More than five hundred years ago, a diminutive Florentine artisan in his late forties conducted a modest “experiment” near a doorway in a cobbled cathedral piazza. Modest? It marked an event which ultimately was to change the modes, if not the course, of Western history.
If we are to point to a crystallizing moment for the postmature birth of geometric linear perspective, it has to be this nameless day of Filippo Brunelleschi’s out-of-doors demonstration in 1425.
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His mirror experiment was a feat, not just of aesthetic marksmanship, but of perceptual upheaval and theological reinforcement. Directly or indirectly, it had implications which extended irreversibly to the entire future of Western art – and to science and technology from Copernicus to Einstein.
In terms of his own times, Brunelleschi’s pocket perspective demonstration was the crucial event – if one taken in stride by the precocious Florentines – in several decades of fitful, teasing progress in optics by the artists, mathematicians, and cartographers of that remarkable, fervent city. Others played their part, too, in the “rediscovery” of linear perspective, some of them centuries earlier.
How curious that an understanding of the mathematics of human pictorial representation occurred so late – and so locally – in history.
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…whatever the ancients may have known of perspective constructions vanished into oblivion during the Middle Ages in Western Europe. Nor did any of the other great cultures of the world – and here we may include the Chinese, Persian, Indian, Arab, and Byzantine civilisations – which classical learning influenced, seem to have been interested in this geometric-optical way of picture making.
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We cannot help wondering why it was the artists of the Italian Renaissance who, unlike any of their fellow craftsmen outside Western Christendom, discovered or invented – once more – the geometric laws of pictorial representation. The distinction between the words “discover” and “invent” here is intentionally provocative. “Discover” implies that linear perspective is an absolute scientific truth, universal to all men regardless of cultural background or historical period. “Invent,” on the other hand, suggests that linear perspective was only a convention, the understanding or adoption of which is relative to the particular anthropological and psychological needs of a given culture. The issue is moot, and the question as to whether perspective is revealed or imposed continues to stir debate among cultural historians and perceptual psychologists (at present, the “discover” side seems to be carrying the day).
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Most people raised in this perceptual tradition since the Renaissance have come to accept linear perspective as producing greater “realism”.
….the attitudes of modern art have persuaded art historians today that the artist of the Loggia del Bigallo fresco was scarcely “naïve”. Was he not raised in the sophisticated age of Dante, Petrarch, and Giotto? Nor was he any less “faithful” in rendering the city of Florence than the designer of the Map with a Chain. The painter of the earlier picture did not conceive of his subject in terms of spatial homogeneity. Rather, he believed that he could render what he saw before his eyes convincingly by representing what it looked like to walk about, experiencing structures, almost tactilely, from many different sides, rather than from a single, overall vantage.
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Could it be possible that the “naturalism” of the Loggia del Bigallo fresco is just as valid a part of human – and artistic – visual experience as the “realistic” linear perspective of the Map with a Chain?
Perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson has recently advanced a theory that lends support to such a view [James J. Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World (Boston, 1950); idem, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston, 1966)]. According to Gibson, sight is not merely a specific, autonomous sense but is interrelated with the other senses in a highly complex sensory system (Gibson rearranges these senses into a new order of “perceptual systems”). Moreover, this visual system involves at least two kinds of perception: the “visual world” and the “visual field”. The visual world, according to Gibson, is what we experience in the broadest sense of seeing, that is, as we move about, orientating ourselves to objects from all sides. In the visual world phenomena are experienced in their three dimensions and with cognisance of their complete form, as perceived by other senses (like that of touch). The visual field, on the other hand, is what we perceive when we fixate with the eyes, whether we are standing still or moving. It is in the visual field that we become aware of linear perspective, that is to say, the distortion of shape, size, and distance in the aspect of the seen objects according to the viewer’s single eyepoint. In the absolutism of the visual world, we are conscious of the invariant size and form of things and of their substantiality in their own right, without relation to other objects. In the more relative visual field, we are aware of how things change shape, size, and proportion with respect to position and distance from the fixed eyes (and from each other).
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The forms of things seen in the visual field are distorted in perspective, seldom appearing according to their actual size and shape. Thus the ordinary dinner plate is recognized as quite circular in the visual world but as being an ellipse in the visual field.
