The Success Intersection by Pat Williams

Author:Pat Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SEL021000
ISBN: 9781493405992
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2016-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

A Passionate Perspective

In the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, there’s an oil painting by the Italian Renaissance master Paolo Uccello. Painted around 1470, it is entitled The Hunt in the Forest. The painting makes a startling impression the moment you see it. The scene is a dark forest at nightfall. Beneath a dark sky and a shadowy canopy of trees, we see a large hunting party—more than a dozen hunters on horseback, arrayed in brightly colored garments of red, orange, and blue, plus attendants carrying staves, and more than two dozen hunting hounds. The trees, the hounds, the horses, and the riders all diminish in perspective as they recede into the distance. All the figures—the men, the horses, and the hounds—are looking toward a single point in the distance at the center of the canvas. They are looking toward the object of the hunt, which we assume is a stag, hidden behind the trees.

What is the historic significance of this painting? It is one of the early experiments by Paolo Uccello using a new technique called “perspective.” Before Uccello’s use of perspective, almost all paintings appeared flat and two-dimensional. Figures in the distance were proportionally the same size as figures in the foreground. There was no sense of depth, no sense of distant objects receding from us in a realistic perspective.

Paolo Uccello was more than a painter—he was a trained mathematician. He applied principles of mathematics to his drawings and paintings. He would start with a vanishing point and draw lines of perspective in order to create a sense of depth. While most other painters of his era were simply trying to tell a story through their paintings, Uccello was reaching for visual realism.

Sixteenth-century painter Giorgio Vasari profiled Paolo Uccello in his book Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), in which he wrote that Paolo Uccello was so passionate about perspective that he left behind “chests full of drawings” and that he “[gave] himself up to perspective, and remained poor and obscure until his death.”

Vasari also records this glimpse into Paolo Uccello’s passion for this new painting technique called perspective: “His wife used to say that Paolo would sit studying perspective all night, and when she called him to come to bed he would answer, ‘Oh, what a sweet thing this perspective is!’”6

What does the success intersection look like? It looks like a fifteenth-century Italian painter, Paolo Uccello, obsessed with a completely new and original way of painting. It looks like a man filling wooden chests with drawing after drawing, focusing his talent as he pursues his new vision of reality. When our talent intersects with our greatest passion, success will happen. We may even discover an entirely new perspective on reality.

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