Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Elias Martins proportionssinne

1934; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 3; Issue: 1-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00233603408603172

1651-2294

Gregor Paulsson,

Architecture and Art History Studies

Summary Elias Martin's sense of proportion. Elias Martin, one of Sweden's leading artists in the 18th century and its foremost landscape‐painter, has been adjud‐ged to be lacking in a sense of proportion. This failing has expressed itself in the fact that certain of his works are spoilt by faulty drawing, especially in the figures and particularly as regards their heads, the size of which is very much exaggerated. The author endeavours to show how this faulty drawing is due to incompatibility between the Rococo form and the meanings which Elias Martin desired to create in the works in question. These meanings, which were brought out with marked con‐spicuousness in his representation of religious sub‐jects, are of a compliant or submissive character, ranging from sympathy, devotion and reverence to religious ecstasy. The Rococo style is based on states of mind of an entirely contrasting character, an inducement of a markedly sensual type. The essential characteristic of the submissive states of mind, most clearly expressed of course in the most extreme state—ecstasy—, is that the sense of distance between the person performing an action and the object of his action entirely disappears. One “merges into” the object, “becomes one with God”, all sense of material weight and substance is eliminated. In the representation of such states of mind in pictorial form, the masses, contours and proportions of bodies become irrelevant, objects become embodied as components in a flood of light. Moreover, the structure of space becomes altered. Instead of a continuous building‐up of the picture from foreground—via middle‐distance — to background, the structure of space becomes more or less amorphous. This is explained by the fact that the sense of distance is not present and that consequently distance cannot be depicted. The attempt to portray these meanings is already clearly discernible in Elias Martin's younger days. He does not succeed then in giving a new form to the Rococo style, but its significance is observable in his over‐emphasizing the most expressive part of the body, the face. In his later works Martin creates a spatial structure that is fully in accord with the expressed meanings.