Print Email Facebook Twitter Shading and shadowing on Canaletto's Piazza San Marco Title Shading and shadowing on Canaletto's Piazza San Marco Author Wijntjes, M.W.A. De Ridder, H. Faculty Industrial Design Engineering Department Industrial Design Date 2014-02-02 Abstract Whereas the 17th century painter Canaletto was a master in linear perspective of the architectural elements, he seems to have had considerable difficulty with linear perspective of shadows. A common trick to avoid shadow perspective problems is to set the (solar) illumination direction parallel to the projection screen. We investigated in one painting where Canaletto clearly used this trick, whether he followed this light direction choice consistently through in how he shades the persons. We approached this question with a perceptual experiment where we measured perceived light directions in isolated details of the paintings. Specifically, we controlled whether observers could only see the (cast) shadow, only shading or both. We found different trends in all three conditions. The results indicate that Canaletto probably used different shading than the parallel light direction would predict. We interpret the results as a form or artistic freedom that Canaletto used to shade the persons individually. © (2014) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only Subject art and perceptionillumination perceptionpictorial spaceshadows and shading To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:7dc6d63b-a21b-4753-81e1-587527da572d DOI https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2047854 Publisher SPIE ISSN 0277-786X Source http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/proceeding.aspx?articleid=1850109 Source Proceedings of SPIE 9014: Human Vision and Electronic Imaging XIX, San Francisco (USA), 2 Febr. 2014 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type conference paper Rights (c) 2014 Wijntjes, M.W.A., De Ridder, H. Files PDF 304397.pdf 1.33 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:7dc6d63b-a21b-4753-81e1-587527da572d/datastream/OBJ/view