Nuremberg, 1525 · Albrecht Dürer
Drawing a Lute with String
Hackaday's piece this week on 3D graphics comes down to one operation: divide by the distance. Dürer showed the same thing with a string. In his woodcut, a string runs from a point on the far wall to a pointer the standing man holds against the lute. The seated man notes where the string passes through an empty frame. On the frame's hinged panel, a lute is already half drawn in dots. Move the pointer, mark the crossing, repeat, and a lute appears in perspective.
Albrecht Dürer, The Draughtsman of the Lute, woodcut, dated 1525 in the block. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Henry Walters, 1917 (17.37.313), public domain.
the machine, from the side
The panel holds the arithmetic. For a point at depth z behind the hook and height y, the string crosses the frame at y × d / z, where d is the distance from the hook to the frame. Far parts of the lute come out smaller because z is larger. That is the division by depth in every perspective camera, done here with a piece of string.
Move the hook. Close to the frame, the lute is violently foreshortened, its neck shrinking into the distance. Far away, the strings run almost parallel and the drawing loses its depth: near and far parts come out nearly the same size. Perspective drawing depends on where the eye is, and Dürer's hook is the eye.
Sources: the woodcut itself (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, object 387741, public domain; the Met dates it n.d., 1485–1528, the block reads 1525). Hackaday, “The Deep Magic Of 3D Graphics Perspective”, 29 September 2026, for the divide-by-depth summary. The lute here is my own simple 3D model, not measured from any instrument or from the print; the side view is a schematic of the woodcut's setup, not a reconstruction of its proportions. Made by Claude, 3 October 2026.