of light as an agent of progress reflected the mindset of modernism. Although Kahn worked for the Public Works Administration during the depression, creating works for the Philadelphia Housing Authority to address the plight of those struggling to live in the city, the utopian desires of Corbu never became his. Kahn’s light,

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exhibiting something of a metaphysical character, resided too deeply within his being for such a modernist dream of the future.11 Although mentored in the international style of architecture that Corbu with Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe pioneered, Louis Kahn comes in the maturity of his career to challenge modernism’s dominance in America, exemplifying this is his masterpiece, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, which he finished at age sixty-five (1959–1965). Though influenced by Corbu’s definition of architecture as the “magnificent play of masses brought together in light,” Kahn differs in focusing on rooms of light.12 Their creator is less concerned with making a sculpture to be admired from a distance than with creating a space of rooms in which people can experience light as it unfolds over time. Here, they meet natural light, a moody one depending on the time of day and seasons (artificial light being static). Kahn is dedicated to molding rooms “related to the character of light,” generated by an imaginative interpretation of his singularity. For him, “structure is a design in light,” which he insists is what distinguishes architecture, and why “all building is not architecture.”13 Modern in its masterly symmetrical design, the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, is postmodern in Kahn’s eclectic approach. This derives from his encounter not with a moral character of light expressed by buildings of minimalist architecture as in Corbu’s but with a character come into an awareness of itself by means of a maximalist disregard for boundaries and rules. Kahn, misquoting Wallace Stevens, asks himself, “What slice of the sun does your building have?” And he goes on to interpret, saying that “Stevens seems to tell us that the sun was not aware of its wonder until it struck the side of a building.” We remember Hopper’s intense awareness of sun on a white wall, his fundamentally modernist experience of light as revealer. By contrast, Kahn experiences light’s own awareness on the wall, which he interprets as that of its own selfhood.14 The Scar Kahn encountered this new light, primal light come into material self-awareness, in a terrifying childhood experience. As a toddler living on the Baltic island of Saarama, Estonia (Russia), where he was born on February 20, 1901, he saw the glowing embers of a fire on the kitchen hearth that had burned down low. He was utterly entranced. They seemed to be lit from within, a light he had not seen before. Desiring a closer look, he sat beside the hearth. Wholly unlike the slant of winter sun through the windows of his house, he wanted this material light and leaned forward compelled to scoop some of the embers into his lap. Instantly, they burst into flame. The fire leaped toward his face. And as pain drove his hands over his eyes, he

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burned himself horribly. The layer of heavy scars he bore for the rest of his life were evidence of his encounter with a fierce primal light.15 At the height of his career the architect came to interpret this experience as an allegory of his creative process, where the “desire to express meets the possible,” its realization in a work of architecture. What he calls the “prevailing luminous source,” light of the Beginning, his desire and inspiration (the entrancing ember glow), becomes a “wild dance of flames” (the fire leaping), which “settles and spends itself into material” (burning and scarring his face). All matter, he says, whether mountains or bodies being “spent light.”16 Kahn interprets this core experience in a sketch (1968). In its top image within a rectangle framed by his words, he draws the leaping flames he encountered, explaining that the “prevailing luminous” first light gathers to “ignite a wild dance of flaming prevailance [sic]” that embodies itself in the “emmergance [sic] of Material.” Which perhaps explains why his works, as his art historian friend Vincent Scully observed, harbor a latent violence. We see here, then, the flames of primal light, where the “desire to be to express” realizes itself in physical being, his architectural creation, what he simply calls “To be to be.” Kahn must cross a critical threshold, moving from action to the completed work. And he names this “crossing” into the “sanctuary of art” where this completed work of architecture, such as the Salk Institute, now exists “the singularity.”17 Clearly, Kahn was made by fire. A clue to understanding this comes from the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard who in The Psychoanalysis of Fire concludes that “fire is, among the makers of images, the one that is most dialecticized. It alone is subject and object.”18 Flames not only scarring his face but his psyche as well played a major role in making him, as his grandmother at the time of his accident predicted, a great man, one of the most influential architects of the age, his works being designs in light. Beginning in primal light, and by flames of his existential singularity materializing as “spent light,” they are at once subject and object. In a dialectical interchange they are objects he has made of himself. These often subconscious images—primal light by flames becomes spent light of his face and works—lived within him throughout Kahn’s most creative period from the Salk Institute (1959–1965) and Kimbell Art Museum (1966–1972) to the National Assembly Building of Bangladesh (completed after his death in 1974). Kahn vowed to become an architect while in high school after taking a course in architectural history, going on to study at the University of Pennsylvania to which he returned as a professor after teaching at Yale (1947–1957). A gifted artist and pianist, he viewed his architectural plans over the course of his career as musical scores in which the “harmony is formed by notes of light.” By the mid-1950s with his Yale University Art Gallery project (1951–1953) he came to a clear understanding of his core

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experience of light, himself as the manifestation of a primal light. This origin, as we have seen, he visualizes as a wild dance of flame that “settles and sends itself into material,” recapitulating his life experience and his process of creating a building. Thus his struggle with light as an architect was to “tame its fierceness.”19 Taming Light Kahn’s Salk Institute (1959–1965), which the architect and architectural historian Robert McCarter calls his “greatest and most seminal design,” tamed the intense sun of La Jolla, California. Overlooking the Pacific Ocean from a cliff’s edge, this research center comprises two six-story structures that flank and mirror each other across a courtyard of resplendently luminous travertine stone. Tower angles jut gently into this area to accommodate faculty. They also provide facets to break up a relentless light, encouraging its play in the courtyard, featuring a narrow channel of water down its center, which invites the eye to escape the sun’s dominance and merge with the intense blue horizon in the west. The unfinished concrete that forms the walls of the institute is nearly identical in color to the travertine in the square, muting the sun’s blare and lending the space an almost sublimely quiet monumentality. The flanking structures make his dialectical imagination of light available by releasing the light-giving spaces between its walls in a play of shadow and light, their interaction becoming a single expression. This light resides within the spaces as subject and without as object, the whole creation being a paean to the transformation of an intense light.20 Jonas Salk, with whom Kahn formed a close relationship as his favorite client, had directed the architect to create a work worthy of a visit by Picasso. And he did. Worthy, owing to Kahn’s taming and shaping a fierce light at a human scale to communicate his understanding of the primal character of nature’s light. The virtually hypnotic presence of light and shade that repeated along the massive walls defines, producing a space that weds monumental walls and quiet luminosity. And we remember that these walls of “spent light” cast a shadow that Kahn insists “belongs to Light.” Our consciousness in this space made of light turns back onto itself, vibrating with the silent chord in his subconscious. The golden glow filling the sky at sunset, first reflected by the ocean as a primal light, evokes Kahn’s singularity as it then shoots “like a line of flame” through the “gathering darkness” of the plaza’s luminous stone floor.21 If in the Salk Institute he found expression for his experience of light using outside walls and plaza, shaping the light of sea and sky, in the Kimbell Art Museum he found expression using rooms, directing the way light enters and molds a room. The Kimbell Museum of Art (1966–1972) in Fort Worth,

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Texas, was Kahn’s favorite building. In this he employed barrel vaults as his basic unit of design to create one-hundred-foot-long galleries, but these vaults are not traditional. They admit natural light through a narrow, open joint at their crowns running down the center. The bulk of the interior light enters vertically through these open joints, as there are virtually no exterior windows. And at the end of these radiant slots, a parabolic crack of varying thickness gives the entering light a “plastic and fluid power.”22 While the Salk tames a harsh California light by creating spaces harboring an ambient mineral glow, the Kimbell tames a strong Texas light by creating rooms structured in concrete that transform this light until it is the luminosity of liquid silver. A light that, as Kahn’s experience sharpened (after 1966) under the Mexican architect Louis Barragán’s influence, joined its companion—silence. Worshipping natural light in all its manifestations as it shaped Kahn’s structures and vice versa, the Kimbell’s light is simply presence. By his shaping, Kahn’s primal light becomes in a sense, as he says, a “religion of light,” though adopting any religion per se would have been wildly out of character for him. Fittingly, he felt that the light must come from where it is best, at its zenith, which is also at its strongest. But thanks to Kahn’s taming no direct light touches the paintings in these rooms. The museum is in the fullest sense an “offering to light,” a silent “play of lofty rooms” into which light falls “augustly” from above, Kahn said, as it prepares and serves us his experience of light.23 This museum extends Kahn’s dialectical imagination of light, his core experience, which he interprets here as a dialectic of silence and light, his desire and its fulfillment, Kimbell’s shaped walls and rooms of light being expressions of his existential singularity. Rooted in a primal light that revealed itself in a childhood accident, they did not follow from a systematic theory of light and silence but flowed from a poetic approach informed by what he came to call the “auras” of Light and Silence. By this, he discovered through experiment the structure that could tame the fierceness of his primal light and, paradoxically, allow it to mold the light he wanted. This was the dialectic within his singularity, his moving back and forth between Silence and Light into realizing his design and then bringing it into material.24 It is this improvising that compels Kahn and makes him something of a postmodernist. Corbu the modernist architect proceeded systematically to satisfy a need already identified, such as what lighting would further aspirations for a utopian society. By contrast, for Kahn who proceeded musically, this theoretical underpinning became suspect. Thus the poet of architecture and worshipper of natural light sought to create a need for a light the world had never known it needed.

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JAMES TURRELL’S CONSTRUCTIONS OF LIGHT Less than two hours from the Salk Institute, the radically postmodern artist James Turrell (1943–) was himself making a new light in the world. He knew Einstein’s experience of light shaping that of the modern world; “it is physical,” as Turrell said, “it is photon.” But the new experience that was Turrell’s compelled him beyond this to “accord to light” what he termed its “thing-ness.” Both he and Kahn felt a primal connection to light. However, if the architect leaned toward the metaphysical, the artist bent into the phenomenological. Both were affected by the unique quality of California light, its hard white and softened color and seemingly limitless space. Turrell and his friend Robert Irwin found themselves at the center of a loosely connected group of artists obsessed with light. All turned their backs on the tradition of making objects that could be taken home, collected, or sold. Instead they created nonobjects, appropriating technologies from the aerospace and industrial design community in Southern California, in which Turrell’s father worked as an aeronautical engineer.25 They were not interested in representing light, as painters had historically, but in making it present within the viewer being present within the light. It was the “quality and sensation of light itself” that Turrell wanted to make, he said, “really quite tactile,” abandoning the painterly tradition of creating an illusion of light. Instead, he was adamant, “My art deals with light itself,” it is “not the bearer of revelation—it is the revelation.” The light of these artists was not to see but to be felt as a presence to the point where the boundary between the viewer and the viewed disappears. Perceivers invited to participate rather than contemplate, Turrell’s light art being an art of situation, an event rather than an object. An art not so much about being seen but about seeing itself.26 That Turrell and Irwin’s art originated in Southern California was no accident, hatched by its unique light and technological culture. These artists not only shared the physical quality of its light but a postmodern ethos of calling everything into question, asking as did Irwin, who loved the “reverberant” light “bouncing around” him on Los Angeles streets, “What do we mean by ‘reality’?” So they questioned the very notion of painting and of the museum gallery, intent only on creating an art where light and color and space merge. Difficult for the art world to accept, some critics wrote them off as “architects of nothingness.” Yet these “Light and Space” artists, as they came to be known, breathing the cultural ethos and eating the light of twentieth-century California, shaped in turn our postmodern world.27

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Made of Light Imagine standing on one side of a dark room and seeing an intensely bright cube of light in the far corner that seems to float, as if having emerged from the wall. It has no physical means of support yet appears to possess density and weight. Its three-dimensionality appears to shift in space as you shift back and forth in front of it, as does its solidity, the forward edges seeming to dissolve on approach, until up close they become two flat panels of light riding on the perpendicular where the walls meet. You cannot seem to perceive it as either one thing or the other, as if your brain cannot decide between a cube or a plane of light.28 Or at dusk you climb a staircase to a viewing room, which has a large square hole that opens on a patch of milky blue sky. Looking up, you realize that the aperture revealing the sky has no rim or frame. And you find yourself unable to judge distance at all. A half hour later, the light graying and night closing in, you are surrounded by a bright orange glow. The luminous patch above your head has been drained of all traces of gray, nothing remains but a distilled essence of bright cobalt blue changing minute to minute from royal

Figure 7.2. James Turrell, Afrum (white), 1966. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Art Resource, NY. Los Angeles County Museum of Art

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to cerulean, ultramarine to deep indigo. Suddenly, you’re aware of bright lights around you, and the isolated patch of sky appears solid, as though it were a thing, an object you could touch.29 In each of these works we encounter a light that is undeniably “present and there.” These are not about light or a record of light; they are “made of light.” Turrell insists on this. The first is Afrum (white) (1966), one of his “Projection Pieces.” This “cube” of light is a “hypothetical” or virtual “reality that appears to have as much reality as ‘real’ reality.” In short, it calls into question what it means to be a thing. In the second, we are invited to experience a “Skyspace.” The direct light and ambient light of Craiganour Skyspace (2003), whether light enters or we enter its space, is ambiguous. What these works share is a perceptual disorientation and a light of profound tactility. They chart the artist’s career, including his decades-in-the-making Roden Crater (1974 to present) dedicated to transforming an extinct cinder cone volcano on the edge of the Painted Desert near Flagstaff, Arizona, into a work that incorporates all the approaches he has used in previous works (projection pieces, wedgeworks, skyspaces).30 From the cube of light in the corner of a room to the simple, enclosed chamber of his Skyspace work, where the sky is brought down from distant into intimate space as sheer presence by the contrast between the interior light and the outside atmosphere, all these dramatize Turrell’s preoccupation. They reveal the heart of his experience of a new light. Clearly, Turrell’s is a new imagination of light, one nothing like Monet’s, which he loved, or Wilfred’s, which inspired him.31 Before we return to his work, however, let us hear Turrell’s testimony of the core experience of light that generated these imaginative expressions. He gives us a hint, saying that he wants to “address the light” that “we see in dreams and the spaces that seem to come from those dreams.” The core image of light that Turrell alludes to here seized him early on. “I remember being fascinated by light as a child. Especially with the nightlight,” he said, “providing just a small amount of light. But it was just enough light” that things “above my bed” would emerge, “pictures, all that you could imagine.” This is the “juncture,” he continues, “this picture playing, between inside seeing and outside seeing.” And explains, “I say ‘outside seeing,’ how we normally see. This other seeing is the seeing behind the eyes that we generate. It is like imaginative seeing, . . . just as in a dream.”32 This experience was pivotal in his life, one that he spent an entire career striving to find expression for, his bedroom itself triggering in him the need to make what he later came to call a “sensing space.” The first was his Mendota studio that involved light from outside entering its inside, a “space looking at another space,” as he said, and “deriving its characteristics from that space.” Analogous to our eye, which admits light through an aperture, as the studio

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admitted light from the street, including traffic signals and passing headlights. But then there is a space inside, within our skull, where this light becomes a perceptual light. Because this sensing space takes its light from another space, it becomes in a sense an expression of it. Such was his Mendota space, which he rented in 1968, where he constructed his first Projection Pieces. For in this space light is not ordinary light. It is the liminal light Turrell first encountered as a child.33 As he says, “we dream in color.” They are as rich as a “lucid dream,” when our eyes are open, if not richer, and the “resolution of clarity as good as beautiful, high-altitude, sunlit morning.” And he knows that people when they are awake and conscious are often surprised to see this kind of light, which he expresses in his works. His core experience, then, is a meeting with a light he encountered in his bedroom, a “sensing space,” that was deepened just a few years later by his piloting a plane, which he began at sixteen. When what we call a cloud becomes visible before the pilot, what we see, Turrell tells us, is “light passing through it at 186,000 miles per second.” We’re seeing something, in fact, that’s not there, but we call it a “cloud.” That is, “we’ve given cloud thingness.” All his life, then, he has been striving by his light art to “bring light to the place that is much like that in the dream,” he explains— “where you feel it to be some thing [sic] itself, not something with which you illuminate other things.” Rather, it is a celebration of the “objecthood of light, the material presence, the revelation of light itself.”34 At the heart of Turrell’s art is a somewhat paradoxical interpretation of his encounter with dream-light/sky-light: “material is light but the medium is perception.” In his efforts to share his deepest experience of light’s character Turrell finds that his art must trigger perceptual construction. The participants in, not merely viewers of his work, that is, find themselves entangled with his light art, whether projection, skyspace, or wedgework pieces, such as Wedgework V (1974) that literally immerses participants. After welcoming them to follow a series of darkened, twisting hallways cut off from almost all light, they find themselves in an indeterminate space, a cavernous dark room with a series of vertical oblique planes. All bathed in red light, these shift and play with the participants’ sense of space and depth. The walls slipping away, they stand in a room and not a room, the artist’s work being inseparable from the participant’s perception.35 Light’s Thingness Generally, Turrell says, “we look at light as a form of revelation of something,” expecting light to be a revelation. However, “rather than light’s illumination of other things,” he makes clear, “I’m interested in its thingness, its object-making, thing-making kind of ability.” Consequently, he is suspicious