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Reverse perspective, as a means of rendering the illusion of the third dimension, is by no means unique to the Studenica painting. there are innumerable examples of it in pictures from all over the ancient and medieval worlds, including the works of the most sophisticated painters of the fourteenth century both south and north of the Alps, among them the great Giotto. It is seen to this day in the art of non-Western societies which have remained outside the influence of Renaissance perspective. Reverse perspective has also been related to the phenomenon of split representation, observed by anthropologists and social psychologists among so-called primitive peoples, and especially among children. This is the propensity to represent three-dimensional objects as if split apart and pressed flat, so that the picture shows more sides and parts of the object that could possibly be seen from a single viewpoint.
This also relates to something Hockney said about linear perspective and how children draw in Weschler (2008)
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While more study of the phenomenon is needed, it seems to be implicitly related to the artists desire to depict what is experienced in the visual world. This propensity, moreover, seems to be innate; cultural history shows it to be at least more “natural” for human beings to begin making pictures in this way. The pictorial attitude of the visual field, on the other hand, is not innate and is quite unnatural until it is learned. Why have we in the post-Renaissance West become so insensitive to nonperspectival pictorial conventions of our own early Middle Ages? Indeed, why did the devout Christians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries abandon such time-honoured, understood conventions for the more mathematical terrain of linear perspective?
In fact, a tendency toward centralized composition, if not precisely toward linear perspective, was beginning to work its way into Western Europe art a century and a half before the decisive inceptions of Brunelleschi and Alberi.
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Late in the century, controversy surrounded the hitherto unassailable teachings of Aristotle. Finally, in 1277, Aristotle was banned altogether by the bishop of Paris on the grounds that the philosopher had described the universe as finite. According to Aristotle, all the planets and stars revolved in fixed spheres around the earth, but beyond the last sphere there was nothing, only void.
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Bradwardine’s remarks reflect a notion held not only by his fellow English opticians, but also increasingly by Italian painters: namely, that the theoretical, infinite space of the mathematician and the physical space one sees before the eyes are one and the same thing. Perhaps it was no coincidence that in Italian art at this very time [c. 1290-13-49], skies were less often painted in the symbolic colours of purple and gold, but frequently in blue. The notion of uniform and infinite space was beginning to take hold.
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Unlike the Renaissance painter depicting his scene in perspective, the medieval artist viewed his world quite subjectively. He saw each element in his composition separately and independently, and thus paid little attention to anything in the way of a systematic spatial relationship between objects. He was absorbed within the visual world he was representing rather than, as with the perspective painter, standing without it, observing from a single, removed viewpoint. It was only later, as we have seen, that people were taught to think of painting as the mason builds his arch: from the outside looking in, as if the picture were a window between the painter and the subject he would depict.
Professor Gibson has used the example of railway tracks to press this distinction in another way. The post-Renaissance artist, he points out, will see the rails as forever converging. But what about the railroad engineer? He is “infused” with the tracks, as it were, and hence sees the rails as parallel. The “reality” of the tracks for the engineer, as with the medieval artist, depends on quite a different viewpoint from that of the linear perspective painter.
How “Naïve”, then, is preperspective art? Modern scholars have seen a distinct parallel between the manner of painting of the medieval artist and that of young children in out own times. (While this observation has always been made with some hesitation, it would be a mistake to imagine that such a comparison in any way denigrates the special genius of the craftsmen of the Middle Ages.) The similarities that come out of such a relating of art history to human development are interesting, for children, like the medieval artists, imagine themselves as completely infused with the world they wish to depict. Instead of looking at things from a single, detached vantage, the young artist tends to see everything egocentrically. An object attracting a child’s is seen only from its most advantageous and descriptive viewpoint. The sky, for example, is usually rendered as a blue streak at the top, because the child sees the sky as being “up”. The ground becomes a green stripe at the bottom, because it is most conveniently seen by looking down. The main or middle part of the picture is generally left neutral in colour by the child, as that is where he sees the people and other things which really interest him. Because he knows his own house from walking all around it, he will often draw it with the two ends showing as well as the main fron side.
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Could one not also say that the peoples of the Middle Ages began to exercise their own innate seeing and structuring capacities in much the same way? Did they not also begin to apply logico-mathematical perspective only after beginning to experience the secular world outside their borders?
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Linear perspective, then, with its dependence on optical principals, seemed to symbolize a harmonious relationship between mathematical tidiness, and nothing less than God’s will. The picture, as constructed according to the laws of perspective, was to set an example of moral order and human perfection.
