Dr. Saida Seddik saidaseddik11@gmail.com My itinerary in art issuesMy interest in art date from my young age when I was in high school. In the town where I was born Tetouan, My school was just next to “beauty fine art school”. I was always visiting the exhibitions organized by the students in the hall of the fine art school. I was very fascinated by painting especially. Later on when I went to college and chose philosophy as major, I kept on visiting exhibitions done by Moroccan or stranger painters in those big Galleries in the famouscity of Morocco, Fez, Casablanca, Rabat and Tangier. Then in 1982 I had a chance to meet a famous Moroccan artist named Mohamed KRICH in his exhibition organized by Spanish cultural center. I could finally work with his team since he was giving painting classes and I could be involved with many figurative and abstract techniques. Since then I started painting with water and acrylic, I did a lot of pastel too. This

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creative experience opened many opportunitiesand contacts with many other talented and famous painters, sculptures, poets, art critical. This various contacts and environment permitted me to be a writer and art critical in many Moroccan news papers. Beside that I did many special catalogues forsome Moroccan painters. Since then I visited many museums in Spain, France Holland, and Germany. I was very impressed by the beauty and light in the Spanish painting. The light was a secret that many western artists were seeking while visiting the Arabic countries, like the famous Matisse, and other figurativepainters called the Orientalist school. We could build a big atelier and we had many female artists from morocco and from other European countries. I was the manager of thatatelier and I got in contact with the artistsand the big boss in art market. I started my project with the artist Mohamed KRICH by collecting the essential informationabout western painters during and after the Renaissance, especially the period of impressionism, school of light like Monet andManet. Then later on I wanted to make researches about Moroccan painting that was

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very recent labored by some painters since 1950, like GHARBAWI, SHARQAOUI and the Naïve School with the first ladies CHAABIA and FATIMA. Historically after the French Colonization, some French painters settle in morocco like PANTOY and MAJORELLE just for the beauty of the land and the light. I was fascinated by their composition and thelight that spread in their painting. I had the chance to see all their painting in exhibitions and in special books made especially for them. Indeed those artists hada big influence in fine art school in the south of Morocco. In the North I could mention BERTUTCHI as a big artist that created the school of light and was the founder of the fine art school inTETOUAN. As matter of fact BERTUTCHI had built the school of art and was the director.Beside that he was a Director of traditional art and created a big atelier that embraced alot of artisans in rug, wood, metal and many other traditional interior decorations. The contact between the western artists from France and Spain with Moroccan artists had a

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big influence on the Moroccan creations and painting. The Moroccan painters had new support and could come up with decorative items to be hanged up in traditional homes. This new style gave a lot of opportunities in creatingnew perspective of colors, forms and lines while making their paintings. Before that period of time of the fifties theMoroccan artists were working on traditional decorations or graphics, using traditional material like caw or goat leather or on metal. That artistic style was mostly known as naïve and the dominant style was very orientalist. In the other hand, the second period that started after 1960 was special because of education that the Moroccan artists had received in the great schools of art calls “fine art school” in North and south of Morocco, this leaded to two different schools of art to appear. The firstfamous school was in North of Morocco in TETOUAN and was created by the famous Spanishpainter BERTUTCHI. The second school was created in south of Morocco in CASABLANCA by French painters like MAJORELLE and PENTOY.

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Since then there was two style of art, one very figurative and bright in TETOUAN, the second one was very colorful in south of Morocco with MAJORELLE and PENTOY. Beside thetwo figurative schools, there was an abstractschool that was very influenced by the new style of European abstract painting in Franceand German. The Moroccan abstract painters were very creative and labored a new style with the traditional Moroccan materials. Thishistoric period that last (1960-1980) was very important and influenced the next generations. Indeed the Abstract style has dominated in Moroccan painting for a while until late period of the eighties. Even the appearance of the figurative style that occurred with young artists, the abstract and naïve style was very dominant. I was impressed by the expansion by the new style and started working on special files about for great artists that influenced the Moroccan style of art in the early period after the independence of Morocco from 1956 to 1990.I met many Moroccan painters and wrote about their paintings as art critic in special

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catalogues or in news papers. That was my field of interest for years that started from1986 till 1994. Later on, I went to graduate school and study Islamic Philosophy as major.That was a great challenge as a young researcher and I studied deeply the great Islamic Philosophers and scholars of the Islamic Renaissance like, AVEREOS, IBN SINAI,FARABI, IBN BAJJA, KINDI and others. But my fascination for Art was so great that I continued making researches about both Moroccan and western artists. Indeed my dissertation of PhD was about western Art and especially about “the perspective in the Italian Renaissance Painting and its influence in Ideas and Sciences”. My big concern was to demonstrate how the early painters since the twelve century were creating a new view and composition of the space in their painting. Giotto was the first one who renovated his paintings by chiaroscuro [light and shadow]. Linear perspective and chiaroscuro were the basics of the Italian painting. The Euclidiansolid geometry, attempted in the beginning todo more than replicate what the human eye perceives according to the tenets of

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Euclidian geometry, which medieval Europeans understood as synonymous with the vision of God. So since perspective pictures replicate geometrically to scale, they not only symbolize but reproduce their subject matter point by point, so faithfully that from such a model alone a lifelike three-dimensional copy could be reconstructed. In truth, the first Renaissance observers of linear perspective were so astounded that they excitedly proclaimed it a “miracle”. Thus Western Renaissance art has influenced so many non-western cultures not because it is imperialistically imposed but because it works more convincingly more like natural perception than traditional, even locally accepted magic representations. The linear perspective permitted normal human perceive the third dimension by moving about in space,seeing and/ or touching solid objects from a jumble of aspects almost simultaneously, the notion of looking at the world or a picture of it from only a single viewpoint is artificial. E. H. GOMBRICH has argued that even though linear perspective is artificial,there is a natural urge in all humankind to make pictures that do match visual truth. Theevolution of pictorial styles, in response to

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this natural desire, is really a matter of continually correcting individual cultural schemata. According to him, the history of art is similar to the history of science [especiallyas interpreted by Karl Popper], in both of which the West took the lead after the Renaissance. In the other hand I had to show how the Italian painters were influenced by the Greek geometry and notion of beauty. But it didn’t mean that they were just copying from the Greek culture. Indeed there was a big renovation in the way the painters were composing the space, there was a move from the middle age notion of creating a painting,which was very simple without any notion of third dimension. The space was flat and the painters couldn’t compose the space as if there is deepness in it. I will here ask the same question that Samuel Y. Edgerton, JR. did in his book named “The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry”. Why was capitalist Europeafter 1500 the first of all civilizations in the world to develop what is commonly understood as modern science, moving rapidly ahead of the previously more sophisticated cultures of the East? Why were some of the most spectacular achievements of both the

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Western artistic and scientific revolutions conceived in the very same place, the Tuscan city of Florence? Was it only coincidence that Giotto, the founder of Renaissance art, and Galileo, the founder of modern science, were native Tuscans? Indeed the perspective geometry of Giotto andBrunelleschi had considerable influence on the visual thinking of Renaissance artisans-engineers, those practical technologists who carried out projects of all sorts for civic and princely patrons in times of war and peace, from designing fortifications and weaponry to the creation of monumental buildings and labor-saving machines. Filippi Brunelleschi was himself an artisan-engineer.His masterpiece, the soaring cupola above thecathedral1 in Florence, pays tribute both to his traditional engineering methods and to his further quantification of Giotto’s three-dimensional visual perception. Many modern scholars contend that Brunelleschi devised perspective in the first place as an aid to his architectural planning. Strangely, not a single sketch of any sort, perspective or

1 The cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, known as the Duomo.

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other-wise, exists by his hand.2 Brunelleschi clearly intended that in diameter and height his new Florentine cupola should not just rival but surpass the Pantheon, the grandest domed building to survive in the West from the age of the Caesars. For many historian ofArt the real Renaissance flourished in the Architecture with the famous Italian architecture Brunelleschi the one who contributed in the revolution of space by twoelements the light and the third dimension. The experience of Giotto was lonely and special, but it doesn’t mean that he wasn’t in contact with the elite of the philosophers, architectures and the theologizes. Leon Battista Alberti, the humanist author who codified perspective rules and wrote a book for architects, warnedhis readers not to be beguiled by Brunelleschi’s new pictorial science : The difference between the drawings of a painter and those of the architect is this: the former takes pains to emphasize the relief ofobjects in painting with shading and diminishing lines and angles; the architect rejects shading, but takes his projections

2 Samuel Y. Edgerton, JR. The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry. Cornell University Press, 1991, p.108.

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from the ground plan and, without altering the lines and by maintaining the true angle, reveals the extent and shape of each elevation and side-he is the one who desires his work to be judged not by deceptive appearance but according to certain calculated standards.3

For Alberti architects and engineers should think in terms of undistorted elevations and thus work from three-dimensional wooden models; what need had they for optical tricks?The ability to compose complex three-dimensional structures in the mind’s eye and then transfer their exact likenesses completein every scaled dimension to a notebook page was captivating to would-be capomaestri. Brunelleschi’s own spectacular success set the standard; his perspective method in fact became a kind of symbolic form indicating therising status of the artisan-engineer. Moreover, his followers, realizing that perspective drawing offered a convenient means for communicating ideas among themselves, proceeded to invent a vocabulary

3 Leon Battista Alberti , (2), p.34.

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of mutually understandable pictorial conventions.Indeed, the artistic creativity stimulated bygeometric perspective resulted not from trompe l’oeil illusionism per se but from clever manipulation of such conventions. But such manipulations the artisan-engineer wouldlearn to explore not just the surface but thecovert interior of things, the essential structure that caused nature’s exterior appearance in the first place.4

So in my thesis dissertation I had to demonstrate how did the move realized in the western middle age art to a performing geometric art? Around 1400, Western artisan-engineers began their historic “escape from flatness,” their Renaissance perceptual encounter with objective reality.But the artists’ contact with the Greek painting was very essential because the masters of art in painting and sculpture were in the beginning just copying from the Greeks’ models. This enriching contact with the Greek geometry and culture gave a lot ofknowledge about how to compose the space.

4 E.H.Gombrich, (5).

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But that contact wasn’t always direct, but was done through Muslim philosophers and Scientists that have read Euclid’s books andpracticed his theorems in Sciences, like Alhazen (Ibn Haitam) and Al KINDY. They did a big job by translating Euclid’s books fromGreek to Arabic. Edgerton had mentioned the Islamic treatises on mechanics from Ibn al-Jazari’s thirteenth-century “Compendium of the Theory and practice of the mechanical Arts”. Against the background of Alhazen’s ideas onvisual perception Alberti outlines a theory of vision in which the passing of time is taken for granted, and which he equates withthe act of painting. In the threefold process Alberti describes we can perhaps hear the echoes of Alhazen or the later perspectives, despite the rhetorical language into which the statement is cast: Since painting strives to represent things seen, let us note in what ways things are seen. First, in seeing a thing, we say it occupies a place. Here the painter, in describing this space, will say this; his guiding an outline with a line is circumscription (circonscrizione).

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Then looking at it again, we understand thatseveral planes of observed body belong together, and here the painter drawing them in their places will say he is making a composition.Finally, we determine more clearly the colors and qualities of the planes. Since every difference in them is born from light,we can properly call their representation the reception of light. 5 Even more than Alberti, perhaps, Leonardo displays his familiarly with the ideas of vision stemming from Alhazen, and more specifically an acceptance of the notion of certification. But since Alberti’s method inits most reductive form describes a unified space, or even a single place, as seen in a single glance, Alberti uses the phrase uno solo guardare, then some kind of simultaneity must be inherent in such representations, especially if we pay strictattention to the physical or optical facts by which one-point perspective is generally explained. More specifically, any picture or pictorial space conceived as an abrupt break, as a slice through a sheaf of light rays making up the visual pyramid, can only

