This book brings to light an unchronicled revolution in art — the “life-scale revolution,” which was launched at the end of the fifteenth century, quickly took hold in the sixteenth century, and changed European painting forever. In place of the medieval and early Renaissance systems of scalable images, around 1500 European pictures began to present figures and settings at a scale congruent with the body and world of the viewer. A non-arbitrary scale — life scale — became a new foundation for painting. All over Europe, painting of all kinds, from portraits and biblical and mythological subjects to genre scenes and still lifes, learned to engage viewers in a common language of life scale. This is not to say that from 1500 all paintings were made according to the new convention, but that life scale became a new standard with organizing force for painting generally, all the way through the nineteenth century. Through a series of brief generously illustrated chapters, this book vividly sketches a major revolution in art, from its origins in the world of Leonardo da Vinci to its varied and far-reaching consequences throughout Europe and beyond.
Pictures at life scale are a generative paradox. Self-proclaimed fictions in framed pictures, they nonetheless claim a continuity with the conditions of our perception of the world. Analyses of select works by artists as diverse as Leonardo, Dürer, Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Reni, and Velázquez explore the profound philosophical, anthropological, and social-political implications of the turn to life-scale painting. “As-if” pictorial extensions and warpings of our perceptual ecology, life-scale pictures model our interaction with the world. But they do so strangely, slowing us down, turning perception into performance and self-reflection, prompting intuitions about how inhabiting the world in and through our bodies shapes our relation to each other and to our environment. Life-scale pictures addressed the bodies of individual viewers but in generalized form, now as representative members of what would eventually be called a “public.”
“It’s been there for all of us to see, and yet Alexander Nagel is the first scholar to see it: a radical transformation in European art, circa 1500, that found artists designing the figures in their paintings to match the size of the people looking at them. An art lover could reach out toward a portrait and find that her hand was the same size as the hand of its painted sitter; the painted Christ, in an altarpiece, was calibrated to seem the same human height as the live priest at the altar before Him. Nagel calls this the ‘life-scale revolution,’ and shows how its effects—pictorial, but also philosophical—were felt for centuries, right across Europe and beyond. Nagel’s discovery of this ‘revolution’ looks set to cause a revolution in our thoughts about art.”
— Blake Gopnik, contributing critic, The New York Times
“Alexander Nagel has found something enormous that everyone else walked past. Around 1500, painters began to make figures the size of the people looking at them, and the habit took hold so completely that five centuries of critics failed to remark on it. We stood in the galleries, we admired the Venus and the Mona Lisa, and we did not ask why they seemed so near. Checking canvas against the height and distance of the viewer, he uncovers a quiet revolution that concealed itself by becoming the norm. His pages are exact and unhurried. A giant and a court dwarf hang together on a palace staircase, a king dwindles to a smudge in a mirror, and Titian’s Venus lies on her bed at precisely the length of a woman. It is a book of real consequence, written with an ear for what is lost when a wonder becomes a convention. No one who reads it will enter a museum in the same way again, or feel entirely unobserved there.”
— Joan Kee, Judy and Michael Steinhardt Director, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
“Alexander Nagel’s unprecedented book now finally brings our full attention to the elemental issue of life scale in art–its meaning and implications. Life scale is the objective point where a picture comes into an immediate, open, and unpredictable relation with the world in front of it. Nagel tells the history of its emergence and defines the phenomenon anthropologically, technically, culturally, and in terms of its resonance with elemental religious meanings that he notices still circulating in our society. I’m putting this book on a special shelf next to my copies of Kodak’s Photography with Large-Format Cameras O-18H and Jacques Maroger’s The Secret Formulas and Techniques of the Masters.”
— Jeff Wall, artist
