August 31, 2018 Friday

Bedtime Story 

The Grid Technique

Alberti perhaps can be called the first person who actively and consciously conceived of applying mathematics to art, even though he was primarily an artist and secondly an amateur mathematician and dabbled in it lightly.

In his 1435 book ‘De picture’ (On Painting) he made it clear that he considered mathematics a common ground that could be applied both to sciences as well as art and wrote:

“To make clear my exposition in writing this brief commentary on painting, I will take first from the mathematicians those things with which my subject is concerned.”

Over and above this Alberti was a firm believer that art must mimic nature not in that very objective sense but in the sense that the artist must be able to capture all the beauty of the nature that he has drawn into his painting.

This is how he puts it, “through by different skills, at the same goal, namely that as nearly as possible the work they have undertaken shall appear to the observer to be similar to the real objects of nature.”

Regarding beauty he says that, “beauty is the harmony of all parts in relation to one another”, and “this concord is realized in a particular number, proportion, and arrangement demanded by harmony.”

Now let us return to the grid technique of painting.

Now what is this grid technique?

It is not a very complicated device to paint upon.

All that is required for this technique  is a large wooden frame or any kind of square frame with fine grid wiring of small squares (not too small though) running through it.

You need to place this grid (which is transparent) in front of you and view he scenery or the object of your interest through it.

Now this grid allows you to get a very accurate sense of the relative proportions of various objects that could be lying at variable distance from your eyes.

This gave the artist the pyramid or cone to be more accurate of all light rays emanating from each and every object entering the grid that was described by Ibn al-Haytham in 1000 AD as:

“from each point of every colored body, illuminated by any light, issue light and color along every straight line that can be drawn from that point” in his ‘Book of Optics’.

Keeping this transparent grid next to your mounted canvas, oil and pastels with perhaps faint grid lines of same proportions hand drawn on the canvas at a prior moment such that the transparent grid covered your scenery of interest allowed you to replicate the same on your canvas.   

This was a near-perfect technique of copying a scene square by square keeping everything in proportion and thereby conveying the sense of linear perspective that is a natural fall out of such kind of imagery construction.

It does not even require any direct application of mathematics of linear perspective in the image construction.

This was almost the perfect way of copying or capturing any kind of scenery or human image.

But then, this left no room for any kind of creativity on your canvas.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg

August 30, 2018 Thursday

Bedtime Story 

Filippo Brunelleschi Hopes to Capture Nature

Filippo Brunelleschi, as we saw last night, is mostly remembered by the Europeans and more particularly the Italians for the construction of the magnificent and unrivalled dome of the Florence cathedral. 

But we are more interested in something that perhaps is not often spoken about him and that is his experiment with a new kind or method of art.

Brunelleschi carried out an experiment on the perspective drawing for capturing the real world outside accurately on the paper.

It is in my view not a true experiment that you would usually associate with or what is usually carried out in laboratories of physics, chemistry and cellular biology all over the world.

What Brunelleschi did was more of devising a completely new technique of painting that has never been recorded before or at least our limited knowledge of recordings since most recordings of human activities are bound to be destroyed over time, whether it be analog on clay, wood, stone, paper, magnetic tapes and silver coated films or digital.

Remember, we are talking about the times when there was no photography and the only way to record the outer world on paper would be sketch or paint it.

In other words it was a technique to translate the volumetric world through which we move and live in real time onto a frozen two-dimensional surface, a feat that was never attempted before.

Brunelleschi made the Florentine baptistery and its surroundings the subject of his perspective experiment.

It was an experiment that did not require too many sophisticated and expensive equipments which anyways did not exist those days.

So what did he rely upon?

He used a drawing board which had a horizon line, a vanishing point at the line of the sight of the viewer (thus making it a one-point perspective) and a series of orthogonals (also known as illusionally receding diagonals).

Then on this board with these lines he began to draw the baptistery sitting in front of it at some distance.

This baptistery is drawn using the grid technique that was probably pioneered by yet another Italian contemporary Leon Battista Alberti who is said to have epitomized the Renaissance Man.

Though Alberti is known mainly for being a man of art but he was also a mathematician and a cryptographer, known to be the first person to have invented the polyalphabetic cipher.

