Read Belittles Role of Renaissance In Growth of Man's Consciousness

Unlike the ancient Greeks, Renaissance artists did not succeed in opening up a new dimension of the human consciousness, Sir Herbert Read told his New Lecture Hall audience last night. He also charged Leonardo daVinci with inadvertantly corrupting the artistic consciousness of Europe for centuries.

Speaking on "The Illusion of the Real," Read discussed the place of the discovery of perspective in the development of the human consciousness through art. He showed that the idea of perspective forced some artists to surrender their awareness of the sensory world, and had brought about "corruption of consciousness" in them.

Thus, although perspective was an important technical discovery, it opened up no now dimensions of reality for man, he added. Indeed, daVinei's recommendation that the painter's job is to hold the mirror up to nature--to create a visual illusion of reality--led directly to the later stultification of European art.

Certain artists of the 15th Century, especially Piero della Francesca, achieved perspectival conflicts which worked on the human consciousness and were very moving, Read said. But the trend towards architectonic representation of the external world forced a set of rules on the pure contents of the consciousness.

Burdened with this set of rules, the artist could not produce real works of art, because the consciousness is not mechanically lucid, but rather the total sensation of experience. Since the consciousness is not merely visual, a theory of painting based on purely mechanical representation of the visual world could not foster great artists, he concluded.