Perspective

=Perspective= Artists and audiences have always perceived pictorial space in ways that suit their worldview - their way, literally, of "looking at the world." 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. 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.

In religious painting of the late Middle Ages, space seems to open out from the picture plane. It encompasses the viewers to make them part of the sacred events depicted, bringing them into the same sphere with the holy figures of Jesus, Mary, and the saints. During the early Renaissance, however, as humanism focused attention on man and human perception, the viewer assumes the active role. Now, instead of projecting outward, space recedes - with measured regularity - from the viewer's eye into the picture plane. Because the viewer himself is the point of reference, the illusion of space is more realistic than was ever before achieved. 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. In linear perspective, all lines converge to a single point in the distance - the vanishing point. Often it is possible to see where the artist has scored these perspective lines into the surface of the painting to serve as guides.



Can you find the vanishing point in Raphael's //School of Athens//, below?



Scroll down to get some help locating the vanishing point.



Click this link to get a more mathematical explanation of how perspective works: []