art history

The word perspective comes from Latin verb perspicio , meaning to see clearly . Its original meaning puts a general emphasis on the lifelikeness of a given representation . During the centuries the artists of various epochs invented and re-invented the techniques for representing the reality and true nature by the means of linear perspective , the play of light and shade . The long history of the development of skill to reflect the illusion of space and volume finished with its collapse in the early twentieth century . The World War I brought to the Western art

the devaluation of conventional human values and made the artists reconsider the reality and truth which was to be presented in their paintings

According to the Renaissance writer and critic Giorgio Vasari linear perspective reemerged in Europe around the end of the nineteenth century in the work of Giotto . It was he who first attempted the device of foreshortening , or in other words the manipulation of scale to produce depth , to obtain an illusionistic space within the plane of the painting . In his paintings the artist positions figures in the immediate foreground of the scene and other characters in the middle or the background . He shrinks the elements as they recede in depth . This technique mimics everyday perception as things closest to us appear larger than those in the distance . Thought , as Vasari claims , the system of linear perspective was reinvented by the painter-sculpture architect Brunelleschi . His discoveries placed an increased emphasis on the viewer 's gaze . The artist produced perfect examples of his discovery which operated like public peep-shows . In these demonstration pieces he painted an accurate depiction of San Giovanni in Florence , which was separated from the viewer by a partition with a small peep-hole cut out in the middle . Directly across from this hole was a mirror in which was reflected a painted scene , which rested on the back of the partition The result was an image that seemed to recede into space . By aligning the viewer 's vision with his own centralized convergence of lines thanks to a small peep-hole , the artist found the important vanishing point , the point where lines receding back into space converge , that had not been used for over a thousand years . Painters such as Masaccio Piero della Francesca , Bellini followed the discoveries of Brunelleschi during the period

Piero della Francesca wrote two treatise one of which is on perspective De prospectiva pingendi . Piero studied perspective with somewhat more rigor than his predecessors . He tended to match the human figure with the perfection of geometry and to place it within the immobility of perspective . In any number of his paintings we find that each figure and object aspires to the state of a geometrical form . The vitality of his pictures is sustained . Take the tree and the second angel in the London Baptism both of them remind cylinders or columns , and both of them accordingly assume an enigmatic stateliness . Yet they remain very much a tree and an angel , their...