The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat

The book arrived early..thought it would be new...but was clearly a second hand version... anyway just started reading its interesting si far...more later

i had the experience of being flooded with light and clarity when i first opened and browsed this book. my enthusiasm is in part because of kemp's extraordinary scholarship and detailed command of paintings and art publications across the entire span of western art. but it's also because the story of artistic imaging over the past six centuries is woven around the european romance with linear perspective, which has become so discredited and disliked by artists that it qualifies as a repressed memory. (like any buried memory, perspective surfaces in the dreamlike digital animations of intergalactic science fiction and first person computer games, which take perspective effects to the ultimate level of technical accuracy and artistic triviality.) kemp unearths those repressed perspective memories and shows how vital they were to the development of art and the connections between art and the wider culture of the times.it is jaw droppingly fun to see how intensive, sophisticated and singleminded was the artistic interest in optical and perceptual issues of seeing. everyone will find special surprises here, but mine include kemp's spatial analysis of velazquez's "las meninas," and the extraordinary drawings and engravings produced c.1800, which force us to realize that we are already looking at "photo graphs," light drawings created by hand, at a time when film photography was not yet practical. there is a large section on various optical devices utilized in visual arts, including the camera obscura and camera lucida, and an excellent section on the evolving understanding and use of color, from the renaissance to seurat.poignant for me was the victorian fascination with light as a spiritual quality, which comes through in turner's paintings and ruskin's amazing perspectival studies of "clouds" -- images that verge on op art. the intelligence and strength of these images reveal a road left untraveled in art, which turned toward the perceptually driven styles of impressionism and fauvism instead. as a bonus to the many interesting visual exhibits, the writing is lucid, sensible and alert. an invaluable publication.

Beautiful

Completely thorough analysis of the history of linear perspective, color theory and application, and machinery pre dating photography. A great book. David Dunlop

Beautiful and thorough, as we would expect from Martin Kemp!

Great book!"

This book was amazing at explaining the geometry behind the construction of space. The color section interesting too. Diagrams and high quality images galore. However, the book misses the use of unique orthogonals which are derived from the Platonic solids used in Raphael's School of Athens and The Dispute. Author mistakenly starts with Euclid rather than the Spherics for the basis of advanced geometry. This leads to problems when trying to address the School of Athens and the Dispute since the foreshortening is designed to create a stereographic image between the two paintings which face one another. Hans Holbein's the ambassadors does something similar and I believe he does address it. These are the most advanced paintings ever and it would have been interesting to see more on those subjects.

In "The Science of Art", Martin Kemp (an emeritus professor of history of art at University of Oxford who is considered one of the world's leading experts on the art of Leonardo da Vinci and visualization in art and science) details the use of geometrical science of perspective and physical science of color in painting within the time period 1400-1800. In this time, the central goal of artists and theorists was the imitation of nature based on scientific principles. This book is academic and dry as well as beautiful and complex.I was already quite familiar with perspective, as I finished The Painter's Secret Geometry recently, so I skimmed until section two on mechanical devises. Christopher Wren's perspective machine, the Claude glass, and Pierre Edouard Frer's Zograscope fascinated me. Although it felt a bit out of place, section three is interesting for its examination of color before and after Newton.This is an important book that will endure because its makes us aware in a new way of the continuity, complexity, and ultimately the beauty of the European ideals that have linked art and science since the Renaissance and given Western culture its unique place in history. Next up for me is:  The Painter's Secret Geometry: A Study of Composition in Art  - two people in my art class recommended it!

I bought a large format art book. It was the most carefully packed parcel that I have experienced in buying books over the Internet over the last 20 years. Well done!!

excellent

Just as required.

Classic text and excellent read

This is a fascinating and scholarly review of the development of perspective with reference to optics and other technological changes.