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I. Perspective.
Although the mathematics of perspective were discovered by Philippo
Brunelleschi in the early 1400's, teaching artists how to construct correct
perspective images was not easy. In this 1525 woodcut, Albrecht Durer
demonstrates the use of a Draftsman's Net. A wooden frame covered with a grid
of black threads, together with an eyepiece - represented here by a small
obelisk - permitted an artist to replicate the scene before him onto a drawing
surface ruled with a matching grid. We will repeat his demonstration in class.
Nobody will be asked to undress.
In this course, we consider the interwoven histories of science and
Western art from the Renaissance to the end of the 19th century. Our approach
will be to study the major revolutions in science and mathematics during these
busy six centuries, then consider the effect they've had (real or imagined) on
parallel revolutions in the visual arts. The images above represent four
problems we'll pay particular attention to. We'll also look briefly at how
computer graphics handles each of these problems. No programming experience is
required.
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II. Scientic illustration.
While the ancients were careful observers of nature, their knowledge of human
anatomy was deeply flawed, and their scientific treatises survive only as text
- no figures. Shown here is a print from Andreas Vesalius's seminal 1543 book,
On the Fabric of the Human Body. With these precisely shaded and carefully
labeled drawings, he revolutionized both the study of human anatomy and the art
of scientific illustration. In this course we will try creating our own
technical illustrations. Nobody will be flayed.
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III. Light and shadow.
The notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519) include many studies of
penumbrae - the zone of partial shadow created when an object occludes only
part of a light source. Despite his legendary powers of observation,
Leonardo's writings contain misconceptions about how shadows are formed.
A scientific understanding of these phenomena came only two centuries later,
with the work of Lambert, Bouguer, and others during the European
Enlightenment. We will repeat many of their crucial experiments in class.
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IV. Color.
Since antiquity, artists have struggled with the question of how to organize
colors into scales. Despite contributions by Newton and others, human color
vision remained a mystery until the 1800's, when Young and Helmholtz proved
that colors occupy a 3D space. After them, writers experimented with many ways
of organizing this space. Here is a spherical arrangement proposed by Philipp
Runge in 1810.
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