painting

Time and movement

Time and movement in painting are not restricted to representations of physical energy, but they are elements of all design. Part of the viewer’s full experience of a great painting is to allow the arrangement of lines, shapes, and accents of tone or colour to guide the eye across the picture surface at controlled tempos and rhythmic directions. These arrangements contribute overall to the expression of a particular mood, vision, and idea.

Centuries before cinematography, painters attempted to produce kinetic sensations on a flat surface. A mural of 2000 bce in an Egyptian tomb at Beni Hasan, for instance, is designed as a continuous strip sequence of wrestling holds and throws, so accurately articulated and notated that it might be photographed as an animated film cartoon. The gradual unrolling of a 12th-century Japanese hand scroll produces the visual sensation of a helicopter flight along a river valley, while the experience of walking to the end of a long, processional Renaissance mural by Andrea Mantegna or Benozzo Gozzoli is similar to that of having witnessed a passing pageant as a standing spectator.

In the Eastern and Western narrative convention of continuous representation, various incidents in ... (200 of 19,544 words)