De Prospectiva Pingendi

De Prospectiva Pingendi

Although Renaissance art may have originated as a revival of classical tendencies, it soon improved on the art of antiquity by incorporating both the innovations of Gothic art from Northern Europe and new developments in scientific knowledge. The resulting style was beautiful and realistic in equal manner. Renaissance artists seemed to compete with one another for who could create the most perfect architectures, natural landscapes, and accurate representations of the human form.
Piero della Francesca (ca. 1415–92) sought to explain how mathematical principles could be applied to art in a first of its kind work and can thus be regarded as one of the fathers of technical drawing. The text was first composed ca. 1472–75, but this manuscript may date to as late as 1482. More than 100 technical diagrams illustrate the theoretical text on solid geometry and perspective, which takes a gradual approach to the revolutionary new material.

A Patient Approach

Unlike many contemporary works, Piero’s treatise is purely mathematical in nature and is entirely free of allegory. It is divided into three books: Disegno, techniques for painting faces; Commensurazio, which describes various perspectives; Coloro, for creating perspective with color. This structure is based on the 1435 treatise De pictura by Leon Battista Agnese (1404–72), but Pieoro’s tone is clearer, more sober, practical, and specific.
After having started by addressing the question of what perspective is, the texts and the accompanying diagrams start from the most basic principles and build on them until the most complicated techniques are clearly understood. The greatest attention is paid to the second section, which details the projection of surfaces, geometric bodies, and more complicated volumes such as body parts as well as investigating the scientific basis for representing them.

A Cornerstone of Western Art

Piero della Francesca’s practical treatise enjoyed immediate success among the artistic community and had a lasting impact on future generations of artists. The more famous mathematical text Divina proportione by Luca Pacioli (ca. 1447–1517) discusses Piero’s use of perspective and even plagiarized it – both men were born in the Tuscan town of Borgo Santo Sepolcro, called Sansepolcro today. Building on these works, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), a close friend of Pacioli’s, wrote his collections of notebooks generally referred to as “On Painting”.
These were assembled into a single treatise, Trattato della pittura by his apprentice and heir, Francesco Melzi (1491–1570). It was first published in France in 1632 and 1651 before being rediscovered in the Vatican Library and published in its modern form in 1817. Thus, the principles and techniques regarding perspective and solid geometry first established by Piero della Francesca in the late-15th century were passed down through various other works and continued to be influential well into the modern era.