Reference no: EM133254670

Case: Even by the Late Gothic period, artists had begun to be more interested in reviving the Classical past (or Greco-Roman) by representing the figure in a more logical, anatomically correct way. Look at the figures on the exterior of Reims Cathedral, and you can see the return of more fully three-dimensional figures and the return of the contrapposto weight shift.

By the 1400s, Italian painters had begun to use a logical, mathematical perspective with a single vanishing point in their painting. The diagonal orthogonals receded in a mathematically calculated way. They also used atmospheric perspective to give depth to a scene so that in the far distance, detail is lost and the colors go to cooler tones, just as it does when we look at a distant scene. They aimed to try to give the illusion of convincing depth in the painting so that the pictorial space could be perceived as continuous with our own. They also began to consistently represent the human form with convincing weight, bulkiness, and volume. Shading followed the folds and cast shadows in a logical manner. They also gave their paintings an internal coherence, organization, and clarity that had not been seen before, very unlike the crowded compositions and disporportionate figures of the medieval period and Early Northern European painters.

Why did the Early Renaissance painters in Italy embrace, logical space, coherence, and clarity? Because they wanted to represent the stories from the Bible in such a way that the viewer would be convinced of the truth and reality of those stories, to make them vivid, alive, and accessible to the viewer in a very human way (the return of Humanism). They wanted to convince the viewer that they could walk into the scene and be in world that was intelligible and consistent with our own.

The photo below is Perugino's Christ Giving the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven to St. Peter

Question 1: the use of linear perspective (remember, artists don't have to include the entire diagonal line of an orthogonal to create linear perspective) and atmospheric persepective (if present) and

Question 2: the handling of the figure that marks increasing degrees of naturalism - meaning realistic and complex poses with the folds of the fabric following logically the sense of body mass underneath the folds, shading, cast shadows etc.