I regretted not being able to see any JMW Turner while in London, particularly as I tried to imagine the Houses of Lords and Commons burning, as it is in his painting above. To conjure the image was difficult, for two reasons. First, the facade of the buildings strikes me as almost perfectly beautiful and suitably stately, and secondly it has, through reproduction over the years, become as iconic a symbol of immutable governance as any structure outside of Greece. To an American, the depth of European history seems almost eternal in comparison to our own brief efforts.
The effect such scale has on one is interesting, and reminds me of what Distorte’s post on Turner called to mind some time ago: the relationship between scale, perception, and cognition. While in London, I spoke briefly with the groom of the wedding about the problem of cyan and noted that in Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, one never encounters the color blue; it is as though the Greeks simply didn’t see it, describing the sea as “wine dark” and focusing their descriptions on “rosy-fingered dawn,” for example. Blue, I have read, is one of the last colors we have come to differentiate mentally, while red, black, and yellow were among the first.
The groom, a classicist among other specialties, mentioned too that hues are never the focus of ancient texts; intensity is, so that darkness and lightness are described without reference to actual color. Of course, it is not biological change that has altered our perception but the development of our cognition: an amazing thing to consider.
One often hears that dogs “see in black and white,” which is of course nonsensical: dogs’ eyes do not perform the rather artificial conversion of the visible light spectrum to grayscale; only recent inventions like chemical photography, television, and digital processing do. Instead, their eyes take in the same wavelengths that ours do but their brains do not seem to differentiate between them: just as your mind effortlessly fills in the gap left by true cyan on your monitor, theirs papers over the various hues and focuses on intensity (and other sense perceptions).
The processing of sensory data, itself raw and natural, in the brain is driven less by biology than by something else, but it is hard to say just what: why did humanity become attentive to blue some thousands of years ago? Why were we previously not? It is as though the sky and sea in their infinity were too dull to differentiate: better to focus on the colors of the Earth.
It is worth considering how visual art both reflects and alters the development of our perceptual capacities. Reading how people of the past related to their painting is astonishing: what to us seems flat and mannered and false to them seemed as real as a film; without a doubt, people after us will regard the succession of thirty still images each second, flashed two-dimensionally, as an absurdly unconvincing depiction of reality. What is impossible to imagine is what else, if anything, there is to see, what other gaps remain in our sense cognition, what colors remain perceived but unseen, taken into the eye but unassembled into the synthetic idea we experience as color.
