The Virtual Space Theory

Which of the following names sounds more familiar to you?

1. Jean-Léon Gérôme

2. Claude Monet

You don’t necessarily need to be an art lover to have at least heard of Claude Monet, to probably know that he was a painter, and maybe even to know that he was one of the main figures of the Impressionist movement. But unless you have a particular interest in art and its history, you have probably never even heard of Jean-Léon Gérôme, let alone become familiar with his paintings.

The difference between the two painters’ current level of renown is due to one of the most dramatic struggles to have ever taken place in the history of art, the aftermath of which raised one side to lasting fame, and dropped the other into relative obscurity. Both painters lived and worked in Paris in the second half of the 19th century, both were exceptionally talented, and both had highly productive careers – but they represented two approaches to art that were directly opposed to one another. This is clearly demonstrated in the following examples:

The Impressionist movement consisted in a group of painters who sought to break free from the centuries-old artistic traditions that were mandated by state institutions, or what was known as ‘the academy’. Gérôme was a key member of the academy, and though he did stretch its rules as well, he was nevertheless one of the fiercest defenders of the highly valued principles for which the academy stood, and he spared no effort to block the Impressionists. Following some thirty years of turmoil, the Impressionists eventually won, Academicism lost, and the art world as we know it today is still at the effect of this quintessential event.

The Musée d’Orsay in Paris recently held the first monographic exhibition of Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris in over a hundred years. As they were careful to emphasize, this was not an attempt to rehabilitate him but only to revisit his work in view of our own times (after all, it is a major museum of Impressionist art). And indeed, although his work may be very classical and academic, it does reveal aspects that kept up with its time and foreshadowed the art of the 20th century – though not the art of painting, but rather the art of film.

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.

From the point of view of The Virtual Space Theory, Gérôme can be considered to be first and foremost a master-builder of virtual places. His paintings are rich in architecture, and the places he creates are carefully constructed to serve the characters and the events taking place in them. Yet in addition to his ability to create places and produce highly detailed paintings through which to make them accessible, he also pioneered new approaches to the making of the places themselves, which will be discussed in the next post.

Following the previous post, this post proceeds to discuss the paintings of Jean-Léon Gérôme from the point of view of The Virtual Space Theory. Discussing the two together is particularly interesting since the Theory sheds light on some of the unique aspects of Gérôme’s work:

Constructing from photographs

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.

One place, multiple paintings

As part of his approach to the creation of places for his paintings, Jean-Léon Gérôme did something that I am not aware of having been done by traditional painters before him, at least not as systematically: Once he had created a place, he actually presented that same place in several different paintings. To use the terminology of The Virtual Space Theory: Throughout the history of art, for the vast majority of paintings the virtual place that was seen through a particular painting was unique to that work of art, which therefore served as the only available window to it. That is, whenever a painter made a new painting, he also created a new place that served as its setting. Gérôme, however, on more than one occasion, used the same place for several paintings, thus emphasizing that its existence is not bound to the canvas – or in other words, that its actual location is in virtual space.

The most obvious example of this is his virtual place that stands for the Colosseum in ancient Rome. To begin with, it is not a fully accurate historical record but rather his own creation, combining elements from the original arena and other locations in Rome, as well as featuring the Athenian Acropolis in the background. But he did not make only one painting of the event he wanted to present, but rather two paintings: One to show the moments leading up to the event, and another to show the moment after it. And not only that, he used this same place again in order to stage yet another event altogether, making two paintings of this second event as well, using the same dramatic effect of before and after – while all of them occur inside of one single virtual place. The following examples show one scene from each of these two events:

Another aspect of Gérôme’s work from the point of view of The Virtual Space Theory will be the topic of the next post.

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.