In 1435 he published his treatise ‘De Pictura’ or ‘On Painting’ both in local Italian for the average man on street and the other in Latin which was far more technical and was meant for the elite scholars.

It is believed that this book had a tremendous influence on the entire Italian renaissance in general and a powerful impact to the style of the great Leonardo da Vinci in particular.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg

    

August 29, 2018 Wednesday

Bedtime Story 

Filippo Brunelleschi and Lorenzo Ghiberti 

From that moment on (after having taken part in a competition in 1401 in Florence that largely relied on one’s artistic and architectural sense) Filippo Brunelleschi knew he had found his true calling.

Architect is a profession where many arts and crafts and knowledge converges such as geometry, trigonometry, engineering, art, metallurgy, physics and that nebulous humanism.

Humanism in the Renaissance architect refers to apotheosizing the art of ancient Greeks and Romans of classical antiquity.

This was in contrast to the previous Medieval period or the Middle Ages (the interim period in Europe that existed after the fall of the Roman Empire and beginning of Renaissance) where art was less like real-life and more formal (perhaps because life for ordinary apes was harsh marked by famines, black death, mass migrations and dislocations and a climate change from Medieval Warm Period to Little Ice Age along with serfdom and anti-Semitism remaining widely prevalent all over Europe).

While Brunelleschi was commissioned for several buildings (his first one was ‘Hospital of the Innocents’ – a children’s orphanage) he is most well known for the Florence Cathedral or the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the flower.     

The building of the Cathedral was designed in the previous century under the supervision of multiple architects and the work on the dome started only in 1420; the first stone of the cathedral was laid way back on 1296.

So to me more accurate, Brunelleschi was commissioned to complete the dome of this cathedral whose base or the body was already built but the challenge was that it had to be even larger and more grandiose than the Roman Pantheon.

Again, Brunelleschi won the contract not through bribery or corruption but through a fair competition against another great Florentine artist and architect Lorenzo Ghiberti who eventually went on to create the pairs of bronze doors for the Florence Baptistery.

Michelangelo was so impressed by the work that he called them the “Gates of Paradise” or in the language of Michelangelo “Porte del Paradiso”.

It lame literal sense to name it so as the Gates of Paradise had 10 panels in them with one biblical story in each of them starting from the story of Adam and Eve to the story of the King Solomon showing how wisely he adjudicated the dispute between two prostitutes who had approached him with one live baby and one dead baby.

    

The construction of the cathedral’s dome, lantern and the exedra went on to occupy most of the life of Brunelleschi (consuming almost thirty long years).

The construction of the dome, as is believed by the experts, was not a task for the average architect of those times and it took both the architectural and mathematical genius of Brunelleschi to bring the arduous task to fruition.

Great as the work of the dome of the Florence Chapel, we for our story are more concerned with Brunelleschi’s experiment on linear perspective.

So what was it that Brunelleschi did that the artist before him did not?

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg

August 28, 2018 Tuesday

Bedtime Story 

Giotto and Dante Alighieri

Scrovegni chapel in Padua and the frescos inside it are worth a view even if you do not happen to be religious or a Christian as these are not only masterpieces of Western Art but in a way, a progress from previous Byzantine and Gothic form of art though progress here is rather ill-defined.

If you do not have the time or the money (or both), then you can search for these paintings on Google images.

You will be able to virtual walk through this chapel sitting in the comforts of your sofa or bed. 

Of course, as I stated earlier, I do not know if Giotto actively and intentionally used mathematics or some kind of algebraic method and used distant lines for creating perspective and foreshortening though some claim him to have used it.

As an aside it is said that Giotto was a short and an extremely ugly man and there is a story (not sure if true or anecdotal) that Dante Alighieri (of Divine Comedy fame which is a portrayal of an imaginative afterlife probably influenced by Biblical notions) once visited Giotto who was working his way on the walls and ceilings of Scrovegni Chapel.

Giotto’s children were present too and on seeing them with utmost unseemliness asked aloud as to how a man who painted such beautiful pictures could have such plain children.

It was to Giotto’s humility, magnanimity and wit that the reply came, “I had them in the dark.”  

