Category: Art History

Missing People–[Addition]. Joachim van Ringelberg, 1541.
JF Ptak Science Books LLC Addition to Post #88

I’ve
found another extraordinary image that would fit just perfectly in an an
earlier post, Missing People—Pelerin, Schoen and Marey and Picturing Absent and
Empty People for the Study of Perspective.

This
wood engraving comes from the Flemish Joachim Sterck van Ringelberg’s (1499-1536
or so) book Lucubrations, printed in Basel in 1541 Ringelberg was one of those famous wandering
scholars from the first half of the 15th century, and the book was no doubt constructed for the use of his pupils. This is one of about 30 books that Ringelberg
wrote–he intended to wrtie a thousand, but times being what they were, and
living to only 37 or so, he fell short of the mark. He did produce quite a lot
though given his youth, the hardship of travel, access to published works, and
tools, and general annoyances of the 16th century traveler who was not a
royal. It is really quite
remarkable. Ringelberg taught a wide
range of subjects belying his quest for M books–he was competent in astronomy,
mathematics, literature, classics (of course) , and languages.

This “missing people” image comes from a section of this book dealing
with perspective. I’m just endlessly
entertained trying to get inside the head of a 16th century student seeing
these empty, missing, place-holder human forms for the very first time. As I’ve said earlier, these figures just
don’t occur in Western art.
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Art History — Perspective
Shaping Space and Controlling What We See—Determining What Color “Is”, Emily Vanderpoel and Pre-Kandinsky Art

JF Ptak Science Books Post #73

The idea of how we put parameters to something like the visual field is a gargantuan topic—it is something that architects and geometers and physicists and mathematicians (in general) have dealt with forever. Mapmakers have perhaps the most visualized aspect of this on paper, performing the semi-miracle of translating three dimensions into two; physicists have a more difficult time, taking the opposite approach, sort of , and translating two or three dimensional space into x-number of dimensions. Anatomists had a difficult time of their subject until relatively recently in human history, what with the sublime religious curfews on messy knowledge and all coming into play, poking around into the heart and such as though it was an affront to the sanctity of the creator (M Servetus’ ideas on the circulation of the blood via the heart, making the heart a tool and not the brain or some odd conjunction of creative divine power, cost him his life, burning slowly alive at the stake…how mysterious the whole world of RNA Genotype-Phenotype Mapping and such would seem to him if he could have a peek into the future/present from wherever he is.)

Color theory is old and pretty—as a matter of fact there is a very attractive gathering of color theory models (in black and white, though) displaying some two dozen or more color models from the last 400 years. People like Della Porta (1593), our old friend and resident oddball polymath crank Kircher (1646), the smarter-than-you-could-believe Newton (1660), Waller (1686), Lambert (1772), the wide ranging and again polymathic Goethe (1792), Herschel (1817, who also ushered in our understanding of the other light-sensitive shape spacing medium of photography in 1840), the semi-forgotten Chevreul (1835), the beautiful Maxwell (1857), Wundt (1874, the early experimental psychologist who also looked for spirits/spiritmus and ghosts), von Bezold (1878), Rood (1879), Munsell (1918) Kandinsky (1914 and not decipherable by me) and Klee (1924), and so on towards the present, all tried to analyze the prospects of color.

Not in this list is the very highly problematic Emily Vanderpoel, who in 1901 and 1903 produced (in two editions) a lovely but mysterious book called Color Problems for the Layman, in which she sought not so much to analyze the components of color itself, but rather to quantify the overall interpretative effect of color on the imagination. I know this sounds begging and vague, but I really haven’t been able to make much headway in the work.

I’m attracted to this effort because of its attempt at quantifying such abstract thoughts.

By virtue of this effort, though, Vanderpoel had produced a strikingly illustrated book, with 118 color plates, all very intense, and beautiful, and in its way exceptional—unique perhaps. Had the book been written thirty years or so hence we’d call it some sort of constructivist/constructionist artform. But since the artwork in the book comes a decade before the first non-representational artwork in human history (or so), I don’t know exactly what to call it.

