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Design and Perspective Construction: why is the Chalice the shape it is?

Peer-reviewed research presented at the inaugural conference of the International Centre for the Study of Perspective in Urbino and subsequently included in an edited book. Other conference contributors included Kim Veltman, Judith Field, Rocco Sinisgalli, Jean Dhombres. This research involved the detailed examination of the ‘Chalice’, the iconic (early?) renaissance drawing normally attributed to Uccello. The key question was how, and to what extent, have the drawing methods and systems, (or other technologies and tools), impacted on the imagery and/or a design? Kern in 1915 examined aspects of the perspective construction, but the practicalities of the making of this seemingly complex drawing have not, to date, been examined in any depth. By using photographic enlargements and examining the drawing itself, particularly the inscribed traces on the surface of the paper, the likely procedures and the order in which they were carried out were established. Inferences about those aspects of its making that are now lost; most likely a supplementary drawing, attached physically to the original, are made. This process was informed by my expertise in perspective construction methods developed through my drawing practice. The findings uniquely inform four key areas: firstly, the technicalities of its geometric/perspective construction; secondly, how the overall design of the depicted object is the result of the methods used in the construction. The paper extends research first presented in 2006 in the Nexus Journal of Architecture and Mathematics and returned in RAE2008. This revisited paper additionally comments on the drawing’s attribution, (unlikely to be Uccello), its evident relationship to another Uffizi drawing, and relates it to the same geometric and proportional concerns evident in Leonardo’s centralised church designs; and fourthly, it places it as a precursor to a whole class of later perspectival drawings of configurations of geometric solids, such as those by Jean-Francois Niceron.