Since time out of mind, people have marveled at the mysterious Mona Lisa smile. Lovers of painting have reported for centuries that her smile changes before your eyes, as if she were a living person. These notes present a straightforward mathematical explanation of how Leonardo’s famous sfumato technique actually works. In all most cases IContinue reading “That Mona Lisa Smile”
Tag Archives: art history
The Last Shall Be The First
The technical process of making stone sculpture in any of the Modernist traditions tends to be very different from the way stone sculpture was made in the period from the Renaissance (Fourteenth to Fifteenth Centuries) to the collapse of the academic traditions after the First World War (1918.) The differences stem from a fundamental change in approach that traces back to early 20th Century politics.
Old-School Materials Science
Classical Greek sculpture arrived abruptly as these things go. In the Fifth Century BCE, naturalistic sculpture suddenly replaced the stylized kouroi that had decorated Greek temples for centuries. The sensibility seems to change overnight. It was the same Greeks and there is no matching discontinuity in architecture, so what happened? A lot of things changedContinue reading “Old-School Materials Science”
Sculpture Tech 