THE TREATISE ON PERSPECTIVE: Published and Unpublished

Perspective was truly the arena in which the "Renaissance Man" could shine: combining art and science, mathematics and optics, it was at the time a cutting-edge field. Many Renaissance artists, including Leonardo da Vinci, Piero della Francesco and Albrecht Dürer wrote and published "treatises," or studies on perspective. As Northwestern University art historian Massey notes, these often took "the form of beautiful, lavishly illustrated folio volumes." With crisp 226 gray-scale images from those texts, this book gathers together a variety of studies of Renaissance perspective treatises that, at their best, read like good murder mysteries. The essays are primarily original scholarship and allow the excitement of the scholar's discoveries about the treatise and the artist's original discoveries on perspective to come through. Particularly fascinating is an essay by da Vinci scholar Clara Farago that shows how, by beginning a study of the relatively new science of hydraulics with a seemingly unrelated discussion of the moon, he not only positioned hydraulics "among the theoretical sciences," he ultimately "defined the subject... in terms that sixteenth-century writers called 'art.'" It's an intriguing and perhaps timely reminder that at one time, the fields of art and science were closely interrelated. (Oct.)