Dr. Saida Seddik saidaseddik11@gmail.

com

All about my PhD thesis dissertation

“Perspective in Italian Painting during the

Renaissance”

Indeed my dissertation of PhD was about

western Art and especially about “the
perspective in the Italian Renaissance Painting
and its influence in Ideas and Science
revolution”. My big concern was to demonstrate
how the early painters since the twelve century
were creating a new view and composition of the
space in their painting. Giotto was the first one
who renovated his paintings by chiaroscuro [light
and shadow].
Linear perspective and chiaroscuro were the
basics of the Italian painting. The Euclidian solid
geometry, attempted in the beginning to do more
than replicate what the human eye perceives
according to the tenets of Euclidian geometry,
which medieval Europeans understood as
synonymous with the vision of God. So since
perspective pictures replicate geometrically to

1
scale, they not only symbolize but reproduce
their subject matter point by point, so faithfully
that from such a model alone a lifelike three-
dimensional copy could be reconstructed. In
truth, the first Renaissance observers of linear
perspective were so astounded that they
excitedly proclaimed it a “miracle”.
Thus Western Renaissance art has influenced
so many non-western cultures not because it is
imperialistically imposed but because it works
more convincingly more like natural perception
than traditional, even locally accepted magic
representations. The linear perspective
permitted normal human perceive the third
dimension by moving about in space, seeing
and/ or touching solid objects from a jumble of
aspects almost simultaneously, the notion of
looking at the world or a picture of it from only a
single viewpoint is artificial. E. H. GOMBRICH
has argued that even though linear perspective
is artificial, there is a natural urge in all
humankind to make pictures that do match
visual truth. The evolution of pictorial styles, in
response to this natural desire, is really a matter
of continually correcting individual cultural
schemata.
According to him, the history of art is similar to
the history of science [especially as interpreted

2
by Karl Popper], in both of which the West took
the lead after the Renaissance. In the other
hand I had to show how the Italian painters were
influenced by the Greek geometry and notion of
beauty. But it didn’t mean that they were just
copying from the Greek culture. Indeed there
was a big renovation in the way the painters
were composing the space, there was a move
from the middle age notion of creating a
painting, which was very simple without any
notion of third dimension. The space was flat
and the painters couldn’t compose the space as
if there is deepness in it. I will here ask the same
question that Samuel Y. Edgerton, JR. did in his
book named “The Heritage of Giotto’s
Geometry”. Why was capitalist Europe after
1500 the first of all civilizations in the world to
develop what is commonly understood as
modern science, moving rapidly ahead of the
previously more sophisticated cultures of the
East? Why were some of the most spectacular
achievements of both the Western artistic and
scientific revolutions conceived in the very same
place, the Tuscan city of Florence? Was it only
coincidence that Giotto, the founder of
Renaissance art, and Galileo, the founder of
modern science, were native Tuscans?

3
Indeed the perspective geometry of Giotto and
Brunelleschi had considerable influence on the
visual thinking of Renaissance artisans-
engineers, those practical technologists who
carried out projects of all sorts for civic and
princely patrons in times of war and peace, from
designing fortifications and weaponry to the
creation of monumental buildings and labor-
saving machines. Filippi Brunelleschi was
himself an artisan-engineer. His masterpiece,
the soaring cupola above the cathedral in
Florence, pays tribute both to his traditional
engineering methods and to his further
quantification of Giotto’s three-dimensional
visual perception. Many modern scholars
contend that Brunelleschi devised perspective in
the first place as an aid to his architectural
planning. Strangely, not a single sketch of any
sort, perspective or other-wise, exists by his
hand. Brunelleschi clearly intended that in
diameter and height his new Florentine cupola
should not just rival but surpass the Pantheon,
the grandest domed building to survive in the
West from the age of the Caesars. For many
historian of Art the real Renaissance flourished
in the Architecture with the famous Italian
architecture Brunelleschi the one who
contributed in the revolution of space by two

