Scale to Size: An Introduction (2025)

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“The Scaling Turn: Experiencing Late Medieval Artifacts,” in How Do Images Work?, eds. Christine Beier, Tim Juckes, and Assaf Pinkus (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021), 43–70.

Assaf Pinkus

2021

Late medieval art was obsessed with scaling: scaling sculptures of Roland and Mary up to colossi and down to miniature figurines; scaling up depictions of the cosmos to appear much larger than God and vice versa; miniaturizing architectural elements into micro-architectural structures and then magnifying them into monumental sacrament houses; miniaturizing multi-figured sculptured tympana into altarpieces and then shrinking them further to fit into prayer nuts; playing with multiple scales within shrine Madonnas; and oscillating between thumb-sized prayer books and gigantic display volumes. The preoccupation with scaling was contemporaneous with new improvements to measuring instruments and standards that could investigate celestial bodies; fix time, distance, space, or quantities; and classify human physiognomy. While this engagement with measuring has been well established in recent scholarship (including the PI’s publications on colossal sculpture) its theoretical underpinnings and how it fueled widespread fascination with scale have not been explored. The proposed research seeks to reveal the late Middle Ages as the stage of an overlooked scaling turn, even a revolution. It aims to delineate and bring to the fore what is here defined for the first time as the “Scaling Revolution”—an artistic, technological, cultural, and ethical manipulation of relational sizing (scaling) that occurred in the Latin West during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. While measuring (using set units, therefore “objective” ontological category) and scaling (a relative and relational act, therefore a subjective phenomenological category) were always a part of artistic cultural production, during these centuries they were, to an unprecedented degree, in constant flux. Scaling determines how artefacts – and by implication, people – occupy a given space in relation to one another, mediating ontological categories of being and their interrelationships. The scaling revolution culminated in Alberti’s theories of proportion and the discovery of the New World, which mandated a rescaling of the world itself to make room for its “new” inhabitants. By studying scaled artifacts, and introducing a new paradigm and analytical tools, the project argues that the scaling revolution dramatically changed not only the visual and material culture of the period but also its theological and philosophical tenets, therefore affecting many aspects of daily life—language, literature, devotion, commerce, science, and law—and impacting fundamental modes of thinking and ideologies. The proposed research will ultimately contend that scaled objects were instrumental in fashioning the late medieval and early modern self. The visual properties of scaled objects attest to implicit perceptions and cultural assumptions about the relationships between God, humanity, and the races, which forged notions of European primacy. The developments and the consequences of the scaling revolution thus reverberated around the globe and into modernity.

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The Address of Art and the Scale of Other Places (Preface)

Weng Choy Lee

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Scale of the Nation: Alberto Giacometti's Miniature Monument

Art History, 2022

In 1939, Alberto Giacometti proposed an unusual work for the Swiss National Exhibition: a tiny head placed on a wide pedestal, which gave rise to dramatic scalar effects. This essay places this little-known episode at the origin of Giacometti's post-war experiments with scale, and argues that those experiments emerged out of a historical context – Switzerland's tense negotiation of national identity in the 1930s – in which monumental forms of sculpture could no longer fulfil their political functions. By untethering the bigness of a monument from its scale, Giacometti's little head disclosed scale's more profound social operation: to formalize and embody our historical practices of engaging with vast structures, including the political structure of the nation. This alignment of aesthetic and political scale suggests how a new phenomenological account of modern sculpture, indebted to Jean-Paul Sartre rather than Maurice Merleau-Ponty, calls into question modernism's supposed negation of the monument.

