"Foreshortening" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dingy performances of Mr. Kerstall senior; very classical, and extremely uninteresting; studies from the life, grey and chalky and muscular, with here and there a knotty-looking foot or a lumpy arm, in the most unpleasant phases of foreshortening. There were a good many portraits, gentlemanly to the last degree; but poor Laura looked in vain for the face she wanted to see—the hard cold face, as she fancied it must ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Watts, and you will imagine a big silly picture of a whale. But if you go to Burlington House you will see something terrible. A spare, wild figure, clad in a strange sort of green with his head flung so far back that his upper part is a miracle of foreshortening, his hands thrust out, his face ghastly with ecstasy, his dry lips yelling aloud, a figure of everlasting protest and defiance. And as a background (perfect in harmony of colour) you have the tracery of the Assyrian bas-reliefs, such as survive in wrecks in the British Museum, a row of those processions ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... fancy that in fact Alfred's Wessex was of very mixed bloods; but in any case, it is the chief value of legend to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment; to see all ages in a sort of splendid foreshortening. That is the use of tradition: it ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... in spite of all your pattern drawings, be at first puzzled by leaf foreshortening; especially because the look of retirement or projection depends not so much on the perspective of the leaves themselves as on the double sight of the two eyes. Now there are certain artifices by which good painters ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... "nightmare fancies." It showed a slender form in gray with one arm about a willow. She and the tree both leaned above swift, flowing water, and her eyes were fixed in sombre brooding. On the bank, in abrupt foreshortening, lay the figure of a man. He looked at her. From the river, unmarked as yet by either, rose the gray face and long, red hair of a Kappa, or malicious river sprite. This sketch, unfinished, for the Kappa was a mere indication ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... inquired with a gravity equal to his own, "does this extraordinary foreshortening have upon a quart ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... degenerate form, an art from which original inspiration was banished to the profit of a much inferior species of skill. Be it granted that the drama, more than any other kind of literature, is liable to the encroachment and dominance of such artificiality on account of its foreshortening in perspective. Be it granted, also, that sometimes a new movement will intensify an old habit. The Romanticists, though reformers in other respects, did little or nothing to render the stage more real. ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... how carefully he studied the nude figure, and how well he understood the principles of modelling. The foreshortening of the right arm and hand of Icarus is a clever piece of technical workmanship. The composition is well ...
— Van Dyck - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... ought to be, and the more doubtful I felt about it, the more I put down my doubts, as if they were unreasonable children. One can scarcely conceive of the alteration made in familiar objects by bringing the eye as low as the horizon, especially by night; to distinguish foreshortening is impossible, and every low near object is equivalent to one higher and more remote. Still I had the stars; and soon my eye, more practised, was enabled to select one precise line of bushes as that which marked ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... exclaimed, "Alas for the statues of the ancients, if this clay were changed to marble!" Begarelli had a school for teaching design and modelling, and he greatly influenced the manner of the Lombard school of painting. Its foreshortening, its relief and grace are largely due to ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... to offer accurate information upon such points as are worth knowing for some ulterior reason. Historical theory, in turn, is a falsification of causes, since no causes are other than mechanical; it is an arbitrary foreshortening of physics, and it dissolves in the presence either of adequate knowledge or of clear ideals. Finally, historical romance passes, as it grows mature, into epics and tragedies, where the moral imagination disengages itself from all ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Virgin with upraised arms, being received by the Saviour who extends His hands as if in welcome. The type of the Virgin recalls that of the small panel representing the "Adoration" and "Annunciation." The Christ is, in the foreshortening and character of the face, a repetition of that on the reliquary of the "Madonna della Stella." The figure of the Virgin is incorporeal and insignificant; but the angels who in varied attitudes dance around the throne playing divers instruments, are ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... all persons feel themselves competent to pronounce on the merits of natural landscapes, and say which of two scenes is finer? And are painters any greater artists than God? If they say that we are not competent to judge, because we do not understand the mixing of colors, the mysteries of foreshortening, and all that, I would ask them if they understand how God mixes his colors? "Canst thou understand the balancing of the clouds? the wondrous ways of Him who is perfect in wisdom?" If, therefore, I may dare to form a judgment of God's originals, ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... delicate snakes seem literally strangling each other in terrified struggle to escape from the Medusa brain. The hue which violent death always brings with it is in the features; features singularly massive and grand, as we catch them inverted, in a dexterous foreshortening, crown foremost, like a great calm stone against which ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... present state of society lost; in other things as well as in the arts, but in the arts especially: nay, in nine cases out of ten, people mistake the polish for the power. Until a man has passed through a course of academy studentship, and can draw in an approved manner with French chalk, and knows foreshortening, and perspective, and something of anatomy, we do not think he can possibly be an artist; what is worse, we are very apt to think that we can make him an artist by teaching him anatomy, and how to draw with French chalk; whereas the real gift in him is utterly independent of all such accomplishments: ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... had not. Say now to your congress of scientists that, according to this great master, life is a drop of the essence of the stars, that each of our organs corresponds to a planet and depends upon it; that we are, in consequence, a foreshortening of the divine sphere. Tell them—and this, experience attests—that every man born under the sign of Saturn is melancholy and pituitous, taciturn and solitary, poor and vain; that that sluggish star predisposes to superstition and fraud, directs epilepsies and ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... converse of the birds. The nervous yet fluty tones are as an emphatic a contrast to the vehement interjections and commands of the varied honey-cater (PTILOTIS VERSICOLOR)—now at the first outburst—as is the swiftly foreshortening profile of the range to the glare in ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... rule, that is all. No allowance has been made for effect of perspective, for the foreshortening to the eye at distances; there is no poetry in these three cathedrals. The designers drew them out on paper without having the faculty of seeing them in their minds' eye rise before them out of the soil. These churches made better ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... should think it is high art!' whispers old Smee; 'fourteen feet high, at least!" And then out loud he says 'The picture has very fine points in it, Gandish, as you say. Foreshortening of that arm, capital! That red drapery carried off into the right of the picture ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... thing, Miss Minturn," he observed, bending nearer to look more closely at a copy of a section of the 'Creation' as painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican at Rome. "The foreshortening and perspective there is wonderful! Michael Angelo was the master of them all! Of course, you have seen many of the wonders of that ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... Giotto and his school, indeed, conducted the art through infancy, but it still exhibited many signs of childhood, especially in chiara-oscuro, and even more so in perspective. Figures sometimes appeared as if sliding from the canvass—buildings had not the true point of view, and foreshortening was only rudely attempted. Stefano Fiorentino, a grandson of Giotto, was the first and only one of the school who endeavoured to grapple with this last difficulty, which he may be said to have perceived rather than overcome; his contemporaries, for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various |
