What's so hard about perspective and depth in art?

Cafe Society
1

I was looking at some ancient Egyptian art - and wonderful stuff it is, too. Great colour, balance and proportion. But just a little flat, a bit 2D.

As far as I remember perspective didn’t get used until, maybe, the 14th or 15th century. Why not? Surely the concept of making something that is further away a bit smaller isn’t that difficult? And the fact that a face has depth in real life, but not in art must have struck someone at the time as being a bit…odd?

Why didn’t they use perspective, and what happened to make people start using it?

2

I remember reading about this, but I can’t remember a jot of it.

We are used to photographs and film demonstrating perspective, it’s second nature to us.

But in the real world, what we see from our eyes isn’t a 2D representation of a 3D world, it’s a 3D representation of a 3D world, which is hard to translate into a 2D flat image if you’re not already familiar with seeing it as photographs do, i.e. with perspective.

Plus, most artists traditionally maintain the current established style, so tend not to experiment much. Veering from the status quo doesn’t often get you much recognition.

3

IANAArtist, but I would guess that drawing realistic perspective is difficult for the same reason that drawing realistic human faces is difficult: because the human brain is very good at spotting even the smallest clue that something is not quite right. When drawing animals or inanimate objects, you have a bit more leeway to get things slightly wrong before the viewers will notice it.

Also, while it doesn’t take a genius to realise that “things which are farther away look smaller” is the essence of perspective, to actually get the proportions right requires some mathematical insights which would be difficult to develop through pure intuition.

4

Perspective in art became a science during the Renaissance. (Just foundthis interesting site.) There is earlier art in which, generally, closer things are bigger than ones in the distance. But who decided that perspective was important?

If the artist is trying to tell a story, should he create a scene depicting the important characters the same size, so we can recognize them? Or with characters’ size dependent on their importance–like little government officials serving a Pharoah? Or maybe he should show scenes flowing into each other–rather like a comic strip without frames. (Sometimes “he” might have been “she.”) Or–should he create one picture that looks like a window into reality? (Not that these artists had much choice–they were contractors or slaves or believers expressing beliefs.)

Alexander met Darius of Persia at the Battle of Issus. Here’s a Pompeiian mosaic showing both leaders together. Is this German Renaissance sceneof the battle more realistic? It’s certainly more dramatic. The painters who gained mastery over perspective had a powerful tool.

Then still photography (& movies) were invented & artists turned in different directions. (Yes, it’s the same battle–linked at the Wikipedia article.)

5

What’s so hard about a spinning jenny? The development of technology was never a large goal in human history up until the Islamic Golden age and then the European Renaissance. There was simply no particular motive to be better than anyone else at anything.

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I am sure some professional art historians can chime in, but to my knowledge it was a combination of two things:

  • Figuring out the mathematics of perspective - Brunelleschi codified the math of vanishing points and other perspective techniques in the 1300’s, along with architecting the Dome of Florence’s glorious Duomo.

  • The evolution of Visual Language - a lot of the rules we have now seem obvious and given, such as perspective. But back in the ancient days, if someone was far back in the layout of the scene of a painting, but they were a King or something, they would still be depicted as huge because, well, they were King. Same with comic-book-type sequential drawings or the use of ideograms in early written languages.

It sounds like the early Renaissance, with its innovations in painting, sculpture, architecture, math, etc. focused on a science-based derivation of our senses, placing a priority on “man as the measure of all things” vs. glorifying the Lord, or King or whatever. That placed a premium on representative paintings vs. ones that used a more spiritual or non-scientific set of criteria for what was “good” and “correct” about the painting style…

7

WAG:

Before Guttenberg, information traveled very, very slowly. In nearly every industry, each succeeding century produces more breakthroughs than the previous century.

8

I’m not an authority, but did get go to art school and have read mulitiple books (or chapters) on perspective.

My non-expert opinion is that the development of geometrical perspective took:

  1. A scientific outlook
  2. Lots of streets and buildings lined up straight.

The concept of the “vanishing point” really hits you in the face looking down a long street with buildings of different heights, studded with rectangular windows and doors, and fronted with geometrically precise sidewalks.

Everything points to the same place!

Certainly there were civilizations with straight streets and long rectangular temples/buildings, but maybe the whole package of precise doors/windows/streets/sidewalks didn’t become common till the Renaissance. Maybe.

And even after you notice vanishing points, working out the details mathematically and artistically is not child’s play. When you factor in hills and valleys and curving forms it’s very complex.

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I took 2 years of high school drafting back in the old days before computers. While that stuff’s not horribly complex, its not trivial either. And like you said, its not something most folks could figure out on their own. Its one of those things thats much more “obvious” AFTER figure it out. Beforehand, not so much.

And if you didn’t know it or understand it, which back then virtually nobody did, but tried to wing it, I think a poorly done attempt at perspective would actually look WORSE than no perspective at all.

Think about cartoon shows. They are decidely non-realistic visually. But your mind quickly learns to ignore it and go with the content. Then at the other end is a filmed movie or special effects/CGI movie done “right” and those look fine too.

What is most jarring is badly done special effects/CGI which is somewhere between “its obviously not real” and “it looks pretty darn real”. Maybe the early artists that didn’t quite know how to do it right had the same problem with their attempts?

10

Early art had a different goal. Nowadays, we think of art as trying to depict what our eyes see, but in many cultures, it was instead intended to depict what actually is: “Just because my eye lies does not mean my brush must lie, also”. That person in the distance looks smaller, but that’s just an illusion. He actually is the same size as the people in the foreground, so draw him that way. This is also the reason for the funny sideways “Walk like an Egyptian” pose: The Egyptians wanted to produce an accurate representation of the shape of each part of the body. The best representation of a foot comes from a side view, but the best representation of a torso comes from a front view, so they painted people with their torsos facing front but their feet turned sideways.

