Introduction to World Art
Senior 1 · Fine Arts
Introduction to World Art
Lesson 3 of 5
25 min
No one ever walked across this square: it is an imaginary city, painted in Italy about 540 years ago. Put a ruler on the screen along the edges of the paving stones on the left and right. Where do the lines meet?
Worked example
Reading an artwork: The Ideal City
Step 1. What you see. An almost empty city square with a fountain, four tall columns topped by statues, a round arena like Rome's Colosseum, a triumphal arch, a domed octagonal building and tall palaces. Only a few tiny people walk across it.
Step 2. How it is made. The painter used linear perspective: the lines of the paving and the rooftops all run to one vanishing point in the arch, so the square seems to go deep into the picture. The buildings are copied from, or inspired by, ancient Roman buildings.
Step 3. What it means. The painting shows a perfect, orderly city, built with mathematics and the wisdom of the ancient world. Art historians often suggest it is a picture of an idea: how a good ruler's city ought to look. One reading of its message is that reason, order and the classical past could make life better.
Definition
Renaissance (French, “rebirth”): the period in Europe from about 1400 to 1600 when artists and scholars revived the learning and art of ancient Greece and Rome and studied nature, the human body and mathematics closely.
Patron: a person or group who pays for and orders an artwork, such as a ruler, a bank family or a church.
Definition
Linear perspective: a drawing system that makes a flat picture look deep, by making parallel lines that run away from the viewer meet at a vanishing point on the horizon line (the viewer's eye level).
Orthogonals: the lines that run to the vanishing point. Transversals: the lines that cross them, parallel to the picture's edge.
You can see perspective every day in Rwanda: the rows of a tea plantation, the edges of a straight road or the rails of a long bridge all seem to meet in the distance.
Worked example: how big should it be drawn?
Objects look smaller in proportion to their distance: an object twice as far away looks half as tall. In a drawing, if an object at distance is drawn tall, the same object at distance is drawn
Uwase draws a street. A lamp post 10 m away is 12 cm tall in her drawing. How tall should an identical post 30 m away be?
And a post 40 m away: .
The German artist Albrecht Dürer published a book in 1525 to teach painters perspective and measurement. This woodcut from it shows a machine for drawing an object exactly in perspective.
Renaissance artists also studied how light falls on forms. Leonardo da Vinci drew this head with chalk and charcoal, blending light into shadow so softly that there are no hard lines.
Definition
Chiaroscuro (Italian, “light-dark”): strong contrast of light and shadow used to make figures look solid and rounded. Sfumato (“smoky”): very soft blending of tones, with no hard outlines.
Fresco: painting with water-based pigment on fresh, wet lime plaster, so the colour becomes part of the wall. Oil paint: pigment mixed with linseed oil; it dries slowly, so colours can be blended and built up in thin, glowing layers called glazes.
| Artist | Lived | Where | Known for | Technique to notice |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Filippo Brunelleschi | 1377–1446 | Florence | the dome of Florence Cathedral; the first demonstration of linear perspective, about 1415–20 | linear perspective |
| Masaccio | 1401–1428 | Florence | The Holy Trinity fresco, about 1427, one of the first paintings built on linear perspective | fresco, perspective |
| Leonardo da Vinci | 1452–1519 | Florence, Milan, France | The Last Supper, Mona Lisa; notebooks on anatomy and machines | sfumato, study of nature |
| Albrecht Dürer | 1471–1528 | Nuremberg, Germany | engravings and woodcuts; books on perspective and proportion | printmaking, measurement |
| Michelangelo | 1475–1564 | Florence, Rome | the marble David, 1501–04; the Sistine Chapel ceiling, 1508–12 | anatomy, fresco, carving |
| Raphael | 1483–1520 | Florence, Rome | The School of Athens fresco, 1509–11 | balanced composition, perspective |
<em>Linear Perspective: Brunelleschi's Experiment</em>, from Smarthistory. Watch how Brunelleschi used a painted panel with a small hole and a mirror to show that his perspective drawing matched the real view of a building in Florence.
Warning
A common mistake: putting the vanishing point anywhere on the page. It must sit on the horizon line, at the viewer's eye level. If you draw a scene as if sitting down, the horizon line is low; standing on a hill, it is high. Draw the horizon line first, then the vanishing point on it.
Tip
“Horizon first, point second, lines third.” To spot linear perspective in a painting, lay a ruler along two edges that go into the distance: if they meet on one point at eye level, the artist used it.
Practice
What does “Renaissance” mean, and what were artists trying to bring back?
Define vanishing point and horizon line. Where must the vanishing point always be?
In a drawing, a tree 5 m away is drawn 15 cm tall. How tall should an identical tree be drawn at 15 m? At 25 m?
Explain the difference between chiaroscuro and sfumato.
Why did Renaissance painters prefer oil paint for portraits, while fresco suited large church walls?
Draw a straight Kigali street in one-point perspective: a road, two rows of buildings with windows, three street lamps getting smaller, and a person in the distance.
1. “Rebirth”. They revived the art and learning of ancient Greece and Rome and studied nature and the body closely.
2. The horizon line is the viewer's eye level; the vanishing point is the point where parallel lines running away from the viewer seem to meet. It is always on the horizon line.
3. ; .
4. Chiaroscuro is strong, dramatic contrast between light and dark to make forms look solid; sfumato is very soft, smoky blending of tones with no hard edges.
5. Oil paint dries slowly, so tones can be blended smoothly and built up in thin layers, ideal for skin and fine detail; fresco bonds into wet plaster and lasts for centuries on a wall, but must be painted quickly in sections before the plaster dries.
6. Practical. Check that all the lines running into the distance meet at one vanishing point on the horizon line.
Sources and credits
