The Art of Seeing:
Light And Darkness through the Four Senses Hermeneutic
with Mary Attwood
Thursday 27th November 2025
7.00 – 8.00pm UK time via Zoom
£10
“‘Light’ and ‘dark’ had powerful theological , intellectual and cultural connotations beyond art at the time . . .”
Dr Christine Riding
This session will be recorded.
As we enter the darker winter months in the Northern Hemisphere, this month’s The Art of Seeing will examine how artists have handled the effects and sources of light within darker compositions.
Our focus will rest on a single eighteenth-century artwork, through which we will consider the layers of meaning embodied within its presentation of light in darkness through the four senses hermeneutic/ of interpretation. The four senses of interpretation, comprising the literal, allegorical, tropological and anagogic senses, are an ancient, half-forgotten framework through which we can begin to explore an image. This is one way in which we might begin to understand the intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual meanings that radiate beyond the painting itself.
Dr Christine Riding writes;
“Light’ and ‘dark’ had powerful theological, intellectual and cultural connotations beyond art at the time . . .’Let there be light’ signifies far more than the physcial creation of light: it represents God’s creative power and the establishment of order and time, of the celestial and terrestrial realms, contrasting with the initial state of formlessness and darkness.”
Drawing on ideas stemming from what we now call the Enlightenment, we will reflect on the impact of tenebrism—an intensified form of chiaroscuro characterised by stark contrasts between light and darkness—on the viewer’s experience. We will also explore how the practice of educating the eye by observing art slowly and attentively by candlelight, firelight, or moonlight was understood as a pathway to intellectual and spiritual insight.
To purchase a this session, please go to Mary’s website here.
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About Mary Attwood
Mary is an art historian, author, business creative and producer. She is co-founder and director of The Centre for Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred, and co-founder and director of Channel McGilchrist. She holds a BA hons degree in the History of Art from UCL and Birkbeck, where she focused on late medieval and renaissance Art and Architeture. She holds an MA with distinction in Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred from CCCU where she researched renaissance art and art’s effects in general on the viewer/ beholder. Taking as broad an epistemological approach as possible, she studied the meaning/s of art, specifically quattrocento Florentine Renaissance art, in the contexts of ancient Greek philosophy, the neuroscientific approach of McGilchrist’s hemisphere theory, archetypal psychology and Renaissance artistic approaches.
Mary’s teaching and research seek to offer a renaissance of humane values through a broader understanding of art, not as an object to be analysed, but as a bridge between seemingly disparate ways of understanding the world and our place in it.
