At the beginning I tried to search with ”perspective theory” under different topics, including “architecture”, “art”, “paint”, “draw” in all brains from Alice. However none of the books were related to the topic I’m concerned with. Then I tried to use “perspective” as the topic as well as the key word in the search bar. The result was still disappointing. At last I change the key words into “ perspective drawing” and some books, which seemed to be close related to the theme in their brief context were found out with a “brain” of Xenotheka. But these books turned out to be irrelevant to the theme themselves after I read the full context throughly. The authors quote some books of the perspective drawing or perspective principles mainly to introduce the history. Generally speaking, this talk with Alice was not that successful. Giving up to talk with Alice, I’ve finally found out few books through typing “perspective” directly in Xenotheka and two of them are picked out.
The first book is On Painting from Alberti in 1435. As the other significant writings from him is the small treatise On Painting also with great influence. The whole work consists two books. In the first book he introduces the principles of distance, dimension and proportion and combines the forms of bodies with basic definitions of the geometrical properties. And the second part is a instruction to the painter how to apply the different rules to create their own work. Except words the book includes also some diagram to better explain the theory of perspective.
The second one is Perspective as Symbolic Form written by Erwin Panofsky in 1924/25. Rather than the principles or rules of perspective Panofsky, as a art historian, regards perspective as a “will to form” and discuss it with his broad historical horizon. Since various art pieces from different ages are quoted in this book, the pictures of these works as well as the explanatory notes are attached after the main part of the text.
In general, both of the selected two books concern the same topic of the book The theory of perspective demonstrated from John Lodge Cowley, however one in about 300 years before and one in about 200 years later. With different educational and historical background of the authors perspective is discussed from various dimensions and has never lost its vitality.