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WiSe 13/14: Optics and Perspective in Early Modern Art

Sven Dupré

Kommentar

The application of linear perspective in early fifteenth-century Italian painting is often considered a defining moment in the history of art. It is closely connected with Florence: the ‘perspective demonstration’ of Filippo Brunelleschi in front of the Baptistery, the ‘Trinity’ fresco of Masaccio in the church of Santa Maria Novella, and the treatise ‘De Pictura’ of Leon Battista Alberti. In the history of science the history of perspective is mostly remembered for its development in to projective geometry in the hands of early seventeenth-century mathematicians from Guidobaldo del Monte to Simon Stevin to Girard Desargues and (in this way) its alleged contribution to a Cartesian concept of space. The seminar will re-examine and question this type of discipline-oriented historiography of perspective developed since Erwin Panofsky’s ‘Perspective as Symbolic Form’. On the basis of the analysis of visual works of art and of contemporary writings the seminar investigates objects of knowledge such as vision, colour, light and shadow and their uses in different domains of art and science from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century: in which ways was perspective related to contemporary bodies of optical and mathematical knowledge? What role did treatises on perspective play in the education of artists? How did painters create the illusion of space? Prior knowledge of science and mathematics is not necessary; the willingness to engage both with historiography and primary sources (in modern translation) is. Schließen

Literaturhinweise

Literature: Martin Kemp, The Science of Art. Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1990); James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 1994); J.V. Field, The Invention of Infinity: Mathematics and Art in the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997); Kirsti Andersen, The Geometry of an Art: The History of the Mathematical Theory Perspective from Alberti to Monge (New York: Springer 2007); Hans Belting, Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science (Belknap Press, 2011). Schließen