Browse 133 people who shaped perspective across art, science, mathematics, optics, photography and technology. Search by name, period or A–Z.
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Showing 133 of 133 people.
A
Adams, K. R.
K. R. Adams is represented in the PRC sources by 1972 work on perspective and viewpoint, including Inverted Perspective in Art. The work is relevant to how perspective pictures are viewed and interpreted, particularly when the observer’s position differs from the viewpoint implied by the image.
Aguilera, Steven
In A New Perspective – Universal Edition (2008), Steven Aguilera argues that perspective should not be defined narrowly as representing three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface. He interprets it more broadly as a position in relation to other positions and, in the visual arts, as the selection of viewpoints that best communicate a subject to an audience. His theory of form perspective explains appearance through three interdependent factors: size, distance and direction relative to the observer.
Al-Farabi
Al-Farabi is cited in the Dictionary for an early account of perspective as a science related to optics, geometry, figures, sizes, positions and visual relations. His formulation helps place perspective within the medieval intellectual connection between geometry and the study of vision.
Al-Kindi
Al-Kindi was a major medieval scholar in the Arabic optical tradition. The Dictionary places him with Alhazen in establishing new foundations for optical research, helping transmit and develop theories of vision that later became important to the history of perspective.
Alberti, Leon Battista
Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) was an Italian Renaissance humanist, architect, author and mathematician. He was a central recorder and developer of linear perspective, and his De pictura provided the first surviving systematic written account of geometrical perspective construction for painters.
Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham)
Ibn al-Haytham, known in Latin Europe as Alhazen (965–1040), was a major medieval mathematician and physicist. His Book of Optics developed a systematic intromission theory of vision and investigated light, reflection, refraction and camera-obscura effects, profoundly influencing later optical and perspectivist traditions.
Andersen, Kirsti
Kirsti Andersen is represented in the Dictionary as the author of The Geometry of an Art (2007), a major historical study of the mathematical theory of perspective from Alberti to Monge. Her work is therefore directly relevant to the history of geometrical and mathematical perspective.
Aristotle
Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was an ancient Greek philosopher whose writings shaped later scientific and optical thought. In the history of vision he rejected a simple eye-beam theory, explaining sight through the action of visible objects upon the transparent medium and the eye.
B
Bacon, Roger
Roger Bacon was an important medieval writer on optics whose work helped transmit and develop perspectivist traditions in Europe. The PRC sources place him within the optical lineage that influenced later scholars including John Peckham and helped connect theories of vision with geometrical perspective.
Barbari, Jacopo de’
Jacopo de’ Barbari is included in the Dictionary for his View of Venice of 1500, a remarkable bird’s-eye representation that uses perspective to create a detailed visual record of the city. His work belongs to the Renaissance intersection of pictorial perspective, urban representation and cartographic viewing.
Barbaro, Daniele
Daniele Barbaro was a Venetian geometer whose 1568 treatise La Pratica della Perspettiva brought together previously scattered knowledge of perspective. The Dictionary presents the work as an important synthesis and systematic codification of perspectival methods across different disciplines and purposes, influential on later treatments of the subject.
Barre, André
André Barre was a twentieth-century artist and perspective theorist associated with Albert Flocon. Their work on curvilinear perspective explored ways of representing wide visual fields and curved visual space beyond conventional rectilinear linear perspective.
Behaim, Martin
Martin Behaim is included in the Dictionary in connection with his globe of 1492. The globe records European geographical knowledge immediately before the discovery of America and serves as an important historical example of representing the Earth through a constructed spatial model.
Bellini, Giovanni
Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430–1516) was a major Venetian Renaissance painter. The Dictionary includes him for his transformation of Venetian painting through colour, oil technique and observed spatial appearance, placing his work within the broader development of Renaissance pictorial representation.
Berners-Lee, Tim
Tim Berners-Lee is included in the Dictionary as the inventor of the World Wide Web. His work is relevant to New Media perspective through the networked environments in which visual information, images and spatial knowledge are linked, communicated and explored across digital systems.
Biagio Pelacani da Parma
Biagio Pelacani da Parma belongs to the late-medieval perspectivist tradition. The Dictionary places him with Witelo and John Peckham in linking rediscovered Greek mathematics and optics, especially Euclid and Ptolemy, with the Arabic optical tradition of Alhazen, helping form new relations between optics and perspectival representation.
Bonne, Rigobert
Rigobert Bonne is represented in the Dictionary through Bonne’s projection, a pseudoconic equal-area map projection. The projection preserves relative area while arranging the central meridian as a straight line, other meridians as curved lines, and the parallels as concentric arcs. His inclusion therefore belongs primarily to the cartographic history of perspective and projection.
Bosse, Abraham
Abraham Bosse (1604–1676) was a French artist and theorist and an important figure in Baroque perspective. He strongly promoted the perspectival methods of Girard Desargues and published treatises applying geometrical perspective to pictures, mechanical drawing and irregular architectural surfaces.
Braque, Georges
Georges Braque was a major twentieth-century artist closely associated with the development of Cubism. His work challenged single-view Renaissance perspective by fragmenting and recombining multiple aspects of objects and space within one image.
