Prologue: Seeing with the Eyes of Perspective

Before you go on reading, here’s a simple challenge: draw a bicycle from memory. Don’t look at photos or references, just take a sheet of paper and a pencil and sketch it as you recall it. Done? Now compare it with the experiment psychologists have used to show how our brain tricks us into believing we know something perfectly when in fact we only have a vague idea:

Most people discover their drawing is inaccurate or even absurd. And although we use bicycles every day, very few know how to represent one faithfully. With a landscape, a room, or the scenography of a Nativity scene the same thing happens: we think we have it clear in our mind, but when we try to put it down without practice in perspective, light, and color, the result isn’t convincing.

It’s important to clarify this from the start: this chapter is devoted to sculpted Nativity scenes that aim for a figurative, realistic, and persuasive result on a stage, that is, in the space where the action unfolds. This is not to disparage other styles —all have their value—, but to go deeper into a field where the illusion of reality is the goal.

Why do we see in perspective?

Perspective is not an invention of painters or architects, nor a trick of the photographic camera. It is, quite simply, the natural way we see the world. But, why does it happen?

How our vision works (and why it matters in the Nativity scene)

This Nativity art manual is designed for those who wish to begin in this craft. That’s why we explain perspective from scratch, without assuming prior knowledge, and always as briefly and clearly as possible. For those who want to explore the science of vision in depth, we recommend an excellent book:

Light enters our eyes through the pupil, passes through the lens —the equivalent of a camera lens— and reaches the retina, which acts like a curved light-sensitive screen. There, a small inverted image is formed, which our brain reorganizes and transforms into the spatial experience we perceive.

In a camera, something similar happens: light passes through the lens, through the diaphragm, and is projected onto film or a digital sensor. There too the image is reduced and inverted, then corrected and displayed on a screen or on paper.

The human eye covers about 200° horizontally and 120° vertically, although only a small central area —the fovea— gives us true sharpness. A camera, by contrast, depends on the lens: a standard 50 mm lens approximates the human field of view, while a wide-angle or a telephoto lens exaggerates or reduces that field artificially.

The difference is that the camera merely records the projection as it is, while our brain interprets and enriches that information: it corrects orientation, merges what each eye sees, and uses cues such as sharpness, shadows, or colors to give us the sensation of depth.

Why does this matter in the Nativity scene?

Because every scene we build —large or small— will be perceived by the observer according to these same mechanisms. Understanding how our vision works helps us decide better on scale, angles, or colors to suggest distance and depth. In other words: knowing perspective is not just theory, but the foundation for making a reduced Nativity scene feel like a real world.

And knowing what happens in our vision helps us understand and reflect on how perspective works. Usually, this subject is introduced without explanation, assuming concepts as known, but in practice skipping these basics only leads to misunderstandings.

Two paths to build a Nativity scene

When you begin building a Nativity scene with sculpted figures, you basically have two paths:

The first is simple: you use all the figures and elements at the same scale. In this case, the sense of depth comes only from the physical space, as in a model railway. There is no single viewpoint here, and what you see depends on how you move around the set. The result? A coherent Nativity, but with few special resources to guide the viewer’s gaze.

Even if you don’t think about it, perspective is always present: the feeling of depth does not disappear. Just look at a model railway: the tracks are built to the same scale, but as they recede on the stage they seem to converge and shrink.

The second path is different: it consists of playing with perspective, that is, applying visual devices so that space appears deeper than it really is. Instead of keeping everything at a constant scale, the Nativity artist adapts figures, props, and scenography to gently trick the eye. Distant figures are made smaller, buildings are constructed with reduced proportions, colors are blurred… And what is achieved? That from a main viewpoint, the viewer feels they are in front of a larger, more realistic world.

Now then, why is it not enough to simply copy and apply the rules of technical drawing? Because those rules were created to represent reality on a flat surface, like paper. The Nativity is not flat: it is volumetric. If we tried to apply textbook conical perspective, we would face an unavoidable demand: to fix a single viewpoint so that everything worked correctly. With 25 cm figures in the foreground, this would require building an excessively deep background, something practically impossible within the limited volume of any Nativity scene.

Faced with this obstacle, the Nativity artist developed their own resources: reducing scales, forcing angles, compressing distances, and even using atmosphere and color as allies to suggest distance. From this pursuit of maintaining the illusion of reality came a decisive solution: framing the view from a single angle of observation. This is how what we now call the Nativity diorama was born.

In the end, the question is simple yet profound: how can a set of figures, arranged in just a few centimeters or meters, be transformed before our eyes into a living, believable world? That is the role of perspective in the Nativity. But it should not be confused with the purpose of the Nativity itself, which is none other than to tell a story: an homage to the childhood of Jesus, or its equivalent in the form of an ethical message.

Since perspective is inseparable from our vision, this is precisely where this chapter begins.

At the start of this prologue I invited you to draw a bicycle from memory. If the result surprised you, think now of your own Nativity scenes: many times, without realizing it, we may lose part of the admiration of those who look at them, not because of lack of effort or talent, but simply for not knowing some basic resources of perspective.

And that loss hurts more than we imagine: nothing frustrates more than wanting to convey the greatness of a scene and not having the effect reach the viewer. The good news is that it’s not a matter of ability, but of knowledge.

If you don’t want the same thing to happen in your Nativity scenes as with the bicycle drawing —taking things for granted that we actually don’t know—, the following chapters on perspective may interest you much more than you think. There you will find the keys to transform a few centimeters into a living and believable world.

And there is more. Perspective did not begin in the Renaissance: long before, Egypt, Greece, and Rome had already intuited ways of representing depth. But it was with Brunelleschi, Alberti, and Piero della Francesca that linear perspective became a science, and with Leonardo da Vinci came aerial or color perspective, teaching us how the atmosphere transforms what we see. Later, Dürer brought these principles into engraving, Canaletto and Vermeer explored the camera obscura, and in the 20th century Cubism deliberately broke with everything that came before. In other cultures, such as Chinese painting, a “scattered perspective” was preferred over the Western “focal” one, showing that there is no single way of imagining space.

Surely many Nativity artists have never heard of these other perspectives, and yet all of them contain keys that can inspire the creation of a more convincing Nativity scene. In another chapter we will return to this fascinating history, and we will also speak of aesthetic currents such as Wabi-sabi (the Japanese aesthetic of the imperfect, the ephemeral, and the incomplete), which remind us that not everything in art has to be perfect. Imperfection, consciously embraced, can itself be a source of beauty.

But to reach that freedom, we must first know the rules: only then can we break them with intention, and not out of simple ignorance.