Perspective and Art </HEAD> <BODY><title> <H2><u><B>III. The Renaissance </B></u></H2>

Part 1: The discovery of linear perspective

c) Comparison between Alberti's and Bruneschelli's perspective constructions of a chess board

Alberti's perspective construction of the checkerboard compared to Bruneschelli's (after the analysis of Kern, Mathematik und Mahlerei, by Wolff)

Overlapping those two constructions, one sees that they are equivalent. Since exchanging H by H' and (MP) by (H''S) in Bruneschelli's construction method, one gets Alberti's

. I want to clear up a matter of confusion; in literature the vanishing point is often called observation point or center of projection and it can either be defined as the intersection of the "centric" ray and the canvas or as the vanishing point of all the depth lines. Since both Bruneschelli's and Alberti's perspective constructions only use one vanishing point, they correspond to one-point perspective. As demonstrated in the mathematical notes at the beginning of this chapter, it only takes a few logical steps to obtain two and three point perspective. However one has to wait until the 16th century to find such application.

Go on to next section: Part 2: Mathematical notes

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