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The 4th International
Laboratory for the History of Science Organized by Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza |
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Alberti's De pictura: geometry and practice Brunelleschi's demonstrations and the diffusion of the new drawing method among the period's most important artists induced Leon Battista Alberti to compose the first treatise on perspective, De pictura. The booklet was initially written in Latin (1435) for a public of humanists, then in Italian (1436) in order to render the new drawing method accessible to artists; this last version was significantly dedicated to Filippo Brunelleschi. Here, Alberti introduced the concept of the picture plane as a window on which we observe a scene lying beyond it, and thus laid the geometrical foundations of linear perspective. His perspective method, which he called the "modo optimo", was conceived to facilitate painters' practical application of Brunelleschi's "costruzione legittima". Its novelty rested in the possibility of determining through geometry the diminution of the intervals between lines parallel to the ground line and correlating it to the distance of observation. The procedure described in the second book (paragraph 33) that provides guidelines on how to draw buildings allows us to identify Euclid's Optics as Alberti's principal source, with special regard to the methods of measuring by sight, which Alberti would later describe in Ludi rerum mathematicarum. Selected
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