Point by point, the image of the lute is being built up on the canvas as a cross-section of the light-rays projected from the lute.Īs the European nations advanced in their domination of the world in the sixteenth century, so did the demands for accurate mapmaking. The point at which the string crosses the frame of the canvas is measured, and then the position of this point is transferred to the canvas. The other end of the string is attached to a point on the lute that is being drawn. The string is secured to the wall at the viewpoint of the drawing that is under construction in the woodcut. This is beautifully illustrated in a famous woodcut by Albrecht Dürer (Figure 25.3), which provides a physical interpretation of this prescription with a taut string representing the light-rays. The challenge for the artist was to find methods to reproduce this cross-section, as though their canvas were a window looking out onto the scene.
Light-rays travel in straight lines, so a drawing will only appear realistic if it looks like a cross-section of these projected light-rays. As we have seen, the artists of the Renaissance developed techniques that built on the solution offered by Brunelleschi. So each of these disciplines investigated and developed methods of projecting an image onto a plane. Astronomers and geographers sought ways to represent the features of a spherical globe on a flat surface, and similarly, artists required ways to depict solid three-dimensional objects on a flat surface. The fundamental issues that astronomers, geographers, and artists faced were quite different, but the solutions were rather similar-certainly with respect to their use of geometry.
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