if you are a little bit familiar with graphics you go: duh, things appear smaller with increasing distance. if you are not tho, it's a great intro to perspective projection. I love how accessibly educative his videos are.
I always found it odd that perspective had to be "discovered" by artists, but a little digging online turned up this interesting, detailed look at its history.
It's a lot less about being discovered, or invented, and a lot more about the idea of using it at all. The Renaissance was a massive change in culture. Before that, art was a tool used in rituals or storytelling rather than something to be enjoyed on its own. There was more emphasis on reproducing things as they actually were than how they looked from a particular vantage point.
Artists are still struggling with the fact that human perception arises from binocular vision. Two distinct retinal inputs are integrated by distributed neural processes into a single, coherent 3D experience. This integration is neither a simple planar stitching nor a direct representation of the world, but an active construction shaped by neural computation and subjective awareness.
It is quite likely that artists in earlier periods struggled with this as well, and were less concerned with adhering strictly to a photographic or geometrically exact perspective, as we are. The adoption of the camera obscura probably influenced things a lot.
Even ignoring binocular vision it's very unintuitive to "draw what you see" because of this. Our brain usually interprets our environment as objects, 3d shapes, and things. Turning that off and trying to grab a literal image from it is difficult
When I was a little kid trying to do 3D graphics on my Spectrum I couldn't find any books with the algorithm for how it worked. I remember my artistic friend and I sitting down with reams of graph paper trying to figure out how to do it. It's so simple and obvious after you learn, but until you do I felt like a caveman.