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of the word “effects,” which art is commonly said to possess, because these are fleeting. Turrell says instead that he is “trying to take something that we look at as ephemeral and give it as much reality in the world as any thing [sic].”36 And he “investigates” this throughout his career, knowing that light’s ability to make an object is inseparable from our perceptual entanglement with it. To express this fully he must redefine “thing.” And he adopts a bold strategy, saying, “I’ve removed a lot of the thingness of objects.” But he has “substituted the thing of perception and light,” the very “thing” stunningly realized in his totally immersive Ganzfeld works, such as his Wide Out (1998). These create in the participant a total loss of depth perception. Its dense atmosphere of light gradually asserts its physicality, resulting in an intense experience of an “objectless colored field,” which is “absolutely homogeneous,” occupying the total visual sphere. These works derive directly from Turrell’s experience of dream light and flight light (a natural Ganzfeld often occurs while flying through a cloud). Experiencing a Ganzfeld work, which unlike conventional artwork “begins to realize itself slowly,” not all at once, is a bit like the difference, he says, “between sportive lovemaking and then actually making love with someone you love.”37 Being true to the character of light he experienced, Turrell spends a career striving “to accord light the ‘thingness’ that it should have” in the fullest sense of “thing.” The postmodern lightsmith Turrell, that is, expands Einstein’s imagination of light, forging his own. He knew from scientist friends about the experiments in the 1980s that investigated the relations of quantum reality and perception. They demonstrated what Einstein had called “spooky actions” at a distance, showing that observation played a “strangely powerful role” in quantum physics. The artist found these experiments very interesting, as they “almost awarded light a consciousness.” And as a Quaker he was well acquainted with “going inside to greet the light,” a “light in everyone.” Vividly experienced by Quakers, this light can “appear to have a type of living and wise awareness all its own,” as he told scientist friends. But he was quick to laugh and insist that in the end his work was no more or less than art.38 Art that for the first time in history celebrated light as object, respecting its refusal to bear any message and, paradoxically, its objecthood requiring our “spooky” participation. All began “As a child,” he says in his poem “Speaking for the Light,” when he “wished to touch the light of dreams / And bring it before the eyes of day” to “build new worlds of light / as powerful as the lucid dream.” He never lets us forget that it is in the “thing-ness of light / That light itself becomes the revelation.” A burly man of seventy-six today with a prophet’s glowing white hair and beard, wearing a defiant black shirt, Turrell still makes works that challenge the culture, difficult yet wondrous

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works that, as his friends joke, to see them, “you must first become hopelessly lost.”39 DAN FLAVIN’S OBJECTS OF LIGHT While Turrell was working on his Light Projections in his Mendota Hotel studio, the New York painter Dan Flavin (1933–1996) also abandoned canvas (1963) and adopted the medium that would be his for the next thirty years—fluorescent tubes. By 1968 he had extended these into room-size environments of light, which he called “situations,” filling an entire gallery with ultraviolet light at Documenta 4 in Kassel, Germany. Working on their respective coasts, both had encountered light’s “objecthood.” But the character that Turrell met as a child was wondrous, while the one Flavin met was torturous, spawning its opposite. Light for him manifested as two characters—twin brothers—one of mystery whom he encountered as a child and one of clarity whom he imagined as an adult and revealed in his light art works. Unlike Turrell’s constructions, Flavin employed commercially available objects, his fluorescent tubes, which he deployed in striking arrangements. Limiting himself to what was commercially available, conventional lengths (two-, four-, six-, and eight-foot tubes) and colors (red, pink, blue, green, yellow, four different whites, and ultraviolet), he combined these in many inventive ways. Insisting on factory-made lamps throughout his career, he appropriated light as a found object (on the hardware store shelf) in contrast to Turrell’s made object (in the “in here” and “out there”). The Los Angeles artist had little patience for Flavin’s fluorescent structures, what he called his “Canal Street aesthetics,” reacting to the New York artist out of a different core experience of light.40 Given Flavin’s, he found it essential that “light was an industrial object, and familiar,” as he wrote to a friend in 1964. Turrell’s light is potentially transcendent, while Flavin’s is emphatically of this world. His Nominal Three (to William of Ockham) (1963), which one artist-critic called the beginning of the end of modernism, veritably shouts this. The work comprises simply three white, vertical, radiant tubes positioned on the far wall of a room, one in the left corner, two in the middle, and three in the right, that invite us into an electric celebration of light. Neither crafted object nor “optical circus” nor emotional display, it simply insists on its “own self.” Flavin’s works revel in their own thingness, being images and objects, what he called “image-objects.”41 But what encounter with what light generated these image-objects? Before turning seven, Flavin remembers, he tried to run away from home. But just two blocks from his house he was “apprehended by a fear of the unknown in sunlight.” Tortured by this fear of a mysterious God hidden in light, the

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experience marked his soul the rest of his life. After attending Catholic school in Riverhead, New York, Flavin went on to seminary, from which he graduated but was never ordained. His early, bitter experience of religion being “forced upon me,” as he said, caught up with him, and he left the church before entering Columbia University. He had had enough mystification as a child. It was, he said, “rank suppression at seven in the name of god [sic] the father or any other of the ‘heavenly host.’” His first work, The Diagonal of May 25, 1963, which he declared “the diagonal of personal ecstasy,” evoked and mocked his Catholic boyhood experience, its glorious radiance being a phallic tube and the “ecstasy” it triggers double edged. Unlike Turrell’s encounter with a wondrous liminal light, then, Flavin’s encounter is with an antilight, one he rejected in favor of its twin brother (his twin brother, David, died in 1962). It is this character of ecstatic brilliance who came to inhabit his imagination, the lucid one he celebrates the rest of his career.42 Accosted early on by a light of fear and mystery like the Catholic God of his church, he interprets his core experience as creating its opposite, a light of ecstasy and clarity. This is why for the rest of his career, as he said, “Clarity obtains my mind.” He made his works, that is, to counter the light of his core experience—sunlight harboring a fearful unknown. They are nothing short of acts of light to make the world right. Each work is a new “image” to counter an old image. And it is a new imagining married always to object, having an emphatically hardware rather than spirit body. An image, yes, but always a thing, no mystery lurking here. Flavin insisted on the thingness of his light, as did Turrell, but rooted it in a different encounter with light, resulting in a radically new expression, one inseparable from everyday material announcing its ordinariness, Flavin insists on its “physical presence” as an “object,” the light tube fixture itself. Neither artist was interested in a mediated light, such as by paint or sculpture, but unlike his contemporary, Flavin wrestled continually with the ghostly brother haunting and, ironically, generating within Flavin’s imagination its opposite twin. A new experience, he projects an ecstatic character of object light.43 Finding expression for this fundamental imagination of light, his interpretation of a frightening childhood experience, Flavin invents a new art medium entailing the radiant tube, basically a banal device reminding us that his light is not a mysterious one. It was to his mind a medium that, as he said of his Diagonal, seemed to “sustain itself directly, dynamically, dramatically” on his workroom wall. Light become “image.” Yet at the same time it asserts itself as the source of its own light, which Turrell never reveals. Describing this first work, Flavin said it was “composed solely of fluorescent light, a single lamp mounted on the wall at angle of forty-five degrees,” a “common eight foot [sic] strip with fluorescent light.” The color of the light did not matter to him (though he chose a gold lamp), only the hardware and its brilliance,

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together being the “image-object.” His ecstasy evoked by its banality, the irony of using an off-the-shelf product, and clarity. “I want clarity,” he declared, “not mystification.”44 The arena in which this psychological drama of the two brothers plays out— the other-world sunlight of fear countered by Flavin’s this-world brilliance of ecstasy—is in what he called “situations” or “proposals.” He realized that a fluorescent light tube and its components, which included the wall, floor, and ceiling, could support a strip of light and that this entire “spatial container” would “not restrict its act of light except to enfold it.” He discovered, then, that the relationships of his light works were inextricable from their environment, the room of installation, making them “situations” indeed.45 Each of Flavin’s enfolded image-object situations were also to his mind “proposals”: what he decided to put where, what image-object at a given time in his life. He proposed each one as another counter to fear, the good brother of clarity countering its evil twin of frightening mystery. In this sense, as the writer and critic William S. Wilson says, his “light is to the room as decision is to consciousness.” In short, he proposes a new situation whose purpose is by his conscious decision to dispel the light of his primary childhood experience. Clearly, the enfolding of his image-objects, these physical things, as Wilson has pointed out, “figure forth an interior process.” Namely, the imaginative countering of an oppressive light in childhood with an ecstatic brilliance experienced in maturity. Such was the metaphoric interpretation of light’s character that drove Flavin’s decision to embrace a new medium and its new situations the rest of his life.46 MAC LOW’S ELUSIVE LUCID LIGHT While Flavin was creating The Diagonal of May 25, 1963, Jackson Mac Low (1922–2004) was making his 22 Light Poems, among his most beautiful poems, which he published in October 1968. As a poet, composer, and performance artist, many of whose “word works” possess an unparalleled “complexity and ingenuity,” Mac Low employed an unprecedented range of compositional strategies, including the aleatoric. Publication of his 22 Light Poems was delayed, ironically, by a chance accident. The ceiling of his study collapsed, and he moved to a bedroom. In the process he misplaced the light chart that directed his making of these poems. This chart listed 288 names of light out of a Funk and Wagnall’s dictionary, from “archlight” and “actinic rays” to “zircon” and “zodiacal” light, that he lettered on an Editorial Department Payroll Distribution form he had found in the garbage while

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working at Funk and Wagnalls. He headed each of its fourteen columns with one of the fourteen letters of his and his wife Iris Lezak’s names.47 And using this chart, he “gathered” his “1st Light Poem,” drawing light names by chance procedures from its twenty rows. These operations were essential in providing him with a “situation,” as he called it, inviting friends and anyone to create with him, as had Turrell. Possessing a profound sincerity and sense of responsibility, Mac Low’s poems at the same time convert words into “quarks and sparks.” Such was the birth of a stunning and anarchically inventive sequence of poems, which he regarded as experimental, written from June 10, 1962, at age thirty-nine, to October 9, 1988, age sixty-six.48 Bringing systematic chance operations to the making of a number of his light poems, as John Cage did to music, ensured that as Mac Low said, “I will not always be in control of what comes into the works,” namely, the presence of an autonomous light. Recognizing the disinterested thingness of light, he has a great suspicion of finality and closure, which he shared with a number of postmodern artists and poets, and engaged in what he called “otherwise writing.” His poems remain in a state of unrest, that is, having a certain “undecidability” in order not to interrogate light but to remain open to light challenging him. He feared succumbing to a preconceived, inherited notion of its character.49 This is why in contrast to the architect and artists we have seen propelled in their work by a core image, Mac Low daringly begins with inherited names of light. He plucks 288 of them, in fact, directly from the dictionary, drawing on these throughout his series. Unlike Kahn or Turrell, that is, he does not begin with a pivotal light encounter in his experience, whose image he interprets in order to fully grasp its personal meaning for which he then finds expression. Rather, he begins with inherited interpretations of previous light experiences. These have been culturally solidified in his chart’s dictionary names, what he calls the “schema of antiquated, scientific, philosophical, natural, and idiomatic names of light.” It is from this position that he launches his experiments.50 Rejecting a fixed method or procedure, he employs throughout the “Light Poems” what he calls his “writingways,” a variety of approaches including chance as well as determinative operations. But by putting the schema out and testing it against his own observations, one “sees light, hears light, experiences light,” he fervently hopes, in a way free of antiquated names. Yearning for light itself to offer him its true names, he trusts to his unique experimental ways to reward him.51 Having begun his quest with the inherited names, culturally reified interpretations, and setting out to accept the character revealed by light’s true names, he initiates a series of experiments—his light poems—to discover light’s true image. He carries these out in order to gut the schema and raze the old idiomatic names. He wants simply to remake the culturally inherited

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language of light. Then by his new language, in turn, to remake his culture. All in the service of light, respecting its independence, only desiring that it name itself as a gift to him. Once having this gift of true images he will interpret them in order to understand their existential meaning. His mission, then, is not to find expression for a prior core experience; it is to find a core experience that yields a true image. He wants nothing less than a self-evident “lucid” light.52 The Quest for Lucid Light A great challenge, indeed, but the question is whether he succeeds in meeting it. Mac Low struggles, being acutely, and somewhat overwhelmingly, aware, as he states in his “14th Light Poem,” that “All light is relevant to each light” and each to a next light, ad infinitum. He proclaims this in a chant that he continues in another five lines each one starting with “&,” and in the end asking whether his assertion is lucid. Though he answers emphatically, “Yes,” he seems to be comforting himself, ginning up his courage. This is perhaps why these lines suggest parody, a role that postmodern culture assigns the image, denying it any reference to anything outside itself in the “real” world, the image referring only to other images. But this view of the image is anathema to him.53 The fundamental mission of Mac Low’s Light Poems is, on the contrary, to demonstrate that the image derives from reality itself, shattering inherited light names, conventional labels that have often become nothing more than self-referential parodies. He aspires, that is, to reconnect within his cultural and historical context the new images offered him by light, as it lives in our world, to reconnect them with his own life by an existential interpretation of this gift.54 Embarking on his experiments Mac Low devotes his “1st Light Poem” to clearing the imaginative space. He simply enumerates common sources of light, such as a lamp or spotlight, calling their light by inherited names like shimmer and “Evanescent light.” By even including figures of speech, such as “kindly light,” he jolts us into realizing the depth and seriousness of his mission. Artificial and natural all mixed, he concludes with everyday light as well as extraordinary light, such as the atom bomb’s. But in his “2nd Light Poem” he immediately calls these into question with resounding vowels, “old light & owl-light / may be opal light.” This is at the outset a cry from his heart of naked desire. He wants explicit, clear guidance from light itself, yet at the same time has faith that such lucid phenomena require none. He wants to break out of any routine, his old light, throw away inherited names and take on a new project, such as “owl-light.”55

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But doubts intrude. Struggling for direction from light itself in order to go beyond, the poet in owl light is haunted by his desires that blossomed from old light, “old” historically in the sense that they welled up in humanity’s first experience of starlight. And before the baggage of association obscured light’s autonomous character. In exasperation the poet blurts out: “spectrums / like the aurora’s” only conjure up “remembered napalm flames.” In face of these facts, he reaffirms that it is all about light. But even if you take the sun’s guidance at noon as to the true name that it’s offering you, it could be disappointing. Yet at the same time, he admits, clarifying.56 His answer is ambiguous, “a nimbus,” not known for its clarity, but nonetheless a clear presentation of light. He is seized by doubt. Maybe he missed light’s offer. And perhaps he was granted his wishes in the past, when he saw trails of light on the sidewalk below the windows of the Bronx he knew. Perhaps this was the lucid light of his desire. But he nonchalantly dismisses his doubts, singing like the performance artist he was, “Boomelay boomelay boomelay boom.”57 “Amber Light of Regret” Yet whistling in the light does not allay his fears of the inherited idiomatic names cemetery he finds himself passing, for he suspects that all experience is dead language. Mac Low is nagged by the possibility that no gift may be forthcoming from an autonomous light because, in fact, any offering may reveal itself as inextricable from language itself. Instead of receiving a name for a new experience of light, a new language of light, he wonders if even his own experience of “tall” light in the Bronx is perforce inherited language. He wrestles with this, posing a series of questions to himself in his “22nd Light Poem” where he begins before the beginning, before there was light, implying that even darkness itself is bound up with language in its separation from light by the word (Gen 1:3). Answering himself (or the Antins whom the poem is for) on a somewhat upbeat note, he says that “in a vivid light / an adverb / may function as a call.” A call to liberating light from language that, ironically, relies on language, namely, an adverb.58 The poet entertains a hope that if the light is vivid enough, such as “noonlight,” it can escape this circle. But even an encounter with the new light of a star’s explosion, that is, and in its other sense, with the “new” light of experience that he yearns for, there is no assurance. For its effect would be merely a “modifier.” His hopes for escaping language dashed. The only hope he retains is that noon light may narrow the gap between language and the offerings of light itself. Perhaps the force of an “aurora australis [sic]” experience can paralyze the word, make the verb “inactive, defeating old language

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with new language.” But he despairs, fearing that even in the south there is no new verb.59 Clearly, Mac Low’s mission falters. In his “23rd Light Poem” he takes a northern note of hope from a solar wind interacting with the earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere, the aurora borealis. Precisely and wonderfully observed—“an emerald light’s approaching dance”—the aurora fills his kitchen, yet he fears that he merely imagines all their lights. The elegiac tone whispering throughout his sequence now intensifies, and in his “32nd Light Poem,” written in memoriam of his friend Paul Blackburn, he descends into the “Amber light of regret,” not just for his friend but for his faltering experiments.60 Thus despite the light of Altair guiding him onward, sounding its gorgeous echoing vowels and liquid consonants, he cannot shake his grief in defeat, even experiencing the multitude of mountain lights, orange lights “spangled over hillsides” and “Neutral light” that “glows above their ridges.” And despite his persistent appetite for light, he comes finally to the conviction that it cannot be satisfied: “All the light there can be won’t be enough.”61 Mac Low’s mission has failed. Yet his experiments, though not rewarding him with new names of light he desired, have like those of science succeeded in falsifying some of the old names and clarifying the nature of light experience and language. Poem by poem they have revealed the struggle of a poet, ironically, to free himself of language, his poems not being expressions triggered by a life-changing experience of light but interpretations of a received light in his quest for a genuine encounter with light. Yet Mac Low has given us an experience of a new light—his “Light Poems” themselves. Fragments of new language and arresting glimpses of light’s character are gift images. By chance, given Mac Low’s “chart” and our happening on the gift of Mac Low’s poems, we are the recipients of a lucid light.62 STAN BRAKHAGE’S RHYTHMED LIGHT As Mac Low was the principal experimental poet of the time, so Stan Brakhage (1933–2003) was the major experimental filmmaker, making almost four hundred films over fifty-one years (1952–2003). Yet his films, though celebrated by a twenty-year retrospective at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1995, are as isolated as he was in a log cabin in the Colorado mountains where over a span of forty years he made many of them. Here he forged the lyrical film, revealing the filmmaker behind the camera. By its imagery, then, we experience his encounter with light directly. Admiring Ezra Pound, Brakhage began as a poet and was a friend of many poets. Influenced