I really don’t know what it is, but I know that it is not entirely accidental, this pre-non-representational artform, because controlled geometrical color art is not accidental.

In trying to quantify the color images of the objects in her study, Vanderpoel establishes a 10×10 square grid, dividing all of the color in that object into individual units numbering to 100. Then, somehow, she identifies the major colors and places them according to a system that I cannot understand within the grid.

The net effect is glorious. I just don’t know how she got there—which isn’t normally a consideration in art, except that this work is an instructional on how to understand color in art and nature, and the explanation of the procedure is ethereal. Vanderpoel was and remains a respected author on porcelains and other applied and plastic arts. In this work she looked at her fair share of porcelain, limogues, clay pots, burial urns, glass shards, and the like; she also analyzed clouds, mummy cloths (and casings), dew on morning grass, brocade, the eye of a blue jay, feathers, and another hundred or so poetic arragenments of the stuff of teh world. I still do not know what this book is trying to tell me, but I do know that it is remarkable.

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The Mathematical Garden—Alexander Pope and the Geometry of Natural Experience

While sitting at the edge of a stream in a flowing dress and shading herself with a yellow parasol, my wife and the jewel in the crown, the brilliant Patti Digh, wrote a superb essay on following the paths less marked. (Maybe I’m making up the parasol bit. And the stream. And flowing dress.) I’ve always been a happy observer of found geometries, and her essay heightened my awareness to them, along with the conscious efforts that we may daily make to enforce these lines or follow a new, multi-dimensional geometric path.

So when I stumbled across this map of Alexander Pope’s garden and noticed the odd paths winding their way through it, and how much in contrast this was to the very sniffy upper crust English garden of the 18th century, Patti’s essay lit instantly to mind—and also because in addition to being a geometer of emotion and thought she was in a past life a U VA English Master.

Pope’s garden was an irregular path in an irregular garden, that garden being his leased property at Twickenham, where he came to live in 1717, along with his mother and his boyhood nurse, Mary Beach, and his dog Bounce.

Pope’s garden was an irregular path in an irregular garden, that garden being his leased property at Twickenham, where he came to live in 1717, along with his mother and his boyhood nurse, Mary Beach, and his dog Bounce. (Actually that would be a series of dogs as he named them all “Bounce”.) Pope was a poet and satirist and
critic and general taste-maker-the social influence extending even to garden-making, as his was famous even during his lifetime, and not for the reasons that most English gardens were famous.

His was not the planned regularity of the gentility (and far of course from the suffocating, critically flawed gardens at places like Versailles, “Is there anything more shocking than the regularity of a planned garden?” asks Batty Langley in his New Principles of the Gardening… 1728), and were removed from the “normal”, more articulated garden. I’ve never really understood the formal garden, especially as it relates to the ancient analogies of gardens and paradise-the Garden of Eden, Pliny’s Garden of Venus, Lucretius’ Earthly Paradise, seem as though they might be some sort of paradisical thing (though we won’t address Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights) , but the formal gardens and its paradise relationship seems odd, what with the removal of nature’s “chaos” and all, unless that was indeed the Master Plan.

But the mathematical garden was a desirous thing—still is—and none other than Christopher Wren wrote that it was “naturally more beautiful than any irregular figure” (1750). There were some critics of the math garden, like Mr. Langley, but most garden designers wrote and argued in favor of it, coming to the similar conclusion of John Dennis, in that the Universe, being “regular in all its parts” would dictate that its beauty be found as regular in other things too, “and it is that exact regularity that [the mathematical garden] owes its admirable beauty” (1704).
Pope didn’t seem to address (in print) the garden idea formally except for a few places– Pope praised ‘the amiable simplicity of unadorned Nature’ in a famous essay, published in The Guardian in 1713, and then again in his message to Burlinton in 1731.

