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Perspective is an artists way of capturing the three dimensional world on a two dimensional surface like paper or a canvas. There are a few ways of doing this...
Aerial perspective. This was developed by the artist Leonardo da Vinci around about 500 years ago. It helped images of nature look more realistic by painting things in the distance more blue.
Linear perspective. This is a perspective system made from many lines. Leon Battista Alberti was the first person to write down the rules for linear perspective around the same time Leonardo was experimenting with Aerial perspective.
Conceptual perspective. Paintings which use conceptual perspective often look very flat, this technique can sometimes look like the perspective has gone wrong but it is simply another way of looking at the world around us.
Leonardo da Vinci believed that atmosphere (made up of moisture and dust) absorbed certain colours of light and that blue light passed more easily through the atmosphere. To show this in his paintings Leonardo painted far away things with a blue colour and things closer to the artist with less blue. To make it easier to do this Leonardo divided up all of his compositions into 5 compartments, things in the fifth compartment contained more blue than the fourth and so on. His ideas were based on a system much older where what we see is put into three categories, near distance, middle distance and far distance, something film makers use still today.
To make this perspective work you need to start with a vanishing point, this is where all the other lines meet, next a horizon line, this passes through the vanishing point and cuts the paper across the middle. Leon believed that perspective was like looking through a window and that lots of visual rays all disappeared at one point, the vanishing point. Leon used maths to figure out where these visual rays went to from the vanishing point and he called them orthogonals. This made something which looked like a chess board and made it easier for Leon to draw buildings as all he needed to do was place the top and bottom of a building on orthogonal lines to make the building look as though it became smaller the further away it went.
All these perspective tricks were used to make paintings look like the real world, in the case of conceptual perspective we are looking at something completely opposite. Do you remember drawing houses when you were very young, they always look very flat and don’t really look like houses at all, in fact without knowing you were drawing a picture using conceptual perspective. The best examples of conceptual perspective can be found in Islamic art. It is against some religious laws to show the world how it really looks as that is like making the world and in certain religions it is believed that only god can create the world. In Islamic art a conceptual perspective system is used, often to tell a story or illustrate something important, sometimes paintings can look as though you are watching lots of different stories all at once. This type of perspective is also used in China and Japan where the start of the story begins at the bottom of the painting and the end is at the top, this can sometimes look like the perspective has gone wrong but it is in fact another way of showing the world around us.