Paint has been known and used since prehistoric times. Throughout most of history the pigments were mineral or organic. There were no organic synthetic colors until the 19th century when the first dyes made from coal were discovered. Most ancient paintings were frescoes - pigment applied on plaster. Separately-hung paintings were usually done on wood panels. The paint was tempera, pigment plus water, egg, or milk. The addition of water or milk have the advantage that the paint can be thinned with water while wet, but dries to a water-resistant hardness. What we now call "oil painting" came into existence with the discovery of linseed oil in the 15th century. Paint was used for decoration, but the use of paint as a wood preservative is very recent; even in the 19th century many buildings were unpainted. The first ready-mixed pigment and vehicle (that is, the liquid that carries the pigment) were sold only in 19th century. The celebrated red barns of the American countryside were painted that color primarily because for a long time red paint was the cheapest.
What could be clearer than a picture? Actually, pictorial representation styles are learned and highly culture dependent, and our "natural" Western perspective style is not at all obvious to people who have never seen it before. Cross-cultural studies of visual perception have had startling results. In one factory in South Africa, where most employees were illiterate and spoke a number of different languages, the management launched a campaign to encourage employee cooperation. They designed a poster showing two calves tied on a rope, each struggling to reach a bucket of water. By pulling in opposite directions, they couldn't do it, but by both going to the same bucket, they could. When the employees were asked about the poster, many did not know the animals were calves, did not understand what the calves were trying to do, and did not understand the pictures were to be read in sequence, or in what order. Fully 80 per cent of the employees did not understand the poster.
Anyone who has read to small children can see how representation styles are learned. If a picture shows a road receding into the distance, the child might very well ask why the road gets small. If a figure is cut off by the edge of the page, the child may ask where the rest is, and so on.
Several representational styles can be regarded as more "natural" than perspective in the sense that people untrained in art naturally invent them when drawing. One is called conceptual. The scale of objects in the drawing are determined subjectively and size reflects the importance or symbolic content of objects, not position or actual size. For example, in Byzantine art the Christ child was commonly shown as a miniature adult, not as a correctly-proportioned baby, because the artist wanted to remind viewers that the significance of Christ lay in his adult role rather than his babyhood. Conceptual art is often used as a diagnostic clue for children; for example an abusive or domineering parent might be drawn as enormous and the child very tiny.
The polydimensional style makes use of multiple viewpoints, where each object is shown from the vantage point that makes it clearest. Egyptian art often shows figures with their head and legs turned sideways in profile, but the torso in front view. If you try it, you will find that this is a very uncomfortable position. It is safe to say no Pharaoh ever "walked like an Egyptian." In native American totem figures, animals are often represented spread-legged as if skinned, so that all their features on all sides can be seen, and this approach is common in non-technological societies. In cross-cultural studies, people presented with a traditional polydimensional drawing of an animal and a "realistic" perspective drawing almost always choose the polydimensional drawing as more realistic, usually because it shows all the significant features of an animal whereas perspective art can only show one side. In Medieval Europe: buildings were often shown from a horizontal viewpoint, but the ground was shown from an aerial or vertical view.
Western artists still use these styles. One famous example of the polydimensional approach is the celebrated drawing by Picasso of a woman's face with the nose in profile but eyes facing front. Depending on how the viewer looks at it, the drawing could be either a front view or a profile view. The Dutch artist Maurits Escher delighted in playing tricks with perspective and produced numerous drawings with deliberate violations of the rules of perspective. Both of these artists were perfectly capable of drawing realistic perspective drawings; Escher in particular produced almost photographically realistic works. They made use of other styles to achieve a deliberately selected effect.
Medieval artists knew of and used many distance cues, but not systematically. These included:
The camera obscura (Latin: dark chamber) appeared about 1400. It's exactly what the name implies, a dark chamber, with a pinhole one one side for admitting light and a projection screen on the other. Such devices are sometimes called pinhole cameras.
Why don't you project your own image onto the wall as you walk by? You do, but so does every other object around. Any given spot on the wall is hit by light rays from myriad objects, and any given spot on you sends rays to myriad points, so there is no image. In a camera obscura, however, the pinhole means that light from one point on the object travels to only one point on the screen. What you see on the screen is an inverted image of the objects outside. The image size is governed solely by the distance from the pinhole to the screen, and its qualities are determined by the pinhole. A tiny pinhole results in a sharp but dim image, a large pinhole makes the image brighter (more light is admitted) but also fuzzier (rays of light from a point hit a larger area of the screen).
Cameras obscura were popular novelties and some buildings were built with them simply so people could experience the novelty of seeing the world projected on a screen. But their utility for drawing is obvious: an artist could get an accurate true layout of a scene quickly. Cameras obscura were standard equipment on explorations into the 19th century so that expedition artists could record scenes accurately. It seems quite likely that many of the geometric principles of perspective would have been discovered almost automatically once artists began using the camera obscura.
Fairly soon, it was discovered that a lens in the pinhole would create a sharper and brighter image that could be focused, but by that time the principles of perspective were already well established. In the 1830's, light-sensitive chemical media were developed for recording images and "camera" took on its modern meaning.
In our media-saturated world it's hard to imagine a time when any improvement in imagery was an amazing novelty, but the historical evidence is clear about the impact of perspective. The fact that cameras obscura were such popular novelties that buildings were built with them simply so people could experience the novelty of seeing the world projected on a screen is testimony to just how novel and amazing realistic imagery was. Once perspective was discovered, artists began producing works that were specifically designed to be compared with the real thing just so people could marvel at the realism (and, no doubt, hire the artist who made it possible). Architects began designing buildings with parallel lines to enhance the impression of size.
One interesting illustration of the interest in the new technique was the discovery of anamorphic art - distorted pictures that magically assumed their proper shape when viewed in curved mirrors. Here we clearly see people fascinated by the ability of geometry to transform the world in unexpected ways.
A World War II cartoon shows two scientists in a lab. One says "I'm not sure there's any demand for a freeze-dried elephant but it is fascinating to see what can be done." Something done simply "to see what can be done" is called a tour de force, driven solely by delight in new technical mastery. Innovations are often expanded this way--out of sheer delight in new-found powers, and the games people played with perspective after 1400 are a good example. They served (if inadvertently) to refine artists' understanding of geometrical techniques.
Perspective also led to deeper understanding of the power of close observation and attention to detail. A good medieval painting didn't have anything like the impact of a good perspective painting, but to exploit the new technique to its fullest artists had to begin observing myriad other details: shading, textures, nuances of color. The importance to the development of science is obvious.
Perspective was an object lesson in the power of mathematics to explain and describe nature. It is one of the first cases where mathematics gave a precise solution to a practical problem. It showed the sorts of things that were possible with increased precision of techniques and observation.
The striking thing about perspective is that its principles are so simple. In fact, we wonder now what took people so long. The amazement that people felt at seeing perspective for the first time must have been an incredible demonstration of the power of simple principles to achieve great effects. This, in turn, must have served to reinforce the belief that there were simple laws governing the world.
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Created 27 Dec 1996; Last Update 20 October 1998