by comparing the view of the Florentine
Baptistery
from a doorway of the unfinished Il Duomo
with his painting reflected in a mirror.
Leon Battista Alberti wrote the first manual for
artists.
Piero della Francesca completed the picture
by adding illustrations and showing how
to represent solids in any area of the picture plane.
Other perspectives
Other artists had had other schemes.
In ancient Egypt, major characters
were larger and placed higher in the composition.
In medieval illustrations, larger figures
had more spiritual or social importance.
Early Italian masters used shadowing
to create an illusion of depth.
In Byzantine art the settings of important
figures
were put in reverse perspective,
where the vanishing point was in front of the
picture.
Perspectives
Sitting at a dockside cafe with her, I seemed
to think the sea stood upright like a blue wall.
A small boat crawled slowly down
like a snail with sails. As I raised a toast to the two of
us,
a jet passed overhead like the head of an arrow
leaving a small hole in a cloud, like the hole in my heart.
I waited for the evening’s wine to reverse
the effects of my afternoon coffee, while the sun set
and the sea disappeared under red flags,
inverted, as though I were inside a camera obscura.
An artist expressing his or her feelings in art, even making
abstract art, is an act of illusion, a sleight of hand. It is not
a contradiction that a mathematics based on optics can help an
artist create an illusion of a realistic scene. Our eyeballs
project the world onto our retinas upside down and horizontally
inverted. Given that our minds are not tied to the orientation of
the image on our retinas, one might ask whether there is any limit
to the mind’s ability to make things seem right when they
are not.
Although Brunelleschi made his demonstration between 1413 and
1420, Alberti published De pictura in 1435, and Francesca
wrote De Prospectiva Pingendi around 1480. It took many
years for the practice to spread to other parts of Italy and
Europe.
An artist expressing his or her feelings in art, even making abstract art, is an act of illusion, a sleight of hand. It is not a contradiction that a mathematics based on optics can help an artist create an illusion of a realistic scene. Our eyeballs project the world onto our retinas upside down and horizontally inverted. Given that our minds are not tied to the orientation of the image on our retinas, one might ask whether there is any limit to the mind’s ability to make things seem right when they are not.
Although Brunelleschi made his demonstration between 1413 and 1420, Alberti published De pictura in 1435, and Francesca wrote De Prospectiva Pingendi around 1480. It took many years for the practice to spread to other parts of Italy and Europe.
Readings on wikipedia:
Other readings: