Italian artists develop and master the use of the rules of perspective

The ability to give works of art an illusion of perspective enables artists to show the world as it appears. When systems for understanding perspective were devised in the early fifteenth century, they paved the way for the immense artistic achievements of the Renaissance.

When we talk about "getting things into perspective" we mean seeing issues in proportion and understanding how one thing relates to another. The same is true in art. A vast mountain is diminished in stature if it is in the distance while a small child can dominate a composition if placed at the front. Using laws of perspective means that the world can be depicted as spacious and with figures, structures, plants, and objects that fit realistically into their setting. There is a sense of depth, and landscapes stretch away to the horizon.

Great artists in the ancient world followed rules of proportion but they rarely took on large scenes with distant landscapes. Throughout the middle ages, Christian art was dominant in the West and artists were focussed on the symbolic meanings of their work rather than on depicting reality. As the subjects of art became broader and religious constraints less rigid, artists became more interested in showing the world as it actually appears. It was not until the fifteenth century, however, that the "laws" of perspective were codified for artists to follow. As soon as they were devised, artists began to use them and Western art was transformed.

The invention of a reliable system of perspective is credited to the Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi. He demonstrated his ideas in two celebrated pictures of local buildings. Brunelleschi's theories were adapted for painters by another architect, Leon Battista Alberti, in his famous treatise On Painting (1435). Alberti translated space into a graph in which a series of diagonal lines converged on a single point called the vanishing point. These diagonals were combined with parallel horizontal lines to create a geometric

11 Feast of Herod

Donatello,1423-1427