Renaissance

“Renaissance” is French for “rebirth,” the rebirth of classical antiquity, though scholars no longer see it as a clean break with the Middle Ages; it spread across Europe together with humanist thought. Painters showed distance with linear perspective: Filippo Brunelleschi carried out a series of experiments between 1415 and 1420, and Leon Battista Alberti set the method out as theory in On Painting (1435). Oil technique was developed by northern painters such as Jan van Eyck and taken up in Italy from about 1475, while northern artists travelled to Italy to learn figure drawing and perspective. The age also turned its eyes to the individual: portraits moved from strict profiles to three-quarter views and began to show inner feeling. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael are counted the three great painters of the High Renaissance (about 1495–1520).

In front of a portrait, see whether the face is in strict profile or turned three-quarters, then where the eyes are looking. In Leonardo's Portrait of a Woman (known as La Belle Ferronnière), the head, the body, and the gaze each turn in a slightly different direction.

What does the person in the picture seem to be thinking, and what tells you so?