4
elements the light and the third dimension. The
experience of Giotto was lonely and special, but
it doesn’t mean that he wasn’t in contact with the
elite of the philosophers, architectures and the
theologizes. Leon Battista Alberti, the humanist
author who codified perspective rules and wrote
a book for architects, warned his readers not to
be beguiled by Brunelleschi’s new pictorial
science : The difference between the drawings
of a painter and those of the architect is this: the
former takes pains to emphasize the relief of
objects in painting with shading and diminishing
lines and angles; the architect rejects shading,
but takes his projections from the ground plan
and, without altering the lines and by
maintaining the true angle, reveals the extent
and shape of each elevation and side-he is the
one who desires his work to be judged not by
deceptive appearance but according to certain
calculated standards.
For Alberti architects and engineers should think
in terms of undistorted elevations and thus work
from three-dimensional wooden models; what
need had they for optical tricks?
The ability to compose complex three-
dimensional structures in the mind’s eye and
then transfer their exact likenesses complete in
every scaled dimension to a notebook page was

5
captivating to would-be capomaestri.
Brunelleschi’s own spectacular success set the
standard; his perspective method in fact became
a kind of symbolic form indicating the rising
status of the artisan-engineer.
Moreover, his followers, realizing that
perspective drawing offered a convenient means
for communicating ideas among themselves,
proceeded to invent a vocabulary of mutually
understandable pictorial conventions.
Indeed, the artistic creativity stimulated by
geometric perspective resulted not from trompe
l’oeil illusionism per se but from clever
manipulation of such conventions. But such
manipulations the artisan-engineer would learn
to explore not just the surface but the covert
interior of things, the essential structure that
caused nature’s exterior appearance in the first
place.
So in my thesis dissertation I had to
demonstrate how did the move realized in the
western middle age art to a performing
geometric art?
Around 1400, Western artisan-engineers began
their historic “escape from flatness,” their
Renaissance perceptual encounter with
objective reality.

6
But the artists’ contact with the Greek painting
was very essential because the masters of art
in painting and sculpture were in the
beginning just copying from the Greeks’
models. This enriching contact with the Greek
geometry and culture gave a lot of knowledge
about how to compose the space. But that
contact wasn’t always direct, but was done
through Muslim philosophers and Scientists
that have read Euclid’s books and practiced
his theorems in Sciences, like Alhazen (Ibn
Haitam) and Al KINDY. They did a big job by
translating Euclid’s books from Greek to
Arabic. Edgerton had mentioned the Islamic
treatises on mechanics from Ibn al-Jazari’s
thirteenth-century “Compendium of the Theory
and practice of the mechanical Arts”.
Against the background of Alhazen’s ideas on
visual perception Alberti outlines a theory of
vision in which the passing of time is taken for
granted, and which he equates with the act of
painting. In the threefold process Alberti
describes we can perhaps hear the echoes of
Alhazen or the later perspectives, despite the
rhetorical language into which the statement is
cast: Since painting strives to represent things
seen, let us note in what ways things are
seen. First, in seeing a thing, we say it

7
occupies a place. Here the painter, in
describing this space, will say this; his guiding
an outline with a line is circumscription
(circonscrizione).
Then looking at it again, we understand that
several planes of observed body belong
together, and here the painter drawing them in
their places will say he is making a
composition.
Finally, we determine more clearly the colors
and qualities of the planes. Since every
difference in them is born from light, we can
properly call their representation the reception
of light.
Even more than Alberti, perhaps, Leonardo
displays his familiarly with the ideas of vision
stemming from Alhazen, and more specifically
an acceptance of the notion of certification.
But since Alberti’s method in its most
reductive form describes a unified space, or
even a single place, as seen in a single
glance, Alberti uses the phrase uno solo
guardare, then some kind of simultaneity must
be inherent in such representations, especially
if we pay strict attention to the physical or
optical facts by which one-point perspective is
generally explained. More specifically, any

