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/fɔːrˈʃɔːr.tən.ɪŋ/

Foreshortening

noun · perspective drawing, figure drawing

The visual compression of an object's length along the viewer's line of sight, producing the optical effect of an object appearing shorter than it would in profile. Required whenever a form recedes toward or extends away from the viewer.

What it is

Foreshortening is what happens to length when geometry meets a flat picture plane. An arm pointed straight at the viewer measures, in projection, only the diameter of its forearm — yet the artist who draws it that short produces a credible arm, while the artist who draws it at its known anatomical length produces a flat one. The skill is overriding what the artist knows the length is and drawing what the eye actually receives.

In figure drawing, foreshortening is the single most-failed skill because it conflicts with the artist's habitual outlines. The fix taught in atelier practice is sight-measurement against a held pencil: the artist measures the apparent length on the model and transfers that length directly to the page, ignoring the anatomical correction the brain wants to apply. Mantegna's Lamentation of Christ (c. 1480) is the canonical demonstration that ignoring the correction produces dignity rather than distortion.

A cylinder seen in profile and the same cylinder foreshortened toward the viewerprofileforeshortened
The same cylinder seen in profile (left) and pointed toward the viewer (right). The receding axis collapses to nearly zero on the picture plane.

Etymology

The English word combines fore ("forward, toward the viewer") with the verb shorten — a 16th-century construction first attested in artist William Salmon's Polygraphice (1672). The underlying technique was named earlier in Italian as scorcio (from scorciare, "to shorten") — the term Vasari uses throughout his Lives of the Artists (1568) when describing Mantegna, Tintoretto, and Correggio.

Examples in use

In Mantegna's Lamentation of Christ (c. 1480, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Inv. 198), the body of Christ is shown from the soles of the feet — the entire torso compressed into a few inches of canvas. Mantegna deliberately reduced the feet to keep them from overwhelming the face; later artists from Tintoretto onward adopted the same compromise rather than treat it as a flaw.

In figure drawing instruction, Glenn Vilppu's Drawing Manual (1997) teaches foreshortening as "drawing the cylinder, not the limb" — reducing each receding form to its underlying primitive solid and constructing the contour from the ellipses of the primitive's cross-sections. Steve Huston extends the same method in Figure Drawing for Artists (2016) under the label "gesture-into-form."

See also: Vanishing point · Horizon line · Sight measurement · Primitive solid · Volumetric drawing · Perspective category

References

  1. Vasari, Giorgio. Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori (1568). Translated by Gaston du C. de Vere as Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Macmillan (1912–1915).
  2. Vilppu, Glenn. Vilppu Drawing Manual. Vilppu Studio (1997). ISBN 0-9657608-0-8.
  3. Huston, Steve. Figure Drawing for Artists. Rockport Publishers (2016). ISBN 978-1-63159-088-3.
  4. Hale, Robert Beverly. Drawing Lessons from the Great Masters. Watson-Guptill (1964). ISBN 0-8230-1401-9.

Sarah Chen

Founder of Grid Maker Pro. Classical portrait painter (BA Fine Arts). Writes about composition, drawing methods, and the art-history claims that don't survive measurement.

Updated · Methodology