Perspectives

Perspective definition, a technique of depicting volumes and spatial relationships on a flat surface. See more.
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Just as odd, many paintings didn't represent the other meaning of perspective either—that is, a scene might not be shown as if it were being seen from one single place. Today, perspective is used much like standpoint. Just as standpoint once used to mean simply the physical place where you stand but today also means the way you "see" things as a result of who you are and what you do, the same could be said about perspective.

Middle French, probably modification of Old Italian prospettiva , from prospetto view, prospect, from Latin prospectus — more at prospect. Middle English, optical, from Medieval Latin perspectivus. See more words from the same century.

Perspective (graphical)

See words that rhyme with perspective. All synonyms and antonyms for perspective. Translation of perspective for Spanish Speakers. Translation of perspective for Arabic Speakers. Encyclopedia article about perspective. What made you want to look up perspective?

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The dictionary has been scrambled—can you put it back together? Other Words from perspective Did You Know? More Example Sentences Learn More about perspective. Examples of perspective in a Sentence Noun 1 The elegant economy of the drawing and the wild inventiveness of such pictorial devices as the towering pitcher's mound and the impossible perspective of Snoopy's doghouse keep the repetitiveness, talkiness, and melancholy of the strip a few buoyant inches off the ground, and save it from being fey. The earliest art paintings and drawings typically sized many objects and characters hierarchically according to their spiritual or thematic importance, not their distance from the viewer, and did not use foreshortening.

The most important figures are often shown as the highest in a composition, also from hieratic motives, leading to the so-called "vertical perspective", common in the art of Ancient Egypt , where a group of "nearer" figures are shown below the larger figure or figures.

Wretch 32 - His & Hers (Perspectives)

The only method to indicate the relative position of elements in the composition was by overlapping, of which much use is made in works like the Parthenon Marbles. Chinese artists made use of oblique perspective from the first or second century until the 18th century. It is not certain how they came to use the technique; some authorities suggest that the Chinese acquired the technique from India, which acquired it from Ancient Rome.

Systematic attempts to evolve a system of perspective are usually considered to have begun around the fifth century BC in the art of ancient Greece , as part of a developing interest in illusionism allied to theatrical scenery. This was detailed within Aristotle 's Poetics as skenographia: Alcibiades had paintings in his house designed using skenographia , so this art was not confined merely to the stage.

Perspective | Definition of Perspective by Merriam-Webster

Euclid 's Optics introduced a mathematical theory of perspective, but there is some debate over the extent to which Euclid's perspective coincides with the modern mathematical definition. By the later periods of antiquity, artists, especially those in less popular traditions, were well aware that distant objects could be shown smaller than those close at hand for increased realism, but whether this convention was actually used in a work depended on many factors.

Some of the paintings found in the ruins of Pompeii show a remarkable realism and perspective for their time. Hardly any of the many works where such a system would have been used have survived. A passage in Philostratus suggests that classical artists and theorists thought in terms of "circles" at equal distance from the viewer, like a classical semi-circular theatre seen from the stage. The art of the new cultures of the Migration Period had no tradition of attempting compositions of large numbers of figures and Early Medieval art was slow and inconsistent in relearning the convention from classical models, though the process can be seen underway in Carolingian art.

Various paintings and drawings during the Middle Ages show amateur attempts at projections of furniture, where parallel lines are successfully represented in isometric projection , or by non parallel ones, but without a single vanishing point. Medieval artists in Europe, like those in the Islamic world and China, were aware of the general principle of varying the relative size of elements according to distance, but even more than classical art was perfectly ready to override it for other reasons. Buildings were often shown obliquely according to a particular convention.

The use and sophistication of attempts to convey distance increased steadily during the period, but without a basis in a systematic theory. Byzantine art was also aware of these principles, but also had the reverse perspective convention for the setting of principal figures. In about a contemporary of Ghiberti, Filippo Brunelleschi , demonstrated the geometrical method of perspective, used today by artists, by painting the outlines of various Florentine buildings onto a mirror.

When the building's outline was continued, he noticed that all of the lines converged on the horizon line. According to Vasari , he then set up a demonstration of his painting of the Baptistery in the incomplete doorway of the Duomo. He had the viewer look through a small hole on the back of the painting, facing the Baptistery. He would then set up a mirror, facing the viewer, which reflected his painting. To the viewer, the painting of the Baptistery and the building itself were nearly indistinguishable. Soon after, nearly every artist in Florence and in Italy used geometrical perspective in their paintings, [10] notably Paolo Uccello , Masolino da Panicale and Donatello.

