Painting and Pictorial Conception: Preconditions for the Development of Renaissance Perspective (original) (raw)

" Perspective in Italian Renaissance Painting "

This PhD dissertation was about Italian Art , especially about the perspective in the Italian Renaissance Painting and its influence in Ideas and Science revolution. My big concern was to demonstrate how the early painters since the twelve century were creating a new conception of space in painting then in architecture. Giotto was the first one who applied the notion of third dimension in his paintings by using chiaroscuro technics. [light and shadow]. Chiaroscuro is considered as the basic step to linear perspective used as new geometric application. However, in theory the Euclidian solid geometry attempted to do more than replicate what the human eye perceives according to the tenets of Euclidian geometry, which medieval Europeans understood as synonymous with the vision of God. My approach to Italian Renaissance painting had various points of view, but my concentration was on E.H GOMBRICH and Samuel Y. Edgerton, JR. theorems through their important published books that I got at Penn fine art library in Philadelphia/PA. In parallel Erwin Panofsky theorems about Renaissance in art in general and Italian Art particularly were the theorems ground of my opinions and views. Indeed there was a big renovation in the way the painters were composing the space, there was a move from the middle age notion of creating a painting, which was very simple without any notion of third dimension. The space was flat and the painters couldn't compose the space as if there is deepness in it. I will here ask the same question that Samuel Y. Edgerton, JR. did in his book named " The Heritage of Giotto's Geometry ". Why was capitalist Europe after 1500 the first of all civilizations in the world to develop what is commonly understood as modern science, moving rapidly ahead of the previously more sophisticated cultures of the East? Why were some of the most spectacular achievements of both the Western artistic and scientific revolutions conceived in the very same place, the Tuscan city of Florence? Was it only coincidence that Giotto, the founder of Renaissance art, and Galileo, the founder of modern science, were native Tuscans? In fact the perspective geometry of Giotto and Brunelleschi had considerable influence on the visual thinking of Renaissance artisans-engineers, those practical technologists who carried out projects of all sorts for civic and princely patrons in times of war and peace, from designing fortifications and weaponry to the creation of monumental buildings and labor-saving machines. Filippi Brunelleschi was himself an artisan-engineer. His masterpiece, the soaring cupola above the cathedral in Florence, pays tribute both to his traditional engineering methods and to his further quantification of Giotto's three-dimensional visual perception.

Images-within-Images in Italian Painting (1250-1350): Reality and Reflexivity - Intro

Images-within-Images in Italian Painting (1250-1350): Reality and Reflexivity. Burlington: Ashgate, 2015

The rebirth of realistic representation in Italy around 1300 led to the materialization of a pictorial language, which dominated Western art until 1900, and it dominates global visual culture even today. Paralleling the development of mimesis, self-reflexive pictorial tendencies emerged as well. Images-within-images, visual commentaries of representations by representations, were essential to this trend. They facilitated the development of a critical pictorial attitude towards representation. This book offers the first comprehensive study of Italian meta-painting in the age of Giotto and sheds new light on the early modern and modern history of the phenomenon. By combining visual hermeneutics and iconography, it traces reflexivity in Italian mural and panel painting at the dawn of the Renaissance, and presents novel interpretations of several key works of Giotto di Bondone and the Lorenzetti brothers. The potential influence of the contemporary religious and social context on the program design is also examined situating the visual innovations within a broader historical horizon. The analysis of pictorial illusionism and reality effect together with the liturgical, narrative and typological role of images-within-images makes this work a pioneering contribution to visual studies and premodern Italian culture. ‘Reflexivity is the name of the game they say when it comes to modern and especially to postmodern art. This study tells a different story. Péter Bokody’s book goes back to where it all began: to Italian Trecento painting which marks the beginnings of the realistic mode. Realism means, among many other things, that one medium can embed another medium. If it does so it will enhance its realistic potential, strengthen the meaning of the whole scene and, finally, it makes a meta-statement: about the power of images, the different qualities of the artforms or even about stylistic options.’ Wolfgang Kemp, University of Hamburg 'Bokody’s book combines visual sensitivity, methodological variety, historical erudition and theoretical sophistication. His work encourages us to think with more precision and flexibility about the concepts of "realism" and reflexivity as applied to the achievements of Giotto and his contemporaries and in relation to subsequent generations of artists. Bokody provides fresh insights for all those who study, admire and teach this material.' Joanna Cannon, Courtauld Institute of Art, London 'Engagingly written, this study will add significantly to our understanding of Giotto and his circle (including Lorenzetti, Gaddi and Daddi) in the dynamically changing world of fourteenth century Italy. Although primarily concerned with images within images in panel and mural painting, the work goes beyond its initial parameters and looks at such concepts as realism, spatial relations, illusionism, meta-painting, self-reflexivity, time and reception in Italian art. It is a study which exposes the viewer to new ideas and details that could easily be passed and whose iconography is significant in understanding the work in its entirety.' Colum Hourihane, Independent Scholar, UK

Color and perspective in Late Classical painting

Technè, 2019

The concept of a central perspective, as invented in the Early Renaissance, is unknown in ancient Greek painting. There is no visualization of space either in archaic images, where the fi gures stand on a continuous ground line, or in early classical ones, when a specifi c art of perspective (body perspective) is invented and the fi gures, in contrapposto postures, may stand on ground lines placed at various heights but are still not coordinated in size. Shortly after the middle of the 4th century, there appear new pictorial means: enhanced body perspective, often combined with a ground surface, viewed-from-below body perspective and color perspective. Even with these revolutionary innovations, no space as such comes into being in Greek painting; perspective appears only as applied to bodies.

The Allegory of Photography in Baroque Painting

Painted Optics, Conference David Hockney and Charles Falco, Florence, 2008

– In this short paper I will consider carefully a number of Baroque canvases in order to evaluate the assumption that certain important Western European artists made use of projected images in the creation of their artworks. The paintings I have chosen act as documentary evidence in support of optical theories, as they can be properly interpreted as artists working in 'dark rooms', or camera obscura. I will also use a painting by Caravaggio to introduce the new theory that he made use of chemicals in the form of a primitive photographic process.

A Classification of Perceptual Corrections of Perspective Distortions In Renaissance Painting

Perception, 2010

Abstract. In an attempt to address major debates in perspective studies, this study brings perceptual research to bear on the problem of the status of perspective in the Renaissance. Between one school that see perspective as mathematically rigorous but imperfectly applied and another that regards perspective as an incoherent discipline, this study argues that errors in the use of perspective are consistent and can be classified into two tendencies: first, the tendency to normalize a foreshortened form toward frontality and, second, the tendency to flatten a three-dimensional object to reveal its hidden sides. These tendencies find confirmation both in the Renaissance doctrine of the judgment of the eye (giudizio dell’occhio) as well as in gestalt-oriented perceptual research. Numerous examples of their working are given in regard to the representation of human figures, architecture, and the relation of figures to space.