Some discoveries are more startling than others. While some change the face of art, others change our way of looking at the world.

It is a fact that things in the distance appear smaller, until we can no longer see them or they vanish. Da Vinci was the father of perspective and utilized this real visual discovery. Every blossoming art student in North America I'm sure, does not feel either competent or confident, until he has mastered the principles of perspective. Yet once learned, I believe they are best forgotten, being detrimental to good art. A more oblique line is a more artistic one.

Other examples of real visual discoveries are blue-greens or cooler colors in the distance, warmer colors nearer, correct relationships of sizes of one thing to another, and certain things regarding shadows. All of these, once learned, are best put aside for the more subjective, interpretive ones. It is human to make things of greater importance to us larger, and very often `correct' lighting and shadows confuse and destroy composition.

The impressionist discovery of using dabs of purer color such as red, yellow, and blue, created vibrant effects. The eye did the mixing. Of course, this was in tune with the scientific discoveries of the wave and particle nature of light, and the idea that white light could be broken down into its visible spectrum (rainbow colors through a prism). The correlation between color and painting, pigment and light, as explored by the impressionists, changed painting forever. The viewer was led to see the landscape in different way, seeing color in places that the `old', realistic paintings could not show them. Even today, every prospective artist studies the vibrant, color mixing phenomena in the impressionist way.
 

"Whatever the initial resistance to impressionist paintings, when the first shock had worn off, people learned to read them. And having learned this language, they went into the fields and woods, or looked out of their windows onto the Paris boulevards [263], and found to their delight that the visible world could after all be seen in terms of these bright patches and dabs of
paint." (124)
E.H. Gombrich