Italian Renaissance Drawer

[Blog post for Drawing I]

My previous blog posts have been about things I have some interest in- that I know something about in the first place. An artist who drew stuff during the Italian Renissance would not be someone I know about.

A look at Wikipedia, though, brings up... perspective! I'm sorta interested in that. So of the artists from that time period, who utilized perspective- are best known for that, rather, -who can I find an example from which hopefully illustrates that they did indeed draw, and thus qualify as the subject of this blog post?

Hm, Paolo Uccello's the easiest to fit. Regardless of whether the paolouccello.org (left) or Wikipedia (right, originally from some place called aiwaz.net) version is truer to the original, or something, they both illustrate perspective. Some form of it, anyways; they're wireframes, which is nice considering they're hand-drawn and all, but there's not a vanishing point in sight.

The only example of a drawing from the required time period showing a vanishing point, which I can find anyways, is this one (to right). While attributed to Brunelleschi by this page, it's attributed to Unknown by the one I linked to just before. So that's why I'm not doing this blog post about Filippo Brunelleschi.

 That reminds me, I ought to get back on topic.

Paolo Uccello was born Paolo di Dono; his father, according to Wikipedia, was named Dono di Paolo. Geez, what naming scheme did the Italians use at the time? Well, Paolo the artist's nickname came from his love of birds, with Uccello simply meaning 'bird' in Italian. While no paintings by him of birds seem to have survived, presumably thanks to his relative unpopularity in his time, he ended up better known for his use of perspective anyways.

Uccello obsessed plenty enough over perspective, after all, perhaps because he was also a mathematician. People didn't bother remembering much about what he did with math. But one site tells of his long studies in drawing foreshortened objects; he would stay up past his wife-enforced bedtime as he practiced the skills that would let him produce artwork such as 'Niccolò da Tolentino Leads the Florentine Troops'.

Said piece bustles with figures, one scene that could stand on its own nowadays in both the foreground and background. A midget-sized knight lies dead on his face near the very front, but issues of proportion aside, the perspective used on him was something never seen in painting before Uccello's time. I guess people didn't see the point in bothering with live models for things other than portraits back then?

All in all, Paolo Uccello is one of the lucky artists who somehow ended up immortalized by... what puts these things on the internet? Academia. Even if they rejected him for serious consideration while he was actually alive. His daughter Antonia Uccello (who ended up a nun) doesn't even get much out of her father's current renown, since despite being a 'paintress', none of her works actually survived till' the point someone would record them.

Time's a pesky thing, it is. Why, at this moment, the sun's rising outside my window and I'll need to get to class in an hour! Ah well.

Casual writing assignments are a nice change of pace when it comes to spending way too much time on the computer.