1 Kim H. Veltman Military Surveying and Topography: The Practical ...

2. Peacetime Links Between Surveying, Topography and Perspective
The aims of surveying and perspective are essentially the same. Both seek to record objective elements of the measured
world. The distinction between them is one of degree. In surveying it is often merely a question of finding two points in
order to establish the height of a tower or breadth of a river etc. In a perspective picture we need to fix many more
points in order to arrive at a three-dimensional outline of the object(s) in front of us.
Once linear perspective is looked upon as a recording method that is a heightened degree of surveying, its early history
becomes much more comprehensible. For example, we are no longer surprised that Brunelleschi, who first discovered
perspective, should have spent the years prior to his discovery, in Rome, surveying ancient ruins and developing his
own ways of notation in the process. 3
Alberti, who is said to have codified Brunelleschi's method in his perspective treatise was also engaged in studying
ancient ruins and his small treatise Descriptio urbis Romae tells us precisely how he surveyed the city. 4 This
connection between the two disciplines is even more evident in Francisco di Georgio Martini's Practica di geometria, a
surveying treatise, the final section of which, is devoted to linear perspective and shows clearly how surveyors' rods
and strings were used to demonstrate physically the principles of perspective. The introductory examples in Piero della
Francesca's perspective treatise, De perspectiva pingendi, draw also on surveying experience. The same holds true in
Leonardo's perspective treatise within the Manuscript A of the Institut de France. Pacioli's perspective treatise is found
within the surveying section of his Summa de geometria (Venetiis, Paganinus de Paganinis, 1494).
This continued close connection between surveying and perspective throughout the fifteenth century is of particular
interest for our purpose because it reveals that the influence of surveying on perspective was double edged. Surveying,
which was initially an important factor for the discovery of perspective, was ironically, a hindrance to its further
development. Fifteenth century writers, instead of developing an independent theory of perspective, were content to
rely on surveying demonstrations as justification of their new method. This reliance on the surveying tradition went so
far that the authors of perspective treatises often felt no particular need to represent their principles threedimensionally.
Thus, even Leonardo represented a basic principle of linear perspective, itself a three-dimensional
situation as an abstract two-dimensional diagram.
It takens a great effort on our part to realize just how gradual was the recognition of the potential clarity in exposition
gained through perspectival rendering. Indeed, the texts of the times claim that persons had genuine difficulties in
«reading» perspective sketches. Daniel Specklin, for example, having outlined the principles of perspective in his work
on fortification (1589), notes that since potentates and other officials are not always able to appreciate perspective
drawings one will also need to make models of fortifications to help them. 5
If we cannot be certain wherein lay the difficulty of such potentates in «reading» a perspective drawing, we can at least
hazard a guess. Notwithstanding Brunelleschi's panels of the Baptistry and the Signoria, the most impressive early
examples of perspective applied to architecture show us idealized and imaginary views, not records of actual buildings
or then existing squares. We need merely think of Bellini's Sketchbooks or the famous Baltimore, Urbino and Berlin
panels. Such examples accord with Gombrich's important hypothesis that «making comes before matching». 6
In other words, the making of perspective pictures came first and it was only much later that persons recognized just
how precisely such pictures could be matched with the natural world around them. If so, the real stumbling block in
«reading» perspective paintaings had nothing to do with being able to «see» the three-dimensional space they
represented 7 : the dilemma lay in learning how to relate a specific picture with a specific object or place in the natural
world.
The Roman ruins, which were closely connected with the first beginnings of linear perspective in the fifteenth century,
offer us evidence of how this matching process slowly evolved through the sixteenth century. If we study the drawings
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