Brunelleschi, Filippo
Filippo Brunelleschi is generally credited with the first systematic demonstrations of geometrical linear perspective in early fifteenth-century Florence. His experiments established a controlled correspondence between a constructed image, a fixed viewpoint and the observed architectural scene.
C
Cameron, James
James Cameron (1954–) is a Canadian filmmaker noted in the Dictionary for innovative film technologies, especially stereoscopic 3-D techniques. His work links cinema perspective with specialised camera systems, binocular image capture and the construction of immersive screen space. Cameron has also contributed to deep-ocean exploration and underwater filming technologies, extending camera perspective into environments that cannot readily be viewed by ordinary human vision.
Canaletto
Canaletto is described in the Dictionary as a master of linear perspective. Analysis of his paintings shows precise control of perspective lines and vanishing points, while the complexity of his architectural views has also prompted discussion of possible optical aids such as mirrors, lenses or the camera obscura.
Carter, B. A. R.
B. A. R. Carter (1909–2006) was a British painter and professor of perspective at the Royal Academy Schools from 1975 to 1983. His writing on perspective appeared in academic publications, and he contributed the entry “Graphical or Linear Perspective” to The Oxford Companion to Art.
Cesariano, Cesare
Cesare Cesariano is represented in Volume 1 through his illustrated 1521 edition of Vitruvius’s De architectura. Its diagrams connect light-ray geometry, architectural theory and perspectival construction, illustrating the Renaissance interrelationship between optics, geometry and representation.
Chelsea, David
David Chelsea is a contemporary artist and author who has written clearly on practical and alternative perspective methods. The Dictionary particularly associates his work with curvilinear, spherical and extreme perspective and with teaching artists how to experiment with non-standard constructions.
Commandino, Federico
Federico Commandino was a Renaissance mathematician and translator of ancient mathematical works. The Dictionary identifies his translations and scholarship as important contributions to the recovery and transmission of geometrical knowledge relevant to the history of visual and graphical perspective.
Copernicus, Nicolaus
Nicolaus Copernicus was a Polish astronomer and mathematician whose heliocentric model placed the Sun at the centre of the planetary system. His work transformed spatial and astronomical understanding and forms part of the wider history connecting geometry, observation and perspective.
Cousin, Jean the Younger
Jean the Elder published his noted work Livre de Perspective in 1560 which is one of the most famous on the subject of artistic anatomy and was printed many times into the late 17th century.
Coxeter, H. S. M.
Canadian mathematician. He is regarded as one of the greatest geometers of the 20th century, who made important contributions to the theory of non-Euclidean geometry. Crane Shot (Camera Perspective; Instrument Perspective; Motion and Cinema Perspective) A crane shot is a camera shot taken with a camera mounted on a mechanical arm called a crane or jib.
Cézanne, Paul
Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) is discussed in relation to a more perceptual and multi-view approach to pictorial space. His paintings allow forms, alignments and viewpoints to shift as the eye moves across a scene, producing a deliberately less rigid perspective than a single geometrical projection. Later writers, particularly Maurice Merleau-Ponty, interpreted this as reflecting the succession of changing views produced by an active observer rather than the frozen viewpoint of a camera. Cézanne’s treatment of space strongly influenced later modern approaches to multiple viewpoint, Cubism and perceptually organised representation.
D
Dalí, Salvador
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) was a Spanish Surrealist artist known for technically precise but often deliberately strange imagery. The Dictionary notes his use of linear perspective, optical illusion, pointillism and holography to intensify dramatic spatial and perceptual effects. Dalí combined conventional geometrical construction with distortions of scale, form and apparent reality, making perspective itself part of the psychological and illusionistic content of his work.
Danti, Egnazio
Egnazio Danti was one of the Renaissance writers and practitioners who described, illustrated or adapted perspective constructions. The Dictionary places him alongside Alberti, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo, Dürer, Serlio, Vignola and Daniele Barbaro in the development and dissemination of Renaissance perspective methods.
de Chirico, Giorgio
Giorgio de Chirico was a twentieth-century painter associated with Metaphysical art. The Dictionary highlights his use of deliberately illogical or unsettling perspective, with arcades, plazas and architectural forms arranged to create ambiguous and psychologically charged spatial relationships.
Debevec, Paul
Paul Debevec is a researcher whose work helped reverse the conventional direction of perspective by starting with photographs and using them to reconstruct represented three-dimensional space electronically. His image-based modelling and rendering research showed how multiple photographic views can be related to spatial geometry and used to produce new viewpoints of a reconstructed scene. Within the PRC framework this is an important example of inverse perspective and spatial correspondence: instead of beginning with a three-dimensional model and projecting an image, the process begins with images and recovers information about the modelled space. Related techniques became important in visual effects, digital games, virtual reality, augmented reality and virtual production.
del Monte, Guidobaldo
Guidobaldo del Monte (1545–1607) wrote a seminal Renaissance work on perspective that the Dictionary describes as providing the first rigorous mathematical foundation for the subject. His work marks an important transition from practical Renaissance construction methods towards a more formal mathematical science of perspective.
Desargues, Girard
Girard Desargues was a seventeenth-century mathematician whose work connected perspective with projective geometry. The Dictionary highlights his treatment of points and lines at infinity and Desargues’s theorem, both fundamental to the mathematical understanding of projection and perspectival relations.
