Follow this timeline to explore four centuries of experimentation in perspective theory and spatial illusion. Click images in the timeline for more.
 

1435
Leon Battista Alberti composes the De pictura (On Painting), the first text to define and theorize linear perspective.

What is Alberti's visual pyramid?

What is linear perspective?

Late 1400s
The artist Paolo Uccello devotes so much time to his "mistress" perspective, that his wife is reported to have become jealous.

1525
German artist Albrecht Dürer brings the science of perspective to Northern Europe through his illustrated treatise Unterweisung der Messung.

1557
The 16th century sees the development of complex perspective machines, like this one by Baldassarre Lanci.

1568
Illusionistic ceilings, like this one, probably for the Church of San Pietro al Po near Cremona in Northern Italy, enjoy a vogue from the 16th through 18th centuries. They seem to extend the space of the church beyond the ceiling.

1649
A scandal erupts in France when Jean Dubreuil is accused by his colleague Girard Desargues of plagiarizing his theories and committing "enormous mistakes and falsehoods."

1700s
The production of miniature paper theaters brings three-dimensional, illusionistic entertainment into middle-class homes.

Where has the perspective gone awry?

1755
With a series of visual puns, Hogarth describes the many possible mistakes that the painter may make when disregarding the application of perspective.

1798
Descriptive geometry, pioneered by Gaspard Monge, comes into its own as a scientific application of perspective projections distinct from artistic applications.

What is anamorphosis?

1775-1800
With irregular perspective already the fashion among artists and theorists, anamorphosis reaches its apex as a popular curiosity, with people of all social classes delighting in the bizarre and the marvelous.

Early 1800s
Andrea Pozzos 17th-century treatise still poses challenges to artists like Elie-Honoré Montagny, who quipped on this sheet that Pozzo "demands great application in the correct execution of this exercise, which is a very difficult one."

Compare this to its model.