Vol. 1 Ch. 8

Perspective brought with it a new kind of matching, which enabled a quantitative fit between representation and object. We have already shown that this was extremely important for the development of early modern science (see above 2.1). In the case of art, this was potentially disastrous, because it threatened to reduce a work of art to a mere copy, constraining the artist with instruments and construction lines. The reverse proved to be true. Perspective was an unprecedented stimulus the creativity, freedom and the imagination.

By way of introduction we shall return to our earlier discussion (see above p. ) of Greek mimesis to suggest why this led to a negative concept of illusion, affected their concept of verbal metaphor and prompted goals of art in terms of a closed system. We shall then show how Renaissance perspective was fundamentally different: that it introduced positive dimensions to illusion, visual metaphor and new goals of art in terms of an open system. Links between Renaissance theatre, perspective and play will be explored us will problems of trompe l'oeil, old and new, real and imaginary. This will take use back to the theme of literacy and art and to outline further branches of matching and two new goals of art involving perspective which have emerged since the Renaissance.

In our earlier analysis of mimesis with respect to the visual arts (see above p. ), we identified five different meanings of the term. Each of these involved imitation in some form, yet none of them involved matching in our more technical sense of the term: i.e. none of them established a quantitative relationship between a painted representation and an object; none of them involved a concept of reversibility, whereby one could work backwards from a painted representation to reconstruct the original object. Because the Greeks made no distinction between mental visual image and actual (physical) visual image - as Kepler later did when he distinguished between imagines rerum and pictura rerum -, subjective and objective dimensions remained undifferentiated, which meant that there was no testable standard for the accuracy of an imitation. Indeed, although there was much verbal discussion about truth, there was no standard to establish visual truth. As a result, images could be rhetorically convincing, even illusionistically persuasive, but in each case the illusionism remained a trick, at once negative and deceptive, as Plato repeatedly insisted.

It is instructive to examine the Greek concept of metaphor in this context. Aristotle tells us that the word, metaphorein, literally means to carry over, transfer.1 Yet it is striking that all his examples involve approximations: i.e. imitations, not matches. Ten thousand, he claims, is a metaphor for "the many."2 This is a connection or comparison which is likely, convincing even, but not one that is visually testable. As such Greek metaphor is like the illusion in Greek painting, based on a comparison for which a real fit or match is not possible. It is therefore the more significant that Aristotle himself speaks of likely impossibilities.3 Both Greek painting and verbal metaphor are universal likelihoods, not particular truths; universal imitations of space, not particular spaces; universal indications of chronology, not particular times; mythic, not historical. The famous dictum ut pictura poesis now emerges in a new light.4 Both poetry and painting were guided by rhetorical truth of words (universals) rather than the visual truth of pictures (individuals). Which is why Auerbach's claims about mimesis in literature5 have parallels in ancient paintings.

In the absence of a true, visual standard, physical copies, sculptural duplicates, were as close as Myron and his contemporaries could come to a standard. Copying remained the highest to which art could attain. Literal identity or equivalence triumphed over metaphor. Sculpture dominated over painting,6 as it was better suited to a metaphysical system based on essence, emphasizing universals, totality, perfection; leading to a closed prescriptive system. Hence Aristotle wanted to limit poetry and painting:

Note that Aristotle did not consider possible things as an alternative. Similarly, Vitruvius sought to limit painting to what is or what is possible.8 Ironically since an unclear imitation could never produce a clear match, both the Greeks and Romans were doomed to keep producing representations which were impossible when seen from a standard of visual truth.

The Renaissance may well have been inspired by Antiquity, but perspective challenged it to go in fundamentally new directions. Perspective introduced a visual standard for checking quantitatively to what extent a match was involved between an individual object or context and its representation. Matches were now testable. If this transformed the nature of representation (see above p. ), it also transformed the nature of illusion. Giotto's illusionistic paintings of concealed chapels in the Scrovegni Chapel offer an early case in point. Unlike the impossible scenes of the Greek stage, this is possible architecture: a physical construction which could readily exist. So we check and discover that the chapels are not real architecture. The paintings thus make visual statements that something is, assuming we will know that it is not. As such they function as visual metaphors.

Whereas Greek illusions were based on universal concepts, Renaissance illusions were based on particular elements: Giotto's chapel, Bramante's choir (pl. 5.4), Pozzo's cupola (pl. 73.1), each of which could be tested in terms of a one to one match. As a result, while Greek illusions were designed to deceive the eye, Renaissance illusions were planned for us to see through them, thus transforming the very concept of illusion from a negative trick to a positive game: challenging us to look more closely, to play with change in focus, scale, and framework (see above p. ); teaching us to expand our sense of what is and what is possible rather than trying to limit these as had Aristotle and Vitruvius.

