“When I was their age I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.”

— Pablo Picasso

 ~The figurative line is the trace of the Sensorium Reflecting on itself

This essay explores why what it calls the ‘figurative line’ forms a nucleus, in terms of the motives and the common denominator from which all other factors of appreciation can be derived in the world of visual art, drawing and painting, and describes the various reasons for this.

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The Sensorium

This work starts by invoking the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who was active in France in the 1940s and 50s, and whose book Phenomenology of Perception appeared in 1945. He figures among the phenomenological community, and in his theories schematised the expression The Sensorium, which indicates that the human body is the centre of all experience by order of the human senses — and thus names the human, and therefore the human body, The Sensorium.

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From this analysis it can be understood that the entire universe is experienced by a human solely through the body. In it is expressed the idea that, for humans, their knowledge of a universe at all is dependent on the body they chanced to inhabit, and that their knowledge of the universe depends on the factors that caused this body to exist (though some would say, from a determinist point of view, these two factors are entangled) — or so it compellingly seems.

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In that sense the universe is human-shaped, human-oriented, interpreted and mapped in terms of the human senses — and unavoidably so, for humans.

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Here the body is the thoroughgoing portal of all experience, the gateway and only expression, for humans, of the universe — and in this sense the universe is entirely human-shaped for humans.

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All Beings Are Simultaneously the Centre of the Universe

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The human body, or Sensorium, is a centre of experience, coexisting with other centres, and in this subjective sense it is unavoidably the centre of the universe — and it can be said that all these centres of universal experience are simultaneously the centre of the universe. Every subjective point of view represents such a thoroughgoing centre of the universe, extending to every last possible detail of the universe — simultaneously. This is, of course, an extraordinary paradox from a number of points of view. In one sense, all beings are simultaneously the centre of the universe. Each can be described as a ‘centre’ — which is an extraordinary paradox.

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There is a sense of the participatory effect of this presence, awareness or observational quality of each of these Sensoriums, or centres of the universe, in that it is possible that one — i.e. the universe — would not exist without the other — the Sensorium — and each completes the other. If it is considered from a determinist point of view that the Sensorium and its existence at all were an ineluctable and inevitable development of the transformations of matter that characterise the universe, then it could be said that the Sensorium, the universe, and all the coexisting ‘centres’ (or Sensoriums) developed simultaneously and complete one another. From this point of view, the universe is human-shaped (to humans), and humans participate in it through their perception of it, thus making or completing it, forming another part of its constitution. They are not an external additional observer: they develop as part of it, genuinely experience it, can be described as embodying the centre of it, and genuinely observe, almost as though ‘from the outside’.

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All human experiences of transcendence, or conceptualisations of God, any kind of Pantheism or Deism, are all equally experienced through the Sensorium, in a human-shaped orientation, in expressions pertinent to the human, and in forms that reference human dimensions, receptors, registers and the like — the divine light arrives… in a human-shaped portal.

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There are dialogues concerning different levels of body, and it is debatable whether these could be included in our rubric of the Sensorium. Some of these might be astral bodies, and some will argue that other types of disembodied awareness are possible (while it does seem that these are posited in a body of some sort); and yet, for the purposes of this essay, and for the human concerns by which it is prompted or motivated, it is a fertile vein to pursue the core principle that the human body is the Sensorium and the centre of all experience, the filter and medium of all experience and knowledge of existence itself, any kind of interaction, etc.

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The human experience is first and foremost, and perhaps entirely, reduced to something that can never be transcended or escaped from, and not even marginally modified (even, arguably, if the existence of an astral body and suchlike is postulated, since these are different orders of the same body in the various schemas in which they exist): it is entirely limited to, and delimited by, the parameters of the skin and outer limits of the body. QED: the Sensorium.

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It could be expressed in very simple terms as ‘let’s face it, humans know no other experience’.
 

Reflection

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This essay takes the view that the expression ‘Reflection’ represents the capacity to see, as in a mirror, the opposite of your argument and compare the two.

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It means seeing different sides Reflected in an argument, in a way very analogous to a mirror. This resolves into comparing, contrasting, balancing and then reaching some sort of established representation as a result, from which one further builds — and Reflects.

