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- Italian Art Renaissance
The use of measuring and realistic vanishing points became more important in the Italian Art Renaissance. Italian artists interpreted space before they placed figures into the painting, instead of building the space around figures. Artists used linear perspective to measure accurate depth.
The argument
Renaissance artists in Italy focused on mathematic equations and realism to create proportion and depth in their paintings. Linear perspective was most commonly used. Linear perspective is when all of the figures and objects in a painting can be traced back to one vanishing point with straight lines. What this gives a painter is a rule rather than an intuition: the size and placement of every object in the picture follows from where it sits relative to that single point, so depth becomes something constructed to a measurement instead of suggested by eye. Italian artists drew these lines for the viewer. The floor of the painting would be decorated with tiles or designs that would disappear at the vanishing point to help the viewer see depth better. This is worth noticing, because it means the technique was not hidden. A tiled floor receding to a point is a demonstration of the system as much as a setting for the figures standing on it, and a viewer looking at such a painting is being shown the geometry that makes the illusion work. The rise of humanism in Renaissance Italy also made the application of mathematical perspective more popular. Artists wanted to portray realistic and secular scenes while using science and modern applications, and perspective served both halves of that ambition at once: it is a scientific procedure, and what it produces is a convincing depiction of the ordinary world rather than a symbolic arrangement of figures. Artists revamped and reintroduced Ancient Greek and Roman paintings with their modern science, so that the recovery of an older tradition and the application of new mathematical technique were the same undertaking. The advance of mathematical techniques for perspective and measuring is accordingly one of the things that distinguishes the Italian Renaissance.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Linear perspective is a genuine and defining Italian achievement, but the contrast is sharper in the telling than in fact. Northern painters also created convincing pictorial depth — van Eyck's interiors recede persuasively — though by empirical, observational means rather than a codified single-vanishing-point geometry; the difference is thus less 'depth versus no depth' than mathematical perspective versus observed perspective. The techniques also diffused: over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries systematic perspective spread northward, so it marks an early and characteristic Italian emphasis rather than a permanent dividing line. And as with the anatomy argument on the other side, mathematical perspective is one feature among several that distinguish the two schools — Italian idealisation, classical revival and monumental figures versus Northern minute detail and symbolic surface — so singling out perspective captures a real hallmark while understating that the deeper contrast is between an idealising, mathematical approach and an empirical, observational one.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] Northern painters such as van Eyck achieved convincing depth by empirical observation, so the contrast is between mathematical and observed perspective, not perspective versus none. [Rejecting C] Mathematical perspective is one characteristic Italian emphasis that also spread northward over time, not the whole of what distinguishes the two Renaissances.