Perspective in Renaissance Philosophy

Abstract

The term “perspective,” deriving from the Latin perspicere (to see distinctly), indicates a technique of graphic representation whose rules were established mainly by the artists and mathematicians of the Renaissance. The term is a vernacular form of the noun perspectiva, which in Medieval Latin designated the science of vision, translating the Greek optiké. The philosophers of “perspective,” devoted to the study of vision from the ninth to the fourteenth century, investigated both physiological aspects, especially in the Arab world, and mathematical ones, retaining the ancient threefold division of the discipline into “optics” (direct vision), “catoptrics” (reflected vision), and “dioptrics” (refracted vision). This science, called perspectiva naturalis or communis, dealt with the visual and light rays propagating in a straight line, as established by a fundamental axiom of Euclidean optics (Euclid 2007, Catoptrics, postulates I and II). The artists and mathematicians of the Renaissance applied its principles to representation of the visible world, codifying the rules for a science of drawing that profoundly influenced the development of the applied arts and sciences in the modern age. Lorenzo Ghiberti described it as “a part of perspective pertaining to painting,” Piero della Francesca called it prospectiva pingendi (painting perspective), Jean Pelerin perspectiva artificialis (artificial perspective), and Daniele Barbaro perspectiva pratica (practical perspective): all these definitions converge on the basic concept of the practical application of optical laws to pictorial representation of the visible world.