Renaissance theories of vision

Abstract

A collection of essays by leading art and architectural historians which examine treatises and works of art produced throughout Europe during the Renaissance in order to understand how artists and writers conceived of processes of vision and perception, and how those conceptions influenced the works of art. Keywords: Renaissance, vision, perception, optics, Plato (Meno, Republic, Symposium, Timaeus), Aristotle (De anima, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Physics), Plotinus (Enneads), Saint Augustine (De Civitate Dei), Ibn Sina (Avicenna, Liber canonis), Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen, De Aspectibus), Ibn Sahl, Marsilio Ficino (De amore, Theologia Platonica), Nicholas of Cusa (On Conjecture, On Learned Ignorance, On the Vision of God), Leon Battista Alberti (De pictura), Gian Paolo Lomazzo (Trattato della pittura), Gregorio Comanini (Il Figino), John Davies (Nosce Teipsum, Orchestra), René Descartes (Optics), Samuel van Hoogstraten, George Berkeley (A New Theory of Vision), Florence, Rome, Venice, England, Austria, Netherlands, Fra Angelico (Annunciation, Lamentation, Lamentation Over the Dead Christ), Donatello (Chellini Madonna, Coronation of the Virgin, Crucifix, Piot Madonna), Leonardo da Vinci (Last Supper, Notebooks, Treatise on Painting, Two Views of the Skull, Uffizi Annunciation, Vitruvian Man), Filippino Lippi (Delphic Sibyl), Giovanni Bellini (Agony in the Garden, Coronation of the Virgin), Raphael (Disputa, Holy Family, Jurisprudence, Madonna di Foligno, Parnassus, School of Athens, Sistine Madonna), Parmigianino (Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror), Titian (Assunta, Salome), Bronzino (Pygmalion and Galatea), Johannes Gumpp (Self Portrait), Rembrandt van Rijn (Bathsheba at Her Bath, Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem, The Jewish Bride, Lucretia, The Night Watch, Salome, Self Portrait, The Syndics, Titus, A Woman Bathing), Svetlana Alpers (The Art of Describing, Rembrandt’s Enterprise, The Vexations of Art), Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica, Commentary on the Sentences), Roger Bacon, Francesco Barozzi, Celeste Brusati (Artifice and Illusion), Norman Bryson (Looking at the Overlooked, Vision and Painting), Baldessare Castiglione (Libro del cortegiano), catoptrics, dioptrics, extramission, intromission, Benvenuto Cellini (Perseus), Giovanni Chellini, Antonio Correggio (Assumption of the Virgin), Georges Didi-Huberman (Fra Angelico), Samuel Edgerton (The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry), Euclid (Elements of Geometry, Optica), Kamāl al-Dīn al-Fārisī (The Revision of Optics), Giovan Ambrogio Figino, Fra Bartolommeo, Fra Filippo Lippi (Annunciation), Piero della Francesca (De prospectiva pingendi), Galileo (Sidereus Nuncius), Galleria degli Uffizi, Galleria Doria Pamphili, Lorenzo Ghiberti (Commentaries), Domenico Ghirlandaio (Annunciation), Giles of Viterbo, Giorgione (Adoration of the Shepherds), Herbert Grabes (The Mutable Glass), Anthony Grafton (Leon Battista Alberti), Martin Heidegger (Poetry, Language, Thought), Edmund Husserl, Cristiaan Huygens, Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason), Martin Kemp (The Science of Art), Johannes Kepler, Alkindi (De Aspectibus), Murray Krieger (Ekphrasis), Diogenes Laertius (On the Lives of Philosophers), John Locke, Andrea Mantegna (Friedsam Madonna, St. Sebastion, Trivulzio Altarpiece), Giambattista Marino (La galeria), Masaccio (Tribute Money, Trinity), Museo San Marco, Narcissus, Neoplatonism, Agrippa von Nettesheim (De occulta philosophia), Erwin Panofsky, Platonic Academy, Pliny the Elder, Proclus (Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements), Ptolemy, Pythagoras, Peter Paul Rubens (Judith with the Head of Holofernes), William Shakespeare (The Rape of Lucrece, Venus and Adonis), Stanza della Segnatura, Giorgio Vasari (Vite), Vatican, Diego Velázquez (The Spinners), Johannes Vermeer (The Artist in His Studio, Girl with a Pearl Earring, View of Delft), Ernst van de Wetering (Rembrandt), Joost van den Vondel, Erasmus Witelo (Perspectivae), Heinrich Wölfflin (Principles of Art History