The science of perspective became a real mental passion, a cold passion perhaps and one not far removed from intellectual research, but destructive of pictorial symbolism: through perspective the picture became an imaginary world, and at the same time the world became a closed system, opaque to every gleam of the supernatural. In mural painting a mathematical perspective is in reality absurd, for it not only destroys the architectural unity of the wall, but it also obliges the viewer to place himself on the imaginary visual axis, on pain of subjecting all the forms to a false foreshortening. In much the same way architecture is stripped of its most subtle qualities when the purely geometrical proportions of art are replaced by arithmetical, and therefore relatively quantitative, proportions; in this respect the prescriptions of Vitruvius did much harm. . . . in losing its attachment to Heaven, [the Renaissance] also loses its link with the earth, that is to say, with the people and with the true tradition of the crafts.

Titus Burckhardt