Leon Battista Alberti Writes De Pictura

1435

The Florentine polymath produced the first theoretical treatise on painting, establishing mathematical perspective as the scientific foundation of Renaissance visual art. Alberti described the canvas as an open window through which the viewer perceives a rationally constructed world. His rules for vanishing points and proportional diminution gave European painters a geometric grammar that would govern Western art for four centuries, from the Uffizi to the Impressionists who finally rejected it.