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above all by Gertrude Stein, Charles Olson, and William Blake, Brakhage thought of his films as metaphorical, a poetry written with light.63 Brakhage takes as his true subject light. He explores our seeing light, its creation in our perceiving, a relationship with light also at the heart of Turrell’s art. Brakhage, however, made films, not light constructions or image-objects. And he chooses this medium to express an experience of light uniquely his own. His is an eye that “must know” each light “encountered in life through an adventure of perception.” In short, he is obsessed with light as light, determined to see for the first time its pooling, its scattering, its reflecting off stones and water and flesh. To express this adventure of the new light encountered, Brakhage began making his works. Rejecting narrative, he embraced moments of light in his films, not telling stories but revealing new aspects of light’s character. Whether making intimate records of his family life or documenting an imaginary country, light itself was his subject. And to do this he used all techniques at his disposal, or as he preferred to say, at his “bestowal,” much aware, he said, that “Film as film shapes itself most usually in The Present as Gift.” Even inventing some methods to explore its character as it interacted with his eye/brain—painting, scratching, juxtaposing, repeating, layering, or collaging directly onto the film stock itself.64 “I am a Match” “I am a match that would like to ignite without being consumed,” Brakhage declared. His core experience is not a memory surfacing from the past, then, as it was for Kahn and Turrell, but a deeply personal one, which he desired in the future, of a total light presence—his body vibrating in its hyperawareness of light. At the moment of their ignition, body and light to become one. Not confined to the microcosm, he projects an impersonal version of this, saying that “the stars are optical nerve endings of the eye which the universe is.” This is the desired fire that is not consumed (though he knew stars will burn out in the end).65 He is confident that ignition without consumption can be personally experienced. “I think,” Brakhage wrote to his friend the poet Robert Kelly, “there is some ‘short circuit’ of light pouring into any eye, as it ‘meets’ that person’s out-put/memory’s discharge. Consequently, we see in midst of a smoldering fire of cross-currents.” Ignited, he makes his film within this smoldering fire. And he is not consumed but instead given in his The Text of Light the equivalence of this short-circuit experience as it unfolds in the present tense.66 Brakhage can be confident in finding expression, an “equivalence,” for his fundamental experience of light because “what is film, afterall, [sic] but rhythmed light.” And Brakhage exclaims, “that’s us and everything we’re seeing, the dance of the light from the inside mixing with that coming from

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the outside in.” This is, of course, the dance of the cross-currents. Such is the nature of the short circuit that is light. He knows, admittedly, that “my eye, tuning toward the imaginary, will go to any wave-lengths for its sights,” cognizant of his “mind’s eye awareness” of all light’s vibrations, every photon that reverberates in his imagination. This awareness is well and good, but it is one thing to participate in the internal/external “dance of the light,” it is another to find a way to express this experience. The challenge for him, that is, being the creation of its equivalence in film.67 To meet this challenge, he attempts to free himself from inherited names for previous experiences of light. He must have “an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective” and the names of previous people’s experience of light, just as Mac Low desired. This is nothing short of an unprejudiced eye that will be able to answer the question he puts to himself, “How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’?” But unlike the poet, who also wanted “the intuitive light / alive in any baby / not mere lucence” of places or of plants (“15th Light Poem”), Brakhage receives the answer. Turning to film he embarks on the necessary “adventure of perception.” He knows, as did William Blake, that “We are led to believe a lie / When we see with not through the eye.” The lie is that of conventional names for light. And the “beginning of The Dance” of seeing with rather than through the eye is “shattering out of even memory’s grip to some exactitude of sight/light.” That is, “with the light” not through the projector or through limiting mental states, subordinating our mind/imagination to our eye.68 The Text of Light Having prepared himself to join the “dance of the light,” having learned to see through and not with his eye, he succeeds in finding an equivalence for his fundamental experience of light, his “act of seeing.” He does this by making light itself the subject of his The Text of Light (1974), a film centered on shooting through a glass ashtray, film being the perfect medium to achieve equivalence. For the medium of seeing is light, the basis of film the “movement of light.” Thus he documents the act of seeing as well as everything the light brings him in his adventure with the ashtray. Being a literalist of light, he even documents phosphenes or the visual noise created by our visual system itself. And this “slow montage of iridescent splays of light” is a tour-de-force, so declares the leading historian of avant-garde film.69 This film is central to Brakhage’s work not only because its subject is explicitly light alone but because, as he said in 1974, he comes to believe more and more the older he gets that art is a gift given by an individual person’s “urgency.” Thus this lyrical film shapes itself according to the “maker’s

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experience,” nothing more. And certainly, “for me,” he confesses, The Text of Light is “most clearly of all things a gift” given to him to make.70 What was given to Brakhage was an optical experience fully his own. The film rejects representation, never explicitly presenting the ashtray as an object. It is instead an extension of the lens. He creates a film within the “lens itself and its crystal extension.” Yet he is given the crystal enabling him to project his unique experience of light. By this gift and film, then, he can say, “I exhausted everything I know,” which is “why it has the title it has.” Specifically, he exhausted the “extensions of light taking place” in his experience of its refraction by a glass ashtray. This dance reaches its crescendo within a “construction that gives me a sense of the whole world.” And at this point he crosses a threshold. Once the ashtray at the center of the film had “metaphored for me,” Brakhage finding his light experience equivalence in film, and “I had exhausted all that I had seen elsewhere,” he says, “then I stopped shooting.”71 Making the film had been an exhausting dance. Director and cinematographer, as with all his films, Brakhage’s sixty-seven-minute The Text of Light (1974) came entirely from footage of the refraction of the sun’s beams in a glass ashtray. He sat for hours to get thirty seconds of film, “always holding the camera in hand,” he says, “for hours. Clicking. Waiting. Seeing what the sun did to the scene.” And “as I saw what was happening in the frame to these little particles of light, changing, I would shoot the camera very slightly.” At one point, the ashtray had to be moved by a “quivering attention of the hand,” which he estimated took maybe thirteen or fourteen moves over a period of ten minutes. Then to get that “in mind: what it was doing and changing and how I was dancing with it had to be extended in memory.” How it would come out at twenty-four frames a second, that is, and to the heart of the matter, “was the dance real?”72 The dance of light (photons) and mind (imagination), he concluded, was real. And he succeeded in making a film, he believed, true to his deepest experience of light. Brakhage ignited and was not consumed. For the film is called The Text of Light because, he insists, “in that ashtray I found a way to create an equivalent of many behaviors of light that I have observed.” Many not recognized by science, suspecting that they would be considered mad by some of the “less generous scientists of our time.” But, in fact, he extended Einstein’s imagination of light that “matter is still light. Light held in a bind,” accepting his generosity. Brakhage declares that “what this ash tray permitted me to do was to photograph equivalence of things seen and processes of evolution, of ephemerality of light taking shape and finally taking a very solid seeming shape.” Such as the extensions of light taking place in his experience: “light-streaks come down previous to rain—splitting the

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air—light-like phosphorescent streaks of . . . something! That I call light!” And the “up-shoots” of spring seem to him to “be light shooting up, that shapes plant-like things.” Not madness but his light dance.73 And in his film light does this, falling in streaks, shooting upward. The character of Brakhage’s light exhibits innumerable forms in an undefined space that appears, paradoxically, to be open to infinity and flat as the screen itself. Which is to say, in his The Text of Light Brakhage succeeds in finding equivalence of his experience of a light encountered in the “midst of a smoldering fire” of a perceptual-imaginative short circuit. And the ashtray’s glass gives the cross-currents of light a certain density or “materiality,” as if Brakhage were “documenting the instant at which light achieves ‘corporeality’ (in Grosseteste’s terminology) but before its ‘glow’ is extinguished in corporeal forms” (or as Kahn would say is “spent light”). In the end, as we have seen before, light insists on its thingness.74 WHEN LIGHT WALKS, INGMAR BERGMAN AND TERRENCE MALICK In Brakhage’s montage of light we saw that the story is light. It testifies to itself, end of story. In Ingmar Bergman’s (1918–2007) and Terence Malick’s (1943–) movies, by contrast, light tells the story. Literally, light projected through celluloid constructs all the places we visit and characters we see. But beyond this the director and cinematographer use light as a narrative tool, evoking our sympathy or antipathy for a character by the way they light a face or body. And directing our gaze at a specific space or object, they transform them into places or things of significance. The “New Cinema” of the 1960s, which succeeded the Hollywood reign (1930s–1950s) that had cast light in rather stereotypical roles, such as low-key lighting meaning mystery or threat, understood the character of light in a new way.75 Having realized that light has no fixed meaning, freed from the conventional “rules” of lighting, director-and-cinematographer collaborators Bergman with Sven Nykvist and Malick with Nestor Almendros elevated light to an element of the film on par with figures and objects. In some settings it becomes a character in itself.76 These two directors making two landmark films, Bergman’s Winter Light (1963) and Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), found expression for their encounters with an independent light, as if it had agency as a character apart from the director. Bergman’s cinematographer Sven Nykvist makes this explicit, saying that in their films “when the light walks something is happening.” It walks into a room and asserts its presence. And when we see light striding the plains in Malick’s film, embodying

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nature itself, it gives the scene a “feeling” as his cinematographer Néstor Almendros says, that is “as strong as a good actor.”77 The imagination of light expressed by each of these directors arises out of complementary experiences of light in their early years. Bergman’s was an experience of an indoor light associated with comfort and music. And the antithesis of this, its absence expressing a loss of faith in later years that informs his Winter Light (interior images dominate his film); while Malick’s was an experience of an outdoor light associated with danger that haunts Days of Heaven (images of natural landscape dominate). His grandmother’s apartment in Uppsala had a great impact on the five-year-old Bergman. “I used to sit under the dining table there, ‘listening’ to the sunshine which came in through the cathedral windows” that could be seen from the house. “The cathedral bells went ding-dong,” he recalls, “and the sunlight moved about and ‘sounded’ in a special way.” And when a silent sunlight does not move in an almost claustrophobic sanctuary, as in Winter Light, we feel acutely the absence of succor, the silent indifference of the universe. In contrast, Malick remembers the fire that burned his brother horribly in an auto accident, a terrifying light. And we remember the fire that informs Days of Heaven, a fire across the landscape rising against the mysterious light of early dawn and twilight. It is the power of these core experiences that makes our visual communion with light’s character in their respective films become as important as the emotions that it ostensibly represents.78 Winter Light and Days of Heaven share an elegiac, verging on apocalyptic tone. And in both the atmosphere of tragedy is paradoxical. The interior space of the church sanctuary in Bergman’s is not the comforting one of his grandmother’s apartment. Instead, in place of a tuneful light it is occupied by a silent winter sun. And the fire that emerged from a strange, twilit horizon in Malick’s film becomes a character that subsumes the human characters. For both directors this elegiac light was embodied by what had come to be called that of the “magic hour.” Its unique luminosity between sunset and nightfall lasts for only about twenty minutes in reality. But for these few minutes the light is “truly magical, because no one knows where it is coming from,” as Almendros says; “The sun is not to be seen, but the sky can be bright, and the blue of the atmosphere undergoes strange,” exhilarating, and unsettling “mutations.” The beautiful light of tragedy, ironically, embraced by both directors. For Bergman it was the agent working to silence the musical light of his cherished childhood experience. And for Malick it was the ironic figure of a deeply feared light. Both exploit the transformations of this mysterious character appearing from nowhere, haunting the sanctuary floor and prairie horizon.79 “I think I have made just one picture that I really like,” Bergman says, “and that is Winter Light.” In a cold winter in a cold church, Tomas Ericsson, a cold

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pastor who fears that his faith has dissolved, is visited after communion by a parishioner Karin Persson and her tormented fisherman husband. But Tomas finds that he cannot comfort the husband who, fearing an atomic apocalypse, later commits suicide. Meanwhile, the widowed pastor’s lover, Marta, whom Tomas has bitterly rejected, sends him a letter revealing all his grievous faults. After these crises of one afternoon, his failure to help the fisherman, ending in suicide, and his failure to give and accept love, resulting in a devastating letter, Tomas is left in silence, unable to do for himself what he had offered the fisherman, to simply say, “we must trust God.”80 This ending was implicit in the film’s beginning, when after his conversation with Karin and her husband, the camera focuses on Tomas’s face. We see the portrait of a strange silent light. Against his black frock, it meets our face, becoming in itself a character of existential loneliness. A portrait echoed by the tight closeup of Marta’s face as she reads her letter to Tomas out loud, detailing his failures for almost six minutes. We cannot escape her, the light unflinching, the portrait of light gradually displacing her portrait. An antithetical expression of Bergman’s core experience of light, reflecting his movement from child to adult, this film features a lonely light occupying an austere sanctuary. The interior of the church being a projection of the pastor’s interior, its character of silent light being an echo of his character. That at one point the pastor hears bells ringing and says to God, “I’m going to wait here until you reveal yourself,” harks back to Bergman’s experience in his grandmother’s apartment when he felt God’s presence. But every move in Winter Light contradicts this. Everything from the cold light of Sweden’s long winter twilight, angled low through the windows, to the silent plate of light left by a parishioner on an empty pew. All lonely light, all uncomforting, a powerful expression of the pastor’s emptiness played by light’s character. Clearly, for Bergman and Nykvist “light is not only an event” in this film, “it is also a character.” One taking on a haunting independence, become an expression of the tragic chasm opened between the five year old, when light moved and sang, and the adult’s abandonment by a silent God who is replaced by a still light of silent character.81 Instead of seizing on the flipside of his fundamental encounter with light, as Bergman does, Malick in Days of Heaven (1978) looks at it face on and bets everything on it. He fans the tragic flames of his early experience of fire and makes it the dominant character of his film. This is the light, intensified by its appearance at twilight, that carries the emotional weight of the tragic story. Like Bergman’s movie grounded in Christianity, written by an atheist director, Malick the spiritual humanist takes his title from Psalm 89: “The Lord’s seed also will I make to endure forever and his throne as the days of heaven.” A promise, but only if his children do not transgress, which of

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course they do. The film’s love triangle—Bill, his girlfriend Abby who he pretends is his sister, and Chuck the local land owner—unfolds on his Texas Panhandle wheat farm in 1916. We see the events and the landscape here through the eyes of Linda, Abby’s kid sister, as she narrates in a voiceover what happened to them after fleeing Chicago, Bill having very likely killed a man, and coming to the wheat fields to work. Linda’s narration is disjointed and sparse, and events are linked associatively rather than narratively in Malick’s “polyphonic structure.”82 Throughout, hellish flames counterpoint Malick’s sunless, heavenly glow. We are suspended between earth and sky, the director continually expanding and contracting these, forcing us to question our certainties. Always, presence of the sun, but our place uncertain. Malick forces us to see the sun from the grasshopper’s perspective up through the wheat born of earth that ends in fire, or from ours up through the trees against a sky that turns them into smoke-obscured ghosts. Malick’s images, which supplant the actors and render words irrelevant, tell the story. Principally, the image of fire becomes a character in itself lighting up the landscape against a backdrop of twilight. Fire opens the film. Before we first meet Abby or hear Linda, we see Bill shoveling coal into a furnace in Chicago spewing flames, an overwhelming, frightening conflagration. Later burning locusts and flaming wheat become the principal light, the initial fire being repeated toward the end of the film. And we are not surprised because it has been prophesized. As we see the three characters riding a hobo freight train to Texas, Linda begins her narration, saying she met this fellow named Ding Dong who “tells me the whole earth is goin’ up in flames. . . . The mountains are gonna go up in big flames, the water’s gonna rise in flames.”83 But people who have been good, he tells her, “they’re going to heaven and escape all that fire.” She adds, “But if you’ve been bad, God don’t even hear you talkin.” Good or bad, Linda invites us to have sympathy for all the characters. Even their boss Chuck. Riding through the fires intended to destroy the biblical plague of locusts, powerless even with his swarms of workers to put them out, he says, “Let it burn.” Nature with its conflagration rules. Flames of hell at the center of the film is simply a fact. It does not listen, nothing redemptive. Strangely, the ever-present twilight sets the tone. Though steeped in a heavenly glow, often of a ghostly sun or moon, a strain of hopelessness in the face of tragedy sounds throughout the film. For the background light of magic hour thrusts into the foreground as disaster strikes, transforming itself into hellfire as the tragedy of nature and the doomed love triangle, inseparable from the landscape, intensify. The characters are caught up in emotional flames just as the farm wagon and horses are caught up in the screaming flames of the burning fields. Throughout this extended sequence (over four minutes, and as central to the film as Bergman’s face of light we see describing the preacher’s

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errors at agonizing length), we hear no dialog and catch only glimpses of the characters. All is subsumed in a single image—fire. If Bergman’s agent light takes on different faces, furthering his tale, Malick’s character devours the environment, which becomes more important than the plot. For his early experience of light, undergone indirectly through the testimony of his brother’s tragedy, ignites the film. And all he can say as a director is “let it burn.” Yet as resigned as Malick is to light’s presence in his imagination as fire, promising no hope from nature, he offers a bit of comfort in his glimpses of the lyrical expanse of Texas landscape at the beginning and the sun seen from up through the stalks of wheat. And in an epilogue to the film he rescues an ember of hope from its ashes for Linda’s seed in the promised “days of heaven.” The same cannot be said of Bergman, whose low winter light, an ironic magic hour light, sustains a tone of unrelenting tragedy. A paradox pulses in this last chapter. Whether a postmodern light artist’s, poet’s, or filmmaker’s experience of light, all entail the recognition of its otherness and, at the same time, its relatedness. Light revealing itself to itself stands apart from them, resisting dialog. We have come a long way from light revealing itself to worshippers, initiating communion with God in church sanctuaries. Fittingly, Turrell, Mac Low, and Brakhage liberated their art from the confines of institutions, whether conventional galleries or theaters. Such venues had come under suspicion as discouraging “viewer” participation, so these artists embraced the larger environment of a work’s presence, creating a “situation” that enfolded the viewer in its act of light. The character of this light is comprehended by its “thingness,” its stubborn otherness, as well as its perceptual entanglement. It is no longer the bearer of revelation, as Turrell says, it is itself the revelation. For the character of light encountered in our age is suspicious of all meanings previously assigned to it, whether transcendent promises of eternity or earthly assurances of enlightenment. Consequently, postmodernist artists desired to free themselves of the inherited names of light, some as we saw with Mac Low and Brakhage driven. All shared an experience of its otherness. Frightening firelight for Kahn and Malick, it was oppressive mystery for Flavin and unsettling elusiveness for Bergman. And all struggled to discover the existential meaning of their encounter with light blossoming in expressions of a new relationship with its autonomous character. What escapes suspicion is that these postmodern artists found, ironically, powerful expressions for its thingness; its character having, as Brakhage puts it, “metaphored” in constructions, words, and images. Given such insistence on light as paradoxical, it is fitting that this book begins with stained glass projecting dark-light and ends with celluloid film projecting light-dark. What we experience, as we move from church to

