Brunelleschi’s namecorresponds to the moment of the inversion of practical
interest into theoretical interest which was, for Husserl, the condition of
science, in the western, European sense of the word”(emphasis added).^10
Brunelleschi serves the function of author-as-category in a narrative that
provides Florentine patrimony for a representational device promising the
universalization of a singular understanding of vision to Man who stands in
for reason as the founding attribute of the West.
Recognition of Alberti’s paternity of perspective grew in the twentieth
century. In his 1936 essay honoring the recent translation ofDe Pittura
into German, the art historian Georg Wolffinterprets Alberti’s work as
celebrating a new era uniting painting with science through geometry. Yet
none of his quotations from the work mention mathematics or geometry,
and his illustrations stem from later works.^11 This informed the thought of
William Ivins, curator of prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who
credited Alberti with the“invention or discovery of perspective,”which he
identifies as the moment that divides the pre-Renaissance from the post-
Renaissance world. Far from merely describing a painting technique, Ivins
claims that“on Alberti’s discovery of a rational way to do this all modern
perspective and all the various mathematical sciences that have grown out
of it are based.”^12 Thus science emerges from art. Ivins also provides
a direct lineage from the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci to the“diagrams
that Alberti may have made to illustrate his description.”^13 Citing these
notebooks as the sole model for Jean Pèlerin’s 1505 work, he produces
a clear genealogy of perspective guiding the reins of civilization on its
preordained journey from Florence to France.
Conceiving of Brunelleschi or Alberti as patriarchs of perspective
depends on ignoring the history of science. Thefirst European book on
perspective wasDe scienta perspectivawritten by the Englishman Roger
Bacon (1214/15–1294?) during his exile in Paris as a Franciscan monk
writing under the patronage of a cardinal. He developed his idea of
perspectiva naturalisbased largely on the translation of thefirst three
books (minus the absentfirst three chapters of thefirst book) of ibn al-
Haytham’s Book of Optics, known in Latin as the De aspectibus of
Alhazen.^14 Bacon’s work became part of the basic educationalquadrivium.
Teaching texts developed by John Pecham (1240–92) and a commentary by
Vittelione (1220/30–1300/14) became influential during the Renaissance.
Continued interest in Alhazen led to a fourteenth-century Italian(^10) Damisch, 1995 : 157. (^11) Wolff, 1936. (^12) Ivins, 1936 : 279. (^13) Ivins, 1936 : 279.
(^14) Bush, 2018 : 40.
304 Perspectives on Perspective