Occlusion Issues in Early Renaissance Art

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.

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