The year 2019 will mark the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci's death at Clos Lucé. To commemorate the occasion, hundreds of events, particularly in the Loire Valley, will pay tribute to the visionary inventiveness of this Renaissance polymath. Artist, engineer, inventor and architect, he was far more besides. In the many roles he took on, he generated thousands of ideas in every field, particularly one in which he excelled: drawing. We owe to him not one but several interpretations of perspective, some of them highly innovative.
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Starting out with classical perspective
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One thing is certain: while employed from 1482 to 1499 as "painter and engineer" to the Duke of Milan, Leonardo da Vinci took a keen interest in geometry. He read his contemporary Alberti's treatises on architecture and painting, De re aedificatoria and De pictura, in which the mathematician and art theorist codified vanishing-point perspective. Leonardo even contributed some sixty plates depicting magnificent polyhedra in perspective to Luca Pacioli's book (see the article "Un patron des polyèdres !").
