The so-called conquest of realism involved a surprisingly small number of spatial forms, which were gradually mastered from the 12th through the 15th centuries. A key aspect of this approach was that persons began to approach the same objects systematically from different viewpoints and in different scales.
The contents of the perspective texts from the Renaissance onwards, were primarily devoted to something other than realism. The treatises were in fact repositories for a whole range of new images: regular solids, semi-regular solids, lutes, chairs, stairs, complex plays of shadow and reflections, grotesques and caryatids, imaginary gardens, fountains, idealized ruins and phantasy architecture.
By the 1560’s, Vredeman de Vries had begun publishing books devoted specifically to perspectival fountains and gardens. A little over a century later, the Italian author, Bisagno, in his Treatise on Painting (1642), included a special section on “what sort of paintings are to be painted in fountains, gardens, in rooms and other places of pleasure,” where he explained that one could use:
various perspectives which have the effect of extending the gates and walls of the garden and besides, the columns in the intervals, landscapes which accompany them in such a way that they appear to follow those of nature, adding some stories which are appropriate to such places.
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