The Problem of Time in Painting

Time, understood as the ceaseless flow of consecutive change, is by nature the least stable of the four coordinates of being; yet at the level of culture it consolidates into remarkably durable configurations, and a given period’s concept of time functions as an index of its en- tire worldview. This paper takes up that broad problem in its narrowest and most demanding form: can painting, an art bound to the instantaneous and the spatial, produce an adequate image of temporal relations, and if so, by what means and according to what criteria does it succeed? Drawing on the classical theoretical positions of Lessing, Kagan, Kogan, Wipper, and Florensky, alongside more recent reframings of the problem by Keith Moxey, Georges Didi-Huberman, Mieke Bal, and neuroaesthetic research on the temporality of visual perception, and situating all of these against Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, the paper traces how successive historical periods - the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque, the eighteenth century, and the nineteenth century - each secured a distinct answer to this question through a distinct repertoire of pictorial means: reverse perspective, linear perspective, simultaneism, tempo, and montage. From this survey, four criteria are derived by which painting’s temporal achievement may be judged - criteria then tested against a close reading of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa - and it is argued that painting’s answer to the problem of time must be given twice over: once historically, as a sedimented achievement of period-specific technique, and once perpetually, as an achievement renewed in the singular act of each viewer’s encounter with the work.