The techniques of perspective have achieved Invisibility through omnipresence. Filippo Brunelleschi's Florentine peep-show captured the world in two dimensions and made reality virtual. A historian of visual representation has an easy choice in choosing the act of the millennium — even though the two seminal works that testify to this act are lost. Probably before 1413, Filippo Brunelleschi painted two demonstration panels to show how to represent space and objects on a two-dimensional surface according to the systematic optical rules of perspective. In doing so, he established a mode of depiction that was to affect how images are conveyed in virtually every field of artistic, scientific and technological activity. By looking into the implicit 'boxes' of space behind the screens of our televisions or computers, we are distant legatees of Brunelleschi's vision.
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