Let us consider a painting which belongs to the tradition whose subject is an art lover.īefore they are anything else, they are themselves objects which can be bought and owned. And the history of the tradition, as it is usually taught, teaches us that art prospers if enough individuals in society have a love of art. It supplies us with our archetypes of 'artistic genius'. Its norms still affect the way we see such subjects as landscape, women, food, dignitaries, mythology. It defines what we mean by pictorial likeness. The tradition, however, still forms many of our cultural assumptions. For these reasons the period of the traditional oil painting may be roughly set as between 15. At about the same time the photograph took the place of the oil painting as the principal source of visual imagery. Yet the basis of its traditional way of seeing was undermined by Impressionism and overthrown by Cubism. Oil paintings are still being painted today. Nor can the end of the period of the oil painting be dated exactly. The oil painting did not fully establish its own norms, its own way of seeing, until the sixteenth century. When oil paint was first used - at the beginning of the fifteenth century in Northern Europe - for painting pictures of a new character, this character was somewhat inhibited by the survival of various medieval artistic conventions. But the oil painting as an art form was not born until there was a need to develop and perfect this technique (which soon involved using canvas instead of wooden panels) in order to express a particular view of life for which the techniques of tempera or fresco were inadequate.
The technique of mixing pigments with oil had existed since the ancient world. The term oil painting refers to more than a technique.
If this is true - though the historical span of Levi-Strauss's generalization may be too large - the tendency reached its peak during the period of the traditional oil painting. It is this avid and ambitious desire to take possession of the object for the benefit of the owner or even of the spectator which seems to me to constitute one of the outstandingly original features of the art of Western civilization. Significantly enough it is an anthropologist who has come closest to recognizing it. This analogy between possessing and the way of seeing which is incorporated in oil painting, is a factor usually ignored by art experts and historians.