A History of Art part 14

I devoted a few more hours to the block today, most of that working on the dungeon area. I fixed a few of the more obvious perspective issues, though a lot of little things are still unresolved. But it occurred to me that one way that Piranesi got around his perspectival inconsistencies was the extreme proliferation of architectural elements, so many that you can't track movements in space very far without running into something else. Some of his prints have dozens of stone piers, columns, arches, stairways (standard and spiral), wooden support beams and bridges (fixed and draw-type), towers, banks of windows, chains, and sculptures. (people, prisoners or other, are found in small numbers if at all) So I decided to start adding things to my dungeon. I added a heavy wooden structure hanging a lamp in the foreground, and added a variety of Piranesi inspired elements in the background past the arches. Sure enough, perspective of the foreground structures seemed less a problem once all that other stuff filled the gaps. I could have put in more, but since I'm planning to add figures/groupings to this scene, I decided to hold off until I know how much more space will be left.

The other area I worked today is to the right and above, a city scene taken from Frans Masereel's woodcut novel The City. The 1925 book is my second favorite of his novels, not so much a narrative as a series of scenes from an unspecified European city of the time. Taken together it gives an impression of what life was like for its various inhabitants. I started roughing in a scene today, looking up a stairway, an elevated railway towering overhead, tall buildings and smokestacks behind it, reaching toward the sky. (this will be part of the tower's top layer) Not yet in- dozens of people moving in all directions.