The vanishing point has always held a certain mystique about it to art historians and art connoisseurs alike. The creation of specific vanishing points in the early Renaissance was a turning point in the art world, and led to cement the depth in many paintings of this time period. Before this point, most artists used skenographia on stage in order to give it more depth, with the artist Giotto even attempting a mathematical calculation to determine points of distance within art.
Brunelleschi was the first Renaissance artist to use the vanishing point and depth perception during this time period. Brunelleschi additionally noticed that when drawing Florentine buildings, all lines converged at the horizon line, therefore leading to the realization of the vanishing point. Other artists such as Donatello and Perugino helped to further cement the importance of depth during this time, culminating in Da Vinci’s Last Supper; never before had there been a painting with such mathematical accuracy in relation to depth perception and linear formation. The realization of linear perspective and the vanishing point was kept within Italy for years before flourishing throughout the rest of Europe.
The checkerboard floor pattern is one of the most obvious examples of original perspective. Alberti was one of the first artists to recognize this phenomenon, and named it as the “pavement” construction, as it typically led to the addition of a pavement scene. He later wrote a treatise entitle “De Pictura/Della Pittura” explaining the proper methods of perspective painting. His theories were based more on planar projections and calculations using the height of triangles in the distance, and also using previous mathematical concepts from Euclid.
The vanishing point and depth perception are concepts which we take for granted today because we have never known an art world without them; however, if you traverse through the ages, you will see pieces from the Middle Ages where the baby Jesus appears to be the same size as Mary because the artists had no way in which to signify perspective. It is amazing to view in art museums this subtle change in technique; many museums have paintings set up in chronological order, or at least by major movements. The Renaissance was truly its own movement within the art world, and symbolized a shift away from the chaotic, extremely fanatical world of the Middle Ages.
Without this kind of revolution within the art world, we would still be looking at one-dimensional art works, lacking a proper depth perception. This would prove to be a completely different world from the one we know now, perhaps even lacking the fundamentals of television and movies. Without depth in art, that could not have translated over into any other medium. Therefore, we owe a great deal to these post-Medieval artists who truly paved the way for modern art and art movements. Picasso would not have been able to exist without his acute understanding of the many layers of depth and perspective, and we therefore would have missed out on abstract art entirely as well as every subsequent modern art movement.
This post was contributed by Heidi Taylor, who writes about the online schools. She welcomes your feedback at HeidiLTaylor006 at gmail.com.
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by Francis Ames-Lewis. It’s a good summary of drawing in the period. Lots of illustrations, a good summary of period drawing materials and methods, and an extensive discussion of how the practice of drawing evolved in Italy in the period leading up to the High Renaissance.
This is a book on the influence of the Netherlandish “Ars Nova” movement on Florentine art. In the early 15th century, a new style of art, using new compositional devices, new themes, new virtuoso rendering methods, and a new use of an old medium (oil paint) began to dominate painting in the Netherlands. Within a decade or so, artists such as Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden came to be well-known and highly regarded in Italy, including the city of Florence, which was at that time a great center of Renaissance painting. Locally-produced paintings in the Netherlandish style soon became popular and, over the next decades, many painters began to excel at this new style of work. This is a big book, full of wonderful illustrations, that examines this phenomenon in great detail.
I don’t know enough about 17th century painting, so I blew a couple of Borders gift cards left over from Christmas on this book. It’s a detailed technical analysis of paintings by Rembrandt (and followers) in the National Gallery in London. I just got it, but it seems quite good so far. The folks at the National Gallery seem to really know their stuff; I’ve very much enjoyed two of their other books in the “Art in the Making” series. The other major book on the subject (in English) is 
, which I have not read.
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