" Perspective in Italian Renaissance Painting "
Dr. Saida Aoulad Mouh SeddikThis PhD dissertation was about Italian Art , especially about the perspective in the Italian Renaissance Painting and its influence in Ideas and Science revolution. My big concern was to demonstrate how the early painters since the twelve century were creating a new conception of space in painting then in architecture. Giotto was the first one who applied the notion of third dimension in his paintings by using chiaroscuro technics. [light and shadow]. Chiaroscuro is considered as the basic step to linear perspective used as new geometric application. However, in theory the Euclidian solid geometry attempted to do more than replicate what the human eye perceives according to the tenets of Euclidian geometry, which medieval Europeans understood as synonymous with the vision of God. My approach to Italian Renaissance painting had various points of view, but my concentration was on E.H GOMBRICH and Samuel Y. Edgerton, JR. theorems through their important published books that I got at Penn fine art library in Philadelphia/PA. In parallel Erwin Panofsky theorems about Renaissance in art in general and Italian Art particularly were the theorems ground of my opinions and views. Indeed there was a big renovation in the way the painters were composing the space, there was a move from the middle age notion of creating a painting, which was very simple without any notion of third dimension. The space was flat and the painters couldn't compose the space as if there is deepness in it. I will here ask the same question that Samuel Y. Edgerton, JR. did in his book named " The Heritage of Giotto's Geometry ". Why was capitalist Europe after 1500 the first of all civilizations in the world to develop what is commonly understood as modern science, moving rapidly ahead of the previously more sophisticated cultures of the East? Why were some of the most spectacular achievements of both the Western artistic and scientific revolutions conceived in the very same place, the Tuscan city of Florence? Was it only coincidence that Giotto, the founder of Renaissance art, and Galileo, the founder of modern science, were native Tuscans? In fact the perspective geometry of Giotto and Brunelleschi had considerable influence on the visual thinking of Renaissance artisans-engineers, those practical technologists who carried out projects of all sorts for civic and princely patrons in times of war and peace, from designing fortifications and weaponry to the creation of monumental buildings and labor-saving machines. Filippi Brunelleschi was himself an artisan-engineer. His masterpiece, the soaring cupola above the cathedral in Florence, pays tribute both to his traditional engineering methods and to his further quantification of Giotto's three-dimensional visual perception.