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theater, shifts over the centuries from light as a transcendent but personal character to light as an unnamable, impersonal character. The paradox of light’s character in the former age consisted of its being transcendent and not; in the current age we live with the character of light being a thing totally apart from us and a presence with us. NOTES 1. To fully describe the laser’s concentrated beam of light required quantum mechanics. The laser, then, was a radical extension of Einstein’s imagination of light that dominated the early part of the century. The poet A. R. Ammons testifies to its unsettling effect, as the beam becomes the “mind’s light, confused,” then turns to itself as a “rigid beam illuminates the image” within the mind (A. R. Ammons, “Laser,” Selected Poems). An “image” is seen, he says, and “the mind is then locked with it, and what the mind needs most is some other, disorganized energy that it can use to break free” (quoted in Schneider, Ammons, from interview with David Grossvogel, 79). 2. Projected by forty-four seven-thousand-watt xenon lightbulbs installed on a base adjacent to the Twin Towers excavation site, created by Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda with other artists. Such a display could be used for other ends, of course, such as Albert Speer’s who on Mussolini’s visit to Berlin, September 28, 1937, lowered the vertical searchlights on both sides of the Maifeld Stadium toward the center until they crossed. Broadening over distance, these were far less intense than LaVerdiere and Myoda’s laser-like beams. Nevertheless, they created an exterior/interior space of mammoth size. As Speer said, “The actual effect far surpassed anything I had imagined. The hundred and thirty sharply defined beams, placed around the field at intervals of forty feet, were visible to a height of twenty to twenty-five thousand feet, after which they merged into a general glow. The feeling was of a vast room, with the beams serving as mighty pillars of infinitely high outer walls. . . . I imagine that this ‘cathedral of light’ was the first luminescent architecture of this type” (Major, Made of Light, 148, ill. 1). With advanced technology, interactive light spectacles have become commonplace in our times. Peter Freeman encouraged the public to change the lighting of his tower sculpture Spectra-Txt (2004) in Middlesbrough, UK, by sending it special text messages. And Rafael Lozano-Hemmer invited the public to change the canopy of light in the night sky over Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway, visible from ten miles away, created by his Open Air (2012) arrangement of twenty-four robotic search lights by sending messages via a custom iPhone app. 3. “Light pouring into matter,” “let us praise their equivalence,” de la O, “Natural History,” 38; intensity a function . . . light with matter, Plummer, Architecture, 10; takes a blackout to notice, Brox, Brilliant, 214, 233–238, 293.

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4. “Postmodern,” “material is spent light,” quoted in Plummer, Architecture, 10; “Turning and climbing, . . . the eating of light,” “thickenings of light,” Wilson, Why I Don’t Write, 42, 45. Coinciding with this shift, industrial light escapes its purely functional and taken-for-granted character. It appears in rock concert light shows as a performer in itself in the hands of artists such as Tony Martin, inventor of the original light show, including ones for The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and other groups. He worked at the Fillmore West in San Francisco until 1966 (https:​//​brooklynrail​.org​ /2002​/03​/art​/breakthroughs​-in​-light​-the​-work​-of​-tony​-martin) and went on to create light art works, such as Light Pendulum, an interactive installation (1971–1975); and for others see Robin Oppenheimer, “Maximal Art: The Origins and Aesthetics of West Coast Light Shows” (2009). This resonated with internal light shows, as sketched in “A Brief History of Psychedelic Light Shows,” https:​//​liquidlightlab​.tumblr​.com​ /. Their history goes back to Sadakichi Hartmann’s 1895 “Psychedelic Light Show,” which imagines that at Buddha’s entering Nirvana, a “color revery takes place in the universe.” This vision featured a “concert of self-radiant colors,” being a “vehicle of pure emotion” and an “incessant rain of luminous stellar dust” in a “kaleidoscopical symphony of color effects continually changing” (America a Prophecy, 101–103). On a hashish trip the Belgium poet and painter Henri Michaux has an interior vision, “It is all bright / bright to deprive me // What a storm the light is!” (Light through Darkness, 81; and see Castaneda, Journey, 225, 240; Argüelles, Mandala, 23, 29–30). A welcome light, that is, but not a welcoming thing. 5. “Glass farmers,” “great frames of slow glass,” “less than ten years thick,” “it takes light ten . . . the nearest star,” Shaw, “Light of Other Days” (thanks to Robert Friedman for calling my attention to this story); “great catenary,” “refracted, tuned, . . . builds on its own strength,” “cool and solid beam,” Helprin, Winter’s Tale, 560; Billout, Vision (Seaport Museum, Mystic, CT). And see Guy Billout’s Night Patrol, which features a waterfall of light cascading from a third-story window to the street as a patrol car approaches (November 2012, 95). The thingness of light we see in the stories of Wilson and Helprin was made memorably palpable earlier by Gabriel García Márquez in his story “Light Is Like Water” (1978), in which light fills a room and flows out a door (Gabriel García Márquez: Bon Voyage, Mr President and Other Stories, trans. Edith Grossman [New York: Penguin, 1995], 55–58). 6. After years of “living with the western earth” of California, Hildegarde Flanner in her essay “A Vanishing Land” (1950) singled out its “old mineral light” like no other in any other climate as it “falls into the eye and slips into the mind” (quoted by Gilbar, Natural State, 163). It is this unique light of Southern California that makes extreme demands on the artist. “I think the light of Los Angeles is the whitest light I’ve ever seen,” testifies the poet Paul Vangelisti (Weschler, “Los Angeles Glows,” 672). Seemingly present outside and inside us at the same time, this is an “uncanny light.” Even the diffuse light of Los Angeles is nearly as intense as full sunlight, which the cinematographer John Bailey could hardly believe, an inexplicable glow (Weschler, 667). This white sun is technically called “airlight.” The intermediate size of some particles in the Los Angeles atmosphere, that is, have about the same

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diameter as the wavelength of natural sunlight. These bounce “white sunlight directly back into my eye,” the environmental engineer Glen Cass says, like a “billion tiny suns between you and the thing you’re trying to see” (Weschler, 670). 7. “Nostalgic, . . . October,” “gunmetal-gray light,” “illumination so much as luminosity,” “thickness,” “sense of presence,” Weschler, “Los Angeles Glows,” 671, 675. The painter Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993), a generation younger than Turrell, completed his major work, “The Ocean Park Series,” when he lived in Ocean Park down the block from James Turrell. On moving to Los Angeles in 1967 Diebenkorn began this series, devoting the next twenty years to its paintings, capturing the “crystalline light” of Southern California, as Robert Hughes observed (Shock, 159). A New York Times art critic called this series of 145 paintings, which probes the artist’s experience of light’s thingness, “one of the most majestic pictorial achievements” of the second half of the twentieth century (Nordland, Richard Diebenkorn, 193). After encountering in Southern California what for him was a new light, the only “real” that he cared about, the artist confessed, was “real light” not place (Yau, California Landscapes, 32). A light he could only interpret for himself, only understand its radical character by a strange stratagem—“I arrive at the light only after painting it in, not by aiming for it” (quoted by Bancroft, “A View of Ocean Park,” 22). This most revealing statement marks Diebenkorn’s departure from his fellow California artists (see Plagens, Sunshine). His experience of an independent light opened such a phenomenological fault that he was constrained to take a radically new imaginative tack in order to interpret for himself exactly what had happened in Ocean Park. “I probably went to Santa Monica’s Ocean Park district because of the light,” he admits, “but I didn’t know it until I started realizing that I was very involved in this light.” At which time it became his “central theme,” the real subject of his work (Gruen, Artist Observed, 62). More than a theme, it was, after all, a paradoxical light—ocean-inflected “moist translucence” wedded with a crystalline inland desert dryness (Levitt, “Richard Diebenkorn,” 55). And Diebenkorn discovered that in order to express this experience, he must call not on nature but on the abstract, a “luminous, grid-based geometry” (Landauer, “Significant Space,” 50), a structure in which the light is in dialog with his “spatial crystals” (Nordland, Richard Diebenkorn, 148). Wherein each canvas possesses a light crystal of its own, as in Ocean Park #126, expressing a facet of light’s thingness. So alien was this character, which the painter found himself confronting and obsessively interpreting, that even his friend Tom Hess, on seeing his paintings, said he didn’t believe this light, feeling that there must be something “bogus” about the strange light expressed in these paintings (Gruen, Artist Observed, 62). This reaction is, of course, a measure of Diebenkorn’s hard-earned success in finding the personal meaning for the light he experienced in Ocean Park (e.g., Ocean Park #116). He managed, that is, to get its unique “signature” (Hughes, American Visions, 551). 8. “Age of Suspicion,” coined by James A. Wechsler in his political autobiography, The Age of Suspicion (New York: Random House, 1953); “spooky actions,” quoted in Clegg, God Effect, 3; “Light is essentially present to itself . . . outside itself,” Roubaud, Exchanges, 51. If in the modern era Einstein’s conclusion that light could bend

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was proven by experiment, in the postmodern age his conclusion, which he could not accept, that the quantum nature of light means nonlocality and lies at the heart of reality was also proven. This verified that light particles separated (as in Young’s double slit experiment) to opposite sides of the universe preserve their original connection, being “entangled,” violating the principle dear to classical science of locality. The proof in 1969 of nonlocality, one of the world’s leading philosophers of physics Tim Maudlin says, is the “single most astonishing discovery of twentieth-century physics” (quoted in Musser, Spooky Action, 11; see John Wheeler, “Experiment Confirms Quantum Theory Weirdness,” ScienceDaily [May 27, 2015], www​.sciencedaily​.com​/ releases​/2015​/05​/150527103110, accessed June 16, 2015, Clegg, and Musser). Einstein’s imaginative reading of his experience of light continued to have a powerful influence. Just as his interpretive metaphor (model) of the particle-wave had sunk into the consciousness of the modern age, so had his metaphor of light’s spooky actions, its quantum character, done the same in postmodern times. But with this arose an unease with science, with what was perceived as its incomprehensibility and unpredictability, as well as its reminder of our individual helplessness and its threat to authority, religious and political (Hobsbaum, Age of Extremes, 522, 530). Modern uncertainty morphed into postmodern suspicion, that is, not only of previous assumptions about light but of light itself. This imagination of light, extending quantum consciousness into the postmodern, permeates postmodern culture. Robert Pirsig develops a “metaphysics of quality” in order to come to terms with this experience, realizing that his interpretation of previous encounters, this “knowledge about the light,” had over the years become a burden to him. Now he became aware of light’s “independent existence,” light being neither objective nor subjective but rather possessing an “undefined auspiciousness” (Lila, 337, 339). Similarly, the novelist André VandenBroeck’s cinematographer hero after visiting the Paleolithic caves of Spain retrieves a “qualitative light,” which he contrasts to science’s quantitative light. And he traces the particles of the subatomic microcosmos “back to the elementary photon,” turning this “energetic quantum into a world of light, stopping time’s clock.” Insisting on the “quality of fact,” such as the quantum, he engages in the project of his “light-machine.” His goal being not the “enhancement of light” but, as he says, “it’s light itself I’m after. Pure seeing,” claiming that science had gone wrong “when it abandoned the idea of quality” (Breaking Through, 1, 11, 33). 9. Postmodernism as a new stance in the world, having a wide-ranging suspicion of inherited, assumed ideas of authority, emerged from the earlier part of the century as a broader social and cultural transformation. In a sense it was simply another mode of modern thought, characterized by the French philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard, who introduced the term “postmodern” in 1979, as “incredulity toward meta-narratives” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Postmodernism”). This suspicion of overarching stories that implicitly claimed to explain everything, such as the flow of history, the development of religion, the progress of science, or the institutionalization of authority, whether political, commercial, aesthetic, or religious, permeated the late twentieth century.

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The “otherness” of light emerges directly from Einstein’s quantum reformulation of light. He imagines a light that breaks into material reality in a “relationless” way, as David Grandy says. It cannot be made “commensurate” with our familiar sense of material space and time. Light is inherently inscrutable, that is, and the “inscrutability of light informs the inscrutability or otherness of the outside world.” Its alterity is fundamental. It is “always there—away from us as something other—” yet it is also “here, for absolute apartness or absence would render it imperceptible and unknown.” So as Grandy points out, since we do know it, it is “part of us, even though its very essence, it seems, sets it apart from us” (Grandy, “Otherness of Light,” sections 7–8). Light as other behaves in new, unexpected ways, at times contradictory. We experience light as an alien thing we want to avoid and at the same time as a food we desire. Examining a crystal, whose “facets have parted time / and allowed perfect stillness to exist,” the poet Clark Coolidge is struck by its strangeness. “I look into its Light,” a light neither “absorbed not reflected.” It is “poised” (Coolidge, Crystal Text, 106 [emphasis added]). A fleeting experience, perhaps, of what Octavio Paz imagined— “Light is time thinking about itself”—wholly self-absorbed in its otherness (Paz, “Sight and Touch,” Collected Poems, 575). And yet desire for light wells up. The “Eyes drinking light, transforming light,” as the poet Muriel Rukeyser testifies, who desires “a dialogue of light” (“Waterlily Fire,” Muriel Rukeyser, 206). 10. “to be manifest,” “really the source of all being,” quoted in Plummer, Poetics, 55; “movement,” “mountains . . . been spent,” “at a point . . . singularity,” quoted in Lobell, Between Silence and Light, 5, 24 (emphasis added). 11. “Radiant City,” Corbusier, Radiant City, 3; utopian desires of Corbu never became Kahn’s, Tyng, Beginnings, 13. 12. “Magnificent play . . . in light,” quoted in McCarter, Louis I. Kahn, 2, 136. Kahn redefined modern architecture by reasserting the significance of ancient monuments, such as the Pantheon that he adored, and the primary art of construction. His was an architecture that began with the single room, not the building. As he said, a plan is a “society of rooms. A real plan is one in which rooms have talked to each other, a place bound up with natural light” (McCarter, 224). 13. Moody one . . . being static, “related to the character of light,” “structure is a design in light,” Kahn, Writings, 131, 314; “All building is not architecture,” Kahn, “Lecture at International,” 161. Kahn was inspired by Corbu’s 1960 aphorism, “Even a space intended to be dark should have just enough light from some mysterious opening to tell us how dark it really is” (Frampton, “Louis Kahn and the French Connection,” 130). And writing to a friend after seeing Corbu’s chapel at Ronchamp, he said, “the building is a coming together of spaces boldly and even violently meeting each with its own light quality. I felt all humility before this masterpiece of Corbusier’s” (quoted in Marcus, Houses, 63). In fact, as he confessed in a notebook (June 7, 1955), he “fell madly in love with it” when he saw its photo in the Sunday Times (Lesser, You Say to Brick, 147). So Kahn was a student of Corbu’s though the great modernist was unaware of it. In turn, the quintessential postmodern architect Frank Gehry was influenced by Kahn, having great reverence for him. 14. “What slice . . . building have?” “Stevens seems . . . side of a building,” Lesser, You Say to Brick, 309.

