The Italian painter and architect Leon Battista Alberti in his book De pictures (On Painting), also known as Della pittura, written in 1435, he describes the science behind the perspectives in art. (basically how to make building look real in a painting via vanishing points and lighting points) Filippo Brunelleschi (a friend of Alberti), the Florentine architect who is credited with working out the mathematical laws of perspective circa 1410, it was Alberti’s book, which was studied heavily by the artists of the early Renaissance, making possible their visually accurate paintings and drawings, which enployed perspective to create the illusion of three-dimensionality on a flat plane.
Date:
1435, 1410
Name(s):
Leon Battista Alberti
Occupation:
Architect
Mathematician
Location:
Italy
1435, 1410
Name(s):
Leon Battista Alberti
Occupation:
Architect
Mathematician
Location:
Italy
Additional Information:
- Leon Battista Alberti – Wikipedia
Leon Battista Alberti was born in 1404 in Genoa. His mother is unknown, and his father was a wealthy Florentine who had been exiled from his own city, allowed to return in 1428. - Leon Battista Alberti: Renaissance Architect, Art Theorist
The Italian architect, painter, sculptor, and writer Leon Battista Alberti was the most important art-theorist of the Early Renaissance. His importance in the arts of painting, sculpture and architecture is mainly due to his three influential treatises on Renaissance art: De Statua and Della Pittura (1435) and De Re Aedificatoria (1452). - Geometry in Art & Architecture Unit 11 – Dartmouth College
He is said to have invented the camera obscura. Any camera, including the camera obscura, automatically makes perspective pictures. Thus if Alberti did indeed invent the camera, or was even familiar with the device, it is hard to imagine that this did not influence his development of perspective theory. - Linear Perspective in Renaissance Art: Definition & Example Works …
Renaissance artists were concerned with making their art look realistic, and one of the ways they achieved this realism was through the use of linear perspective. This lesson discusses the rediscovery of linear perspective during the Renaissance. - Linear Perspective: Brunelleschi’s Experiment (video) | Khan Academy
- Early Applications of Linear Perspective (article) | Khan Academy
What renaissance artists had clearly achieved through the careful observation of nature, including studies of anatomical dissections, was the means to recreate the 3-dimensional physical reality of the human form on two-dimensional surfaces.