The Triptych as a private devotional object has a long tradition in early Christian Art. There is frequently a narrative, multi-dimensional aspect to the story telling and an emotive quality to the relationship between the artwork and viewer.1.
The concept of artistically exploring ‘real and symbolic’ realms across different panels also lends itself to eliciting a deeper reflective gaze and prompts further viewer enquiry, as there is an additional layering in the representation, in its physicalness and conceivably unconscious allusions to western arts historical religious convention.
Connolly (2002) suggests that the modern-day viewer takes in and emotionally responds to stimuli more than is consciously known by the individual and that this form of non-conscious perception is actively operating within our image saturated culture.2.
Developing the idea of how generalised technological immersion impacts the viewer, brings in how individual perceptions are linked to and altered by broader cultural nuances? .3.
Furthermore, this questions how observers cognitively construct and affectively respond to art when notions of beauty are culturally contingent: and an individual’s actual attention span is at least partially conditioned by their day-to-day milieu?
To complicate the problem of what constitutes “Beauty,” Cassirer (1927) states :
“The beautiful is essentially and necessarily a symbol because, and to the extent that, it is split within itself, because it is always and everywhere unity and double. In this splitting, in its adherence to and its transcendence of the sensory, the tension that pervades the world of our consciousness is not only expressed but it is also revealed in the original and fundamental polarity of being itself: in the dialectic that exists between the finite and the infinite, between the absolute idea [Idee] and its presentation and embodiment within the world of particular empirical existents”.4.
References.
1. Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. “Private Devotion in Medieval Christianity.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/priv/hd_priv.htm (October 2001).
2. Connolly, William E. Neuropolitics : Thinking, Culture, Speed, University of Minnesota Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/open/detail.action?docID=310590.
3. Benjamin, W. 2008. The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (J. A. Underwood, Trans.). Penguin Books.
4. Cassirer, E. "The Problem of the Symbol and Its Place in the System of Philosophy 1927." The Warburg Years (1919–1933): Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology by Ernst Cassirer, Yale University Press, 2014. A&AePortal, aaeportal.com/?id=-15000.
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