On Background: From the Renaissance to Zoom

Figure 1. Scheggia (Giovanni di Ser Giovanni), Portrait of a Lady, c.1460. Tempera and gold on panel, transferred to canvas. Philadelphia Museum of Art

Conversation continues around me as my eyes train on the colorful bookshelf in the background, rich in attention-grabbing imagery like figurines and cascading plants. While the individual titles on the bookshelf are hard to make out, their volume and tidy organization suggest an impressive collection. Unlike mine, none of these books are marred by shiny white library stickers. Nor do they have crumpled post-its creeping out of the top. I immediately begin to wonder whether the collector is the kind of person who keeps every page pristine or the kind who writes in the margins and leaves coffee rings on the sleeve. A delicate porcelain dog placed carefully on the bookshelf’s edge tells me it’s likely the former. I tune back into the dissertation writing workshop taking place on my Zoom screen. When it is my turn, I share my fascination with backgrounds—not only the dreamy landscapes of Piero della Francesca’s Renaissance portraits but also the grainy rectangles of bookshelves, gallery walls, and stock images of the Golden Gate bridge that surround my colleagues’ faces as we teleconference.

Figure 2. Fra Filippo Lippi, Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement, c. 1440. Tempera on wood. The Metropolitan Museum

In both my historical research and my new remote working conditions, I am curious about background as an arena of creative expression, a space that contextualizes and identifies figures in the fore. Backgrounds function as environments, which is to say, they “environ” or surround central figures rather than serving as passive backdrops. Through contrast and context, backgrounds fundamentally change our impression of what we see before them, whether it’s a painted profile or a face projected through a webcam. I like the word “environment” here because it captures the interconnectedness of bodies, things, and places that constitute our identities. It has historical relevance as well, since Italian Renaissance artists often conceptualized pictorial composition as a dynamic network of figures (figure) surrounded by fields (campi), rather than through the binary aesthetic categories of background/foreground and subject/setting that we rely on today.

The relationship between figure and field developed in interesting ways over the course of the fifteenth century in Italy. For example, where portrait artists had traditionally enveloped sitters within flat, dark-color fields so as to focus attention on the sitter’s physiognomy and attitude (Figure 1), they eventually began to incorporate suggestions of place through domestic interiors and landscape views that were either seen through a window (Figure 2) or filled the entire picture plane as if the painting itself were a window (Figures 3 & 4). The trend toward depicting place in portraiture coincides with a similar phenomenon in religious paintings wherein landscape imagery began to overtake the gilded backgrounds traditionally associated with medieval and Byzantine art (Figures 5 & 6).

Figure 3. Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, c.1503-1506. Oil on poplar. Louvre, Paris.

While art historians typically trace this shift from abstract to representational backgrounds in terms of its visual genealogies (the rise of landscape as pictorial subject matter, for example), I am more interested in the ways it might have changed the status and function of background itself. I argue that the move towards elaborate mimetic scenery created new opportunities for artists to extend the project of portraiture from the realms of physiognomy, attitude, and dress and into the physical environment, a capacious entity with its own complex cultural history.

Let’s look more closely at Piero’s portrait of Battista Sforza, the precocious Duchess of Urbino who died at age twenty-six after birthing her tenth child and only son (Figure 4). In this portrait, we perceive Battista’s identity not only through the unique (though likely idealized) contours of her profile and the extravagant jewels that adorn her, but also in the rolling hills and lush valleys that evoke the topography and atmosphere of the Duchy of Urbino, the territory she helped to govern and eventually passed on to the son whose life she traded for her own. Scholars, me included, believe this portrait commemorates Battista’s maternal martyrdom through themes of inheritance and legacy. I push this interpretation further, identifying specific formal elements and symbolic references that characterize Battista not only as a steward of the Duchy’s ordered and bountiful possessions, but also as an extension of them. Merging landscape and portraiture to articulate complex dynamics of gender, nature, and power in Renaissance Italy, this portrait emblematizes the explosion of creative possibilities that emerged as the space of background became a new kind of pictorial real estate through which to individualize commissions and memorialize individuals.

