36 FORM RENDERED
DESCRIBING THREE-DIMENSIONAL FORM IN TWO DIMENSIONS
Rendering three-dimensional forms on a two-dimensional surface is one of the central recurring tasks of representational painting. While both ancient and medieval painters made some headway with rendering, it wasn’t until the Renaissance that artists finally discovered how to make a completely comprehensive and consistent description of form in space. An early example is The Marriage of the Arnolfini by Jan Van Eyck (1390–1441), painted in 1432. The artist has succeeded in meshing extremely credible drawing with meticulous tracking of the tonal and color changes across all the various forms in the painting. In Italy, artists made a similar journey from an essentially linear ...
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