Thanks to its exquisite pictorial material, this book familiarizes the reader with the logic and golden rules of art. It enables an understanding, on the one hand, of the keys to appreciating the works of the great masters, and on the other, of how to apply these rules to the practice of one's own creative activities. The work begins with a number of basic explanations on how to represent and interrelate the different parts of the human body. The introduction is followed by chapters on the various possibilities for representing male and female nudes, and mythological and biblical figures, dressed and contextualized. Finally it looks at quadruped animals and birds.

LumenPicturaeis apictorial guide to classicaldrawing as exemplified by the sublime work of the influential 17th centuryDutch engraver Frederick de Wit. Presenting a carefully curated set of imagesnever before seen outside of rare book archives, Lumen Picturaerenders de Wits’ incomparable figure drawings available to the public forthe first time. In the tradition of Harold Speed’s The Practice and Scienceof Drawing, Andrew Loomis’s Figure Drawing for All It’s Worth,Gottfried Bammes’ Der NackteMensch, and George Bridgman's Complete Guide to Drawing from Life,the step-by-step visuals in Lumen Picturae arean indispensible handbook for visual artists both professional and amateur, andfor readers of any age or language who want to incorporate the incomparableinsight of classical Dutch figure studies into their drawing today.

Ours is the age of the picture. Pictures abound in our newspapers and magazines, in storybooks and on the glossy pages of instruction manuals. We find them on billboards and postage stamps, on the television screen and in the cinema. And in all of these cases pictures inform us: they explain, they clarify, they elucidate - and at times, too, they entertain and delight us. Images on the television screen have all but replaced the printed word as a source of information about the world; and nowadays, too, picture books and comic strips are consulted much more readily, and with much less intellectual effort, than the printed word. There can be little doubt but that pictures have come to play a very important role in communication. It strikes me as odd that, in what is nothing less than a visual age, philosophers have had so little to say about the visual image and its use in communication. Hardly anything has been done to explain the way in which pictures are used to inform us; the way in which they influence our thinking, our attitudes and our perception of the world. My aim in this work is to fill this gap, and in so doing to provide a viable account of pictorial communication.

Das Werk "Lumen picturae" von Frederick de Wit, das wohl zwischen 1660 und 1675 in Amsterdam erschienen, ist ein Buch von grossem historischen Wert. Es entstand in der Tradition der Zeichenlehrbücher, die bis zur Revolution des Impressionismus unverzichtbarer Bestandteil der Ausbildung eines jeden Jünstlers waren. In der vorliegenden vollständigen Fassung erlaubt es einen hervorragenden Einblick in das ästhetische Empfinden des 17. Jahrhunderts und lässt und Ausbildung und Werdegang eines Malers in jenem "Goldenen Zeitalter" der Niederlande nachzeichnen, das durch eine bis dahin nicht gekannte Blüte von Kultur und Kunst geprägt war.

Frederick de Wit published his work 'Lumen picturæ' in Amsterdam between 1660 and 1675. It is a book of great historic value that falls within the tradition of the treatises on illustration, which were an essential element in any artist's education up to the impressionist revolution. The complete version of this work is an excellent introduction to the aesthetic developed in the seventeenth century. It enables us to take up the trail of the education and evolution of a painter in the Dutch Golden Age, characterized by hitherto unknown cultural prosperity and a blossoming of the arts.

A groundbreaking account of perception and art, from one of the twentieth century’s most important art historians E. H. Gombrich is widely considered to be one of the most influential art historians of the twentieth century, and Art and Illusion is generally agreed to be his most important book. Bridging science and the humanities, this classic work examines the history and psychology of pictorial representation in light of modern theories of information and learning in visual perception. Searching for a rational explanation of the changing styles of art, Gombrich reexamines ideas about the imitation of nature and the function of tradition. In testing his arguments, he ranges over the history of art, from the ancient Greeks, Leonardo, and Rembrandt to the impressionists and the cubists. But the triumphant originality of Art and Illusion is that Gombrich is less concerned with the artists than with the psychological experience of the viewers of their work. Please note: All images in this ebook are presented in black and white and have been reduced in size.