POINT OF VI'EW IN THE ARTS
829
What we find in El Greco is that the architectonic principle has
completely taken over the represented objects and forced these, with
unparalleled violence, to submit to its ideal schema. In this way, the
analytic vision, which seeks volume by emphasizing each figure for
its own sake, is mitigated and neutralized, as it were, by the synthetic
intention. The formal dynamic schema that dominates the picture
imposes on it a certain unity and fosters the illusion of a single point
of view.
Furthermore, there appears already in the work of El Greco
another unifying element: chiaroscuro.
x
The Chiaroscurists.
Raphael's composition,
EI
Greco's dy–
namic schema, are postulates of unity that the artist throws upon his
canvas;-but nothing more. Every object in the picture continues as
before to assert its volume, and, consequently, its independence and
particularism. These unities, then, are of the same abstract lineage as
the geometrical perspective of the primitives. Derived from pure rea–
son, they show themselves incapable of giving form to the materials of
the picture as a whole; or, in other words, they are not pictorial
principles. Each section of the picture is painted without their in–
tervention.
Compared to them, chiaroscuro signifies a radical and more pro–
found innovation.
When the eye of the painter seeks the body of things, the objects
placed in the painted area will demand, each for itself, an exclusive
and privileged point of view. The picture will possess a feudal consti–
tution in which every element will maintain its personal rights. But
here, slipping between them, is a new object gifted with a magic
power that permits it-even more- obliges it to be ubiquitous and
occupy the whole canvas without having to
dispo~sess
the others.
This magic object is light. It is everywhere single and unique through–
out the composition. Here is a principle of unity that is not abstract
but real, a thing among other things, not an idea or schema. The
unity of illumination or chiaroscuro imposes a unique point of view.
The painter must now see his entire work as immersed in the ample
element of light.
Thus Ribera, Caravaggio, and the young Velasquez
(The Ador-
