<P> The earliest art paintings and drawings typically sized many objects and characters hierarchically according to their spiritual or thematic importance, not their distance from the viewer, and did not use foreshortening . The most important figures are often shown as the highest in a composition, also from hieratic motives, leading to the so - called "vertical perspective", common in the art of Ancient Egypt, where a group of "nearer" figures are shown below the larger figure or figures . The only method to indicate the relative position of elements in the composition was by overlapping, of which much use is made in works like the Parthenon Marbles . </P> <P> Chinese artists made use of oblique perspective from the first or second century until the 18th century . It is not certain how they came to use the technique; some authorities suggest that the Chinese acquired the technique from India, which acquired it from Ancient Rome . Oblique projection is also seen in Japanese art, such as in the Ukiyo - e paintings of Torii Kiyonaga (1752--1815). In the 18th century, Chinese artists began to combine oblique perspective with regular diminution of size of people and objects with distance; no particular vantage point is chosen, but a convincing effect is achieved . </P> <P> Systematic attempts to evolve a system of perspective are usually considered to have begun around the fifth century BC in the art of ancient Greece, as part of a developing interest in illusionism allied to theatrical scenery . This was detailed within Aristotle's Poetics as skenographia: using flat panels on a stage to give the illusion of depth . The philosophers Anaxagoras and Democritus worked out geometric theories of perspective for use with skenographia . Alcibiades had paintings in his house designed using skenographia, so this art was not confined merely to the stage . Euclid's Optics introduced a mathematical theory of perspective, but there is some debate over the extent to which Euclid's perspective coincides with the modern mathematical definition . </P> <P> By the later periods of antiquity, artists, especially those in less popular traditions, were well aware that distant objects could be shown smaller than those close at hand for increased realism, but whether this convention was actually used in a work depended on many factors . Some of the paintings found in the ruins of Pompeii show a remarkable realism and perspective for their time . It has been claimed that comprehensive systems of perspective were evolved in antiquity, but most scholars do not accept this . Hardly any of the many works where such a system would have been used have survived . A passage in Philostratus suggests that classical artists and theorists thought in terms of "circles" at equal distance from the viewer, like a classical semi-circular theatre seen from the stage . The roof beams in rooms in the Vatican Virgil, from about 400 AD, are shown converging, more or less, on a common vanishing point, but this is not systematically related to the rest of the composition . In the Late Antique period use of perspective techniques declined . The art of the new cultures of the Migration Period had no tradition of attempting compositions of large numbers of figures and Early Medieval art was slow and inconsistent in relearning the convention from classical models, though the process can be seen underway in Carolingian art . </P>

Who created the first mathematical system of perspective in painting