日本語: レッスン 2: ターミネーター（ライン）
The Study for this lesson can be found here: Study 2: Notan
School of Athens by Raphael
There’s a lot of people in this scene, but you know exactly where to look at. How?
They may look very different, but this painting shares the same concept:
Large simple areas of rest make your eyes want something complicated. Areas that are complicated make your eyes want to rest on something simple. By interleaving them together, we push and pull the eyes to follow invisible lines around the picture. The goal of the artist is to carefully craft the place where the gaze ends up.
Regardless of whether we’re drawing a crowd scene of philosophers or a single portrait, we use areas of rest and areas of complexity to drive the attention of the picture to the important parts. Usually a picture has only one, this is called the “focal point.” You can think of it as the central argument.
As a child, I owned the puzzle set for School of Athens. I repeatedly took it apart and put it back together. Even though I didn’t understand at the time what artistic principle I was looking at, I noticed that some pieces were always easier to locate than others. For example, Plato and Aristotle (in class, I incorrectly identified Aristotle as Socrates, sorry!) sit on the vanishing point, as well as the point of highest contrast for the painting, so they were always easy to place. In comparison, the ceiling was always very hard to assemble. The center is the vanishing point, the focal point, and the point of highest contrast and saturation. The artist really wanted you to understand his central argument.
When you have these two focal points, they compete for priority. Notice the jewelry and the face here, competing for your attention. This is caused by the visual complexity in the jewelry
If you continue ramping up the visual complexity of the jewelry, at some point, the subject of the painting will change, back to one focal point, on the hairpin. (Perhaps you could use this to sell a fancy hairpin)