Perspective

Donatello started sculpting elaborate checkerboard floors into the simple manger portrayed in the birth of Christ. Although hardly historically accurate, these checkerboard floors obeyed the primary laws of geometrical perspective: This became an integral part of Quattrocento art. Not only was perspective a way of showing depth, it was also a new method of composing a painting.

Paintings began to show a single, unified scene, rather than a combination of several. As shown by the quick proliferation of accurate perspective paintings in Florence, Brunelleschi likely understood with help from his friend the mathematician Toscanelli , [11] but did not publish, the mathematics behind perspective.

Alberti's primary breakthrough was not to show the mathematics in terms of conical projections, as it actually appears to the eye. Instead, he formulated the theory based on planar projections, or how the rays of light, passing from the viewer's eye to the landscape, would strike the picture plane the painting. He was then able to calculate the apparent height of a distant object using two similar triangles. The mathematics behind similar triangles is relatively simple, having been long ago formulated by Euclid. In viewing a wall, for instance, the first triangle has a vertex at the user's eye, and vertices at the top and bottom of the wall.

The bottom of this triangle is the distance from the viewer to the wall. The second, similar triangle, has a point at the viewer's eye, and has a length equal to the viewer's eye from the painting. The height of the second triangle can then be determined through a simple ratio, as proven by Euclid. Alberti was also trained in the science of optics through the school of Padua and under the influence of Biagio Pelacani da Parma who studied Alhazen 's Book of Optics [12] see what was noted above in this regard with respect to Ghiberti. Alhazen's Book of Optics , translated around into Latin, laid the mathematical foundation for perspective in Europe.

Alberti had limited himself to figures on the ground plane and giving an overall basis for perspective. Della Francesca fleshed it out, explicitly covering solids in any area of the picture plane. Della Francesca also started the now common practice of using illustrated figures to explain the mathematical concepts, making his treatise easier to understand than Alberti's. Della Francesca was also the first to accurately draw the Platonic solids as they would appear in perspective. Luca Pacioli 's De divina proportione On Divine Proportion , illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci , summarized the use of perspective in painting.

Perspective remained, for a while, the domain of Florence. Jan van Eyck , among others, was unable to create a consistent structure for the converging lines in paintings, as in London's The Arnolfini Portrait , because he was unaware of the theoretical breakthrough just then occurring in Italy. However he achieved very subtle effects by manipulations of scale in his interiors.

Gradually, and partly through the movement of academies of the arts, the Italian techniques became part of the training of artists across Europe, and later other parts of the world. The culmination of these Renaissance traditions finds its ultimate synthesis in the research of the 17th century architect, geometer, and optician Girard Desargues on perspective, optics and projective geometry. Further advances in projective geometry , in the 19th and 20th centuries, led to the development of analytic geometry , algebraic geometry , relativity and quantum mechanics.

Like the painter, the computer program is generally not concerned with every ray of light that is in a scene. Instead, the program simulates rays of light traveling backwards from the monitor one for every pixel , and checks to see what it hits. In this way, the program does not have to compute the trajectories of millions of rays of light that pass from a light source, hit an object, and miss the viewer.

CAD software , and some computer games especially games using 3-D polygons use linear algebra, and in particular matrix multiplication, to create a sense of perspective. The scene is a set of points, and these points are projected to a plane computer screen [ dubious — discuss ] in front of the view point the viewer's eye. The problem of perspective is simply finding the corresponding coordinates on the plane corresponding to the points in the scene.

By the theories of linear algebra, a matrix multiplication directly computes the desired coordinates, thus bypassing any descriptive geometry theorems used in perspective drawing. Of the many types of perspective drawings, the most common categorizations of artificial perspective are one-, two- and three-point. The names of these categories refer to the number of vanishing points in the perspective drawing. A drawing has one-point perspective when it contains only one vanishing point on the horizon line. This type of perspective is typically used for images of roads, railway tracks, hallways, or buildings viewed so that the front is directly facing the viewer.

Any objects that are made up of lines either directly parallel with the viewer's line of sight or directly perpendicular the railroad slats can be represented with one-point perspective. These parallel lines converge at the vanishing point. One-point perspective exists when the picture plane is parallel to two axes of a rectilinear or Cartesian scene — a scene which is composed entirely of linear elements that intersect only at right angles.


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If one axis is parallel with the picture plane, then all elements are either parallel to the picture plane either horizontally or vertically or perpendicular to it. All elements that are parallel to the picture plane are drawn as parallel lines. All elements that are perpendicular to the picture plane converge at a single point a vanishing point on the horizon. A drawing has two-point perspective when it contains two vanishing points on the horizon line. In an illustration, these vanishing points can be placed arbitrarily along the horizon. Two-point perspective can be used to draw the same objects as one-point perspective, rotated: One point represents one set of parallel lines , the other point represents the other.

