Vision and the Theory of Artistic Perspective (Lindberg, Theories of Vision, 8)
About 1303, a little more than a decade after the deaths of Roger Bacon and John Pecham, Giotto de Bondone (ca. 1266-1337) began work on the frescoes of the Arena Chapel in Padua – paintings that later generations would view as the first statement of a new understanding of the relationship between visual space and its represnetation on a two-dimensional surface. What Giotto did was to eliminate some of the flat, stylized qualities that had characterized medieval paintings by endowing his figures with a more human, three-dimensional, lifelike quality; by introducingf oblique views and foreshortening into his architectural representations, thereby creating a sense of depth and solidity; and by adjusting the perspective of the frescoes to the viewpoint of an observer standing at the centre of the chapel. This was a beginning of a search for ‘visual truth’, an ‘endeavor to imitate nature,’ which would culminate a century later in the theory of linear perspective.