Linear perspective

Perspective is a set of devices for suggesting deep space on a flat surface, so that things in the distance look smaller than things nearby. In linear perspective, parallel lines running away from the viewer are drawn so that they converge on a single vanishing point. The National Gallery in London credits the Florentine Filippo Brunelleschi with devising the one-point method in connection with his architecture, and says that artists in Florence were using it by the early 1400s. Leon Battista Alberti then set out its rules in his treatise On Painting (De Pictura, 1435). AAT-Taiwan, Taiwan’s art and architecture thesaurus, adds that Alberti likened perspective to a pyramid formed by the lines of sight, with its tip at the viewer’s eye, and that the vanishing point usually sits at or near the middle of the picture. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture says that perspectival drawing is thought to have begun with Greek painters in the 5th century BC but was firmly established only in the Italian Renaissance. Netherlandish painters of the early 15th century appear to have achieved convincing depth by careful observation, without the Italian system. Distance can also be built from changes of colour and tone: in aerial perspective, tones shift gradually from foreground to background, as they do in nature when air lies between the eye and the view. East Asian landscape painting had methods of its own for showing distance, such as the three distances (三遠法).

Find lines on a floor, wall, road, or building that run toward the distance, and imagine extending them: where would they meet? Then compare the colours of near things and far ones.