After the crisis of the ancient world and the medieval era, a profound cognitive revolution in Western culture occurred in the Renaissance, and particularly in the world of the visual arts.
Linear perspective is a system for representing three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface devised in Florence in the 15th century. It is based on the insight that the lines of a three-dimensional environment painted on a two-dimensional plane, such as a room or a street, converge at a point on the horizon, called the “vanishing point,” so objects shrink in proportion to their distance. An idea well known to all today, but one that was a real shock at the time, stimulating a real cognitive revolution in the art world. With the affirmation of perspective, the West shifted its gaze from the beyond to the real world: after the dark ages, art, anticipating science, reopened its eyes to rediscover man and the reality around him. It was thus a methodology based on a cognitive technology-the perspective technique-that stimulated the Renaissance revolution, and created a new representation of reality that anticipated the scientific method, shaping one of the highest moments of universal art. Renaissance masters elaborated the perspective technique, an innovative representation of space in 3-D that is still valid today, based on mathematical models as virtual reality does today, simulating the world with new digital media. It is to two architects, Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti, that we owe the discovery of perspective and the elaboration of the mathematical rules that govern it. Brunelleschi around 1413 created optical instruments to demonstrate the theory of perspective and brought to the Piazza del Duomo a kind of “prospettograph,” a square panel depicting the baptistery of San Giovanni in perspective. It is speculated that it was a painted picture with a small hole in the center, by means of which the public could verify the coincidence of perspective lines. Brunelleschi’s technique anticipates other machines devised by painters and architects to represent the world in perspective. In his treatise “De pictura,” Alberti systematically describes the perspective method, which would influence art history for centuries, and which still forms the basis of 3-D representations and virtual reality. The most popular perspectiveographs are based on the principle, formulated by Leon Battista Alberti and later systematized by Leonardo da Vinci, of intercepting and fixing the image on a plane that intersects the cone of vision. This plane is usually represented by a veil or a sheet of glass-in each case, a transparent surface on which one can directly draw what one observes. The observer fixes his or her point of view through a hole or viewfinder, which forces the observer to maintain a stable eye position. Another type of prospectograph, on the other hand, uses a plane with a grid that breaks down and organizes the visual scene into regular portions, allowing the draughtsman to transfer it faithfully to a sheet of paper that is also divided into a corresponding grid.
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