게인즈버러의 영상 상자와 18세기 광학 장치에 관한 연구

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship of the art and technology focusing on the case of Thomas Gainsborough. This representative figure of the 18th century English Painting invented a ‘show box’ in the early 1780s. It was a device which consists of candle-lit wooden box with a lens and oil landscape paintings on glass slides. Gainsborough’s intension was to make an illusion which was constantly changed with the light effects and loose brushwork. The spectator viewed the transparencies through a large round peep-hole, fitted with a magnifying lens. He also used this device as a trial work-out for a major composition. Unlike the Renaissance tradition of linear perspective system, the optical devices and perspective systems of Gainsborough’s era were to represent the world image as in time and motion. Gainsborough’s show box was highly influenced by the technology-based theatre culture and popular spectacles of London life. One of these spectacles was Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon, a miniature theatre with special effect of light and movement. He was an French painter and scenographer who created an new forms of stagecraft during his time in the Drury Lane theatre. Loutherbourg’s theatrical entertainments integrated the virtual reality of the scenic illusion with the special effect of light, sound, and movement. As a result, a new realism encouraged the viewers to be absorbed into the illusion the theatrical world. He proceeded further in Eidophusikon, where the scenic illusion itself is a protagonist of the performances. Such scaenographic entertainments became very popular in the late 18th century London. the panorama theatres and Dioramas are other examples which provided artificial imitations of the actual world, by means of new vantage points and moving sceneries. While the traditional linear perspective system and mechanical devices the Renaissance and Baroque painters used were means to visualize the objective form of the world, the optical devices and illusionistic technologies of the 18th century were to grasp the constantly shifting images of the world. Gainsborough’s show box and contemporary optical media of the theatrical entertainments are fine examples where the aesthetic intension achieved with the help of the mechanical illusions. The virtual reality of these devices reveals an acute sense of time and movement in our visual perception, which became the fundamental feature of the English Romantic landscape paintings after Gainsborough.