Principles of Art - Proportion

Proportion

Proportion is a measurement of the size and quantity of elements within a composition. In ancient arts, proportions of forms were enlarged to show importance. This is why Egyptian gods and political figures appear so much larger than common people. The ancient Greeks found fame with their accurately-proportioned sculptures of the human form. Beginning with the Renaissance, artists recognized the connection between proportion and the illusion of 3-dimensional space.

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Famous quotes containing the word proportion:

    The businessman who assumes that his life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth.... No; truth, being alive ... was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility.
    —E.M. (Edward Morgan)

    Fruits are acceptable gifts, because they are the flower of commodities, and admit of fantastic values being attached to them. If a man should send to me to come a hundred miles to visit him, and should set before me a basket of fine summer-fruit, I should think there was some proportion between the labor and the reward.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Heaven always bears some proportion to earth. The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, or the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)