BRUNELLESCHI & A SENSE OF SPACE

Perspective drawing for Church of Santo Spirito in Florence, 

Brunescelli, c.1428, early renaissance

The question of how to 'make space' in two dimensions is one which artists, and perhaps particularly architects, have grappled with for centuries. The method which we are probably most familiar with today is attributed to Brunelleschi, was an early renaissance architect, craftsman and goldsmith, who is said to have reinvented linear perspective. 

reconstruction of Brunelleschi's first picture in perspective,
Samuel Y. Edgerton, (1975)

reflection of the perspective drawing of the Florentine Baptistery in the mirror experiment of Brunelleschi

 ‘Herod’s Feast’ by Masolino (1436);
‘The Annunciation’, by Fra Carnevale (1448);
 ‘The Flagellation of Christ’ by Piero della Francesca (1453).

Bruneschelli observed that when you have a fixed, single point of view, parallel lines seem to converge at together at an imaginary point in the distance. He then applied this idea of a single vanishing point to a canvas, and discovered a method for calculating -and drawing - depth. Bruneschelli's famous experiment used mirrors to aid him in sketching the Florence baptistry in perfect one-point perspective. 

Prior to Bruneschelli's observations, artists either avoided depicting space, producing flattened images, or attempted to produce space using other means, often resulting in skewed space. While Bruneschelli's perspective might be the most 'correct' in the sense that the images produced reflect what the human eye sees, other methods of depicting space, including ones which might not yet be discovered, are also valuable

In making his first depiction of Florence’s baptistery, Brunelleschi himself recognised the limitations of his invention. To address those limitations, he added a sky of silver leaf, so that the clouds, the light, and their shifting environmental effects – all of which were outside the domain of perspectival drawing – could be represented alongside the spatial and formal qualities of the architecture.  

These drawings address begin to not only the solidity of physical form but also the flow of architectural possibilities and spatial contingencies.