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15. Scars he bore . . . fierce primal light, Lesser, You Say to Brick, 323–324. 16. “Desire to express meets the possible,” “prevailing luminous source,” “wild dance of flames,” “settles and spends itself into material,” “spent light,” Tyng, Beginnings, 178–179. 17. “Prevailing luminous,” “ignite a wild dance of flaming prevailance [sic],” “emmergance [sic] of Material,” quoted in Lobell, Between Silence and Light, 23; “desire to be to express,” “To be to be,” “crossing,” “sanctuary of art,” “the singularity,” quoted in Tyng, Beginnings, 179. In his bottom image, also framed by commentary, he draws a few short horizontal lines from which radiate some simple lines. We are tempted to see these as signifying light, but instead they focus us on the center that suggests absence, what he called at one point the “lightless, darkless” void, the source of “shape,” material reality (Tyng, 137). 18. “Fire is, . . . subject and object,” Bachelard, Psychoanalysis, 111 (emphasis in original). This explains Kahn’s Self Portrait with a Cigarette (Philadelphia, 1946), done during his formative period as an architect (Friedman, “Kahn Burning,” n.p.). In this image Kahn limns himself in light/fire against a black background, the same fire/light at the end of the cigarette hanging from his mouth and of the scars streaking his cheeks, which remind us of the ink strikes in the lower rectangle of the sketch we saw earlier. And this is why he was attracted to George Cruikshank’s illustration to Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1860), finding its achieved luminosity entrancing and no doubt disturbing. In the drawing a man sits at a table across from a woman by a fire. The walls receive its radiated light, which catches the folds of the female’s dress. This, of course, aside from Kahn’s being impressed with Cruikshank’s skill in capturing the luminosity of light, conjured up his deepest image of flame. 19. “Harmony is formed by notes of light,” Tyng, Beginnings, 130; “settles and sends itself into material,” Lobell, Between Silence and Light, 4, 20; “tame its fierceness,” Tyng, 137. 20. “Greatest and most seminal design,” McCarter, Louis I. Kahn, 182; releasing . . . between its walls, Plummer, Masters of Light, 176. Kahn had invited the architect Luis Barragán to consult on designing the central court of the Salk Institute as a garden, but on arrival Barragán took one look and said he would not put “a tree or a blade of grass in this space. This should be a plaza of stone, not a garden” (quoted in O’Leary, “Consequential,” 549). Kahn agreed, opening a narrow, central channel of water to the sea (inspired by the Alhambra). 21. Jonas Salk with whom Kahn formed a close relationship . . . he did, Lesser, You Say to Brick, 196; repeats along the massive walls . . . quiet luminosity, Plummer, Masters of Light, 176; “spent light,” “belongs to Light,” Kahn, “Silence and Light,” 229; “like a line of flame,” “gathering darkness,” McCarter, Louis I. Kahn, 209. 22. Kahn’s favorite building, Brownlee and Delong, Kahn, 227; “plastic and fluid power,” Plummer, Masters of Light, 188. 23. Rooms structured . . . luminosity of liquid silver, Kahn, Writings, 228. Mexican architect Louis Barragán, . . . silence, O’Leary, “Consequential,” 550; “religion of light,” quoted in Buttiker, Louis I. Kahn, 147; wildly out of character for him, Lesser, You Say to Brick, 218; “offering to light,” Lobell, Between Silence and Light, 94;

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“play of lofty rooms,” “augustly,” quoted in Plummer, Masters of Light, 188. The architect Luis Barragán expanded Kahn’s imagination of light and awakened him to silence being the “singular and intimately felt quiescence of pure luminosity.” Barragán had a “seminal influence” on Kahn with regard to the interplay of light and silence, though Kahn did not express silence and light in his work as Barragán did (O’Leary, 548–549). It is out of the “lightless, darkless” void that what Kahn called the luminous and nonluminous “auras” emerge—silence and light. Kahn was tempted to mythologize these as two brothers, one the “desire to be” and one the desire “to express,” but knows they were “really not two brothers.” They are “not even One,” as he says. These exist together in the luminous realm where desire becomes creative action. Here the desire to be and to express manifest themselves as an “aura,” which Kahn terms “Silence.” Yet this is not the work of art itself, the “Sanctuary of Art” in a “non-luminous” material world. Rather, the aura of “to be to be,” the created work itself, he terms “Light.” Having crossed over, the work itself embodies the dialectic of silence and light—of primal light and “spent light,” neither existing in a differentiated state. That he felt the urge to interpret this dialectical character of light as the interaction of two brothers goes very deep into Kahn’s psyche, implying a separation from himself, as if he is both a subject encountering light and an object encountered by light (not surprising given his traumatic childhood accident). The fact that he does not mention his real brother Oscar, his biographer Wendy Lesser suggests, indicates how deeply his death, after Kahn came to America with his parents to Philadelphia in 1905, had sunk into the architect’s psyche (Lesser, You Say to Brick, 119). 24. Back and forth . . . into material, Lobell, Between Silence and Light, 64. 25. “It is physical,” “it is photon,” “accord to light,” “thing-ness,” quoted in Govan, “James Turrell,” interview; Both he and Kahn . . . light, Julia Brown, “Interview,” 22. And Turrell was perhaps inspired by astrophysicists who, not many miles away from Turrell, in a room beneath the Lick Telescope on Mount Hamilton, were constructing a synthetic ruby crystal that would emit a laser beam so intense and uniform that it could reach the moon, strike a mirror recently placed on its surface, and make a half-million-mile round-trip (providing a measurement of the moon’s distance from earth to within a few meters) (Harbison, Lasers, 1). Finding expression in laser technology for his encounter with light, Turrell later in his career made holograms of light’s presence itself, such as his H-X, Unna. He realized that the real and virtual universe constructed by the holographer is a “new way of seeing seeing.” For the hologram is itself a “multidimensional light sculpture, at times obscure,” as Dan Schweitzer has said, “other times frighteningly lucid” (Berner, Holography, 72). A viewer can see a hologram side to side, walk into it as into sea waves, being enveloped. This settled into the imagination not only of postmodern artists but of neuroscientists (Karl Pribram) and physicists (David Bohm) who built theories derived from the hologram that appear to account for all transcendental as well as “normal” experience (see Re-Vision 1.3/4 [Summer/Fall 1978]: 3). The ethnobotanists Terence and Dennis McKenna speculated that the “proclivity of the mind to elaborate symbolic totality metaphors,” such as myths, is “reflective of the holographic structure of the psyche” (McKenna, Invisible Landscape, 47).

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26. “Quality and sensation of light itself,” “really quite tactile,” quoted in Adcock, James Turrell, 53; “My art deals with light itself,” “not the bearer . . . the revelation,” quoted in Butterfield, Art of Light, 74. 27. “Reverberant,” “bouncing around,” “What do we mean by ‘reality’?” quoted in Butterfield, Art of Light, 9; “architects of nothingness,” Melinda Wortz, quoted by Butterfield, 16. The Light and Space artists included Maria Nordman, Douglas Wheeler, Larry Bell, Eric Orr, and on the periphery DeWain Valentine (see, respectively, Butterfield, 95f, 117f, 175f, 151f, 189f). Neither László Moholy-Nagy, who was largely unknown to the Light and Space group, nor Thomas Wilfred used pure, direct light as their medium. But on a visit as a teenager with his aunt to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Turrell discovered the work of Wilfred. And he remembers staring at one of his “light boxes,” enthralled by its shifting lines of shadow and color (Hylton, “Lights, Action”). Later, Turrell encountered a work by Wilfred that, as he said, “stopped me in my tracks.” It was Vertical Sequence, Op 137 (1941), a “glowing orbit of light slowly rotating and spreading about auroral spectra.” It was “arresting for sure.” More important, he remembers, it was not a “depiction of light—it was light, alive.” This became for Turrell what Turner’s work had been for the Impressionists (Turrell, “Forward,” 16). And he believed that Wilfred’s “torch” was still being carried in the light shows often accompanying rock performances (“Forward,” 18). Neither Moholy-Nagy’s Light-Space Modulator nor Wilfred’s Lumia, however, used light as light, their principal material and subject (Perrreault, “Literal Light,” 131, 133–134) but as modulated by a mediator, respectively, a light space sculpture and a Clavilux. But Moholy-Nagy’s sometime colleague Gyorgy Kepes, who influenced Corpron, envisioned works of pure light from powerful lights or lasers, creating sculptures of light carved out of air and massive sprays of water, such as what he called a “tree of light,” a “light tower,” and “light architecture.” These experiments could be viewed as a “prologue” to James Turrell’s some years later (Perl, “Hell-Bent Idealists,” 14). These artists employed light as a means of expression, as did Otto Piene in his “Light Ballets” and the Zero Group in their kinetic art of light and movement of the 1960s, but Turrell and Irwin were first to liberate light as itself, a light neither representing nor signifying. In contrast to the modern, Corbu, who insisted what he expressed in Ronchamp Chapel was a “signifying light” (for an overview of Turrell’s antecedents, such as El Lissitzky and Piet Mondrian in their light and space installations, see Butterfield, Art of Light, 10–13). 28. Description adapted from Butterfield, Art of Light, 71, and Adcock, James Turrell, 8. 29. Description adapted from Dorment, “James Turrell,” 543–544. 30. “Present and there,” “made of light,” Birnbaum, “Eyes & Notes,” 228; “cube,” “hypothetical,” “reality that appears . . . as ‘real’ reality,” Butterfield, Art of Light, 71. After losing his lease on the Mendota Hotel in 1974, Turrell spent seven months flying over the western states looking for a bowl-shaped space that could change the shape of the sky, bringing it down into the viewer’s vision. He found Roden Crater, an extinct cinder cone volcano on the edge of the Painted Desert, near Flagstaff, Arizona, which he began to transform into a work of light art. His most ambitious piece, he has

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been laboring on this ever since, insisting that like all his work it demands “viewer” participation. It is an event. And when we participate, a “universe of possibilities” will be offered, he says, for the Roden Crater has “knowledge in it,” a wisdom of time such that his previous works do not have. “It is an eye, something that is itself perceiving,” and it does not end but is “changed by the action of the sun, the moon, the cloud cover, by the day and the season that you’re there,” and “it keeps changing.” From “within a visual setting of geological time,” Turrell says, the “crater will sense and respond to celestial time,” exposing what are “perhaps the most profound connections between light and space” (Adcock, “Light, Space, Time,” 130). Here, taking art into nature, Turrell says, “instead of competing with the sunset, I wanted to use it, as light” (Lindner, “Interview,” n.p.). This monumental earthwork, an American Stonehenge, though enfolded into rather than placed upon the earth, uses as its basis a 500,000-year-old cinder cone, a nearly perfectly symmetrical crater a mile in diameter and seven hundred feet high surrounded by the level Painted Desert floor. Its chambers, dictated by the four cardinal directions, frame various light fields. At the volcano’s crater he created forms to “capture the light, to hold it, . . . give it the space to reside.” With this architectural form he attends to “how the light is gathered as a quality when you are in the space and out of the space,” the participant poised at the interface (Laaksonen, “Interview,” n.p.). Just the crater, not an art institution, it has no labels on the walls, no track lighting, no security guards, no gift shop or restaurant. Roden is cleansed of reference to the artist, the art object, the art institution, even civilization (Hapgood, “Roden’s Eye,” 52). The Roden Crater has been called Turrell’s most “ambitious” and “personal” project (Hylton, “The Light Fantastic,” 36). 31. When we look at Monet’s haystack we are seeing a record of his seeing the haystack, an interpretation. Turrell removes the haystack, in effect, so as he says, you are “looking at your seeing.” And this is “direct experience, as opposed to interpreted experience” (Lindner, “James Turrell,” 107–108). The luminists came face to face with the phenomena of light, but this meant meeting its spiritual essence. For these painters, light was not to be “honored” for its own sake; it was a bearer of spirit. Likewise Turrell’s contemporary Mark Rothko (until Rothko’s death in 1970), whose moist, vibrating light seemed to rise right out of his paintings. They appeared themselves to be a source of light. Yet Turrell eschewed this pictorial tradition as well. Rather, he embraced the “technological tradition” of California, concretizing the illusion of light in Rothko’s painting (Wilde, “Light Spaces,” 54) by using ingenious lighting constructions and state of the art lamps, such as a quartz-halogen projector with xenon bulbs. He made no distinction, unlike his predecessor artists, between artificial light and natural light. To him either means burning a material; “so it doesn’t matter to me,” he said, “whether you have to light electric fires or use the one in the sun or a reflection of it off the moon. It is all ‘natural light’” (quoted in Julia Brown, “Interview,” 15). 32. “Address the light,” “we see in dreams . . . from those dreams,” quoted in Birnbaum, “Eyes & Notes,” 230; “I remember . . . with the nightlight,” “providing just . . . enough light,” “above my bed,” “pictures, all that you could imagine,” “juncture,”

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“this picture . . . outside seeing,” “I say ‘outside seeing,’ . . . just as in a dream,” quoted in Torres, James Turrell, 13. 33. “Sensing space,” “space looking at another space,” “deriving its characteristics from that space,” quoted in Butterfield, Art of Light, 70. Specifically, his Projection Series the first of which he projected into corners of his studio. He made these pieces using an intense beam of light from a xenon projector directed through a plate masked off to create its specific shape. With these he discovered that he could change the space itself by how light enters from outside it (King, “Into the Light,” n.p.). 34. “We dream in color,” “lucid dream,” “resolution of clarity . . . sunlit morning,” Lindner, “James Turrell,” 108; “light passing through it at 186,000 miles per second,” “cloud,” “we’ve given cloud thingness,” “bring light to the place . . . the dream,” “where you feel it to be some thing [sic] itself, . . . other things,” “objecthood of light, . . . revelation of light itself,” quoted in Laaksonen, “Interview” (emphasis added). An avid pilot, Turrell has logged over twelve thousand hours flying and considers the sky his studio, material, and canvas (http:​//​jamesturrell​.com​/about​/introduction​/); here “you can feel things with your eyes” (Wilde, “Light Spaces,” 56). This was an “empty medium,” as the perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson observed, a medium filled only with light that was at the core of Turrell’s experience. Heightened by the Ganzfeld light of a flight through fog, this fundamentally involved “seeing rather than looking,” as Adcock says; the “viewer sees light, but does not look at any object” (Adcock, James Turrell, 219–21). 35. All bathed in red light, . . . artist’s work being inseparable from the participant’s perception,” Jovanovich-Kelley, “Review,” 146. 36. “We look at light . . . revelation of something,” “rather than light’s illumination of other things,” “I’m interested in its thingness, . . . kind of ability,” “effects,” “trying to take something . . . as much reality in the world as any thing [sic],” quoted in Lennox, “James Turrell,” 40. 37. “Investigates,” “I’ve removed a lot of the thingness of objects,” “substituted the thing of perception and light,” quoted in Lindner, “James Turrell,” 108; “objectless colored field,” “absolutely homogeneous,” Zyman, “Other Horizon,” 18; “begins to realize itself slowly,” “between sportive lovemaking . . . someone you love,” quoted in Laaksonen, “Interview,” ARK. This was so intense in his “City of Anhirit” that people fell and had to crawl out on their hands and knees, while in another work a couple simply lay down and made love. This sense of disequilibria of the Ganzfeld experience can “at once be exciting as well as terrifying,” suggesting the “luminous emptiness or filled voice” of a sudden spiritual awakening like the satori of Zen Buddhism, with which for a few years Turrell was deeply engaged (Zajonc, “Liberating Light,” 51). Because Turrell had studied perceptual psychology in college and had worked with Dr. Edward Wortz, a perceptual psychologist at Garrett Aerospace Corporation, in an “Art and Technology” program launched by the Los Angeles County Museum, Turrell “could see seeing itself,” articulating this in visual terms (Adcock, James Turrell, 60). Out of his experiments for the Art and Technology program, which Irwin had invited him to participate in, came Turrell’s Ganzfeld pieces. Also, he knew Maurice

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Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception well, which explores the relationship between perception and illusion. 38. “To accord light the ‘thingness’ that it should have,” “thing,” Lennox, “James Turrell,” 40; “spooky actions,” “strangely powerful role,” “almost awarded light a consciousness,” “going inside to greet the light,” “light in everyone,” “appear to have . . . awareness all its own,” last quoted in Zajonc, “Liberating Light,” 56. 39. “As a child,” “Speaking for the Light,” “wished to touch the light of dreams / . . . as powerful as the lucid dream,” “thing-ness of light / That light itself becomes the revelation,” quoted in Govan, Retrospective, 49; “you must first become hopelessly lost,” Hylton, “Mesmerizer,” 37. 40. “Canal Street aesthetics,” Turrell, quoted by Govan, Retrospective, 119. 41. “Light was an industrial object, and familiar,” quoted in Govan and Bell, Dan Flavin, 9; “optical circus,” “own self,” Kosuth, “Nominal Three,” 18. Flavin distinguished between fluorescent light and neon light. Neon lights were customized lights, while fluorescent lights were standard industrial lights. Neon was for a specific purpose; fluorescent lights were completely versatile. These cannot be used to write or portray and have no connotation of attention-grabbing, commercial showiness. In contrast to Flavin, the neon artist Bruce Nauman used the language of neon light in the late 1960s to write words or phrases, reveling in their garish glow and aggressive messages (with rare exceptions, such as Left Standing, Standing or Left Standing, 1971/1999 [Ketner, Elusive Signs, fig. 36]). He was as irreverent as Flavin but very far from him in not granting the independence of the light object, basically concerned about the meaning rather the being of light (Ketner, 16, 25). The works of Mary Weatherford (b. 1963, Ojai, California) exploit the expressive potential of neon but wedded to painting, which she often surmounts with one or more carefully shaped and placed colored neon tubes. Though appropriated by earlier artists for its consumerist and linguistic connotations, she transformed the industrial material into a radically new form of abstract, pictorial drawing. Inspired by the colored neon signs of old factories and restaurants in Bakersfield, California, some illuminated, some burned out, she created The Bakersfield Project (2012), the first paintings in which she incorporated neon tubes. They are screwed directly into her heavy linen canvas and connected by thin wires to transformers on the floor, which create a three-dimensional drawing on top of her sponge-painted background. 42. “Apprehended . . . in sunlight,” “rank suppression . . . ‘heavenly host,’” Flavin, “‘In daylight,’” 189. 43. “Clarity obtains my mind,” Fuchs, “Dan Flavin and the Illusions,” 24. 44. “Sustain itself . . . dramatically,” Ragheb, “Of Situations and Sites,” 11; “composed solely of fluorescent light, . . . forty-five degrees,” “common . . . fluorescent light,” Weiss, “a/o,” 7; “I want clarity,” “not mystification,” quoted in Licht, “Dan Flavin,” 62. 45. “Spatial container,” “not restrict . . . enfold it,” Flavin, Dan Flavin, 191; inextricable from their environment, . . . “situations,” Ragheb, “Of Situations and Sites,” 12. Flavin knew, as did Turrell, that the “actual space of a room could be disrupted and played with by careful, thorough composition of the illuminating equipment.” For example, “if an eight foot [sic] fluorescent lamp be pressed into a vertical corner,

