Specialization and the firm in Renaissance Italian art

'Psychosurgery' in renaissance art.

Hieronymus Bosch and other early Renaissance artists depicted 'stone operations' in which stones were supposedly surgically removed from the head as a treatment for mental illness. These works have usually been interpreted either as portraying a contemporary practice of medical charlatans or as an allegory of human folly, rather than a real event. As trepanation for head injury and mental disea...

Science in the Art of the Italian Renaissance I : Ghiberti ' s Gates of

AS with the works of a number of Italian Renaissance artists, Lorenzo Ghiberti's art contained scientific elements. In his case both his training as a goldsmith, which introduced him to concepts of mineralogy, and his knowledge and use of techniques in the realm of the science of optics demonstrated a melding of art and science. Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise was among the first works of the peri...

The Art of Renaissance and Baroque Eras

Occlusion issues in early Renaissance art

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 Ren...

Computerized Face Recognition in Renaissance Portrait Art

In this work, we explore the feasibility of face recognition technologies for analyzing works of portraiture, and in the process provide a quantitative source of evidence to art historians in answering many of their ambiguities concerning identity of the subject in some portraits and in understanding artists’ styles. Works of portrait art bear the mark of visual interpretation of the artist. Mo...