Take a look at Shorpy Historical Picture Archive :: Summer Sale: 1905 high-resolution photo
Look around at Shorpy for hundreds of other examples. This is just one of the recent postings.
Forgive me, what am i to be seeing?
Cool old photo though, when is it? Very early 1900’s i am guessing?
Or look up “hyperfocal distance.” Not difficult to do. That said, even in classical paintings, it’s usually not desirable for everything to have equal amounts of detail. Foregrounds tend to be significantly more detailed than backgrounds.
In terms of motion lines, don’t some of Leonardo’s fluid studies comes close. For example. This is surely intended to convey a sense of movement, rather than just a static arrangement.
That’s possible but in that image there seems to be slightly more to it - I can see what looks like “motion lines” in that picture.
I’ve never seen a pre-photographic era pic of an arrow or crossbow bolt in the process of being loosed - it’s either about to be launched or it’s on its way to the target. There are, however, pictures of guns firing. It’s quite interesting from a historical perspective.
Yeah, it’s not as if people hadn’t heard of pubic hair before La Maja Desnuda.
True, but way too much of art was about depicting reality for me to believe the perspective was understood long before it showed up in art.
The actual geometry isn’t intuitive. It’s something they actually teach you in art class, because it’s not something you’re likely to pick up on your own. It doesn’t look like every single object has lines that meet up at one (or possibly two) focal points.
I even remember being taught the less accurate versions of perspective that developed earlier–using isometric views. Or even earlier stuff that would just make things smaller or make them foggier.
I’d seen photographs, but my development of oblique projection was actually based, not on studying photographs, but on studying what I saw from my own very-high window (yes, I was drawing in oblique projection way before anybody told me what it was called; I even came up with different ratios for the Z axis depending on its angle).
In medieval paintings and tapestries, while the whole piece is usually not in perspective, individual objects sometimes are: a bench here, a tower there. The artist saw the point in drawing those objects in a way which made them more “realistic” than a frontal view, but not in placing the whole composition in perspective, partly because so much of the objective was symbolic. A symbol doesn’t have to be realistic.
Like those Nativity scenes where the infant Jesus is depicted as nearly the size of Mary. He’s depicted as big not because he was big, but because he’s important, and obviously an artist should make important things bigger.
There’s always three vanishing points in reality, but you can usually pull off a good depiction with two in art.
In medieval art, the same character can appear multiple times in a single painting - this to convey the notion “first he did this, then that, then he moved here…”
Another common effect, typical of battle scenes, is the spear trick : a bunch of soldiers (whether on foot or on horse, though more often on horse) all have similar poses, but the ones at the back hold their lances vertically, the ones in the middle at a diagonal, and the ones at the front hold them horizontal, like so : ||||///_ _ _. This was both a graphical shorthand, and a visual effect to depict the forward momentum of a charge. That one lasted well into the Renaissance.
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In medieval paintings and tapestries, while the whole piece is usually not in perspective, individual objects sometimes are: a bench here, a tower there. The artist saw the point in drawing those objects in a way which made them more “realistic” than a frontal view, but not in placing the whole composition in perspective, partly because so much of the objective was symbolic. A symbol doesn’t have to be realistic.
[/QUOTE]
Indeed. A common topos featuring this is images celebrating a donation, when nobles or kings gave away some land to the Pope/the local Bishop so the latter could found a monastery or church there. In these, you see the nobleman physically handing an entire building to the religious figure - the building (sometimes complete with monks !) fitting inside the nobleman’s hands. “What is this, a monastery for ANTS ?” 
If you’re dealing with rectangular objects whose edges all line up parallel to each other along a grid. Which have been relatively rare until fairly recently.
We’ve had rectangular buildings for at least 3 millenia.
I think rain has always been drawn as streaks instead of the individual oblate spheroids identifiable only in strobe photography.
The notion that good art HAD to be “realistically” representational (even when portraying something fantastical or mystical) really came to be the mainstream expectation in the West upon the Renaissance and was only really let go of after the advent of photography. And that realism involved the “freeze frame” effectbut the expectation was that *the viewer would **know *that of course that scene was in motion.
Kobal2 that particular way of arranging lances/pikes was based on actual use in mass formations, so that yes, showing the front ranks had them lowered was the visual signal to the painting’s viewer that the formation was moving forward.
Yes, but were they all aligned with each other?
You need 3 vanishing points just to draw one rectangular box properly.
And six to draw two boxes, if they’re not aligned.
Except, of course, vanishing-point perspective isn’t correct, either, because straight lines project into our visual field as curves. Stand between a pair of straight railroad tracks and look to the horizon, and you’ll see them vanishing to a point… but now look down at your feet, and you’ll see they’re now parallel. And now keep moving your field of view until you’re looking between your legs at the horizon in the other direction, and you’ll see that they converge to a point there, too. How can two straight lines converge at two different points? Answer: They’re not straight lines.