Imagine a film of a man on a bicycle. It's a stationary exercise-bicycle, and he's pedalling away for all he's worth. It is night, or anyway a place of total darkness, and all that illuminates this cyclist is a small spotlight aimed at his body. He goes on pedalling hard, and you begin to wonder what he's really doing, or what the point is of this strenuous nocturnal scene, until you perceive that, from time to time, there's some slight fluctuation in the strength of the lighting; and then you notice that there's a cable running from the light to the bicycle, and it's attached to a dynamo on the bicycle, and that the man is pedalling in order to make the light shine. His visibility, in other words, is dependent on his activity.
Now imagine these three short films turned into three still images. Each one would be curious. With movement that doesn't show, there'd be no difference between a film and a still. With an imminent, suspended climax, you wouldn't need any looping trickery, the still image by itself would put things on hold, and maintain an endless "any moment now". With the lighting generator, the subject's visibility wouldn't be – what it normally is in pictures – an assumption. It would be a contingency. You'd have a scene that implied a change of scene, where the light was out and everything was lost.
El Greco's Boy Lighting a Candle shows a boy blowing on an ember. It's an action that, while it lasts, can be perfectly steady and show no change. The passage of the air is invisible. The pursed lips, the glow of the ember, the hold of the hands: all these things can stay as they are for a while. It is movement without any movement to be seen, while it lasts. Of course this process can't continue for ever. His lungs will soon run out of air.
Who knows how much puff is left? We can't tell, but it can't last. And when the boy's breath fails, the ember will fade too, and the whole scene, lit entirely from this light source, will revert to darkness – unless he can get the candle to catch and hold on to that light in time.
It is one of the great pictorial subjects. With its play between stillness and timing and visibility, between breath and light, it's rich in allegorical possibilities, in thoughts of life and death. At the same time it's based on a simple, natural physical event – the beautiful two-way relationship between a face and an ember. The face blows air upon the ember, causing the ember to shine back upon the face. The boy puffs himself into light. While he breathes, he is there before us.
It's painted in the most realistic style El Greco ever used, and it looks like everyday life. It was, in fact, inspired by classical example. Almost no paintings survive from ancient Greece, but many are described by the Roman author, Pliny the Elder, in his encyclopaedic work Natural History.
Post-Renaissance artists often tried to recreate them. El Greco painted several versions and variants of this subject. So did other artists, after him, in the following century. It's not clear, though, whether any of them realised the original idea in full. Because what Pliny describes is not just a picture, it's an installation.
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