Disney, Walt
Walt Disney (1901–1966) was an American animator, film producer and entrepreneur whose studios helped develop major techniques in animated and immersive image-making. The Dictionary highlights the multiplane camera, in which separate image layers move at different rates to create stronger impressions of depth and parallax in animation. Disney productions and attractions also employed stereoscopic film, Circle-Vision and Circarama panoramic systems, Pepper’s Ghost effects and other combinations of projected, optical and physical perspective. His work therefore extends from graphical and cinematic perspective into immersive environments in which the observer is surrounded by coordinated visual effects.
du Cerceau, Jacques Androuet
Jacques Androuet du Cerceau was a Renaissance architect, designer and author associated with architectural representation and perspective. His work contributed to the dissemination of geometrical methods for depicting architecture and designed space in sixteenth-century Europe.
Dürer, Albrecht
Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was a German Renaissance artist, printmaker and theorist. His publications and famous perspective instruments helped disseminate geometrical perspective north of the Alps, while his studies connected perspective construction with measurement, geometry and human proportion.
d’Aguilon, François
François d’Aguilon (1567–1617) is placed by Volume 1 within the seventeenth-century interaction of optics, astronomy and geometry. His work belongs to the period in which perspective increasingly became connected with mathematical science and systematic optical theory.
E
Einstein, Albert
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) is included in the Dictionary in relation to perspective, relativity and visual thinking. His theories showed that measurements of time, distance and simultaneity depend upon an observer’s frame of reference while physical laws retain invariant form. This makes his work relevant to the wider history of observer-dependent spatial description, although physical relativity should not be confused with pictorial perspective. Einstein also described productive thought as relying strongly on mental signs and images before their translation into words, making him an important example of visual thinking in modern science.
Elkins, James
James Elkins is included in the Dictionary as the author of The Poetics of Perspective (1994). His work examines the structures, conventions and meanings of pictorial perspective and is used by the PRC as a specialist source on graphical perspective.
Empedocles
Empedocles (c. 490–430 BCE) proposed an extramission theory of vision in which rays were thought to issue from the eyes towards objects. The Dictionary includes him in the long historical debate over how vision works, a debate fundamental to later optical and geometrical theories of perspective.
Escher, M. C.
M. C. Escher (1898–1972) was a Dutch graphic artist whose prints explored mathematical and perspectival ideas including impossible objects, infinity, reflection, symmetry, tessellation, polyhedra and hyperbolic geometry. His images often construct internally convincing local spaces that cannot coexist consistently within ordinary three-dimensional geometry. Escher therefore provides one of the clearest modern demonstrations of how perspective can be used not only to represent spatial reality but also to construct impossible, recursive and alternative visual worlds.
Euclid
Euclid, active around 300 BCE, provided one of the earliest systematic geometrical accounts of visual appearance in his Optics. He described the visual cone, apparent diminution and foreshortening and recognised that parallel lines can appear to converge, introducing a quantitative framework for the geometry of vision.
F
Fabritius, Carel
Carel Pietersz Fabritius (1622 – 1654) was a Dutch painter who was a pupil of Rembrandt and worked in his Amsterdam studio. Fabritius, a member of the Delft School, developed his flown artistic style and experimented with perspective distortions, projections, and lighting. In particular, he used a number of unusual perspective instruments to help produce his paintings, including a perspective box, peepholes, single or double convex mirrors, and bi-convex lenses.
Filarete (Antonio di Pietro Averlino)
Antonio di Pietro Aver(u)lino (1400 – 1469), known as Filarete, was a Florentine Renaissance architect, sculptor, medallist, and architectural theorist. He is perhaps best remembered for his design of the city of Sforzinda, the first ideal city plan of the Renaissance, which also included one of the earliest examples of an artificial perspective drawing executed according to the legitimate construction method of central/linear perspective. Filling-In Illusion (Eye (Human Vision); Blind Spot; Filling In / Perceptual Completion) The lling-in illusion is a visual phenomenon in which…
Flocon, Albert
Albert Flocon (1909–1994) was an artist and author who made an important modern contribution to perspective theory. His publications include La Perspective and, with André Barre, Curvilinear Perspective: From Visual Space to the Constructed Image (1988). The latter became a major modern treatment of curvilinear perspective and helped popularise geometrical methods for representing wider and curved fields of view beyond conventional rectilinear linear perspective.
Florensky, Pavel
Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky (1882–1937) was a Russian theologian, philosopher, mathematician, physicist, engineer and polymath who strongly criticised the claim that linear perspective provides a uniquely correct representation of visual space. He valued reverse perspective and argued that conventional linear perspective depends upon assumptions that ordinary human viewing does not consistently satisfy: Euclidean and effectively unbounded visual space; a privileged central observer; a single monocular viewpoint; a fixed beholder; a static world; and the exclusion of psychophysiological processes. Florensky instead emphasised a moving, binocular and interpretive observer whose visual experience is assembled from changing views. His work became an important modern critique of fixed-view linear perspective and a major theoretical source for reverse and multiple perspective.
Fournier, Daniel
Daniel Fournier was an eighteenth-century writer on perspective who helped explain and develop the mathematical perspective tradition associated with Brook Taylor. The Dictionary notes that Taylor’s concise treatment required later explanation, including Fournier’s 1761 treatise.
