Rebirth!

Abstract

It was not until the early fifteenth century that Filippo Brunelleschi, another architect from Florence, invented the vanishing point by using geometry, not to say mathematics. And yet another architect, also Florentine, Leon Batista Alberti, who was a good friend of Brunelleschi’s, wrote a theoretical book about the revolutionary discovery of perspective. From this point on, a painting could show the viewer the image of a third dimension on a plane of just two dimensions, thanks to the evolving science of geometry. Leon Batista Alberti explains the vanishing point in his book “De pictura”, putting particular emphasis on the mathematical and geometrical aspects. “De pictura” became the first scientifically written document about perspective. Here we find a rather amazing synchronicity, in that mathematicians were already exploring a third dimension in geometry at that very time.