What Is Foreshortening?
Foreshortening is a way of drawing an object or a body so it appears to rush back into space, looking shorter and more compressed than it really is. It is how a painter makes a pointing arm or an outstretched leg seem to come straight at you, off a flat surface.
A leg can shrink to a stub and still read as a leg.
That sounds wrong. Done well, it looks more real than the real thing.
Foreshortening in one look
What it is: showing a form receding into depth, so it looks shortened.
The point: it builds the illusion of three dimensions on a flat surface.
The classic example: Mantegna's dead Christ, seen from the feet.
The hard part: you paint what the eye sees, not what the mind knows.
The extreme form: ceiling figures seen from directly below.
Drawing what you see, not what you know
Your brain knows a leg is long. So when a painter shows that leg pointing at you, squashed to a fraction of its length, something in you resists.
Foreshortening is the skill of ignoring what you know and painting only what the eye receives. A foot thrust forward can be larger than the head behind it, and still look right.
Get it wrong and the body looks snapped. Get it right and it lifts off the wall.
Mantegna's dead Christ
The most famous foreshortening in art is a body on a slab.
Around 1480 Andrea Mantegna painted the Lamentation over the Dead Christ from the foot end, so the soles meet us first and the body rushes back to the head. It is raw, almost rude, and it puts the death within arm's reach.
Mantegna even shrank the feet a little, so they would not block the body. He bent the measurements to serve the punch.
It is not the same as perspective
People mix the two up. They are cousins, not twins.
Perspective organizes the space of a whole scene: the floor, the walls, the lines running to the horizon. Foreshortening applies that same logic to a single object or limb, compressing it as it turns away from you.
Perspective builds the room. Foreshortening builds the body inside it. The two together gave Renaissance painting its depth, the obsession that drove Leonardo. Like contrapposto, it was part of the kit for making a figure look convincingly alive.
Painting the ceiling: di sotto in su
The boldest use of foreshortening points straight up.
When artists painted ceilings, they used di sotto in su, Italian for seen from below. Figures are foreshortened as if floating right overhead, feet first, rising into the sky.
Mantegna opened a painted hole in a ceiling around 1470, with figures peering down through it. Later Correggio and the Baroque masters filled whole domes with bodies tumbling toward heaven, dissolving the ceiling into open air.
The hardest trick to fake
Foreshortening was a test of skill, and everyone knew it.
Paolo Uccello chased it so hard that he packed his battle scenes with lances, horses and a fallen soldier all collapsing into space. It became his signature and nearly his madness.
A convincing foreshortened figure proved a painter could do the hardest thing in representation: bend a human body through depth and keep it believable.
Common questions about foreshortening
What is foreshortening in art? Drawing an object or figure so it recedes into space and looks shortened, to suggest depth.
What is the most famous example? Mantegna's Lamentation over the Dead Christ, seen from the feet.
Is foreshortening the same as perspective? No. Perspective orders a whole scene, foreshortening compresses a single object or limb.
What is di sotto in su? Italian for seen from below: extreme foreshortening used in ceiling painting.
Why is foreshortening difficult? You must paint what the eye sees, not the true length the mind expects.
The feet that point at you
Stand at the foot of Mantegna’s dead Christ and the soles arrive first, the body laid out toward you.
Around 1480 he compressed a grown man into a few feet of canvas and made him feel closer than any life sized figure could. Five centuries later it is still the first picture students are shown when they learn what foreshortening can do.