Italian Renaissance Painting
Perspective and Artistic Style
Description:... Linear perspective is not just a geometrical conception of how to conceive or present objects on a pictorial space; it's a system of thinking, a philosophy of art, and a complicated structural theorem. May be the Italian painters were the first to apply its techniques in painting, however the architect had as well applied the theory of perspective in their great accomplishment in building churches as a dominant dogma and a place of worshiping God.To create the sensation of third dimension in painting, the early Italian painters used the chiaroscuro, as basic techniques to draw the vanishing point where the conception of pictorial space is possible. This return to the Euclidian geometry couldn't be done without the study of its solid geometry that attempted in the beginning 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. True, the Italian painters were influenced by the Greek geometry and its notion of beauty that was endorsed for centuries in the classic style. Their masterpieces were reproduced in the Italian schools of art in Florence, Siena, Padua, and classes were giving about its technics, proportion, and the distribution of space based on vanishing point. However this very didactical mean of learning wasn't limited in just reproducing the Greek painting and its geometrical perspective of deepness, but also in their composition of objects, which showed the sky on the top. While the medieval painters used golden as background, their paintings were flat and missing the tree Euclidian's notions of space: harmony, unity, and infinity. The perception of space was limited on drawing geometrical lines; without the opportunity to depict the deepness in composing the space. Indeed the innovation in the Italian painters in their perception of pictorial space was the key to understanding what we call now "the linear perspective".
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