A Brief History of

Perspective for my Eight Year-Old

Granddaughter Stephanie Wynn Wolfe, 2001

Perspective:(Random House Dictionary)

1. A technique of depicting volumes and spacial relationships on a flat surface.

Definitions (2), (3), and (4) read much the same, but five (5) drops the math and acknowledges the human element —

5. The state of one’s ideas, the facts known to one, etc., in having a meaningful interrelationship: You have to live around here a few years to see local conditions in perspective.

[So it is, things take a little time to sink in or to see clearly for each of us].

My granddaughter, Stephanie and I, were leaving a restaurant ahead of the others, a place the whole family frequented on Sunday mornings from the time she was a toddler. Suddenly one Sunday, walking to the car, Stephanie holding my hand, jerked me to a stop, raised her other hand to take good measure and blurted: “Hey Grandpa, just a minute…just a minute…just a minute! How does that eighty-foot tall palm tree fit between my two fingers?” For many years Stephanie and I played at the base of this tree for a few minutes each Sunday looking how it leaned towards the Sun, how its palm leaves might brush the blue of the sky away so that her imagination could get a glimpse of beyond the blue horizon, etc. — she always asked a lot of good questions! This time I said, “Well Stephanie, it’s a matter of perspective.” Her question reminded me of several interesting tidbits I had read over the years. I said I’d pull some references together into a little PowerPoint presentation and we’d read and look at these ideas together. One, in particular, I knew I wanted to end with, even though it tweaks the heads of adults; I wanted her young, enthusiastic mind to have it for keeps -- she’s like that ya know!

Brunelleschi is generally regarded as the inventor of perspective, the one who discovered (or recovered) it's mathematical laws. For example, he worked out the principle of the vanishing point which was known to the Greeks and Romans, but like so much other knowledge, had long since been lost (imagine a vanishing point getting lost — that sounds funny).

Filippo Brunelleschi (1377 - 1446)

Leonardo’s study for the 'Adoration of the Magi Drawn about 1481, this is a virtually perfect illustration of linear

perspective as it was practiced in Florence at that time. The illusion of three dimensions is created by the lines that recede from the very foreground and converge on the vanishing point to the right of the center.

Roman scientist Pliny the Elder, 23 - 79 A.D.

However, Pliny claimed that this method of representation, which he calls “slanting images” had been invented by a painter in the sixth century B.C. named Kimon of Kleonai.

Plotinus, ce. 205-270“Why Distant Objects Appear Small”

Here is why I saved this piece for last -- no matter the chronology. The first paragraph below reads mathematically, and the second paragraph adds the “human element” (imagination), “the state of ones ideas,” as defined in the Random House Dictionary; interestingly:

“Seen from a distance, objects appear reduced and close together, however far apart they be: within easy range, their sizes and distances that separate them are observed correctly…

“Distant objects show in this reduction because they must be drawn together for vision and the light must be concentrated to suit the size of the pupil.”

[You have to live with these last ideas for a while to see them in their rightful perspective.]

Stephanie is now twenty-three, she graduated in 2015 from Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts in International Relations. She has just begun her second year of graduate business school at IFM, Institut Francais de la Mode in Paris, France, and is working as an intern at Givenchy in Paris.

Her educated imagination is fully engaged!