disagreement) in the world of art scholarship with the theory David Hockney put out about 10 years ago stating that some Renaissance artists made use of aids aids like camera obscuras to achieve their highly realistic results? It appears that people generally do figure it out, but it takes a little bit of thought for them to make sense of what they are seeing. A straight picture of a cow in a field is relatively easy to parse, but a complex photo with perspective and multiple subject is tougher. Yeah, I'm just talking regular ol' photos taken with a normal lens ("normal" being used in the technical sense: 50-55mm on a 35mm film camera or 80mm on a 6x6, etc.) I mean, surely these primitive cultures have seen reflections before, so they do have some concept of 3-dimensional space being mapped onto a 2-dimensional plane, no? One of the best examples my art professor gave was a full size portrait of Christ being lowered from the cross. It was done in a way that made it appear that the body was about to fall out of the painting. It was quite shocking at the time and first time viewers would run up and try and catch the body. By today's standards, it is not even close to photo realistic, but it was leaps beyond what the average Italian of the time was used to seeing. I'm pretty sure you're thinking of this painting by Masaccio, a student (I think he