The Recovery of Perspective

[A] Linear perspective is often described as a discovery, as though painters had simply failed to look carefully until the fifteenth century. The description is misleading. Roman wall painters produced convincing recessions in single scenes, and the medieval workshops that followed them were not incapable of the effect; they were pursuing a different one, in which the size of a figure recorded its importance rather than its distance. [B]

[C] What was genuinely new in Florence was not the illusion but the rule. Earlier painters had converged lines by eye, adjusting until the scene looked right, and the results were convincing locally and inconsistent across a whole wall. The construction set out in the fourteen thirties replaced judgement with a procedure that any competent painter could follow and check. [D] Its consequence was therefore social as much as visual: a technique that can be written down can be taught, delegated and verified, and within a generation the ability to produce a coherent architectural setting had passed from a handful of exceptional artists to the ordinary equipment of a workshop.