CLICK ON ANY OF THESE IMAGES FOR A FREE STREAMING SUBSCRIPTION OF HYLAND, a digital lifestyle magazine featuring residential decoration, design, architecture, art, travel, fashion, cuisine, good works and reflections.
Issue link: http://digital.hylandmagazine.com/i/117517
continually moving the eye around the holy family in the centre. In the side fragments of the Adoration, however, the eye is drawn either up or across, which once again recalls a medieval pictorial solution rather than an Albertian. Consequently, both fragments appear somewhat crowded. Although the people are rendered carefully, the viewer loses sight of the individuals thanks to their grouping in an intangible space. In the New York fragment, pictorial space is almost entirely collapsing, the foreground figures and the horses behind seemingly occupying the same plane. This is emphasised by the figure in the lower centre, whose hand appears pressed up against the picture plane, while his head is shown in dramatic profile. A masterful arrangement of crowds is visible in the right-hand fragment despite the flattened picture surface. In contrast, in the left-hand fragment Botticelli places his figures in an impossibly shallow space, creating a tense surface expressing the drama of the story of the Adoration. In his drawing Botticelli turns away from crisp outlined contours seen in earlier works toward a more opaque and broader application of the pigment. This is Alberti, Leon Battista (1404-1472) Renaissance humanist polymath. With his book ���De Pictura���, published in 1435, he provided the first known treatise on art, since precedents from Antiquity were lost. Being friends with Masaccio, Ghiberti and Brunelleschi certainly helped him to demand that the artist should imitate nature. This required the use of central perspective for credible architectural representations. He is best-known for suggesting viewing an object as if looking through a window, a remark that was to have profound implications on Renaissance portraiture. Being well-versed in Latin and Greek texts made him one of the propagators of Antiquity. HYLAND 16