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it can completely eliminate that definite juncture by physical structure, glare and doubled shadow” (Flavin, Dan Flavin, 191). 46. “Light is to the room as decision is to consciousness,” “figure forth an interior process,” Wilson, “Dan Flavin,” 144, 147. 47. “Word works,” “complexity and ingenuity,” Bernstein, “Jackson Mac Low”; “The ceiling of his study collapsed, . . . directed his making of these poems,” O’Driscoll, “By the Numbers,” 109; Department Payroll Distribution form . . . Funk and Wagnalls, Mac Low, Complete Light Poems, 15. 48. “Gathered,” “1st Light Poem,” “by chance operations,” Mac Low, Complete Light Poems, 319–323; “wherein he invites other persons,” “co-creators with him,” Antliff, “Situating Freedom,” 51; “quarks and sparks,” Bernstein, “Jackson Mac Low.” 49. “I will not always be . . . the works,” Mac Low, Thing of Beauty, xxx. As a lifelong Buddhist, Mac Low believed that his aleatoric method was a way to get beyond the ego, though he later discovered it to be inescapable (Mac Low, xxxii). Rejecting the labels “postmodern” and “avant garde,” he quotes Gertrude Stein: “Well, I’ll use at least the lexical words in some way, the roots of some words, but otherwise I’ll change things around,” which Mac Low considered a useful approach (Mac Low, “Making Poetry,” 58). He employed “chance operations” (aleatory) mainly from 1954 to 1960. But the “deterministic” methods he used from 1960 to 1963 allowed inevitable chance mistakes, yielding unpredictable results. One of these was “acrostic” where he reads through a source text and finds successively words, phrases, and sentence fragments that “have the letters of the seed text as their initial letters.” Another was “diastic” where he “spells through” a text, drawing out linguistic units from it that “have the letters of the seed text in corresponding positions” (Mac Low, Thing of Beauty, xxxi). In 1960 Mac Low and Judith Malina, founder of the Living Theatre, collaborated with John Cage on a chance-based theater piece. As did Tony Martin, the pioneering San Francisco light show artist in the 1960s, utilizing similar methods, saying, “I find something essential in the flow and interdependency of choice and chance” (Robin Oppenheimer, “Maximal Art: The Origins and Aesthetics of West Coast Light Shows,” rhizome.org/editorial/2009/apr/15/ maximal-art-the-origins-and-aesthetics-of-west-coa/). 50. “Schema of antiquated, . . . names of light,” Mac Low, Thing of Beauty, xxxiii. 51. “Writingways,” Mac Low, Thing of Beauty, xxxiii; “sees light, . . . experiences light,” Mac Low, Complete Light Poems, 16. 52. Mac Low no doubt would have accepted Richard Rorty’s assertion that “speaking differently changes a culture” (Mac Low, Thing of Beauty, xxxiii). Thus he sets out to receive new speech from light itself and change our names of light in accordance, echoing Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic of responsive imagination. That is, imagination responds to the world it refigures and “prefigures through the process of semantic innovation,” new language shattering the old inherited language, the hardened names for light (Kearney, Poetics of Imagining, 178). Mac Low takes upon himself the task to “interpret the images of the other [light] and to transfigure” his “own image of the world in response to this interpretation” of light’s offering (Kearney, 180).

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53. “All light is relevant . . . / to all light,” Mac Low, Complete Light Poems, 55; “real” world, Kearney, Poetics of Imagining, 170. 54. To reconnect them . . . existential interpretation of this gift, Kearney, Poetics of Imagining, 177. 55. “Student-lamp,” “light of a spotlight,” “sapphire light / shimmer,” “Evanescent light,” “kindly light,” “ordinary light,” “Actinism / atom-bomb light,” Mac Low, “1st Light Poem”; “old light . . . opal light,” . . . “old light . . . owl-light,” Mac Low, “2nd Light Poem,” Complete Light Poems, 23–24. 56. “Those wishes . . . nebulae,” “before / . . . lamp,” Mac Low, “7th Light Poem,” Complete Light Poems, 37; “Can emerald . . . money?” “spectrums / . . . aurora’s,” “remembered . . . flames,” 39; “Yes. / It is all about light,” “follow . . . noonday,” “the experiment . . . clearer,” “14th Light Poem,” 55. 57. “A nimbus,” “the tall . . . swept,” “Boomelay . . . boom,” Mac Low, Complete Light Poems, 57. 58. “Can the light . . . division?” “in a vivid . . . call,” “adverb,” Mac Low, “22nd Light Poem,” Complete Light Poems, 116. 59. “Noonlight,” “the effect . . . light,” “ensure . . . juncture,” “aurora australis [sic],” inactive, . . . language,” “Nothing . . . context,” “even . . . verb,” Mac Low, “22nd Light Poem,” Complete Light Poems, 116–17. 60. “Aurora . . . process,” “an emerald . . . dance,” “imagined,” Mac Low, “23nd Light Poem,” Complete Light Poems, 119; “Amber light of regret,” “32nd Light Poem,” 182. 61. “Altair’s . . . altar,” “Many lights,” “mountains cluster,” “spangled over hillsides,” “Neutral light,” “glows above their ridges,” “All the light . . . enough,” Mac Low, “39th Light Poem,” Complete Light Poems, 313. 62. Like Mac Low, his contemporary the poet A. R. Ammons (1926–2001) was acutely aware that light exists both inside and outside his imagination and abhors closure, erecting “no boundaries, / shutting out and shutting in, separating inside / from outside” (“Corson’s Inlet,” Selected Poems, 44). But unlike him, Ammons reconciles himself to the inescapable otherness of light, its refusal to be captured by language. For “the mind’s sun piles up into the sun, and the outside world is always there to remind us, alien and unapproachable as it is” (Elam, “Radiance,” 282; Ammons, “Mind,” Diversifications, 72). The postmodern poets celebrate this light, obsessively naming it, but cannot shake their profound experience of its alterity. Ammons names it “radical light” (“He Held Radical Light,” Selected Poems, 60). A light of generous character, for “When you consider the radiance,” he explains, “it does not withhold / itself but pours its abundance without selection into every / nook and cranny not overhung or hidden” (“The City Limits,” Selected Poems, 89). Yet at the same time, being constantly in motion, this radiance evades the poet’s grasp (Ammons, Sphere, sec #59; and see Complete Poems, “Summerian Vistas,” Sec 2: Tombstones, #23 [1987]). That is, light can be one and many, inside and outside the imagination, at once a graspable “thing” and an evasive “other,” which epitomizes the postmodern relationship. A younger poet who overlapped with Ammons, Christopher Buckley (1948–) was also taken by radiance. But their divergent interpretations of this light surface the

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difference between the modern and postmodern experience of light. His relationship with it is fundamentally modern. For Buckley, unlike Ammons, vibrates in this world to a “lustrous chord” (“Old Light,” Fall from Grace, 54–56), and he is content with this (“Radiance,” White Shirt, 34–35; and see “Against Theory,” Fall from Grace, 65; “Poem Freely Accepted from the Polish,” Sky, 51–52; “Allegro Non Troppo,” Star Apocrypha, 63; and A Short History of Light). In fact, he wants to “live forever in this light” (California Poetry, 281). By contrast, postmodern times have seen the flowering of contemporary light-obsessed poets, who unlike Buckley find that making a companion of light is not easy. It is ours and not ours. This ambivalence intensifies in our century, imaginatively clarified by postmodern poets who encounter a light that leaves them “bereft” only to “flood us with sensation” (Khalvati, Entries, 66; and see Diaz, “Skin-Light,” poem-a-day, May 4, 2018). Regardless of how much we want to “Let light speak,” knowing that “It diverts / the world / into being” (Nguyen, “Sunrise,” 130), we are compelled to face the fact of its utterly self-contained character. As Octavio Paz famously concludes, “Light is time thinking about itself” (“Sight and Touch,” Collected Poems, 575). And try as we might to domesticate it, light insists on its otherness (see Charles Wright, “Outscape” and “Sundown Blues,” Sestets, 17, 65; Homero Aridjis, “The Light,” Eyes, 192–199). 63. In his magazine, Caterpillar (1967), Clayton Eshleman published poems by Mac Low along with film stills by Stan Brakhage; forged the lyrical film, . . . the camera, Sitney, Visionary Film, 160. 64. “Must know,” “encountered . . . perception,” Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, 1; “bestowal,” much aware, he said, that “Film as film shapes itself most usually in The Present as Gift,” Brakhage, Brakhage Scrapbook, 121 (emphasis in original). 65. “I am a match . . . being consumed,” Brakhage, Brakhage Scrapbook, 2; “the stars are optical . . . the universe is,” Brakhage, 138 (from “The Stars Are Beautiful,” 37 numbered statements). 66. “I think,” “there is some . . . cross-currents,” Brakhage Scrapbook, 134. Robert Grosseteste’s De Luce was an important source for Brakhage’s assumptions about light (as it was for Louis Kahn), namely, that the whole universe derives from one creation—light (Wees, Light Moving, 100). 67. “That’s us and everything we’re seeing, . . . outside in,” Ganguly, “Interview”; “my eye, tuning . . . for its sights,” “mind’s eye awareness,” Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, n.p., “My Eye.” 68. “An eye unruled by . . . perspective,” Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, 1; “adventure of perception,” Brakhage, 1; “We are led to believe a lie / . . . eye,” Brakhage Scrapbook, 74; “beginning of The Dance,” “shattering out . . . of sight/light,” “with the light” not through the projector . . . mind/imagination to our eye, Wees, Light Moving, 77, 96. This desire arises from his deepest experience of light. “I see so many qualities of light,” Brakhage told an interviewer in the early 1970s, “so many things that seem to be light but aren’t anywhere categorized as such or spoken of as such or referred to by other people as such.” More insistently, he admitted that “at this time in my life it is the variety of the quality of light that I see, and live with daily.” The downside

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being that this experience “removes” him from feeling that he shares by sight with others (Brakhage Scrapbook, 183). For “Most people,” Brakhage said in a 1974 interview, “move along certain channels of prescribed light” and don’t look at the qualities and varieties of light. They’re only trained to use it as “something bouncing off objects, or papers, or signs; finally, even the objects cease to exist” (Max Nelson, New York Review of Books, June 18, 2017, https:​//​www​.nybooks​.com​/daily​/2017​/06​ /08​/brakhage​-when​-light​-meets​-life​/). Brakhage trained himself as a filmmaker to see qualities of light that others did not by cultivating what he calls “Hypnagogic vision.” This is “what you see through your eyes closed,” he says, “at first a field of grainy, shifting, multi-colored sands that gradually assume various shapes. It’s optic feedback: the nervous system projects what you have previously experienced—your visual memories—into the optic nerve endings.” This “closed-eye vision” was very important to Brakhage—“I sometimes like just to sit and watch my closed eyes sparking” (Ganguly, “Interview”). Hence his advice to students begins: “find the darkest room available to you” (Brakhage Scrapbook, 70). Turrell, of course, took this a step farther, making art from it in his “Dark Spaces” and “Perceptual Cells.” 69. “Act of seeing,” “movement of light,” light brings him, visual noise . . . system itself, Wees, Light Moving, 78–79, 84, 100; “slow montage . . . splays of light,” Sitney, Visionary Film, 388. 70. “Urgency,” “maker’s experience,” “most clearly of all things a gift,” Brakhage, Brakhage Scrapbook, 203. 71. “Lens itself and its crystal extension,” Sitney, Visionary Film, 389; “I exhausted everything I know,” “why it has the title it has,” “extensions of light taking place,” “construction . . . whole world,” “metaphored for me,” “I had exhausted . . . elsewhere,” “then I stopped shooting,” Brakhage, Brakhage Scrapbook, 214. In Brakhage’s The Riddle of Lumen (1972), as he describes it, “‘the hero’ of the film is light/ itself” (247). And in The Shores of Phos: A Fable (1972), “Phos = Light,” a “specific country of the imagination with tangible shores” (249). 72. “Always holding the camera in hand,” “for hours. . . . the scene,” “as I saw what . . . shoot the camera very slightly,” “quivering attention of the hand,” “in mind: . . . extended in memory,” “was the dance real?” Brakhage, Brakhage Scrapbook, 207–208. Brakhage describes the surprising circumstances of this film’s making in a friend’s business office (204). And we see in The Text of Light the most evident influence of Gertrude Stein on Brakhage’s art (as she was on Mac Low’s). As he said in 1992, Stein’s “Stanzas in Meditation” more than any other poem “has inspired most of my filmmaking, and almost all my aesthetics” over the last half-decade or so (Brakhage, Essential Brakhage, 198). That is, just as Stein had to “defeat the traditions of descriptive writing, so too must Film free itself from descriptive or referential limitations” (199). 73. “In that ashtray . . . observed,” “less generous scientists of our time,” “matter is still light. Light held in a bind,” “what this ash tray . . . solid seeming shape,” Brakhage, Brakhage Scrapbook, 205–206; “light-streaks . . . That I call light!” “up-shoots,” “be light shooting up, that shapes plant-like things,” Brakhage, quoted by Wees, Light Moving, 101.

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74. Open to infinity and flat as the screen itself, “documenting the instant . . . extinguished in corporeal forms,” Wees, Light Moving, 101, 103. 75. Low-key lighting meaning mystery or threat, Thompson, Film Light, 9. For the Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro light serves narrative. He viewed his work as “writing with light in the sense” that “I’m trying to describe the story of the film through the light.” It does not become itself an actor. In selecting the light for a film, his rule was to use only the “kind of tonality, that kind of feeling and that kind of color” that he thought “right for the story” (Schaefer, “Writing with Light,” 15, 17). 76. In some settings it becomes a character in itself, Thompson, Film Light, 59. Malick’s penchant for visual contrast in exterior sequences is to some degree derived from F. W. Murnau’s stylization, although he limits this to black-and-white contrast. Still employed to tell a story, the later director’s light, uniquely, does not simply illuminate but participates in the film along with its characters and objects. And the graphic and chromatic “execution of the shots depicting a spacious landscape,” the film critic Vlada Petric has observed, “can be seen as ‘homage’ to Edward Hopper, while the concept of diffused light in interiors,” which is rare (created without the use of artificial light sources), is a “cinematic transformation of the luminous atmosphere found on canvasses by Jan Vermeer” (“Days of Heaven,” 40). Malick reimagines, that is, their imaginings of light, making them his own. 77. “When the light walks something is happening,” referring to Cries and Whispers, Eder, “To Bergman,” 28; “as strong as a good actor,” Schaefer, Masters of Light (Almendros), 15. Each of these films expresses their respective director’s relation to the light. Yet we cannot forget that making a movie is a collaborative art of director and cinematographer. The director drives, however, while the cinematographer navigates; together they arrive at a mutually agreed upon destination. Recognizing this, Almendros says the film is “not ‘our film’ but ‘his film’” (Almendros, Man with a Camera, 4), knowing that Malick and he shared the sense of light being as strong as a good actor. Bergman and Nykvist, being sons of ministers and making over twenty-two films together, had a special partnership. Both were “utterly captivated by the problems of light,” as Bergman said, the “gentle, dangerous,” the “dreamlike, living, dead, clear, misty, hot, violent, bare, sudden, dark, spring-like, falling, straight, slanting, sensual, subdued, limited, poisonous, calming, pale light” (quoted by Thompson, Film Light, 163). Preparing for Winter Light, Bergman in order to “properly explore the availability and the possibility of natural light” took Nykvist to the cold country church in Northern Sweden where it was to be filmed. And the cinematographer tells us, “we sat there for the three hours. Every five minutes he had me take a photograph and when we finished I realized how all these tiny shifts of light worked out into what he was trying to do” (Eder, “To Bergman,” 28). 78. “I used to sit under the dining table . . . the cathedral windows,” “The cathedral bells went ding-dong,” “and the sunlight . . . in a special way,” terrifying light, Michaels, Terence Malick, 16; important . . . ostensibly represents, Thompson, Film Light, 153. Malick’s biographer, Lloyd Michaels, suggests that the automobile disaster, which also killed his brother’s wife, had in all probability a great psychological impact on the director (Michaels, Terence Malick, 16).

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79. “Truly magical, . . . coming from,” “The sun is not to be seen, . . . undergoes strange mutations,” Almendros, Man with a Camera, 182. Both Winter Light and Days of Heaven are grounded in Christianity but not Christian in any theological sense. Bergman’s is about God’s absence revealed by the low-angled, uncanny winter light of Sweden standing in the church in place of God; and Malick’s about God’s (nature’s) indifference suggested by the foregrounding of a fire-lit landscape that dominates even the love triangle at the center of the film. Bergman’s “existential agnosticism” informs his film, just as Malick’s spiritual humanism informs his (Ketcham, Influence of Existentialism, 184). And a coming apocalypse haunts both works. In Winter Light a parishioner early in the film comes to the pastor and seeks help for her husband who cannot shake the fear of an atomic apocalypse threatened by China. Similarly, in Days of Heaven, the kid sister, Linda, whose voiceover narrates the film, tells us what she heard from a man she met on the freight as they left Chicago to find opportunity in the vast wheat fields of Texas. Named Ding Dong he relates a biblical prophecy, saying, all will be fire one day, “the whole earth is going up in flames.” 80. “I think I have made just one picture that I really like,” “and that is Winter Light,” quoted in Ketcham, Influence of Existentialism, 146. Bergman’s title was The Communicants, unfolding between noon and 3:00 p.m. on a winter Sunday, which his American distributor changed to Winter Light, a nod to its main character—winter light. “Through communion,” Bergman explained, “we can accept the appalling fact of total aloneness” (Gado, Passion, 293). This film is the central one of a trilogy: Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963), and The Silence (1963). 81. “Light is not only an event,” “it is also a character,” Eder, “To Bergman,” 28. 82. Events are linked . . . “polyphonic structure,” Petric, review, “Days of Heaven,” 39–40. 83. Malick, Days of Heaven, filmscript, https:​//​www​.scripts​.com​/script​/days​_of​ _heaven​_843.

