Changing Images of Pictorial Space: A History of Spatial Illusion in Painting - Hardcover

Sandra J. Dunning (author)

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9780815625056: Changing Images of Pictorial Space: A History of Spatial Illusion in Painting

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0815625057 ISBN 13: 9780815625056

Publisher: Syracuse University Press, 1991

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A comprehensive history centered around the changing images of pictorial space. This book traces the evolution of the conception and the depiction of space in European (primarily Italian and French) and American painting and the ways in which the evolution reflects ideological changes in society over a period of two thousand years. Unravelling one illusory image after another into their particular elements, he explains the development of new styles and images in painting as a continuous rearrangement of these basic elements. This book follows this progression through the Graeco-Roman period, the Italian Renaissance, impressionism, and the end of modern art. Dunning concludes by discussing how today's post-modern concentration on linguistic aspects in painting demonstrates a change from the former emphasis on space and illusion. This book will be of interest to a wide audience - from art historians, painters, and art educators to general readers who wish to understand more about one of the central organizing principles in all schools and periods of art.

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From the Author:

A Formalist History of Painting for Two Millennia
Changing Images of Pictorial Space (now in its 4th printing) was selected by "Choice" magazine as one of the outstanding academic and scholarly books.

Changing Images of Pictorial Space: A History of Spatial Illusion in Painting is a formalist history of the illusionist aspects of painting covering the two thousand years from Greco-Roman through modern art. It explains and demonstrates the Renaissance *system* of perspective in ways that have not previously been done in print.

For the first time in print this book explains that the term "Renaissance perspective" is not just a synonym for linear perspective, but it refers to a system of interlocked perspectives: atmospheric perspective and color perspective as well as the linear. It explains and demonstrates compositional climax and compositional congruency, as then Jackson Pollack's antithesis to these methods of compositional organization.

The book traces the use and evolution for two millinnea of major ideas in painting, such as the evolution of: dark and light, pictorial space, volume, spatial composition, lateral composition, and various treatments of the picture plane.

Though this book is formalist in focus, it is also somewhat postmodern in sympathy in the sense that it relates each change in the image of pictorial space to society's changes in priorities as evidenced by the science and philosophy of the relevant century. It thoroughly unravels Renaissance illusion down to its six principal elements, then carefully demonstrates that with each inversion in society's priorities in each century, came corresponding changes in the prioritizing of these six elements of illusion. This re-weighting of priorities in the illusionistic elements generated a new image of pictorial space for each century.

This book offers a history of art and its relationship with reason. It is the opposite of my next book, The Roots of Postmodernism, which offers a history of painting as sign and art's relationship with the irrational.

About the Author:

Dunning is professor of fine arts at Central Washington University.

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