A New Perspective on Reality
1425 AD
1425 1425
11.15E43.47N
ART

FLORENCE, ITALY
	How can you make things which have length, width and height look real when you paint them on a flat surface? This is just the problem that the ancient Egyptians and Greeks had. Their paintings look strange and flat to us because they did not discover the science of perspective.
	No doubt you have noticed that things appear smaller the farther away they are. You can reproduce this effect in a painting simply by drawing distant objects smaller than nearer objects. But how do you draw objects that are both near and far at the same time, such as a road or a long building?
	Here's where two concepts come in: "horizon" and "vanishing point." First, a horizon is an imaginary line that goes across a scene. If you go to the seashore it is easy to see a real horizon. It is the horizontal line created where the water and sky meet.
	To understand what a vanishing point is, imagine an unusual floating road starting on the seashore and going straight over the ocean to the horizon. It would seem that the road actually vanished at the horizon. The point where the road -- or any other object -- disappears on the horizon is the vanishing point.
	If you draw the road on paper, the lines showing the edges of the road would be wide apart at the start of the road and would come to a point at the horizon. If there are several objects on the paper, all of the lines showing depth would be directed toward the same vanishing point, though the lines might not extend all the way to the horizon.
	Interestingly, the principles of perspective were not discovered by scientists, but by artists who were passionately searching for more realistic ways to represent their world. The mathematical rules of angles and distances came to be understood in the early 1400's by Renaissance painters and architects in Florence, Italy. An excellent example of perspective is in Leonardo Da Vinci's painting, "The Last Supper," where all the implied lines of perspective lead to an imaginary vanishing point at Christ's head. By using perspective in this way, Da Vinci encouraged the viewer's eyes to focus on Jesus.