Size perspective

The moun­tain is big­ger than the house; the house is big­ger than the man. When objects are sized accord­ing to how large they really are (or are expected to be) then the eye inter­prets them as exist­ing in orderly three-dimensional space. This works even when a more geo­met­ric approach would make a small object that is close to the viewer take up a larger area of the pic­ture than a large object that is far away.

Size per­spec­tive is a con­ven­tion in some pre-Renaissance West­ern art, as well as many tra­di­tional non-Western art styles, such as Per­sian or Chi­nese. It is inter­est­ing to look at works from cer­tain East­ern art tra­di­tions (such as Japan­ese wood­block prints), com­par­ing art from before and after the adop­tion of “mod­ern” geo­met­ric per­spec­tive conventions.