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It is interesting that most of the Italian artists during the first half of the fifteenth century did not suddenly adapt to linear perspective, and the new art-science was never applied either to scientific drawings or architectural models until the time of Leonardo do Vinci (1452-1519). Rather amusingly, there was a propensity, continuing right through the sixteenth century, to illustrate scientific manuals with pictures in split-view or reverse perspective, long after the rules of Brunelleschi and Alberti had been acknowledged by artists generally. [The Diagram above] for example, is a reproduction of a cylinder figure that was to be found in nearly all European geometry textbooks published from classical antiquity through the 1500s. the learned geometer, the salient property in the cylinder’s “reality” was always it oblong length with parallel sides and equal circles on each end. This, of course, the diagram showed him quite graphically without the help or need of linear perspective. In the seventeenth century, however, the ever-increasing impact of perspective pictures prompted conservative textbook printers to “improve” the old cylinder – by the incongruous addition of shading!
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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Insert Diagram!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Insert Diagram!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Their [Brunelleschi and Alberti] crucial discovery unquestionably was the definition of the so-called vanishing point. This refers to the illusion in ordinary vision that the parallel edges of objects spreading away from the eyes seem to be converging at an infinite point on the horizon. Brunelleschi, as all evidence here will suggest, was not only the first artist but also the first scientist in history since antiquity to grasp the geometrical and optical principles by which this appears to happen. In spite of the intense interest in the science of vision by Greek, medieval Christian, and Arab scholars, and despite the scrutinous observation of nature by the European painters of the fourteenth century, no one before Brunelleschi seems to have satisfactorily elucidated this phenomenon in ordinary sight – much less shown how to recapitulate it in pictures.
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The term vanishing point, used for convenience throughout this book, was not coined until modern times. We do not know what epistemological significance, if any, either Brunelleschi or Alberti gave to the phenomenon; that is, whether they thought of it as a mathematical POINT, A distinct place, or a symbol of infinity. Alberti referred to it as the “centric point”. Although he understood its relation to infinity, his only expressed concern was that it be placed by the artist in the center of the drawing space and operate as the single locus for all converging architectural lines.
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It is during and shortly after the year 1425 that we can date the first pictures to show such features. The young Florentine artist Masaccio seems to have been the earliest painter, and Donatello the first sculptor, to employ linear perspective.
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Leonardo da Vinci was only the most illustrious practitioner of what had long since been regarded as a proud calling in Italy and throughout Renaissance Europe. Like Leonardo, many of these artisan-engineers kept notebooks filled with drawings. Besides possessing a rich imagination, they were called on for two other requisite talents: skill in mathematics, and the ability to draw. In addition – and what is most important to us here – they had to have an unusual sense of what is today called “depth perception”, for it was their job to imagine complex mechanical devices completely in the abstract, and then commit these designs to paper with a convincing illusion of three dimensions. It is scarcely surprising, in view of this, that it was an artisan-engineer who gave the Western world its first linear perspective system.
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…Alberti would first outline his quadrangular drawing space, which he wanted to think of as a window or, more scientifically, as an intersection through the visual pyramid.
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Then, the text continues (Alberti is emphatic about the word “then”), he would “establish how much distance there is to be between the eye of the spectator [the distance point] and the picture,” and at such a proper distance he would insert a vertical intersection through the diagonal.
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…the distance point itself is not variable in Alberti’s construction,…
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….Alberti’s compositione seems to have provided a special compromise for the fifteenth-century artists – between his traditional, still-medieval studio practices and his increasing desire to infuse geometric (devine) harmony into his various pictorial situations.
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As we have already argued, …, perspective was not fully embraced by its first practitioners for any such reason. “Realism” in fifteenth century eyes was as metaphysical as it was physical. Therefore perspective rules were accepted by these early artists because it gave their depicted scenes a sense of harmony with natural law, thereby underscoring man’s moral responsibility within God’s geometrically ordered universe. Was this not in itself conductive to aesthetic experience, different only in kind from that produced by the modern abstract painter who seeks also to reach the inner “spirit” of his viewers?
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I think Alberti understood, as we now should ourselves, that linear perspective remains the servant not the master to the artist, and that visual truth in a picture does not depend upon correct perspective per se, but upon the basic moral and philosophical priorities of the civilisation itself. These are the “realities” appropriate to pictures in any given culture. It just so happened that linear perspective enhanced these values during the Renaissance. During the early Quattrocento at least perspective proved a loyal valet; it was only until relatively modern times that the servant became jealous of the master’s wardrobe.
