Perspective and depth
How do you turn a flat surface into a space? Renaissance artists found the answer in geometry.
Linear perspective was demonstrated by the architect Brunelleschi in Florence in the early 15th century. All lines running straight into the picture meet at a vanishing point on the horizon, at the viewer’s eye level. Masaccio, Piero della Francesca and Leonardo made it the foundation of Renaissance painting.
Long before that there were other ways of showing depth: placing things higher up in the picture, letting them overlap or making important figures larger. Medieval pictures are not “wrong” – they follow different rules. And the modernists, from Cézanne to the Cubists, deliberately broke perspective apart again.