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In this sense Reflection looks like Reflecting, as in a mirror, one argument against another. Such a comparison of different viewpoints is, in this respect, also tantamount to what is usually understood as critical thinking.

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Reflection is a word which possesses an important philosophical history. It features in Walter Benjamin’s early essay The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, which reconstructs ideas of Reflection in Fichte, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. Benjamin’s account develops a schema describing the mind at play when creating a work of art.

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The word Reflection appears as a marker of a self-conscious process involved in the project to capture a mood or moment, with the work of art as a signifier of that experience. It involves self-doubt and questioning.

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Each stage, impulse or response made by the artist — word, mark, lyric — becomes something Reflected on in turn, and in turn as a group, and the response to that itself becomes Reflected on. Reflection is here constitutive of the act of creation, or event.

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For Benjamin, criticism is an enactment of awakening the Reflection that existed in the artwork, such as doubts and revisions, and is related back, as Reflections accumulate, to an overriding ‘absolute’ of painting as a class or order of existence.

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The critic traces further Reflections and associations created in the mind by the artwork. There is this sense that the critic, like the observer in the universe mentioned above, participates in the artwork, as though he were psychically present and a factor in the mind of the artist. In this sense the critic also develops relations latent in the work — creating a discourse about them which communicates them.

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Indeed, in common parlance, Reflection means considering a question carefully. And when one does this one is inevitably considering criticisms and challenges to this idea — which is to consider alternative points of view.

This more prosaic and colloquial understanding of the term is perfectly valid in this context and entirely commensurate with Benjamin’s unfolding of the term in respect of a project of formalising an ‘art criticism’.

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This therefore more prosaic understanding of the word Reflection is entirely commensurate with Benjamin’s: an understanding more on the level of everyday psychology in terms of the creation, appreciation and criticism of art.

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This essay takes this act of subtle critical Reflection to be the sign of a nuanced consideration of a theme, a situation, often its resonance with oneself.

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Subtlety as Opposed to the Crude and Obvious

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This essay therefore contrasts this with art which may be seen as kitsch, derivative, or driving a very particular agenda. To paint, without subtle nuance, even an engaging sunset — for example, one which does not perhaps portray a sense of relief, eternity, preternatural light, or perhaps the overcoming of doubt — may be seen as kitsch; likewise, painting a battle or some political theme without considering the subtle interplay of opposing factors may be seen as lacking nuance and lacking a critical, open or Reflective mind.

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When kitsch is mobilised in an ironic or historically aware sense, this can be a more Reflective use of it.

Humans are by nature temperamental, complex and Reflective, and possess multiple — even multifarious, even conflicting — viewpoints which all coexist within their minds as Reflections and preoccupations. Since this is the case there will be a certain amount of sympathy with other persons embodying these qualities. There will be sympathy, recognition, even a sense of ‘safety’. It is the sense that someone is able to consider and balance varying points of view that can convince people that someone is of balanced mind, possesses evenness of temper, and is capable of proportionality and restraint. Humans perhaps feel more comfortable around someone who considers different arguments and points of view rather than jumping in an impulsive way to one viewpoint.

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Therefore it would be conceivable that humans resonate with objects or expressions that seem to recognise or embody this, and that appear to be of the same order. Thus, as opposed to some decisive, passionate proclamation of a very particular viewpoint, humans may find more resonance in the different degrees of nuance and variation which may surround an idea, and the ambiguities and differences of opinion connected with it.

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In general, humans are conflicted emotionally and psychologically and so also resonate with art which is able to encapsulate and express this. This is in essence the Sensorium, as exactly such a whirlwind of conflicting impressions, impulses and ideas, Reflecting on other expressions by other Sensoriums with which it resonates. Therefore an artwork which can subtly display a range of minor, flickering, conflicting emotions and attitudes, perhaps layered, has a meaning which unfolds and perhaps hits differently with different viewings, or even evolves over time.

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It could be a battle scene in which the expressions on the faces show the internal conflicts, private allegiances and mixed responses of the fighters, while the light shows uncertain shadows, or overly emphasised shadows, or ragged trees indicating the assaulting of nature, or small symbolic animals caught in the fray.

