While linear perspective took center stage in the biographies and treatises of Brunelleschi, Alberti, and Vasari, Leonardo da Vinci named it as only one of four different types of perspective. The others– color, acuity, and aerial perspective– require thinking beyond geometric optics to the way shape, distance, separation, and contiguity are perceived. The subjects only appeared in written treatises after Leonardo’s abridged treatise on painting began to circulate, but much of what he recommended appeared much earlier in practice.

This panel seeks to address the disparity in approaches to perspective in early modern Europe by exploring how artists understood and utilized non-linear perspective in their work, how these techniques were dispersed, and how they were conveyed in writing through treatises, letters, or documents.

We invite scholars to submit papers that deal with issues such as the following:- Artist’s engagement with optical treatises

• The limitations of linear perspective
• Depictions of light and color in the distance
• Relief sculpture and the depiction of distance
• Responses to Leonardo
• The rise of interest in aerial perspective in the early seventeenth century
• Transmission of non-linear perspective in a wider European context