Until people started peering through the first optical instruments, we all shared one world view through eyes that are optically very similar. Within fifty years of the introduction of linear perspective, artists were already starting to exploit the effects of unusual projections, notably in trompe l’oeil frescos.

Andrea Mantegna’s magnificent Oculus, the Latin for eye, on the ceiling of the Spouse’s Chamber in the Palazzo Ducale, Mantua, is a splendid example from only 1473.

At the other extreme is Hendrik Goltzius’ foreshortened projection of the Dying Adonis from 1609. This pushes the face and head of Adonis into the distance and makes their features almost unreadable, while his feet take pride of place and you can even read their soles.

It took rather longer for landscape painters to invent the panorama, a precursor of the wide-angle lens.

Caspar Wolf’s Panorama of Grindelwald with the Wetterhorn, Mettenberg and Eiger painted in 1774 is an early example showing the distortion needed to include the whole of this view on a single canvas, with an aspect ratio of 2.75:1. Today we’d envisage this as being painted through a wide-angle lens, although it was a century before such camera lenses came into use.

A little later, Giovanni Battista Lusieri attained high aspect ratios by assembling multiple supports, in his case sheets of paper, as he worked in watercolour on this View of the Bay of Naples, Looking Southwest from the Pizzofalcone Toward Capo di Posilippo in 1791.

By the end of the 1830s, as the first Daguerrotype images took the world by storm, the human visual environment was changing irrevocably. Although most traditional visual artists looked down on the infant art of photography, the impact of its lenses of different focal lengths was quickly reflected in more progressive paintings.

The meticulously realist Jean-Léon Gérôme was an early adopter of lens effects, here in his Ave Caesar, Morituri Te Salutant from 1859. Its wide-angle view has a lower aspect ratio of 1.6:1, but was so wide that it attracted criticism when it was exhibited. Gérôme became a pioneer photographer, and a defender of photography as a new art in its own right, but he can’t have projected this view using an early wide-angle lens even if he had been able to, as they are spherical in their effect, so would have shown more of the top and bottom of the image.

Instead, Gérôme’s image more closely resembles widescreen movies, which of course didn’t start to appear until the 1920s, and weren’t commonplace until the 1950s. If anything, Gérôme’s panoramic spectacles were the precursor to widescreen cinema, and continued to be an influence on them: his paintings were important to Ridley Scott when he was making Gladiator (2000), for example.

Although such optical effects are often attributed to the French Impressionists, their great exponent was another pioneer photographer (with his brother Martial), Gustave Caillebotte.

His major painting of 1875 shows three workmen preparing a wooden floor in the artist’s studio at 77 rue de Miromesnil. Each is stripped to the waist, and they’re talking to one another as they work kneeling down. It’s thoroughly detailed, Realist, and despite its innovative view and unusual subject, it conformed to the highest standards of the Salon at the time. But it was rejected by the Salon jury, who were apparently shocked at this depiction of the working class at work, and no doubt taken aback at its photographic projection.

Caillebotte’s Pont de l’Europe from the following year shows a road bridge over the railway yards at Gare Saint-Lazare, with an unusual perspective projection that may well have been derived from photography.

Perhaps the Salon jury would have found the theme of Caillebotte’s Paris Street, Rainy Day (1877) less vulgar and more acceptable, despite its unusual projection.

Telescopes had been invented in the early seventeenth century, long before photography, and had been used by many landscape painters to acquire the fine details they needed for very precise paintings. The Pre-Raphaelite landscape artist John Brett is thought to have used them when painting in the Alps, and for his breathtakingly detailed view of Florence. What Brett didn’t do, though, was use the optical effects of a telescope in the projection and composition of his views.

It was Gustav Klimt who painted this view of the Church in Cassone (1913), when on holiday on Lake Garda. Its flattened perspective is characteristic of the use of a lens with long focal length, as in a telescope or camera. Another good indicator is the very small difference in scale between the houses at the water’s edge and those behind the church, even though in reality the latter must have been a significant distance from the shore. These flattened views are distinctive of many of Klimt’s landscapes.

It had taken nearly half a millennium for painters to exploit Brunelleschi’s geometry to its full effect, and to expand our vision.