Guest Post: The Importance of Depth and Linear Perspective

The van­ish­ing point has always held a cer­tain mys­tique about it to art his­to­ri­ans and art con­nois­seurs alike. The cre­ation of spe­cific van­ish­ing points in the early Renais­sance was a turn­ing point in the art world, and led to cement the depth in many paint­ings of this time period. Before this point, most artists used skenographia on stage in order to give it more depth, with the artist Giotto even attempt­ing a math­e­mat­i­cal cal­cu­la­tion to deter­mine points of dis­tance within art.

Brunelleschi was the first Renais­sance artist to use the van­ish­ing point and depth per­cep­tion dur­ing this time period. Brunelleschi addi­tion­ally noticed that when draw­ing Flo­ren­tine build­ings, all lines con­verged at the hori­zon line, there­fore lead­ing to the real­iza­tion of the van­ish­ing point. Other artists such as Donatello and Perug­ino helped to fur­ther cement the impor­tance of depth dur­ing this time, cul­mi­nat­ing in Da Vinci’s Last Sup­per; never before had there been a paint­ing with such math­e­mat­i­cal accu­racy in rela­tion to depth per­cep­tion and lin­ear for­ma­tion. The real­iza­tion of lin­ear per­spec­tive and the van­ish­ing point was kept within Italy for years before flour­ish­ing through­out the rest of Europe.

The checker­board floor pat­tern is one of the most obvi­ous exam­ples of orig­i­nal per­spec­tive. Alberti was one of the first artists to rec­og­nize this phe­nom­e­non, and named it as the “pave­ment” con­struc­tion, as it typ­i­cally led to the addi­tion of a pave­ment scene. He later wrote a trea­tise enti­tle “De Pictura/Della Pit­tura” explain­ing the proper meth­ods of per­spec­tive paint­ing. His the­o­ries were based more on pla­nar pro­jec­tions and cal­cu­la­tions using the height of tri­an­gles in the dis­tance, and also using pre­vi­ous math­e­mat­i­cal con­cepts from Euclid.

The van­ish­ing point and depth per­cep­tion are con­cepts which we take for granted today because we have never known an art world with­out them; how­ever, if you tra­verse through the ages, you will see pieces from the Mid­dle Ages where the baby Jesus appears to be the same size as Mary because the artists had no way in which to sig­nify per­spec­tive. It is amaz­ing to view in art muse­ums this sub­tle change in tech­nique; many muse­ums have paint­ings set up in chrono­log­i­cal order, or at least by major move­ments. The Renais­sance was truly its own move­ment within the art world, and sym­bol­ized a shift away from the chaotic, extremely fanat­i­cal world of the Mid­dle Ages.

With­out this kind of rev­o­lu­tion within the art world, we would still be look­ing at one-dimensional art works, lack­ing a proper depth per­cep­tion. This would prove to be a com­pletely dif­fer­ent world from the one we know now, per­haps even lack­ing the fun­da­men­tals of tele­vi­sion and movies. With­out depth in art, that could not have trans­lated over into any other medium. There­fore, we owe a great deal to these post-Medieval artists who truly paved the way for mod­ern art and art move­ments. Picasso would not have been able to exist with­out his acute under­stand­ing of the many lay­ers of depth and per­spec­tive, and we there­fore would have missed out on abstract art entirely as well as every sub­se­quent mod­ern art movement.

This post was con­tributed by Heidi Tay­lor, who writes about the online schools. She wel­comes your feed­back at HeidiLTaylor006 at gmail​.com.