Abstract
Early Renaissance painters innovatively attempted to depict realistic three-dimensional scenes. A major problem was to produce the impression of overlap for surfaces that occlude one another in the scene but are adjoined in the picture plane. Much has been written about perspective in art but little about occlusion. Here I examine some of the strategies for depicting occlusion used by early Renaissance painters in relation to ecological considerations and perceptual research. Perceived surface overlap is often achieved by implementing the principle that an occluding surface occludes anything behind it, so that occlusion perception is enhanced by a lack of relationship of occluding contour to occluded contours. Some well-known figure-ground principles are also commonly used to stratify adjoined figures. Global factors that assist this stratification include the placement of figures on a ground plane, a high viewpoint, and figure grouping. Artists of this period seem to have differed on whether to occlude faces and heads, often carefully avoiding doing so. Halos were either eliminated selectively or placed oddly to avoid such occlusions. Finally, I argue that the marked intransitivity in occlusion by architecture in the paintings of Duccio can be related to the issue of perceptual versus cognitive influences on the visual impact of paintings.
Highlights
Occlusion is rarely discussed as a major issue in art, yet it could be regarded as the major issue in depicting a three-dimensional scene on a picture plane
I have chosen the period leading into the Renaissance to examine the methods that foster perception of surface overlap in the two-dimensional representation of a scene
While haloes in naturalistic settings may increase facial occlusion, possibly exacerbating the problem of perceiving continuation/completion of the face, I have argued that they can play a positive role in occlusion perception by improving segregation of heads from their backgrounds and from each other
Summary
Occlusion is rarely discussed as a major issue in art, yet it could be regarded as the major issue in depicting a three-dimensional scene on a picture plane. A second and related problem in depicting occlusion is that partially occluded objects are represented on the picture plane as incomplete They need to be seen as continuing behind the occluding surface rather than amputated where they touch it. Hyman (2003) makes the related point that overlaps and occlusions were used by early Renaissance painters such as Ambrogio Lorenzetti to “emphasise chance and happenstance” (p 96) These authors (who are among the few art historians who mention overlap at all) are interested in the influence of overlap on the narrative conveyed by a painting. Since the earliest known cave art, painters have readily depicted surfaces occluding one another, successfully giving the impression that adjacent areas are overlapping with apparent continuation of the occluded object They clearly discovered features of twodimensional images that promote the perceptual segregation of foreground figures from background figures. T-junctions and relatability are the sole sources of the sense of surface occlusion in much ancient Egyptian art (see Figure 2)
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