What are pictorial depth cues?

They are the visual means used to suggest depth on a flat surface, including overlap, the diminishing size of distant objects, linear perspective, and the haziness and cooler color of far-off forms.

Why did modern painters flatten pictorial space?

Many modern artists wanted to acknowledge the painting as a flat object rather than an illusionistic window, so they reduced perspectival depth and emphasized the surface and the picture plane.

Pictorial Space and Depth

Pictorial space is the illusion of depth created on a flat surface through cues such as overlap, diminution, perspective, and atmospheric and color effects.

Definition

The representation or suggestion of three-dimensional space and depth on a flat picture surface, achieved through pictorial depth cues, and including the alternative conventions by which art may assert rather than disguise the picture plane.

Scope

This topic covers the means by which painters and draftsmen suggest three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface — overlap, relative size and placement, linear and aerial perspective, color and aerial recession, and modeling — as well as the deliberate flattening or denial of depth in modern and non-Western art.

Core questions

What pictorial cues — overlap, diminution, perspective, atmosphere — suggest depth on a flat surface?
How do linear and aerial perspective contribute to the sense of recession?
How did conceptions of pictorial space change across periods and cultures?
Why did modern art often flatten or deny pictorial depth?

Key concepts

Pictorial depth cues
Overlap and diminution
Linear perspective
Aerial (atmospheric) perspective
Color recession
The picture plane

Key theories

Depiction as learned schema and correction: Ernst Gombrich's argument that the rendering of space and appearance proceeds through inherited schemata that artists test and correct against observation, so that pictorial realism has a history rather than a single natural form.
Historical development of pictorial space: John White's account of how systems for representing space developed and were transformed in Western art, especially the construction and uses of perspectival space in the Renaissance.

History

Means of suggesting space vary widely across traditions, from the layered registers of ancient art to the systematic perspectival space constructed in the Renaissance, charted by John White. Ernst Gombrich's Art and Illusion analyzed the psychology of pictorial representation, while modern movements from Post-Impressionism onward increasingly asserted the flatness of the picture plane against illusionistic depth.

Debates

Illusionistic depth versus the flat picture plane: Whether the suggestion of deep space is a central achievement of painting or a convention that modern art rightly abandoned in favor of acknowledging the literal flatness of the surface.

Key figures

Ernst Gombrich
Rudolf Arnheim
John White

Seminal works

gombrich1960
white1987
arnheim1974

Frequently asked questions

What are pictorial depth cues?: They are the visual means used to suggest depth on a flat surface, including overlap, the diminishing size of distant objects, linear perspective, and the haziness and cooler color of far-off forms.
Why did modern painters flatten pictorial space?: Many modern artists wanted to acknowledge the painting as a flat object rather than an illusionistic window, so they reduced perspectival depth and emphasized the surface and the picture plane.