H U M A N a book . walden zero project
emanuel dimas de melo pimenta
2018
E Y E S
Both the humanities and the
natural sciences, as well as mathematics and philosophy, have
the impractical outlook of what the ancients called vita contemplativa
as opposed to vita activa. But is the contemplative life less
real or, to be more precise, is its contribution to what we call
reality less important, than that of the active life? The man
who takes a paper dollar in exchange for twenty-five apples commits
an act of faith, and subjects himself to a theoretical doctrine,
as did the mediaeval man who paid for indulgence. The man who
is run over by an automobile is run over by mathematics, physics
and chemistry. (...) Even he who merely transmits knowledge or
learning participates, in his modest way, in the process of shaping
reality - of which fact the enemies of humanism are perhaps more
keenly aware than its friends.
Erwin Panofsky, in Meaning in the Visual Arts
We are a permanent metamorphosis.
But because we are too close to ourselves, relatively little
do we realize of our own transformations.
Just look at the drawings we made when we were kids to realize
that our visual reality had radically changed over the years.
This happens throughout our lives, albeit apparently in a less
radical way.
We plastically change our brains over the years.
And this also happens, not less intensely, to large human groups
over long periods of time.
To get an idea o how such phenomenon works, take a look at the
story of some painter through his paintings. What some people
call "evolution" is in fact metamorphosis.
Such mutation happens also over the course of centuries, and
is not restricted to sight. It occurs in music as well as in
the world of ideas.
When we refer to the vision, we call this phenomenon iconography.
Human Eyes is a book about a collection of engravings started
more than thirty years ago, in the 1980s. It is just a part of
the collection that covers, with hundreds of works, a period
of over five hundred years, with drawings from 1503 to the present
day.
There are more than one hundred fabulous illustrators who tell
us, through their works, our metamorphosis in terms of civilization
and iconography, about how reality transforms itself.
Several of these engravings are also present in important collections,
such as the Metropolitan Museum of New York, the British Museum
and the Tate Gallery among others.
Kant argued that what we know is our way of knowing. Two hundred
years later, Marshall McLuhan would translate Kant into his celebrated
maxim: the medium is the message.
We have changed the media over the centuries and have transformed
what we are, reality, revealing inner and outer as a single phenomenon
in continuous metamorphosis.
Ernst Gombrich would said: "The true miracle of the language
of art is not that it enables the artist to create the illusion
of reality. It is that under the hands of a great master the
image becomes translucent. In teaching us to see the visible
world afresh, he gives us the illusion of looking into the invisible
realms of the mind - if only we know, as Philostratus says, how
to use our eyes".
Among the fabulous illustrators in the collection we have William
Hogarth, who would become known as the Shakespeare of the illustration;
Gravelot; Boucher; William Turner; Auguste Renoir; James Skene;
Hablot Knight Browne, often better known as Phiz; a self-portrait
of Titian; or the masterful Gustave Doré among many others.
The book is made in memory of a dear friend, the great illustrator
and color specialist, Fred Jordan, who lived between 1928 and
2001.
Understanding the contemporary world in all its faces, fields
and disciplines, and even to know ourselves, implies understanding
this process of permanent metamorphosis.
