Jean Baptiste Regnault, "The Origin of Painting" (1785) Musee National du Chateau, Versailles, France
In a past post I wrote about the Venus of Willendorf and the recently uncovered Venus of Tuebingen, two figurines created about 30-35 thousand years ago. It is interesting to me that three-dimensional art, i.e. sculpture, as far as we can tell was created thousand of years before the advent of its two-dimensional cousin, cave painting.
While the earliest cave paintings go back 14-18 thousand years and are found in France, Spain and Russia, Greco-Roman mythology places the creation of drawing in a very different time and place. Pliny the Elder, a first century Roman historian relates a beautiful and heartbreaking tale in his catch-all magnum opus, Natural History. He tells the story of the Maid of Corinth, seemingly in the not-to-distant mythic past. The Maid was in love with a sailor, who was soon to depart and leave for perilous and long journey across the sea. During their farewell embrace, the Maid noticed how the sun cast his shadow on a nearby wall. Wanting to forever have this image of him, she grabbed a burning stick from a nearby fire and traced his outline onto the wall. Art journalist Victoria Finlay, in her book Color (Random House, 2002) writes that after this she imagines the maid “kissing the image and thinking that in this way something of his physical presence would be fixed close to her while his beloved body was far away in the distant Mediterranean.”
Like any good legend, this one makes my imagination run wild with the question of “What next?” What would the Maid’s fellow Corinthians have thought of this image? In this time of great superstition would they have seen this image as the creation of some malevolent sorcery? If not, what did the Maid do next? Like all great artists did she become addicted to this act of creation? Perhaps she went from wall to wall, tracing whatever shadow was cast upon it. But maybe, with her heart still longing for her lover, she spent her time in front of his “portrait”* — adding detail to his face or depth to his limbs. Perhaps she spent her remaining years transfixed by the icon of her estranged lover — creating not just beautiful art, but the very notion of tragedy in beauty.
*In later versions of this legend, her father was the one who became obsessed with the drawing, molding clay onto the wall the mimic his face — the mythological origins of sculpture.
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