William Mitchell, in his book ?The Reconfigured Eye,? describes computer graphics research similarly:
?The tale of computer image synthesis in the 1970s and 1980s (and I should say even in 2005), as chronicled in the Proceedings of the annual SIGGRAPH conferences, strikingly recapitulates the history of European painting from the Miracle of Masaccio?s Trinity to the birth of photography; the standards of verisimilitude established by Lambert shading seem to be made obsolete by those of Phong Shading, and these in turn are superseded by those of ray tracing, and radiosity, and beyond.? [p. 161]