Ever since Erwin Panofsky suggested early in the twentieth century that the invention of perspective resulted from a massive cultural change in the way things are perceived and the reorganisation of human vision according to the principles of homogenous space, numerous authors have asserted that the homogenous conception of space itself was inconceivable before the early 1400s, or even before the late Enlightenment. In this paper I challenge these claims by analysing Leon Battista Alberti’s views on space and the Aristotelian context that dominated the intellectual life of the fifteenth century.