English Beholders and the Art of Perspective

Abstract

‘We shall believe we have achieved our purpose if in this difficult subject, which as far as I can see has not before been treated by anyone else, our readers have been able to follow our meaning’ (p.37).¹ It is subject, that Alberti introduces the perspective construction which, together with his notion of compositio, constitutes his main contribution to the theorization of art. As we noted in the previous chapter, this construction was the offspring of Euclidean optics, the geometrical analysis of vision or, more specifically, of the visual rays ‘by [whose] agency the images of things are impressed upon the senses’ (p.40). Developed from its classical origins by a succession of Arabic and Scholastic writers during the Middle Ages, the science of optics had hitherto remained cerns. It was left to Alberti — following in the footsteps of his contemporary, Brunelleschi — to see how its lessons could be applied to the problem of ordering pictorial space. This marriage of art and science led to the invention of the painter’s perspectiva artificialis, so called to distinguish it from the perspectiva naturalis of optical studies: a set of rules enabling a mathematically exact and rigorously unified depiction of space organized around a single vanishing point.