Francesca, Piero della
Piero della Francesca (1415–1492) was an Italian Renaissance painter and mathematician renowned for both his art and his theoretical study of perspective. His treatise De prospectiva pingendi developed rigorous geometrical methods for pictorial construction and strongly influenced later Renaissance perspective theory.
Francesco di Giorgio Martini
Francesco di Giorgio Martini was among the Renaissance writers and practitioners who described, illustrated or adapted perspective constructions. The Dictionary places him within the developing network of architecture, geometry and pictorial representation that included Alberti, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo and later perspective authors.
Frisius, Gemma
' astrolabes exhibit a universal projection that can be used flat any latitude on Earth to map the sky and calculate time, position and other astronomical data. This projection was developed by az-Zarqāllu in the 11th century, but Frisius revived its use in the 16th century. Facts / Features Frisius (1508-1555) was a Dutch astronomer and member of the faculty of medicine flat the University of Louvain.
Fuller, Buckminster
Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) was an American architect, designer, inventor and systems theorist. The Dictionary connects him with geometry and perspective through projects including the Dymaxion map and geodesic structures. The Dymaxion map provided an alternative way of unfolding and representing the Earth with reduced emphasis on conventional cartographic orientation, while his geodesic work explored structural and spatial relationships through highly systematic geometry. His work is therefore relevant to perspective as a means of modelling, reorganising and representing global and three-dimensional spatial relationships.
G
Galilei, Galileo
Galileo Galilei was a seventeenth-century scientist whose telescopic observations transformed astronomy and the use of optical instruments. In the PRC history he represents the growing connection between geometry, optics, instruments and the extension of human visual perspective beyond unaided sight.
García-Salgado, Tomás
Tomás García-Salgado is an architect and researcher whose work focuses on the geometry of perspective. The Dictionary discusses his Modular Perspective and reverse-outlining methods for analysing and reconstructing spatial geometry from perspective images.
Ghiberti, Lorenzo
Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455) was an Italian Renaissance sculptor best known for the bronze doors of the Florence Baptistery. His Commentarii contain important writings on art and perspective, placing him among the early Renaissance figures who helped connect artistic practice with emerging theories of pictorial space.
Gibson, James J.
James Jerome Gibson (1904–1979) was an American psychologist who made major contributions to the study of visual perception. In his ecological theory, perception is based upon information available in the environment to an active observer rather than upon a static retinal picture considered in isolation. Gibson emphasised environmental surfaces, texture gradients, optic flow, affordances and invariant information that remains stable as an observer moves. His work is highly relevant to perspective because it treats spatial vision as a dynamic relationship between observer, movement and the structured optical information of the surrounding world.
Goldstein, Leonard
Leonard Goldstein is included in the Dictionary as the author of The Social and Cultural Roots of Linear Perspective (1988). His work is relevant to the historical and cultural interpretation of linear perspective and its development within Western visual representation.
Gombrich, E. H.
Sir Ernst H. Gombrich (1909–2001) was an Austrian-born British art historian whose influential works include The Story of Art and Art and Illusion. His research examined how pictures are made, recognised and interpreted, emphasising that representation depends upon learned conventions, perceptual expectations and processes of making and correction rather than simple mechanical copying of visual reality. His work is important to perspective because it connects pictorial construction with perception, illusion and the interpretation of represented space.
Gregory, Richard L.
Richard L. Gregory is included in the Dictionary’s optics and visual-perception sources, notably through Mirrors in Mind. His work on perception and visual illusion is relevant to perspective because it examines how the visual system interprets images, spatial relations and apparent reality.
H
Hansen, Robert
Robert Hansen is included in the Dictionary as a researcher and author on curvilinear and spherical perspective. His paper “The Curving World: Hyperbolic Linear Perspective” (1969) examined a non-standard curved system for representing visual space.
Helmholtz, Hermann von
Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1821–1894) was a German physicist and physician whose work strongly influenced the scientific study of vision. The Dictionary highlights his mathematical work on the eye, theories of vision, visual perception of space, colour vision, and empiricism in the physiology of perception.
Henderson, Linda Dalrymple
Linda Dalrymple Henderson (1948–) is an American art historian whose research examines modern art and changing ideas of space. Her work on the fourth dimension and non-Euclidean geometry is important for understanding relationships between modern art, geometry and alternative concepts of spatial representation.
Hering, Ewald
Ewald Hering was a German physiologist whose work contributed to the study of visual perception. The Dictionary discusses the Hering illusion, discovered in 1861, in which parallel lines appear bowed against a radial background, making his work relevant to geometrical optical illusion and the interpretation of perspective cues.
Hitchcock, Alfred
Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) was a film director whose use of perspective is associated in the Dictionary with point-of-view shots, framing, lighting, long takes and controlled camera movement. His cinema frequently places the audience within a character’s visual position and uses framing to regulate what is revealed or concealed. The dolly zoom—the “Hitchcock zoom” or Vertigo effect—changes camera distance and focal length together so that subject scale is held approximately constant while the apparent spatial relationship between subject and background changes dramatically.
