THE SOURCES AND LITERATURE OF PERSPECTIVE, VOLUME I

Kim H. Veltman

THE SOURCES OF PERSPECTIVE

To

B.A.R. Carter, Sir Ernst Gombrich, and Luigi Vagnetti

TABLE OF CONTENTS

    Projects such as this would be unthinkable without long term support. From September 1977 through September 1984 a generous series of fellowships from the Volkswagen, Humboldt, Thyssen and Gerda Henkel Foundations made it possible to concentrate on Leonardo da Vinci's perspective and optics and work part-time on the bibliography at the great Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel. From September 1986 through June 1987 support from the Getty Trust made it possible to concentrate full time on the project. This continued from July 1987 to July 1989 with the aid of a Canada Research Fellowship.

    In the course of the past decade, hundreds of individuals have contributed to the bibliography. A number of these are mentioned in the introduction. Professors André Chastel, Decio Gioseffi, Kaori Kitao and Corrado Maltese kindly sent lists of titles and references. Particular thanks go to a handful of mentors whose interest, criticisms and counsel have helped to shape this project: Professors Eugenio Battisti, B.A.R. Carter, Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., Sir Ernst Gombrich and Luigi Vagnetti. Special thanks go to Professoressa Marisa Dalai-Emiliani who has patiently followed and encouraged every phase of the project.

    In Wolfenbüttel there were also three individuals, unflinching in their support, whom I thank particularly: Professor Paul Raabe, Director of the Herzog August Bibliothek; Dr. Sabine Solf, Leiterin des Forschungsprogramms and Dr. Hans-Heinrich Solf. There was also Dr. Marie-Luise Zarnitz, of the Volkswagen Foundation, who visited regularly from Hanover. At the library, Anne-Marie Deegen was exemplary in her helpfulness. Ulrich Kopp gave advice. Gaby (neé Jöckel) Lüddecke, heroically ordered seven meters of photocopies through interlibrary loan. Uwe Jumtow, and subsequently Miss Schultze, kindly drove me to Göttingen and helped in the search. At the Niedersächsische Staats-und Universitätsbibliothek Messieurs Grobe and Münther, patiently introduced me to standard reference works (Art Index, Répertoire d'Art and R.I.L.A.); national book catalogues (Brinkmans, Estreicher, Lorenz, Pagliaini, etc.); then, via the mysteries of the 800-volume Real-Katalog, to specialized bibliographies (Draud, Lipenius, Murr, Murhard, Riccardi and thirty others, see Index I.A.). Reimar Eck, head of user services, was tireless in his patient help and counsel.

    By August 1986, the bibliography was based on the lists of 125 libraries. In addition books and manuscripts had been consulted in 34 libraries, particularly Göttingen, Leiden, London, Madrid, Paris and Wolfenbüttel. Index I.C. lists cooperating libraries, plus many of the librarians who helped in consulting texts or answering queries concerning rare and spurious editions.

    As the information arrived it was transferred to handwritten file cards. In August 1986, Dr. Richard Dolen began preparing a preliminary programme which permits the information to be entered into an IBM PCAT using a DBase III Plus system. At the Getty Center, the 15,000 titles were entered into a machine largely by Coley Grundmann and partly by Joseph Leon, with some help from Victor Bonino and Clay Stalls, two research assistants, who also continued the painstaking work of verifying titles and locations. Since 1987, Alan Brolley (Toronto) has continued to develop the computer version.

    At the Getty Center, Dr. Herbert Hymans, Peter Holliday, Steven Lanzarotta and Marianne Tegner were constantly helpful as were Dr. Marilyn Schmitt, Celine Alvey and John Logan at the Getty's Art History Information Program. Megan McFarland and Michelle Nordon kindly typed the first chapters of the draft. In Toronto, Shirley Fulford patiently typed the manuscript, which Professors B.A.R. Carter, M. Dalai Emiliani and Samuel Edgerton Jr. and Rocco Sinisgalli read fully. Professors Sir Ernst Gombrich, André Corboz, Dan Blickman, Ruth Mellinkoff and Drs. R. N. D Martin, and Richard Dolen kindly read sections.

