The Point That Swallowed Florence: A Story Inspired by Filippo Brunelleschi's Experiment

Filippo Brunelleschi stands before the Florence Baptistery holding a flat page that laughs when he promises to give it a city. He watches the receding edges of the building draw together and sets a small point on the page, and by noon the point has swallowed a street, a row of windows, a roof and the distance between the building and the sky, while the horizon line tells him it is the height of his own eye. To test the finished drawing he pierces a small opening in the panel, looks through it from behind and raises and lowers a mirror until his eye can no longer tell where Florence ends and the page begins. When the streets, towers and people of the city start sliding toward the point, he learns that the vanishing point is where the eye confesses its limits. The closing pages turn to the reader with a course in perspective, horizon lines and vanishing points, rooms, streets, arches and stairways, and a reminder that every view begins from the place where the viewer stands.