The Intersection of Visual Science and Art in Renaissance Italy*

Abstract

In the time of the Renaissance, a major aspect of vision science was understanding how spatial information projected to the viewpoint of the observer, that is, visual perspective, which is one of the primary cues to depth perception. Perspective representation was thus an early form of virtual reality. Although accurate perspective representation was developed earlier in the 15th century, the first analytic perspective scheme was developed by Piero della Francesca, whose chef d’oeuvre is in the Church of San Francesco, Arezzo, in which the present lecture took place. The focus of the lecture was to evaluate some of the contributions of Piero della Francesca and his 15th-century contemporaries to the visual science, art and symbolism of his era, and its significance for the perception of depth structure from two-dimensional images.