    The original vision of the project owes much to my friend, Dr. Rolf Gerling (Zürich), who in the spring of 1981 generously took me on a three-month tour of the Mediterranean. As he drove the range rover its 12,000 miles from the straits of Gibraltar, through the mountains and plains of Tunisia, Sicily and Greece, along the coasts to Tarsus and finally back across the vast expanses of Turkey, he played Socrates, and challenged me to articulate a new approach to knowledge. Other friends, Udo Jauernig (Wolfenbüttel), and Ian Stuart (London) listened many hours, as this approach gradually evolved as a multivalent bibliography. In the spring of 1986 a series of three lectures at Brigham Young University, generously arranged B. M. friend Professor Dan Blickman, helped clarify my ideas, as did the lecture with the Gesellschaft für Klassifikation in Münster arranged by Dr. Ingetraut Dahlberg. In Toronto my ideas were further developed with my colleague, Professor Ian Hacking, and friend, Sergio Sismondo, Jr. There was also the loyal encouragement of friends, particularly Professors Syd Eisen, Deirdre Vincent, Dr. Pauline and Don McGibbon and Diane Everett.

    Between the preparations in London, the ideas in Wolfenbüttel and their accomplishment in Santa Monica and Toronto lay the vision of Dr. Kurt Forster, director of the new Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities as well as the generous support of the Getty Trust, the encouragement of the Director of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Professor M. P. Winsor, and the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. To these and to all who have contributed I am very grateful.

    In a sense, this project has been twenty years in the making, although it has only begun to take serious shape in the past decade. As I read through the text, I am profoundly conscious of how much more there I. T. do, that this is an introduction in fact, as well as in name. And yet, if it proves to be truly that, if it can introduce more critical and discerning minds to a vast realm of human activity, whereby we render things visible, the many invisible hours will not have been in vain.

Introduction

1. Beginnings
2. Problems of method
3. Scope of the book

1. Beginnings

    In March 1977, Professoressa Marisa Dalai Emiliani, was in London organizing the first world conference on perspective. At the suggestion of Professors B.A.R. Carter, Sir Ernst Gombrich and John White she visited a young man who had recently finished a doctorate on the history of perspective and invited him to do a bibliography for the conference.

    The young man's interest in the subject went back to childhood. At fifteen, he had decided to learn about perspective and had asked the art teacher at his high school for instruction. The teacher went to the blackboard, drew an horizon line, put a vanishing point in the center and explained that in perspective all lines at right angles to the viewer converge at this point. By way of example he drew two box-shaped houses. Within five minutes the pupil had learned "all there was to know" as far as the teacher was concerned. The pupil went away both delighted that the truth was so wonderfully simple, and disappointed: How was it possible that myriad effects of depth with vast vistas real and imaginary as well as all those mysterious feats of illusionism and trompe l'oeil were governed by a simple dot on the blackboard?

    While preparing an undergraduate thesis on concepts of perfection and infinity with Professor Brayton Polka, (York University), the student found claims (Ivins, Foss)1 that the Greeks' concept of perfection had led them to emphasize tactile sensibility, which led them to prefer sculpture over painting. By contrast, a concept of infinity in the Renaissance had allegedly led them to emphasize things visual, to prefer painting to sculpture and to develop perspective. The student was puzzled. If it took eyes to look at both sculpture and painting in what sense was Renaissance painting more visual than Greek sculpture? He decided he would study the history of theories of vision and their relation to theories of representation, but for the purposes of an M.A., Professor Stillman Drake (University of Toronto), wisely persuaded him to focus on the history of optics.

    Dr. A.I. Sabra, at the Warburg Institute, in London challenged him to define the problem more carefully when he began his doctoral studies. What, if anything, set Renaissance theories of vision apart from those of Antiquity? In the quiet of the North Library the student found a provisional answer: a new emphasis on distance, particularly in relation to size. He would study the history of distance even if his contemporaries found the topic way out. Accordingly he read texts in the history of optics, perspective, surveying and even cartography. When Dr. Sabra left for Harvard the orphan was adopted by Sir Ernst Gombrich who plunged him into the psychological dimensions of perspective and led him to consult two other mentors: Professor Robert A. Weale, Director of Visual Science at the Institute for Ophthalmology and B.A.R. Carter, professor of perspective at the Slade and later at the Royal Academy. Meanwhile, almost by chance he met at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, another mentor, Dr. Kenneth D. Keele, under whose guidance a reconstruction of Leonardo da Vinci's perspectival experiments took place.

