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Occlusion issues in early Renaissance art

ognissanti-giottoOcclusion issues in early Renaissance art

Barbara Gillam (School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney)

 i-Perception: (2011) volume 2, pages 1076-1097

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.

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. By occlusion is meant that in any view of a scene some surfaces are hidden in part by nearer surfaces. In viewing a real scene, stereo and motion are available to segregate surfaces in depth; however, on the picture plane, occluding and occluded surfaces will be adjacent. This raises two problems for a painter trying to represent a three-dimensional scene. The first is how to generate the impression that adjacent surfaces are at different depths and overlapping rather than at the same depth and touching. The common border must be seen to be owned by the nearer surface. 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.

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