Drawing Gothic

The early styles of the International or High Gothic period are dominated by a lack of perspective. Artists at this time were rediscovering the ways of showing three dimensions and their attempts are an interesting exercise in drawing.

Gothic art

They were aware that things changed over distance but were not sure how to depict distances or foreshortening. Although devices are commonly found in Greek and Roman art, down the years the techniques had been discouraged and lost. Now artists found themselves experimenting to reinvent the illusion of depth.

With a relaxing of regulations by the church controlling art and a growing merchant class with money to spend, more naturalistic lifelike studies  began to emerge. People, landscapes, buildings and vegetation all appeared in paintings.

Drawing perspective

The first uses of perspective were simple oblique projections, whereby angled ,parallel lines were used to indicate that a building was going into the distance. Ariel perspective, the bluing of the horizon, was another early device for showing objects further away.

Gradually the idea of vanishing points took hold and artists had all lines converging at a single point. Quite often this was the centre of the room and painting panelled ceilings and tiled floors were popular to show their mastery of the technique.

There was however a tendency to give each object their own vanishing point in the picture, which gives the scenes a chaotic but interesting look. There are chairs at strange angles, beds that seem to float and objects that sit in a completely different plain to the things they rest on.

Painting nature

By the end of the High Gothic artists could comfortably draw ellipses, understood how objects sat next to each other and where shadows naturally fell. All important developments in illustrating three dimensions.  As each mystery unfolded their worlds took on a more realistic appearance.

Over the next two hundred years the skill of using one, two, three and four point perspectives would be unlocked and by the start of the Renaissance  artists were comfortably creating realistic rooms, elegant street scenes and marvelous landscapes.

It was through these early experiments during the Gothic period that led to the later, accomplished designs. They do provide an interesting instruction on how to draw perspective and show how the different ways effect the look of a painting.

 

Painting the Medieval Landscape

Late Byzantine Fresco

Up until the 14th century there was little, if any, representation of the countryside and its buildings in frescoes. Vegetation and architectural features were just used to decorate the borders of the religious panels.

Lorenzetti 1285 – 1348

There were early renditions of landscape by Giotto and Lorenzetti around the 13th century but in the 1400s Protestant artists in the Netherlands, free from the constraints of a papal paymaster, were able to explore natural representation.

Van Eyck 1395 – 1441

Artists like Van Eyck and Brughel started to hint at the luscious landscapes around them in the backgrounds of their paintings. The northern European art was soon to influence Italians, Massacio and della Francesco and landscapes began a common theme in the frescoes of the Mediterranean.

It is claimed by many that the landscapes of the late Byzantine and early Renaissance periods were fantasy or symbolic representations of real locations. Over time landscapes change, new buildings appear, trees are felled and roads constructed. However, what we can see in these old master’s pictures are elements of today’s scenery in their images.

Fra Angelico 1395 – 1455

There is a familiarity to the gentle curving hills, the many tall trunked trees and the aimlessly winding, tracks. There is also the blue Renaissance sky and the verdant greenery of the area, particularly around the valleys of the Tiber. Here Perugino, Signorelli, Raphaelo, and Michaelangelo all lived and worked, recording life and the surroundings.

Before this time nature had been relegated to the role of decorative foliage. Now though, the hills, forests and rivers played the part of a painted stage on which the artist’s characters acted out their stories.

Gozzoli 1420 – 1497

One of the grandest of these is Benozzo Gozzolio’s enormous series “The Magi’s Procession” painted from 1459 to 1461. It testifies to the new importance placed on the landscape in the artist’s designs. The journey, is as familiar today as it was then and anyone who has walked around the countryside of central Italy will immediately feel at home.

In these frescoes you can see the artists discovering and inventing the conventions of perspective used today. As they battled with the notion of creating three-dimensional spaces, the rules about vanishing points, size difference and colour degradation were all experimented with in representing distance.

Masaccio 1401 – 1428

It is with the founding of these rules that the great landscapes of the 18th and 19th centuries would later be painted by Gainsborough, Canaletto and Turner. However, despite their simplicity there is an innate charm about them and a beautiful clarity about the world around.

Other noteable artists of the age –

Konrad Witz 1400 – 1446

• Giotto 1267 – 1337
• Fillippo Lippi 1406 – 1469
• Paolo Uccello 1395 – 1475
• della Francesco 1415 – 1492
• Botticelli 1445 – 1510
• Bosch 1450 – 1516
• Brughel the Elder
• Ghirlandio 1449 – 1494
• Signorelli 1450 – 1523
• Perugino 1448 – 1523
• Dieric Bouts 1415 – 1475
• Van der Weyden 1399 – 1464