Jacob Tack¹, Jaya Joshi¹, Emily Fitzgerald¹, Ederlyne Mae Alcaraz¹, Ethan Brickey¹, Anirudh Praveen¹, Lars Strother¹, Gideon Caplovitz¹; ¹University of Nevada Reno

The development and use of accurate linear perspective was one of the revolutionary innovations of the early Renaissance period. One point perspective employs a single vanishing point and there are several examples of Renaissance period paintings in which this vanishing point is precisely located. Despite the skill and effort required to accurately represent the vanishing point in one point perspective an unanswered question is whether or not observers perceive the vanishing point where it actually is? In this experiment we sought to answer this question by having non-art experts report where they thought the vanishing point appeared to be located in examples of one-point perspective Renaissance paintings. Our findings are quite remarkable! First, in certain paintings, particularly those with relatively explicit vanishing points located towards the center of the image, observers are quite accurate in recognizing the location of the vanishing point. Second: in many images, observers have little to no idea where the vanishing point is located, demonstrated by high inter-observer variability and inaccurate response. Third and most excitingly, in a small subset of paintings, including some of the most famous, the perceived vanishing point is systematically biased away from where it is actually located with a high degree of inter-observer reliability. We hypothesize that such biases arise due to configural aspects of the paintings that lead to perceptual phenomena/illusions familiar to the perceptual scientist.