I
Classical antiquity seems to have confined its atten-
tion to chance images of three kinds: those in rocks,
blots, and
clouds. For the first two, our earliest source
is Pliny's Natural History, although his references to
these phenomena are
clearly derived from Greek
(probably Hellenistic) literature. He tells of
an image
of Silenus found inside a block of Parian marble that
had
been split open with wedges (XXXVI, v) and of
“the agate of
Pyrrhus on which could be seen Apollo
with his lyre and the nine muses,
each with her proper
attribute, rendered not by art but by nature,
through
the pattern of the spots” (XXXVII, i). The context from
which Pliny lifted these passages cannot be recon-
structed; the images, absurdly
perfect down to the last
iconographic detail, are apparently cited as
evidence
of the miraculous generative powers of Nature, supe-
rior to any man-made artifact. Somewhat
more illumi-
nating is Pliny's story about
a panting dog in a picture
by the famous Hellenistic painter Protogenes
(XXXV,
x). The artist tried in vain to represent the foam issuing
from
the mouth of the animal until, in a rage, he hurled
a sponge at his panel
and thereby achieved the desired
result. This dog, Pliny states,
“was wondrously made,”
since the natural effect was
the work of
fortuna. The
same story, he informs us,
is told of another famous
painter, Nealces, with a horse taking the place
of the
dog. A variant of the latter version, substituting Apelles
for
Nealces, occurs in the sixty-fourth oration of Dio
Chrysostom, which deals
with the workings of
fortuna. Here again the chance
image is so perfect as to surpass
any human intention. The inference to be
drawn from
the sponge story, it would seem, is that Fortune re-
serves such “strokes of
luck” only for the greatest of
artists, as if on occasion she
took pity on their ambition
to achieve the impossible.
It must have been these accounts of incredibly per-
fect chance images that provoked the following skep-
tical rejoinder from Cicero:
Pigments flung blindly at a panel might conceivably form
themselves
into the lineaments of a human face, but do
you think the
loveliness of the Venus of Cos could emerge
from paints hurled at
random?... Carneades used to tell
that once, in the quarries of
Chios, a stone was split open
and the head of a little Pan
appeared; well, the bust may
not have been unlike the god, but we
may be sure that
it was not so perfect a reproduction as to lead
one to
imagine that it had been wrought by Scopas, for it goes
without saying that perfection has never been achieved by
accident
(De divinatione I, xiii).
This early hint at the rationalist explanation of chance
images corresponds
to the classicistic taste that domi-
nated
Roman art of the late Republic and the Augustan
era (note the references to
classic Greek masters). The
story of the sponge-throwing painter, in
contrast, re-
flects an admiration for
spontaneity, for inspired grop-
ing by a great
individual as against an impersonal ideal
of perfection. If fortuna favors only artists of the stat-
ure of Protogenes, Nealces, or Apelles, is she not
just
another name for genius? Such an unclassical (one is
tempted to
call it romantic) attitude seems to have
existed in Hellenistic art,
although it cannot be docu-
mented from
surviving examples. An echo of it may
be found in another passage of
Pliny's Natural History
(XXXV, cxlv) that speaks of
painters whose unfinished
pictures were sometimes even more admirable
than
their completed work, because they still showed the
lines of the original sketch and thus revealed the work-
ing of the artist's mind.
The agate of Pyrrhus, too, although obviously myth-
ical, has a bearing on artistic practice. Greeks and
Romans
greatly admired carved gems of varicolored
semiprecious stones, as attested
by the large number
of preserved specimens. In many of these, the
design
takes advantage of, and may indeed have been sug-
gested by, the striations of the material. Thus the
value
of a gem stone was probably measured by its potential
in this
respect even more than by its rarity, and those
that lent themselves
particularly well to carving would
have been looked upon as miraculous
“images made
(or at least preshaped) by Nature.” How
far human
skill has been “aided by Nature” in any
given case is
of course difficult to assess after the carving is
finished,
although certain gems indicate that the artist wanted
to
suggest that such aid had been considerable.