11

You’re referring to the Uncanny Valley- when something tries to appear - and gets close to appearing - human, it’s “off-ness” is aggressively jarring. And yeah, I bet there was a bit of Uncanny Valley going on before a true system of math established how to depict 3D space…

…and with computing power progressing the way it is, it won’t be long before CGI images transcend the current Uncanny Valley. Avatar was a big step past Polar Express…

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This is exactly the point I was trying to make upthread - better stated.

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It wasn’t until Alberti developed the Albertian Grid that perspective became something any artist could do. Brunelleschi did the math, Alberti made it available to everybody.

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In western art, scientific perspective doesn’t seem to have begun developing in a big way until the Renaissance, and the guy scholars tend to point to in starting the whole thing off is often Filippo Brunelleschi. One of my college art books associates the development of this perspective and other artistic developments, more implicitly than explicitly, with the idea that Italian artists entered into the same community as scholars and and other big-brained intellectual sorts during early modern times, allowing a greater exchange of ideas between what had previously been two different groups. I’m drawing this from several different places in A Basic History of Art, the sixth edition, by H.W. Janson and Anthony F. Janson. I am not an art historian, though, and I’m willing to entertain the idea that I and/or the text book I was forced to purchase and read some years ago might be incorrect in all this.

All that said, the use of perspective doesn’t really seem to have started during the Italian renaissance. The book I mention above discusses experiments with it by various ancient Greek and Roman artists, and flipping through the section on medieval art at least a rudimentary form of perspective can be seen . . . the stuff farther away is often (but not always) smaller than the stuff close up. But yeah, the art of using multiple vanishing points and plotting visual art in such a way that it creates realistic, proportionally exact representation of various objects seems to have come into its own during the Italian Renaissance.

And after hitting Preview Post, I see that **Chronos **beat me to the punch on some other things I was going to try to say, so I’ll just wish all a nice day and hit Submit Reply.

15

No, sir. In the real world, what we see from our eyes is a 2D representation of a 3D world.

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Our mind puts together the two 2D images into a 3D one.

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Ok, IAA art historian. Lecture mode-- this might sound pedantic at moments but I’m gonna ramble.

Various ways of getting an effect of distance:

  1. linear perspective (what we’re talking about here)-- converging orthogonals at a vanishing point and such-- which is related to
  2. diminution in size (and this is what Brunelleschi, Alberti et al were REALLY trying to work out-- object X at Y distance is smaller. EXACTLY HOW MUCH smaller?)
    Other issues:
  3. Atmospheric perspective-- that things father away look fuzzier and cooler-colored
    and very rudimentary techniques like
  4. overlapping
  5. stacking stuff up on the picture plane
  6. the suggestion of depth you get with shading.

But as a number of ya’ll note, it’s all to some degree an issue of priorities. In a lot of Medieval Christian artistic traditions, for example, what’s being represented is something otherworldly and supernatural. Why worry about representing it optically as the meat world? Or, in Song-era Chinese landscapes, they get an AWESOME sense of deep landscape through other techniques and which might actually be impossible if hamstringed by linear perspective. And, as some have noted, cultures like ancient Egypt had another set of priorities entirely (sort of like the early Christians), in representing the permanent and eternal rather than “this here now” and so loaded in multiple viewpoints to get as much information as possible across, to recreate objects.

On the Renaissance. . .If you look at Roman fresco painting, they were really good at a lot of this-- their “linear perspective” was really just eyeballed and approximate. When Brunelleschi gets into it, it’s a sort of physics exercise-- he’s an architect, mainly, and wants to work out how to diagram buildings better (and, later, Alberti’s a pencil-necked geek of a theoretician who wants to work out the geometry in detail). The application to 2-d arts is a sort of “oh, yeah, that, too” moment (although, timeline note, it spreads pretty widely throughout Italy at least before print really takes off well-- see Piero or Pollaiuollo in the 40s and 50s). But perhaps we can see it being of interest at all as a peculiarity of the Renaissance mentality-- humanism, man as measure of all things, etc etc (as has been noted earlier) rather than something “natural” and obvious.

BUT. . . does linear perspective “exist” in the real world? Obviously, the geometry is there, but what does a human in the world really see (if this interests you check out Ernst Gombrich’s… um…Art and Illusion, I think)? Linear perspective only works with an implied viewpoint of the static, single point in the flat world with convenient close-in borders. I think to some degree our modern eye has been trained by linear perspective to see the world that way. If you really look for a minute at the ceiling line 10 feet in front of you… it curves, optically (forget what you know and see what you see)-- we see the world like a fish-eye camera lens does-- our eyeball is not a point. My point is, linear perspective is a way of seeing and representing among others (i.e. Panofsky’s famous work “Perspective as Symbolic Form”). It happens to be privileged in our post-Renaissance western world, but at least in artistic terms it’s a construction and convention as much as anything else is. “Realism” is relative.

18

Perspective isn’t obvious. A person trying to draw his subject realistically would try to use what he knows is true. For example, he knows that a horse is bigger than a person so he’s going to make a drawing of a horse bigger than a drawing of a person. The idea that apparent size is relative - that a large object in the distance can appear to be smaller than an object close to the viewer - is counter-intuitive.

19

Once more, presentism raises its head. Perspective only seem obvious to us because we’re used to seeing it in art. We also demand “realism.” People in the past did not have the same requirements or expectations.

The assumption in the question was that people would perceive things the same way we do. That’s false – though they might see it the same way, they did not perceive it using the same framework.

20

I’ve been out today (at the beach!), and I haven’t got any time now, but many thanks for all these fascinating insights.