PAPERCAMS

In the European Renaissance the camera obscura was at the leading edge of both Science and Art. Leon Battista Alberti apparently used one to reveal the geometric laws of perspective drawing in 1435, and DaVinci wrote in "Codex Atlanticus" about forming images with pinholes. In 1475 Paolo Toscanelli incorporated one into the dome of the Cathedral of Florence creating a projection of the solar disc on a floor marked as a Sundial. A few years later the new St. Peters Cathedral at The Vatican was built with a similar pinhole in the dome. After two years of observation Pope Augustine revised the Roman calendar which had drifted two weeks out of phase from the farmer's seasons by its rounding off of a fraction of a day a year for a thousand years.