The ancient marble sculptor's interest in chance
effects, suggested by the
tales of images found in
cracked blocks, is even harder to verify. One
wide-
spread feature of later Greek and
Roman decoration,
the foliage mask (Figure 1), may have originated in
this way. Ladendorf has proposed that it developed
from the acanthus
ornament crowning Attic grave
steles, which sometimes tends to assume the
appear-
ance of a human face (Figure 2).
This physiognomic
effect is so unobtrusive that, in the beginning at
least,
it could hardly have been intentional. A stele (an up-
right stone slab or pillar) evokes the image
of a standing
figure, and its upper terminus thus may be viewed as
its
“head.” Perhaps this notion was unconsciously pres-
ent in the carver's mind. In any event he
must have
become aware at some point of the face hidden among
the
foliage, and from then on the effect was exploited
quite explicitly. The
foliage mask, then, could be
termed an “institutionalized chance
image.”
Figures that are seen in clouds are noted by Aristotle
(Meteorology I, ii) and briefly mentioned in Pliny's
Natural History (II, lxi) and other ancient authors.
Because of their instability and remoteness, however,
they were not given
the significance of the miraculous
images made by Nature or Fortune in
rocks and blots,
and their origin rarely excited speculation. An excep-
tion is Lucretius (De
rerum natura IV, 129ff.), who
found them a challenge to his
theory that all images
are material films given off by objects somewhat
in
the manner of snakes shedding their outer skin. Since
cloud figures
are unstable, there cannot be any objects
from which these image films
emanate; Lucretius
therefore postulates the spontaneous generation of
such
films in the upper air—an ingenious but hardly persua-
sive solution. By far the most
interesting analysis of
the phenomenon, linking it for the first time with the
process of artistic creation, occurs in a memorable
dialogue in
Philostratus'
Apollonius of Tyana (II, 22).
Apollonius and his interlocutor, Damis, agree that the
painter's purpose is
to make exact likenesses of every-
thing
under the sun; and that these images are make-
believe, since the picture consists in fact of nothing
but
pigments. They further agree that the images seen
in clouds are
make-believe, too. But, Apollonius asks,
must we then assume that God is an
artist, who amuses
himself by drawing these figures? And he concludes
that those configurations are produced at random,
without any divine
significance; it is man, through his
natural gift of make-believe, that
gives them regular
shape and existence. This gift of make-believe
(i.e.,
imagination) is the common property of all. What
distinguishes
the artist from the layman is his ability
to reproduce his mental images in
material form. To
Philostratus the difference between cloud figures
and
painted images would thus seem to be one of degree
only: the
artist projects images into the pigments on
his panel the way all of us
project images into the
random shapes of clouds, but he articulates them
more
clearly because of his manual skill. Although this view
clearly
reflects the growing ascendency of
fantasia over
mimesis—of imagination over
imitation—that had
been asserting itself in the attitude of the
ancients
toward the visual arts ever since Hellenistic times, it
retains the traditional conception of painting and
sculpture as crafts or
“mechanical arts” as against the
“liberal
arts.” That the artist might be distinguished
from the nonartist by the quality of his imagination
rather
than by his manual training did not occur to
Philostratus. If it had, he
would have anticipated an
achievement of the Renaissance by more than a
thou-
sand years. Nor did ancient painters
think of the pig-
ments on their panels as a
“hunting ground” for images
analogous to clouds; they
seem, in fact, to have been
repelled by clouds—the skies in
ancient landscapes are
devoid of them, and even where the subject
requires
them (as in
The Sacrifice of Iphigenia,
Naples) they
appear as the merest wisps. This aversion was clearly
a
matter of aesthetics, not of disability. Ancient paint-
ers commanded all the illusionistic techniques for
rendering clouds, and bequeathed them to Early
Christian art, where clouds
are conspicuous.