THE ART EQUIVALENT OF PLOT HOLES?
In literature and movies I can find many examples of plot holes and things that just don’t make sense. Are there any equivalent examples in the world of classical, mimetic art?
I don’t mean surreal / abstract art or Escher.
Are there classical / well known paintings, that are supposed to depict ‘real’ things, with elements that don’t make sense or just don’t add up? Or that are regarded as goofs and errors?
What comes to mind is The Last Supper which is usually depicted with all of the apostles gathered on one side of a conventional western rectangular dining table, which looks like a workaround to make sure you can see all of them clearly.
Upon further research, this does look like a plot hole, except in a different way. The consensus is that by the standard of eating at that time and place, they would have indeed all been on one side of the table - but they would have been sitting on the ground and/or pillows around the outside of an open “C”-shaped table rather than an elevated rectangular one.
Thank you! I’ve always thought that the ‘all on one side’ depiction, while we can all understand it from a compositional point of view, just looks silly, in the sense that no group of people, ever, anywhere, has ever eaten a meal that way.
I think that whenever i see “everybody loves Raymond” !
There’s this wonderful example of a picture deliberately filled with impossibilities – William Hogarth’s A Satire on Perspective from 1754
Something else. Although I have no examples at hand right now, I’ve observed that rainbows in many paintings, especially before 1900, are filled with errors – the colors are wrong, or in the wrong order, or the rainbow is impossibly placed in the sky relative to the sun.
You could say these are just errors, but the OP DID ask for “…examples of plot holes and things that just don’t make sense.” I maintain that the appearances of these rainbows “don’t make sense”.
Speaking of things that “don’t make sense,”, consider the anamorphic image of a human skull in Hans Holbein’s painting “The Ambassadors” (1553). Even in the context and in its time, that thing is obtrusive and completely outta nowhere.
Benjamin West’s Death of Wolfe has actual people wailing at his Pietà-like corpse when they really had better things to do elsewhere on the battlefield, plus a Native American (no native auxiliaries participated) symbolizing North America. (Making it a Navtive American woman would have been too on the nose).
Ingres’ Grande Odalisque never answers the question “why the extra vertebrae, girlfriend?”
Thank you. I think that’s in a slightly different category, like Escher’s work, of knowingly and deliberately subverting the ‘rules’ of representation. Rather than what might be regarded as a mistake or good.
Thank you. I’d love a good example of the rainbow error! That would be cool.
I’m aware of the Holbein skull but that’s not quite what I was after. It’s deliberate and planted, not a mistake or error. But thanks anyway.
Thank you! Some good possibilities there!
A famous one is Washington Crossing the Delaware, with a flag that did not exist until a few years later.
It’s a really interesting question, I think! It seems to me that most art that still gets seen and talked about falls into the “intentional” category, with artists making conscious choices, rather than mistakes. (my favorite is Parmigianino’s Madonna of the Long Neck, and there’s a good discussion of the intentionality of that distortion and its role in the history of art here: » Parmigianino, Madonna of the Long Neck ).
But your question makes me really curious about the difference between visual art and literary (or cinematic) art here. If the “plot holes” or unintentional mistakes are fairly common in literary and cinematic art and tolerated there, but not so much at all in visual art, why should that be? Fascinating!
(I’m also interested in if you would count works like Dürer’s Rhinoceros (Dürer's Rhinoceros - Wikipedia) as errors or plot holes? It’s not a very “accurate” depiction of a rhino, but that’s probably because Dürer had never seen one, rather than because he had a lapse or error.)
Yes. Artists didn’t try to depict reality as seen by the human eye. They were telling a story. There was no intention or expectation of realism. Just as novels and movies don’t cover every bowel movement of the characters, paintings and sculptures aren’t trying to capture everything.
The Last Supper isn’t intending to show what happened; it’s a representation of who was there and their personalities. The artists didn’t care about the dishes or table or clothes, and wouldn’t have changed them to be historical even if he knew, because that wasn’t the point of the painting. Washington Crossing the Delaware isn’t intending to be a photograph; it’s capturing the emotion and spirit of the event. The flag is American because the artists wanted to show that these are Americans displaying the American spirit.
Now, it’s still interesting to point out historical inaccuracies, but the artists weren’t trying to be accurate. It’s more interesting to discuss why the artists made the choices they did.
Oh, I like that one! I knew of the painting but didn’t realise the flag was an anomaly!
Here’s one – Peter Paul Rubens’ The Rainbow Landscape. (circa 1636) The colors are completely wrong. The rainbow is in the wrong place relative to the sun. Worst of all, the rainbow is depicted in perspective as if it’s a physical arch in the sky and the viewer is off to one side. The only way you can see a rainbow is as a sector of a circle centered on the “antisolar point”, with its axis of symmetry running from the sun through your head. You can’t see it as other than a part of a circle. This picture, being off-center, represents it as a section of an ellipse.
The Rainbow Landscape | Art UK’
Here’;s another Rubens landscape with rainbow that gets the same things wrong, although it’;s closer to a circle here:
Robert S. Duncanson (1859) got the colors closer to correct, but his rainbow is still in the wrong place relative to the sun
For comparison, here’s one that looks as if he got it right Willem Roelefs (1875)
Here’s a whole page of Rainbows in Art, mostly wrong:
That reminds me of a joke.
“Jesus, party of 26.”
“That’s us.”
“Wait, there’s only 13 of you.”
“Yeah; we all want to sit on the same side of the table.”
Blah, blah, blah. What if you’re seeing somebody else’s rainbow, smart guy?
Thank you for being so superbly helpful! Getting the colours wrong is one thing but painting a rainbow in perspective, as if it’s a solid arch… that’s so much richer! Thank you.
Actually, there IS a way that you can see a rainbow not centered on your particular antisolar point (besides looking at one produced by a camera, say) – you can see a “reflected rainbow”. There are two different kinds
Rainbow seen reflected in a lake or a mirrored building – These reflections are not actually a reflection of the rainbow you see, but are the rainbow as you would see it from your “mirror image” point of view – as if the sun were as far below the horizon as you are above it.
or
Rainbow seen in the sky produced by the reflected image if the sun (from a flat body of water or the mirrored side of a building).
In either case, the sections of the arc you see will have their centers not lying on a line running from the sun through your head. But they’ll still be sections of a circle, not an ellipse.
I grew up in northern Virginia. So, field trips to the Capital and such were common. In the Rotunda are a few paintings. One of them has a Native American with bare feet. One of his feet has six toes. The average field trip had a checklist of sites to see (the whispering spot for example). The six-toed man was one of them.
