Linear perspective 7 arose because people started to live in environments where straights lines were commonly found. In Medieval times however, those were incredibly rare, therefore there was no need for linear perspective to convey depth because it wasn't part of the daily life of people.
This view is in contrast to the typical modern-biased perspective, where the Middle Ages were dumb and unskilled—implicit message being: because of Religion 8 —whereas the Renaissance was this great era of intellectual and artistic growth and people finally started drawing properly for once. Just pay attention to how loaded the terms "Middle Ages" and "Renaissance" are to get a sense of the modern bias view how we view History.
It is certainly quite easy to find Medieval art with an almost childlike depiction of human faces, and then build a narrative on top of that with cherry-picked examples. Then again, I am sure you could do the same with other time periods, though perhaps, there was genuinely an increase in skill from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It is worth keeping in mind though that the art we remember through the centuries was commissioned, mostly by the Church during the Middle Ages, and as such there was a certain expectation and restrictions imposed from above. Most notably, depicting clothed people to preserve the Christian purity regarding sexuality, and artists having fairly limited access to anatomy from what I understand. As such, the comparison of skill always to be contextualized in what the demand for art was—in the case of the Middle Ages, certainly not realism—and the several constraints that artists inevitably had to deal with.
This change in subject and most particularly the focus of the painting can be seen in how humans are depicted. They can appear incredibly small in Renaissance paintings, for instance The School of Athens by Raphael where people are towered by the immensity of their environment, whereas the focus of Medieval art is almost always the characters. Moreover, light is an external element in Renaissance art, whereas it comes from the saintly characters in Medieval art, further emphasizing the divide between depicting human beings as the focal point, versus them living in 3D space
All those observations together seem to point to me that the artist's relationship to the world changed pretty significantly between those two periods. The focus in the Renaissance seems to be about conveying an objective, which is to say a mind-graspable version of Reality, formalized by linear perspective.
This isn't to say that I dislike the latter, or that all art is equal. I do enjoy a lot of works of the Renaissance, probably more so than Medieval ones, but the point of my writing here is to highlight how much our modern world tends to perceive objectivity as the “correct” relationship with Reality, when it simply isn't. It is an incredibly biased worldview which leaves us with many blind spots, though it is certainly great at providing us with immense power through technology and science.
Thus we could say that this small bit of the history of perspective highlights a pretty significant aspect of Perspective with an upper case 'P'—how we relate with other worldviews, and especially those that came before us. Our view of history, like how we view space in the lens of perspective, has a foreshortening effect, which is to say that distant events appear smaller to us, making us more likely to misunderstand them or simply apply our modern views to look at the past.
4 A way to categorize the first 4 reasons is with the 4 elements: Powerlessness = lack of fire, Disembodiment = lack of earth (the body), Atomization = lack of water (relationships ~ love ~ water), Boredom = lack of air (curiosity/excitement ~ air)
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2024-12-14