Foreshortening
The visual compression of objects projecting toward the viewer.
Foreshortening is the perspectival representation of an object or part of an object seen from an angle that shortens its apparent length. A figure lying with feet pointed toward the viewer is foreshortened — the legs appear far shorter than they are in life. Mastering foreshortening is one of the technical signatures of post-Renaissance figure painting.
Origins in Renaissance perspective
Foreshortening emerged together with single-point perspective in fifteenth-century Florence. Andrea Mantegna's Lamentation of Christ (c. 1470–80) is the textbook early example: Christ's body lies feet-toward the viewer, with the soles of the feet large in the foreground and the head much smaller in the distance. The effect was startling enough that contemporaries described the painting as a miracle of art.
The High Renaissance and Baroque
Leonardo studied foreshortening obsessively in his anatomical drawings; Raphael deployed it in the figures of his frescoes; Michelangelo built much of the Sistine ceiling around dramatic foreshortened poses. By the seventeenth century, Caravaggio was using extreme foreshortening for dramatic effect — the foreshortened arm of the executioner in The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, the foreshortened body of The Conversion of Saint Paul. Tintoretto in Venice and Rubens in Antwerp built whole compositions around foreshortened figures.
Ceiling painting
The most virtuosic uses appear on Baroque ceilings. Andrea Pozzo's Apotheosis of Saint Ignatius (1685–94) at the Sant'Ignazio in Rome opens the entire ceiling into an illusory architectural void with foreshortened saints flying upward — the technique called quadratura. The viewer standing on the marked spot at floor level sees a perfectly coherent extension of the church's space; from any other angle the illusion collapses.
How to recognise it
Foreshortening is most obvious in figures lying or pointing toward the viewer: a foot or hand near the picture plane appears unusually large, while the corresponding head or other end appears unusually small. Look for body parts whose proportions seem 'wrong' until you read the angle of the figure — that is foreshortening doing what it is supposed to do.
Related techniques
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