Document:Q11886

With his systematization of a one-point perspectival system for illusionistic representation, Leon Battista Alberti offered painters a method of constructing a space that was coherent and cohesive when viewed from a single position: painting thus came to simulate a window onto a world beyond, a fictional yet mimetically convincing milieu. For the Belgian-born artist Francis Alÿs, the momentous influence of Alberti's codification on subsequent methods of visual representation finds a telling contemporary analogue in the spatial tenets embodied in today's ubiquitous electronic technologies. Arguably, Windows 95 may embody and consequently canonize for virtual space much of the revolutionary potential that Alberti's model did for those illusory worlds first limned in the early Renaissance.