Opinion Scientists and the Perspective of View-painters New Scientist (26 June 2010, p. 21) has recently reported on a scientific study of the perspective used by eighteenth-century view painters (vedutisti). The team, headed by Thomas Sharpless, a retired software engineer in Philadelphia, picked 14 vedute of the interiors of buildings for which they had ground plans. ‘They identified 20 points in each painting and located them on the corresponding plan. They then used this information to create a mathematical projection function and incorporated it into a piece of software, called “Panini”.’ No prizes for guessing which painting(s) and which building features prominently! The article goes on to state that ‘Panini [the program] can squash the width of a panoramic image while retaining perspective.’ Quite what this means is far from clear. It seems to assume that all 14 paintings employ…
