Art and Perspective in the Renaissance

During the period of European history known as the Renaissance, which ran from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, man engaged with the world around him with a sense of adventure and curiosity. The constraints and stagnation of the Middle Ages, ruled by the ideology of the Catholic Church, were gradually left behind. Artists were obsessed with finding bold new techniques and forms capable of fully expressing the Renaissance atmosphere. It is said that fifteenth-century Florentine painter Paolo Uccello was so fascinated by the problems of perspective—a technique for illustrating a three-dimensional scene on a flat surface, like a canvas or wall—that he stayed awake nights pondering them. “Perspective is such a beguiling thing!” he would say when his wife told him it was bedtime. Legends aside, the fact is that Renaissance painters created masterpieces with the aid of perspective and other new methods, displaying the same daring and inventiveness as their contemporaries in other fields of human endeavor, such as Nicolaus Copernicus, the Polish astronomer who in 1543 demolished the cosmological system defended by the Church, or the great navigators, like Columbus.

Art reflects the spirit of its time through its themes, forms, and techniques. In ideological terms, Christianity lay at the core of medieval European society. Earthly life was deemed less important than spiritual life, and emphasis was placed on what would follow death. Medieval painting manifested this philosophical attitude, and for visual artists in the Middle Ages, the Bible, not man or nature, was their key source of themes. Since they had no interest in techniques to help them show the world as it was, they ignored perspective, and their works looked flat. Content with expressing themselves symbolically, they employed a highly stylized approach when portraying people and objects, usually depicting them against a golden background as if to stress that the theme of their paintings—most often religious—bore no relation to the real world.

With the advent of the Renaissance, artists turned to portraiture, landscapes, and scenes from daily life. Even when their theme was religious, they painted their figures to seem real, often going so far as to dress biblical characters in Renaissance-era clothing. In tune with this thematic shift, painters also sought out techniques that would render their pictures more realistic. In this regard, one of their central concerns was perspective.

How to portray exactly what the eyes see—this was the challenge facing Renaissance artists. Since scenes from real life are three-dimensional but paintings are flat, it at first seemed impossible to achieve realistic visual representations. Artists eventually solved the problem by recognizing an essential fact of how humans see. Imagine a person observing a scene through a window with only one eye. He is able to visualize the scene because rays of light from myriad points strike his eye. Because these rays pass through the window, a dot can be drawn on the pane of glass at each point where a beam from the real-life scene crosses it. This set of dots is the projection of the scene on the window. What Renaissance painters discovered is that this projection leaves the same impression on the person’s eye as does the scene itself. We can understand this in physical terms, because the effect is roughly the same whether it is the result of light beams emanating from particles of the real scene or the result of dots drawn on the window.

This example provides a fine illustration of how painters envisioned things back then: their pictures should be like windows onto the world. Generalizing from this example, we can position a pane of glass between the scene and the observer and trace out the projection that appears on the glass. Of course, this projection depends not only on the artist’s own position but also on the position of the pane, which means the same scene can be portrayed many ways. Once an artist has chosen his scene, his position, and the position of the pane, he must faithfully transfer what is in the projection to his canvas.

Even if an adequate method for painting realistically and with perspective can be established, the approach is somewhat cumbersome in practice. Moreover, depicted scenes often exist only in the artist’s imagination. So a search began for geometric methods that could be used to determine precisely how a scene should appear on a (now imaginary) pane of glass and thus be faithfully reproduced on canvas.

The matter therefore shifted into the field of mathematics. Since many Renaissance artists were also architects and engineers, they were up to the task. Two fundamental concepts emerged: the horizon line, or infinity, and the vanishing point. You can observe the horizon line experimentally by looking out at the ocean, at the place where sea and sky divide. Furthermore, the horizon can be considered a straight line, since the earth’s curvature is so small. This line is found in every scene, even if not as explicitly as in this example. The vanishing point is where straight, parallel lines appear to meet, even though they never do so physically. This is easy to observe in the case of railroad tracks, which never actually meet and yet to the human eye appear to touch at the horizon. In fact, herein lies the relationship between the two concepts at hand: if straight, parallel lines are horizontal, as in the case of railroad tracks, their vanishing point will always be at the horizon line.

