An evaluative account of the rediscovery of geometric linear perspective in fifteenth-century Italy, the artists, architects, and mathematicians who studied and applied its principles, and its pervasive impact on Renaissance and post-Renaissance life.

Edgerton shows how linear perspective emerged in early fifteenth-century Florence out of an artistic and religious context in which devout Christians longed for divine presence in their daily lives and ultimately undermined medieval Christian cosmology.

The essays selected for this book, presented in chronological order, discuss various aspects of image-making technologies, geometrical knowledge and tools for architectural design, focusing in particular on two historical periods marked by comparable patterns of technological and cultural change. The first is the Renaissance; characterized by the rediscovery of linear perspectives and the simultaneous rise of new formats for architectural drawing and design on paper; the second, the contemporary rise of digital technologies and the simultaneous rise of virtual reality and computer-based design and manufacturing. Many of the contributing authors explore the parallel between the invention of the perspectival paradigm in early-modern Europe and the recent development of digitized virtual reality. This issue in turn bears on the specific purposes of architectural design, where various representational tools and devices are used to visualize bi-dimensional aspects of objects that must be measured and eventually built in three-dimensional space.