Perspective Between Fiction and Function: Pattern Mutations Through Science and Art

(Incipit) This paper aims to focus on the mutations occurred in the perspective pattern as signs of changes in the projective knowledge and in the same idea of space. Nowadays a Perspective manual normally starts showing ‘the end of the story’: an adamantine reference system made of points, lines, circles and subtended planes, namely main point and main distance, horizon and ground lines, distance and visual circles (Fig. 1b). As well as a Projective Geometry manual does (Fig. 1c). They both are significantly different from that described at ‘the beginning of the story’ by Leon Battista Alberti in De Pictura proestantissima et numquam satis laudata, the first official treatise following the Brunelleschi’s perspective code: a point and a line, namely the main point and a segment on the ground line, with a separate schematic side view of the system, superbly graphically combined by Piero Della Francesca in the book De Prospectiva Pingendi (Fig. 1a). (...).