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Art Mathematical Perspective In The Essay

Thus, the invention of perspective by the artists of the Renaissance reflected the emergence of science and the mathematical ordering of man's observations of the physical world. The manifestation of perspective can clearly be observed in the paintings of many Renaissance artists. For instance, da Vinci's masterpiece the Last Supper, rendered between 1495 and 1498 as a wall fresco, portrays the figure of Jesus Christ sitting in the center of the picture with his body framed by a central window in the background and a curved pediment, the only curve in the architectural framework serving as a halo, arching above his head which serves as the focal point for all the perspective lines/axis in the composition, a system not invented by da Vinci but one copied from earlier master painters.

Another earlier example is Christ Delivering the Keys of the Kingdom to St. Peter by Perugino, rendered as a wall fresco between 1481 and 1483. In this composition, the grouping of Jesus Christ and St. Peter are located on the central axis which runs through the doorway of a temple in the background, thus serving as the vanishing point of the painting's perspective. In other words, the figures in the foreground are standing on an imaginary hypotenuse with the doorway...

With this method, both two-dimensional and three-dimensional space are interlocked with the central figures carefully integrated with the axial center.
Obviously, the great masters of the Renaissance period clearly understood the power of mathematics when it came to creating works of art which have stood the test of time for more than 500 years. Culturally speaking, the integration of mathematics and art during the Renaissance was highly responsible for bringing art to the attention of the masses and the common man and woman, for when they gazed into a painting like da Vinci's Last Supper or even Raphael's magnificent School of Athens circa 1510 with none other than Euclid, the founder of Euclidean geometry, sitting on the steps with his students, what they saw was actual reality and not some mere formal representation of the world from the Medieval period based on the ignorance of the church. In essence, the results of the union of mathematics (i.e., applied mathematics) with pictorial science brought about a new form of artistic expression and paved the way for future artists to express themselves with even more emphasis on mathematics via abstract expressionism and…

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