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A book could describe the world of thoughts and emotions someone feels on meeting someone, and these are things which engage the interest of the Sensorium, since people recognise it, and it resonates with their own journey and experience as a human being. It resonates, moreover, with the overall sense of the experience of being human as a ‘class’ of experience, to evoke Benjamin’s rather abstract description — or it resonates with the entire existential situation of being human, with deep implications.

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In general, such nuances, ambiguities and possibilities for interpretation are preferred above fixed ideas that are hammered home in a blunt and ill-considered fashion.

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There is a general sense that humans are drawn to nuance and conflicted emotions and viewpoints over more rigid and quickly arrived-at viewpoints.

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By contrast, works of art with a limited range of resonance can be seen as one-sided, partisan, crude, illustrative, or ‘hammering home an agenda’.

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Refinement, Sensitivity and Sophistication

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Further, it is understandable that a work which carries within it multiple possibilities for interpretation, and different responses, has the potential to be something that is Reflective and has more potential meaning for a wider range of people. Reflective art may comprise that which unfolds differently on different viewings and differently for different people.

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Since humans are such complex creatures, and because of the Reflective, conflicted, complex and contemplative nature of humans, with so many different impressions and things to process and consider, there is a sense that continued Reflection and balancing of these matters constitutes a sense of ‘refinement’ of thought, ideas, manner, etc.

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Artwork too, when it embodies such complexity and such a capacity to embody so many nuanced instances and feelings, also crosses into this territory of ‘refinement’, ‘sophistication’ and ‘subtlety’.

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In this sense Reflection and Reflectiveness become bywords for these properties in artwork: ‘sophistication’, ‘subtlety’, ‘nuance’.

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Subtlety, Complexity, and Reflectivity Extend to Other Areas of Appreciation and Connoisseurship

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A wine is regarded as superior to others within similar categories — with ‘complexity’ often used as a byword — with indications of many hints of flavours and an aftertaste. A similar vocabulary is utilised for perfumes with changing notes; music with counterpoint, phrasing, harmonic tension and resolution.

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It is almost a similar terminology if one considers that these different elements and qualities in wine, perfume and other categories appear to Reflect and complement one another in an interesting equilibrium.

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Promethean Moment in Art History — The Cartoons

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With the advancement of the Italian Renaissance in the 14th century, and renewed vigour in the appetite for Classicism in those times, intensified by humanist scholarship, which coexisted with fervour for Christianity, something strange was brewing that was to change art history forever.

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Within the furnace of the imaginative minds of three great geniuses renowned all over the world, and whose influence has extended to every corner of the art world — all from this one epicentre in Rome, Italy — there grew a fascination with the strange, almost iridescent, ‘emblazoned’ and animated quality of certain linear drawings of humans. It was a fascination with lines, as vibratory contours, that seemed to bristle or vibrate with a strange kinetic energy. It is a quality that needs to be visually perceived.

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It is a vibrant combination of grace, vigour and animus: a combination of containment and expansion, in which flesh appears tightly held by a mark that nevertheless seems alive.

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It seems that this oddly animated drawing quality only really took shape in the hands of these three prodigious geniuses — Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo — most notably in images of the human figure, and seems to reflect their status as these three giants of the painting world. It is a strange phenomenon in itself: these strange kinetic drawings still defy easy description.

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Those of the larger variety, often ‘pounced’, i.e. filled with holes along the edges of the lines in order to transfer them for paintings, are more readily called cartoons, while the many smaller drawings which all three produced might be called disegno, and were also preparatory drawings. But in common parlance ‘cartoon’ can be used as a collective category for these works.

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Therefore these drawings were arguably preparatory drawings for larger works, indeed such as those created by Raphael and Michelangelo for the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican. But, as can also be seen from Leonardo’s unique and strange sketchbooks — which really are a unique factor in world history — these were evidently valued as remarkable, surprising and magical works of art in themselves.

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Vasari records the wonder with which people attended the display of a large cartoon by Leonardo in Florence, with people young and old coming to see it.

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It is inconceivable that this was only appreciated later, as otherwise scattered sketches for larger paintings were gathered. It is clear that these came to be regarded as charting incremental skill, and stations of different practitioners in the field.

