Masters of Illusion

I have never been a particularly good artist. When I say that, I mean that I struggle with stick figures. Today for class, we had to draw a scene from around town where two building intersect. This was already intimidating enough everything here in Italy is so beautiful, I knew that I would not be able to do the scene justice. I gave it my best anyway and pretty much slaughtered it. I especially struggled with being able to portray the idea of dimension. I knew that I needed to try to make my buildings “come off the page,” but I just couldn't really get it. Little did I know that this was actually the point of the assignment.

Apparently, painters before the Renaissance and at the beginning had the exact same problem. They wanted their paintings to look more realistic and less two dimensional. Giotto, an early Renaissance painter, was one of the first to actually capture the true essence of dimension in a realistic fashion. It just grew exponentially from there. Artists began to incorporate math into their art to achieve more and more perfect proportions. They also discovered and perfected ideas such as linear perspective and vanishing point.

We looked a painting from the Renaissance today and I thought it literally looked computer generated because it was truly that perfect. It is honestly just mind blowing to me how the painters in the 1300-1600 could not only understand these things, but portray them perfectly. I remember standing in a museum in Rome, looking up at the ceiling, literally thinking that has to be a mold in the ceiling. But it wasn't, it was a painting, intended to trick the eye. They were some of the first optical illusions and definitely the most mind blowing. They didn't have computers or algorithms to compute the dementions, they only had their minds, creativity, and raw talent.