IA idea · Art, music & design
How accurate is the perspective in a Renaissance painting?
Research question
Do the receding parallel lines in [a painting] meet at a single vanishing point, and how large are the deviations when measured on a high-resolution image?
Adapt it: change the place, the data or the comparison until the question is yours.
Why it makes a good exploration
Renaissance painters used geometry to create depth. Extending lines on a digital image and measuring where they meet tests how precisely a famous artist applied the rules.
The mathematics you'll need
- Equations of lines from points
- Intersections of lines and their spread
- Distance from a point to a line
- Descriptive statistics of errors
Course labels show where a technique sits; using maths from outside your course is fine if you explain it clearly and say it is new to you.
Where the data comes from
Use a high-resolution public-domain image from a museum's online collection.
- GeoGebra — Free geometry and graphing software — Voronoi diagrams, loci and regression built in.
Cite every source in a footnote where you use it and in your bibliography. Check the licence of any dataset you download.
A possible outline
- Explain one-point perspective.
- Identify receding lines and extract points.
- Compute intersections.
- Measure spread and errors.
- Reflect on deliberate distortions and image resolution.
Pitfalls that cost marks
- Choosing lines that are not truly parallel in the scene.
- Low-resolution images.
- Ignoring the artist's intentional choices.
Showing personal engagement
- Compare two artists or a painting and a photograph.
- Draw your own perspective scene and measure it.
- Discuss whether deviations are errors or artistry.
See Criterion C: personal engagement for what examiners look for.
Taking it further
Use the vanishing point and the horizon to estimate the viewer's position relative to the painting.