As just about anyone who's taken art history 101 has probably learned, Andrea Mantegna's Renaissance-era painting
"The Lamentation Over the Dead Christ" (c. 1490) is famous for being one of the first paintings to use
foreshortening to create the
illusion of depth.
(I'm sure you're wondering what this has to do with cats, but stick with me here.)
In the painting, Christ's legs appear shorter than they would if he were vertical, and this adds to the illusion that the corpse is lying flat. I always thought that in the interest of correct perspective his feet should appear somewhat larger because they are at the foreground of the painting, but I think Mantegna preferred to emphasize other features, such as the chest area and genitals, for dramatic reasons. Call it artistic license, if you will.
The excellent 2004 Russian film
"The Return" ("Vozvrashcheniye") includes a scene that's an homage to this painting. This luminous movie is about two teenage boys and their estranged father. The boys haven't seen their father since they were little, and suddenly one day he reappears in their life. There's some question as to whether he's really even their father at all. At one point in the movie the father is portrayed lying down, and the scene is shot from the foot of the bed similar to the positioning of Christ in the Mantegna painting. The father is lying in the same position, and the
chiaroscuro lighting mimics the painting as well.
Well, and I know this is an absurd segue, but hey, this article is intended to be rather absurd (cats have a weird sense of
humor)....
Cats, the ultimate art teachers, have been trying to teach us about foreshortening since the dawn of time.
See what I mean? The back paws appear dramatically enlarged – that's the cat's way of emphasizing to humans the importance of foreshortening in art. The supine cat in the photo, posed on a flat surface just like in Mantegna's famous Renaissance painting, has stretched out his legs to further dramatize the pose for art students' benefit. He seems to be saying , "Make the feet BIGGER to show foreshortening."
Here's another example of cats teaching us foreshortening. In this shot, another cat, on another bed, demonstrates that when the head is in the foreground, the HEAD is bigger.
In the following image, the cat is trying to tell us that the head and feet are equally important, and hence they appear much larger than the body, which shrinks into the background. What lesson do you suppose this cat is trying to impart? Perhaps something to the effect that humans who shave cats in an effort to make them look like lions or poodles should be forced to eat dog poop?
The image below is obviously intended to show humans the subtly ironic nature of cat humor. The cat art teacher depicts the dog as much, much larger in relation to the cat, and thus more important in the overall scheme of the photo. However, the lesson the cat is trying to impart is really just the opposite – that the cat, naturally, is the most important thing in the picture. This is doubly reinforced by the fact that the dog is paying homage to his superior by licking the cat’s face. Notice the disappearing perspective lines in the pattern of the carpet - a subtle homage to our Renaissance artist forebears.
And the picture below, of course, shows a cat whose legs really ARE foreshortened - well, at least they're
shortened, anyway.
It’s a wiener cat!
All in all, it’s pretty clear that when it comes to art, we have much to learn from cats!