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As we have already noted, craftsmen and writers on perspective prior to Alberti were never seriously interested in the problems of illusory visual effects in pictures. Nevertheless, perspective assumed what could be called a stepfatherly role in the emergence of artificial linear perspective.
Indeed, throughout the no less than two thousand years before the scientific breakthroughs of the seventeenth centuries, when Kepler, Descartes, Newton, and others reshaped optics in the form we know it today, perspective had stood firm, built as it was on the most mathematical and empirical of foundations. For all its errors, medieval optics was a completely rational and mechanistic science, relatively uncluttered by theological mystery, it cemented together the best scholarship and talents of three great civilisations: the Greco-Roman, the Arab, and the medieval Christian. No wonder, then, especially as the science reached a wider audience during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, that people not only took for granted these explanations, but also tended more and more to “see” the natural world according to these Euclidean or geometric rules.
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He [Alberti] was not interested in the complexities of binocular vision, for example, a problem which had been of great import to the medieval opticians. Why? Because Alberti insisted that painting performed best when seen from a monocular and centric viewpoint.
A comprehensive account of the history of optics in the Western world is well beyond the scope of this book, but we cannot fully escape its glance if we are to have some understanding of the evolution of linear perspective. Out theme here is not only pictorial objects but the eyes which view them, and above all, the forces – and directions of those forces – linking the two. Both Brunelleschi and Alberti had much to sort out from the optics bequeathed them by the Greek, Arab, and Medieval Christian scholars.
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It remained for the geometer Euclid in the fourth century B.C. to give the then inconclusive science of optics its first uniform mathematical model. Euclid’s Optica is almost entirely an exercise in geometry, he believed that the force of vision always proceeded from the eyes as “visual rays” which could be diagrammed as straight lines. These visual rays diverged to form an imaginary cone, with the apex in the observers eye. Since the visual cone can be diagrammed, he reasoned, must it not therefore fall under the same laws which govern that abstract figure in geometry?
…these propositions Euclid demonstrated by geometrical proofs. He was not concerned, of course, with problems of pictures, so there are no theorems in his Optica having to do with the vanishing point phenomenon. In fact, his basic rule, that the illusion of diminishing size of distant objects is determined by the visual angle, is meant not to explain the apparent convergence of parallels but rather to insist on just the opposite – that they really do not converge at all.
While Euclid bequeathed the science of optics a much-needed geometrical structure, his numerous propositions still did not explain some of the most basic physical and physiological – much less psychological – aspects of human sight.
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So far as linear perspective theory is concerned, Ptolemy’s major contribution for future painters was his explanation of the centric visual ray principle. (This idea had apparently occurred to other Greek optical scientists following Euclid, but their treatises have not survived.) whereas for Euclid the ray’s fanning out from the observers eyes were undifferentiated, Ptolemy (as well as Galen and other post-Euclidean Greeks) stressed that those rays near the centre of the visual cone were shorter; hence they carried back clearer and more precise impressions of the objects seen. Thus the centremost visual ray, following the axis of the visual cone and making right angles with the surface of what is seen, would be the most distinct ray of all. Alberti was eventually to refer to this as the “prince of rays”.
Page 69 (Even though this is not believed anymore, it connects with comments by Hockney on his photocollage work – about things seeming bigger when in central vision)
Hence it is the visual rays nearest to this axis which elicit the greatest visual acuity to what is seen in the center of the visual field of view. In such insights by this, the greatest of the Arab optical theorists, can be seen the foreshadowings of the ultimate and true perspective which was to come fourth in Italy centuries later.
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Alberti devoted special attention to the centric visual ray:
It remains for us to speak of the centric ray. We call the centric ray the one which alone strikes the quantity in such a way that the adjacent angles on all sides are equal. As for the properties of the centric ray, it is of all the rays undoubtedly the most keen and vigorous. It is also true that a quantity will never appear larger than when the centric ray rests upon it…..if the distance and position of the centric ray are changed, the surface appears to be altered. For it will appear either smaller or larger according to the relative disposition of the lines and angles. So the position of the centric ray and distance play a large part in the determination of side.
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Brunelleschi insisted, in his own first experiment with artificial perspective, that this picture seen from a single viewpoint, the same as that determined by his own axis visualis when he painted the picture.
Europeans came more and more to believe that things planned or seen from a central viewpoint had greater monumentality and moral authority than those which were not.
