MCLUHAN AND TRANSPARENCY

WhenMarshall McLuhan uses the word transparency, we take note.  In the passage below, they give us the following description at what happened at the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance:

“The rebirth of continuous visual space after a thousand years militated against the interfaces of transparency and overlay.”  p81

It is interesting that McLuhan uses the word transparency when they are describing art from the Middle Ages.  As we have seen in for example Byzantine Spacetime, we know that there was an anti-illusionist flattening of the objects.  And then in the Renaissance, the linear perspective de-flattened the pictorial spacetime.  Yet why does McLuhan use the word transparency in a Middle Ages context?

Overlay I get.  Without a vanishing point serving as an overall organization, there is an overlay quality to the Byzantine images.  It is as if the various elements have been simply overlaid on one another which compresses or even eliminates a sense of space.  Or collage might be another operative term.

But transparency?  I’ve looked thru many Middle Ages compositions and I don’t see transparency in the layering of shapes and forms.  Possibly McLuhan is getting at more of an implied transparency.  While you can’t see thru the opaque surfaces of cathedral walls and Bishop’s bodies, possibly the transparency is evident within the scale of the artwork.

Or possibly what they are describing is when forms and shapes are overlaid over each other, the continuation of forms is implied, or suggested, behind forms in the foreground.  If so, is this an augmentation to our current understanding of transparency?

Regarding the example above, which is the left panel of the Wilton Diptych, there is a transparency in the halos of the holy figures.  Still, the flatness of the images remains rather solid and not very much transparent.  The image above is in the public domain.

As with any McLuhan passage, I always have to spend time with it before I understand it fully.