The Discovery Of The Perspective’S Rules In Visual Arts

The discovery of the perspective’s rules in visual arts is celebrated as one of the major turning points in human history, which fueled centuries-long advancement and developments in both artistic creations and scientific or engineering inventions as the foundation for many breakthroughs of the modern times. It was the bridge between the middle ages and the early modern period or more specifically the fifteenth century, during Italian Renaissance, when the law of perspective was first introduced, explained, published and started to become widely adopted by generations of artists, painters, artist-engineers and the like. Art historian and professor Samuel Edgerton, however, reminds that the event should be rather noted as the rediscovery of†¦show more content†¦Still, how was he able to accomplish the task? Long story short, he proposed to construct two domes inside one another during the contest for the dome’s design in 1418 and later claimed that â€Å"he wou ld bind the walls with tension rings of stone, iron, and wood† to control the outward pressure called â€Å"hoop stress† caused by the structures (Mueller 86). Moreover, Mueller notes that he invented several lifting-machines and didn’t use standard â€Å"ground-based scaffolding† for the dome’s construction, which made the process less costly and more efficient, giving him a great advantage over others, plus no one surpassed the lifts he invented for centuries that followed (86-87). Back to the discovery of perspective or particularly linear perspective in paintings, Brunelleschi actually figured one-point perspective through an experiment he performed near the unfinished Cathedral on which â€Å"11 years later, a huge dome from his designs would be raised,† by using a mirror reflection of a painting of the Florentine baptistry he drew, which was seen through a hole made on the painting (Edgerton 124-125). Professor Edgerton argues his mirro r demonstration of geometrical nature of pictorial space had implications that extended â€Å"to the entire future of Western art and to science and technology from Copernicus to Einstein† (4). The two event is different in a