The Psychology of Visual Art Eye, Brain and Art

Introduction

During the Italian Renaissance, painters acted partly as interior decorators, creating frescos, murals and easel paintings with which rich patrons decorated the rooms of their grand villas. The aim was to treat the picture frame as a window opening that offered a captivating glimpse of a realistic visual world. In order to achieve the illusion of a window, artists had to solve the problem of projecting a three-dimensional world onto a flat, two-dimensional picture plane. The problem of perspective projection was solved in the early fifteenth century by Fillipo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti. Leonardo da Vinci described the solution as follows:

Figure 4.1 illustrates Leonardo’s description. The viewer’s eye is positioned at O, and light rays from the top surface of the cube create a pyramid of sight with its apex at O and base defined by the points ABCD at the corners. A plane surface FGHI (Leonardo’s transparent window) intersects the pyramid to form a perspective projection of the surface, abcd, as a two-dimensional image. The laws of linear perspective define the shape, size and disposition of all the elements in the scene on Leonardo’s window. The image formed on Leonardo’s window corresponds to the image that would be captured by a camera positioned at O (apart from the inversion caused by the camera’s lens). In a sense, therefore, the aim of the representational artist is to create a painting that corresponds to the perspective projection captured by a camera positioned at the eye.