ABSTRACT
Alberti thought perspective revolutionary not because it was a rational way to make
pictures, but because it was a repeatable one.2 In the Della Pittura Alberti ascribed the
term prospettiva a double meaning-it could designate a process for creating the illusion
of depth on a flat surface, or, as we have seen in the case of Netherlandish architects,
of ordering and controlling structural information from a single point of view.3 In
assuming a fixed relationship between an observer and sets of objects, a screen
between work and world, perspectiva artificialis-as a drawing system, a symbol-has,
since the Renaissance, been accused of collapsing the experience of lived space to
geometric ends.
