EARLY PERSPECTIVE THINKERS

During the 1620s, Francis Bacon, a Franciscan monk, composed the Opus Majus. This was intended to be a compendium of the knowledge of the world. As we may expect from a Franciscan monk, he is continually looking at the world thru the eyes of God. “…Oh, how the ineffable beauty of the divine wisdom would shine and infinite benefit would overflow, if these matters relating to geometry…should be placed before our eyes in their physical forms!” Drawing in the service of God. Drawing as a way of representing God’s truthful ordering of the universe.

Very early, it was nearly inconceivable for the purposes of art to be anything other than the celebration of God. And any geometrical system of constructing these pictures that led to greater truth only got the artist and the viewer, in their view, closer to God. If a geometric system could show God’s master order for the universe, that only adds credence to your belief system.

The eventual acceptance of linear perspective was dependent upon a mathematically approved definition of infinite space. Other early perspective thinkers abounded. Thomas Bradwardine who  added to the inexorable drive toward the mathematical and he brought God along with it. Indeed, a precursor of the modern world was the belief that mathematical space and God’s divine logic were one. While at the beginning it was important for God to be intertwined with mathematics, at this point it time it would seem that the secular mathematical world is trying to shun God.

The fact that there was an ordering system which permitted such a “realistic” picture only indicated, to artists in the early 15th century, that there was a moral order and human perfection might be possible. So as we might expect, the first comprehensive uses of the linear perspective were of solely religious subjects.

Brunelleschi then was the first artist / scientist to proffer the concept of the single vanishing point. In his famous experiment in Florence at the Duomo, he painted the images of buildings on a mirror. And he noticed that when he continued the lines from the building, they converged. Then he compared a reflected image of the baptistery with his drawing, asking viewers to compare them to see if the drawing was accurate. To the viewer, the building and the drawing were indistinguishable. After this, there was no stopping the advancement and acceptance of the linear perspective.

Alberti, Brunelleschi’s friend, was also an early thinker and proponent of the perspective. He saw the meaning in less theological terms and more in terms of a universal aesthetic beauty. While based on Brunelleschi’s experiments, Alberti might be considered the first step toward a secular application and understanding of linear perspective. His system could be considered more of a theatrical application; you the viewer are looking into a unified pictorial space. Alberti was the first to formalize the methods of the linear perspective into a useable set of rules and guidelines.