Art History and Aerial Perspective - Essay Example

Egg tempera is a painting technique of creating a permanent, terrific fast-drying medium made of dry and ground pigments, water, and a glutinous material, for example, egg yolk. A painting done on such a medium is also referred to as tempera and usually consists of bright, pure, and clear colors.

Manuscript refers to something that is handwritten while illuminate simply means to lighten up. Therefore, an illuminated manuscript is a handwritten text that is decorated with borders, initials, and miniature illustrations, as well as the use of brilliant colors, gold or silver to enhance the appearance of the text.
Diptych is a two-part painting made up of a continuous image or two closely related images usually of equal sizes. The format for a diptych painting can be a landscape or portrait, and the best example is portraits of a couple with one partner on each side of the painting.

Part II: Essay Question
1. What is atmospheric (aerial) perspective and what evidence is there of other cultures utilizing this artistic technique?
Aerial perspective is the technique of creating a work of art that shows how atmospheric conditions influence the perception of distant objects. Objects closer to the horizon have lighter tones and are less detailed than objects far from the horizon. A good example is looking at the sky whereby the part directly above a person looks bluer, but looking toward the horizon the color fades and appears lighter (Blake and Sekuler 45). Evidence of the application of aerial perspective can be seen in architectural drawings such as a city plan.
Artists realized that moisture and dust in the atmosphere caused the light passing through it to scatter.

The most scattered is the blue, short wavelength, and the least scattered is the long wavelength, which is red. This results in far-looking objects appearing bluer, paler, and hazier. Landscape painters utilized this principle to present the atmosphere between the viewer and distant objects such as mountains. The atmosphere makes distant objects appear with less distinct edges and outlines than objects nearer to the viewer. Among the first painters to utilize this technique was Leonard Da Vinci who invented the term aerial perspective (Blake and Sekuler 45). In the painting by Masaccio, Tribute Money, there is evidence of a change in color and value of the composition as the viewer’s eyes move from the foreground backward. As the viewer looks backward, the hills in the painting become lighter and lighter, and also bluer.  Read More