page_title: Mathematics and art
section_title: Perspective and proportion
hierarchical_section_title: Mathematics and art / Origins: from ancient Greece to the Renaissance / Perspective and proportion
caption_attribution_description: Niccolò da Tolentino Leads the Florentine Troops
context_page_description: Mathematics and art are related in a variety of ways. Mathematics has itself been described as an art motivated by beauty. Mathematics can be discerned in arts such as music, dance, painting, architecture, sculpture, and textiles.
  Mathematics and art have a long historical relationship. Artists have used mathematics since the 4th century BC when the Greek sculptor Polykleitos wrote his Canon, prescribing proportions based on the ratio 1:√2 for the ideal male nude. Persistent popular claims have been made for the use of the golden ratio in ancient art and architecture, without reliable evidence. In the Italian Renaissance, Luca Pacioli wrote the influential treatise De divina proportione, illustrated with woodcuts by Leonardo da Vinci, on the use of the golden ratio in art. Another Italian painter, Piero della Francesca, developed Euclid's ideas on perspective in treatises such as De Prospectiva Pingendi, and in his paintings. The engraver Albrecht Dürer made many references to mathematics in his work Melencolia I. In modern times, the graphic artist M. C. Escher made intensive use of tessellation and hyperbolic geometry, with the help of the mathematician H. S. M.
context_section_description: In classical times, rather than making distant figures smaller with linear perspective, painters sized objects and figures according to their thematic importance. In the Middle Ages, some artists used reverse perspective for special emphasis. The Muslim mathematician Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham) described a theory of optics in his Book of Optics in 1021, but never applied it to art. The Renaissance saw a rebirth of Classical Greek and Roman culture and ideas, among them the study of mathematics to understand nature and the arts. Two major motives drove artists in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance towards mathematics. First, painters needed to figure out how to depict three-dimensional scenes on a two-dimensional canvas. Second, philosophers and artists alike were convinced that mathematics was the true essence of the physical world and that the entire universe, including the arts, could be explained in geometric terms.
  The rudiments of perspective arrived with Giotto (1266/7 – 1337), who attempted to draw in perspective using an algebraic method to determine the placement of distant lines. In 1415, the Italian architect Filippo Brunelleschi and his friend Leon Battista Alberti demonstrated the geometrical method of applying perspective in Florence, using similar triangles as formulated by Euclid, to find the apparent height of distant objects. Brunelleschi's own perspective paintings are lost, but Masaccio's painting of the Holy Trinity shows his principles at work.
  The Italian painter Paolo Uccello (1397–1475) was fascinated by perspective, as shown in his paintings of The Battle of San Romano (c. 1435–1460): broken lances lie conveniently along perspective lines.
  The painter Piero della Francesca (c. 1415–1492) exemplified this new shift in Italian Renaissance thinking. He was an expert mathematician and geometer, writing books on solid geometry and perspective, including De prospectiva pingendi (On Perspective for Painting), Trattato d'Abaco (Abacus Treatise), and De corporibus regularibus (On Regular Solids). The historian Vasari in his Lives of the Painters calls Piero the "greatest geometer of his time, or perhaps of any time." Piero's interest in perspective can be seen in his paintings including the Polyptych of Perugia, the San Agostino altarpiece and The Flagellation of Christ. His work on geometry influenced later mathematicians and artists including Luca Pacioli in his De divina proportione and Leonardo da Vinci. Piero studied classical mathematics and the works of Archimedes. He was taught commercial arithmetic in "abacus schools"; his writings are formatted like abacus school textbooks, perhaps including Leonardo Pisano (Fibonacci)'s 1202 Liber Abaci. Linear perspective was just being introduced into the artistic world. Alberti explained in his 1435 De pictura: "light rays travel in straight lines from points in the observed scene to the eye, forming a kind of pyramid with the eye as vertex." A painting constructed with linear perspective is a cross-section of that pyramid.
  In De Prospectiva Pingendi, Piero transforms his empirical observations of the way aspects of a figure change with point of view into mathematical proofs. His treatise starts in the vein of Euclid: he defines the point as "the tiniest thing that is possible for the eye to comprehend". He uses deductive logic to lead the reader to the perspective representation of a three-dimensional body.
  The artist David Hockney argued in his book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters that artists started using a camera lucida from the 1420s, resulting in a sudden change in precision and realism, and that this practice was continued by major artists including Ingres, Van Eyck, and Caravaggio. Critics disagree on whether Hockney was correct. Similarly, the architect Philip Steadman argued controversially that Vermeer had used a different device, the camera obscura, to help him create his distinctively observed paintings.
  In 1509, Luca Pacioli (c. 1447–1517) published De divina proportione on mathematical and artistic p
caption: Paolo Uccello made innovative use of perspective in The Battle of San Romano (c. 1435–1460).
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