Filippo Brunelleschi
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Filippo Brunelleschi (1377 – April 15, 1446) was one of the foremost architects of the Italian Renaissance. All of his principal works are in Florence, Italy. As explained by Antonio Manetti, who knew Brunelleschi and who wrote his biography, Brunelleschi "was granted such honors as to be buried in Santa Maria del Fiore, and with a marble bust, which they say was carved from life, and placed there in perpetual memory with such a splendid epitaph."
Invention of linear perspective
Brunelleschi is famous for two panel paintings illustrating geometric optical linear perspective made in the early 1400s. His biographer, Antonio Manetti, described this famous experiment in which Brunelleschi painted two panels: the first of the Florentine Baptistery as viewed frontally from the western portal of the unfinished cathedral, and second the Palazzo Vecchio as seen obliquely from its northwest corner. These were not, however, the first paintings with accurate linear perspective, which may be attributed to Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Annunciation of 1344.
The first Baptistery panel was constructed with a hole drilled through the centric vanishing point. Curiously, Brunelleschi intended that it only be observed by the viewer holding the unpainted back of the picture against his/her eye with one hand, and a mirror in the other hand facing and reflecting the painted side. In other words, Brunelleschi wanted his new perspective "realism" to be tested not by comparing the painted image to the actual Baptistery but to its reflection in a mirror according to the Euclidean laws of geometric optics. This feat showed artists vividly how they might paint their images, not merely as flat two-dimensional shapes, but looking more like three-dimensional structures just as mirrors reflect them. Unfortunately, both panels have since been lost.
Around this time, linear perspective as a novel artistic tool spread not only in Italy but throughout western Europe, and quickly became standard studio practice up to and including present time.
