ABSTRACT
Perhaps no historian has understood that Brunelleschi was making a space, not a picture. The demonstration had everything to do with architecture and very little to do with painting, although – through Alberti – it may have subsequently helped painters ‘get it right’. The demonstration is a machine for thinking basic architectural principles. It comes before – not after – a building, because it models the relationships that constitute architecture. In addition to establishing the veracity or correspondence of 2D panel to 3D space, the demonstration established the conditions of occupation of the new classically derived architecture. Architecture is a camera, and that is deeply narcissistic. This vanishing point image is an effect of the mirror, it is according to Filarete what the mirror shows, the mirror into which Narcissus stares. Space so organized and framed, framed in a proportionally diminishing series, conforms to and is assimilated to the subject’s fantasies of wholeness and completion.
