Perception as a function of desire in the Renaissance

Abstract

This essay focuses on the treatises of Marsilio Ficino and Leon Battista Alberti in the Florentine Renaissance, how the ideas in the treatises were applied to artistic production, and how the ideas were developed from classical philosophy. Keywords: Renaissance, perception, Plato, Euclid, Plotinus (Enneads), Marsilio Ficino (De amore), Leon Battista Alberti (De pictura, De re aedificatoria), Piero della Francesca (De prospectiva pingendi), George Berkeley, Immanuel Kant, Alessandro Botticelli (Birth of Venus), Leonardo da Vinci (Last Supper), perspectival construction Keywords