Renaissance Art - Was it done with mirrors?

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-- Renaissance Art - Was it done with mirrors?

Posted by Franz on Jan-26-2003 22:57:

Renaissance Art - Was it done with mirrors?

This is a very interesting debate that has been going on for a while, if you don't know about it, read HERE

What's your opinion?

Posted by kirbtastic on Jan-26-2003 23:36:

eh...even if they used mirrors they had to come up with the idea of what they wanted to make their painting look like and also had to add color to give the picture depth and character.

i think a great artist has ability..but more importantly imaginination..mirrors cant help imagination

Posted by sherman on Jan-27-2003 01:53:

haha he cant stand the fact that rennaissance artists were better than he is, so he came up with an explaination

Posted by kirbtastic on Jan-27-2003 01:57:

were u talking about me..if u were i was defending the reneisance artists if they did use mirrors...i dont care if someone is better than me...there will always be someone better

Posted by DJ Chrono on Jan-27-2003 03:32:

quote:
Originally posted by kirbtastic
were u talking about me..if u were i was defending the reneisance artists if they did use mirrors...i dont care if someone is better than me...there will always be someone better

I think he was talking about the author of the book.

Anyways, I've never heard about this before. I can see it as a posibility, but highly unlikely in most cases.

This guy is basically saying these artists needed a projection to use as a guide to accurately paint these portraits. I think it's fair to say that such accuracy can be achieved without the use of guides, and we have no way to tell how acurate their painting are, anyways, considering we do not know what their subjects looked like in life.

Also, why would da Vinci need to disect humans, looking at their muscle structure and skeleton, and how it reflects in their external appearence? By looking at Da Vinci's sketchbooks it's clear that he had the artistic abilities, and painting something like the Mona lisa would be easily achieved without the help of optics.