The use of perspective revolutionized Renaissance painting, giving the artist the opportunity to paint the viewer's point of view. Yet the theory of perspective was developed elsewhere, in Baghdad, by the mathematician Ibn al-Haytham in the eleventh century.

The famous historian and art theorist Hans Belting uses the metaphor of the gaze in Florence and Baghdad to narrate the historical encounter between Baghdad in Arabia and Florence in the Renaissance. He examines the dual history of perspective, used as a visual theory (Middle East) based on geometric abstraction and a theory of painting (Europe). Belting explains that Arab mathematics in the Middle Ages gave birth to the theory of perspective, which was later transformed into art in the West, and asks a question that transcends the boundaries of aesthetics and mathematics: What happens if Muslims and Christians, when they look at each other, see a transformed version of their own worldview? Hans Belting is a faculty member at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe, in Germany.
(From the Promotional Bulletin)