A study of the radical transformation of scale in European painting 1300-1600

This book brings to light an unchronicled revolution in art—the “life-scale revolution,” which was launched at the end of the fifteenth century, quickly took hold in the sixteenth century, and changed European painting forever. In contrast to earlier painting, around 1500 European pictures began to present figures and settings at a scale congruent with the body and world of the viewer. All over Europe, painting of all kinds—portraits, biblical and mythological subjects, genre scenes, and still lifes—learned to speak the common language of life scale. Life scale was a radical departure from earlier painting, which not only was produced at many different sizes but was designed to function at different sizes. In place of the medieval system of scalable images, life scale proposed a non-arbitrary scale as a new foundation for painting. This is not to say that from 1500 all paintings were made according to the new convention, but that life scale became a new standard with organizing force for painting generally, all the way through the nineteenth century.

Pictures at life scale are a generative paradox—self-proclaimed fictions in framed pictures, they nonetheless claim a continuity with the conditions of our perception of the world. Analyses of individual works by artists as diverse as Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer, Titian, Caravaggio, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Velázquez explore the profound philosophical, anthropological, and social-political implications of the turn to life-scale painting. “As-if” pictorial extensions of the general conditions of our perceptual interaction, life-scale pictures offer parallel worlds. They model our interaction with the world, but they do so strangely, slowing us down, turning perception into performance and self-reflection, prompting intuitions about how inhabiting the world in and through our bodies shapes our relation to each other and to our environment. Life-scale pictures addressed individual viewers, but in generalized form, now as representative members of what would eventually be called a “public.”