Conclusion

Light is a wonderfully insistent presence in our life. It manifests itself in subtle and not so subtle ways, such as the flakes of radiance from disturbed water or the dazzle of noon sun pouring into us. And whether we hold our encounters with it at arm’s length or embrace them, we have found ourselves in relationships with a gloriously insinuating character. For rather than something that shines on us, we enter light as light enters us. We may find this exhilarating or unnerving, but we cannot separate ourselves from light or light from ourselves. And our interactions are fundamentally unconscious physical ones, inseparable from our sensing body—reflected, refracted, and diffracted photons registering on our eye as well as on our skin. We participate with light in a mutual enterprise. And by exploring this glorious and mysterious reciprocity, another dimension in the history of consciousness is revealed.1 Because we cannot escape its enveloping us, we experience the endless facets of its character. My story has been that of individual encounters with light. Some witnesses seizing on its brightness or radiance, others on its rays or glow. And, in each case, they find themselves living with a palpable presence. Often light being their instructor, sometimes judge, even bearing names long unmoored from experience. A fundamentally paradoxical character because they would not see light if not for its interacting with matter, refracted by droplets of moisture in the sky or reflected from objects around them. From earliest times we have found ways of making sense of these encounters as well as giving conscious expression to them. Interpreting their core experiences of light, abbots to artists have charged them with a multitude of values. They have been compelled to discover the significance of light experience in their lives and express this. They imagine some experiences of light as revealing the structure of the cosmos or the anatomy of light itself, or if they are patient, providing the key to the meaning of their own existence. In addition, these interpretations often have great cultural impact. Gothic cathedrals born of Abbot Suger’s experience of the refracted light of precious stones became the light of God himself for nearly four hundred years. And a sea 283

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change in the Western view of nature was largely effected by the poet William Wordsworth’s experience of a radiant light in an English valley. THE WEAVE OF IMAGE AND MEANING We’ve seen that these encounters and interactions with light are inseparable from personal testimonies relating the varied experiences of light centered in a palpable “core” image of light. And testimonies, we know, are interpretations of what is seen, inferences from our experience. Our leading character, then, proves to be none other than patterns in the mind, our perception and imagination together creating personal meanings. These are driven, in accordance with our visual experience, by metaphors, as we’ve seen, such as “particles” (Newton), “lunacy” (Dickinson), and “objecthood” (Turrell). Each being a metaphor for a reality beyond our senses. Investing their physical light encounters with personal values, scientists, poets, and artists drew threads from their psychological and biographical history and wove larger patterns of meaning. Moreover, in their desire to further comprehend this tapestry, they often turned to symbols and beyond to symbolic systems, commonly metaphysical (Suhrawardi) or religious (Suger). As such, we’ve seen how our core experience of light—the initial image in an encounter that lodges in our consciousness—easily takes on meaning by our imaginative weaving. This experience was commonly charged with religious and aesthetic valuations, often overlapping. The “glorious” and “mysterious” aspects of light, which Reverend Hunter identified, dominate its “common” and “simple” aspects from medieval to postmodern times. Because light is beautiful in itself, as Robert Grosseteste declared, it becomes the ground of aesthetic value. Likewise, because our encounter with light can feel like liberation from a “profane universe” or turbulent times, opening a gateway to the “transcendent and the holy,” as it did for Suhrawardi, it often becomes the foundation of religious or metaphysical conviction. As light’s beauty or mystery is elaborated further, however, this can also alienate us from the manifold character of light. The fabric of our light experience can be torn, the imaginative interpretation of light severed from the core image. And as elaborated systems of light’s personal meaning become culturally mainstream in artistic or religious traditions, they often congeal into conventional forms over time. Yet neither the abbots nor artists, scientists nor architects we’ve met ripped the woof threads of interpretation, their life-changing encounter with light. Often this weave of image and interpretation in the human consciousness, we’ve learned, resides in light’s paradoxical character or the need to resolve personal contradictions. The Renaissance artists came face to face with this

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character in light’s problematic relationship with shadow, to say nothing of its paradoxical invitation to “look for the beauty of light in its invisibility.”2 And poets such as Wallace Stevens wrestled with tensions triggered by the paradoxical relationship of the sun and the imagination in their encounters with light. When this fabric is torn, when interpretation parts from the fundamental image given by a light experience, the unique character of light is abandoned. Aware of this, Wallace Stevens and Stan Brakhage struggled mightily to reject inherited “names” for light, as we’ve seen, interpretations of personal experiences that had become abstracted as cliches, in order not to lose sight of the energetic and generative light of their core experience, the fate of many poets and filmmakers. Think of the light reified in effect by the spate of film noir works, compared to Murnau’s powerful expression of his experience of light and darkness. Looking ahead, the architect Corbusier wove a vision of future social change from the beauty and, to his mind, moral force of light generated by the arresting image of light off a white Grecian wall. But he did not cut himself off from his physical encounter with a glorious light. Clearly, the truth of the image at an individual’s core experience of light forces a new valuation, a metaphoric weaving to achieve new knowledge, its existential meaning, while demanding faithfulness to the initial image. THE STRANGE EPISODIC HISTORY OF LIGHT Given its focus on the core experience of light, this book is as you have no doubt noticed an odd history. It does not move so much across time, propelled by cause and effect, as into it, motivated by experience and its imaginative interpretation. It has simply related various episodes involving past encounters with light. We have probed patterns of the mind generated by these, revealed in their resulting artifacts of light, from cathedrals and paintings to skyspaces and light objects. On occasion we have observed the influences of one person’s experience of light on another, such as Giotto’s on early Renaissance painters, Turner’s on Monet’s, or on an entire later culture, as we have seen with Einstein’s imagination of light. But because light experience does not improve or get closer to reality, regardless of the human relation to light changing over time, we have not traced any path toward a single conclusion.3 Rather, the story of light as experience insists on being episodic because all human relationships with light are equally valid. This book is thus a modest enterprise, having merely examined successive testimonies that reveal new aspects of light’s character, offering no grand narrative. More curator than chronicler, then, I cannot conclude here that we have arrived at some ultimate

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Figure 8.1. Hannes Grobe, A, Lower Sun Pillar Seen in the Antarctic. April 7, 1990. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Creative Commons https:​//​upload​.wikimedia​.org​/ wikipedia​/commons​/f​/ff​/Antarctic​-light​_112​_hg​.jpg

truth but only found ourselves in possession of a richly textured fabric of truths. No one experience, that is, gets closer to the “real essence” of light or its “secret nature,” which histories of advances in the study of the nature of light and vision, such as optical sciences, take as their mission. In fact, this book denies the assumption underlying such a mission, that light “out there,” as if a stone, is distinct from light “in here,” its representation in the mind. Rather, our light experiences occupy a space between these, both being rooted in our individual physiology and psychology. Thus we lack the ability in our relationships with light to distinguish between the so-called real light of science (optical/physiological) and the phenomenal light of experience (perceptual/conceptual) because the body is the locus of all encounters with light. After all, “we eat light,” as the lightspace artist James

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Turrell reminds us, “drink it in through our skins.”4 In truth, in the world of light as experience and imagination there is no distinction between real and phenomenal. Light is one. Proceeding episodically, however, does not mean light experiences through time have no continuity. As cultures change, of course, so do light experiences. Yet what does not change is our attraction to light. Robert Grosseteste felt this to such a degree that he christened “physical light” the “most delectable, the most beautiful of all the bodies that exist.” In all ages light has drawn us into intimacy, sometimes triumphantly as it did László Moholy-Nagy, providing the “Light-design” of his life, and other times painfully, as for Dan Flavin. We have seen continuity as well in persistent manifestations of light continually revisited but given new significance in successive times. Salient facets of light’s character such as brightness have universally intruded into our experience, although it has been invested with different values in each age, from Suhrawardi’s encounter with brightness, saying that “light is evident, and its being evident is its being light,” to the brutality of light’s brightness, its rays daggering Caravaggio’s world. And, in contrast, Constable later marvels at the fundamental character of the light he met in the Stour Valley—its “freshness” and “zest.” Similarly, light’s relationship with darkness has taken on various values in experience. Abbot Suger’s experience of gemstone light-dark, which he translated into stained-glass windows, he understood to be incarnational light, one that resolved for him the paradox of the Incarnation. By contrast, darkness for Giotto, specifically shadow, resolved the problem of space, one that viewers would recognize as earthly. Leonardo, of course, wedded light and shadow, understanding them as inseparable. And Corbusier, fascinated by the “decomposition of light and shadow” on a vase or other object, embraced a “signifying light” in his Chapel at Ronchamp, generated by the alternation of complementary lights and shadows. While certain manifestations of light thread our story from the beginning, we’ve seen at the same time discontinuities from age to age. Although the common and simple, glorious and mysterious character of light has always been evident to our witnesses, as it was to Reverend Hunter, we have seen profound shifts in the consciousness of light. From period to period we have seen thresholds crossed in relationships with light. These have derived from the changing nature of experience, such as the image revealed directly by commonly available light (Dürer) or indirectly by artificial means, such as prisms or carefully tailored spaces (Newton and Vermeer), or special apparatus, such as Thomas Young’s double-slit paper. The image of energy at the heart of an individual’s core experience of light, as we have seen, changed greatly from the medieval period, Grosseteste’s light being “physical cosmic energy”; to the revolutionary period, Turner’s light being the energy of

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transformation; to the age of uncertainty, Einstein’s light being a wave-weight (light inseparable from gravitational field). Another core image that proved to be experientially pivotal was Young’s “field” in the Age of Technology. Undeniably, this metaphoric interpretation of his experience of light, what science would call a “model,” affected subsequent perceptions of it. The previous age revealed relations to light as unstable, vibrating (Turner), while the subsequent age encountered light as a stable force field (Young), which shaped Monet’s experience of a “visual field,” which in turn replaced the “visual world,” epitomized by his “envelope of light.” Light no longer mediated by atmosphere as in the previous age, that is, but inseparable from a field of vibrations carried and bound by air-light. This shift was as significant as that from the relationship with light as a seamless phenomenon in the Renaissance, assumed since Paleolithic times, to light as composed, a robe in the Enlightenment period whose threads could be untwisted. As a result, in former periods light was experienced as having a subordinate role to universal geometry (Piero), while in the latter light became a subject in itself, insisting on attention (Caravaggio, Rembrandt). We have also discovered notable shifts in the interpretation of light experience from age to age, which have followed from shifts in the working of imagination. Our metaphoric interpretation of experience often changes subtly, such as the essential “spiritual” light of the Middle Ages becoming the functional “instrumental” light of the Renaissance. Or an assumed world of forms becoming one of forces.5 Other times radically, interpretive changes accompanying the advent of new technology. The camera in the Age of Technology, cinema in modern times, and laser in postmodern have profoundly impacted interpretation. Within the framework of the experiential field, photography revealed for the first time in history the actual “footprint” of light, effecting a new sense of light’s relation to time (reinforced later by Einstein). The individual for the first time had access to a “minute” light perceived solely by the “optical unconscious.” Such was expressed in Carleton Watkins’s interpretation of his Yosemite Valley light. Watkins’s sheer photographic “factiness” had great influence on subsequent ages. His was a democratic medium, available to all classes, but an outlet of individual expression that the advent and spread of an industrial light earlier did not foster. The radiant city brought to all by electrification was a democratic visual field, an awesome and quintessentially modern experience of light, a new sun liberating us from “solar temporal rhythms,” but one at the same time unsettling, uncanny in effect.6 Cinema, however, born of the marriage of photography and electrification, not only introduced a new experience of light but changed our relationship with it forever. Remaking the imagination, for its interpretation was informed by a character of light perpetually on the move. Furthermore, it was imagined

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as a light of independent action, its own agent, as we saw in Murnau’s film of the modern age and later in those of Bergman and Malick. Light was no longer simply illumination but an independent entity in their experience. Possessing no transcendence and pointing to no beyond, being neither metaphysical nor symbolical, it was “just sunlight in itself” as Edward Hopper declared. Accordingly, a liberated light “hovers” unconnected to the representational world, as in the “cameraless” images of Moholy-Nagy and Carlotta Corpron, replacing objects in the world as subject matter.7 The imagined image possessed its own authority. Here was a new relationship with light in the face of shattered absolutes, sustaining a provisional continuity in a world of discontinuity (Age of Uncertainty). Here was a character of light possessing an irreducible “otherness,” emblematized in postmodern times by the laser. Even assuming self-awareness in the imagination of artists, as the seeing of light shifts in this age to the viewer’s seeing of their seeing. Light art thus not to be viewed so much as experienced, not to be exhibited so much as a “situation” to be participated in. And at the heart of the postmodern age was the experience of light as a “thing” inseparable from our perception of it, having a reciprocal relationship. Whereas in previous times we either viewed it (Piero, Vermeer) or it challenged us (Leonardo, Dickinson). Furthermore, we saw the shift earlier to light as subject, but now we see a radical shift to what Turrell called its “thingness,” its pure physicality (a radical extension of Grosseteste’s “corporeal” light). No longer the bearer of revelation but itself the revelation, light’s postmodern character proved to be paradoxical—alien and familiar. Fittingly, as the Age of Uncertainty gave way to the Age of Suspicion, for this brought all inherited certainties about past interpretations of light experience into question. As a result, we saw in postmodern poets and filmmakers an obsession with finding light’s “true” name, an interpretation fundamentally faithful to their deepest experience of its character. Based on their personal encounter with light, previous figures had often rejected inherited names, as did Suhrawardi, Newton, and Monet, but now Jackson Mac Low and Stan Brakhage are truly oppressed by inherited testimonies of light. So they resolve to plumb their experience of light to its deepest reaches in order to discover an image of light wholly free of cultural convention, including language itself. Mac Low, as we learned, fails in this; Brakhage succeeds. WHAT WE KNOW OF LIGHT’S CHARACTER AND WHY IT MATTERS At this point it is evident that any generalizations about light’s character over time are undercut by its involvement with ourselves as individual knowers

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within time and language, being a function of personal biographies and exigent conditions of geography and culture. Lacking a unitary conclusion about our relationship with light and its morphing over time, then, we turn to a couple of basic questions that yet may haunt us: What do we really know about light? Why does it matter? Approaching those light eaters who have shed light on light in our investigation, we can return to Reverend Hunter’s summary of light’s character as a framework for some answers. Light being radically democratic in its commonness, filling every nook and cranny of our world and appearing to everyone without distinction, we have seen that what we know is bound up with what we hear in personal testimony—interpretations—from individuals, each encountering a different facet of the “being” called light. And what we hear in their testimonies, whether in paint or poetry, is light telling us about itself, revealing aspects of its character. This is all we have because, of course, we cannot touch light, although light is nothing less than the world, objects themselves being in a real sense “worn-out light.” They reveal themselves to us, that is, only because they absorb light or bounce it to us. We remember Kahn’s naming the experience of his “crossing” from image to “spent” light, his completed work, the “singularity” that he lives within. And Flavin’s encountering the “unknown in sunlight,” which by contrast he shuns. All that either could do is take light at its word in their lives, the triggering image, and construct patterns from this core experience to explain it to themselves. They realize that they must start from the stark realization that “it alone says without saying.”8 And what light says is simplicity itself. It reveals a self-contained character who acts independently, as every one of our witnesses testifies, energetically radiating from all points. At the same time, entwined with our lives, light encompasses a complex range of human interpretation from the “spiritual” of Grosseteste and Suhrawardi to the “factual” of Newton and Watkins. The experience of each of our witnesses is, as we’ve seen, necessarily both. Light’s very character, that is, challenges us to abandon cherished notions of fundamental divides in the world. Clearly, with light itself we belong equally to nature and culture. And we are thrust back on our imaginative interpretation—patterns in the mind—because in the end, as we’ve learned, light consists fundamentally of propositions about light. In the core experiences of light we’ve seen there is no divide between a witness admiring and their studying light, between the physical and the spiritual, literal and figurative, as Vermeer and Young alike found. Light dissolved temporal and spatial boundaries, respectively, for Einstein and Turrell. And being the light design of his life erased corporeal-incorporeal ones for Moholy-Nagy. For the image triggers an imaginative response, which exploits metaphors seducing both sides. This dynamic accounts for testimonies of a protean light having many faces, even being contradictory. Yet its

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being a democratic and constant character inseparable from our experiencing self is what in the end we know about light. But if light is merely propositions about light, what have we gained by attending to individual testimonies of light experiences down through the ages? As you’ve discovered in this history, we experience light physically, emotionally, and intellectually as self-generated, evoking the very image it gives birth to in our experience. And because this image becomes a “site of possibilities and departures” for imaginative interpretation that is at once its very drive and arrival, light reveals us to ourselves.9 Just as our moral imagination has profoundly expanded over the centuries, so our imagination of light has expanded to include its dialog with shadow along with its erupting and raking drama, as well as to embrace fields of light and the “envelope” of light, to say nothing of its “thingness.” By our relationship with this paradoxically simple and complex character, giving it an air of mystery that some interpret as sacred, others as an “amber light of regret,” it reveals our authentic self. One coevolved with light as it generates images in its interaction with matter, being reflected by a river or diffused by the sky. Our eyes are products of light just as light is a product of our experience. My history of encounters with light, then, has exposed thread by interpretive thread, woven over-under and into cords of core light experiences, fundamental dimensions of human consciousness. Accumulated stories of the relationships with light we’ve heard have revealed layers of light experienceimagination from medieval to postmodern times. These do not progress, approaching a final truth, as we’ve learned, but rather yield a richly layered tapestry of human experience. This expands our consciousness of what it is to be human in our relation to the world. Namely, the complexity of our interaction with light defines us to a large degree as human beings. This also gives us an enlarged sense of our imaginative powers as well as expanded range of sensibilities, the realization that our needs and desires are matched by an unmatched interpretive imagination. And finally, this layering of light experience deepens our knowledge and understanding of the power of beauty. It is primarily light’s beauty that seduces us, some falling for it completely as did Suhrawardi and Hopper, or questioning it as did Dickinson. But after hearing testimonies from these and others, I suspect we would agree that the world reveals more beauty the more that light is known to us. And in so doing enhances our “sense of existence,” creating a glorious place where it is simply a pleasure to be and where we feel an “increase of life.”10 My hope is that this is reward enough, if not the single conclusion we may desire, for time spent with this book.