8
picture or pictorial space conceived as an
abrupt break, as a slice through a sheaf of
light rays making up the visual pyramid, can
only describe a momentary, and in effect
simultaneous, set of relationship, whether the
resulting depiction is to be seen all at once or
not.
Leonardo, too, perhaps had something similar
in mind when he recommended painting on
glass as a means of studying atmospheric
perspective. He instructs the painter to record
the appearance of the same object, a tree in
which instance, at various distances on a
series of glass plates, which can after-wards
be used as standards of reference in
rendering la prospective de’ colori or la
prospettiva aerea.
What Leonardo suggests sounds rather like
the painted equivalent, on an enlarged scale,
of lantern slides or more recent kinds of
transparencies!
Ghiberti’s overall purpose and the
disorganized result have left scholars
understandably bewildered, and very often
puzzled as to the meaning of specific
passages or phrases as well. Nevertheless
Ghiberti’s commentary is an important

9
document for my purposes, indeed for any
study of quattrocento perspective and its
implications, as Mesnil recognized some
years ago; beneath the confusion pastiche of
disjointed notations rests a coherent optical
and cognitive theory, which can be
reconstructed despite the garbled form in
which it appears. More specifically, Ghiberti’s
text presents the theories of the well known
Arab authority on vision, Ibn-al-Haitham, or
Alhazen as he was generally called (ca.
965-1038), whose views on optics held sway
in the west until the time of Kepler’s
discoveries.
According to Alhazen, vision occurs, in two
basic ways: either as immediate perception, or
as more attentive and contemplative
perception. Alhazen had given an ample
explanation of the process done when the
perception attentive and contemplative is
done by a painter. The same process is
continued and repeated until a complete
mental picture is fully assembled in the
imagination, the repository of the common
sense, a processing center in the brain. A
detailed overall impression is therefore built
up piece by piece, an impression that is held
in the mind as a kind of armature, or as the

10
 framework of a jigsaw puzzle, as more and
more details are added in succession: every
separate observation, all the puzzle, take their
place in an overall structure outside of which
they have little or no significance.
The process Alhazen describes has a kind of
familiar ring: it calls to mind the explanation of
memory. The latter formation was, of course,
based on recent research and current
theories, but it is clearly anticipated in
Alhazen’s observations. Like many of his
modern counterparts, Alhazen regards
perception as a successive operation, a
process that occurs in stages: vision, in his
view, a view shared by Ghiberti, depends as
much on the functioning of the mind as upon
pure sensation; light and color per se;
moreover, such perception requires a tangible
or perceptible amount of time, no matter how
rapidly light is physically transmitted to the
eye, or how ideal the viewing conditions. Such
a conception does lend itself very well to the
creation of instantaneous images.
Renaissance perspective brought a new clarity
and cohesion, even a new unity to pictorial
representation: everything stands in some
measurable relation to everything else. But the
system in itself did not, by definition, limit the

11
duration of narrative action, at least so far as the
painters and sculptors of quattrocento were
concerned; on the contrary, one point
perspective provided these artists with an
effective means of creating a legible and
spacious setting in which stories could unfold
and time could flow in which a series of separate
events could take place, in the painting, and
accordingly in the viewer’s imagination.
My concern was to show how the big change in
the composition of the painting and its process
in the new way to see the beauty and the
favorite themes of the artists practically in
special period of time. That period started from
the fourteen century through the fifteen and the
sixteen century with the Science Revolution with
Galilees. I had to demonstrate how the change
in composition of the painting had a big
influence on the new notion of space with
Galilees in the new Physic. It wasn’t very easy to
contour the subject because there was many
factors that I had to take in consideration and my
knowledge in Sciences are very limited and are
more philosophy of science.
Indeed my large knowledge about philosophy
helped me a lot to see from very close the
influences that the big philosophers like, Fichini,
and Gucci, had about art and philosophy of

