{"id":56271,"date":"2019-05-09T15:04:41","date_gmt":"2019-05-09T19:04:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsroom.carleton.ca\/?post_type=cu_story&p=56271"},"modified":"2025-10-17T16:37:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-17T20:37:11","slug":"da-vinci-3d-mastery","status":"publish","type":"cu_story","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/story\/da-vinci-3d-mastery\/","title":{"rendered":"Da Vinci\u2019s 3D Mastery Explored by Carleton President"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Da Vinci\u2019s 3D Mastery Explored by Carleton President\n <\/h1>\n \n <\/header>\n <\/div>\n\n \n <\/path>\n <\/path>\n <\/svg>\n <\/div>\n\n \n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

When we look at a black-and-white image of several outlined circles with varying degrees and placement of shading inside their rings, some of the circles will look like bumps, while others will look like holes, despite the fact that they\u2019re on a flat piece of paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Image bv V.S. Ramachandran<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s because we assume that light comes from above and use shadows to interpret 3D shapes and depth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe brain has learned that light comes from above, because for millions of years the sun has come from above,\u201d Carleton University President Benoit-Antoine Bacon<\/a> said during \u201cda Vinci\u2019s Vision: The Beauty (and Limitations) of Painting a 3D World<\/a>,\u201d a lecture he gave on May 8, 2019 as part of the university\u2019s year-long series of events<\/a> to explore lesser-known aspects of Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s life.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Cultural and Artistic Flourishing<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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Carleton\u2019s da Vinci celebration \u2014 marking the 500th<\/sup> anniversary of Leonardo\u2019s death \u2014 has been dubbed \u201cCinquecento,\u201d an Italian term for the cultural and artistic flourishing of the 16th century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thanks to his understanding of science and engineering, da Vinci knew how to use shadows, as well as techniques such as occlusion, familiar and relative height, atmospheric perspective and linear perspective to bring depth to his paintings, said Bacon, whose talk drew from his background in cognitive neuroscience research. He focused on the links between brain activity and perception in the visual and auditory systems, as well as on multi-sensory integration.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cThe magnificent paintings of Leonardo da Vinci and other artists of the Renaissance are characterized by a dramatic increase in realism and in particular by their remarkably vivid 3D representation of the world,\u201d declared Bacon\u2019s abstract. \u201cIndeed, whereas pre-Renaissance art was iconographic and \u2018flat,\u2019 a number of techniques increasingly brought 3D accuracy and fullness to paintings.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Showing a slide of da Vinci\u2019s \u201cThe Mona Lisa\u201d on the screen in the Health Sciences Building\u2019s large lecture hall, Bacon pointed out the artist\u2019s use of shadows \u201chighlighting the roundness of the face and framing that famous smile.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

\"President<\/figure>\n\n\n

Da Vinci Harnessed the Emerging Pictorial Techniques of His Era<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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The hour-long, three-part lecture, which explored how da Vinci harnessed the emerging pictorial techniques of his era \u201cto create art of stunning 3D realism and everlasting beauty,\u201d stressed how he realized the limitations of depicting a 3D world on a 2D canvas and knew that our two-eye viewpoint was the key to those limitations. Bacon ended with a discussion about \u201cthe emerging notion that both his artistic mastery and his inability to fully grasp the power of stereoscopic vision . . . might have been due to his having a mild eye misalignment called exotropia, a form of strabismus.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Strabismus may have helped his art,\u201d said Bacon\u2019s summary slide, \u201cbut it is possible that it prevented him from understanding stereopsis\u201d \u2014 which is defined as depth perception or 3D vision produced by the fusion of binocular images.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But that\u2019s excusable, noted Bacon. It took humanity another 300 years to figure this out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When we look at a black-and-white image of several outlined circles with varying degrees and placement of shading inside their rings, some of the circles will look like bumps, while others will look like holes, despite the fact that they\u2019re on a flat piece of paper. That\u2019s because we assume that light comes from above […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":410,"featured_media":56295,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"cu_story_type":[28],"cu_story_tag":[],"class_list":["post-56271","cu_story","type-cu_story","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","cu_story_type-community-partnerships"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":"blueprint"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/56271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/cu_story"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/410"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/56271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98535,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/56271\/revisions\/98535"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"cu_story_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story_type?post=56271"},{"taxonomy":"cu_story_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story_tag?post=56271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}