Leon Battista Alberti Quotes

People think one-point and two-point perspective is how the world actually looks, but of course, it isn't. It's a convention.

However minutely labored the picture may be in the detail, the whole will have a false and even an unfinished appearance, at whatever distance, or in whatever light it can be shown.

Drawing is based upon perspective, which is nothing else than a thorough knowledge of the function of the eye.

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance!

There is no object so large but that at a great distance from the eye it does not appear smaller than a smaller object near.

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

I like that 3D is based on the fact that you look with two eyes, so two cameras imitate that.

If the technical innovations of the Impressionists led merely to a more accurate representation of nature, it was perhaps of not much value in enlarging their powers of expression.

It's pretty far, but it doesn't seem like it.

Black and white creates a strange dreamscape that color never can.

Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.

I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions - no one seeing what they are.

The artist does not see both eyes alike. There is always 'the eye' and the other eye... It adds life and plasticity to the drawing if the eye in the light is darker than the one in the shadow. It gives the head vividness.

One wants to see the artifice of the thing as well as the subject.

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

Scientific perspective forces the objects in a picture to disappear away from the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should.

Just as things in a picture, when viewed from a distance, appear to be all in one and the same condition and alike.

The painter sees the semblance of things and repeats it. That is, without fabricating the things himself, he fabricates their semblance; and, if that no longer recalls any object, this artificially produced semblance functions only because it is scrutinized for likeness to a familiar - that is, object-related - semblance.

Thirst will parch your tongue and your body will waste through lack of sleep ere you can describe in words that which painting instantly sets before the eye.

Have you never seen a strange unconnected deformed representation of a figure, which seen in another point of view, became proportioned and agreeable? It is the picture of man.

A mountain seen in the haze of distance must nevertheless look a solid heavy mountain.

It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.

Like those statues which must be made larger than "nature" in order that, viewed from below, or from a distance, they may appear to be of the "natural" size, certain truths must be "strained" in order that the public may form a just idea of them.

One can take a neon tube and simply paint it black on the front. So it would read as a black letter or a line, but it would also read as neon because there would be light coming from behind that black letter.

A modeled form is less striking than one which is not. Modeling prevents shock and limits movement to the visual depth. Without modeling or chiaroscuro depth is limitless: movement can stretch to infinity.