The New Possibilities of Representation associated with the Development of Renaissance Perspective led to the Formation of new architectural spaces and to a new relationship between architecture, painting, and theatre. Discuss.
Before the invention of a theory of mathematical perspective, artists of the middle ages were more interested in depicting religious, spiritual truths rather than the real, physical world. They did not dwell on technicalities such as making a scene scientifically coherent, but determined the scale of objects and figures by their importance. Even as artists began to show a sense of perspective in their art, the lack of a defined theory made drawings appear awkward. Domenico Veneziano's 'St.Zenobius performs a miracle' (1445) is an early example of successful use of perspective.
Historians agree that the Florentine Fillipo Brunelleschi was the founder of perspective. He rediscovered the principals of linear perspective construction, a technique which had been known to the ancient Greeks and Romans but forgotten during the middle ages. Brunelleschi demonstrated his findings with two painted panels, now lost, which depicted Florentine streets and buildings. From Antonio Manetti's description of the panels, it is clear that Brunelleschi had understood the concept of a single vanishing point to which all parallel lines converge, and the relationship between distance and the diminishing size of objects as they appear further away. These optical and geometrical principals allowed artists of Brunelleschi's generation to produce works of much greater realism than ever before.
Leon Battista Alberti published a treatise that established, for the first time , guidelines for drawing three dimensional scenes on a two dimensional panel or wall, based on Brunelleschi's findings. This book 'Della Pittura' presented the use of perspective in a mathematical sense and laid the foundation for further developments of both the theoretical and the practical aspects of perspective.
