This program concentrates on the importance of drawing to the different artistic disciplines as it addresses ongoing debates surrounding the representation of space. Drawing tools and materials are presented, and special attention is given to the application of geometry, the principal science of image construction. Classical and Renaissance theories of perspective are considered, as is the progressive disintegration of these theories by artists of...

This program travels to four locales to examine technical aspects of how frescoes have been painted: a villa in Pompeii, where walls saturated with figures, dense colors, and ornamental motifs functioned both decoratively and ritually; the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo, home of della Francesca's Legend of the True Cross; the Salle des Saisons at the Louvre, to view Romanelli's frescoes combined with richly gilded stuccowork; and the Residenz...

While they allow the viewer into the artist's workshop, paintings of the painter's studio are always a stylized portrayal where what is not shown is just as important as what is. This program surveys a number of examples of this classic theme, drawing attention to some of the different approaches artists have used to convey the space in which they work.

Isaac Newton's ideas transformed our knowledge of what we see and how we see, and the prism and its refracted colors became a captivating image. One-hundred years later, Florence Nightingale's pioneering Rose Diagram was a catalyst in the creation of better and cleaner hospitals that would save thousands of lives.

In only 15 years' time, we will be watching television in a radical, three-dimensional form. This 2009 Falling Walls lecture video features Thomas Wiegand, professor at the Technische Universität Berlin and head of the Image Processing Department of the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich Hertz Institut, whose work is transforming television and our viewing habits. Having studied electrical engineering at the Universities of Hamburg...

John Virtue is painting an impressionist landscape on an enormous canvas laid out in a field. While he paints, he discusses how he expresses himself artistically through creative brushstrokes rather than through realistic imagery. Through Virtue we learn how the elevated social status of artists in general, and physical changes in the composition of paints, have allowed for more artistic experimentation with a wider variety of mediums and techniques....

The idea that uncertainty and improvisation in art can help in negotiating the dangerous passage between passive acceptance and authoritarian subjugation is a theme that William Kentridge continues to expound upon in Drawing Lesson Four. He uses his short film Journey to the Moon - a tribute, in part, to George Méliès' 1902 cinematic classic La Voyage dans la Lune - as a part of a discussion praising cinema as an art form that exemplifies, as stated...

Anti-entropy as it applies to art - think of it as a sort of explosion in reverse - results, ultimately, in the annihilation of creativity because each step toward the completion of a project rules out more and more of the random possibilities of what that project otherwise might have been. "The infinite becomes finite," says Kentridge in this lecture, as he seeks an answer to the question "Can we avoid the end of all potentiality?" A partial performance...

In the first two of William Kentridge's "drawing lessons," "the South African filmmaker argued that rationality has often served as a mask for power and control, as ideas of what is 'rational' privilege one group's understanding of reality over another's," says Harvard Magazine. Kentridge carries that theme forward in this lecture - which is anchored by his short animated film Mine - as he delves down into "the legacy of his home country's multiple...

In this program, artists Ben Johnson and Patrick Hughes travel to Florence, where 15th-century painter Piero della Francesca first employed mathematically based perspective. Tracing the use of perspective, they discuss how artists at the beginning of the 20th century rebelled against its limitations. Johnson then uses a computer to create a perfect perspective model for a planned painting, while Hughes completely subverts the rules of perspective...