Faldoni, parts 2800 - 2803

2800. Then again the lace collars that the Flemish women liked to wear; made up of tiny white threads, might come out looking like a plate of pasta was spilled at the top of the woman’s chest.

 

2801. But regardless of the difficulties of getting the small details right, and indifferent to the tragic mistakes and catastrophes involved, artists for thousands of years struggled as best they were able to make their images as realistic as possible, and then came the Pre-Raphaelites; born into the world at a very awkward time from the point of view of details in pictures.

2802. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of English painters was founded by Holman Hunt and others in the year 1848. The picture above is a typical Hunt painting, and also very usual for the Pre-Raphaelite school. We can pass over their philosophy which is a lot of vacuous ideas critical of the art from Raphael on, and simply note that the paintings of this period are characterized by excessively tiny detailed observation coupled with trite sentimental subject matter.

2803. As Mr. Holman Hunt was laboring in his studio producing canvases in which the surface of things was being rendered with meticulous precision, another set of images was being produced in France which was to have a profound influence on the question of how to depict things like hair, thread, flies wings, dust and feathers in an image. Photography had been invented, and for fifty years the process had slowly evolved.