The long-running thread in many of his paintings, his quest for visual truth, seen in the blind Michelangelo, the arena, a courtesan on trial, and Truth coming out of her well.
realism
From depth cues used by painters in ancient times, through the many advances in the Northern Renaissance, to modern photographic projections.
More important than perspective projection are cues including depth order, relative size, height in the picture plane, and aerial perspective.
Hodler’s Parallelist paintings, and more than 30 of the paintings of Paul CĂ©zanne depart from the basic optical principles of reflections. Why?
Before photography, the only opportunity to see your face, painters took advantage of the Venus Effect to break optical rules and show faces that couldn’t have been seen in the mirror.
How to paint a landscape with faithful and coherent cast shadows, why most painters don’t do so, and a few get it wrong.
Leonardo da Vinci studied different types of shade and shadow, but recommended painters not to depict cast shadows in their paintings. This explains why.
Explaining shade, attached and cast shadows seen in paintings. While the first two have been generally painted faithfully, cast shadows are more complicated.
The hard road to realism: development and propagation of knowledge, how to apply it in paintings, and its benefit on visual art.
From about 1900, he painted almost exclusively in pastel, finely realist works that rendered surface optical properties to perfection.
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