Perspective is the method painters use to make a flat surface look deep. Its best-known form, linear perspective, rests on two things everyone has noticed.
Objects look smaller the farther away they are. Parallel lines that run away from us, like the edges of a road, seem to draw together until they meet at a single point on the horizon, called the vanishing point.
A painter who aims every receding line at that point can make a wall look like a window, the illusion the method was invented to produce. In The School of Athens, which Raphael painted in the Vatican palace, the paved floor and the rows of arches all run back toward the center, so the hall appears to continue behind the wall it is painted on.
The name of the method points to the eye. It goes back to the Latin perspicere, “to look through” or “to look closely at.” In the Middle Ages, perspectiva was the name of a science, optics, the study of light and vision, and Italian painters borrowed the word, as prospettiva, for their new way of drawing space.
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Before the fifteenth century, painters had not looked for such a window. For most of the Middle Ages, the size of a figure showed rank, not distance, so a Virgin could tower over the angels around her throne.
The first step toward real space came around 1300 from Giotto, a Florentine painter who gave his figures solid bodies and set them in a space with some depth. He built that depth by eye, though, without a rule that held the whole picture together.
Such a rule appeared in Florence in the early fifteenth century: a geometric way to aim every receding line at one point and shrink each object according to its distance. It is credited to an architect, Filippo Brunelleschi, the man who later raised the great dome of the city's cathedral.
His two demonstration panels are lost, and most of what is known about them comes from a biography written decades later, which describes a painted church, a hole and a mirror.
Brunelleschi's peephole
The biographer, Antonio Manetti, was a Florentine who wrote Brunelleschi's life in the 1480s. He describes the experiment step by step, from the spot where the architect stood to paint to the size of the hole he drilled, and he explains what the mirror was for.
What You'll Discover
What Alberti meant by an open window.
Where Masaccio put his vanishing point.
Why distant mountains turn blue.
What Leonardo hammered into a wall.
The yellow stone set in a church floor.
How Cézanne bent the rules.