@hollyr.eth
Framedl 2026-09-09 1/6*
Around 1425 Brunelleschi painted the Baptistery on a small panel, drilled a hole at the vanishing point, and had you look through from behind while holding a mirror out front. Lower the mirror: the building. Raise it: the painting. No difference.
He was positing that vision has a single fixed point and that space obeys a rule. Alberti wrote it up as a method a decade later and artists were able to extrapolate it to modern day linear perspective.
The panel is lost. The account comes from a biographer writing decades after. Every picture of the experiment, including this one, is a reconstruction.