The plan of Pope’s garden was somewhat irregular, but to me the most appealing aspect was the irregularity of the paths that curled and snaked their way through the garden.
And particularly, what about the lower part of the path along the bottom of J. Serle’s 1725 engraving? What was that path in Pope’s garden leading to, or from? Was there a particularly nice tree there, a favorite spot, a cool shade, an odd bit of sunshine at sundown? Or was this wall-clinging path just the workman’s route?

Perhaps these weren’t Pope’s principal desire lines in the garden—in fact, the garden desire lines weren’t the garden at all— they might’ve been under it. Pope’s famous grotto at Twickenham may be better known than his garden-it certainly sounds much more interesting. Followed his own desire line, underground, in his famous grotto, which he began to build shortly after arriving at Twickenham, and which was still under construction at the time of his death.

The unseen desire lines of Alexander Pope seem more fitting to me, more poetic, what with Pope needing to dig out the earth in order to find what he was looking for, rather than a more simple wandering around his fine, rustic garden.

Have a look at the materials house in the grotto/cabinet of curiosity here, along with a commendable plan of the grotto itself.

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Architecture and Building — Art History
The Nature of Things & the Display of Information: Alhazen and Optics, 1572

JF Ptak Science Books LLC
Alhazen, (pseudonym of Abu
Ali Hasan Ibn al-Haitham), born in Basra, Iraq, and who
lived from 965-1039, was perhaps the greatest of all the great Muslim
physicists, and was also one of the greatest physicists with an interest in
optics of all time. Considered to be “the
father of modern optics”, he was an original thinker and an historian, an overall
scientist, preserving the ancient,
accentuating the modern and creative in his own right.

The woodcut illustration—deceptively
complex but rather simple once you focus– from his book Opticae
thesavrvs. Alhazeni Arabis libri septem, nuncprimum editi. Eivsdem liber De
crepvscvlis & nubium ascensionibus… demonstrates a number of optical principles–if
you look hard enough. (The Opticae by the way was about the only one of his 200 or so books to have survived the destructive powers of time and neglect.) In the foreground we see tow examples in the
field of optics of keen interest to Alhazen. The man standing in the puddle up to his knees in water shows the
distortion that occurs due to refraction (an area in which he greatly improved
upon Ptolemy’s understanding) The guy to
the right of naked knee-distorted man is probably using his mirror to keep an
eye out on what was happening behind him (it looks as though the person he’s
spying is not him but someone hiding behind the hillock). This small defensive use of the mirror pales
in comparison to what was happening as a cause of mirrors directly behind
him: the galleons are definitely being
set ablaze by the Archimedean-like use of mirrors in the city on the far side
of the harbor (like Syracuse), and we can see that one of the ships is already
nearly sunken.

The bridge (with the loitering
elephants ?) is set to exhibit the knowledge of perspective, even though this
is not the best example of receding background– it was through Alhazen
that a very considerable part of that science found its way into Medieval and Renaissance
culture, particularly in the artwork of Ghiberti,
Alberti, Leonardo, and later, Poussin. Roger
Bacon (13^th c), Pole Witelo (Vitellio) and most of the other
Medieval Western writers on optics based their optical work primarily on Alhazen’s
work. ‘ (The use and choice of the
elephant on the bridge is a mystery to me, particularly since we don’t see one
on the other side of the bridge, which would’ve been helpful to illuminate the
perspective bit.) The rainbow in the background is there simply
to remind us of the already well-known association of its formation and
light. The
setting sun might also hint at Alhazen’s discussion of the density of
the atmosphere and the relation between it and height—he would go on to discover that origin
and breadth of twilight, the height of the atmosphere, and many other things
back there one thousand years ago. This woodcut
hints at only a few of his great achievements.