Figure 4. Piero della Francesca, Portrait of the Duchess of Urbino, c.1474. Tempera on panel. Uffizi Gallery, Florence

The events of this year have enabled me to more fully grasp the unique challenges and opportunities this pictorial development might have presented Renaissance artists. As I transitioned to Zoom work in early March 2020, I found myself preoccupied with self-presentation, plagued by what I found to be the paradoxical demand of projecting professionalism and domestic ease at once. Should I turn the camera away from my kitchen because I’m technically “at work”? Will my makeup look absurd under the harsh lighting in my one-bedroom rental? Is the book I strategically placed behind me legible from a distance? It felt new and unfamiliar to experience my self-consciousness extend beyond the bounds of my body. Yet, I quickly found that these new anxieties brought with them new opportunities. For instance, when I staged my background for remote teaching, I included books from the syllabus, souvenirs from the places we were to learn about, and framed album covers to remind students of my humanity. There was a sense of delight, even subtle transgression, each time I broke the gaze of my webcam to reach back and pull an object into view, collapsing the background/foreground spatial binary upon which we, in Western cultures, have become conditioned to interpret representations of two-dimensional space. Like Piero, I took advantage of this “new” space—background—to express myself more richly and to forge deeper connections with the people on the other side of the “window.”  

My obsession with background has blossomed throughout quarantine, and I have discovered unexpected connections between my academic pursuits and my own peculiar vanities. It has been fruitful to write about the ways in which new pictorial conventions reconfigured figure/ground relationships while learning to conceptualize my own appearance in those very same terms. Scrutinizing my peers’ backgrounds in addition to my own, I’ve noticed a set of emergent “pictorial” conventions that are intriguing from a sociological as well as an art historical perspective.

Figure 5. Gentile da Fabriano, Madonna and Child, c.1420. Tempera and gold on panel. National Gallery of Art, D.C

On one end of the extreme are people like me who view background as an extension of their personal appearance, no different from clothing or grooming. On the other end are those who approach background purely as a function of practicalities like lighting, privacy, and available desk space. The difference lies between composing background and selecting it, and a spectrum of approaches exists in between.

By now, we are surely all familiar with the notorious “bookshelf background” and the increasingly popular “virtual screen,” a stock photo or organizational logo that blurs around the edges of a messy-bun or warps abruptly at the intrusion of a pet or child, revealing a flashing glimpse of the person’s “real” environment. These pictorial types, evolving around a tension between creative expression and practical constraint, draw parallels with those that emerged in fifteenth-century Italian painting. I offer as an example the “long and winding road” background, which is my term for a generic hilly landscape with a sinuous road that elegantly sutures foreground to background. This background type—perhaps most famously exemplified by Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa  (Figure 3)—creates the impression of place without committing to any single location. Like the “bookshelf background,” the “long and winding road background” blurs the boundaries between generic and specific, universal and personal. It suggests a particularized reality through an aura of meticulous detail yet, upon closer examination, makes plain its own artifice.  

Like fifteenth-century Italian portrait painters, we find ourselves in the midst of an experimental period. It is unclear what the future will hold, whether it is standardized virtual bookshelves or targeted ads that suggest lipstick shades based on wall color. Yet, if the history of art offers any indication, we should expect that this period of experimentation will coalesce into a distinct set of practices and conventions, some of which could have lasting cultural impact. Indeed, it is commonly held that the genre of landscape painting in the West emerged as Renaissance background landscapes outgrew their spatial barriers and emerged into the fore, ultimately overtaking figures as the primary subject matter.

Figure 6. Carlo Crivelli, Madonna and Child, c.1480. Tempera and gold on panel. Pinacoteca Civica Francesco Podesti, Ancona

From an art historical perspective, the fact that teleconferencing has enriched public literacy of pictorial composition, self-presentation, and critical reception is an encouraging byproduct of this hellish time. Going forward, I will be curious to witness the social, political, and ecological implications of extending one’s self-image beyond the body and into the things and views and images that surround it. The backgrounds of Italian Renaissance paintings were long deemed insignificant in the history of art. Yet, approached with a different set of investments, they offer a window onto the intersections of cultural, environmental, and art histories. As we spend the next decades reckoning with the global trauma of COVID-19, perhaps our Zoom backgrounds can function in the same way.

Chloé M. Pelletier is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Chicago, where she studies Italian Renaissance art and cultural histories of the environment. She also holds a Graduate Curatorial Internship at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.