Repetition of formal schemata in the visual arts does not pertain only to learning. It is usually more complex. Copying represents the simplest of possible relationships since it is satisfied only with the appropriation of the model. The relation between the current production and tradition is a broadly stretched scale between typological patterns and quotations. Too radical changes would have impeded reading and resulted in incomprehension. That risk was willingly taken by modern art answering the demand for originality, authenticity and purity. The meaning of the particular reference to tradition can be gleaned only from the historical context in which a work of art is created.

The convention of the portrait is the least obvious matrix since we seldom realize that the positioning of the model in Western portraiture has been established in Renaissance art with very little possibility of variation. Physiognomy and likeness are the tasks vital to the success of a portrait. The convention of the portrait was established already by the Byzantine icons which were supposedly divine likenesses, believed to had been self-generated, proved by their miraculous powers. The utilization of this matrix is evidenced in the pair of paintings by Fortunat Bergant: Madonna del Buon Consiglio and Mother and Child by Fran Tratnik produced a century and a half apart. Tratnik's image has abandoned religious attributes, but the matrix warrants its reading as a universal symbol.

The realistic portrait was often limited to the study of the human head, repressed the importance of identity and emphasized the uniqueness and actuality of the model here and now. The coinciding of the time of production and the model's posing has been captured by the handling of the paint in Ivana Kobilca's Woman with a Kerchief. With broad and decisive stokes of the brush the painter makes vivid the relationship between the model and herself for the viewer. The same kind of relationship resonates in the vigorous drawing-like strokes of the pastel chalks with which Ferdo Vesel executed his Man with a Turban, enhanced by the counter-light which also marks that particular and unrepeatable scene. Later, in Modernist portraits artists more or less worry only about the essence of the model and its interpretation. They create an uneasy confrontation with the face of the other, this eliminating in advance any possible circumstance that could have interfered with the art and craft of painting. The most extreme is Jama in his late, perhaps his last and unfinished self-portrait which we have learned to see as a legitimate work of art. Not physiognomy, but the polarity between the bright daylight and the artist's failing sight is the subject of this painting.

The matrix in landscape is even simpler. A horizontal line stretching from edge-to-edge defines the convention of landscape, be it the reflected image of the world out there or the mysterious universe of the artist's inwardness. Its functions are as varied as one can imagine but in modern art it has sometimes offered an opportunity for a professional statement by implication or visual quotation of an esteemed predecessor's work. Such models thus obtain posthumous re-actualization and most valuable professional acclamation. Such declarative instances are very important in our local context because they indicate conscious attempts or programmatic formation of domestic tradition, a local artistic school by construction of one's identity in continuity and opposition to the authority of predecessors. Such an instance comes alive in Stane Kregar's Cowherd in juxtaposition with Matija Jama's small but powerful Cows. Several happy incidences of this kind exist in Slovene art but they have never really added up to the local tradition. The cultural periphery cannot resist the temptation of looking towards the centre time and again.
Andrej Smrekar