Check out Albrecht Dürer
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/durer/
Hard to say who "discovered" it, but Durer is sure early, and he clearly understood mathematics, too.
Neat example of his perspective work here
http://mathforum.org/sum95/math_and/perspective/perspect.html Another answer: Brunelleschi discovered it abot 1415.
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A Perspective Image is an image that looks realistic and tends to be almost 3D, there is at least one vanishing point. Think of an image of a road. Notice how the road is large where we stand but gradually gets smaller until we can't see it at all? That's where the vanishing point is. A Non-perspective image is an image that lacks in a vanishing point and is almost flat.
The left painting only
The perspective in art is the viewpoint of the artist. The formal perspective is the perspective that the artist wants the audience to have when looking at the piece.
Artists have employed the use of perspective for eons, however wobbly. Atmospheric perspective (where we see mountains receding into the mist and fog) has been used in Chinese and Japanese painting as well as in that of Northern Europe and Scandinavia. The person to really nail down linear perspective was engineer/architect Fillipo Brunelleschi. He is the one who came up with the iron-clad laws of vanishing points and perspective grids. This forever changed drawing and painting.
Multiple perspective