Yesterday we looked at the space in between columns - but what about the space on the columns themselves?
When confronted with blank space, people tend to fill it. And despite their three-dimensional form this happened with columns too.
Egyptians covered many columns in hieroglyphs and pictures of the Gods.
Greeks and Persians preferred simple lines and decorations, as did the Romans. They made them resemble organic structures, or decorated them with shapes to underscore length or simply please the eye.
Colonna Trajana, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 1748 - 1778, Rijksmuseum
But they also used them for triumphant storytelling - with Trajan’s column as the most famous example.
Here, the column isn’t used to support a building - it is used to supported a persona, a function, the idea of empire.
What I find most fascinating about decorated columns is how the viewing experience is completely different from what we’re used to. If you’re viewing two-dimensional pictures, even in sequence, you are mostly stationary. Your eyes may wander around in the image, but your feet tend to stay put.
When you’re ‘reading’ a column you have to dance around it. It makes you move, go in circles, crane your head to see the top, bend down low to see the bottom.
Columns as a canvas provided us with a fresh experience of what it means to look at something. To read a story. With film and video, the image is moving.
With columns, that tell stories we do the moving.
Today, cast your eye on columns used as canvases.
What stories do they tell? How do they move you?
Find them, capture them and share them using the hashtag #kramerseye on Twitter or Instagram
Listen to today’s podcast