Hockney, David
David Hockney (1937–) is a British artist whose work repeatedly questions the limitations of a single fixed viewpoint. In the 1980s and 1990s he combined photography and painting and produced photo-montages in which many individual views are assembled into one image, creating multiple viewpoints and temporal changes within a single representation. Hockney has argued that conventional linear perspective can separate the viewer from the represented scene, while alternative and inverted-perspective arrangements can create a more participatory relationship between viewer and image. His work therefore belongs to the modern exploration of multi-view, composite and non-standard pictorial perspective.
Hogarth, William
William Hogarth used perspective both seriously and satirically. The Dictionary discusses his deliberate construction of impossible and inconsistent spatial relationships to demonstrate the absurdities that arise when perspective rules are ignored.
Hughes, Patrick
Patrick Hughes is known for reverspective, in which perspective images are painted on projecting three-dimensional reliefs. The painted geometry makes physically projecting forms appear to recede, producing a striking spatial illusion that changes as the observer moves and directly reverses ordinary expectations of perspective.
J
Jobs, Steve
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) was an American entrepreneur and technology executive whose work contributed to the mass adoption of personal computers, graphical user interfaces and later mobile visual systems. Through Apple, and through his role in the development of Pixar, he participated in the transition from text-based computing towards increasingly graphical, image-based and three-dimensional digital media. Devices such as the iPhone and iPad subsequently became portable perspective instruments capable of displaying maps, satellite imagery, augmented-reality views, celestial visualisations and continuously changing multi-scale spatial information.
K
Kemp, Martin
Martin Kemp is included in the Dictionary as an author and professor whose work examines relationships between art and science, including the historical use and interpretation of perspective in art.
Kepler, Johannes
Johannes Kepler was a seventeenth-century astronomer and mathematician whose optical work was fundamental to image formation and vision. The PRC sources connect him with the development of camera optics, retinal-image theory and the broader geometrical understanding of visual perspective.
Kirby, Joshua
Joshua Kirby (1716–1774) was an English landscape painter, engraver, writer, draughtsman and architect, noted for publications and teaching on linear perspective based on Brook Taylor’s mathematics. He helped make Taylor’s difficult geometrical treatment more accessible to artists and students.
Kircher, Athanasius
Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) is placed by Volume 1 within the seventeenth-century interconnection of astronomy, optics and geometry. His wide-ranging investigations formed part of the period in which projection, optical instruments and perspectival representation were increasingly studied together.
Klee, Paul
Paul Klee (1879–1940) was a Swiss-born German artist whose work combined influences from expressionism, Cubism and Surrealism. His images often use apparently simple, diagrammatic or childlike spatial structures while actually relying upon sophisticated transformations of scale, viewpoint, geometry and pictorial organisation. Klee’s work is relevant to modern perspective because it demonstrates how represented space can be deliberately reorganised according to expressive and conceptual principles rather than conventional naturalistic projection.
Kubrick, Stanley
Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) was a filmmaker noted for highly controlled camera composition and frequent use of strong one-point-perspective structures. Central vanishing arrangements, axial framing and symmetry repeatedly direct the audience’s attention towards a specific region of the image and can create order, tension, confinement or psychological intensity. His films provide particularly clear modern examples of linear-perspective geometry being used deliberately as a compositional and expressive instrument within cinema.
L
Lambert, Johann Heinrich
Johann Heinrich Lambert was an eighteenth-century mathematician and physicist whose work is associated with geometrical projection and map projection. His name survives in important projection systems, linking mathematical perspective with cartography and the representation of curved spatial surfaces.
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) treated perspective as a fundamental discipline connecting art, science and vision. Across his writings and drawings he examined visual pyramids, diminution, foreshortening, optical appearance, perspective instruments and the geometry of pictorial representation.
Levi ben Gerson
Levi ben Gerson (1288–1344) connected astronomy, measurement and optics. Volume 1 notes his use of camera-obscura ideas in the 1330s and credits him with an early description of the Jacob’s staff or cross-staff, an instrument later important for angular measurement and navigation.
M
Magritte, René
René Magritte was a Belgian Surrealist whose paintings use familiar objects in unexpected spatial and conceptual relationships. His work is relevant to perspective through its deliberate manipulation of scale, viewpoint, representation and the apparent relationship between image and reality.
Maignan, Emmanuel
Emmanuel Maignan (1601–1676) is placed by Volume 1 within the seventeenth-century interdependence of astronomy and geometry. His work belongs to the tradition linking perspective, optical effects, projection and mathematical analysis.
Malton, Thomas
Thomas Malton was an eighteenth-century draughtsman and writer on geometry and perspective. The Dictionary cites his publications as part of the effort to explain and teach mathematical perspective methods derived from Brook Taylor and related eighteenth-century theory.
Mandelbrot, Benoit B.
Benoit B. Mandelbrot (1924–2010) was a mathematician associated with the development of fractal geometry and the study of self-similar and scale-dependent forms. His celebrated discussion of the measured length of coastlines showed that measured size can depend upon the scale or resolution at which a form is examined. Within the PRC framework this is relevant to the Scale–Shape–Size Problem: changing projection scale or optical magnification can reveal different levels of structure, so the measured size and even the effective shape of a complex object may depend upon scale and resolution as well as distance. Mandelbrot’s work therefore points towards a multi-scale conception of perspective capable of relating spatial information across very different scales.
Mantegna, Andrea
Andrea Mantegna was a Renaissance painter noted for forceful perspective, foreshortening and monumental spatial construction. The Dictionary associates his work with deliberate horizon placement and strong geometrical recession used to heighten the apparent scale and presence of figures and architecture.
Masaccio
Masaccio (1401–1428) was a major early Renaissance painter. The Dictionary recognises his naturalism, three-dimensional figures, foreshortening and use of linear perspective with a unified vanishing point, especially in works such as the Trinity.
McLuhan, Marshall
Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) was a Canadian media theorist known for the phrases “the medium is the message” and “Global Village”. His work anticipated a world increasingly organised through electronic and networked media and is relevant to the PRC through the transition from fixed pictures and printed information to interconnected New Media environments. McLuhan’s emphasis on the way a medium changes the form of human experience is particularly relevant to perspective systems in which the means of viewing, displaying and navigating spatial information alters what can be seen and understood.
Melozzo da Forlì
Melozzo da Forlì (1438–1494) was a Renaissance painter associated with ambitious perspectival and illusionistic treatments of figures and architecture. Volume 1 places him among artists whose work connected perspective with astronomy, geometry and the expanding visual culture of the Renaissance.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) was a leading High Renaissance artist, sculptor and architect. His large-scale frescoes and architectural work used powerful foreshortening, spatial staging and illusionistic effects that form part of the Renaissance development of perspectival representation.
Monet, Claude
Oscar-Claude Monet (1840 – 1926) was a French painter, founder of Impressionist painting, and a precursor of modernism. From 1883, Monet began a vast landscaping project, including a water-lily pond, which he used to inspire himself and paint amazing new kinds of perspective views in his paintings. He employed broad brushstrokes, creating a new kind of Impressionist perspective which eschewed realism in favour of emotive perspectives.
Monge, Gaspard
Gaspard Monge (1746–1818) was a French mathematician identified in the Dictionary as the inventor of descriptive geometry and a founder of differential geometry. His quadrant construction uses perpendicular horizontal and vertical projection planes to represent three-dimensional objects in two dimensions and became foundational to descriptive geometry and orthographic projection.
Munch, Edvard
Edvard Munch (1863–1944) was a Norwegian painter and a major precursor of Expressionism. The Dictionary notes his deliberate distortion of visible reality to convey intense subjective emotion, making his work relevant to non-naturalistic and psychologically transformed perspective.
Muybridge, Eadweard
Eadweard Muybridge was a pioneering photographer whose sequential studies of motion and experiments in image projection contributed to the development of motion analysis and early cinema. His work is important to perspective as a bridge between photographic image capture, time, movement and projected visual representation.
N
Nelson, Ted
Theodor Holm “Ted” Nelson (1937–) is an American pioneer of information technology who coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia and developed an influential alternative vision of interconnected digital information. His Project Xanadu proposed richer forms of linking than those later adopted by the World Wide Web, including persistent two-way connections through which users could see both where a document points and where it is referenced from elsewhere. Within the PRC framework Nelson is important to New Media perspective because navigation itself becomes a form of viewpoint: information can be approached through multiple paths, connections and contexts rather than as one fixed linear sequence.
Newton, Isaac
Isaac Newton was a physicist whose work on motion, gravity, space and time profoundly shaped modern science. The Dictionary includes him in relation to ideas of absolute space and time and an empiricist philosophy of science, concepts important to the wider historical development of spatial and optical thought.
P
Pacioli, Luca
Luca Pacioli was a Renaissance mathematician whose 1494 publication devoted an entire chapter to perspective. The Dictionary places this between Alberti’s early treatise and Pélerin’s 1505 monograph, marking an important stage in the consolidation of perspective as a systematic mathematical and representational subject.
Panofsky, Erwin
Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) was an influential art historian whose 1924 essay Perspective as Symbolic Form examined perspective as both a geometrical system and a historically conditioned mode of representation. Rather than treating Renaissance linear perspective as a purely neutral transcription of vision, Panofsky interpreted it as connected with the intellectual and cultural assumptions of its period. The Dictionary also associates him with interpretations of Alberti and with discussions of subjective and curvilinear perspective. His work became central to modern debates about whether perspective is natural, conventional, geometrical or culturally constructed.
Peckham, John
John Peckham was a medieval Franciscan scholar and Archbishop of Canterbury who wrote on optics, perspective and astronomy. Influenced by Roger Bacon and Alhazen, his Perspectiva communis became an important university text and helped transmit medieval perspectivist optics.
Pepper, John Henry
John Henry Pepper was an English scientist associated with the theatrical illusion now known as Pepper’s Ghost. The Dictionary describes the method as using angled reflection to create an apparently floating or displaced image, linking optics, projection and simulated perspective.
Picasso, Pablo
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) is included in the Dictionary through Cubist perspective and the modern rejection of a single fixed viewpoint as the only basis for pictorial representation. Cubism breaks objects into geometric facets and can present different sides, angles or moments of a subject together within one image. This multi-view approach emphasises the two-dimensional picture surface while simultaneously suggesting a more extensive knowledge of the object than any one optical view could provide. Picasso’s work therefore became central to the twentieth-century challenge to conventional single-view linear perspective.
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista
(1700s) was an Italian artist who used a variety of perspective techniques in his etchings of Rome. His work often featured one-point perspective, multiple vanishing points, and unusual perspectives. One-point perspective (accelerated and forced methods) A forced perspective technique that places the intersection of almost all lines flat one-point Creates a sense of depth by making the background appear further away than the foreground A technique that was popular in Italy during the Renaissance Multiple vanishing points (multiple-viewpoint perspective) A technique that Piranesi used to…
Pirenne, Maurice H.
Maurice H. Pirenne is included among the Dictionary’s principal sources on optics and visual perception. His Optics, Painting and Photography examines relationships between optical image formation, pictorial representation and photographic perspective.
Plato
Plato was an ancient Greek philosopher whose ideas about vision, reality and representation influenced later thought about perspective. The Dictionary places him within early theories of sight, including an extramission account in which vision involved activity extending from the eye toward the visible world.
Pozzo, Andrea
Andrea Pozzo was a Baroque artist, architect and perspective theorist renowned for quadratura and large-scale illusionistic ceiling painting. His work used rigorous linear perspective to dissolve real architectural boundaries and create convincing fictive three-dimensional space.
Ptolemy, Claudius
Claudius Ptolemy was a Greco-Roman scholar active in Alexandria whose works on geography, astronomy and optics were fundamental to later perspective traditions. His map projections and optical theories helped connect geometry, visual rays, spatial measurement and representation.
Pélerin, Jean (Viator)
Jean Pélerin, called Viator, was a French author and perspectivist. His De artificiali perspectiva, published in 1505, was the first printed treatise devoted specifically to perspective and included an early printed two-point-perspective construction, helping spread perspective theory north of the Alps.
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Radley, Alan S.
Alan S. Radley is Scientific Director of the Perspective Research Centre. Trained in physics and astronomy, his work brings together visual, optical, graphical, mathematical, instrument and New Media perspective within a systematic theoretical and classificatory framework, including Perspective Category Theory.
Raphael
Rapid Cavalier Oblique Axonometry (Parallel Perspective) Describes a quick, hand-drawn pictorial method (oblique projection) where the front face is shown true size, while receding depth lines (often flat 30° or 45°) are drawn flat full scale (not foreshortened), preserving measurements but creating a potentially exaggerated depth, useful for visualising objects with depth smaller than width. It's a type of axonometry, a parallel-projection method that shows volume while keeping parallel lines parallel, unlike realistic perspective.
Reisch, Gregor
Gregor Reisch (1467–1525) is important to the PRC history because his Margarita philosophica visually and intellectually connected optics, astronomy, geography, cartography, surveying and architecture. Volume 1 uses his work as evidence of the interdisciplinary setting in which Renaissance perspective developed.
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Serlio, Sebastiano
Sebastiano Serlio was a Renaissance architect and author whose architectural books helped disseminate methods of geometrical representation and perspective. The Dictionary lists him among the writers and practitioners who described, illustrated or adapted Renaissance perspective constructions.
Shen Kuo
Shen Kuo was a Chinese polymath associated in the Dictionary with the historical study of the camera obscura and the inverted image. His observations form part of the long development of optical knowledge showing that light travels in straight lines and can form inverted projected images.
Sinisgalli, Rocco
Rocco Sinisgalli is included in the Dictionary as the author of Perspective in the Visual Culture of Classical Antiquity (2012). His scholarship contributes to the historical study of perspective and spatial representation in the ancient world.
Sorte, Cristoforo
Cristoforo Sorte was a Renaissance cartographer, engineer and writer whose work connected surveying, mapping, perspective and visual representation. He belongs to the practical tradition in which geometrical methods were applied to landscapes, territory and designed space.
Spielberg, Steven
Steven Spielberg (1946–) is a filmmaker noted for visual storytelling through camera movement, framing, depth, lighting and viewpoint. His films frequently use tracking, dolly, crane and other fluid camera movements to reorganise the spectator’s view of a scene without relying entirely upon cuts. Such techniques allow viewpoint, image scale, depth relationships and framing to change continuously through time. Spielberg’s work therefore provides modern examples of perspective functioning dynamically within cinema to guide attention, reveal spatial information and shape narrative experience.
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Taylor, Brook
Brook Taylor presented a general mathematical treatment of central perspective in his 1715 treatise Linear Perspective, enlarged in 1719 as New Principles of Linear Perspective. Its concision and difficulty prompted later explanatory works by authors including Joshua Kirby and Daniel Fournier.
ten Doesschate, G.
G. ten Doesschate is included in the Dictionary as the author of Perspective: Fundamentals, Controversials, History (1964), a classic study concerned with the principles, historical development and disputed questions of perspective.
Termes, Dick
Dick Termes (1941–) is an American artist known for painting complete surrounding scenes on spheres called Termespheres. He developed a six-point perspective system for constructing continuous 360-degree environments on a spherical surface. His work is an important modern example of spherical and curvilinear perspective, replacing the restricted rectangular picture plane with a representation capable of extending around the observer in every horizontal direction as well as upward and downward.
Toscanelli, Paolo
Paolo Toscanelli (1397–1482) is placed by Volume 1 within the Renaissance intersection of astronomy, geometry and visual measurement. His work with the cathedral gnomon flat Santa Maria del Fiore exemplifies the close relationship between projection, astronomical observation and the spatial sciences surrounding the development of perspective.