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…the whole theory of linear perspective rests on a fundamental assumption by the viewer that large things can be represented smaller and in exact proportion. Since the science of optics also made use of this same assumption, Alberti’s Book One intended to prove to artists that they could paint pictures not only of what the eye sees but as the eye sees.
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The power to render an abstract image of space in our minds, regulated by an inflexible coordinate framework of horizontals and verticals, is what makes any grid system of measurement so instantly meaningful. No matter how the grid-squared surface is shrunk, enlarged, twisted, warped, curved, or peeled from a sphere and flattened out, the human observer never loses his sense of how the parts of the surface articulate. The continuity of the whole picture remains clear so long as he can relate it to at least one undistorted, modular grid square.
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The new geometrical grid system for conceptualizing space, such as Toscanelli describes, eventually became the modus videndi of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This humble checkering method became such an ubiquitous device for so many things during these centuries that it, rather than the dome or classical nude, could justly lay claim to being the aegis or trademark of the Italian Renaissance.
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The Discovery of the Vanishing Point
Would that either of these panels had survived! [Brunelleschi’s two famous perspective experiments – now lost forever, probably]. Yet their loss can be emphatically mourned well apart from normal aesthetic considerations. Brunelleschi wanted his two demonstrations to be admired, not as works of art per se, but because they showed a new geometric construction which could give a sense of unity and consistency to any illusionary picture. He wanted to prove that, by applying his method, the familiar conventions of naturalism could be surpassed.
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It is hard to believe that Ptolemy could have worked up his elaborate and complex procedure without at first understanding generally how a vanishing point functions in the illusion of perspective.
According the Professor Krautheimer’s recapitulation, the vanishing point was only realized by Brunelleschi after he had first drawn a picture of the Baptistery as a coordinated architectural view. Yet, as with Ptolemy, it is hard to believe that Brunelleschi did not know how this phenomenon worked beforehand: indeed, the vanishing point is also implicit in the construction hypothesized by Panofsky and Krauheimer. One might well ask how Brunelleschi could have known that such a synthesis could depict the Baptistery better than naturalistic Trecento renditions if he did not understand a priori the principle of the vanishing point. In an age whan visual perception was still conditioned by the imagery of the Middle Ages, how could anyone have known beforehand – without ever having seen a picture in geometric linear perspective – that such a representation of the Baptistery would turn out more “real”?.
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The second experiment, which presented a setting in oblique perspective, had almost no influence on artistic composition in Italy during the rest of the fifteenth century. Once artists realized that optical laws could be applied to painting, there was general acknowledgement of the primacy of the central visual axis in composing pictures. With few exceptions, painters during the ensuing decades relied on compositions focusing the observer’s eye on a centric vanishing point.
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As a “laboratory condition”, Brunelleschi insisted the viewer looked through the hole with only one fixed eye, ostensibly to avoid any visual confusion deriving from the phenomenon of binocular parallax. Actually, two holes, or one hole wide enough for two eyes, would not have caused any appreciable distortion in his experiment. It was then believed, however, that only one hole for one eye could wield the effect he wanted, since in binocular vision the visual axis of the two eyes overlap, thus making it theoretically impossible to concentrate on a centric viewpoint. Binocular vision might also, the Quattrocento Florentines thought, give the sensation of curved lines (as Leonardo Da Vinci later observed). But the crucial consideration for Brunelleschi was that two holes would have made the viewer too aware of the mirror surface, thereby mitigating the illusion of visual-field depth.
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Just fifty years ago, the late great art historian Erwin Panofsky wrote an essay called “Die Perspektive als ‘symbolische Form’”. This article created extraordinary interest in subsequent decades because the author argued that linear perspective by no means conclusively defined visual reality, rather it was only a particular constructional approach for representing pictorial space, one which happened to be particular to the culture of the Italian Renaissance.
Art historians, trying at the time to justify the rise and spread of modern abstract art, were pleased because Panofsky seemed to be saying that linear perspective was not the last word in pictorial truth, that it, too, could pass away as had all earlier artistic conventions. Modern artists had therefore been correct in rejecting perspective in favor of the new “symbolic forms” such as Impressionism or Cubism, which corresponded more to the iconoclastic visual attitudes of the twentieth century. Such a notion has since been expressly defended by various writers on art and psychology, among them Rudolf Arnheim, Gyorgy Kepes, and Nelson Goodman.
