With Perspective in Mind (1)

November 14, 2025 General Insights No Comments

Perspective, in art as in life, reveals that we do not simply look — we create our way of looking. Every act of seeing carries geometry and soul. What once began as lines on Brunelleschi’s glass window grew into an ever-expanding field between the world and the mind.

This is the story of how space, meaning, and autosuggestion meet on the same transparent plane.

The window appears

In early fifteenth-century Florence, Filippo Brunelleschi stood before the Baptistery and held up a small mirror to test a discovery: the laws of vision could be drawn. Light itself obeyed geometry. Thus began the Brunelleschi screen — each painting as a transparent window between eye and world, where three-dimensional reality meets a two-dimensional surface.

That pane was more than a tool; it was a revelation. What the artist traced on the glass was not the world as it is but as it appears. From that moment on, every artist would work inside a projected pyramid of vision, each line of sight converging toward the single point of a human observer, with the painting itself as one window-slice of the pyramid. The world and the mind were suddenly bound by the same rule of relation.

This is where outer perception first mirrored inner creation — a theme that returns in Seeing = Creating, where perception itself is described as a gentle act of making reality.

The pyramid of vision

Each object we see forms its own sub-pyramid, narrowing from vastness to the tiny pupil. The smallest of these pyramids is a single line ending in one luminous point. If we knew nothing of the world, we would perceive only such points — a mosaic without form.

It is the mind that binds these points into lines, surfaces, and depth. The eye gathers light; the brain organizes meaning. What travels upward as photons meets what travels downward as expectation. Reality, therefore, is negotiated on that invisible plane — a meeting of the world’s rays with those of understanding.

One can speak of autosuggestion in this way: as the meeting of inner and outer patterns. In Autosuggestion: So Little, So Much, this subtle dance is compared to a tango between the conscious and deeper self — no coercion, only resonance. Seeing, too, is such a dance.

The grammar of space

Perspective has its own language — a set of terms that let the artist translate the world through a window of seeing. Learning them is like learning grammar before writing poetry: they form the invisible structure through which vision becomes expression.

A few essentials in this window-language:

• Station point – the place where you stand before the window. Everything depends on it; move, and the entire view rearranges.

• Picture plane – the window itself, perfectly transparent yet defining all that is seen. Reality meets consciousness on its surface.

• Line of sight – each ray that travels from your eye through the window toward the world, stitching you and it together.

• Horizon line – the height of your gaze projected on the window; where earth and sky meet in your particular way of looking.

• Vanishing point(s) – the spots on the window where parallel lines seem to converge and disappear — the eye’s doorway to infinity.

• Orthogonals – the radiant lines on the window leading toward the vanishing point, as if the world were pulled gently inward.

• Transversals – the lines that cross the window parallel to its surface, marking rhythm and distance, like the quiet beats of perspective.

• Ground line – where the window touches the imagined floor beyond it; the line that lets people and objects rest instead of float.

• Foreshortening – the way shapes pressed toward the window seem to shorten, like a hand reaching out from the glass.

Together, these terms describe how space unfolds on the Brunelleschi screen — the dialogue between world and observer captured in simple geometry. When the artist knows this grammar, the window ceases to be a barrier; it becomes a meeting place. Through that understanding, precision turns to poetry, and technical mastery becomes a path toward inner freedom.

Inner and outer perspective

Outer perspective is geometry: light traveling through air to the eye. Inner perspective is what the artist adds — knowledge, emotion, intuition. When both coincide, we sense truth; when one dominates, we lose depth.

A photograph holds the purity of outer projection — the world imprinted upon a window. But the painter lets meaning flow back the other way, projecting his own understanding onto that same screen. The result is mind-enhanced perspective: reality touched by soul.

This harmony between outer order and inner freedom reflects the essence of AURELIS — “100% rationality, 100% depth.” Art, too, seeks that balance: reason without dryness, depth without chaos.

Seeing as dialogue

For the artist, painting is not a command but a conversation. He gazes through the window, then back into himself, asking what truly appears. The act becomes a dialogue between eye and imagination.

When the work is finished, the dialogue doesn’t end. The viewer continues it. Looking at a painting means entering the same geometry of seeing. One aligns one’s own pyramid of vision with that of the artist — standing, for a moment, in the same point of awareness.

This living exchange is expressed in Art (an AURELIS Viewpoint), where art is described as an invitation rather than a product — ‘an opening of space within.’ True seeing, like true change, grows from the inside out.

The mirror with a time lag

When we stand before a painting, we meet another person’s seeing, preserved across centuries. The canvas becomes a mirror that reflects not light but consciousness — a time-lagged mirror.

In that reflection, viewer and artist briefly merge. The painting lives again, not as pigment but as participation. What the artist once projected outward, the viewer now projects inward. Each completes the other.

This moment of resonance is deeply autosuggestive. The painting does not impose; it invites. The meaning arises within the viewer, unique and self-born. Art and autosuggestion share this respect for freedom — the same non-coercive openness that AURELIS calls Compassionate.

Toward autosuggestive art

If we follow this path of perspective to its end, we arrive at a new understanding: art is autosuggestion in visible form. It offers shapes through which inner movement may unfold. The artist begins the gesture; the viewer continues it.

Such art, as explored further in Lisa’s Art, does not dictate meaning but allows it to emerge. It is living form, not frozen object. Every time someone truly looks, the artwork is reborn — not in pigment but in perception.

This is where With Perspective in Mind (2) begins: the long journey of art styles through which humanity learned to see — from outer geometry to inner freedom, and finally toward a shared, autosuggestive way of creating.