Hungarian artist Bence Hajdu digitally edited out all the characters from old master paintings for his aptly titled series Abandoned Paintings. What started as a simple study of perspectival drawing turned into a series about the environments of renaissance painting which, outside the world of art historians, is largely ignored. Previously encouraged by the painters to focus on the Virgin Mary, Jesus and his disciples, Horatii warriors, and baby angels, we now shift our attention to tiled floors, towns outside the window, empty dinner tables, arches, boats, and gardens. Work this flawless is always stunning to stare at, and will hopefully inspire lots of photoshop-savvy art history enthusiasts to do this with all their favorite paintings. Bence’s statement:
“I am a student at the university of fine arts, hungary. At one of the descriptive geometry classes we had a task to find and draw the perspective and horizon lines of renaissance and other pictures with significant perspective space. I thought it is not that interesting to just draw lines, so I decided to erase all the characters from them and examine how the painter really created the perspective space and how it actually looks. I saw this could be something exciting and continued thinking and working on it. After a while I found myself interested in the new atmosphere and the new thoughts the retouched pieces generated without their main subjects.”
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