Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Realism and Perspective:
From Renaissance Painting to
Digital Media
Class 5
lisa.peden@utoronto.ca
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January 27, 2022
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Non- Urgent:
1. Report your sickness to your course instructor
2. Go home
3. Email U of T’s Occupational Health Nurse
(ehs.occhealth@utoronto.ca) who will conduct
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NOTE: The University has suspended the need for a doctor’s note or
medical certificate for absences if experiencing COVID-19 symptoms.
2. Visual Analysis Revision:
• New due date: Sunday, February 20th by 11:59 p.m.
through Quercus
Visual Analysis Revision:
• Why revise something that’s already done?
• Instructions posted to Quercus along with a Rubric
• Social Realism: a 19th-century photographic style
documenting true conditions of immigrants and
working class to prompt reform
– fine art realism also often associated with political
movements and social reform
• Elements of early
Christian paintings
used as symbolic
communication among
members of marginal
religious sects
– concern with
symbols
overshadowed
concern with
reproduction
Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.
Types of Realism
• Definition of realism in given time and place subject
to contestation, often levied powerfully in visual
expression of political movements
– episteme: accepted, dominant mode of acquiring and
organizing knowledge in given historical period
• Constructivism: geometric abstraction that
represented changing social life of modernizing
Soviet state
– valued industrial materials
– took multiple forms
– displayed in public spaces
– rejected by Stalin as too abstract for majority of populace
• Poetic Realism: French film style influenced by
Surrealism that dramatized social conditions of
working class, often by focusing on tragic antiheroes
• Neorealism: Italian film style that captured untrained
actors in urban ghettoes of Rome on grainy, black-
and-white film
Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.
Perspective
• Perspective: set of techniques for depicting spatial
depth within two-dimensional pictorial space
– signifier of realism across different periods
– suggesting physical depth not inherently more realist
approach to organizing image field
– single, fixed spectator position
– signifying scientific progress rather than new ways of
seeing
• Filippo Brunelleschi: picture as window through which
sight is organized
– first used instruments to measure distances accurately
• Rationalism: knowledge of
world derives from reason
– space knowable through
measuring with tools
that correct human
perception
– perspective system
displaces individual with
mechanical device
Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.
Perspective and the Body
• Techniques for rendering space advanced at different
pace from those for rendering body as dimensional
• Anatomical foreshortening: technique used to make
the body appear to recede in space
• Potentially distorting or deceptive aspects of viewing
systems have been understood differently over time
• Camera Obscura:
darkened chamber in
which light rays
bouncing off well-lit
object or scene create
an inverted projection on
surface inside chamber
– affirms empiricism’s
basic tenets
– found in artists’
studios as drawing
instrument
Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.
Johannes Vermeer, Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman (The Music Lesson), 1662–1666,
oil on canvas, 28 3⁄34 x 25⁄15"
Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.
The Camera Obscura
• Many modern artists working after invention of
photography defied perspective
– Impressionism: painting style that depicts same scene
many times to evoke changes in light over time
– Cubism: painting style in which bent perspective lines
and fragmented spatial planes suggest movement over
time
– perspective as source of metaphor and symbolism
• Giorgio de Chirico’s
Melancholy and Mystery of
a Street
– uses perspective to
suggest anxiety about
what may unfold in
Italy’s civic spaces
– refuses nostalgia and
heroism associated with
urban spaces and
monuments
– suggests foreboding
• Many modern artists questioned organization around
Cartesian subject as fixed center of pictorial world
– abstract expressionism: artistic style that records the
artist’s emotions and physicality during painting process
– conceptual art: artistic practice in which concept is more
important than visual product
• Digital imaging presents multiplicity of perspectives in
multiplicity of virtual worlds within same screen
– isometric perspective: technique that renders forms as
flattened and scenes without vanishing points
– virtual: breaking with conventions of representing what is
seen
– virtual reality: a simulation of reality in which users feel
physically incorporated into the world on all sensory
levels
• Cartesian space: a
physical, three-dimensional
space that can be
mathematically measured
• Virtual space: an
electronically constituted
space that resembles
physical space but cannot
be measured
2. Visual Analysis Revision:
• New due date: Sunday, February 20th by 11:59 p.m.
through Quercus
Visual Analysis Revision:
• Why revise something that’s already done?
• Instructions posted to Quercus along with a Rubric
• Support is here if you need it
• https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/dvs/dvs-hcc-personal-
counselling-service