Truth in Images: From the Technical Drawings of Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari, Campanus of Novara, and Giovanni de'Dondi to the Perspective Projection of Leon Battista Alberti

"Truth in Images: From the Technical Drawings of Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari, Campanus of Novara, and Giovanni de'Dondi to the Perspective Projection of Leon Battista Alberti." When Alberti justified artist's perspective projection in mathematical and theoretical terms, he relied on a graphic tradition best exemplified not by Euclidean geometric optics, as most commentators would have it, but by technical illustrations used in the creation of exceedingly precise instruments of measure. Long before artists employed Alberti's method of projection to recreate the world illusionistically, late medieval instrument makers were creating drawings that functioned as graphic substitutes for the real thing. Beyond a concern for verisimilitude, however, much broader shared assumptions existed between Alberti and earlier scientists. These assumptions depended on mathematical truth to chart the perfections of time and space. The drawings of planetary clocks, dials, and astrolabes by the fourteenth-century philosopher/astronomer Giovanni de'Dondi, as well as those by the thirteenth-century Italian mathematician Campanus of Novara and the Arab engineer Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari, signaled a new response to an ever more complex technology. Taken together, they reflect a growing, cumulative commitment among erudite craftsmen to the twin standards of mathematical rigor and illusionistic credibility, the very hallmarks of Alberti's more famous method of projection.