This artist proved that his system for creating depth was effective through an elaborate process that involved a painting with a
hole, a mirror, and the Florence Baptistery. The viewer would look through the back of the painting of the Florence Baptistery while the mirror reflected it, then, when the mirror was removed, the viewer could see the actual building. Who was this artist and innovator?
Filippo Brunelleschi's great relevance to the Renaissance comes from being the inventor of perspective with a vanishing point and devising a whole new way of representing space. He knew linear geometry, as already mentioned, from his studies with Toscanelli. His first experiments in the visual field would be two altarpieces described by Alberti. One had the Baptistery figure with burnished silver in place of the sky and a hole at a certain point. The idea was to observe the painting through the hole with the aid of a parallel mirror; thus one would see the royal sky reflected in silver. The mirror feature was widely used by the Renaissance, as the reflected image is inverse and any asymmetry is more noticeable. In the other altarpiece, he painted the Signoria square and cut it into the contours of the represented buildings so that the true sky could be observed as a background. Not painting the sky indicates the interest of the architect, not the painter. He was interested in things that occupied a place and were inventions, so the only objects present are buildings. In addition, he defined a rule of vision, perspective, "which values symmetry and proportion of parts," and stated that "the value of architecture lies not in the elegance and variety of the elements, but in the distributive clarity of the structure."
