ANDY HEDGECOCK is entertained by a playful novel that embeds a fictional game at its heart
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WHEN the wife of 15th-century Fiorentine painter Paolo Uccello would implore him to come to bed at night, he would exclaim: “Oh what a lovely thing this perspective is!” and carry on working until the crack of dawn.
He was trying to discover the Holy Grail of the “vanishing point,” which in perspective drawing represents the mutually parallel lines in three-dimensional space which appear to converge.
The Uccello story, probably apocryphal, was told a century later by Giorgio Vasari in his remarkable Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects. It is, to this day, considered the methodological foundation of writing on art history.
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