Depicting Occlusion in Early Renaissance Art

Abstract

The artist attempting to give the impression of three-dimensional relationships must convey somehow that one surface is in front of another. There is a large and venerable literature in Psychology on this subject, showing how figure-ground, border ownership and amodal completion and continuation are determined but there is almost no discussion of how artist's have recruited these and other principles to create convincing impressions of occlusion. Even Gombrich (Art & Illusion 1960) only considers the situation in which a figure has to be imagined from very partial cues, not how juxtaposed elements in art are parsed perceptually into occluding and occluded surfaces. In this paper I shall discuss approaches to occlusion present in early Renaissance art and the degree to which the principles now well-known to Psychologists were discovered and used, as artists increasingly depicted naturalistic scenes. Among the preoccupations of these artists, as indicated by their work, were whether and how much to occlude faces (and the related issue of the management of haloes), occlusion of and by architectural features, and the importance or otherwise of transitivity in occlusion relationships within the scene. They also clearly used the ground plane, high viewpoints and arrangements of contour terminations, as well as more conventional figural cues, to disambiguate perceived occlusion or to avoid the confusion of multiple surfaces.