Engineering Design Graphics: Sketching, Modeling, and Visualization, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 13

PERSPECTIVE PROJECTIONS AND PERSPECTIVE SKETCHES

PERSPECTIVE PROJECTION

Historical Development

Perhaps the single most important development in Renaissance art is the use of perspective.¹ Just prior to that time, paintings like those of Duccio di Buoninsegna (1255–1319) tended to be rather flat and two-dimensional (see Figure 13-1). Artists had yet to achieve an adequate understanding of human anatomy, and they had not developed techniques like shading and perspective to create an illusion of depth. Giotto (1267–1377), actually a contemporary of Duccio's, is generally considered the first Renaissance painter. In Figure 13-2, Giotto employs converging lines to suggest spatial depth, although these lines do not systematically converge to a single vanishing point.

In the work of later Italian Renaissance artists such as Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) and Raffaello Sanzio (1483–1520), we find paintings that employ one-point perspective to call the attention of the viewer to important details in the painting. See, for example, Figures 13-3 and 13-4 on page 328. The mathematical rules of perspective were developed and documented by people like the German Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) and several Italian artists, including Brunelleshi and Alberti. Filippo Brunelleshi (1377–1446), a Florentine, invented a systematic method for determining perspective projections in the early 1400's. ...