This "leap through the window"—or through the frame of the picture—necessitated an abandonment of the rules of perspective which had been established by the Renaissance revolution in painting. Braque explained this as follows:
- Before, one used the Renaissance framework, largely because of the vanishing point, and the depth helped the illusion. But I have suppressed the vanishing point which is almost always false. A painting should give a desire to live "within". I want the public to participate in my painting, for the frame to be behind one's back...[1]
The desire to live "within", and to express the experience of active involvement with the shapes and energies of existence, led to a number of other technical innovations. If it was the experience of involvement which mattered—rather than the depiction of an independent reality as seen through a pane of glass—then the "objective" world no longer had absolute priority over the "subjective". To put roughly the same idea in different words, "content" had no longer its supremacy over "form".
Painting since the Renaissance, whatever may have been its almost infinite diversity in other respects, had been content—oriented. What was important was not the daubs of paint, the splashes of colour and the brush-strokes in themselves. 0n the contrary, these traces and manifestations of the artist's own activity, of his own involvement in his work, had to be rendered "invisible". Like glass in a window, they should allow the viewer to see through them and perceive another reality beyond. The important personages, kings, saints or other "subjects" were what the picture was all about. It was to accomplish the requisite "invisibility" of form that the various revolutionary techniques of Renaissance painting—tonal composition, the vanishing-point and so on—had been established.
The Renaissance assumptions were accepted without question until the later decades of the nineteenth century. These
- ↑ Michel Georges—Michel, De Renoir a Picasso, Paris 1954, p 112. Quoted in: Schwartz, op cit p 44.
