Emphasis on Linear Perspective
Pictures organised around geometric perspective, with converging lines, tiled floors and vanishing points that build deep space.
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About
Linear perspective treats the picture as a window: parallel lines running away from the viewer converge on a vanishing point on the horizon, and objects shrink at a measurable rate. Look for chequered floors, receding colonnades and roof lines that all aim at one spot.
The system was worked out in early 15th-century Florence. Filippo Brunelleschi demonstrated it with painted panels around 1415–20, Leon Battista Alberti set out a method for painters in 1435, and Masaccio's Holy Trinity (about 1427) opened a convincing painted chapel in a church wall. Paolo Uccello became famous for his fascination with foreshortening, and Piero della Francesca wrote his own treatise on the subject. In the Low Countries, Hans Vredeman de Vries published books of perspective architecture, and Pieter Saenredam's church interiors of the 17th century show the tradition at its most exacting. Giorgio de Chirico later bent the rules to create unsettling, contradictory spaces.