This might be a great loss. Comparing with the development of perspective theory, which was the prerequisite for relief perspective theory, it started with Filippo Brunelleschi’s perspectival experiment around 1425. According to Antonio Manetti, Brunelleschi painted an image of the Baptistry in Florence with an approximate linear perspective and put a small hole in the centre of the vanishing point level. He held the painting facing away from him, and then he held a mirror facing the painting in the back. Through the hole on the painting, by constantly taking the mirror away to see the actual Baptistry and taking the mirror back on to see the reflection of his painting from the mirror, he was able to correct his representation painting with precision and accuracy.8 Brunelleschi’s experiment device (Figure 3) had already presented the qualities of an analogous model and his findings were very intuitive and practical. They soon dominated western painting tradition, even before Leon Battista Alberti’s book De Pictura (On Painting) was published in 1436, which codified Brunelleschi’s findings into a manual and was regarded on the history of western art as the establishment of perspective theory.9 Similarly, Constructing an accurate relief perspective must have been a sophisticated task, very likely, a series trial and error with the help of physical models like Brunelleschi’s experiment to perspective rules might be carried out for the design of Teatro Olimpico (1580-1585), Palazzo Spada (1652-1653) and Scala Regia (16631666), while architecture history failed to record those design efforts. This probably also explains why after the Renaissance built relief perspective ceased to be an architectural concept and played a minor role in architectural theory. While built relief perspective was almost completely forgotten by the field of architecture, the mathematical field rediscovered it and established a geometric theory from it, and soon dominated academic publicity on this matter in the recent two centuries. Mathematician, Johann Adam Breysig was the first in history to introduce the term “relief perspective” to describe the three-dimensional effect of accelerated perspectival convergence and had the first book on this matter published in 1798 - Versuch einer Erlauterung der Reliefperspektive (The use of perspective in projecting relief). In his book, Breysig illustrated the construction of relief perspectives for basic geometries (Figure 4.a) and simple rooms (Figure 4.b).10 Nevertheless, his publication didn’t catch the attention of the architecture realm, instead, the gap between the geometric theory of relief perspective and architectural practice started to expand.
8
Samuel Y. Edgerton, “Brunelleschi's First Perspective Picture,” Arte Lombarda 18, No. 38/39 (1973), 172-195. Andersen, The Geometry of an Art – The History of the Mathematical Theory of Perspective from Alberti to Monge, 11-19. 10 Cornelie Leopold, “The Development of the Geometric Concept of Relief Perspective,” Nexus Network Journal 21, no.2 (2019): 241-243. 9
