Igor Dancing

Depending on Your Perspective

Italian architect and art theorist Leon-Battista Alberti gave the West perspective theory in his book On Painting written in 1435, in the early Renaissance. This illustration of “Igor Dancing”, from a book published in 1987 will give you the basics if you just spend a couple of minutes with it. Happily, the subject of the painting is an imaginary dancer, a stick-figure named Igor, holding some kind of long thin bar as he dances. At the upper left is the eye of a viewer looking at a painting. The checkerboard floor and the large stick figure Igor dancing on it is what the artist would have been looking at when he or she reduced his three dimensional dance in real time to a frozen two-dimensional image on a canvas. Look at how the eye of the viewer has three lines going out from it through a three-dimensional rectangle. You will see on the largest visible side of the rectangle the image of Igor dancing as he appears on the canvas. He is smaller than the Igor actually on the checkerboard in real time, but the angle of his feet and hands and bar are the same. That smaller Igor on the front side of the three- dimensional rectangle is Igor as he appears on the canvas when painted using Alberti’s perspective system.

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