PROPORTION & PERSPECTIVE

 In 1416 Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) brought back to Florence a manuscript of De Architectura by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius, discussing the ideal proportions of the human body. A few years later, the architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) made a panel painting of the Baptistery in Florence with a hole through its centre with which he illustrated one-point linear perspective. Written in the 1430s, Leon Battista Alberti’s influential Della Pittura (On Painting) referred to both proportion and perspective, establishing for the first time the principles of art as an intellectual discipline. Tuscan artists such as Paulo Ucello (1397-1475) and Piero de la Francesca (1416-1492) explored these new ideas in drawings of objects and heads, and Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), a few decades later, produced his famous Vitruvian Man. The search for correct proportions in drawings of the human body continued to preoccupy artists in later centuries, and is still taught in some art schools today.