Cathedral Interior

This is the second in a series of architectural drawings. It is an extremely complicated drawing in all respects and there are a great many approaches I could take to discussing it. I could talk about its tonal range, and aspects of light and shading. I could talk about the relationship of expressionism to classicism, and where this drawing does or doesn’t fit in. I could talk about Freudian, or sexual symbolism in the drawing, this wouldn’t be hard considering all of the groin vaults right in the middle of the picture. But all those topics are going to have to wait until I have finished with the topic of perspective.

This drawing presents one of the most difficult perspective problems an artist must deal with, the problem of drawing big circles, or ellipses in succession. Not only are there numerous big arches but there are sets of them slowly decreasing in size and blocking each other out.

In classical perspective theory there is a procedure for drawing circles and ellipses. First you draw the square that the circle fits into. You draw this square in perspective and this automatically gives you four points of the ellipse, the points where the circle is tangent to the square. Then you draw a series of about twenty crossing and intersecting lines through the square in perspective, too complicated to explain here, and this will give you a number of additional points on the ellipse. With all these points as a guide you draw the ellipse. This never works, however, because all the thousands of guide lines make your drawing look like a dish of sauerkraut rather than a drawing.

I have utilized the above method many times but even with all those points as a guide one always ends up relying on one’s eye and the natural tendency of the wrist and hand to draw an ellipse naturally. Artists always end up drawing these troublesome shapes freehand, you simply rest your wrist in the proper relationship to the curve being drawn and then rotate your hand back and forth. If your line comes out a little off, you let the shadows gobble up the mistakes.

You may want to ask me, “That's fine, with that method a left handed person can draw the right side of an ellipse, but what about the other side of the shape where the fingers have to contract?” This is an extremely good and important question and I’m glad you asked it. From the time of the cave paintings until the Renaissance perspective was unknown, its discovery solved many problems artists face. The problem of how to draw the opposite, or inner side of an ellipse was discovered in the late eighteenth century, and consists of turning the paper upside down.