Slice

Odd Tandberg
Composition
ca. 1950
oil on canvas
Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo

Lucas van Uden
Spring
before 1672
oil on panel
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

Walter Tiemann
Book Arts and Graphics Exhibition, Leipzig
1914
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Heinrich Ulrich
Boy sailing on a Shell
ca. 1610
engraving
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Giandomenico Tiepolo
Punchinello feeding Peacocks
ca. 1800
drawing
Yale University Art Gallery

Jean Tinguely
Letter to Charles Goerg
1985
ink and watercolor on paper
Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques
des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Rudolf Tewes
Portrait of Eva Margarete Jung
1961
oil on board
Kunsthalle Bremen

Walter Ufer
Portrait of Samuel Lustgarten
ca. 1925-27
oil on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Moses van Uyttenbroeck
Self Portrait
ca. 1640
etching
Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich

Ulrich Ursentaler
Double Schauguildiner of Emperor Maximilian I
1517
(struck from dies made in 1509)
silver
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Wilhelm Tischbein
Group of Trees
ca. 1829
drawing
Städtisches Museum, Braunschweig

Pietro Tenerani
Princess Marie Franziska von Liechtenstein
1837
marble
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

Taddeo di Bartolo
St Catherine of Alexandria
ca. 1400
tempera on panel
(altarpiece fragment)
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen

David Teniers the Younger
Presentation of the Christ Child in the Temple
ca. 1650
oil on copper
Staatsgalerie Flämische Barockmalerei
im Schloss Neuburg

Adam Töpffer
Revolutionaries in Geneva
(leadership quartered in a theater)
1798
watercolor on paper
Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Adam Töpffer
Revolutionaries in Geneva
(auctioning aristocratic possessions)
1798
watercolor on paper
Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Studies on the problem of proportions are generally received with skepticism or, at most, with little interest.  Neither attitude is surprising.  The mistrust is based upon the fact that the investigation of proportions all too frequently succumbs to the temptation of reading out of the objects just what it has put into them; the indifference is explained by the modern, subjective viewpoint that a work of art is something utterly irrational.  A modern spectator, still under the influence of this Romantic interpretation of art, finds it uninteresting, if not distressing, when the historian tells him that a rational system of proportions, or even a definite geometrical scheme, underlies this or that representation.

Nevertheless, it is not unrewarding for the art historian (provided that he limit himself to positive data and be willing to work with meagre rather than dubious material) to examine the history of canons of proportion.  Not only is it important to know whether particular artists or periods of art did or did not tend to adhere to a system of proportions, but the how of their mode of treatment is of real significance.  For it would be a mistake to assume that theories of proportions per se are constantly one and the same.  There is a fundamental difference between the method of the Egyptians and the method of Polyclitus, between the procedure of Leonardo and the procedure of the Middle Ages – a difference so great and, above all, of such a character, that it reflects the basic difference between the art of Egypt and that of classical antiquity, between the art of Leonardo and that of the Middle Ages.  If, in considering the various systems of proportions known to us, we try to understand their meaning rather than their appearance, if we concentrate not so much on the solution arrived at as on the formulation of the problem posed, they will reveal themselves as expressions of the same "artistic intention" that was realized in the buildings, sculptures and paintings of a given period or a given artist.  The history of the theory of proportions is the reflection of the history of style. 

– Erwin Panofsky, from The History of the Theory of Human Proportions as a Reflection of the History of Styles (1921)