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.
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:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
No comments:
Post a Comment