Foreshortening is the way a painter shows a body or an object that points toward the viewer, or away into the picture, by drawing it shorter than it really is.
Seen from the front, an arm stretched straight out is mostly a fist, with a short stub of forearm behind it. The painter draws that short shape, and the mind, which knows how long an arm is, supplies the missing length.
The best known example is a Lamentation, the scene in which Christ's family and friends mourn over his body after the Crucifixion. The Italian painter Andrea Mantegna made his version around 1483, and it now hangs in the Pinacoteca di Brera, a picture gallery in Milan.
Mantegna laid Christ on his back on a stone slab and painted him from the end where the feet are. The soles fill the bottom of the picture, the legs run back under a sheet, and the head lies at the far end, so that the whole body fits into a short stretch of canvas.
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The English word, made from fore and shorten, only dates from about 1600, but the idea is far older. It goes back at least to ancient Greece, and to a painter named Pausias.
An ox seen from the front
Pausias's picture is known only from Pliny the Elder, a Roman writer who gathered what was known about art into his encyclopedia, the Natural History…
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