It is almost six centuries since the invention of artificial perspective, a way of seeing that makes space a quantity, and the painter's art mathematical. This invention did not come to pass sine scientia. Alberti was the first to delineate the theory of the technique and leave legible evidence of its science. However, because as Manetti tells us, it is Brunelleschi we should credit with its invention. And yet regarding the precise nature of Brunelleschi's invention, and the circumstances in which it came about, we can be certain only of the mantle of obscurity which shrouds them, which reveals only rough outlines, the hints of answers to our questions. The authors gathered here look back into this history and approach those questions from their own discipline. Peering through the mist of time, as if into a stage across the hazy Arno, we attempt to recognise the characters and their roles in those first rehearsals of perspective. Perhaps a little like Alberti's early fictores, we tease out from that occluded view the formative strands of a method that was to dominate the production of art, and our conception of what it is to see, until the advent of photography and modernism. David A. Vila Domini

CONTENTS
David A. Vila Domini, Guest Editor. Letter From The Editor

RESEARCH ARTICLES
György Darvas. Perspective as a Symmetry Transformation

Tomás García-Salgado. Distance to the Perspective Plane

Marco Jaff. From the Vault of the Heavens

Richard Talbot. Speculations on the Origins of Linear Perspective

David A. Vila Domini. The Diminution of the Classical Column: Visual Sensibility in Antiquity and the Renaissance

DIDACTICS
Luisa Consiglieri and Victor Consiglieri. A Proposed Two-Semester Programme for Mathematics in the Architecture Curriculum

THE GEOMETER'S ANGLE
Mark A. Reynolds. Perspectiva Geometrica

BOOK AND ARTICLE REVIEWS
Michael Chapman. Origins, Imitations, Conventions by James Ackerman

Jin-Ho Park. Contested Symmetries and Other Predicaments in Architecture by Preston Scott Cohen

Michael J. Ostwald and Stephen R. Wassell. "Dynamical Symmetries: Mathematical Synthesis Between Chaos Theory (Complexity), Fractal Geometry, And The Golden Mean" by Nigel Reading

CONFERENCE REPORTS
João Pedro Xavier. Nel segno di Masaccio. L'invenzione della prospettiva (In the Traces of Masaccio. The Invention of Perspective)

Carol Bier. Bridges 2002: Connections Between Art, Music, and Science