RapThumb.JPG (9285 bytes) The Reading Images Project

 

Style: Raphael's stylistic sources

The development of  linear perspective and the concomitant creation of an illusion of a three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface is probably the outstanding technical achievement of Renaissance art.  The desire to recreate the world in a physically plausible way exists by the end of the thirteenth century, but it was only Brunelleschi's discovery of a method for consistently creating an impression of space through 1-point perspective that gave artists the tool they had been seeking to achieve the illusion of reality.

Renaissance Space

Artists of the fourteenth century knew that real forms in space recede into the distance, but they had no method for consistently suggesting that recession.  Each individual building in Lorenzetti's cityscape looks three- dimensional, as it angles back into space, but together they are an odd jumble of forms that don't imply a unified spatial experience.

   

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Effects of Good Government, 
Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, c. 1338

Once Brunelleschi 
 invented a system for logically creating an impression of space, 
called  linear or 1-point perspective, artists had the ability to give a much more convincing representation of a 
 unified world.

     

    Unknown Italian artist, Ideal City, Walters 
Art Gallery, Baltimore, c. 1495 


composition     space     figures     colors      light      Renaissance Style

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