“The idea of a rational, objective way of seeing art is an invention of the 15th century. In 1435, Leon Battista Alberti told a charming story about the architect Filippo Brunelleschi, who created an image of the Florence Baptistry so perfect that it was mistaken for the real thing. Brunelleschi gathered a crowd outside the Baptistry, and presented a bystander with a board to be held in one hand and a mirror in the other. Standing on a precise spot, looking through a small hole in the board towards the mirror that he was holding in front of him a precise distance away, the man was convinced he could see the Baptistry. In fact, he was looking at a reflection of Brunelleschi’s picture of the Baptistry, painted on the board’s reverse side. Brunelleschi has ‘discovered’ how to depict objects and buildings in proportion to each other, so that they appeared to shrink and recede into the distance, just as they do in the in the real world. This was the invention of fixed-point perspective. Brunelleschi’s revelatory painting no longer exists, so this origin story relies on Alberti’s version (never mind that Alberti wasn’t there, since he was exiled from Florence at the time). It was a key turning point in European art history: the single moment when vision and knowledge were perfected, made flawless and ordered; the discovery of a system of rules that ushered in the Renaissance and all its glories. Brunelleschi’s was a moment of genius that changed the world. At least, that’s how I remember my high-school art teacher describing it. This system of perspective will be familiar to anyone who has ever sat in a school art room dutifully drawings grids. But this way of telling the story misses an important point that is generally accepted in modern art history: there is no one ‘better’ way of seeing or representing. The compulsion to represent a mathematically 'perfect’ world, with 'correct’ perspective and proportion, is not always the purpose of making. Brunelleschi’s method reflected the very specific goal of creating a visual trick, which worked only if one single person stood at one single point, and looked with one single eye. Anybody can make a picture, and choose to use or not use fixed-point perspective; they can opt instead for any of the technologies of representation used by picture-makers in different times or places: using scale to denote power, flattening landscapes to focus on the foreground, depicting a single object from multiple angles. But representations tend to be cultural specific. For Brunelleschi and his contemporaries, illusions of perspective and depth were a key consideration, just as at other moments representing texture, light or movement became the priority.”
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