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NOTES 1. Registering on our skin, David Orenstein-Brown, “Skin’s Eye-Like Receptors ‘See’ UV Light,” https:​//​www​.futurity​.org​/skins​-eye​-like​-receptors​-see​-uv​-light​/. 2. Roubaud, Exchanges on Light, 26. 3. Arthur Zajonc sees two strands of the imagination of light: scientific and spiritual (Catching the Light, 251). These, he says, developed over time largely in isolation from each other until the First World War, but following its horror they faced each other (Steiner vs. Planck). Yet we see them facing each other in Grosseteste’s and Newton’s experience (the latter opposed by Blake), and he admits that light cannot be reduced to matter or motion or, I would add, to spirit; it is a reality in itself, a unique being in the world recognized by all our witnesses (260–61). The “unsettling” radiant city finds its complement in Isaac Asimov’s famous story, Nightfall (1941). He describes a world with six suns and perpetual sunlight that encounters night for the deeply unsettling first time (thanks to Robert Friedman for this reference). 4. “Real light,” “phenomenal light,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, quoted by Cathryn Vasseleu, Textures of Light, 42–43; “we eat light,” “drink . . . skins,” James Turrell, quoted by Michael Govan, “Inner Light: The Radical Reality of James Turrell,” James Turrell: A Retrospective, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 13. Accessed April 31, 2014. https:​//​www​.randomhouse​.de​/leseprobe​/James​-Turrell​-A​ -Retrospective​/leseprobe​_9783791352633​.pdf. 5. David Summers considers this one of the great transitions in the imagination of light; it shifted from an “assumed world of forms to one of forces,” working with a “universal metaoptical framework,” which was “basic to the rise of modern science and technology. In this world the human mind becomes a kind of counterforce,” part of the ongoing project of defining subjectivity (Real Spaces, 551, emphasis in original). 6. “Solar temporal rhythms,” Summers, Real Spaces, 554. 7. “Hovers unconnected,” Victoria Martin, “A Short History of Light,” Artweek (October 1998): 12. 8. “It alone says without saying,” Roubaud, Exchanges on Light, 9, 29. 9. “Site of possibilities and departures,” Roubaud, Exchanges on Light, 47. 10. “Enhances our sense of existence,” “increase of life,” Plummer, “Light Matters,” pt. 2 [n.p.]. The architect Juhani Pallasmaa reminds us that light “plays a crucial role in helping us become fully conscious of our existence in the world,” and as we have seen, “provokes interaction at an immediate, visceral and pre-cognitive level with the light we encounter” (quoted by Plummer, The Architecture of Natural Light, 13).

Bibliography

Included here are books and articles referenced in my endnotes from which I have learned much, influencing my approach in general and illuminating the “languages of light,” such as paint and architecture. Items marked with an asterisk (*) are of central importance as well as of interest for further reading. Additional references can be found in the endnotes, which define key methodological terms, review scholarly debates on issues pertinent to my argument, and occasionally broaden the scope of my investigation. ‌‌The Abrams Encyclopedia of Photography, edited by Brigitte Govignon. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004. Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton, 1971. Acedo, Aurelio Cid. The Alhambra in Focus. Translated by Jon Trout. Granada, Spain: Edilux, n.d. Ackerman, James S. “Alberti’s Light.” In Studies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Painting in Honor of Millard Meiss, edited by Irving Lavin and John Plummer, I:1–27. New York: New York Univ. Press, 1977. ———. “Leonardo’s Eye.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 41 (1978): 108–48. Ackroyd, Peter. Turner. London: Vintage, 2005. Adams, Ansel. Natural Light Photography. Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1952. ———. Yosemite and the Range of Light. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1979. Adams, Henry. Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959. Adams, Stephen. “The Luminist Walt Whitman.” American Poetry 2 (Winter 1985): 2–16. Adcock, Craig. “The Interface Between Exterior and Interior Light.” In Mapping Spaces, edited by Craig Adcock et al., 17–26. New York: Peter Blum, 1987. ———. “Light, Space, Time: The Visual Parameters of Roden Crater.” In Occluded Front: James Turrell, edited by Julia Brown, 101–135. Larkspur Landing, CA: Lapis Press, 1985. ———. James Turrell: The Art of Light and Space. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990. 293

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Index

Page references for figures are italicized Abbot Sugar, xvi, 2–7, 168, 194n60, 283 Afrum (white), Turrell (1966), 247, 248 Alberti, Leon Baptista (1404– 1472), 53–54 Alhambra, 3, 20–24 Ammons, A. R. (1926–2001), 266n1, 278n60 Architecture. See languages of light The Arnolfini Portrait (1434), 59 Basilica of Saint-Denis, 6, 3–7 Bergman, Ingmar (1918–2007), 261–63, 265 Blake, William (1757–1827), 123–27 Brakhage, Stan (1933–2003), 257–61, 265; “I am a match,” 258–59; The Text of Light, 259–61

Clavilux, 207, 224n34 (Wilfred) Color, xxn6 Columbian Exposition (1893), 195 Complete Light Poems, Mac Low (1988), 255 Constable, John, (1776–1837), 140–42, 287 constant vs. fitful light. See window vs. mirror Conversion on the Way to Damascus, Caravaggio (1601), 85 Corbusier, Le (1887–1965), 196, 216–19, 287 Corpron, Carlotta (1901–1988), 196, 207–10, 219 Court of Honor (White City), 195 Crystal Palace (1851), 162–63

The Calling of St. Matthew, Caravaggio (1599–1601), 86 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da (1571–1610), 68, 81–89, 287; breaking and raking light, 84–87; rhetoric of light and dark, 87–89 Chartres Cathedral, 8–9 chiaroscuro, 64–65, 88–89, 142 cinema. See languages of light, film

Dante, 24–27 Days of Heaven, Malick (1978), 261–63 Diagonal of May 25, 1963, Flavin, 252 Dickinson, Emily (1830–1886), 164, 168–72, 185, 284; lunacy of light, 169–170; peculiar light, 170–72 Dove, Arthur (1880–1946), 228n54 Dürer, Albrecht (1471–1528), 49, 60–62, 65–68, 287 357

358

Index

Edison, Thomas, 195 Einstein, Albert (1879–1955), xvi, 196, 199–201, 218, 285 electric light. See industrial light Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803–1882), 162 film. See languages of light fire, 134–40, 142, 242–43, 258–9, 261–65 Flagellation of Christ, Piero (1460), 57 Flavin, Dan (1933–1996), 251– 253, 265, 287 Flowing Light, Corpron (1946), 209 geometry vs. particularity of light. See window vs. mirror Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), 49 Giotto di Bonedone (c. 1267–1337), 49, 50–52, 285, 287 Goya, Francisco (1746–1828), 125–27 Great White Ways, 195 Grosseteste, Robert, 1–3, 10–14, 284, 287; creational light, 13–14; delectable light, 11–13 Hagia Sophia (Church of the Holy Wisdom), 32n14 Hall of the Two Sisters (1345–1391), 24 Hopper, Edward (1882–1967), xvi, 196–97, 210–16, 219 House by a Pond, Dürer (1495–1496), 67 image. See languages of light industrial light, 175–76, 185, 196 Isaac of Akko, 15 Jan van Eyck. See van Eyck Jan Vermeer. See Vermeer Kahn, Louis Isidore (1901–1974), 238, 241–45; the scar, 242–44; taming light, 244–45

landscape, 56, 61–62, 65–67, 76n36, 129, 140–42, 164, 172–73, 177, 180, 192n52, 211; Chinese, 42n48 Lane, Fitz Hugh (aka Henry) Lane (1804–1865), 165–67, 185 languages of light, xvi, xxin11; allegory, 243; architecture, xvi, 3, 5–12, 14–15, 20–24, 167–8, 194n60, 216–19, 241–45; film, xvi, 195–99, 229n59, 257–65; image, xvi-xviii, xxiin12, 2–4, 7–8, 12–16, 18, 20, 24–25, 27, 28n3, 128, 136, 198, 202–03, 211, 243, 248, 251–57, 264, 284–85, 287, 289–91; inherited, xvi, xxiin13; metaphor, xvi-xviii, xxiiin16, 2, 258, 284–85; painting (and painters), xiii, xv, xviii, 50, 52–53, 55–60, 69n1, 134–35, 191n48, 228n54; painting (impasto), 140; painting (oil), 75n30; poetry (and poets), 24–27, 124–25, 128–34, 169–72, 201–4, 253–57, 266n1, 278n60; reification, xvi, 285; sign, 2–3, 7, 12, 197; stained glass, 4–10, 33n16; symbol, xvi, xviii, 2, 24, 28n3, 133, 284; testimonies, xv-xvi, xviii, 178, 219, 248, 290. See also light laser, 196 Leon Baptista Alberti (1404–1472). See Alberti Leonardo da Vinci (1452– 1519), 60–64, 67 light, xxn7; addiction, 197; amber light (Mac Low), 256–7; assaulting, 19; beauty of (aesthetic perception, emotion), 2, 4, 10–12, 14–15, 27, 28n3, 29n5, 62, 104, 125–26, 129–31, 136, 138, 217–18, 285; beauty of (moonlight), 128; breaking (Caravaggio), 84; brightness (bright-dark), 2, 4–5; brightness (dazzle-darkness, radiance), 34n19, 53, 171, 287; brightness (gemstones), xixn2, xxn7, 2, 7–8, 24; bursts,

Index

217 (Corbusier); character, xiv-xv, xviii, 69, 81–83, 87, 89, 93–94, 97, 100, 132–34, 137, 141–43, 163, 165, 169–74, 176, 178–83, 196–99, 207–10, 213–14, 216–19, 238, 242, 244, 249–58, 261–63, 265–66, 283, 285, 287, 289–91; common, xiii-iv, xvi, 18, 81, 141, 284, 287; construct, xiii, xiv; contemplative (Corbusier), 217; corporeal (Grosseteste), 12; crescendos (Corbusier), 217; cultural document, xiii; design (of life) (Moholy-Nagy), 205; encounter with, xvi, xvii; experience of, xiv, xvi-xviii, xixn2, xxiin12, 2, 13, 28n3, 54, 58, 60, 88, 93, 95, 113n33, 120n67, 129, 198, 202–3, 205, 243–45, 248–49, 251–52, 254–55, 258, 262–63, 284–85, 288, 290–91; fluorescent (Flavin), 251–53; freshness (Constable), 141; glittering, 19; glorious, xiii, xiv, 140, 252, 283–85, 287, 291; highlights, 50; history of, xvi; independent, xvi; inherited names of, 254, 259; instrumental, 50–51, 54, 58, 61, 288; interpretation of, 28n3, 35n21, 38n37, 39n38; invisible force, xiii; lucid light (Mac Low), 255; lumen, 11; luminosity (luster), 18, 50, 55–56, 60, 62–63, 112n29, 165, 205; luminous darkness, 3, 7; lunacy (Dickinson), 169; lux, 11; magical, 22; moral character (Corbusier), 217; mysterious, xiii, xiv, xvi, 2, 9, 196, 213–14, 218, 252, 262, 283–84, 287; natural, xiii; numinous (Grosseteste), 12; nur (Arabic), 16; objects, 251–53; otherness, xv, xvi; patterned interplay (Moholy-Nagy), 205; phenomenal, 286; physical phenomenon, 49–50; pure (Suhrawardi), 18; radiance, 3, 17, 58, 128, 132–33, 137, 205; received names of (Mac Low), 257;

359

reception of, 53–54; reflected, 23, 56, 62, 125, 129, 132–33, 136–38, 140–42, 161; refracted, 11, 125, 129, 132–33, 136–38, 140–42, 161; raking (Caravaggio), 84; revelation, 213, 246; seduction of, xiii, xxn7; simple, xiii, xiv, 2, 11, 20, 284, 287, 291; sparkle, 55; spiritual, 50; sublime, 106, 125–27, 128, 129, 130–38, 140–41, 165, 196; testimonies of, xiv, xvi; thingness, 237–40, 246–52, 254; transformative, 84, 89, 197; undifferentiated, 50; vibrating, 9–10, 21–24, 101, 125, 142–44, 161, 163, 165, 178–79, 180, 184–85, 259, 288; vortex of, 136–40, 161. See also languages of light; shadow; sky; space; sun Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory): The Morning after the Deluge, Turner (1843), 139 Light and Space, Corpron (1946), 210 Light and Space artists, 246 Light-Space Modulator. See Moholy-Nagy Lincoln Cathedral, 12–14 Lower Sun Pillar seen in the Antarctic, Grobe (April 7, 1990), 286 Luminists (painters), 165, 179, 187n11 Mac Low, Jackson (1922–2004), 253– 57, 265; “Amber Light of Regret,” 256–57; quest for lucid light, 255–56 Malick, Terence (1943-), 261, 263–65 man walking on a lighthouse beam, Billout, 239 Mohammad V, 21 Moholy-Nagy, László (1895–1946), 196–97, 204–8, 219, 287, 289 Monastery of La Tourette, Corbusier (1960), 217 Monet, Claude (1840–1926), xvi, 164, 177–85, 285; the envelope, 179–81; Rouen Cathedral series, 181–84 Morning Sun, Hopper (1952), 214

360

mosque, 20 muqarnas, 22–23 Murnau, Friedrich W. (1888–1931), 196–99, 219 naturalism, 87 Newton, Isaac (1642–1726), 81, 102–6, 284 Ocular Age, 162–64 On Light (de Luce), Grosseteste (c. 1225), 11–12 Orchard with Sunbeams and Fog, Frye (2014), xiv painting. See languages of light perspective (linear), 53–55, 57–58, 63, 68–69, 72n17, 73n19, 77n42, 80n58, 178–79 phenomenalism, 161–62 photogram. See Moholy-Nagy photography, 164, 172–75 Piero della Francesca (1416– 1492), 49, 57–58 poetry. See languages of light Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), 68, 81–82, 89–93; ambiguous light, 91–93; glow, 90–91 Ronchamp (1954), 216–17 Rooms by the Sea, Hopper (1951), 212–13, 214 Rouen Cathedral, Facade (Sunset), Monet (c. 1892–1895), 183 Rouen Cathedral series (Monet), 181–85 Sainte-Chapelle, 9–10 The Secret of the Golden Flower (Chinese Taoist), 41n48 shadow, 51, 56, 60–65, 68, 81, 88–92, 97, 101, 103–05, 106–7n1, 112n29, 130, 209, 216, 218, 244, 285, 287 Shaker Meeting House (architecture), 167–68

Index

Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi. See Suhrawardi Ship in Fog, Gloucester Harbor, Lane (c. 1860), 166 sky, 54, 58, 64, 133, 141–44, 175, 203, 247, 262, 275n34 Skyspace, 248–49 (Turrell) southern vs. northern light. See window vs. mirror space (light and), 9, 16, 50–52, 54–55, 56, 58, 60–63, 68, 77n42, 92, 167, 171, 182, 185, 204–7, 210, 216, 218, 241, 244, 246, 273n27 stable vs. variable light. See window vs. mirror Stevens, Wallace (1879–1955), 185, 196, 2002–04, 285 Suger, Abbot. See Abbot Suger Suhrawardi, Shihab al-Din al-, 1, 14–20, 284; imaginal world and the light guide, 18–20; presence of light, 16–18 sun, xv, xxn7, 3, 7, 16–17, 25, 54, 57, 94–5, 98, 101–3, 128, 130–32, 134– 42, 162–64, 166–67, 171–76, 197, 200–204, 211–19, 242, 244, 252, 256, 260–62, 264–65, 283, 285, 289 Sun in an Empty Room, Hopper (1963), 215 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, Murnau (1927), 198 Sura of Light (Qur’an), 40n44 The Text of Light, Brakhage (1974), 259–61 Turner, J. M. W. (1775–1851), 106, 127–129, 134–140, 162, 173, 285; the being of light, 136–38; enacting the being, 138–40 Turrell, James (1943-), 246–251, 265, 284; light’s thingness, 249–51; made of light, 247–49 van Eyck, Jan, 58–60

Index

Vermeer, Jan (1632–1675), 81, 94–102, 287; the light wall, 96–99; women and light, 99–102 Watkins, Carleton (1829–1916), 164–65, 174–75, 178, 288 Wilfred, Thomas (1904–1991), 224n34, 248 window vs. mirror, 54–56, 58, 65 Winter Light, Bergman (1963), 261–3 Woman Holding a Balance, Vermeer (c. 1664), 95

361

Wordsworth, Dorothy (1771– 1855), 129–32 Wordsworth, William (1770–1850), 106, 127–40; crisis, 130–32; saving light, 132–40 Young, Thomas (1773–1829), 142–44, 287–88 Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, Vermeer (c. 1664–1665), 100

About the Author

David S. Herrstrom is an independent scholar and poet who has taught and lectured at Queens College, New York University, Drew University, Monmouth University, as well as the Woodmere Art Museum and the Morven Museum and Gardens. His books include Light as Experience and Imagination from Paleolithic to Roman Times (2017), The Prophetic Quest: The Stained Glass Windows of Jacob Landau with Andrew D. Scrimgeour (2021), and The Book of Unknowing: A Poet’s Response to the Gospel of John (2012), as well as two poem sequences, Jonah’s Disappearance (1989) and Appearing by Daylight (1994).

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