Thoughts on the history of shadows. 

I like to start with Bellini and Mantegna. Prior to them shadows in medieval art had not been important. The re –discovery of Roman Mosaics and paintings brought an awareness of naturalism; and that meant painting shadows. (Actually Leonardo predates Bellini and Mantegna) We have the advantage in that Bellini and Mantegna were brother –in laws and often painted the same subject and started at about the same place in terms of painting shadows. However they gradually parted company developed into their natural leanings.

If we look at later works we can see that Bellini’s shadows are naturalistic while Mantegna’s become dramatic.

The dramatic shadow is a bit like a “flashbulb moment”, in the way photographers used to take photos with huge flashbulb, capturing a dramatic moment, or like lightning illuminating the landscape for a moment. Maybe those sudden moments of illumination are fewer and therefore seem dramatic. We can see how they developed in Chiaroscuro, Caravaggio, DeCirico and later in films by Hitchcock.  

Naturalistic shadows depend on half tones and the middle of the tonal scale. They are many moments and can be elongated time or an ambiguous time. Half tones give more chance for the passing of time and are less fixed; Rembrandts self-portraits, Marandi’s still lives, Gwen Johns chair in a window and Bellini’s Madonna and Child.

Composite shadows are time experienced.

I once went to Tate St Ives to look at a Bonnard painting with a group of students. Someone asked, "what time of the day do you think it is?” We couldn't decide.

Bonnard makes composite shadows like a composite character in a book. (A character that an author has made up from lots of people they know). These paintings are not made from one moment but from a whole day or time, from being in a place.

The philosopher Bergson's ideas on time are very helpful in explaining; "he argues that when we measure time we are treating it in terms of space. 

Let's take an hour; an hour is one twenty fourth of a day and a day is one revolution of the earth around the sun. That revolution is a movement in space. An hour is a chunk of that movement. That means that when we try to measure how long a process takes , say running a marathon, we may think we are dealing directly with time but all we are doing , Bergson argues by means of a clock is comparing two spatial movements with each other ; the locomotion of the runner to the locomotion of the earth circling the sun. The lived experience of time falls out of this equation."

“Bergson is trying to think of time as duration. Duration as he sees it involves a kind of flow a flux an interpenetration of the different elements that make up time. We can't think of time as discreet components, like seconds, minutes or hours. These are just spatial markers. They mark time but they don't account for the passing of time. 

There has to be a coexistence an interpenetration of the past and present otherwise we can't account for the passage of time, we just get time as a sort of linear movement of discreet insoluble presence, we never get the movement of time.

Hence why composite shadows are time experienced.