The painter's secret geometry : a study of composition in art. [Hardcover) (A Study of Composition Art)

It is rare that a painter also turns his hand to writing, and only a very few have undertaken a program of truly scholarly objective research and carried it through to the point of publishing their findings. M. Bouleau is himself a painter who combines the painstaking qualities of the scholar with a really fundamental, practical knowledge of his subject. His survey of Western European painting concentrates not so much on the purely superficial aspects of art history as on the essentials of basic composition. Using as his point of departure the Parthenon friezes and taking in the Bayeux tapestry, Romanesque and Gothic architecture, and the whole of European painting from the Middle Ages onward, M. Bouleau shows the development of pictorial composition, examining fashions, the influence of new ideas in the fields of philosophy and art theory, and the impact of sociological phenomena on the form and size of paintings. Numerous illustrations, ranging from antiquity to Matisse and Mondrian, visually interpret the writer's theories. Here is an illuminating view of man's changing sense of scale and proportion, of the won and lost arts of harmony, of astounding calculated effects and their basis in mathematical and optical laws. The result of a lifetime's studies, The Painter's Secret Geometry is a unique achievement, endlessly stimulating.