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Art History — Iconography
Visionaries: the Crowded Future of Albert Robida, the Jules Verne of SciFi Art

JF Ptak Science Books

Albert Robida, a fabulous visionary born in France in 1848 (dying in 1926) was an illustrator, etcher, lithographer, caricaturist, and novelist. His greatest achievement is his futuristic trilogy, including Le Vingtième Siècle (1883), La Guerre au vingtième siècle (1887) and Le Vingtième siècle. La vie électrique (1890). In general he has deep, realistic vision, the sort that puts him on a similar plane as Jules Verne, but is differentiated from his famous French compatriot, in that his creations seem more compatible with possibility, being more common, more fashioned to what the average person might come to expect of their future creature comforts. In spite of a fantastic and perhaps unparalleled scifi imagination, Verne seems a little beyond the scope of the mortal future, maybe a little too much for their appreciation of whatever common class the future might hold room for.

[Source: Library of Congress]

The future of Robida includes telephones (more in their application and use than in the invention itself, seeing far more accurately, I think, in the possible roles in society than people like Bell and Dolbear saw in their own inventions), televisions (the telephonoscope), bacterial warfare, emancipation and political empowerment of women, advanced submarines, transportation tubes, helicopters, and the like.

Verne (born in 1828) had an exhaustive, exhausting, fantastically accomplished literary career—his bibliography is a sci-fi equivalent of William Shakespeare in that his accomplishments are so vast. (Not of course actually as vast as the Bard, because Old Bill was totally impossible–an Einstein/Feynman/Newton/Chandra of literature, all rolled into one person. For example, some of his fifty books include these recognizable nuggets: Five Weeks in a Balloon (Cinq Semaines en ballon, 1863), Journey to the Center of the Earth (Voyage au centre de la Terre, 1864), From the Earth to the Moon (De la terre à la lune, 1865), In Search of the Castaways or Captain Grant’s
Children (Les Enfants), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, 1869-1870), Around The Moon (Autour de la lune, a sequel to From the Earth to the Moon, 1870). A Floating City (Une ville flottante, 1871). Around the World in Eighty Days (Le Tour du Monde en quatre-vingts jours, 1873), The Mysterious Island (L’île mysterieuse, 1875), Off on a Comet (Hector Servadac, 1877)

They are deep and far-reaching, though Verne, unfortunately, did not find an artistic muse for his visions nearly as capable as those Robida produced for himself. For example, in 1863 Verne wrote about Paris in the 20th century on many now-familiar things that in the heights of the US Civil War seemed impossible: skyscrapers, automatic and electric calculating machines, gas-powered cars, flying machines and a worldwide information and distribution network.

What Robida did indeed have that Verne did not was an artistic talent, and it was here that he excelled—actually no one, in my opinion, had accomplished anything nearly as close as did Robida in imaging the future; few others in the 19th century comes close. He was a Jules Verne of scifi illustration.

(Hayao Miyazaki’s “Howl’s Moving Castle”, a Japanese anime film from 2004, has remarkable flying machine quite resembling Robida’s mannerism, and I think I’d be remiss for not mentioning it.)

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Architecture and Building — Art History — Future, History of the
Beautiful Title Pages 2—Living Skeletons and Anthropomorphic Shells

JF Ptak Science Books LLC
The first title page here belongs to Guillio Casserio (c.1552-1616), De Vocis Auditusque Organis historia anatomica singulari fide methodo…, 1600-1601, an absolutely gorgeous illustrated monograph on the vocal organs and organs of hearing in man and animals. Casserio, a superb anatomist (and who was also signatory to William Harvey’s doctoral diploma from Padua in 1602), set the standard for accuracy and beauty in copperplate anatomical illustration just as Vesalius had set the standard for woodcut illustration.

I cannot recall a title page illustrated with so many skeletons, especially so beautifully arranged, and posed in common, breathing, living situations. Their placement is excellent, along with the other skull and bones—it seems to me as though they could not be re-arranged into a better assortment more pleasing to the eye, much like rearranging Joseph Cornell construction…it just cannot be done.

