For a long time, the Early Flemish painters were thought to be unfamiliar with the principles of perspective. That is, until Gilles Simon, a professor of computer science and a specialist in computer vision, began studying the works of the van Eyck brothers and Rogier van der Weyden.
The result is a groundbreaking thesis: Flemish painters of the early 15th century mastered sophisticated forms of perspective—both natural and artificial—contemporary with Italian research. Rather than “Primitives,” Gilles Simon and historian Ludovic Balavoine prefer to speak of “Flemish Precursors” in a book recently published by Brepols.
