We can see this reflected in such masterpieces as Perugino’s Delivery of the Keys (1481-82) in Figure 2 below. For artists, it was no longer a matter of recovering what had been lost, but of discovering a fundamentally new creative power.
It was also a great confidence-builder: here, at last, was a major discovery that clearly went beyond what had been achieved by the ancient Greeks and Romans. Obviously, it allowed more accurate rendering. The work of Brunelleschi and Alberti made an enormous impact on the artists of the time. It involves a fascinating new kind of geometry, projective geometry. Fifteen years later, Leon Battista Alberti published a classic explanation of the technique. An earlier scientific breakthrough, driven by the needs of art rather than astronomy, was equally profound: Filippo Brunelleschi’s invention of drawing in perspective, around 1420.įigure 1: Brunelleschi’s arrangement allows a viewer to compare a reflected drawing to the thing itself, by removing the mirrorīrunelleschi demonstrated his ability to render scenes accurately through the brilliantly convincing experiment shown in Figure 1 below.
While that is a convenient and defensible choice, it is not the only good candidate. Historians of science usually date the origin of the Scientific Revolution as 1543, when Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus first put the Earth in motion.
0 kommentar(er)