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A Tantalising Parallel

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A tantalising parallel may be found in Chinese and Japanese traditions of brush drawing and calligraphy, where technical mastery was likewise cultivated through close study of predecessors, disciplined repetition, lineage and, at times, rivalry between artists and schools. In both the Far Eastern and Italian cases, the practised line could become a highly charged record of training, temperament and individual authority.

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Whilst studying these drawings, and also the paintings themselves by these three masters, it can occur to one that the drawings almost seem more important — or as though they vie with the paintings for importance. But drawing is an area in its own right, which contains much information about the artist and provides much understanding in connection with the appreciation of the works as a whole.

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This is a quality that is sometimes forgotten in art appreciation. These oddly vibratory contours and this strange, kinetic, almost breathing, vibrant line are certainly there in Picasso’s work — later to be discussed — and it is in actual fact a very rare and inexplicable phenomenon, since it does not seem to attach itself to manual and motor skill alone.

In any case, it does attach itself to the idea of the master, which has a range of connotations. The idea of Master in itself denotes a changed human body, or a human body that has crossed a certain point at which the nerve endings, neural pathways and muscle memory cannot ‘learn any more’, but rather develop and refine further: almost a quantum difference between that and learner draughtspeople. Personal inclinations of taste all factor into this broad schema.

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The Gold Standard in Draughtsmanship

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Of these three, perhaps the most widely praised for his consistency and curious charm is Raphael Santi (1483–1520) — or at least he is the most consistently praised in subsequent generations as a kind of technical exemplar.

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One of his most sensitive commentators was the German scholar Oskar Fischel. His life’s work was so strongly characterised by his abiding fascination with Raphael that it can be compared to the almost lifelong devotional project of C. K. Scott Moncrieff translating Proust.

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Fischel, who had begun his scholarly career with a Strasbourg dissertation on Raphael’s drawings in 1896, later taught art history at the University of Berlin while continuing what became a decades-long scholarly engagement with Raphael. His great multi-volume Raphaels Zeichnungen project continued through those Berlin years, with volumes appearing from 1913 onward.

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You may find many of Oskar Fischel’s sensitive and sustained reflections on Raphael’s draughtsmanship in the 1948 volume Raphael.

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Raphael (1483–1520) became one of the great historical exemplars of this condition.

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Over the centuries, his style and the appreciation of it have become baked into the substrata of artistic consciousness as an artistic draughtsmanship Gold Standard. He has been emulated throughout the centuries ever since, with so many artists wanting to achieve his Florentine balance and style, and his wonderful kinetic line — his wonderful line — that it could be said he attained the status of Gold Standard.

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And what is important here is that above all these were drawings emphasising not landscapes, fruit, etc., but rather the human body, and these lines can be understood, above all, as Figurative Lines.

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It is important to note that all these admired drawings by Raphael show the Figurative Line — and that these comprise the overwhelming concentration and weight of his production in this period and characterise the portal at which people arrive at appreciation of his line in general.

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This kinetic and vibrant quality in these drawings, by Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo alike, is also oddly transmissible through bad digital reproductions.

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That resistance to verbal description of this phenomenon is probably a good thing, arguing for its value as a form and expression in itself.

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The Drawn Body as the Centre of Art — the Apotheosis of Art

It has been remarked above that the body is the centre of experience.

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When it is considered that the human body, or the Sensorium, is the centre of experience, it can be seen that the figurative line not only depicts a body but is also a trace made by a human body, recording traces of that nervous system — of the person who drew it — masterful and otherwise.

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On two levels this is appreciable to other humans. In this sense, two bodies are being considered by the viewer.

It therefore embodies a Reflective act on a number of levels from this perspective also. It is a body Reflecting on itself and its own drawn lines, and on the body appearing before it, which is in turn Reflecting inwardly, in its own way: the body Reflecting on itself.

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It is not only a level of narcissism that drives human interest in images of the body, and it is not just that humans enjoy seeing images of their own species. As remarked above, it is the resonance with similar experience, the vacillations of the mind, the Reflective qualities, so that it is a medium for Reflecting on their experience.