Another fine example of title page design is Filippo Buonanni’s Museum Kircherianum sive Museaeum A.P. Athanasio Kirchero…printed in Rome in 1709, and it belongs to the first published effort to catalog the scientific and miscellaneous

collection of the vast 17th century polymath, Athanasius Kircher; the collection assembled in the Jesuit Collegio Roman, and assembled by Alfonso Donnimo. Buonanni was a student of and successor to Kircher at the Collegio and catalogued the specimens of natural history, scientific instruments, geological items, Egyptian antiquities, and other items brought back to the school via networks of Jesuit missionaries. His particular strength in study was conchology, and he displayed his knowledge in this intricate arrangement of shells from the collection in the title page.

I cannot help but think that his artistic vision may have been influenced by the extraordinary Giuseppe Arcimboldo (also spelled Arcimboldi; 1527-1593), who, one hundred or so years earlier, painted (in his non-conventional works) fantastic portraits and images using fruits, vegetables and other natural objects as the sole source of representation. On the other hand his influence may not have been so very well known, as many of his works were stolen during war time in the mid-17th century, and he fell rather deeply into obscurity until being revived and resurrected by the Surrealists in the 20th century. His work was so extraordinary–and this is true at any time in history but especially so during the time that he lived–that it would be impossible not to mention this unique talent in connection with Buonanni.

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Art History — Medicine, History of — Title Page Art, Beautiful
The History of the Future 2: Henard touches on the Future’s Future Plan, 1911

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post #51

This cross section illustration (“Rue Future”/Future Street) is from E. Henard’s (1849-1923) article, “The Cities of the Future”,
from American City, Volume 4, January, 1911. In this article Henard (architect of the city of Paris and from 1880 a life-long employee and advocate of public works in that city) looks into the future
and sees the movement towards underground (or enclosed) vehicular traffic,
“smart” buildings, pneumatic tubing for vacuum cleaners (“almost
sure to come into general use”), an improvement in the system for water
delivery and removal, replacing coal with natural gas, and more. He lays out a
plan to implement his idea that, if implemented int he city of

Paris, would cost $420,000,000 (or
approximately $15 billion in 2006 money) over 100 years. [This part seems a
little off given that the area for public roads alone in Paris at this time was 3,700 acres–nevertheless this was an interesting appearing plan, a significant
portion of which has found its way into building and community planning albeit
on a far smaller scale].

Henard was also acutely interested in the future traffic problems of Paris and other major cities, proposing revolutionary radial traffic patterns for moving cars around major metropolitan areas–which was really quite visionary as the mass production of automobiles had not yet really taken place–certainly automobiles were far more common by 1911 than 1905, but their numbers would be vaulted higher int he next decade with the first true approach to assembly line production of automobiles, making them affordable to the millions. His plan for a ring-lime system around the city of Paris was influential to some of the ideas in the early
American planning reports for San Francisco and Chicago by the great Daniel Burnham.

What is particularly interesting for me in the Henerad plan is the room that he left for his future’s future–he attempted to make his plan adaptable for the time when the future he was writing about was becoming the past. And so he was leaving room in his underground plans (in particular) to accommodate some of what the future might hold in store for his city, leaving unused spaces and tunnels, so that the city planners in the future would not have to go through the enormous expense of putting these things in for themselves. Now that is future-forward thinking.

For a good, long article on the plan see http://www.library.cornell.edu/Reps/DOCS/henard.htm

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Emblems of Featureless Faces–Philibert de l’Orme’s Architecture, 1568

Philibert de l’Orme’s book, Le Premier Tome de l’Architecture,
printed in Paris in 1568, contains a singular illustration. L’Orme (who lived ca. 1515-1570), was perhaps one of the first modern
architects, not only because of his superior engineering skills, but also because
he was a superb organizer—a superior architectural tactician.

He worked for Henry II and Charles IX, supervising the construction
of Fontainebleau, Saint-Germain-en-Laye—where he built the
Château Neuf, and the other royal buildings. As well as the Tuileries,
in collaboration with Jean Bullant.

