Historians of science usually date the origin of the Scientific Revolution as 1543, when Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus first put the Earth in motion. While that is a convenient and defensible choice, it is not the only good candidate. An earlier scientific breakthrough, driven by the needs of art rather than astronomy, was equally profound: Filippo Brunelleschi’s invention of drawing in perspective, around 1420.

Brunelleschi demonstrated his ability to render scenes accurately through the brilliantly convincing experiment shown in Figure 1 below. Fifteen years later, Leon Battista Alberti published a classic explanation of the technique. It involves a fascinating new kind of geometry, projective geometry.

The work of Brunelleschi and Alberti made an enormous impact on the artists of the time. Obviously, it allowed more accurate rendering. It was also a great confidence-builder: here, at last, was a major discovery that clearly went beyond what had been achieved by the ancient Greeks and Romans. For artists, it was no longer a matter of recovering what had been lost, but of discovering a fundamentally new creative power.

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