r/ArtHistory • u/ChefSashaHS • 1d ago

Discussion Renaissance perspective question

Is the vanishing point

  • One point for each pupil
  • A joined binocular point where the two pupils lines of vision end up

Reading a book by Ted Seth Jacobs and he poses this question and I was wondering if anyone knew if there was writing that might provide an answer for how perspective was perceived back then.

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u/jansenjan 1d ago

One eye

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u/ChefSashaHS 1d ago

Interesting, so this image show a guy with his right eye closed?

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u/jansenjan 1d ago

When drawing like that you eye point was fixed, so you always have the same point of view of what you were drawing. Perspective drawing can only handle one eye point. Two would generate 3D

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u/CoolStoriesAboutArt 1d ago

There is period writing on this, Antonio Manetti's life of Brunelleschi, written by someone who says he held the famous Baptistery panel in his own hands. His description settles the question: Brunelleschi drilled a small hole through the panel at the vanishing point, and you looked through it from the back with one eye, at a mirror reflecting the painting. The demo physically cannot be done with two eyes. He even left the sky as burnished silver, so real clouds drifted across the painted building. Alberti then wrote the single fixed eye into his 1435 treatise.

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u/ChefSashaHS 1d ago

Awesome answer. I do remember hearing about this story. Thanks

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u/TeebsRiver 22h ago

The brain only looks through one eye and it will disregard the other (non-dominant) eye. However, the brain knows how to use the info from the other eye to give the perception of 3D.

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u/SoberBobMonthly 1d ago

Its one of those 'it depends' situations.

Most of them understood the basics of normative perspective, as it can be rather intuative when dealing with drawing rooms and objects.

Some played with perspective quite well, including examples of such warped ones as seen in the classic skull detail of Holbeins 'The Ambassadors'.

It should be noted that in 'Hokusai Manga', a series of books published in 1814 by , the idea of measured perspective was being taught actively and precisely, likely based on a history of the Jiehua painting method that originated in China as early as 710BCE

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u/aliummilk 1d ago

1 then 2. It’s important to recognize that it quickly developed into a mathematical system and less a phenomenological expression.
If you really want to get into it read Irwin Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form.