The text explaining the illustration reads something like “to
guard against persons who can do nothing right, cannot see what is to be done
well, cannot hear what should be understood…” Perhaps l’Orme was talking about people in general; or, perhaps, as I
suspect, he was referring to someone in his own profession, a builder, an
engineer, an architect? In any event,
this singular image is one of the few that I can recall in which a person is
allegorically represented without hands,
eyes, ears or, perhaps a nose.

There’s quite a bit of imagery showing unusually-featured faces–and I’m talking about emblemata rather than monsters or mythological/hypothetical beings meant to go creaking into the night. I’m also excluding medical images
(like this for an early form of rhinoplasty) and people who have suffered injury or are differentially abled (as in this image of the great Tyhco Brahe and his silver nose). I’m
hard put to think of other examples of representational humans with such features existing in the technical or scientific world, though–I think that l’Orme’s designer/engineer here is a very scarce creation.

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Art History — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
The Sovietesque Disappearance of Pacioli’s Rhombicuboctahedron

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 23

What?

I’m lodging a complaint, 16 years after the fact (though new to me), about the Italian commemorative stamp honoring
the great Fra Luca Pacioli—a great mathematician, inventor of modern bookkeeping, and friend and dispersal-agent of/for Leonardo da Vinci—it also seems to be the first representation of a living mathematician. The stamp is based upon and freely rearranges (to the point of obsidian abstraction) elements of the famous painting by (perhaps) Jacopo Barbari (and painted in 1495), which now hangs in the Museo di Capodimonte (Naples).

The painting has been reproduced in mathematics books and such many times over—with good reason, as it is a gorgeous work and is filled with lots of mathematical bits and pieces.

The stamp, however, is a curious and annoying work if you are at all familiar with the original. The most glaring but not most important change is the Soviet-like loss of the figure to the right of Pacioli—although
not positively identified, some believe it is Guidobaldo, and others believe it to be the very pretty Albrecht Durer. He’s gone, replaced by some sort of out-of-century bookcase. I’m not saying that whoever this happened to be needed Stalinist disappearing for political reasons, but it upsets the entire composition of the painting, and leads to other more foul errors.

The closed red book on the table is moved and an hour glass is placed on top of it, taking up the slate that was there in its place in the original, which is now hanging on the wall. It is highly unlikely that Pacioli would provide a demonstration in this matter.

Also the mathematical notes here are slightly different from the (correct) references to Euclid’s Elements Book XIII, proposition 12 (If an equilateral triangle is inscribed in a circle, then the square on
the side of the triangle is triple the square on the radius of the
circle.)

An armillary sphere makes a curious appearance, and a few of the mathematical tools on the table top make disappearances. The sphere may be the artist’s attempt to make up for the loss of other symbols, as the sphere represents the Platonic music of the spheres, successive levels of forms being built one on the other and so representing the universe. (Plato’s
Republic, where, in the Myth of Er he wrote,“. . . Upon each of its circles
stood a siren who was carried round with its movements, uttering the
concords of a single scale.” [Republic p. 354])

The important item that is kept on the stamp from the original (though moved) is the polyhedra form, the dodechahedron, one of the great Platonic solids, and a figure composed of 12 pentagons. It is a highly symbolic link between ancient thought and the rise of the new mathematics and even newer art.

The most important missing item, though, is the glass object hanging at the left of the painting—it is the
rhombicuboctahedron. This object is one of the thirteen semi-regular (or Archimedean) solids, and has 26 faces made of 18 squares and 8 equilateral triangles, with 24 vertices and 48 edges. It is constructed of glass and hangs by a string, and is half-filled with water. It is spectacularly shown in the painting by Barbari—it is simply a glorious achievement of perspective and light and shadow.

