Of the Foreshortening of Figures looked at from beneath, and of those
on the Level.
§ 79. _Foreshortenings._
Our artists have had the greatest skill in foreshortening figures, that
is, in making them appear larger than they really are; a foreshortening
being to us a thing drawn in shortened view, which seeming to the eye to
project forward has not the length or height that it appears to have;
however, the mass, outlines, shadows, and lights make it seem to come
forward and for this reason it is called foreshortened. Never was there
painter or draughtsman that did better work of this sort than our
Michelagnolo Buonarroti,[193] and even yet no one has been able to
surpass him, he has made his figures stand out so marvellously. For this
work he first made models in clay or wax, and from these, because they
remain stationary, he took the outlines, the lights, and the shadows,
rather than from the living model. These foreshortenings give the
greatest trouble to him who does not understand them because his
intelligence does not help him to reach the depth of such a difficulty,
to overcome which is a more formidable task than any other in painting.
Certainly our old painters, as lovers of the art, found the solution of
the difficulty by using lines in perspective, a thing never done before,
and made therein so much progress that to-day there is true mastery in
the execution of foreshortenings. Those who censure the method of
foreshortening, I speak of our artists, are those who do not know how to
employ it; and for the sake of exalting themselves go on lowering
others. We have however a considerable number of master painters who,
although skilful, do not take pleasure in making foreshortened figures,
and yet when they see how beautiful they are and how difficult, they not
only do not censure but praise them highly. Of these foreshortenings the
moderns have given us some examples which are to the point and difficult
enough, as for instance in a vault the figures which look upwards, are
foreshortened and retire. We call these foreshortenings ‘al di sotto in
su’ (in the ‘up from below’ style), and they have such force that they
pierce the vaults. These cannot be executed without study from the life,
or from models at suitable heights, else the attitudes and movements of
such things cannot be caught. And certainly the difficulty in this kind
of work calls forth the highest grace as well as great beauty, and
results in something stupendous in art. You will find, in the Lives of
our Artists, that they have given very great salience to works of this
kind, and laboured to complete them perfectly, whence they have obtained
great praise. The foreshortenings from beneath upwards (di sotto in su)
are so named because the object represented is elevated and looked at by
the eye raised upwards, and is not on the level line of the horizon:
wherefore because one must raise the head in the wish to see them, and
perceives first the soles of the feet and the other lower parts we find
the said name justly chosen.[194]