The Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello, c. 1435-55, tempera on wood.

I'd have to answer with, "I'm not so sure." For me, studying Italian Renaissance and Baroque art meant spending a lot of time talking about how awesome linear perspective was. And I still think it is, to a certain extent. Artists were able to celebrate conquering three dimensions in just two. Practitioners such as Piero della Francesca and Andrea Mantegna illustrated how to masterfully employ the effects of perspective and sometimes emphasized them outright.

		The Horizon (Arising) by John K. Grabach, 1935, oil on panel, 42 x 48.

But linear perspective no longer holds the same cachet it did five centuries ago. Its conventions are viewed more like tired math equations. Instead of talking about vanishing points and two-point perspective, artists resolve spatial challenges of distance and proportion less rigidly, creating recessional space, atmosphere, and volume with compositional and light choices.

Preacher by Charles Wilbert White, 1952.

Perspective and looser interpretations of it, such as sighting, are still useful for artists to understand, especially when situating objects in space. Yes, extreme perspective makes a painting look artificial (for example, take Paolo Uccello's warring cavalry in his Battle of San Romano series, which look a bit like carousel figurines on a checker board), but searching for how to resolve the illusion of space and distance—as well as how to create believable proportions—is still a compelling challenge that all artists come upon in their practice.
 
How artists meet those challenges today—often using color, texture, line, and shape—all contribute to what the Renaissance artists espoused centuries ago—pushing the boundaries of two dimensions to capture our three-dimensional world. In Still Life Painting Highlights, dozens of featured artists situate objects in space using all kinds of effective strategies. Flipping through the pages, I was struck by how that ability translates beyond genre or medium. It attests to how diversely and skillfully each artist approaches his or her work, and how much there is to learn from seeing that process unfold, which is what Highlights is all about.

With the Passage of Time (Seemingly Unimportant Events Take on Greater Significance) by Debra Bermingham, oil and graphite, 20 x 94 1/2.

---