    The young man soon learned that even the principle of the picture plane was not nearly as obvious in practice as it was often assumed to be in theory. He learned the problems of the standard opinions. His mentors revealed that the usual analogies between optics and perspective were too facile, and that most questions with respect to perspective and psychology were still unanswered. And as he continued to read quietly in the North Library he began to uncover a wealth of new material. By August 1977 when he left London it had become clear to him that perspective was an open field.

    By the autumn of 1978 the publisher, Dr. De Marchi of Centro Di, grew impatient and announced that the bibliography would appear in the spring. Professor Vagnetti also announced that his bibliography, thirty years in the making, would appear in March 1979. When this great work appeared it seemed petty to publish a version which had only a few hundred titles more. When the young man wrote to Professor Vagnetti asking for advice, he was invited to Rome.

    It was a remarkable encounter only a few weeks before the professor's final stroke. He explained calmly that although he had studied the subject for fifty years he knew nothing about perspective in China, Japan, India, South America, Africa or Australia. Nor, he added, did anyone else. He was old. His colleague was young. If the young man would write letters to the major libraries of these countries the official bibliography could achieve something more than his. Challenged, the young man wrote sixty letters to places including Beijing, Calcutta, Canberra, Moscow and Rio de Janeiro. The next six months saw fifty-five replies with lists ranging from six to six hundred titles, many cursory, with no indication of place of publication, publisher or format. A slow process of verification now began.

2. Problems of method

    By 1981, three problems of method dominated his attention: 1) how much of a book needs to deal with a subject for I. T. be included as a title; 2) how does one handle meanings of a term changing over time, or 3) definitions which change from place to place? Each of these problems will be explained briefly. In the first case one obviously included all books dealing strictly with perspective. But what about a four-volume work on drawing with one volume on perspective? Or a single volume on drawing with a major section or perhaps a minor section, a chapter or only a few pages on perspective?

    A computer would be needed in order that one could search for books or articles separately. Individual volumes, sections or chapters contained in a larger work could be searched either with respect to the part or the whole and their relation would be indicated in terms of: contains or contained in. In the case of individual volumes, sections, or chapters, the general title which contains them would be listed first, then the title of the part.

    The second problem was which titles one should include if the meaning of a term changed with time. In 1983 he joined the Gesellschaft für Klassifikation hoping that they would have an answer. Finding none he developed his own preliminary solution. Again a computer would be needed. First there would be a master list of titles including all possible connotations. Then there would be various levels. One level would identify standard categories of the term: axonometric, cylindrical, isometric, parallel, spherical, etc. Another level would identify titles which earlier bibliographers had included but which he would exclude. Peckham's Common perspective is an example. Being a work on optics, on theories of vision rather than theories of representation he would exclude it, or rather, wish to identify all optical works in the list which are borderline with respect to perspective. A further level would identify titles which earlier bibliographers had excluded but which he would include. Jacques Androuet du Cerceau's Twenty optical views which they call perspective is a case in point. Others have classed this under Roman ruins, architectural views or the so-called Vedute(n) literature. But given the title, and the perspectival nature of the views, which are as convincing as those by Vredeman de Vries whose work is accepted as being perspective, he felt it should be included. Yet another level would identify which titles had been included in each of the earlier bibliographies. Proceeding chronologically one could trace how awareness of the scope of the field grew with time. This new approach to bibliography would thus bring to light the historical dimensions of a subject. The printed bibliography would simply publish all these works including borderline cases.

    Even so this solution could not resolve deeper problems concerning classification. In the fifteenth century there had been no well-established category for linear perspective and thinkers accordingly classified the idea under optics, architecture, surveying or geometry. As the concept of linear perspective developed so too did its connotations and related fields including chiaroscuro, conic sections, drawing, geometry, instruments, projection, proportion, scenography, shades and shadows, space and time. Each of these terms also changed with time.