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The body is the locus in which all Reflection takes place. The human body is the site of all pleasure, union, sensation, loss, joy, all memory, and thus it will always be of central fascination to humans.

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When dreams are depicted, these are visions that are almost bodily — and they are certainly experienced within a body. The body itself is that which experiences abstract and conceptual art, theatre. Dreams have the character of almost being representations of Sensorial experiences, such as a weirdly reinterpreted impression of some object in contact with the body during sleep, creating an odd concatenation of dream sequences and interpretations. Or some might say that bodily habits, neural reflexes which relate to external phenomena, carry their imprint in dreams: the visions in dreams may relate back, in a Reflective sense, to reinterpretations responsive to lower strata of imagery and symbolism emanating from a variety of antecedent causes.

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The body is a yardstick by which to measure other art — for example, when viewing a painted landscape. One knows, on viewing a painted landscape, that this is a human orientation, understood and read in human proportions, and that the reading of it is, in a way, vaguely done through the experience of a body. The plants and trees are experienced as being other than the body — i.e. in comparison to it: the human, having only itself within its skin as the vantage point, necessarily uses itself as the vantage point for measuring and qualifying different orders of things — and that is how they are recognised and their qualities, often personified, are understood in the sense of how they differ from humans, who are trapped in their bodies.

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Abstract art, too, is experienced on a human scale, with inclined direction, binocularity, etc., often referencing humans in a space and in certain orientations and gravitational situations. Any accidental figurative moments that appear in abstract paintings are also interpreted on a bodily scale, so that humans again Reflect on abstract art in accordance with overwhelming human criteria: that of being in a body.

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The body is the locus of all Reflection and therefore this has the most resonance, and the most points of identification, for humans.

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Human relationships are primarily with other humans, with whom we identify most, and so we resonate with their image — images of humans — and, from an animistic point of view, their energy.

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Therefore, since humans are self-Reflective, and endlessly fascinated not only with human experiences and scenarios, political or otherwise, or the experience of nature, viewed and understood through the body’s senses, but also with the image of the human body itself — the site of all this experience; of beauty, youth, confusion, Reflection, nuance and psychological depth — the mark and the painted mark, in as far as they depict the trace of a body, depicting an experience that must always and necessarily be experienced by a body, or the Sensorium, and be the result of a bodily perception in a universe that is ‘human-shaped’ and experienced in terms of the human and human proportions, etc., return as the centre of the whole project of human image-making in general.

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Thus it is reasonable that the human body returned — though of course the religious and Byzantine art which preceded it tended to show humans in combination with divine figures — as the centre of art in the Italian Renaissance, since the human is the centre of experience.

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The body is posited here as the abiding centre of focus in figurative painting, containing the most resonance and interest for humans.

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The Sensorial, Virtuoso, Reflective, Recursive Line

How can a line be Reflective?

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A line is recursive on itself — in the sense of being built up over multiple repetitions of different drawings over many years by an artist. In this sense a line is built up as a succession of repetitions, building neural pathways, with those neural pathways arguably fusing at the moment of mastery. It is the sense of this line Reflecting on itself, and past delineations, and what it has made, and condensing it onto further experience. The repetition and accumulation of experience are all part of the building of an integrated sense of hand-eye coordination.

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The lines are produced by a human body and survive as a trace of the neural and muscular expectations, memories and psychology, or memorised psychology, of that experience.

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This recursive quality also occurs within a single drawing, with the line being built up in the same Reflective manner as that delineated in reference to Walter Benjamin and his representation of the German Romantic approaches to art criticism.

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Psychological depth is almost the common denominator — and may be a byword — in understanding how ‘Reflection’ represents itself in art.

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A human experiences the outer edge of their body as the point at which their body meets the outside world — the skin — and this represents itself inwardly, to some degree, as the sense of a bounding line. A drawn line depicting this, by a Reflective artist — i.e. Reflecting as they go along — with its minor inflexions and interpretations, variations in weight, possibly depicting how they, the subject, ‘let the world in’ or ‘exclude the world’, among other interpretations, Reflects the interpretive mind and emphases of the creator in fantastically subtle ways.