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What Scale Affords Us: Sizing the World Up through Scale

Joan Kee

<Art Margins> 3:2 (June 2014): 3-30

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"The Scale Question in Contemporary Asian Art," Japan Foundation Asia Center: Art Studies 02, 2016

Joan Kee

How is the contemporary Asian art field defined by questions of scale? Surveys two key exhibitions, "Cities on the Move" and "Traditions/Tensions"

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Scale and Its Histories

Chris Lukinbeal

2016

While geographers have long considered the meaning of place, space, and landscape, they have only recently turned their attention toward the concept of scale. During the 1990s and 2000s it was taken up in the " scale debates " in human geography, but these debates engaged very little with the scientific geography, cartography, or GIS communities. While no consensus was ever reached about what exactly scale means, its degree of usefulness, or whether it even exists, the continued use of scale has nevertheless become stigmatized or even blacklisted from the vernacular of human geography. I argue that what was missing from the scale debates was that cartographic scale is not the oldest form of scale; rather, scale as a mentifact predates its use in cartography. This point is important because it exposes scale's two histories: one as a mentifact tied to the human condition, justice, and value, and the other as a representational device that aides in transforming three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional form. The implications of this bifurcated history show that the varied and unstable nature of the meaning of scale complicates its use within all subfields of geography. 'we can see there is something there that we cannot see' —Balázs 1970, 76

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Size matters: virtual scale and bodily imagination in architectural drawing

Paul Emmons

arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, 2005

This small reflection on scale begins with remembering Jorge Luis Borges's tale of a certain seventeenth-century Spanish treatise describing a place where 'the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection' that a map of the Empire was made: 'whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars […]'. 1 Borges's full-sized map enveloping its territory helps us to understand the delirious condition of scale drawing gone awry that occurs in cad where buildings are represented at 'full scale'. After thousands of years of developing architectural drawing in scale, it behoves our thoughtful study, as scale is not merely a technical issue, but a question of the nature of architectural conception. A scale drawing is more than a miniature; it has a consistent specific ratio to its object. The scale of an architectural drawing consists of equal parts measure and proportion where a unit of measurement is chosen and a ratio established between actual and apparent size. 2 Eighteenthcentury surveyor Samuel Wyld defined scale as 'the true and exact Figure of the Plott, tho' of another Bigness'. 3 Scale is a stair providing means for ascending and descending between the great and the small or in music between the high and the low. 4 'Scale' is simultaneously an instrument for the hand to make drawings and for the mind to imagine buildings. 5 Scale's presence in architecture is so enormous that it is almost invisible and has been used for at least several thousand years. 6 From the middle of the second millennium BCE, a statue of Gudea, leader of the City State of Lagash in presentday Iraq, is seated with a building floor plan resting on his lap. Also on the tablet are a stylus and a scale rule, showing fine divisions of the finger measure. 7 Representing scale Modern architectural scale drawing begins early in the Renaissance with the widespread use of paper and the separation of the architect from the construction site, so that early illustrated history arq. vol 9. nos 3/4. 2005 227 history The rich, long history of scale as the imaginative inhabitation of a drawing provides a critique of the seductive but illusory exactness of 'full scale' representations in CAD.

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Scales as a Symbol of Metaphysical Judgement – from Misterium Tremendum to Misterium Fascinosum An Analysis of Selected Works of Netherlandish Masters of Painting

Karol Dobrzeniecki

2016

The aim of this article is to analyze the motif of scales in Netherlandish art from the 15th to the 17th century. The motif of scales was present in art from earliest times, but its role and function differed in various historical epochs – antique, the middle ages, and the modern age. The core part of the article is devoted to the symbolic relationship between scales and different aspects of justice. The first painting taken into consideration is Rogier van der Weyden’s Last Judgment (approx. 1445 to 1450), and the last one – Jan Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance (approx. 1662-1663). The article attempts to answer some crucial questions. What were the meanings attributed to scales during the two centuries examined? How did these meanings evolve, and was the interpretation of the symbol influenced by the ethos characteristic for particular periods and geographical spaces, as well as transient fashions, religious and political changes? The article presents paintings selected during th...

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Beyond scale: Imprinting of everyday life in the architectural and artistic forms

Milena Kordic

SAJ. Serbian architectural journal, 2016

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Some Theoretical issues in comparing Modernities in Art

John Clark

World Art Studies: exploring Concepts and Approaches,, 2003

2003 Some Theoretical issues in comparing Modernities in Art 2008 ‘Modernities in Art: how are they “other”?’ in World Art Studies: exploring Concepts and Approaches, eds. Wilfried van Damme and Kitty Zijlmans, Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008.

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Scale to Size: An Introduction (2025)
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