    To make matters worse, and this was the third problem of method, the meaning of perspective and each of these related terms changed from place to place. They changed from country to country as witnessed by book catalogues. In France, Lorenz listed perspective and dessin together in a way that catalogues in Britain, Germany or Italy did not.The

                             Anatomy
                                |
             Roman Ruins\       |          Architectural Sketch Books
                          \     |          /
                           |    |        /
     Shades and Shadows\   |    |      /        /---Chiaroscuro
                        \  \    |    /        /
                          \  \  |  /  /-----/          
Scenography-----\__________ \  \|/  / ___________________/---Drawing
                    _______PERSPECTIVE_____________  
                  /         / | | | \               \
Proportion------/    ____/-/ /  | \   \--\____        \------Geometry
                   /       /    |   \          \
                 /       /      |     \          \
     Projection/       /        |       \          \Conic Sections
                     /          |         \
                   /            |           \               
             Space and Time     |          Instruments
                                | 
                                |                       
                               Optics


                             Anatomy
                                |
             Roman Ruins\       |          Architectural Sketch Books
                          \     |          /
                           |    |        /
     Shades and Shadows\   |    |      /        /---Chiaroscuro
                        \  \    |    /        /
                          \  \  |  /  /-----/          
Scenography-----\__________ \  \|/  / ___________________/---Drawing
                    ________\DRAWING/______________  
                  /         / | | | \               \
Proportion------/    ____/-/ /  | \   \--\____        \------Geometry
                   /       /    |   \          \
                 /       /      |     \          \
     Projection/       /        |       \          \Conic Sections
                     /          |         \
                   /            |           \               
             Space and Time     |          Instruments
                                | 
                                | 
                               Optics

Fig. 1 Schematic view of perspective and drawing with their satellite concepts

meanings and connections between them changed also with every major system of classification. They were different in Dewey than in Bliss or Ranganathan. They even changed with every major library which had its own classification scheme. In Göttingen one looked for perspective under mathesis optica and artes plastices. In the Library of Congress one looked under architectural drawing (NA 2710), drawing technique (NC 749-753), descriptive geometry (QA 515) and in the technology section under projection (T369).

    To handle such problems library catalogues had their "see also" signs. But these too varied from place to place. At Stanford if one looked under perspective one was referred to drawing and under drawing in turn asked to see thirteen other headings including anatomy, artistic; architectural drawing, caricature, and design, decorative. In Seattle under the same heading, drawing, one was asked to see thirty-six other headings including brush, charcoal, crayon, fashion and figure drawing. At the Library of Congress, in the Scorpio system, under drawing one was asked to see 175 other headings including drawing materials, drawing of the hand, drawing pets, sharks, and spaceships.

    These problems of method implied that there could be no definitive list of books on a single subject. At best, any list which aimed to be exhaustive would become a (temporary) full bibliography on that subject and a partial bibliography on all its related terms. A complete study would require full bibliographies for each of the satellite terms in which the original subject would in turn be treated partially (fig. 1). Thus an exhaustive approach to perspective pointed to a comprehensive bibliography on all the theoretical literature on art: Julius von Schlosser's vision2 in a new dimension.

    Indeed, considerably more than a bibliography in the old sense was needed. Since definition and meaning played such an essential role in defining boundaries one would wish eventually to integrate existing dictionary definitions and encyclopedia explanations with the titles. Given the new possibilities of video discs which allow one to record 100,000 pages on a single diskette, the complete corpus of primary literature on perspective could be recorded on a handful of discs. The Saur Verlag was approached and steps to accomplish this are underway. The existence of a corpus will make it possible for students and researchers to study systematically the contents of the texts: to identify which images become part of a stock repertoire, to trace when certain themes such as secular architecture, gardens, landscapes or seascapes enter the tradition. In the long term these results could then be compared with parallel trends in painting, sculpture and other arts such that, for the first time, a practical confrontation of theory and practice would be possible.