And, as it turns out, reflection. In a superb 90-page article by Nick Mackinnon: (“The portrait of Fra Luca Pacioli”, The Mathematical Gazette, 77 (1993) pp. 130 – 219). Mackinnon combs through the painting with microscopic precision, and in this case reveals that there is an exterior reflection (of s house) on one of the bottom panels of the figure. (Good work! He even goes on to try and figure out what it is we are looking at in the reflection.)
It is annoying for this figure (or a shadow or hint of this figure) not to be on the stamp because of its beauty and symbolism. It is none other than Pacioli’s friend, Leonardo, who illustrates his book Divina proportione—a masterpiece of thinking and illustrating, introducing the concept of the divine proportion (phi) and its importance in design and in nature in general. Perhaps of greatest significance though are the illustrations of some of the figures in the book, which I believe are the first time that people are able to see geometrical drawings in perspective, which is a very big deal.

Unfortunately this link is pretty much missing without the Rhombicuboctahedron—you don’t have to know how to
say it to appreciate it. (Or as Bernard Malamud writes in the Natural, when discussing a spaghetti dinner “I don’t know how to spell it, but it sure eats good”.)

All I’m saying is that the designer for the stamp shouldn’t been consulted, and the Italian government should just have used the original as the basis for the stamp. After all, they didn’t remove the backgrounds of the Mona Lisa or the Last Super because they were too-conflicty with their subjects in those commemorative issue stamps, did they?

Oh, I forgot–they did.

Here are a few good books to consult if you’re interested in polyhedra:

H.S.M. Coxeter, Regular Polytopes. Coxeter was perhaps the most impressive geometer of the 20th century.
Peter R. Cromwell, Polyhedra.
H. Martyn Cundy and A.P. Rollett, Mathematical Models
Alan Holden, Shapes, Spaces and Symmetry. (Very pretty!)
Peter Pearce, Structure in Nature is a Strategy for Design.
Magnus Wenninger, Polyhedron Models. (Paper construction!)

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Art History — Perception
Original Reflections: unique experiences with mirrors: Van Eyck & Brunellesci

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

I was thinking about writing a short post on van Eyck and settled on his painting of this newly married couple–The Arnolfini Marriage, painted in 1434, depicting the union of Giovanni Arnolfini and Giovanna Cenami, who married in Bruges in that year–and the very unusual image of the scene as reflected in the convex mirror directly behind the couple. It is a wonderful painting of course, lusciously and richly colored–the observer, though, is brought instantly to the mirror. And in that reflection is what is seen from behind the couple as well as what the couple is seeing–in a sense, a 180-degree view of the room (if we considered the painter’s perspective towards the couple as 90-degrees). It is one of the first times that a mirror is used in this fashion and is also offers a great instruction on the newly-rediscovered perspective. (The inscription above the mirror, which is surrounded by ten scenes from the life of Christ, reads “Jan van Eyck was present”–and probably was literal, as we see the painter himself reflected in a tiny portrait…along with another man, who may also have been involved with the wedding).

As a matter of fact, it is just 30 years earlier that Filippo di Ser Brunellesci (1377-1446) used mirrors as a tool in “creating” the first paintings in linear perspective in modern times–and he uses the mirrors in such a way as to compare what he was seeing in front of him, rather than using them to gain a sight-line for things that he couldn’t see. But they did in a way do just that. Brunellesci set his position inside the unfinished Santa Maria del Fiore (Florence), and used the apparatus (pictured here from the linked website) to record the facade of San Giovanni de Firenze (better known by its subsequent name, the Florentine Baptitstry, as all Florentine Catholics
were Baptized there well into the 19th century) which was opposite his position across the Piazza del Duomo. He effort was a panel which was finished between 1407 and 1410, and which is now lost to time and space.

It should be noted that the Baptistry, an 8-sided figure (with another, triangular, form added later; and 8-sided to represent the octava dies, the “eighth day,” the day of the risen Christ, which would be outside the scope of time and measurement) was decorated with colossal, fantastically beautiful doors, some of which were created by none other than Ghiberti, another (slightly later) master of linear perspective.

(The image above is taken from the very useful site which goes into good detail about the Brunellesci pin/peephole experiment.)

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Art — Art History — Perspective