ABSTRACT
In 1435, the Renaissance scholar Leon Battista Alberti published Della pittura (On Painting), a treatise formally describing the principles of creating perspectively correct paintings (Alberti, 1435/1991). In this work, Alberti utilized a metaphor that is now referred to as Alberti’s window : “When [painters] go around a surface with lines and then fill the described places with colors, nothing is to be sought more than that on this one surface are represented many forms of surfaces, and not otherwise than if this surface, which they work on with colors, were wholly transparent and so glass like that the entire visual pyramid passed through it” (Greenstein, 1997). Alberti goes on to suggest a method for constructing perspectively correct paintings involving “a veil . . . set up between the eye and the object to be represented, so that the visual pyramid passes through the loose weave of the veil,” with the painting copied from the image on the veil rather than the view of the three-dimensional object itself.
