Story and space in Renaissance art : the rebirth of continuous narrative

This book focuses on a puzzling but ubiquitous feature of Renaissance art: continuous narrative, in which several episodes, each including the characters, are shown in a single space or setting. Continuous narratives have often been considered to be incompatible with the new system of representing space, one-point perspective, which has been traditionally understood to freeze time as it unifies pictorial space. In this study, Lew Andrews reassesses the problem and offers a new interpretation of continuous narrative. By looking afresh at the visual narratives of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries within the context of the visual and narrative theories of those times, this study shows that continuous narrative is a progressive feature of Renaissance art, inextricably linked to the expansion of space through one-point perspective. The Rebirth of Continuous Narrative focuses on a puzzling but ubiquitous feature of Renaissance art: continuous narrative, in which several episodes, each including the same characters, are shown in a single space or setting. Continuous narratives have often been considered to be incompatible with the new system of representing space, one-point perspective, which has been traditionally understood to freeze time as it unifies pictorial space. In this study, Lew Andrews reassesses the problem and offers a new interpretation of continuous narrative. IN HIS DE PICTURA OF 1435, Leon Battista Alberti likens a painted picture to an open window: A picture, in his view, should be made to seem as if it were a pane of transparent glass through which we look into an imaginary space extending into depth. xiv, 188 p. : 23 cm Includes bibliographical references (p. 166-182) and index