There is only one method of using this device for assisting in the production of relief in interiors. This is to throw the figure against a high wall which is undecorated or nearly so. The figure must be some little distance in front of the wall, and it is observable that the best effect is obtained when the light throughout the room is equal, but in any case the wall should not have less light than the figure. Inasmuch as the figure has to be of life size or nearly so, to produce the desired result, a very large picture would be necessary for the representation of a standing adult; hence the plan is not attempted with a life-size figure, except with a sitting adult or a standing child. Before this scheme was used for the human figure, that master of relief, M. A. Caravaggio, adopted it for a simple still-life work.[t] A basket of fruit on a plain table, with a high bare wall at the back—the canvas now sombre and darkened, like the soul of the artist, but still remarkable for the relief: this was the first application to interiors of a plan which had been used in exteriors by some of the greatest masters for more than a century.
So far as can be gathered from existing works, thirty or forty years elapsed after the picture of Caravaggio was painted before the scheme was brought into use for the human figure in interiors. In 1630, or thereabouts, Velasquez produced his Christ at the Column.[] Here the wall is not actually high, but Christ is shown seated on the floor, and hence there is ample wall space over which the eye may rove. It is possible that the adoption of the plan in this instance was the result of accident, but the very unusual pose of Christ hardly warrants the suggestion. Velasquez painted no more pictures of the kind till a quarter of a century later, when he produced Las Meninas. In this the relief is excellent, but it would have been still better without the picture on the wall, and the open door in the background, though the figure seen on the steps through the doorway lends assistance to the illusion.
Towards the middle of the seventeenth century, some followers of the Neapolitan school used the plan occasionally, but the best existing Italian works of the time where it is seen are from the hand of Evaristo Baschenis, a Bergamese monk. He was an excellent painter of still-life, and produced several pictures, each with a boy or a woman seated in the middle of a room near a plain table on which rests a dish of fruit or a gathering of various articles, while at the back there is a high bare wall. In all of these works a fine relief is exhibited, though they are now considerably marred by darkened shadows. A few years later the plan was adopted by some Dutch artists, and later still in France and Germany. Chardin, who in more ways than one seems to have been a French Baschenis, used it in several pictures. In recent times since the study of Velasquez has become a vogue, many artists have successfully followed the plan, and one of the finest examples of it in existence—Lydia Emmet's Patricia[v]—dates as late as 1915.
There are several minor mechanical ways of enhancing relief, most of them providing a setting which acts as a kind of inner frame to the design, the object being to reduce the effect of the actual frame in disturbing the illusion. Portrait painters of the Dutch, Flemish, and English schools, have often placed half length figures in painted ovals on canvas rectangles, and in the case of Hals he sometimes further improved the illusion by extending a hand of the subject over the oval. Hanneman used this oval in a most exceptional way. On a large canvas he painted the bust portraits of Constantine Huygens and his six children, each in a separate oval, the father being in the centre.[w] The scheme is strangely effective, for the attention of the observer is involuntarily confined to one portrait at a time. In genre pictures a doorway may act as the inner frame, but this is only of material value if the picture be of considerable size. The Dutch painters, notably Gerard Dow, loved to paint figures leaning over window-sills, this method usually enhancing the relief, because the eye is apt to be confined for a time to the window-frame. Perhaps the best use of a window for the purpose of relief is Rembrandt's Samson Menacing His Father-in-law, where the old man's head and hands, of life size, are seen protruding from a small window.[x]
FOOTNOTES:
[a] At the Hermitage. See Plate 21.
[] The first at the Louvre, and the others at the Pitti Palace, Florence.
[c] This painting, or one corresponding to it, is in the Boston Museum, U. S. A. See Note 56.
[d] Saint Sebastian, at Bergamo; The Redeemer at Brescia; and The Prophets and Sybils at Perugia.
[e] Madonna del Orto, Venice.