The role of perspective in the transformation of European culture

Abstract

The origins of the Renaissance pictorial perspective are closely linked with the transformation of European culture that began already before the fifteenth century. This transformation can be traced back to the new appropriation of nature in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, growing individualism, the first signs of a new humanism and the change in the nature of knowledge, marked by the return to Aristotelian tradition. However the most important source of perspectival thinking was the new development in the medieval philosophy of light and geometrical optics known then as perspectiva naturalis Perspective natural. The move towards a geometrical representation of light was a logical consequence of an attempt to find a more direct form of participation in the essential reality of the divine, closely associated already in the twelfth century with mathematics and in particular with geometry (Ohly, Friedrich Ohly 1982, p. 142).