Before Alhazen’s ideas could be used by Renaissance artists, however, they had to be digested by Renaissance math and science. First
Roger Bacon and later
Galileo,
Johannes Kepler, and others rediscovered Alhazen’s ideas about perspective in translation from the original Arabic.
Giotto began to use a crude form of perspective in the earliest days of the Renaissance that was more observation and intuition than science and mathematics.
Filippo Brunelleschi and
Lorenzo Ghiberti helped translate mathematical perspective into architecture and sculpture, but it took a later generation, perhaps exemplified best by
Piero della Francesca, himself trained as a painter and a mathematician, to make mathematical perspective generate whole worlds in paint to gaze upon.
For Muslims, Belting explains, to “counterfeit life” with realistic painting would make “both those who produce them and those who own them guilty of the sin of forging God’s creation, a form of blasphemy.”. For Westerners, however, keen on more human-centered art, depicting the world in art as closely as possible as it did to their own eyes seemed not playing God, but rather a way of getting closer to God. “
The new cult of the eye reaches a peak in the writings of Leonardo da Vinci,” Belting writes. The eye “is an excellent thing, superior to all others created by God!” Leonardo proclaimed. In the West, few (most notably
Nicholas of Cusa) argued otherwise.
(1).jpg)
this should've been done a while ago
