McCloud 4-6

This chapter on line effectively showed me, as most of the rest of this book has, that I do respond to visual information in very specific ways, but again I'm left to puzzle out the why. There's something mysterious about what makes a particular line have any kind of character at all. On 126, McCloud notes how the characteristics of the lines suggest something of the internal experience: "bold lines, obtuse angles, and heavy blacks... suggest the mood of a grim, deadly world full of adults." I think the temptation is to say that the connection is obvious, that those lines work because dark and heavy lines match a dark and heavy world, but then I'm just stretching the same metaphor over both, and I notice that McCloud very carefully doesn't do that. His language for line is different from his language for what they express.

Last semester, for a class on Spanish history, I was treated to a crash course on intellectual movements and their expression in art and architecture. The Renaissance was marked by a stated value for rationality, and in architecture this took the form of straight, unbroken lines, or gently curving arches and circles. Spaces were meant to be contemplative, and this came out in an obsession with symmetry. In Spain, where the Renaissance didn't quite catch on, one of the few good examples is the palace of Carlos I (Charles V everywhere else, as a result of the inscrutable mysteries of European monarchy):



Overall, the palace is a perfect square with a two-tiered circular plaza in the center. The Baroque, on the other hand, valued the emotional and dynamic, and embraced irregularity in lines. El Catedral de Santiago de Compostela:














According to my professor, who is largely animated by a hatred of the Catholic Church, this emotionality was embraced as propaganda against the Renaissance and its reason and the Protestants. I don't know. That guy said a lot of things. But in general there's some recognition that lines evoke something of the interior experience. What fascinates me is that various times and places are identifiable with their specific use of line in art. Early medieval Northern Europe; Contemporary Aboriginal; Byzantine. For a contrast to the Renaissance Plaza, consider the lines of a Zen garden as an approach to contemplative lines.