1 The Birth of Science - MSRI

3.1 Optics, Scenography and Catoptrics 53
particular, Aetion’s The marriage of Alexander and Roxane (a description of
which we owe to Lucian 10 ) and a painting by Apelles showing Alexander
holding a lightning bolt in the temple of Diana. Pliny, stressing that
the bolt seemed to come out of the painting, 11 is probably referring to one
of the first successful attempts to represent the third dimension. He also
states that the great Apelles was surpassed in his ability to render the distance
of objects by the less famous Asclepiodorus; 12 this is yet another
indication that toward the end of the fourth century new techniques of
perspective were being perfected. 13
The Pompeii frescos clearly reveal the use of effective geometric rules
for three-dimensional rendering — not only in the depiction of buildings
(in particular in the so-called “second style”) but in optical illusions that
would only be taken up again in the trompe l’œil of the baroque period. 14
The notion of the vanishing point, too, is well attested, pace the many who
have denied that perspective was known in antiquity. 15 Lucretius observes
that a long portico appears like a cone toward whose vertex the ceiling, the
floor and the side walls converge. 16 Sextus Empiricus and Geminus give
the same example, 17 while Vitruvius writes: page 86
Likewise scenography is the sketching of the front and sides that recede
and the convergence of all lines to the center of the compass. 18
The connection between scenography and optics, mentioned by Geminus,
is confirmed by looking at Euclid’s treatise: already one of the first
propositions asserts that parallel lines are not seen as parallel. 19
The debate over whether perspective was known in antiquity has been
going on for centuries. It goes right back to the Renaissance painters 20
and is still alive. If by “perspective” we mean the systematic use of cen-
10 Lucian of Samosata, Herodotus or Aetion, chap. 4–6 (in, e.g., Loeb Classical Library, vol. 430).
11 Pliny, Natural history, XXXV, 92.
12 Pliny, Natural history, XXXV, 80.
13 For an analysis of Hellenistic painting and of perspective in particular, see, for example,
[Bianchi Bandinelli] or [Robertson], vol. 1 (the discussion of Hellenistic perspective is on pp. 587–
588).
14 Some of the chief examples of these effects can be found in the villa at Oplontis, where excava-
tions started in 1964 have not yet been concluded.
15 See [Veltman] for a bibliography on the subject.
16 Lucretius, De rerum natura, VI, 426–431.
17 Sextus Empiricus, Adversus dogmaticos, I, 244; Geminus, in [Heron: OO], vol. IV, 102, 4–8.
18 “Item scaenographia est frontis et laterum abscedentium adumbratio ad circinique centrum
omnium linearum responsus” (Vitruvius, De architectura, I, ii, 2).
19 Euclid, Optics, proposition 6.
20 Piero della Francesca starts his De prospectiva pingendi underscoring the need to recover this
ancient technique and listing ancient painters who had used it; other painters from the period held
instead that the Ancients did not know perspective. Note that the word “perspective” comes from
the Latin “perspectiva”, itself a translation of the Greek .
Revision: 1.13 Date: 2002/10/16 19:04:00