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A line drawn with great sensitivity, and as the result of a Reflective, subtle mind, will arguably contain those properties, resulting in a Reflective (contemplative) depiction of a Reflective (contemplative) subject. They are inexorably, or inseparably, interfused: the subtle vegetative sensitivity, and the responsiveness to mood, hesitation, contemplation, inflexions of mood and responsiveness in the subject.

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All these characteristics seem interfused — a combination of sensitivity, virtuosity and psychological insight.

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The Link Between Virtuosity and Sensitivity and Reflectiveness

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The link between virtuosity and Reflective sensitivity applies in other realms. Think how sensitive a boxer must be — which may run counter to the perception of a boxer as simple-minded and crude — to the psychological and emotional state of his opponent, and the interplay of this with the subtle twitch movements of his opponent. These are the heights of human receptivity and sensitivity. To be alive to these inflexions of emotion and psychology implies being alive to one’s own psychology and emotional life in order to recognise it in others.

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The virtuoso violinist, who also produces ‘lines’ in terms of phrases and sequences, and the ballet dancer follow similar principles of weight, subtlety and Reflective — contemplative — quality, and this applies exactly to this treatment of the Figurative Line as the final summation of pictorial art.

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NB. The word Reflective has a slightly abstract quality when applied to an object without the given understanding of life and animation that humans have. So as to prevent a veneer of confusion, it is important to point out that it denotes the result of a Reflective human; or, in order to aid understanding, the word can be substituted with ‘contemplative’.

The figurative line is a trace made by the Sensorium, and embodies a reflecting act: the body reflecting on itself.

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"But we feel that what shines in those reflecting discs is not due solely to their material composition; that it is, unknown to us, the dark shadows of the ideas that the creature is conceiving, relative to the people and places that she knows—the turf of racecourses, the sand of cycling tracks over which, pedalling on past fields and woods, she would have drawn me after her, that little peri, more seductive to me than she of the Persian paradise—the shadows, too, of the home to which she will presently return, of the plans that she is forming or that others have formed for her; and above all that it is she, with her desires, her sympathies, her revulsions, her obscure and incessant will"

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, p. 717

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The figurative line is a trace made by the Sensorium, and embodies a Reflecting act: the body Reflecting on itself.

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Line and Tone

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It is well known that two approaches are recognised when it comes to depicting figures, or creating images in general: that the ‘marks’ made on the canvas are either ‘lines’ or ‘tones’.

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Some artists, like Vermeer, or a printmaker printing large areas of flat colour, may be seen to be working with areas of tone.

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Obviously a line is a condensed, contoured, highly manipulated tone, and tone is a spread-out and broadened line of sorts, and the distinction between them is relative; but the following observations point to a sense that pursuing mark-making as a project, within the rubric of line and tone, nevertheless coalesces on the figurative line.

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In creating tones, they may very often have a reasonably sharp edge which also has linear qualities.

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As observed above, the human experience is characterised as being curtailed or limited at the point at which the inner body meets the outer world — the skin — which usually appears as, or is characteristically represented inwardly as, a sort of line.

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All humans know is the boundary of their bodies. It even forms the meeting point between the outer world and the inner.

Even from that point of view, the bounding line between the interior of the body and the outer is extremely expressive.

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A line is an infinitely regressing tone. A line is an infinitely expanding line.

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This is different from a line being an infinitely expanding dot, and a plane being an infinitely expanding line, etc.

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In perceiving the world, things are seen as having delineating edges, which is a form of linear experience.

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Lines also transmit and communicate inordinate amounts of information, intimating planes, depth, weight, dimension, form and background.

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Lines are more stories of progression, and delineate edges and differentiated spaces. If it is considered that they are in essence an imposition on the perception of space, it is equally so for planes and tones, if it is understood that the edges between things are infinitely regressive.

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Even Figurative Tonal Mark-Making Naturally Coalesces on the Line

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When it is a tonal image, it could be without skill, without expression, without nuance and subtlety; it could be stamped, or arranged by photographic means.

