Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of ScienceAllen, Grant
Science
Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science
Allen, Grant
Science
Printing, in turn, necessarily follows the rule of writing, so that in
fact the order of letters and words on this page depends ultimately upon
the remote fact that primitive man had to use his right hand to deliver
a blow, and his left to parry, or to guard his heart.
Some curious and hardly noticeable results flow once more from this
order of writing from left to right. You will find, if you watch
yourself closely, that in examining a landscape, or the view from a
hill-top, your eye naturally ranges from left to right; and that you
begin your survey, as you would begin reading a page of print, from the
left-hand corner. Apparently, the now almost instinctive act of reading
(for Dogberry was right after all, for the civilised infant) has
accustomed our eyes to this particular movement, and has made it
especially natural when we are trying to 'read' or take in at a glance
the meaning of any complex and varied total.
In the matter of pictures, I notice, the correlation has even gone a
step farther. Not only do we usually take in the episodes of a painting
from left to right, but the painter definitely and deliberately intends
us so to take them in. For wherever two or three distinct episodes in
succession are represented on a single plane in the same picture--as
happens often in early art--they are invariably represented in the
precise order of the words on a written or printed page, beginning at
the upper left-hand corner, and ending at the lower right-hand angle. I
first noticed this curious extension of the common principle in the
mediaeval frescoes of the Campo Santo at Pisa; and I have since verified
it by observations on many other pictures elsewhere, both ancient and
modern. The Campo Santo, however, forms an exceptionally good museum of
such story-telling frescoes by various painters, as almost every picture
consists of several successive episodes. The famous Benozzo Gozzoli, for
example, of Noah's Vineyard represents on a single plane all the stages
in that earliest drama of intoxication, from the first act of gathering
the grapes on the top left, to the scandalised lady, the _vergognosa di
Pisa_, who covers her face with her hands in shocked horror at the
patriarch's disgrace in the lower right-hand corner.
Observe, too, that the very conditions of _technique_ demand this order
almost as rigorously in painting as in writing. For the painter will
naturally so work as not to smudge over what he has already painted: and
he will also naturally begin with the earliest episode in the story he
unfolds, proceeding to the others in due succession. From which two
principles it necessarily results that he will begin at the upper left,
and end at the lower right-hand corner.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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