The Great Influence On The Great Works Of Art

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In this essay, I’ll discuss three sciences that I feel had a great influence on the great works of the Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo periods, including; dissection, linear perspective, and the invention of the printing press. During the Renaissance, artists were curious of the way the body worked. Not from the external view, but from the internal perspective. Even though dissection was not allowed, artist secretly performed dissections on the cadavers of criminals. The knowledge they gained made it possible for sculptors and painters to create the natural effect of the inner body parts on the skin, and drapery. Michelangelo quite possibly used a model for his masterpiece, David, but with the David produced by Bernini, during the Baroque period, was so much more active and realistic, using diagonal lines and not the traditional pyramid used in so many earlier works of art. I can’t imagine any model could have posed in that position for such a long time. So the information artists gleaned from the dissections and drawings produced by Leonardo Di Vinci, had to be a huge asset, to be able to recreate on canvas and in stone, the bones, muscles and tendons so amazingly accurate. (Khan, n.d.) …show more content…

Linear perspective “is an approximate representation, generally on a flat surface (such as paper), of an image as it is seen by the eye. The two most characteristic features of perspective are that objects are smaller as their distance from the observer increases; and that they are subject to foreshortening, meaning that an object's dimensions along the line of sight are shorter than its dimensions across the line of sight.” (Wikipedia.org, n.d.) Brunelleschi method included a horizon line, vanishing point and a series of orthogonals to create an image more naturalistic, and more like real life. (Khan,