For The First Generations Of The Renaissance, Perspective Had A Special Meaning

Learn to capture an image equal to the dimensions of a distance you want to reach, without being affected by the reception of a reality with obvious characteristics of “broadening the horizon”.

Perspective. Other works on perspective were also written, but they did not bring anything new, but merely repeated what Euclid wrote on the point of view and the vanishing point. But the fact that such works were written shows that painters began to show interest in this problem, which would completely change their conception of painting. During the Middle Ages, no one posed the problem of rendering three-dimensional space in a two-dimensional painting. There were certain processes that gave the figures and objects a certain relief, but they were presented in a stylized way, and the painting, in its entirety, had a symbolic character.

Painters from the beginning of the Renaissance, however, understood that perspective gave them the opportunity to highlight the space in which the models were, represented in such a way as to be able to establish, at a single glance, the connections and relationships between the represented forms, which could even appear isolated or detached from each other. In Leone Batistta Alberti’s book, “On Painting”, the painting was supposed to be “like a transparent window through which a part of the visible world appears”. This book is also the first systematic treatise on perspective. He showed how several equal segments can be represented in perspective, placed one after the other, and especially that the perspective of the circle in a plane not parallel to the plane of the painting was an ellipse.

Although Alberti composed the first systematic treatise on perspective, Filippo Brunelleschi is considered the founder of modern perspective, and in his honor, Florence erected a funerary monument. He showed that a perfect illusion of three-dimensional space can be created in a painting, if the point of view, i.e. the observer’s eye, is located at a distance that corresponds to the actual distance at which the painting is located. He introduced the notion of the horizon line and that of the transparent fictitious painting, which is interposed between the painting and the object. He and his students, Masaccio and Paolo Uccello used these notions in their paintings, and of Uccello, Leonardo da Vinci remembers exclaiming: “How sweet is perspective.” Uccelo also drew, for the first time and after much effort, a circle in perspective !

Does the perspective you relate to give you the opportunity to highlight the space where the patterns of perception of the images you perceive around you are located, representing them in such a way that the connection between what you imagine and reality can be established?

- In truth, the ellipse that Apollonius had loved and studied its properties some 17 centuries before, was rediscovered, in an entirely rudimentary form, now in the Renaissance. Here we recognize a single model of image perception that Apollonius noticed around: when the image is perceived as an object of direct experience of the moments of life, then the representation of the artistic vision will depend on what happens on the “surface”, not in background.

- You have no reason to be surprised, that is exactly why we are in the Renaissance era. But, practically, things did not go quite so easily, for example, the problem of the vanishing point was imposed quite late, because the painters could not accept the idea that parallel lines could meet. Only in the middle of the 14th century does it appear in the paintings of Giotto, Lorenzetti, Jan van Eyck, applied to the parallel lines between the floors or the ceiling.

- Let’s not forget that this theory of perspective and closely related to it, that of proportions, required serious geometry studies, and these studies developed in the 15th and 16th centuries. This is what Jan Bialostocki writes in the book before us.

For the first generations of the Renaissance, perspective had a special significance. From their point of view “mathematical perspective not only gave the guarantee of correctness (representation of reality), but also offered – and perhaps, above all, that’s why – the guarantee of an aesthetic perfection”. The problem of the correctness of the representation of space and what is in it was, therefore, essentially identical to the basic problem of Renaissance aesthetics, which is distinguished by emphasizing harmony as the most important compositional principle.

And there was something else, those painter-geometrists who penetrated deeper into the problem, were not willing to disseminate it outside the narrow circle of students they had next to them. I know that Albrecht Durer made a particular journey from Nuremberg in Italy to Venice and Bologna to learn the secrets of perspective, “mysterious perspective”. When he returned, he wrote a special geometry for painters: directions for measurements by compass and ruler, probably inspired by Pierro della Francesca’s book On Perspective in Painting, which circulates in manuscript or perhaps after Leonardo da Vinci’s “Treatise on Painting”.

Leadership depends on what you want to convey through the image, where the parallelism between the element of novelty that marks the direct experience of life’s moments and the expansion of a horizon that stretches beyond you makes sense.

For The First Generations Of The Renaissance, Perspective Had A Special Significance. But even now, and especially in the future, perspective will have associated contents made up of objects, properties of these objects, as well as the relationships between objects.

But more than that, I would allow myself another approach to perspective: to be aware of a horizon that stretches beyond you, finding its relevance in the way of reality to reconstruct a moment of great trial under the influence of the surprising (or the random).

* Note: Câmpan, Florica - Povestiri cu proporţii şi simetrii, Editura Albatros, 1985.