12
beauty practically. Indeed the big question who
were the Renaissance artists that caused that
sea-change in visual thinking, eventually
influencing the education of Galileo, William
Harvey, Rene Descartes, and Isaac Newton?
My approach to Italian Renaissance painting
had various points of view, but my concentration
was on E.H GOMBRICH and Samuel Y.
Edgerton, JR. theorems through their important
published books that I got at Penn fine art library
in Philadelphia/PA. In parallel Erwin Panofsky
theorems about Renaissance in art in general
and Italian Art particularly were the theorems
ground of my opinions and views. I was very
supported by one of the advisors, “Moulim
Laaroussi” Professor of history of art at
University Hassan II in Casablanca. He had just
published his important book about Moroccan
painting and its itinerary from the colonization to
the recent period of abstract style.
He did appreciate very well my thesis subject
since it was the first one done about history of
art at the University of Letters and humanism
Sciences in Morocco. Indeed my thesis was a
grandiose in the history of Mohamed V
University and it would be the first one in the hall
Universities of the country. He wanted his
students from Hassan II University to approach

13
the thesis from close and get the advantage of
the diversity of the information’s it contends,
because of the richness in the References,
Arabic, French, and English.
Indeed the linear perspective in western
painting, this specific complicated subject that I
tried to contour, unifies between renovation in
art, philosophy of beauty and Science
renovation.
The material I worked on was from Penn fine Art
library in Philadelphia, because I couldn’t find it
in our libraries in Morocco. Otherwise my
advisor Professor Elbouazzati did provide me
with many books from his own library, the ones
that I used to have a closer and first approach to
this kind of very specific subject.
The head of the Department of Philosophy,
Professor Salem YAFOUT was also very proud
of the hard work I could do about such subject
from gathering the materials and strong
references. Then approaching the subject from
different points of view like, history of Art, history
of Science, and Philosophy.
Indeed the day of my defense thesis, we had a
big debate because of the diversity of points of
view, from history of Sciences that the Professor
Mohamed ABBATOUY represented, to history of

14
Art with Professor Moulim Laaroussi and the
philosophy of thinking and mastering the
practice of creative Art that Dr. Salem Yafout
discussed. For me and all of us that was a great
day, especially after a long struggle in finishing
my thesis dissertation, it was a grandiose after
coming up with new ideas and theorem after
years of researches.
My points of view were very influenced by
western theorems that had big and strong
impact in history of Art like EDGERTON,
GOMBRICH, PANOFSKY, and many other big
and famous theorists about Renaissance
renovations. For my Professors there are no
differences between the human Art creation,
because there is no differences between
western painting and eastern or Arabic/Islamic
painting since they all represent the beauty
which is very relative.
Moreover researchers have to go further, and
surpass the old Philosophy that catteries or
divide the human creation depending on
civilization differences. Indeed I was very
influenced by the American theorists and art
critical, and I had been always influenced by
them since I was in college especially when I
was studying Western Philosophy. In the other
hand I don’t deny the strong influence of French

15
Philosophers on my way of thinking and
analyzing these subjects.
Indeed in my undergraduate philosophy program
I had to study many western philosophers in
French language since it is my second
language. I did the same while studying western
painters and the history of art, and I was very
fascinated by the European culture and methods
of analyzing. But it doesn’t mean that I do not
have my way of thinking and analyzing those
kinds of subjects. I still believe that there is a big
difference between two cultures, the western
culture and the Arabic/Islamic culture. Saying so
doesn’t mean that there are no common points
between the two civilizations. For example in the
early Islamic Renaissance in the tenth century of
the Hejra ( the Islamic calendar), the famous
Islamic philosophers in south of Spain and in the
middle east were studying the big philosophers
like Aristotle, Platoon, Euclid, and many others.
They translated their essential books from Greek
to Arabic and took advantage of the strong logic
they had especially with Aristotle and the
Geometry with Euclid. They didn’t just translate
the books from Greek language to Arabic
language, but they were trying to build a new
system of thinking. The same thing happened
with the Egyptian culture but in Art, because

16
they were very advanced in expressing
themselves in drawing on the walls in the city,
also inside the huge Palaces of Egyptian
Emperor. So for me the contact between
different civilizations can always be interesting
and flourishing, because I don’t believe in the
Crash of civilizations but in cooperation and
communication.
Houston, TX: 11/11/2011

17