Pictorial space

For more than six centuries, European painters have been ambitious to depict objects as if they possessed volume, placing them in a space that seems equivalent to the real space of our world. This ‘fiction’ was central to the artist’s purpose. Through a close examination of paintings from the 1400s to the early 20th century, including works by Uccello, Vermeer, Titian and Monet, Nicholas Penny explains in this latest title in the National Gallery’s Closer Look series how artists sought to make the fiction of pictorial space compelling, not only through the use of linear or aerial perspective, but also through the choice and intensity of colour, the variations in light and the texture of the painted surface.