While at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), and looking for ideas for a border of a painting I am working on, it occurs to me that in the history of art, the frame died along with the death of religious art.
Want some cool ideas for frames from the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, 21st centuries? Uh… how about a rectangle!
Rectangle, rectangle, rectangle, rectangle. Huh? I did a quick breeze through several galleries of post-renaissance art: rectangle, rectangle, rectangle, rectangle…, There was one oval
Not exactly an exhaustive search, but you get the idea.
Compare this with the paintings before 1600, where about half had clear geometry of the frame.
My point being, how could the frame of the painting become unimportant? Is it as simple as laziness meets the technological advance of mass-produced canvas stretched on mass-produced wooden frame? Is it a rejection of “that old style”?
Tonight I am thinking it is a devolution of the artistic understanding. The context has become unimportant. Some art historians call it an appreciation of the everyday scene, a celebration of the ordinary. This rectangle frame that is irrelevant to the subject matter of the painting reminds me of a camera photo: click! and you have a perfect rendering of the matter along with a near absolute isolation of the subject.
That previous religious mindset valued a geometric interface between the subject and the surrounding context; also an enclosure for the subject that has some vibrational complexity. I suppose that by 1600 this sort of geometry had become rote, incapable of conveying the meaning it once did - so I am not surprised that artists abandoned it. I am surprised that no meaningful geometry took the older’s place.
Well for a truly detailed and thorough explanation to your question, I would highly recommend a substack writer named Hilary White. You won’t be disappointed.
Her substack is called World of Hilarity