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This essay argues that the advent of linear perspective, ca. 1425, when Filippo Brunelleschi painted a small panel of the Florentine Baptistery by applying the geometric rules of optical mirror reflection, was more than just an artistic event. Indeed, it subsequently had the most profound - and quite unanticipated - influence on the rise of modern science. Surely, by 1609, Galileo would not have understood what he saw when observing the moon through his newly invented optical telescope, then called the 'perspective tube,' had it not been for his training in perspective drawing. Yet, Brunelleschi's original dependence on the mirror two centuries earlier was intended not to reveal objective 'scientific' reality, but rather to reinforce Christian spiritual 'reality.' In 1435-6, Leon Battista Alberti, when codifying Brunelleschi's perspective in his famous "Treatise on Painting," substituted a gridded window for Brunelleschi's mirror, thus redirecting the purpose of perspective art away from revealing God's divine order as reflected on earth, to a more secular physical reality viewed directly in relation to human moral order.

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The subject once again has to do with the inception of geometric linear perspective in the pictorial arts during the early Renaissance. I begin by tracing the reasons why this mathematical method was conceived only in Western Christendom (no other culture in the world had ever invented it independently before). The failure of the Crusades, the loss of Jerusalem, and schismatic divisions within the Church itself had badly weakened the Faith by the late Middle Ages, and many felt that religious imagery needed to be refreshed in order to help rekindle Christian fervor. Some application of the revived ancient science of Euclidian geometry might be the answer.