A study of the radical transformation of scale in European painting 1300-1600 This book brings to light an unchronicled revolution in art -- the "life-scale revolution," which was launched at the end of the fifteenth century, quickly took hold in the sixteenth century, and changed European painting forever. In place of the medieval and early Renaissance systems of scalable images, around 1500 European pictures began to present figures and settings at a scale congruent with the body and world of the viewer. A non-arbitrary scale -- life scale -- became a new foundation for painting. All over Europe, painting of all kinds, from portraits and biblical and mythological subjects to genre scenes and still lifes, learned to engage viewers in a common language of life scale. This is not to say that from 1500 all paintings were made according to the new convention, but that life scale became a new standard with organizing force for painting generally, all the way through the nineteenth century. Through a series of brief generously illustrated chapters, this book vividly sketches a major revolution in art, from its origins in the world of Leonardo da Vinci to its varied and far-reaching consequences throughout Europe and beyond. Pictures at life scale are a generative paradox. Self-proclaimed fictions in framed pictures, they nonetheless claim a continuity with the conditions of our perception of the world.

Analyses of select works by artists as diverse as Leonardo, Dürer, Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Reni, and Velázquez explore the profound philosophical, anthropological, and social-political implications of the turn to life-scale painting. "As-if" pictorial extensions and warpings of our perceptual ecology, life-scale pictures model our interaction with the world. But they do so strangely, slowing us down, turning perception into performance and self-reflection, prompting intuitions about how inhabiting the world in and through our bodies shapes our relation to each other and to our environment. Life-scale pictures addressed the bodies of individual viewers but in generalized form, now as representative members of what would eventually be called a "public.".