Hacker News Reader

Comment by asimpletune | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes it blows my mind how good Leonardo is at drawing. It's really striking when you go to a museum that has artists from the same time period. Leo's stuff is just head and shoulders above the rest. In a way, it's like he knows exactly what detail to capture that makes something look realistic. It's a form of compression I guess, but done by a human. In a way, it's better than a photograph because it captures how we judge a subject. To see what I mean, try tracing a photograph.

View on HN

By comparison, when I saw a few of Donatello’s sculptures I was surprised by how poorly he was able to convey faces compares to other artists. I am no art historian, I am just a big fan of TMNT :)

I guess there's a reason Donatello has much more notoriety as a ninja turtle than as a renaissance artist[1]

[1]https://xkcd.com/197/

I know it’s bending the rules a bit, but a mere upvote doesn’t do your great service justice. Thank you, I love learning about xkcd gems. I guess I should go through them all!

Compared to his contemporaries? He is possibly the most influential sculptor of the Renaissance. Michelangelo wasn't even born yet when Donatello died.

That’s fair. I saw his sculptures in Florence as a part of a larger exhibit and his were by far the most abstract looking. But I don’t remember the dates.

I'm always surprised at how long it took to be able to draw perspective as we see it with our own eyes. Its not like ancient artists struggled with realism or anatomy, since the ancient Greeks were chiselling perfect human forms dozens of feet tall sometimes. Maybe it was just extremely challenging to think about converting a 3d field of view into something 2d until more drawing techniques were established?

Wasn’t there that theory about Vermeer (Dutch 17th century), that he was able to “crack the code” by using special lenses that allowed him to see how an image should look on paper?

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7872661

everything is obvious after the first time something is done.

Congratulations on moving the goalposts. Further away. So they looked smaller.

Part of it was also what was in vogue and what humans wanted to depict with art. Or allowed by the Church (idol worship and whatnot). Not to say it wasn't a skill to be discovered and pioneered. But there were reasons in addition skill floor why it developed when and how it did.

> it's like he knows exactly what detail to capture that makes something look realistic

Picasso’s bull drawings were a great example of this as well. It’s like you said, an exercise in compression: https://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/animals_in_art/...

but none of that looks realistic. It's becoming more and more symbolic. The thing that he was lauding about leonardo was not symbolism, but his ability to portray a realistic visual perspective as if your eye was seeing it. Picasso's bull has nothing to do with that, and really picasso was uninterested in it and it wasn't what he was trying to do. None of those bull images try to portray a realistic looking bull the way your eyes would see it.

The point was that just as Leonardo knew the key aspects of a figure to highlight for realism, Picasso used them for deconstruction. Picasso here, is not about symbolism, but about the interaction of the shape of objects with our experience of looking at it.

They're not even related concepts. For sure Leonardo knew the basic form of a bull. But 100% Picasso's entire exercise was to remove the bull and leave only a symbol you interpret as bull. You can dress it up as "experiential bull" but even his detailed bulls don't really have 3d surfaces.

Leonardo wa dealing with three dimensional forms, lighting, the interaction of light and materials, etc. It's what makes even the picture in the article look "real". It's got nothing at all to do with what Picasso was doing.

From plate 6:

"At this stage, another new head and tail are created to conform to the style and direction of the developing image. Picasso introduces more curves to soften the network of lines that crisscross the creature. Once again he adjusts the line of the back which now begins as wave on the shoulders and flows like a pulse of energy along the length of its body. The two counterbalancing lines discussed in the previous plate are extended down the front and back legs to act like structural supports for the weight of the bull. All three of these lines intersect at a point that suggests the bull's centre of balance. Through the development of these drawings, Picasso is beginning to understand the displacement of weight and balance between the front and rear of the animal."

I agree that Picasso's intention with the bull drawings was mainly to draw a mythological or symbolic looking bull, and then deconstruct it into a more abstract, simple looking bull. He was almost flicking through the range of aperture changes in our symbolic internal representations of things, from finer and crisper to simpler and more abstract.

But I also think part of what informs him and his cubism, his method for dissecting and understanding these ideas, takes greatly into account "three dimensional forms, lighting, the interaction of light and materials, etc" as you like to put it. Unlike Leonardo, he was uninterested in merely making them faithful to reality, instead he was trying to put many instances of reality into one instance, like a prism. I think you are underselling the overlap in their interest about reality and the value in faithfully depicting it. Both are clearly obsessed with it. Even if they both go radically different directions, since of course they lived in different worlds basically.

Picasso could have done a beautifully rendered bull, as his very early work demonstrates - he chose instead to capture energies, emotions, motions, rather than form.

Perhaps there is something more real in a representation in depth than in a “realistic” image.

Tbh as someone whos drawn their whole life(worthless anecdotal exp i know) i think he was just having fun experimenting

Or maybe his dad did all the early work.

I do like how Picasso’s more symbolic bulls mimic the Aurochs on the walls at Lascaux.

Definitely not realistic though, as you said. Pretty cool that I can easily recognize what someone from 17,000 years ago was trying to depict, though.

Degas knew how to draw:

https://harvardartmuseums.org/index.php/article/homecoming-f...

https://www.pubhist.com/person/286/edgar-degas/works/drawing...

Sargent knew how to draw:

https://www.pubhist.com/w24267

That's the best "draw a circle, now draw the rest of the owl" i've seen in practice yet

Except it's in reverse - he drew "the owl" first, then the circle.

only if you read left-to-right. reading it from right-to-left it's draw the circle first

I doubt Picasso was a manga reader.

That may not be what GP was talking about, but that should be a separate post. I've never seen those lithographs before, and it's like having Picasso explain his work personally, with demonstrations. Amazing. I've never felt like I quite got what Picasso was driving at in any of his work before.

When Picasso went to the cave of Lascaux, he said, "We have invented nothing." I wonder if this was due to seeing just how similar his bull drawings were to the ~20kya drawings.

I'd say Albrecht Dürer is up there as well.

I Found that using "in the style of Albrecht Dürer" (probably without the umlaut, tbh) was a great way to get some pretty fantastic stuff out of Stable Diffusion.

With photography, judgement, otherwise referred to as perspective, is achieved by composition. All things relayed through a human are bottlenecked through perspective.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com