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Writers on optics and perceptual psychology such as James J. Gibson, G. Ten Doesschate, and M. H. Pirenne have challenged Panofsky for his subjective curvature hypothesis and denial that linear perspective has a catholic or “ultimate” veracity. They are especially put off by Panofsky’s reference to perspective as a “symbolic form”, which is to say, a mere convention.
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What Cassirer means here [when he says “symbolic form”] is that the symbol man uses to communicate ideas about the objective world have an autonomy all their own. Indeed, the human mind systematizes these symbols into structures that develop quite independently of whatever order might exist in the natural world to begin with.
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….”symbolic forms” may still be alive and well – under a currently more fashionable name, “structuralism”. Jean Piaget has recently published a little book in which he outlines the theory, now largely subscribed to by Gestalt psychologists, anthropologists, linguists, mathematicians, biologists, and philosophers, that the human mind possesses an innate capacity to structure. This assumption has become a common denominator for the study of the above disciplines. Piaget’s definition of structuralism, especially as he tires to reconcile interpretations as divergent as those of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Noam Chomsky, is remarkably similar to Cassirer’s old notion of symbolic form. Sadly, Cassirer’s name is never mentioned.
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But let us return to Panofsky. First of all, the real thrust of his essay is not to prove that the ancients believed the visual world was curved or that Renaissance perspective was a mere artists convention, but that each historical period in Western civilisation had its own special “perspective”, a particular symbolic form reflecting a particular Weltanschauung. Thus linear perspective was the peculiar answer of the Renaissance period to the problem of representing space.
In antiquity, Panofsky notes, space was understood by artists as a discontinuous residue between objects rather than as something which transcends and unites them. Such a conception allows a proper sensation of above, below, ahead, behind, but never of a unified continuum such as today informs us about the relative distance between objects in perspective pictures.
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…the space one perceives is conditioned by both the way one enjoys seeing it – perhaps as traditionally shown in pictures – and the way it is explained in contemporaneous thought, that is, according to its accepted explanation by the science of the day. Pictorial representations of space in any given age are thus symbolic forms of this combined perceiving process.
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Linear perspective, whether “truth” or not, thus became the symbolic form of the Italian Renaissance because it reflected the general world view of the Italian people at this particular moment in history.
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The cultural paradigm is not a very tidy entity, of course. The beginnings and endings of its various constituent strains do not all happen at once. Thus, it could be said that the paradigm of the Middle Ages did not really end until the acceptance of the heliocentric universe discovered by Copernicus and Galileo. The paradigm of the Renaissance, in turn, ended finally with Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Within the Renaissance paradigm, given further mechanical structure as it was by Newton, linear perspective served as the most appropriate convention for the pictorial representation of “truth”. And today? It is widely agreed that Cubism and its derivative forms in modern art are in the same way the proper pictorial means for representing the “truth” of the post-Einsteinian paradigm.
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So long as both artist and viewer are aware that such a picture represents what is seen from one specific viewpoint, the linear perspective depiction is certainly true in the objective sense. What Brunelleschi and Alberti discovered was that only that which is seen from one fixed point can be represented on a flat surface according to precise geometrical rules derived from the science of optics. What is seen in the visual world, that is, as the viewer moves naturally about the objects to be depicted, can indeed be rendered geometrically – but at the expense of the illusion of depth.
Thus the artists of the Italian Renaissance did contribute to the “progress” of science by finding a relatively nonsubjective way to make pictorial images which everyone, regardless of cultural background, could learn to become orientated to or respond to. I stress learn to because it is not natural to the human race to assume this attitude about a picture either as viewer or artist. Little children, for instance, do not, nor did the ancient Chinese or the medieval Christians.
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So far as science is concerned, can there be any question that the special geniuses of Leonardo da Vinci, Columbus, and Copurnicus were given a very special catalysis at this time by the new communications revolution of linear perspective? Indeed, without linear perspective, would Western man have been able to visualize and then construct the complex machinery which has so effectively moved him out of the Newtonian paradigm into the new era of Einsteinian outer space – and outer time? Space capsules built for zero gravity, astronomical equipment for demarcating so-called black holes, atom smashers which prove the existence of antimatter – these are the end products of the discovered vanishing point.
Or are they? Surely in some future century, when artists are among those journeying throughout the universe, they will be encountering and endeavouring to depict experiences impossible to understand, let alone render, by the application of a suddenly obsolete linear perspective. It too, will become “naïve”, as they discover new dimensions of visual perception in the eternal, never ultimate, quest to show truth through the art of making pictures.
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