ABSTRACT
Brunelleschi's discovery of linear perspective was the biological consequence of his exposure to buildings such as those he represented in his famous panels. Brunelleschi was such a person and the connection between his discovery of perspective and his experience of architecture is illustrated by his decision to use paintings of two of the city's major buildings, the Baptistery and the Palazzo Vecchio, to demonstrate the correctness of his theory. An interest in mathematics, in architecture, or indeed in the practice of painting itself, would each in a different way have intensified latent sensibilities to particular linear configurations. While the formulation of the rules governing linear perspective in Greece was sustained by other aspects of Greek culture, such as the general interest in geometry, the emergence of such a system was above all the biological consequence of the Greek exposure to a new and distinctive architecture.
