نطق سوم

Lecture 3:

Listen to part of a lecture in an art history class.

Perspective, this was a brand-new idea in art during the European Renaissance.

Before this time, painters had accepted the fact that a painting was twodimensional and everything was more or less flat in a painting. But you can, as you’re painting or drawing, make it look like it has depth, make it look like things get farther away as they go back.

During the Renaissance, new techniques were developed to do this. Now the simplest example would be trying to draw a picture of a road. If you draw two parallel lines right next to one another. The road looks flat. It doesn’t look like it stretches off into the distance. In order to make it look like it stretches off into the distance, you draw your two lines slightly converging, getting closer and closer together until they meet at what we call the vanishing point. This gives you the illusion that the road gets farther and and farther away from you, the viewer.

So as this process of perspective in painting became more and more common and more and more popular, it began to be used by set designers. Set designers in the theater at this time were generally painters, so these painters who were creating perspective paintings decided to do the same thing on stage and create perspective set designs. In order to do this, they had to use wings.

What is a wing you ask?

Good question.Well, it doesn’t involve birds or flying. In this context, a wing is a large wooden frame covered with a canvas. Basically, it’s a very large painting.

Let’s say, three meters long by two and a half meters tall. A typical set design during the Renaissance would have four wings on stage left, four wings on stage right, and another one in the back, creating the illusion of one big giant painting.

And you would arrange these on stage and it would look like a town square or a grove of trees in the woods or whatever the setting was.

There were two ways to arrange these wings to create the illusion of perspective on stage.

The earliest method was known as angled wings because perspective was difficult to do at first, right? It was a new technique. Painters were just getting the hang of it. This involved placing your wings not directly facing the audience, but slightly angled toward the back of the stage.

This is just like that drawing of the road, where the lines start to come together. By placing the wings at this angle, it made it much easier for the painters to create the illusion that things got farther away, as you move toward the back of the stage.

Whether it was buildings, trees, or type of set you were trying to create. There was a problem with angled wings, though. The illusion was beautiful, but angled wings are very difficult to change, made it very hard to have more than just one setting for any given play.

They came up with a method for shifting or changing these angled wings. But you’ll see that it wasn’t very convenient. It involved simply having multiple canvases for each wing. If you have your wing, and it has its scene painted on it, you could hang two or three more canvases over the back. When you wanted to change sets, you simply take that canvas and flip it over to the front. Of course it requires a number of people to do that and it never quite looks right because it’s not firmly attached to the frame.

Another way was known as flat wings.So as painters got better at painting in perspective as their techniques became more advanced, they developed the ability to have these wings directly facing the audience instead of angling them in. This development made it easier to change sets. They said, we’ll just put another behind another behind another. When it’s time to change a set, we simply pull the first ones away and we reveal the ones that are behind. Of course, the problem with lining them up was it still required a number of people to drag these large wings out of the way.

Then, in 1645, the chariot-and-pole system was developed. The chariot was simply a rolling wagon located below the stage on tracks, poles connected it to the wings through long holes in the stage floor. Using a system of pulleys and ropes that were all attached to a single crank, one person could sit below the stage and move all the wings off or on stage at once.

ally was a hybrid.