That the flat screen presents some difficulties in handling representations of different
geometries is nothing new. Artists and mapmakers have wrestled for centuries
with trying to present the three-dimensional (3D) world on the two-dimensional
(2D) canvas or atlas. In western art, beginning in the fifteenth Century with artists
such as Brunelleschi, the use of perspective first found systematic presentation in
Alberti’s Della Pittura published in 1435. The most common method for representing
3D space on a surface, usually known as linear perspective, is illustrated by
Albrecht Dürer in a famous engraving of 1525 reproduced in Fig. 4.1. Here a hook
on the wall takes the position of the eyes, and a taut string represents the straight
line joining the eyes to a visible spot beyond the frame. This provides one solution
to the problem of representing solid (3D) objects on a flat surface in a way that is
compatible with human stereographic vision. As such, the idea of linear perspective
is a result of taking account of human perceptual apparatus.