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Leonardo realized that the art of painting and the science of optics were inseparable from the study of perspective. Along with the proper ability to deploy shadows, the mastery of various types of perspective allowed painters to convey a three-dimensional beauty on a flat surface. A true understanding of perspective involved more than merely a for

Brunelleschi’s successor as a theorist of linear perspective was another of the towering Renaissance polymaths, Leon Battista Alberti (1404 –1472), who refined many of Brunelleschi’s experiments and extended his discoveries about perspective. An artist, architect, engineer, and writer, Alberti was like Leonardo in many ways: both were illegitimate

By applying mathematics to art, Alberti elevated the painter’s status and advanced the argument that the visual arts deserve a standing equal to that of other humanist fields, a cause that Leonardo would later champion.

Cet accent porté sur l’utilisation des ombres comme élément clé de la représentation d’objets tridimensionnels dans une peinture constitue une rupture dans les pratiques de l’époque. Dans le sillage de Leon Battista Alberti, la majorité des artistes considèrent en cette période que ce sont les lignes de contour qui priment. « Quel

Leonardo’s most important contribution to the study of perspective was to broaden the concept to include not just linear perspective, which uses geometry to figure out the relative sizes of objects in the foreground and background of a painting, but also ways of conveying depth through changes in color and clarity. “There are three branches of pers

With the help of the writings of Alberti and the development of mathematical perspective, the social and intellectual standing of painters was rising, and a few were becoming sought-after names.

Alberti, in On Painting, emphasized the importance of the idea in a clear and crisp sentence: “Movements of the soul are made known by movements of the body.”43

Utilizing Visual Perspective