Perspective as learned convention or physiological fact?

Architects and engineers’ use of perspective illustrations to document the physical world relies on methods established in the European Renaissance. The proliferation of perspectival imagery since the Renaissance and its seemingly profound replication of visual perception has tended to inhibit culturally alternate methods. This paper takes the position that Renaissance perspective is, like its cultural alternatives, simply another culturally mediated method for organising our visual experience of the physical world. Those acculturated to its conventions use it to interpret how they ‘see’ the world. Though not providing a prospective view for an alternative perspective (the subject for a subsequent study), this paper probes the dominance of perspective as a global visual culture