Read The Signs
The Evolution of Writing, In Science and Art
Humans learned to paint and draw before we learned to write. The earliest known cave art dates from about 50,000 years ago, so we can assume that humans drew pictures until the Sumerians came up with the first writing system over 45,000 years later. Fast-forward another 3,500 years or so to newsletters that combine words and images, featuring artists who constantly push the boundaries between writing and drawing. How did we get here?
I’ve explored the relationship between seeing and reading before (here and here). In this post, I’ll take a look at some science and history around this topic, and a little bit of art. There’s just too much cool art to cover, so I’ll save some of the more recent work for a future newsletter. Let’s dig in!
Recent scientific research suggests that humans evolved the ability to process written words via the brain’s visual cortex, the same area that allows us to perceive images. I’m going to radically compress these findings, so if you’re interested in learning more, I recommend the book Reading in the Brain (2010) by Stanislas Dehaene, a top authority on the science of reading. According to Dehaene,
“Neurons in the ventral visual pathway often respond to simple shapes, such as those formed by the intersections of contours of objects. Even in the macaque monkey, the inferotemporal visual cortex already contains neurons sensitive to letter-like combinations of lines such as T, L, X, and *.
The visual word form area [in the human brain] seems to arise from this preexisting neuronal alphabet: a subset of the shape-recognition system specializes in the shapes of letters…in all of the world’s cultures, scribes in generation after generation progressively selected their letters and written characters to closely match the set of shapes that were already present in the brains of all primates and, as a result, were easy to learn. This hypothesis is corroborated by a large-scale analysis of the world’s writing systems.
Visually speaking, [all writing systems] systematically make use of the same set of shapes, precisely those that abound in natural visual scenes and tend to be internalized in the ventral visual cortex.”
To recap: Humans created letters based on shapes they regularly saw in their environments, which the human brain was able to perceive and interpret, even in highly abstract forms. This is amazing and, as far as we know, no other animals have managed it; go humans!
This is where drawing and painting come back in. Once reading and writing became well-established, scribes around the world got busy making the letters fancy, producing stunning, highly-stylized texts like these examples from the 10th to 12th centuries.
In parts of Asia, the tradition of calligraphy as art continued for many more centuries. In Europe, however, text and images began to go their separate ways. With the arrival of the printing press in the 15th century, hand-lettering rapidly dwindled to a niche, just as new art techniques and materials allowed major advances in drawing and painting.
Although combining letters and images - for example, illustrating a text with pictures - never completely went away, it was not until the early 20th century that fine artists in the West began to experiment again with letters as art.
In 1916, German artist Paul Klee began painting watercolors built around lines of German translations of Chinese verse, which he called color-writing. These works touched upon a German Romantic theory of Chinese character writing as a form of hieroglyphics, “a primeval union of picture and writing,” resistant to any definitive reading. This theory is now debunked (Chinese writing is logographic), and in any case, Klee soon moved on.
In this 1918 painting, Once emerged from the gray of night…, Klee composed his own poem, using a grid to mediate between writing and painting. Annie Borneuf writes that this picture “takes up the material and procedural similarities between writing and painting…[but] rather than depicting a hieroglyphic unity of word and picture, this watercolor throws the difference between words and pictures back upon the viewer…Reading and looking oscillate back and forth through a figure/ground reversal - either the scaffolding of the letters or the colors spanning it come to the fore.”
Six years later, Klee produced another painting, Collection of Southern Signs (header image), that looks astonishingly as if he had been reading Mark Changizi’s blog. Possibly inspired by travels in Tunisia and Southern Italy, the painting features symbols strikingly similar to the proto-letters that were the forerunners of modern alphabets. Sarah McGavran writes:
The namesake signs that resemble ancient and exotic writing are organized in a loosely circular group—instead of in registers like on a Babylonian clay tablet or in lines like words on a page—which renders them illegible as text. These forms hover in an atmosphere of shimmering silver and gold, as if to suggest a message written in the stars. A half-moon shape at the top of these cryptic forms reinforces the impression of a celestial subject. However, the top left side presents not a sun or a star, but a small yellow square, suggesting that the work may be not so much a fanciful interpretation of the sky but a visual language that requires further decoding.
Modern visual language meeting ancient written language 100 years ago seems like a perfect place to stop for now. I’ll be back with more words, art and science in a couple of weeks.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, share it or leave a comment, and if you would like to support my work, consider buying my art.