14. Art and the Deep Ken

The first of three art chapters describes deep-ken approaches to the problem of representation: Deep-ken art is beautiful and proportioned, indifferent to plain-ken particularities, and richly (literally, with expensive material) coloured. The chapter looks in particular at consonances between symbol and referent, between exemplars of a tradition, between parts and the whole, between the expense of the pigments and the awesomeness of the subject, and between the depicted and the context of the art. The fifteenth-century is one of the great turning points in Western art history, celebrated as a shift towards images more three-dimensional, natural, and realistic—that is, closer to the plain-ken spacetime we generally perceive as natural and real. Rather than talking about a shift from abstract to real, we might consider a shift from a deep-ken realism to a plain-ken realism. Each style looks real if the viewer has the appropriate perspective. Indeed, in eastern Orthodox societies, Christians who had religious visions could and did use these “abstract” icons to identify their apparitions. Looking at Renaissance art as a shift between two kinds of realism, from the deep ken to the plain ken, makes it easier to dispel, or even reverse, triumphalist accounts of Renaissance art as progress.