Seen from the corner, one wall of a house would recede towards one vanishing point while the other wall recedes towards the opposite vanishing point. Two-point perspective exists when the painting plate is parallel to a Cartesian scene in one axis usually the z-axis but not to the other two axes. If the scene being viewed consists solely of a cylinder sitting on a horizontal plane, no difference exists in the image of the cylinder between a one-point and two-point perspective.

Two-point perspective has one set of lines parallel to the picture plane and two sets oblique to it. Parallel lines oblique to the picture plane converge to a vanishing point, which means that this set-up will require two vanishing points. Three-point perspective is often used for buildings seen from above or below.

In addition to the two vanishing points from before, one for each wall, there is now one for how the vertical lines of the walls recede. For an object seen from above, this third vanishing point is below the ground. For an object seen from below, as when the viewer looks up at a tall building, the third vanishing point is high in space.

Three-point perspective exists when the perspective is a view of a Cartesian scene where the picture plane is not parallel to any of the scene's three axes. Each of the three vanishing points corresponds with one of the three axes of the scene. One, two and three-point perspectives appear to embody different forms of calculated perspective, and are generated by different methods. Mathematically, however, all three are identical; the difference is merely in the relative orientation of the rectilinear scene to the viewer. Four-point perspective, also called infinite-point perspective, is the curvilinear see curvilinear perspective variant of two-point perspective.

This perspective can be used with either a horizontal or a vertical horizon line: Like all other foreshortened variants of perspective one-point to six-point perspectives , it starts off with a horizon line, followed by four equally spaced vanishing points to delineate four vertical lines. The vanishing points made to create the curvilinear orthogonals are thus made ad hoc on the four vertical lines placed on the opposite side of the horizon line.

The only dimension not foreshortened in this type of perspective is that of the rectilinear and parallel lines perpendicular to the horizon line — similar to the vertical lines used in two-point perspective. One-point, two-point, and three-point perspective are dependent on the structure of the scene being viewed. These only exist for strict Cartesian rectilinear scenes. By inserting into a Cartesian scene a set of parallel lines that are not parallel to any of the three axes of the scene, a new distinct vanishing point is created. Therefore, it is possible to have an infinite-point perspective if the scene being viewed is not a Cartesian scene but instead consists of infinite pairs of parallel lines, where each pair is not parallel to any other pair.

In its usual sense, zero-point perspective is not truly "zero-point". Rather, because vanishing points exist only when parallel lines are present in the scene, a perspective with no vanishing points "zero-point" perspective occurs if the viewer is observing a non-linear scene containing no parallel lines. This is not to be confused with elevation , since a view without explicit vanishing points may still have been drawn such that, there would have been vanishing points had there been parallel lines , and thus enjoy the sense of depth as a perspective projection.

On the other hand, parallel projection such as elevation can be approximated by viewing the object in question from very far away, because projection lines from the point of view approaches parallel when the point of view POV approaches infinity.

This may account for the confusion over zero-point perspective, since natural scenes often are viewed from very far away, and the size of objects within the scene would be insignificant compared to their distance to the POV. Any given small objects in said scene would thus mimic the look of parallel projection.

Foreshortening is the visual effect or optical illusion that causes an object or distance to appear shorter than it actually is because it is angled toward the viewer.

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Additionally, an object is often not scaled evenly: Although foreshortening is an important element in art where visual perspective is being depicted, foreshortening occurs in other types of two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional scenes. Some other types where foreshortening can occur include oblique parallel projection drawings. Foreshortening also occurs when imaging rugged terrain using a synthetic aperture radar system. In painting, foreshortening in the depiction of the human figure was perfected in the Italian Renaissance , and the Lamentation over the Dead Christ by Andrea Mantegna s is one of the most famous of a number of works that show off the new technique, which thereafter became a standard part of the training of artists.

One of the most common, and earliest, uses of geometrical perspective is a checkerboard floor. It is a simple but striking application of one-point perspective. Many of the properties of perspective drawing are used while drawing a checkerboard. The checkerboard floor is, essentially, just a combination of a series of squares. Once a single square is drawn, it can be widened or subdivided into a checkerboard. Where necessary, lines and points will be referred to by their colors in the diagram. To draw a square in perspective, the artist starts by drawing a horizon line black and determining where the vanishing point green should be.

The higher up the horizon line is, the lower the viewer will appear to be looking, and vice versa. The more off-center the vanishing point, the more tilted the square will be. Because the square is made up of right angles, the vanishing point should be directly in the middle of the horizon line.