Nelson-Denny Practice Test 2

The Geometry of Seeing

¹For most of the Middle Ages, European painters showed little interest in making a flat panel look like a window onto real space. Figures in religious paintings were often sized according to their importance rather than their distance from the viewer, so that a saint might tower over the buildings behind him. Gold backgrounds, which suggested the radiance of heaven, flattened the scene still further.

²In the early fifteenth century, artists in Florence began to pursue a different goal. The architect Filippo Brunelleschi is credited with demonstrating a method, now called linear perspective, for representing depth on a flat surface. Some years later, the writer and architect Leon Battista Alberti set out the method in a treatise on painting. Its central principle is that parallel lines receding from the viewer, such as the edges of a floor or a road, should be drawn so that they meet at a single vanishing point on the horizon. Objects shrink in a regular, measurable way as they approach that point.

³The new method did more than improve realism. Because every line in the picture was organized around one point, the painting assumed a viewer standing in one particular place and looking from one fixed eye level. The picture was thus arranged for an individual observer, and its space could be measured and reasoned about like a problem in geometry. Some historians see in this change an early sign of the confidence, characteristic of the Renaissance, that the visible world could be understood through mathematics.

⁴Perspective was not, however, simply the discovery of how things "really" look. Human beings see with two eyes that are constantly moving, not from one fixed point, and later artists such as the Cubists would deliberately abandon single-point perspective, treating it as one convention among many.