    The above-mentioned problems of method had led previous thinkers to begin each time with the premise that one needed to discover or invent a new system of classification which would replace all others and then see where a book fitted in. But could one not reverse the process: start with the title of a book and then record the different ways in which it had been classed? Thereby the differences between international classification systems, national book catalogues and local library catalogues were no longer an embarrassment or a threat. Indeed these different cubbyholes which changed with time and place offered unexpected insights into the history of mentalities. This was a way of watching how cultural differences led to different structures of knowledge. In the case of perspective one could trace how some mind sets emphasized its mathematical dimensions, others its technical qualities, others its purely artistic functions.

    Implicit in this approach was a whole new way of perceiving the function of texts. Some texts, for instance, by nature of their being very specialized, would find themselves being slotted into a minimal number of cubbyholes. Other texts, by contrast, would involve various fields and thus appear in many more cubbyholes. Alberti's On Painting, for example, would appear under painting, painting technique, perspective, optics, aesthetics of art, artes plastices and so on. This would provide one dimension of a book's field of influence. Such an approach offered more than a thermometer of popularity. It offered a means of identifying which books had affected both art and science, which books had functioned as bridges between what are now seen as two cultures.

    Thus it was that a project which had begun in 1977 with the intent of producing an official bibliography had expanded by 1983 into a vision of a new approach to knowledge. When representatives of the Research Libraries Group came to Wolfenbüttel in 1983, Professor Paul Raabe, the Director of the Herzog August Bibliothek, kindly persuaded two members, Drs. Marcus McCorison and David Stam to consider the idea informally. The former of these felt the project should be taken up by the Getty Trust and wrote them personally. On 10 April, 1984 the idea was presented formally as the inaugural address at the annual meeting of the Gesellschaft für Klassifikation. In November 1984 came an invitation to become Canada's first Getty Scholar. Commitments made it necessary to delay the invitation for a year, during which time the plan was further developed.

3. Scope of the book

    A distinction is made between primary and secondary literature: primary referring to treatises and textbooks giving theoretical instructions how to do perspective; secondary referring to works which deal with historical, metaphorical and philosophical dimensions. In rare cases, a primary treatise, such as Danti's edition of Barozzi (1583) contains important historical material such that it functions also as secondary literature. For the purposes of this bibliography a distinction between treatises and manuals has yet to be made.

    The published version is not merely a paper copy of the computerized version. It is in four volumes, the first two dealing with primary literature, the third and fourth devoted to secondary literature. Volume one offers an historical survey of the primary literature. In volume two the bibliography is presented chronologically including: basic texts, manuscripts, articles, and some texts in related fields (as explained above). With respect to locations, the reader is informed whether a title is in the National Union Catalogue (NUC for cases pre-1956) or in the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN, for post-1956 imprints), and given one European holding where possible. In the case of lost or spurious works a standard bibliographical reference is given instead. Appendices provide lists by author, lists of editors, translators and publishers plus cross-references to works on specific branches of perspective and related terms. Volumes three and four will do the same for the secondary literature.

    The volumes offer an historical survey of the literature and provide a bibliography in short title catalogue (STC) form, thus serving both as introduction and reference work with respect to the more comprehensive computerized version. As such they represent work in progress, are intended to assess the state of the field, to ask new questions and point to new avenues of research.

    The survey of primary literature is in two parts. An opening chapter gives definitions of pseudo- and standard perspectival methods, analyzes the effects of different projection planes, outlines the origins of the two chief perspectival methods, explores the interplay of perspective with cartography, astronomy, geometry, optics, architecture and surveying, and traces how early thinkers classed perspective in terms of these established disciplines. It is shown that the development of perspective was intimately connected with the rise of the mathematical sciences in the Renaissance. A second chapter outlines the Italian centres where perspective evolved, identifying some of the key theoreticians and practitioners and suggesting their connections with Northern centres in Burgundy, France, the Netherlands and Germany. The initial interplay between South and North is examined; their different approaches to oral, manuscript and printed traditions contrasted and the gradual dominance of the North by the mid-sixteenth century traced. The rise of Paris in the seventeenth and London in the eighteenth centuries as the leading European centers is documented briefly.

    Most of the second chapter concerns patterns of publication in major centres since 1600. A thorough treatment of this vast subject would have been a major book in itself. Since our purpose I. T. provide an orientation with some hint of relationships between three areas, artistic perspective, mathematics and various branches of drawing, the treatment often becomes rather dry, sometimes resembling a list. Persons who find this tedious are advised to use this chapter only as a reference tool and a move directly to the next chapter.

