Why does this look so weird?
And why does this look weird?
Why does this look weird?
And why does this painting look so real?
Let's talk about perspective. How it saved art, and how it kinda ruined it.
I'm Professor Lise (not really a professor) and this is Art 101
(not really a class). We're here to go on a deep dive of an idea, an artwork,
or a story from the art world that's controversial, inexplicable, or just plain weird.
Today we're talking about linear perspective.
What is it, how did it get here, and why should we care even if we don't think we do?
And we'll see how linear perspective changed art — and also became a trap.
What is linear perspective? Basically,
it's a set of lines that trick your eye into thinking that something that's 2-dimensional
is actually 3-dimensional, like a painting of a road extending endlessly into the distance.
That distance isn't real, kid! It's pretty fake. It's still on a flat piece of canvas.
It's actually not even a road, though that's a larger story. But linear perspective allows
you to stare deep into the distance of that painting that isn't really a distance at all.
How'd it happen?
Before the invention of linear perspective, paintings looked a bit strange.
If you wanted somebody to look like they were behind someone else,
you sort of painted them on top of somebody else.
We had a sense that things that were further away looked smaller
and things closer to you looked bigger but with no real sense of how to go
about doing that in an organized way. But we tried. We really, really tried.
In the 15th century, an artist and architect named Filippo Brunelleschi came up with a viable
system for rendering a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional surface.
The story is that from about 1415-1420,
he started experimenting with a system of orthogonal lines converging on a vanishing
point that allowed him to draw a building that looked exactly as it did in real life.
And linear perspective was born!
A ton of artists began to use it, sometimes to a startling degree of precision.
It's what makes Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper" work so well.
In this one, the vanishing point is just above Christ's head.
Linear perspective organizes the painting, makes it seem like it's happening in a real space
and also directs your eye to the most important part of the scene.
"The Holy Trinity" by Masaccio employs linear perspective so exactly that you could use the
painting to plot out a chapel in real space, with all of the characters in the right spots.
And Perugino's "Delivery of the Keys to Saint Peter" makes you feel like you're
looking into a very deep piazza in the middle of an Italian town,
with buildings in the background you could walk to or build.
A lot of people got in on this linear perspective game. It became part of the language of painting.
Artists were able to make their works look like things from real life set in real spaces.
Perspective is also maybe one of the reasons your uncle is enthralled by a painting of dogs playing poker. It looks so real!
I should point out that linear perspective was a tool of the West — and not the only
way that artists made sense of space. Painters in Northern Europe used things
like atmospheric perspective or multiple vanishing points.
Chinese painters used flat perspective.
Europe isn't the centre of the world — it's just one example of how artists dealt with real life.
Ok, so artists had a perspectival system now and that seems like it should be the
end of the story. We made it! But that isn't quite how it worked out.
What if there was a machine that could make every image have perfect perspective? Enter the camera.
After about the 1820s, this mechanism could do the job of capturing real life in 2D.
So, in its own weird way, the camera became the competition that artists just couldn't beat.
Painters like Picasso, Matisse and Mondrain began challenging Brunelleschi's system and
making paintings that were defiantly unphotographic. They didn't try to fool
your eye into thinking a painting was a window you could see the world through.
But perspective lived on, even after artists dismantled
it. Why should you care about it now, over 500 years after it began? It has authority. It speaks
of painting's formal history. And you'll still see it used in paintings of prime ministers and
presidents, in altarpieces at churches and murals at city hall. Perspective is a tool of tradition.
In contemporary art, artists make choices — sometimes they use it, and often they don't.
Perspective is still a big part of the reason your uncle is able to stare lovingly
into a painting of dogs playing poker and forward you said painting in a group email
that includes other people whose email address you don't recognize with a note that says "this is amazing!"
We rely on that kind of thing for sanity: preserving familiar relationships
and keeping an artistic tradition alive that began in the 15th century.
See you next time on Art 101!