Abstract
SUMMARY. — An empirical form of pictorial perspective was used in Graeco- roman painting. However, despite their skill, the artists were not able to achieve a coherent geometrical representation of space and objects in their pictures. This absence of a systematic method seems to me to be related the notion of visual ray and the theory of perception of distances which follows from it. Consequently, one of the prerequisites (though it has never been made explicit as such) for the appearance of Renaissance perspective in early fifteenth-century Italy could be the revolution in optics instigated by Ibn al-Haytham, at the beginning of the eleventh century. Al- Haytham demonstrated that vision is not a result of visual rays emitted by the eye but of light rays entering the eye instead. Alberti explained and justified his method of perspective construction by using the metaphor of a window opening onto the world. The picture surface is conceived as intersecting the pyramid of vision without altering it. I propose that without al-Haytham's new account of distance-perception, which his hypothesis of an intromission of light made necessary, Alberti's window would not have been thinkable.
Published Version
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