What we know for certain that some hundred years later after Giotto another Italian designer, engineer and architect for certain used mathematics of linear perspective in his works. 

It was Filippo Brunelleschi of Florence who would actively use the geometry of linear perspective for his art and for the construction of the majestic dome of the Florence Cathedral which is now a UNESCO world Heritage Site.

Brunelleschi is an important figure in the history of early European Renaissance and yet very little is known about his early life and childhood.

Brunelleschi is most popular for the construction of the magnificent dome of Florence Cathedral which in those days was a tremendous challenge.

To the Western world and civilization, Brunelleschi is seen as the first modern engineer, construction supervisor and one of the founding fathers of the entire Renaissance that is its seminal seed.

Brunelleschi was born to a notary father and he was given an education in mathematics and literature, specially groomed to become a civil servant like his father.

Yet, his natural talent lay in art and he soon joined the silk merchants’ Guild and groomed himself to become an extremely skilled goldsmith.

He would have done great as a goldsmith and a merchant but then something happened.

He by pure chance happened to take part in a competition that was meant to test the architectural acumen of young men (the task was to design a set of new doors for the Florence Baptistery) and in it designed a gilded bronze panel depicting the Sacrifice of Isaac, a scene from the chapter Genesis 22 of the Hebrew Bible.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg

August 27, 2018 Monday

Bedtime Story 

Giotto is Commissioned by Scrovegni of Padua

Last night we saw that the news of Giotto’s artistic talent was beginning to spread far and wide until it happened to reach the pope who in turn dispatched a messenger ordering him to get some kind of evidence (perhaps a sample painting) in order to judge for himself if what he had heard about the young artist was true or not.

Giotto as an evidence had merely provided a circle for the evidence.  

The messenger did not take it well for he considered it very contemptuous of Giotto for having sent him back to Pope with merely a red circle.

When this work reached Pope and his courtiers, explanation was sought as to how Giotto drew the circle.

When the messenger described what he had seen (that Giotto had drawn this circle with his free hand without the use of compass and straight edge), the Pope and his men were stunned for the circle was perfect and they had expected it to have been constructed using geometrical instruments.

This event established Giotto’s reputation as the best artist among his Italian contemporaries and Cimabue from that day on knew that he has been overtaken by his disciple.

While Cimabue’s style of painting was primarily Byzantine with a mix of Gothic, Giotto took a sharp deviation from the prevailing style with his human figures not elongated and uni-dimensional but appearing solid three-dimensional, with faces and gestures in the form that would appear on close observation.

The apparels worn by his subjects were not some kind of formal artistic drapery but hung like natural clothes having form and weight.

But beyond all this, he boldly uttered the element of foreshortening in his paintings and also having the faces of the figures turned in.

To add a greater element of naturalness he used forced perspective devices constructing his paintings as if they were a set on which some kind of action was being enacted.

If his paintings had in them several figures, then they would be placed strategically such that the person seeing them also felt he was in certain specific position and maybe even a feeling that he was one amongst them.

If you wish to see his work, you need to go to Padua, Italy and see the interiors of Scrovegni Chapel (named after the affluent banker Enrico Scrovegni who commissioned the work) which today is considered as a masterpiece of Western art.

Giotto was commissioned by Scrovegni to paint the interiors of the chapel which would include both the walls and the ceilings.

Giotto had about 40 men along with him to do the entire fresco painting and he calculated that it would take him 625 work days to do the complete work.

Now I will tell you more about fresco painting later but in fresco painting labor, a single “work day” is not your usual diurnal day that is generally understood.

A “work day” includes the maximum painting that requires to be done to a calculated portion before the plaster dries up and is thus no longer “fresh”.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

Advertisements

Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg

August 26, 2018 Sunday

Bedtime Story 

How Giotto Outshone Cimabue

Gothic art is a medieval art that developed in northern France.

It appears quite late as compared to Byzantine art in 12^th century AD out of the Romanesque art and it spread all over the Catholic Europe right from Sicily in the south to Scandinavia in the North.

It obviously did not make much headway to the East.

