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Art and Science
Nature 392, 445 (2 April 1998) | doi:10.1038/33033
Saenredam's shapes
Martin Kemp1
Abstract
Painting 'portraits' of churches might seem a limiting pursuit. But the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Pieter Saenredam turned it into a paean of praise for the geometrical way in which we perceive space.
One of the peculiarities of linear perspective is that, the more rigorously we follow the principles of mathematical projection to create convincing illusions of forms in space, the more we become aware of their strange shapes on the flat plane of the picture surface. This is particularly true for geometrical forms that lie near the margins of wide or tall pictorial fields.
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