Leon Battista Alberti1404–1472
The costruzione legittima, 1435
Italian humanist, architect and writer whose On Painting (1435) gave artists the first written method of perspective, the costruzione legittima, built from a floor of squares.
Tiled Floor
A chequered pavement running to the horizon. Every tile is square and no two are drawn the same shape.
About this pattern
Perspective pavement · Alberti's costruzione legittima, 1435
Alberti's construction, and the floor under half the painting of the fifteenth century. Depth alone sets both the width and the height of each row, so the rows crowd together toward the horizon at exactly the rate the columns narrow. Get that relation wrong by any amount and the floor tilts or buckles.
The far rows are drawn paler here, which is the one addition: distance thins contrast before it thins anything else.
Behind the mathematics