   

By nature Cimabue the master was haughty and arrogant (being one of the best or perhaps the best painter in those parts), extremely disinclined to take any sort of criticism regarding his work and if so happened that any artist found flaw in his work, he would immediately destroy that work, no matter how precious it might have been to be.

It is said by his contemporaries that he was a perfectionist who was extremely critical of his own work (and perhaps that is why he was unable to tolerate anyone else’s criticisms).

How ironical and perhaps even befitting it is that this great artist of extreme pride and haughtiness was completely eclipsed by the talent of his own protégé and assistant.

In his second book of his Divine Comedy after Inferno, Dante Alighieri in the book Purgatorio (Italian for “Purgatory”) describes this tragedy of the great master being overshadowed by his own pupil.

“O vanity of human powers,

How briefly lasts the crowning green of glory,

Unless an age of Darkness follows!

In painting Cimabue thought he held the field

But now it’s Giotto has the cry,

So that the other’s fame is dimmed.”

Oddly enough, it was not Giotto who had approached Cimabue but the other way around after Cimabue came across some of the pictures drawn by Giotto on the rocks.

Once Giotto came under the tutorship of Cimabue he got more opportunities to display his genius.

On one certain occasion the master was away from the workshop which was obviously full of the creations of Cimabue.

On one of the paintings that had a face represented drawn by the master, the young apprentice painted a lifelike fly so remarkable that upon returning Cimabue tried several times to brush off the fly.

To fool his master in his own field and on his own creation was no small feat.

Soon the news of his artistic talent spread to Pope who sent a messenger of his to Giotto to get a taste of his skills.

Giotto had to send some kind of evidence as a proof of his genius.

Giotto drew a circle for the Pope with his bare hands without the use of a pair of compass and keeping his arm absolutely stationary using merely the fine muscles of his wrists and fingers.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

Advertisements

Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg

August 25, 2018 Saturday

Bedtime Story 

Understanding the Style of Giotto di Bondone's Art

It is in the nature of the bedtime stories of the storytelling chimpanzee that when certain new topic is breached upon, it has to be elaborated and narrated.

It obviously calls for a digression but then no true story would be worth its salt without it.

It’s the constant digressions that give the bedtime story its true narrative power; or at least that is how the chimpanzee would want to believe.

So it was with the subject of Byzantine art and the icons of the Eastern Orthodox Church which was a fairly primitive kind of religious art focusing primarily on Jesus or his mother or few of his disciples with haloes around their heads as a mark of supernaturalism and distinguishing them from average mortals (it would not be right to use the word ape here for religious people stand firmly against the truth of evolution simply because if they were to accept the evolutionary truth their entire belief edifice would collapse).

So truth has to be sacrificed at the altar of belief and faith.         

         

The icons of the Eastern Orthodox Church are very typical in nature where your visual sense will be left with the impression (at least that what mine gave to me) that the artists have been trying to get as real as possible yet failing in their attempts.

These art works also seem to lack both the concept of proportions, ratio and linear perspective and that’s the reason for considering them primitive.

In any painting where you find more than one people, it is hard to miss that there is a complete lack of body proportionality as the distance demands for each figure and for each location of their presence. 

Giotto di Bondone quite boldly and uniquely took a bold break from this kind of style and subjected his own work to the greater rigors of perspective drawing.

He is described by another Italian who followed his steps some two hundred years later as the initiator of the “great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life, which had been neglected for more than two hundred years.”

Giotto was a gifted artist from the very childhood and so I am not sure whether he actively and consciously applied the mathematics of perspective to his paintings or sketches. 

There are a great number of stories that reveal the artistic talent of Giotto even from his early childhood days.

Giotto as a young boy was an apprentice for one of the great Florentine painter and mosaic designer by the name of Cimabue whose paintings are largely a reflection of the Byzantine style of art that you find in today’s Russian Orthodox churches.

In the language of artists’ Cimabue’s style of painting was clearly medieval (not exactly in the sense of primitive but more with perspective to the historical time frame) largely Byzantine with a mix of Gothic.

Medieval art, as far as the Western world is concerned, spans a large time scale of about 1000 years originating from the artistic heritage of the Roman Empire along with a strong influence of Christian Iconography of Early Christian Church.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

Advertisements

Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg