Light and Illusion

In reading Livingstone’s book, I am constantly in awe of the images reproduced within the pages, but I was particularly struck by the Ingres painting on pages 126 and 127 entitled “Princesse Albert de Broglie, nee Josephine-Eleonor-Marie-Pauline de Galard de Brassac de Bearn”. Livingstone says that Ingres has “taken luminance to a new level” and “It is difficult to tell that the black-and-white version is not a photograph of the woman herself, rather than a photograph of the painting.” (Livingstone page 125) In careful reading of these statements (and others throughout the chapter), I realized that Livingstone places a heavy emphasis on the comparison of equiluminant representations of the same picture. In this chapter [8] specifically, she seems inclined to trust the monochromatic version of the piece more, in terms of spatial information it is giving the viewer. This is interesting to me because as she has very well noted, this is not how things occur in reality. “But it is impossible to consciously see only the luminance version of a scene or painting; we cannot simply see with that part of the visual system…” (Livingstone page 110)
This discrepancy correlates to an idea Arnheim discusses briefly in his chapter on light (chapter six). “Even so, we have trained ourselves to rely on knowledge rather than our sense of sight to such an extent that it takes accounts by the naïve and the artists to make us realize what we see.” (Arnheim page 305) This disparity between what we perceptually believe to be true and what is actually going on to cause us to perceive stimuli in one way over another lends itself to the idea of illusion. Prior to these chapters on light I would become frustrated whenever an author would use the word illusion. I thought this to be an inappropriate description of art. It is with the theories on the way light works that “illusion” becomes more appropriate to me. As Arnheim explains to us, the child’s notion of light is something that becomes terminated by darkness. He then goes on to describe how physicists and other “knowledgeable people” view the way light works in the exact opposite way. This implies that in this specific topic, the explanation of how it really works contradicts the way we perceive it to work intuitively. And, as Livinstone clearly accentuates, this offers a difficult task to the artist attempting to use shading in order to create reality-based depth. Therefore, when an artist accomplishes this task well (as Ingres does in the portrait on page 126), I believe it now to be more appropriate to call this an illusion.