To compare Braque’s and Delaunay’s painting, the first word I shall say is “ vibrating ”. “Violin and Palette” (1909-10) and “Sun and Moon” (1913)，from the historical standpoint, shook not only the audiences, but also the traditional concept of art from the Renaissance times – the five hundred years artistic system. Both paintings with their individual artistic approach destroyed the old aesthetic concept and definition of art and established new techniques of painting, new concepts of art, and new philosophy of thinking physically and spiritually.

With Picasso, Braque invented Cubism, the significant historical turning point of the 20 th century world of art. Basically, Cubism is regarded as two phases: Analytic Cubism and Synthetic Cubism. “Violin and Palette” was created in the Analytic period. However, this painting, still stood at the transitional point between Renaissance illusionism and Modernism’s new conceptual way of reality. The reason is that in this painting, Braque combined both the traditional representation and modern abstract elements which is different from Delaunay’s “Sun and Moon”. In the upper parts of the composition, the palette, the nail, and even the curtain were rendered by shadowcasting with their natural forms. However, in this case, “Sun and Moon” is free from the direct presentation of natural shape. The sun and moon in Delaunay’s painting, I think, only retain some optical memory or some primal of their natural forms. In the lower part of “Violin and Palette”, another new pictorial language has been created. The violin and its surrounding space were distorted and fragmented, and then rebuilt according to Braque’s personal “arbitrary principle of mathematical perspective”. This process of disintegration and reintegration also describes some symbolic meaning and some profound implications: painting should be a transparent window through to some reality, “opening to the phenomenal world”.

Influenced by Cubism, Delaunay’s “Sun and Moon” maintains some cubistic fragmentation characteristics. Unlike “Violin and Palette”, “Sun and Moon” totally divorced painting from any relationship to the objective world. The rough overlapped shape and circular motif suggest the conceptual quality of sun and moon; a very spiritual reality embodied in the representation of universal principal. Unlike “Violin and Palette”, “Sun and Moon” presents a brilliant, completely abstract composition which may be inspired by the physics of light. Delaunay’s Orphism creatively grafted a full-color palette into Analytic Cubism, unlike Braque’s usually limited color and use deep, dark tones. In “Sun and Moon”, color is form and subject like music, motion and time which forms the structure of the rhythmic development as well as the observed natural phenomena.