Based on the concepts of vanishing point and horizon line, Renaissance painters defined rules for determining the location, size, and shape of objects in their paintings and frescoes. The application of these two fundamental concepts is strikingly evident in two magnificent works: Rafael’s The Marriage of the Virgin and Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. These two artists were at the forefront of the early sixteenth-century period known as the High Renaissance, and they had wholly mastered these new painting techniques.

These transformations in the realm of art occurred gradually, reaching their peak during the High Renaissance. Most scholars agree that Florentine painter Giotto, who lived from 1266 to 1337, laid the foundations for the changes in the field of art that transpired during the Renaissance. Giotto was a true revolutionary. Little of what preceded him in the history of art was of any help in painting either spaces that seemed real or human figures that expressed real feelings. Anticipating the art revolution inaugurated one century after his death, Giotto severed ties with the symbolic, highly stylized approach used by gothic painters. He posed his figures in natural postures and groupings and let strong human feelings show through. In his works, the sky is no longer golden—contrary to the gothics, who thus symbolized the reign of God in the firmament—but, quite meaningfully, blue. His compositions were rational attempts to portray real rooms and spaces. Thanks to his sharp intuition, this revolutionary painter was already probing the laws of perspective, blazing the trail so that those who followed could define these laws more precisely.

It was not until the fifteenth century that someone who could compete with Giotto’s talent came along: Masaccio. Born in 1401, Masaccio ushered in a period of intense technical development in the field of painting and made major contributions to art through his death in 1428. Likewise from Florence, he was the first Renaissance painter to master the use of geometric perspective, relying on principles discovered by architect Filippo Brunelleschi during his research on ancient Roman construction. Masaccio was also the first to indicate the human anatomy lying beneath the folds of clothing on his figures and also to experiment heavily with chiaroscuro, a technique where figures and objects are shaded to lend the appearance of volume.

Masaccio also applied aerial perspective more effectively than earlier artists. In this technique, distant objects are represented as fainter, and they fade into blue tones, something you can observe experimentally by looking at distant elevations. This is because of the air mass lying between observer and object; the greater the distance between them, the greater this effect. Aerial perspective and chiaroscuro are ways of surpassing the limits of geometric perspective, which is based on the supposition that we see with only one eye, when our depth perception in fact derives primarily from the stereoscopic vision afforded by two eyes. Masaccio and later Renaissance artists skillfully employed and combined the three techniques to give the illusion of depth.

Masaccio managed to make his figures both more solid and softer than Giotto’s. His style set a standard that would be followed in general lines throughout the Renaissance. In the fifteenth century, Masaccio’s compatriots lent continuity to his work, striving to perfect technical aspects of painting. In the 1430s, Leon Alberti addressed this topic in a book whose guiding principles influenced many artists for hundreds of years. Two of the leading painters of the Florentine school were the monk Fra Angelico, who blended the new technique of perspective with the decorative style of the Middle Ages, and Paolo Uccello, mentioned earlier, who was obsessed with the technique. Andrea Mantegna was also from the Florentine school, although he lived in Padua; his painting Lamentation of Christ is a notable example of perspective and was in part done as an exercise in this technique.

In the final decades of the fifteenth century, this newly developed artistic language enjoyed new momentum and spread geographically, as the Renaissance approach to painting gained ground across Europe. It flourished in Flanders, where Jan van Eyck was one among other notables, and in Germany, with Albrecht Dürer as the major proponent. At the same time, Italy, and especially Rome, was the birthplace of the classic period of the Renaissance, also known as the High Renaissance. This was the era of Leonardo da Vinci’s and Rafael’s great masterpieces. By relying on these newly developed techniques, they achieved an ideal of perfection, beauty, and harmony in their paintings and frescoes that still inspires awe.

Around this time, technical investigation was supplanted by a period of dormancy, but soon to be disrupted by the rise of new ideas. All classicism is fleeting, because it represents a hard-to-sustain balancing point. Yet the classic period of the Renaissance established an artistic language where perspective was one of the key elements, serving as the foundation for all subsequent artistic movements until the nineteenth century—when French impressionists became the first since the Renaissance artists to offer truly revolutionary contributions to the portrayal of images on the flat surface of a canvas.

Henrique Davidovich

English version by Diane Grosklaus Whitty