This article highlights a series of contributions that, since the Late Middle Ages, laid the foundations of the scientific revolution. The development of optics in the Franciscan school of Oxford during the 13th century is adopted as a starting point to show its influence on the emergence of perspective in painting and the geometrization of physical space that the new pictorial technique involved. The work concludes by indicating how the Copernican revolution in particular and the scientific revolution in general are heirs of the visual turn involved in perspective.