Saenredam

In this book three issues are discussed which all concern the history of perspective and pertain to the work of the 17th-century artist Pieter Saenredam, best known for his paintings of church interiors.
The book opens with an introduction on central perspective, followed by a discussion of the relationship between central perspective and freehand drawing, in which the concept of ‘implicit curvilinear perspective’ is introduced.
In the next chapter Saenredam’s construction technique is examined in detail. It explores, for example, how and why Saenredam combined distant point perspective with costruzione legittima abbreviata in one and the same drawing. The investigation of his methods is centered around the construction drawings Saenredam made by rule and compass.
The final section of the book deals with the means by which Saenredam acquired his knowledge of perspective.