A direct vertical perspective line descends perfectly through one coffer of the ceiling, and then down through the tip of his pen.
Add another diagonal line coming from the right vanishing point and continuing above the previous two lines until it hits the bottom left side perspective line.
A thick tome on art and geometry by Dürer, for example, is open to pages of densely printed German illustrated only by a nondescript diagram of a man and a web of perspective lines.
There are long, rectangular perspective lines; we see tatty rooms and seedy bars and gloomy streets, whose endlessly receding angles make them look like chambers of some refrigerated hell.
Peter Bradshaw The film has some classic Coen tropes: wide establishing shots of eerily empty spaces and interiors with receding perspective lines, deadpan faces, querulously bespectacled old ladies and the mandatory old guy in a semi-darkened office.
The great gesture of the right-hand disciple, traditionally identified as Peter, seems to break through the picture plane, and echoes the swift perspective lines of the table – all of which lead to Christ.
In Bruges: The influential Belgian garden designer Jacques Wirtz, now in his 80s, is best known for bold landscapes with strong perspective lines, sweeping hedges, swaths of grass and geometric topiary.
And as he grew ill, he calculated that although there are too many vanishing points in the painting for the perspective lines to converge at any single point, they do all run through that open door, to dissipate in the light beyond it.
This is an Australian picture, written and directed by the novelist and first-time film-maker Julia Leigh (mentored by Jane Campion), but it has a distinctly European sheen, a feel for rectilinear compositions, deep focus and receding perspective lines in brightly lit interiors – and all with a sense of impending horror or disgust.
His new English-language film, This Must Be the Place – starring Sean Penn as Cheyenne, a retired goth rocker living in Dublin – has superbly elegant and distinctive forms: looming camera movements, bursts of pop, deadpan comedy, quasi-hallucinatory perspective lines in landscapes in which singular figures look vulnerably isolated.
