Linear perspective
Also called: Perspective · Topic: Renaissance, Reformation and the Scientific Revolution · NCERT: Class 11, Ch 5 "Changing Cultural Traditions"
Meaning
Linear perspective is a way of showing depth on a flat surface. Distant things are drawn smaller, and lines meet towards a point, so a picture looks three-dimensional. Renaissance painters in fifteenth-century Italy worked it out using geometry. They also studied how light changes. Together these gave their paintings a lifelike depth that older, flatter art lacked.
Example
Italian Renaissance painters used geometry to set out perspective. Combined with light, shade and the new oil colours, it produced the style later called "realism", which lasted in European painting until the nineteenth century.
Don't confuse with
- Realism: realism is the overall aim of showing people and nature as they really are. Perspective is just one technique used to reach that aim.