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The mark made by a hand, if it is to be expressive of what is seen — i.e. a figure, the human body — even though no lines arguably exist in nature as we perceive it, would naturally angle itself to produce contoured shapes and tones as it works to produce detail, nuance and expression. After all, a shape is an expansive line and vice versa, as all things are relative. So much so that the various marks, expressions and contours would converge on linear draughtsmanship.

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One illustration of this may well be that an artist incapable of linear art could certainly produce tonal art, and not vice versa. Linear art is the motor-training vehicle of art, the natural and emergent expression of the effort of mark-making on paper, and the apotheosis and culmination of this work.

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Mark-making in depiction coalesces on the figurative line, and since humans are the centre of experience, the figurative line is the centre of art.

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These lines of enquiry converge only and resolutely on one point — the Reflective line and its centrality in art.

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This is an instance of the human body considering itself, and painting converges on such a Reflective and psychologically deep figurative line.

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Cubism and the Multiperspectival Reflective Figure

Since that period in the Renaissance it is arguable that much of Western art consisted of footnotes to these three — with the example of Raphael’s almost ubiquitous impact as a Gold Standard of draughtsmanship, as delineated above.

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Some German artists attempted to adhere to Gothic standards as a rebellion against this, but this must still be read and understood as responsive to, and ultimately dependent on, the all-encompassing influence of Raphael, or the Gold Standard of art.

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This recursive Reflective line dominated art discourse, sometimes explicitly but always implicitly. It was always there as an undercurrent, as the standard by which all other art was interpreted and understood.

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With advancements in thought and technology, painting became more expressive and freed from the depiction of humans and figures, and exact likeness, with strands of it moving into Expressionism — broadly to be understood as the appreciation of sweeping gestures, often lines alone, not necessarily depicting objects or human figures in painting — and abstraction.

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Subject matter also framed more interior matters concerned with Surrealism and imaginative scenes. These arguably had their precursors in figures such as Hieronymus Bosch.

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The Vorticists began to explore expressive methods of showing machines and images of the future, following design and mechanical forms.

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But within all these trajectories, it was at the point of Cubism that a real, decisive movement occurred. It is often seen that the most direct precursor to this was Cézanne, and Braque was a substantial figure in its development — but it was Picasso who brought this into stunning form.

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This was to embody an image splintered into different viewpoints, coalescing on the canvas — a distillation of different viewpoints and angles, conceivably seen at different times.

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This must be seen as relevant to the human experience both of piecing the world together from different moments and angles and of the shifting perspectives and viewpoints of the Reflective human mind.

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Cubism becomes an expression of the multiperspectival human mind.

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Not only did Picasso pioneer — though he had his contemporaries and precursors — this very Reflective art form, embodying multiple perspectives and comparing them, but he also possessed this type of line that has been dwelt on at length above in this essay. It was a highly condensed, Reflective, virtuoso line, with the same vibratory contours as described above in relation to Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo. His line embodied exactly that vanishingly rare kinetic quality identified above in this essay.

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In this sense Picasso simultaneously embodied two of these conditions for representing the heights of Reflective art and sophistication.

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Therefore, not only did he create composites of multiperspectival figures — evoking a sense of expanded non-linear, or block, time — he would also thread them through with a highly versatile, virtuoso line, with echoes of Classicism and embodying figuration in general. Thus, for Picasso, the body remained front and centre of his art — as it would.

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One could explore the deeper implications and interconnections of this seeming coincidence: that this Reflective style of art that is Cubism, consisting of many viewpoints, which constituted a defining turning point for all pictorial art — on a scale not far removed from that of the turning point of the Italian Renaissance — was made demonstrably public, again, by one of the extremely rare examples of the consummate Reflective figurative line, in exactly the same way that the turning point in the Italian Renaissance was.

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Cubistic Parallels in Literature

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Cubism may be seen to run parallel to the increasing interiority of modernist literature such as James Joyce or Marcel Proust. Picasso again is credited with having this virtuoso line, elevating it to that level mentioned: that of the Virtuoso Sensorial Line.

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Both Proust and Joyce represent life experienced from the mind’s viewpoint as a jostling coalescence of mental impressions, past Reflections, memories, resonances, differing and conflicting viewpoints, even dream and semi-hypnotic states or reveries… endlessly churning on, not even stopping in sleep, such is the curious way in which the mind and visual cortex seem to work.

