Until about the fifteenth century artists in Europe didn’t understand how to represent a three-dimensional object, such as a building or the interior of a church or monastery on a flat surface, which is why most of their paintings look kind of distorted to us. Several artists (notably an Italian architect named Filippo Brunelleschi about 1420) worked out rules for drawing perspective, and for a generation or two, artists from Italy to the Netherlands made perspective their real subject. Several of them, especially Pieter Saenredam (1597-1665) and Pieter de Hooch (1629-1684) became known for their mastery of perspective. It seemed to be a convention in seventeenth century Dutch paintings to include a checkerboard tile floor so the artist could show off his mastery of perspective (even Vermeer did it).

Today it is not uncommon to find strong photographic images that depend entirely on perspective for their impact, such as a line of telephone poles along a roadside that diminishes as they recede into the distance.

This image at the top right uses the symmetry of the building to emphasize the way perspective “distorts” reality. We know the windows are really rectangular, not trapezoidal, and that the top floor of the building is not narrower than the ground floor, but our eyes—and the camera—tell us differently. In this image the photographer is not relying only on the converging lines to engage our attention, but on the reflection of the sky and clouds in the window—perhaps to suggest that this may be just a wall and we’re looking through the window to real sky behind it! Think about how different the image would be if another building were reflected in that window, or if you could see something of the inside of the room through the window. It’s OK to tease your viewers a bit—several of the great twentieth-century artists like Andre Kertesz (1894-1985) and Rene Magritte (1898-1967) did it all the time.

The photograph at the bottom depends for its any success entirely on the seven or ten (count ‘em) lines (or triangular shapes) that converge on a point at the very center of the image. The fact that this is a rooftop walkway at Chartres cathedral in France is of little interest, as there is not much information here about Gothic architecture. You either respond to the formal element or there is not much here for you.

Want to see a couple more examples of converging parallels? Click here.