Programme 6

Programme Outline

This programme looks at the way that from the fourteenth century, artists used perspective to represent three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. In the Renaissance, Italian artists developed ‘linear perspective’: the illusion that lines perpendicular to the picture plane meet at a ‘vanishing point’ in the distance: a point on the horizon which corresponded with the viewpoint of the spectator. Artists learnt to calculate the diminishing sizes of objects placed between the foreground and the horizon. The change in approach is apparent in the differences between Cione’s Coronation of the Virgin and Crivelli’s The Annunciation.