Exam 3: Renaissance art in fifteenth-century Italy

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Linear perspective is a mathematical system for creating the illusion of space and distance on a flat surface. The system originated in Florence, Italy in the early 1400s. The artist and architect Brunelleschi demonstrated its principles, but another architect and writer, Leon Battista Alberti was first to write down rules of linear perspective for artists to follow. Leonardo da Vinci probably learned Alberti's system while serving as an apprentice to the artist Verrocchio in Florence.

To use linear perspective an artist must first imagine the picture surface as an "open window" through which to see the painted world. Straight lines are then drawn on the canvas to represent the horizon and "visual rays" connecting the viewer's eye to a point in the distance.

The horizon line runs across the canvas at the eye level of the viewer. The horizon line is where the sky appears to meet the ground.

The vanishing point should be located near the center of the horizon line. The vanishing point is where all parallel lines (orthogonals) that run towards the horizon line appear to come together like train tracks in the distance.

Orthogonal lines are "visual rays" helping the viewer's eye to connect points around the edges of the canvas to the vanishing point. An artist uses them to align the edges of walls and paving stones.

In the Middle Ages, the period before the Renaissance, most art in Europe featured heavenly figures devoted to the worship of Christ. Because the people in Medieval paintings were citizens of heaven and the artists painting these pictures had never actually seen heaven, the background was left to the imagination and the teachings of the church. Gold backgrounds were very common, as the air in heaven surely must be precious. When people became more interested in the world around them and the ideas of other people rather than heaven and the teachings of Christ and the saints, landscapes and buildings began to show up in paintings. Everyone could see landscapes and buildings everyday so one of the essential artistic problems of the Renaissance became how to paint landscapes and buildings in pictures so that they looked the same as in real life.

In the Renaissance, painters needed to be able to translate the three-dimensional world around them onto the two-dimensional surface of a painting, called the "picture plane." The solution was "linear perspective"; the idea that converging lines meet at a single vanishing point and all shapes get smaller in all directions with increasing distance from the eye. The discovery of perspective is attributed to the architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446), who suggested a system that explained how objects shrink in size according to their position and distance from the eye. However, the nature of Brunelleschi's system and date of its discovery remain unclear.

In 1435, Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), provided the first theory of what we now call linear perspective in his book, On Painting. The impact of this new system of measurement in paintings was enormous and most artists painting in Europe after 1435 were aware of the principles Alberti outlined in his book. First, an artist created a "floor" (a ground or stage on which figures and objects would be placed) in a painting and drew a receding grid to act as a guide to the relative scale of all other elements within the picture. Alberti suggests relating the size of the floor squares to a viewer's height. This suggestion is important because it reveals an underlying principal of the Renaissance. The act of painting would no longer be to glorify God, as it had been in Medieval Europe. Painting in the Renaissance related instead, to those people looking at the painting.

In this study for Adoration of the Magi, Leonardo has carefully drawn all of the lines needed to create perspective before sketching in all the figures. Look carefully and see if you can find the horizon line,orthogonals, and vanishing point.



Development of Perspective During the Renaissance

At the beginning of the 14th-century, the great proto-Renaissance fresco painter Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337) introduced linear perspective into his 1305 painting - Jesus Before Caiaphas; but the implementation was contradictory and inadequate.

Indeed, the use of perspective in painting wasn't properly investigated until the era of the Early Renaissance. The process commenced about 1413 whenFilippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446), the architect, engineer and sculptor, demonstrated the geometrical method of perspective, by comparing his painting of the Florentine baptistry with a real-life view. His ideas were further implemented by Tommaso Masaccio (1401-1428) in his fresco paintings likeThe Holy Trinity (1425) and The Tribute Money (1426), and by Tommaso di Cristofano Masolino (1383-1440) in his work The Healing of the Cripple and the Raising of Tabitha (1425) - part of the Brancacci Chapel frescoes. The scientific details of linear perspective and the correct method of showing distance in painting were also discussed by the Genovese architect and art-theorist Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) - in his treatise Della Pittura(1435/1436) - and by the Florentine sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455) - in his incomplete manuscript entitled Commentaries, a work which drew heavily on the 11th century Book of Optics by the Iraqi mathematician Alhazen. Other pioneers of perspective in art included the Umbrian painterPiero della Francesca (1420-92), who further developed the mathematical principles contained in Alberti's Della Pittura (complete with precise illustrations), the Padua-based Francesco Squarcione (1395-1468) - teacher of Andrea Mantegna - and the Florentine Paolo Uccello (1397-1475) whose obsession with optical perspective is well illustrated in his work Battle of San Romano (1455).

The principles of linear perspective were further explored during the High Renaissance, by artists such as Raphael (1483-1520), in masterpieces like The School of Athens (1518). However, while Renaissance art made a major breakthrough in our understanding of how to accurately depict depth in a two-dimensional picture plane, it remained firmly wedded to the simple one-point perspective scheme, which duly became part of the core-curriculum in academies of fine art across Europe. During the Baroque era, painters likePietro da Cortona (1596-1669) and Andrea Pozzo (1642-1709) used their knowledge of perspective to build on pioneering work by Andrea Mantegna in order to perfect the illusionistic painting technique called quadratura. Thistrompe l'oeil method of (fresco) ceiling painting appeared to extend the architectural features of a room into imaginary space.

18th Century Onwards

It wasn't until the 18th century that two-point perspective in art began to be appreciated and explored, notably by artists like the Venetian architectural cityscape painter Canaletto (1697-1768) and Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78), who all tried bold new ways of improving on one-point perspective with its old idea of a central vanishing point. The next major development wasCubism, which appeared in the late 1900s and revolutionized all ideas of three-dimensional depth in painting, by promoting the two-dimensional picture plane. However, the most spectacular advances in linear perspective have come during the late 20th century with the advent of computers. Today, modern graphics software programs can demonstrate numerous schemes of spatial depth and alignment at the press of a button.