Perspective Posters
instructional, motivational and inspirational images for the classroom, home schoolers, office.

Giotto di Bondone
b. c. 1267; Italy
d. 1-8-1337

Giotto di Bondone, known simply as Giotto, was both an architect and painter. Born near Florence in the late Middle Ages, he was, according to Vasari, the first to make “a decisive break with . . . the Byzantine style, and brought to life the great art of painting ... drawing accurately from life.” The frescos at Arezzo depict the life of St. Francis; in the pictured fresco Giotto's figures are grounded in a medieval cityscape depicted with what is referred to as pseudoperspective.

• Giotto (Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists)

Filippo Brunelleschi
b. c. 1377; Italy
d. 4-15-1446

Filippo Brunelleschi, an Italian Renaissance architect and sculptor, is credited with the first known paintings using geometric optical linear perspective. The paintings, now lost, were of the Florentine Bapistery and the Palazzo Vecchio. They were designed to be viewed as a reflection with the aid of a mirror through a hole located at the vanishing point from the backside, in order to demonstrate the Euclidian laws of geometric optics.

• Brunelleschi: Studies of His Technology and Inventions

Piero della Francesca
b. c. 1415; Sansepolcro, Republic of Florence, Italy
d. 10-12-1492; Sansepolcro

Early Renaissance mathematician and geometer Piero della Francesca is best remembered today for his paintings which used geometric shapes and perspective.

Among his works are three notable treatises: Abacus Treatise, Short Book on the Five Regular Solids and On Perspective for Painting.

• Piero della Francesca

Albrecht Dürer
b. 5-21-1471; Nuremberg, Germany
d. 4-6-1528

Albrecht Dürer is an early Renaissance artist best known today for his prints from woodcuts and copper engraving.

The Renaissance ideal of the complete man - the artist as scholar and gentleman - appealed to Dürer who had begun his lifelong search for new ideas, theories, and techniques, and for the solution to the problem of combining realism with abstract concepts.

During his later years he devoted considerable time to writing and illustrating a book on theories of art based on Piero della Francesca's earlier work with perspective.

• “I hold that the perfection of form and beauty is contained in the sum of all men.”

• more Albrecht Durer posters

Raphael
b. 4-6-1483; Italy
d. 4-6-1520

Italian Renaissance artist Raphael created the illusion of depth in a grand interior architectural space in the fresco “School of Athens”. Raphael constructed mathematical linear one point perspective, and used size, light, shadow, and overlapping figures in his imaginary portraits of the greatest ancient philosophers (Plato and Aristotle are in the foreground center) in the rational pursuit of truth.

Sebastiano Serlio
b. 9-6-1475; Italy
d. c. 1554

Sebastiano Serlio was a Mannerist style architect and stage set designer who published several books of woodcut designs for stage setting, Scenographies, in Paris (1545), as a part of his treatise devoted to perspective.

• Perspective Rendering for the Theatre

Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola
b. 10-1-1507; Italy
d. 7-7-1573; Rome

Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, or simply Vignola, was a Mannerist style architect.

Giovanni Antonio Canal
b. 10-28-1697; Venice
d. 4-19-1768

Giovanni Antonio Canal, known as Canaletto, was the 18th century’s most famous view-painter. He was aided by the camera obscura, an early version of modern cameras.

William Hogarth
b. 11-10-1697; London
d. 10-26-1764

Hogarth's engraving Satire on False Perspective (1754) is captioned “Whoever makes a DESIGN without the Knowledge of PERSPECTIVE will be liable to such Absurdities as are shewn in this Frontipiece.” For instance - in the upper right corner, the woman leaning out the window with a candle is lighting the pipe of the man on the distant hill.

Vincent van Gogh, not known for his use of linear perspective, has employed the technique in an attempt to establish an orderly world.

Maurice Utrillo
b. 12-25-1883; Montmartre
d. 11-5-1955

The artist Maurice Utrillo was the son of artist and model Suzanne Valadon.

Salvador Dali
b. 5-11-1904; Spain
d. 1-23-1989; Spain

Dali used perspective to create the illusion of a rational landscape, and then “melted” familiar objects so they appeared as lifeless skins.

The Dutch artist M. C. Escher gives viewers a reality check by manipulating linear perspective and expected proportions to create a visual paradox of water seemingly flowing upward in order to fall onto the waterwheel.

Perspective
“The pessimist sees a difficulty in every opportunity; the optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”
Winston Churchill

• Mind Body Spirit motivation poster series
• Winston Churchill print

The Power of Perspective
“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant, I felt wery, very small.”
Neil Armstrong