Drawing a frame, telling the world: from cave paintings to the vertical screen

The evolution of framing and formats in painting.

Since the art of caves, humans have had to delimit what they wanted to reproduce. But each figure from this distant era seems to us today to be placed without order among others. With the birth of agriculture and therefore the organization of cultivated fields, the drawn or sculpted surface began to respect a certain geometry. As for painting, the first ancient traces that remain are frescoes applied to walls or tombs, sometimes on scrolls, then later to the walls of churches or on wooden panels intended to decorate the altars of these places of worship. This of course implied that the format did not come from an artistic decision but simply conformed to the surface allocated to it. We also saw the first manifestations of small formats, as decoration, often admirable, of the pages of religious books.

After the Middle Ages, formats began to become more precise and the frame began to be distinguished from the painting itself. It should be noted that easel painting allowed for the generalization of small or medium sizes, while the arrival of canvas, which lightened the overall weight, encouraged the mobility of works. The development of art academies and the circulation of works led to the definition of more precise dimensions, according to genre.

"Modernity", from the 20th century onwards, was based on the idea of constantly questioning what has been acquired and on the need for constant innovation, hence the disappearance - for better or for worse - of all rules, and therefore the possibility of practicing all sizes or even irregularities of format!

In the article "From the widescreen to the pocket screen" , we study, using the example of cinema, that contemporary production of images, in all its forms, is also the heir to what we have just described.

Article written by Jean-Marie Sanjorge