Story and Space in Renaissance Art

The Rebirth of Continuous Narrative focuses on a puzzling but ubiquitous feature of Renaissance art: continuous narrative, in which several episodes, each including the same characters, are shown in a single space or setting. Continuous narratives have often been considered to be incompatible with the new system of representing space, one-point perspective, which has been traditionally understood to freeze time as it unifies pictorial space. In this study, Lew Andrews reassesses the problem and offers a new interpretation of continuous narrative.

First sentence: IN HIS DE PICTURA OF 1435, Leon Battista Alberti likens a painted picture to an open window: A picture, in his view, should be made to seem as if it were a pane of transparent glass through which we look into an imaginary space extending into depth.

Year

1995

Language

English

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Editions

1

Pages

208

ISBN

9780521646635

Data source: Wikidata