5. Alberti, para. 30. Trans. Spenser, p. 68.

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describe a momentary, and in effect simultaneous, set of relationship, whether the resulting depiction is to be seen all atonce or not. Leonardo, too, perhaps had something similarin mind when he recommended painting on glass as a means of studying atmospheric perspective. He instructs the painter to record the appearance of the same object, a tree in which instance, at various distanceson a series of glass plates, which can after-wards be used as standards of reference in rendering la prospective de’ colori or la prospettiva aerea.What Leonardo suggests sounds rather like the painted equivalent, on an enlarged scale, of lantern slides or more recent kinds of transparencies! Ghiberti’s overall purpose and the disorganized result have left scholars understandably bewildered, and very often puzzled as to the meaning of specific passages or phrases as well. Nevertheless Ghiberti’s commentary is an important document for my purposes, indeed for any study of quattrocento perspective and its implications, as Mesnil recognized some

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years ago; beneath the confusion pastiche ofdisjointed notations rests a coherent optical and cognitive theory, which can be reconstructed despite the garbled form in which it appears. More specifically, Ghiberti’s text presents the theories of thewell known Arab authority on vision, Ibn-al-Haitham, or Alhazen as he was generally called (ca. 965-1038), whose views on opticsheld sway in the west until the time of Kepler’s discoveries. According to Alhazen, vision occurs, in two basic ways: either as immediate perception, or as more attentive and contemplative perception. Alhazen had given an ample explanation of the process done when the perception attentive and contemplative is done by a painter. The same process is continued and repeated until a complete mental picture is fully assembled in the imagination, the repository of the common sense, a processing center in the brain. A detailed overall impression is therefore built up piece by piece, an impression that is held in the mind as a kind of armature, or as the framework of a jigsaw puzzle, as more and more details are added in succession: every separate observation, all

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the puzzle, take their place in an overall structure outside of which they have little or no significance. The process Alhazen describes has a kind of familiar ring: it calls to mind the explanation of memory. The latter formation was, of course, based on recent research andcurrent theories, but it is clearly anticipated in Alhazen’s observations. Like many of his modern counterparts, Alhazen regards perception as a successive operation, a process that occurs in stages: vision, in his view, a view shared by Ghiberti, depends as much on the functioningof the mind as upon pure sensation; light and color per se; moreover, such perception requires a tangible or perceptible amount oftime, no matter how rapidly light is physically transmitted to the eye, or how ideal the viewing conditions. Such a conception does lend itself very well to thecreation of instantaneous images.

Renaissance perspective brought a new clarityand cohesion, even a new unity to pictorial representation: everything stands in some measurable relation to everything else. But the system in itself did not, by definition,

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limit the duration of narrative action, at least so far as the painters and sculptors ofquattrocento were concerned; on the contrary,one point perspective provided these artists with an effective means of creating a legibleand spacious setting in which stories could unfold and time could flow in which a series of separate events could take place, in the painting, and accordingly in the viewer’s imagination. My concern was to show how the big change inthe composition of the painting and its process in the new way to see the beauty and the favorite themes of the artists practically in special period of time. That period started from the fourteen century through the fifteen and the sixteen century with the Science Revolution with Galilees. I had to demonstrate how the change in composition of the painting had a big influence on the new notion of space with Galilees in the new Physic. It wasn’t very easy to contour the subject because there wasmany factors that I had to take in consideration and my knowledge in Sciences are very limited and are more philosophy of science.

