Digital ACT Reading Practice Question #1578

According to the passage, how did medieval artists typically determine the size of figures in their paintings? Passage Excerpt (Humanities): In 1415, Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi conducted an optical demonstration outside the Baptistery of San Giovanni. Using a painted panel and a mirror with a viewing peephole, he demonstrated the mathematical principles of linear perspective: parallel lines receding toward the horizon appear to converge at a single vanishing point. Codified twenty years later in Leon Battista Alberti's treatise On Painting, this breakthrough shattered medieval artistic conventions. Medieval painters had sized figures hierarchically—depicting holy figures enormous and peasants minuscule regardless of spatial depth. Linear perspective replaced theological hierarchy with geometric humanism, placing the individual viewer at the rational center of the visible universe.