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O ne of the most interesting and important changes in art that occurred dur-
ing the Renaissance was the discovery of an idea that made it possible for
painters to translate the three-dimensional world they lived in onto the
two-dimensional surface of a painting. This idea is called “linear perspective.”
Linear perspective was first invented by a famous Renaissance architect named
Filippo Brunelleschi, who had a system that helped show how objects shrink in
size according to their distance from the eye. Brunelleschi’s system has been lost
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Leonardo the Artist and Dreamer
Linear Perspective
The basic idea behind linear perspective is actually pretty simple: in every paint-
ing an artist creates a “floor” or area of the painting where the figures and/or
objects will be placed. The floor ends at a horizon line, and the horizon line has a
vanishing point on it. The artist then
Horizon line Vanishing point draws parallel lines radiating from the
vanishing point outward. Images clos-
est to the vanishing point should ap-
pear smaller and closer together, and
images farthest from the vanishing point should appear larger and farther apart,
giving the impression of depth and space in the painting.
to history, but in 1435, a painter and architect named Leon Battista Alberti wrote
a book called On Painting, in which he described a method that painters could use
that would actually do just what Brunelleschi suggested: make what was painted
on the canvas look three-dimensional.
Alberti’s book had a huge influence on painters during the Renaissance, in-
cluding Leonardo. He learned about Alber-
ti’s theory of linear perspective during his
days as an apprentice in Verrocchio’s studio,
and all of Leonardo’s paintings, even his early
ones, show that he not only understood linear
perspective, he took the idea of perspective even
further.
Leonardo considered a painting a window to
the outside world, and wanted everything in his
paintings to look as if it were a scene through a
window, happening before the viewer’s eyes. Be-
cause he was a careful observer of nature, he no-
ticed that at different times of day objects in the
distance looked more or less sharp and took on
Leonardo’s angel against the background
in The Baptism of Christ
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Amazing Leonardo da Vinci Inventions
slightly different colors. Other painters had also noticed this and even had started
showing it in their paintings, but Leonardo carefully measured and recorded what
he noticed. For example, Leonardo noticed that in the morning light, distant objects
(such as hills or mountains) looked less distinct and more blue than closer hills or
mountains. He also noticed that the farther away the image was, the more its color
blended into the color of the air around it.
As a result of his observations, Leonardo came up with some simple rules for
painters to follow in creating what he called aerial perspective: the nearest object
should be painted its true color, the one immediately behind the nearest one should
be painted proportionately bluer, and the object farther away should be proportion-
ately bluer still.
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Leonardo the Artist and Dreamer
Build It Yourself
Build Your Own PersPectoGraPh
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Amazing Leonardo da Vinci Inventions
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