Scenes from the life of St. John the Baptist by B. Giovianni Essay

Scenes from the life of St. John the Baptist by B. Giovianni - Essay Example The paper tells that Giovanni depicts a stage on which a life of St. John is being portrayed.   He makes the artifice of the theatre painstakingly clear from the transition from an Italian tiled floor to a backdrop painting of grasslands, as well as the depiction of a character on the far left of the painting not standing in front of the backdrop.   The illusion of reality is further simultaneously created and broken by the use of perspective in the painting.   The perspective used on the floor is inconsistent with the one used in the backdrop, giving the impression that the backdrop is flat and two dimensional while the stage is three dimensional with a great deal of depth, which is what one would experience viewing a stage with a painted backdrop.   The characters on the left, however, all continue growing smaller in the distance at the same rate and on the same imagined plane, with the group of three and an infant in the foreground appearing realistically larger than the g roup of three with the kneeling woman in the mid-ground and the group of three with the animal and the infant on the backdrop.   This unity of character combines with the disunity of floor perspective to remind the viewer that they are looking at a piece of art of a piece of art, forcing their attention on the artifice of construction.   All this works to remind the viewer to interpret all art as art, rather than connecting it overly with reality or other kinds of truth.