http://www.uni-muenster.de/EuropeanPopularScience/win-sample/win-overview1.htm
Chapter Four
Renaissance: the Appearance of the Screen
"Writing about Dürer’s famous print of a draftsman drawing a nude through a screen of perspectival threads, Martin Jay notes that a ‘reifying male look’ turns ‘its targets onto stone’; consequently, the marmoreal nude is drained of its capacity to arouse desire...Similarly, John Berger compares Alberti’s window to ‘a safe let into a wall, a safe into which the visible has been deposited.’ And in the Draughtsman’s Contract, time and again the draughtsman tries to eliminate all motion, any sign of life from the scenes he is rendering. With the perspectival machines, the imprisonment of the subject also happens in a literal sense...[up to the] petrified world of the photographic image..." (Lev Manovich) - What Renaissance artists had clearly achieved through careful observation of nature, including studies of anatomical dissections, was a means to recreate the 3-dimensional physical reality of the human form on 2-dimensional surfaces. In part, the key to this achievement lay in understanding the underlying, hidden structure of the human body.
But in addition, by literally systematizing the ‘view through a window’, a similar inspiration occurred to those seeking a corresponding dramatic reality in the representation of physical space. A means - namely window-like frames - was devised early in the 15th century for translating the reality of 3-dimensional natural phenomena onto 2-dimensional surfaces, producing virtually realistic copies. A correspondence was thus made possible, through mathematics, between the representational reality of the artist and the physical reality of nature.
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DC_Collins
17 years ago
Yeah, there were several devices like the one in Durer or Draughstman's Contract being used by respected artists everywhere.
David Hockney put a book out several years ago that traces the use of these instruments, called Hidden Knowledge (I think). Artists also used camera-obscura lenses to project a photo-image directly onto the work service, as a reference.
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antvolley
10 years ago
Secret Knowldedge, the book is called, and I'd recommend it to anyone with more than a passing interest in the development of "photographic" naturalism in Western painting. A splendid book.
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