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Indeed my large knowledge about philosophy helped me a lot to see from very close the influences that the big philosophers like, Fichini, and Gucci, had about art and philosophy of beauty practically. Indeed the big question who were the Renaissance artiststhat caused that sea-change in visual thinking, eventually influencing the education of Galileo, William Harvey, Rene Descartes, and Isaac Newton? My approach to Italian Renaissance painting had various points of view, but my concentration was on E.H GOMBRICH and Samuel Y. Edgerton, JR. theorems through their important published books that I got at Penn fine art library in Philadelphia/PA. In parallel Erwin Panofsky theorems about Renaissance in art in general and Italian Artparticularly were the theorems ground of my opinions and views. I was very supported by one of the advisors, “Moulim Laaroussi” Professor of history of art at University Hassan II in Casablanca. He had just published his important book about Moroccan painting and its itinerary from the colonization to the recent period of abstractstyle.

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He did appreciate very well my thesis subjectsince it was the first one done about historyof art at the University of Letters and humanism Sciences in Morocco. Indeed my thesis was a grandiose in the history of Mohamed V University and it would be the first one in the hall Universities of the country. He wanted his students from Hassan II University to approach the thesis from close and get the advantage of the diversity of the information’s it contends, because of the richness in the References, Arabic, French, and English. Indeed the linear perspective in western painting, this specific complicated subject that I tried to contour, unifies between renovation in art, philosophy of beauty and Science renovation. The material I worked on was from Penn fine Art library in Philadelphia, because I couldn’t find it in our libraries in Morocco.Otherwise my advisor Professor Elbouazzati did provide me with many books from his own library, the ones that I used to have a closer and first approach to this kind of very specific subject.

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The head of the Department of Philosophy, Professor Salem YAFOUT was also very proud ofthe hard work I could did about such subject from gathering the materials and strong references. Then approaching the subject fromdifferent points of view like, history of Art, history of Science, and Philosophy. Indeed the day of my defense thesis, we had abig debate because of the diversity of pointsof view, from history of Sciences that the Professor Mohamed ABBATOUY represented, to history of Art with Professor Moulim Laaroussi and the philosophy of thinking and mastering the practice of creative Art that Dr. Salem Yafout discussed. For me and all ofus that was a great day, especially after a long struggle in finishing my thesis dissertation, it was a grandiose after comingup with new ideas and theorem after years of researches. My points of view were very influenced by western theorems that had big and strong impact in history of Art like EDGERTON, GOMBRICH, PANOFSKY, and many other big and famous theorists about Renaissance renovations. For my Professors there are no differences between the human Art creation,

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because there is no differences between western painting and eastern or Arabic/Islamic painting since they all represent the beauty which is very relative. Moreover researchers have to go further, and surpass the old Philosophy that catteries or divide the human creation depending on civilization differences. Indeed I was very influenced by the American theorists and art critical, and I had been always influenced bythem since I was in college especially when Iwas studying Western Philosophy. In the otherhand I don’t deny the strong influence of French Philosophers on my way of thinking andanalyzing these subjects. Indeed in my undergraduate philosophy programI had to study many western philosophers in French language since it is my second language. I did the same while studying western painters and the history of art, and I was very fascinated by the European cultureand methods of analyzing. But it doesn’t meanthat I do not have my way of thinking and analyzing those kinds of subjects. I still believe that there is a big difference between two cultures, the western culture andthe Arabic/Islamic culture. Saying so doesn’t

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mean that there are no common points between the two civilizations. For example in the early Islamic Renaissance in the tenth century of the Hejra ( the Islamic calendar),the famous Islamic philosophers in south of Spain and in the middle east were studying the big philosophers like Aristotle, Platoon,Euclid, and many others. They translated their essential books from Greek to Arabic and took advantage of the strong logic they had especially with Aristotle and the Geometry with Euclid. They didn’t just translate the books from Greek language to Arabic language, but they were trying to build a new system of thinking. The same thing happened with the Egyptian culture but in Art, because they were very advanced in expressing themselves in drawing on the wallsin the city, also inside the huge Palaces of Egyptian Emperor. So for me the contact between different civilizations can always beinteresting and flourishing, because I don’t believe in the Crash of civilizations but in cooperation and communication.Houston, TX: 11/11/2011

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