Wednesday, May 7, 2025

Picture Plane

Master of Saint Veronica
The Crucifixion
ca. 1400-1410
tempera on panel
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

attributed to Joan Rosato
Mystical Crucifixion
(Four Doctors of the Church and St Paul
contemplating the Crucifixion)
1445
tempera on panel
Princeton University Art Museum

workshop of Konrad Witz
God the Father sending Christ into the World
ca. 1445
tempera on panel
Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Agostino Mitelli
Design for Ceiling Quadratura
ca. 1650
drawing
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon

Abraham Bisschop
The Raven robbed of its Borrowed Feathers
1708
oil on canvas
(trompe-l'oeil ceiling painting)
Dordrechts Museum

Daniel Marot
Design for Ceiling with Commedia dell'Arte Figures
ca. 1710
drawing
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Sebastiano Ricci
The Last Supper
ca. 1713-14
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

François Le Moyne
Apotheosis of Hercules
1733-36
oil on canvas
(installed as ceiling of the Salon d'Hercule)
Château de Versailles

Anonymous German Artist
Trompe-l'oeil with Engraving affixed to Board
18th century
oil on canvas
Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden

Thomas Fearnley
Study of Gnarled Tree
ca. 1830
drawing, with watercolor
Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo

Anselm Feuerbach
The Banquet of Plato
ca. 1871-74
oil on canvas
Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Pieter Oyens
The Art Lover
1878
oil on panel
Dordrechts Museum

René Magritte
The Giantess
1929-31
tempera and oil on paper, mounted on canvas
Museum Ludwig, Cologne

Victor Vasarely
Alma
1971
oil on canvas
Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo

Svein Bolling
Resting Figure I
1996
tempera on canvas
Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo

Svein Bolling
Resting Figure II
1996
tempera on canvas
Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo

Picture Plane – The surface of a picture; the term is used in Western art when speaking of the degree of relief or recession of painted motifs.  In gold-ground medieval paintings, the picture plane may appear to be an opaque surface situated behind the figures, which seem to protrude into the viewer's space.  With the development of linear perspective in the Renaissance, it came to be defined as a transparent, sometimes permeable, membrane covering an imaginary opening in wall or ceiling, and separating the viewer's actual three-dimensional space from a fictive space optically continuous with it.  In this convention, painted objects may seem to straddle the picture plane, and figures to move from our space into that of the painting, or vice-versa.

– Erika langmuir and Norbert Lynton, The Yale Dictionary of Art and Artists ( 2000)