Leonardo Compared With Piero

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sible thing is represented.’ Leonardo is saying that a painting it a two dimensional surface and is not three dimensional and does not extend past the canvas or wall it may be on. This denies Alberti’s window metaphor. ‘Where I must paint I draw a quadrangle of right angles…which I consider to be an open window.’ Leonardo did not completely deny that the painting was like a window. Piero on the other hand rejected Alberti’s claim. Leonardo also wrote ‘Perspective is nothing else than the seeing of an object behind a sheet of glass, smooth and quite transparent, on the surface of which all the things may be marked that are behind the glass.’ This supports Alberti’s window metaphor.

Leonardo was incessantly observing the way humans perceive visual objects. This led to a lot of writings in his notebooks about perspective and the effects on perspective of mist, smoke and atmosphere. He wrote of items diminishing in size in the distance – linear perspective, colour changes when farther away from the eye and that obj...