raphers would know exactly what to do were that situation to arise, but their solution would be hatched more out of experience and intuition rather than clear-cut rules that could be rationally explained.
I do not call attention to Zsigmond's writing to single out the one aberration in an otherwise rational system. Rather it is indicative, in my view, of the vagueness that infiltrates even the best efforts by professionals to explain their work. Put even more bluntly, one could argue that the function of light in motion pictures has never been clearly articulated. Its "history" consists of no more than a bundle of recognizable styles (e.g., "expressionist" lighting which keeps popping up now and then), or a series of authorial motifs on the part of the director of photography (for instance, Zsigmond's own ''diffusion" period in his 70's films from McCabe and Mrs. Miller [Robert Altman, 1971]and The Long Goodbye [Robert Altman, 1973], all the way to Heaven's Gate [Michael Cimino, 1980]). On a day-to-day basis, however, lights are being placed on the set here or there because this position has worked well in the past and there is neither the time nor the inclination to study the ramifications of what is being done or investigate possible alternatives. Hence, to understand film lighting, one had better go back to its sources: the Renaissance.
III
Although a lot has been written about the introduction of monocular perspective in painting (especially its ideological impact on film), the importance of light in the construction of the Renaissance scheme has been left relatively unexamined. 8 In fact, as Oswald Spengler correctly recognized, the introduction in Western painting of light and shadow (the former's acolyte) was absolutely critical in making the visual space inviting or Faustian.9 Let us take two opposing examples. If we look first at the Annunciation by Domenico Veneziano (ca. 1445) certainly one of the classic texts of the early Renaissance movement in Italy we can see that its visual construction very much follows the new formula for perspective discovered by Brunelleschi and propagated by Alberti: depth is rendered by retreating lines leading to a vanishing point. With Gabriel on the left and Mary on the right, diminishing tiles on the ground and receding vertical columns help lead the eyes to a garden with a bolted door in the background. Despite the new technique, however, the image fails to convince the viewer that he or she is witnessing an actual scene. Why is that?
