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Representation of Places: Reality and Realism in City Design

By Peter Bosselmann

University of California Press

Copyright © 1998 Peter Bosselmann
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520206584
Concept and Experience: Two Views of the World

Pictures do not mimic what we see. In fact, no optical system exists to mimic the tasks performed by our eyes, although now, more than 150 years after the invention of photography, we assume that photography truthfully records the world around us. But photography is based on a convenient geometric fiction called "central projection." Picture taking, film, television recording, and eye-level drawings rendered by hand or computer all rely on the concept of central projection, or linear perspective, a technique that offers a somewhat limited representation of reality.

These limitations have been with us since Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1466) carried out an experiment associated with the discovery of linear perspective,1

Rudolf Arnheim, "Brunelleschi's Peep Show," Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 41 (1978): 57-60.

a method for representing a place in a manner that approximates reality. This artisan-engineer gave Florence the magnificent dome (1420–1436) of the cathedral, the first such engineering accomplishment in the Western world since Roman antiquity. He was also a painter. Much has been written about his experiment with a painting—what Rudolf Arnheim calls Brunelleschi's peep show. A decade prior to the construction of the dome, Brunelleschi had painted from the portal of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore the view of the Baptistery San Giovanni di Firenze. Apparently he executed the painting in perfect linear perspective. It is known that he painted the picture on a wooden panel, although there is much speculation in art-historical literature about both the method Brunelleschi used to produce it and the date he finished it.2

See Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1975), who estimates 1425; Martin Kemp, Geometrical Perspective from Brunelleschi to Desargues (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), who gives the date as prior to 1413; and Michael Kubovy, The Psychology of Perspective in Renaissance Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), who cites a source setting the date between 1401 and 1409.

The painting is lost, and the method used was not recorded until after his death.

According to his biographer Antonio Manetti, Brunelleschi's demonstration went as follows:

He [Brunelleschi] had made a hole in the panel on which there was his painting. … The hole was as small as a lentil on the painting side of the panel, and on the back it opened pyramidically, like a woman's straw hat, to the size of a ducat or a little more. He wished the eye to be placed at the back, where it was large, with one hand bringing it close to the eye and with the other holding a mirror opposite, so that there the painting came to be reflected back … which in being seen, it seemed as if the real thing was seen. I have had the painting in my hand and have seen it many times in these days, so I can give testimony.3

Antonio di Tuccio Manetti, in John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (Boston: Boston Book and Art Shop, 1967), 116.

Indeed, Brunelleschi's contemporaries must have been stunned when he took viewers to the exact spot where he had painted the Baptistery. Brunelleschi had set up his painted panel on an easel, five feet inside the cathedral's main portal.4

According to Manetti, "some three braccia inside the middle door of Santa Maria del Fiore," in ibid., 114.

He had drilled a hole in the center of his picture to control the position of the viewer's eye. Brunelleschi asked his viewer to look from the back of his painting through the hole into a mirror that he held approximately a foot from the painted side of the panel. The observer saw the reflection of the painting in the mirror. When the mirror was lowered, the observer could confirm the painting's accuracy by comparing the painted scene with the reality framed by the dark doorway of the cathedral. When the mirror was raised, the observer would again see the reflection of the painting. A person standing where Brunelleschi stood when he painted the image could see the Baptistery in the center of the scene, the Misericordia on the left, and the Canto alla Paglia on the right.

Brunelleschi sought to increase the realism of the picture: "For as much of the sky as he had to show, that is where the walls in the picture vanished into the air, he put burnished silver, so that the air and the natural skies might be reflected in it; and thus also the clouds which are seen in that silver are moved by the wind, when it blows."5

Ibid.

More than a decade after the experiment, Leon Battista Alberti credited Brunelleschi as the inventor of linear perspective and called it constructione legitima .6

See Leon Battista Alberti [1402-1472], Della Pittura (1435).

Now, nearly six centuries later, art historians believe Brunelleschi's experiment "ultimately was to change the modes, if not the course of Western history."7

Edgerton, Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, 40.

Brunelleschi demonstrated a technique for representing the world as we see it. We can only speculate that the late-fourteenth-century invention of flat mirror glass, produced on the Venetian island of Murano, gave him the idea of a two-dimensional representation of the multidimensional world around him.

Since Brunelleschi, instructions in perspective generally start like those in Alberti's Della Pittura : "First of all, on the surface on which I am going to paint, I draw a rectangle of whatever size I want, which I regard as an open window through which the subject to be painted is to be seen."8

Quoted in ibid., 42.

In Brunelleschi's experiment, the frame of the cathedral door (today, as in Brunelleschi's day, 3.80 meters wide) was his "window." The distance between the doorway and the exact place where the picture was painted was approximately 1.75 meters. The two-to-one ratio of door width to distance means that a person standing where Brunelleschi stood to paint and looking out toward the piazza could take in a 90-degree view between the uprights of the door.9

Manetti, in White, Birth and Rebirth, 114.

Such explicit instructions guide an effort to re-create what Brunelleschi's painting must have shown and what could be seen through the hole in it. The re-creation of Brunelleschi's experiment clarifies the shortcomings of linear perspective.

What is most noticeable when the cathedral's heavy doors swing open (they open only on special occasions) is the immediate presence of the Baptistery, with the morning sun illuminating the splendid gold panels of the Portal del Paradiso. When the eyes grow accustomed to the scene, they begin to take in the details of the Baptistery (the arches, the inlaid marble) and the people in front of the Portal del Paradiso who, noticing the open cathedral doors, step inside, as if that were the normal way to enter the cathedral. All this the spectator sees while looking at the facade of the Baptistery. The square to the right and left is visible, but only with a turn of the head. Similarly, the sky above the Baptistery can be...