Changing Perspectives: The Science of Optics in the Visual Arts

Harvard FAS

Renaissance artists began to create stunningly realistic representations of their world. Paintings started to resemble photographs, suggesting that artists had solved technical problems that escaped their forebears. Our brains effortlessly deduce three-dimensional scenes from two-dimensional images. But faithfully transferring spatial information to a flat canvas - a sense of depth, surface and shadow, geometrical accuracy - is hard to do.We will discuss how artists from van Eyck to Vermeer…