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Picasso and Cubism, with the deeply Reflective and reflexive figurative line, along with the multiperspectival and multiviewpoint, non-linear planar form of Cubism, represent a perfect exemplar of the height of Reflective art.

Cubism, in a similar way to the hot furnace of the Italian Renaissance, along with these Gold Standards of draughtsmanship, proved a decisive moment in art history, with almost everything beneath it becoming a commentary on that, or footnotes beneath it.

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All Postwar Painting Is Footnotes to Picasso’s Cubism and His Sensorial Line

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As mentioned above, in essence this shift is again so profound that it is possible to argue that traces are found in all art ever since.

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It created a new licence for a new angularity to be found in, for example, David Bomberg. The Futurists and the Vorticists may have absorbed it. It is there in Edward Piper. And it is what is behind the purely absolute profile views, in the way that Picasso began to create the sheer Grecian profiles in the exercise of his figurative line throughout his works.

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Influence of Cubism on Freud and Bacon

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The distortions and disruptions of Lucian Freud — in which a face seems subtly to diffuse between two faintly incongruent planes — are attributable to Picasso and Cubism’s influence. And in Bacon’s case this is quite explicit, with the multiple angles, distortions, disjointed fields and planes being expressly derived from Cubist devices.

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Picasso Circles Back on Raphael

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“When I was their age I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.”

— Pablo Picasso

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In his early years Picasso was marked for his prodigious draughtsmanship, which we have remarked is among those vanishingly few who embody this odd vibrant kineticism, which distinguish the lines of our Gold Standard Exemplars.

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It is perhaps telling that many of Picasso’s late drawings centred on the enigmatic figure Raphael. He produced a whole series entitled 347 Suite, including many such works. It is as though he felt compelled to return to Reflect on this enigmatic master whose waves of influence are to be felt throughout history.

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In the same way that Raphael had this multigenerational impact on artists, with obvious and explicit attempts to emulate and match him, let alone stand shoulder to shoulder with him with a unique expression, to be found almost ubiquitously, the same can be said of Picasso. The impact is almost unavoidable, as though, again, some kind of standard has been applied. There is a sense of inevitability about it.

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A Gold Standard Defined

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This paper has thus far observed that this Reflective quality in works of art — in characterisations, scenes and then finally in the human body and the Reflective Sensorium Virtuoso Line — forms a Gold Standard in appreciating art.

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In the same way that Walter Benjamin conflated the word criticism with the creative act and with Reflection involved in the act of creation, this involved the role of the critic as an external person validating, interpreting and observing these factors in the work. This critical faculty naturally involves the same kind of Reflective process undergone by the artist — though placed into words by the critic. In this sense the critic enters into the artwork in interpreting it.

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This then emerges as a Gold Standard in art to be distinguished from more partisan or ‘derivational’ modes. That is to say, ‘derivational’ in that it is an unconsidered commandeering of motifs and agendas in a one-sided and crude way. It is seen that humans resonate with artwork that embodies this Reflective, multifaceted dimension — in nuance and complexity.

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This standard in art criticism cannot be forgotten, since human interest and enquiry repeatedly lead in the same direction — towards maximal Reflectivity and a refined and nuanced outlook. It leads to the authority of considered experience, and the comparison of practised hands, which creates an emergent sense of the possibility of real mastery.

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This mastery would appear to pertain to a sense of hand-eye coordination which can develop no further but can only refine — something that extends to other disciplines as well. It denotes a certain coordination, even an awareness of limits: a complete coordination could be tantamount to this kind of mastery… the Sensorial Line remains the Gold Standard of this.

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The line is the ultimate mark, and its ultimate use is in the depiction of humans: it is Reflective both in its responsiveness to the nuances within the artist — and viewers may Reflect on this — and also in the character and nuance of the people it was used to represent.

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That it should be of the human body and simultaneously a refined trace of the human body makes this doubly the centre of art, and the primal mark by which all other marks are understood.

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Here we have presented The Virtuoso Figurative Recursive, Reflective Line — or, in short: the Sensorial Line.​​​​​​​​​​​​

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