The Man Who Opposed the Impressionists (part 3)
March 22nd, 2011 Contextography, Painting Add Comment
This is the last in a series of posts that discuss the paintings of Jean-Léon Gérôme from the point of view of The Virtual Space Theory. This time, we will look at them using the Theory’s principle of contextography.
A Short Intro to Contextography
To demonstrate The Virtual Space Theory’s principle of contextography, let’s first look at the following two images. One is Gérôme’s painting Pollice Verso, the most famous of his series of paintings showing events in the ancient Roman Colosseum. The second is a contemporary photograph of the ruins of the Roman Colosseum.


The two images have some things in common as well as some obvious differences. If we were to describe them using the common terminology for discussing such matters, what would we say? We might start by saying that one is a painting and the other is a photograph. We would probably regard the photograph as being ‘real’ and proceed to question the nature of the painting in that respect. For example, the hand gesture with the thumb pointing down had never been seen in an image before Gérôme made this painting, because the ancient records of it are only verbal and do not provide an accurate enough description (which also means that Gérome’s contribution to our lives extends even to the form of the Facebook “like” icon). So does this mean that the painting is imaginary, or is it an authentic representation? As another example, we also know that this painting was the direct inspiration for the making of the film Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000). So does this mean that the film is a copy and that the painting is the original?
The Virtual Space Theory approaches such questions by discussing them from another angle altogether. Before anything else, it considers the visible contents of any pictorial image as being located inside of virtual space. Does this mean that all images are equal? Of course not. But instead of discussing the differences between the images themselves, The Virtual Space Theory shifts the discussion to the differences between the places that are seen through them.
In the above examples, once we can consider both as showing virtual places, we will see that what sets them apart is their context: One virtual place is a historical reconstruction of a particular physical location (with arguable accuracy), and the other virtual place is a contemporary documentation of the same physical location. Using the same terms, we could proceed to discuss the virtual place seen in the film Gladiator, and discover that it shares nearly the same context as that of the place seen in the painting.
The Virtual Space Theory proposes that virtual places that share similar contexts can be considered to be ‘neighbors’ in virtual space, or in other words, to be located inside of the same ‘context zone’. Accordingly, virtual places that have different contexts – even if their images are otherwise similar – can be considered to be located in completely different parts of virtual space. Contextography, then, is The Virtual Space Theory’s principle for determining what the contexts of virtual space are and mapping the relative locations of virtual places inside of it. This topic is further explained in another post, and fully elaborated in my book “The Architecture of Virtual Space”.
A Contextographical Dispute
The Virtual Space Theory’s principle of contextography provides another facet to an understanding of the historical conflict between the Impressionist and Academic approaches to the making of paintings. From this point of view, one of the main disagreements between the two rival sides was in determining which contexts of virtual space are worthy of having virtual places made in them.
In that sense, the virtual places made by the Impressionists were all neighbors in virtual space, since they belonged to one single context: Virtual places that are an interpreted documentation of physical places. The Impressionists, despite their non-committal approach to technical accuracy, clearly stuck to existing physical locations from which to create their virtual places – which gave them all a very particular as well as consistent context.

Academicism, on the other hand, and Jean-Léon Gérôme in particular, took the exact opposite approach. The virtual places he made belonged to a wholly different set of contexts: Some of his virtual places were free reconstructions of places from the past, and some were fabricated documentations of a non-existing present. Despite his fervent dedication to utmost accuracy in his painting technique, when it came to contexts he intentionally created virtual places that do not have an equivalent in the physical world – which puts them in another context altogether, and thus in another part of virtual space.

Gérôme’s argument with the Impressionists, then, can be seen simply as a matter of where inside of virtual space virtual places should be created. A painting worthy of the title of ‘Art’, he believed, should create a richly detailed virtual place, and should be made for the sections of virtual space which have only a partial relation to the everyday world in which we live.
Succeeding generations of painters did not agree – but filmmakers surely did.
The academic art which Gérôme stood for considered classical antiquity to be its ideal model of reference, and thus one of the only worthy settings for a painting. Yet rather than just imagining ancient Greek or Roman settings in his studio, Gérôme’s way of following this program was to travel to the Orient in search of living cultures that still embodied some of what ancient Greece or Rome might have been like. With a photographer as his travel companion, he documented places of interest and then returned to his Paris studio. There, he combined chosen elements from various photographs following his own constructed vision of a place, and made his paintings based on the results of that process. To his audience he may have seemed to present a documentation of the Orient, yet the places which he showed were very much his own creation – a romanticized and mythicized image of the Orient for Western eyes, which exists only as a virtual place in virtual space.




Gérôme’s paintings, perhaps more than those of most painters before him, actually look like snapshots taken from excessively produced Hollywood movies – except that they were painted at a time when movies did not yet exist. Accordingly, some of the most iconic movie scenes of the following century were taken directly from Gérôme’s paintings (Ben-Hur, 1959; Gladiator, 2000) and his dramatic sense of organizing space has influenced many other films as well. Additionally, as the comparison between his painting to the right and the video game image below might suggest, his influence seems to have extended even to present-day video games.







