December 2017
Intermediate to advanced
208 pages
3h 39m
English
Hierarchical proportion is a convention in representational art in which figures are scaled relative to their importance or social status.
Thus, in Egyptian art, pharaohs are generally shown as larger figures than their surrounding attendants. This convention extended for millennia across much of the world’s art, including Mayan, Persian, Indian, Carolingian, and Gothic art. Even in the Sienese painting of Duccio (1255–1319), the central religious figures in compositions are painted on a larger scale than the lower-status attendants.
When perspective arrived in the first part of the fifteenth century, the determination of scale was fixed by the geometry of the setting and new means had to be found to differentiate ...