2020 Essays

“Perspective is Very Difficult”: Practical and Impractical Tools for the Painter

Wang, Xinguo; van Buren, Ariane; Uchacz, Tianna Helena

The entry “Perspective” on fol. 62v describes and depicts practical tools to help an artist construct the underdrawing for an oil painting according to the rules of linear perspective, including a ruler for laying down orthogonals that converge at a single vanishing point. The author-practitioner describes two different designs for this tool and even provides an illustration of one of them. However, this drawing, when reconstructed, yields a sub-optimal result. It is unclear whether the author-practitioner had first-hand knowledge of such a tool, invented it as he wrote without thinking through the design, or exaggerated certain features in his drawing that, when reproduced as depicted, made the tool problematic to use.