    A third chapter outlines the chief themes contained in the early treatises and identifies major trends in the contents of texts from the seventeenth century, through to the present. A fourth chapter examines how the intended readership of texts expanded gradually to include amateurs, outlining how this went hand in hand with the emergence of different levels of dissemination and the spread of more specialized literature; trying to map out what role was played by perspective in the extraordinary proliferation from a single type of model book of the thirteenth century to individual treatises on machine drawing, architectural drawing, flower drawing, furniture drawing and so on by the nineteenth century and asking what effects this proliferation of literature had on the classification of perspective?

    Part two of the survey explores the consequences of perspective on science, art, the environment and the imagination. In terms of science it is shown that the development of perspective was integrally connected with the rise of instrumentation and that this focussed attention on proportion, scale and finally quantification in science. It is claimed that the nature of perspectival representation, which permitted a systematic treatment of both views and scales of an object, also played a role, leading away from questions of essence to those of distinct functions which could be isolated and catalogued. This approach was applied to machines, extended to living organisms, as if they were mechanical objects, and eventually used also in cataloguing what had hitherto been abstract powers of nature. In the process, perspective introduced a visual standard for scientific truth which led to observation, experiment, measurement and the other familiar characteristics of early modern science.

    A second chapter shows that the consequences for art were no less profound. By way of introduction Gombrich's approach in terms of various goals and functions of art is used to explain why many cultures, including the Greeks, were ultimately uninterested in perspective. Connections between perspective, literacy and the narrative function are explored in order to show how this transformed the spatial contents of pictures, leading eventually to an integration of spatio-temporal factors. Meanwhile, another strand of perspective focussed attention on the frames of pictures more than their contents and led to paradoxical plays on form without content which offer new insights into differences between renaissance, mannerist and baroque art. The third chapter explores the transformative effects of perspective on architectural and environmental spaces, while a final chapter explores the function of perspective as a visual metaphor in order to emphasize its links with concepts of freedom and imagination.

    A central thesis of this book is that the history of perspective involves two distinct stories. One is the development of an objective method for recording or copying the physical world at different levels of abstraction in the form of photographs and maps. This is the story which Samuel Edgerton, Jr.,3 has emphasized and which James Burke has popularized in his programme on perspective in the television series The Day that the World Changed. What needs to be emphasized is that the theoretical texts on perspective did not play a crucial role in these developments. The breakthroughs were made by practitioners, were only subsequently integrated into the theoretical texts, and even then constituted a small part of the contents of the treatises.

    The so-called conquest of realism involved a surprisingly small number of spatial forms which were gradually mastered from the 12th through the 15th centuries. I shall suggest that there is an implicit logic behind perspective which involves not only the window principle, but also doors, cupolas, vaults, columns, porticos, and colonnades, interiors and exteriors. A key aspect of this approach was that persons began to approach the same objects systematically from different viewpoints and in different scales.

    If perspective had been nothing more than this, its discovery should have threatened the creative imagination and its development should have reduced art to an process of dull reproduction. But the Renaissance was hardly that and that is why there is a second story to be told. The contents of the perspective texts were primarily devoted to something other than realism. The treatises were in fact repositories for a whole range of new images: regular solids, semi-regular solids, lutes, chairs, stairs, complex plays of shadow and reflections, grotesques and caryatids, imaginary gardens, fountains, idealized ruins and phantasy architecture.

    These new perspectival images led to an emphasis on illusionism and trompe-l'oeil involving a new interplay between real scenes, realistic scenes as if theatrical and theatrical scenes as if realistic; an interplay between reconstructions of past structures and interpretations of existing, possible and ideal ones. I shall argue that it was precisely this blurring of boundaries between the natural and the fictive which inspired that extraordinary proliferation of visual images which is unique to the West and that herein lies the true significance of linear perspective: not simply as a tool for realism, but as a catalyst to our imagination, playfulness, creativity and freedom.

finnigan@idirect.com

Last Update: August 4, 1998