Turner, J. M. W.
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) was a British artist and Professor of Perspective flat the Royal Academy from 1807 to 1837. Turner’s ideas/works on Perspective Turner believed perspective was the "colouring of architecture" and that the artistic mind could overcome the mathematical rules of perspective. Turner's work often depicted the power of nature, such as in his watercolour The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons.
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Uccello, Paolo
Paolo Uccello (1397–1475) was an Italian Renaissance painter noted for intensive experimentation with linear perspective, vanishing points, grids and geometrical construction. His work helped demonstrate how mathematical spatial organisation could be used to create powerful pictorial depth.
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van Eyck, Jan
Jan van Eyck (c. 1390–1441) was a Netherlandish painter renowned for detailed observation, reflections, texture and realistic light. The Dictionary notes that his spaces often use local or multiple vanishing arrangements rather than one unified linear-perspective system, combined with strong atmospheric and optical effects.
van Gogh, Vincent
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) used perspective deliberately in drawings and paintings, employing vanishing points, perspective grids and a perspective drawing frame that he constructed for practical study. He used these devices to organise landscapes, interiors and architectural views while also allowing expressive departures from strict geometrical regularity. Works such as The Bedroom demonstrate how conventional perspective relationships can be modified so that represented objects and spatial directions acquire a deliberately unstable or intensified appearance.
van Hoogstraten, Samuel
Samuel van Hoogstraten was a Dutch painter and writer associated with perspective boxes and illusionistic spatial representation. The Dictionary discusses seventeenth-century perspective boxes as devices that intensified depth and architectural illusion, placing his work within the history of optical and pictorial entertainment.
Vasarely, Victor
Victor Vasarely was a major figure in Op Art whose geometric compositions create strong optical effects of depth, curvature, expansion and contraction. His work is relevant to perspective through deliberate visual distortion and the construction of apparent three-dimensional space on flat surfaces.
Veltman, Kim H.
Kim H. Veltman (1948–2020) was a scholar and author whose work ranged across linear perspective, Leonardo da Vinci, the visual dimensions of art and science, New Media and the history of knowledge. He directed major research programmes on perspective and visual knowledge and produced extensive historical and bibliographical studies. His work repeatedly connected subjects normally separated by disciplinary boundaries and argued for understanding the history of visual, optical and technical methods as an interconnected field. These studies form an important intellectual foundation for the Perspective Research Centre project.
Vignola, Giacomo Barozzi da
Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola (1507–1573) was a major Italian Mannerist architect and perspective author. His Le Due Regole della Prospettiva Pratica became an important Renaissance treatise explaining practical rules of perspective for artists and architects.
Vitruvius Pollio
(80–70 BC – 15 BC) was a Roman architect known for De architectura, the only surviving ancient architectural treatise. He emphasised three qualities for well-designed buildings: rmitas (stability), utilitas (utility), and venustas (beauty), known as the Vitruvian Triad. He asserted that a building's parts should be proportionate to the whole, akin to human body proportions, and advocated for the application of harmony in architecture.
Vredeman de Vries, Hans
Hans Vredeman de Vries (1527–1607) was a Dutch Renaissance architect, painter and designer noted for architectural perspective. He studied Vitruvius and Serlio and produced influential designs and publications that helped disseminate elaborate perspective constructions in northern Europe.
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Watt, James
Scottish engineer James Watt designed a machine in the 1760s based on an easel, with a pantograph mechanism allowing the artist to trace an object using a sight arm and transfer the movement of the vista to a pen drawing on paper. Watt stated that his machine was based on an invention by a Mr Hurst, who lived in India. Watt's perspective machine was a device used to trace and sketch objects.
Wheatstone, Charles
Charles Wheatstone was a nineteenth-century scientist central to the study of binocular vision. The Dictionary credits him with inventing the first stereoscope in 1832 and the pseudoscope, instruments used to investigate how the two eyes combine different views to produce three-dimensional depth perception.
White, John
John White was an influential historian of pictorial space and perspective. His The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space is included among the Dictionary’s principal historical sources and remains important for understanding the development of spatial representation from medieval to Renaissance art.
Witelo (Vitello/Vitelo)
Witelo (c. 1230–after 1280) was a major medieval writer on optics. His Perspectiva synthesised Greek and Arabic optical traditions, including Alhazen’s work, and addressed vision and optical instruments; it became highly influential in the later European history of optics and perspective.
Wollaston, William Hyde
William Hyde Wollaston developed the camera lucida, an optical drawing instrument that superimposes a view of the subject with the drawing surface. The Dictionary treats the device as an important instrument perspective method for assisting accurate observation and tracing.
Wright, Lawrence
Lawrence Wright is represented in the PRC sources through Perspective in Perspective, a historical study of the subject. The Dictionary also cites his discussion of perspective instruments and Leonardo’s experiments, making his work useful to the history of graphical and mechanical perspective.
About this index: the concise biographies are based primarily on the Dictionary of Perspective and The Past, Present and Future of Visual and Optical Perspective, with aliases retained where useful for searching. Longer PRC material is linked only where an existing relevant page is available.