Comic #4690: perspective-3
Description
Here's a transcription of the text from the comic:
Panel 1:
- Kid: Dad, how come in old paintings the perspective is really badly drawn?
- Dad: Perspective didn’t exist back then. Sometimes there’d be a whole castle right behind you. Other times you’d sit at a table and the tabletop would face away from you.
Panel 2:
- Dad: That’s also why the portraits were so badly drawn. Try holding a brush in a world without three consistent dimensions.
Panel 3:
- Dad: Later, Italian architects invented perspective in order to make it easier to draw buildings. That’s why things suddenly look a lot nicer around the 16th century.
Panel 4:
- Kid: Are you sure?
- Dad: How else do you explain that it took 10,000 years of civilization to invent Cartesian coordinates?
Panel 5:
- Dad: I figured people are just kinda stupid.
- Kid: How facile.
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