These links between perspective and visual metaphor deserve closer attention. The development of perspective involved ever closer matches between object and representation, resulting in more realistic representation, and an ever finer play on the distinction is - is not, which lies at the heart of visual metaphor. When perspective is at its best, the distinction is-is not in at its height. This intimate connection between the rise of perspective and visual metaphor is important for at least two reasons. First, it suggests that perspective transformed the very meaning of metaphor: from a general comparison without a specific match, to a particular comparison with a -potentially- specific match, from a verbal concept to a visual metaphor. Secondly, perspective changed its function. In Aristotle's scheme, metaphor remained an ornamental frill with respect to the structure of language, an extra of no real importance.9 Perspective implicitly made metaphor central to the whole aesthetic experience, for now the effect of a painting turned on how well it could play upon the distinction is - is not.

In Padua, Giotto explored these problems in terms of painting (1304-1306). In Verona, a decade later Dante explored them in terms of language with respect to sculpture, when he wrote in his Divine Comedy (c. 1314) of the angel that:

Dante went on to describe pictured smoke,11 stories in stone narrated,12 complete with visible speech.13 We must at this point resist the temptation of a Dante commentary and only mention in passing that there are clearly parallels between these developments in literary narrative and those in pictorial narrative considered above (p. ). It is of interest that literary historians of the period have provided a more ample context for understanding Auerbach's concept of creatural realism arising out of the Judaeo-Christian biblical tradition. Indeed, they now speak of a development of perspective in literature: in terms of stories based on individuals in specific times and places, rather than eternal heroes in universal landscapes.14 We have seen pictorial parallels, as the townscapes of Florence and other towns entered into the backgrounds of paintings showing the lives of Christ and the saints (pp. , cf. pl. 13.1-4).

It is important to note that the problem of visual metaphor, which plays on the is-is not distinction, involves both spatial and temporal dimensions. To continue with our Florentine example (pl. 13.2), at a spatial level the distinction plays on whether this is Florence or is not Florence (i.e. only a representation of Florence). The more difficult it is to make this spatial distinction, the more necessary it becomes to make a temporal one: i.e. the more we are convinced that this is actually Florence in the background, the more we have to insist that although this be a contemporary scene, the story in it is not. To put it differently, the more realistically we paint the space of a religious story, the more allegorically we need to see its contents if we are not to fall into crass anachronism. Use of visual metaphor in space thus leads to use of visual allegory in time. Two years after Giotto painted the Scrovegni Chapel (1304-1305) in Padua, Dante in his Convivio (1307), distinguished between literal and allegorical as well as moral and anagogical senses.15 Such parallels suggest new fields of study: exploring the extent to which the development of visual metaphor in painting went hand in hand with a growing importance of metaphor in language to a point where, in the United States, there is even discussion of metaphors we live by.16

These developments are so central to European civilization that they take us at once into many controversies which still rage. Here our role is not to take sides but simply to report on different viewpoints. The development in perspective, which led to visual metaphor and positive dimensions of illusion17 began in Italy and continued in France. In other countries they evoked very different responses. While we have stressed the interplay of North and South, differences between the two cannot be overlooked. The South tended to be more abstract and ideal, the North more concrete and realistic. Hence, in terms of art, Italy explored paintings with perspectival space, while a tradition in the North continued to explore sculpture with physical space. In terms of language, Italy was more interested in the spirit than the letter and thus welcomed metaphorical and allegorical interpretation. The North took words far more seriously, stressed the literal and worried about allegorical and metaphorical interpretations.

In England, for example, there were two very different approaches to metaphor. One, based on the biblical tradition was positive. Hence, Bonner in his Homilies (1555) noted "that Chryste always in his speakynge dyd use figures, metaphors and tropes," while Addison (1712) referred to "those beautiful metaphors in Scripture where life is termed a pilgrimage." Another, more widespread tradition, approached metaphor as something negative. For instance, Wilson in his Rhetoric (1533) defined it as "an alteration of a woorde from the proper and natural meanynge to that which is not proper and natural thereunto, by some lykness that appeareth to be in it." A little over a century later the Earl of Moumouth (1560) was even less equivocal: "The Metaphora, which is so frequent with them...is it not an imposture?"18

This concrete, realistic strand of the North, which emphasized literalism over metaphor had profound consequences. It inspired a particular kind of dead pan humour epitomized by Till Eulenspiegel which laughed at itself for taking things so literally.19 But there were also less humourous consequences. One extreme form of this approach read sculptures and all visual images of God as idols, revived the iconoclastic tradition and wishing to exclude visual images from sacred matters altogether, sought to limit religion to words.

The complex interplay between North and South inspired almost every region to develop their own solutions in these debates concerning the primacy of words over pictures or conversely. Luther's friend, Cranach, inadvertently pointed to the dilemmas of applying literalism to painting. Wishing to avoid painting a symbolic Last Supper, Cranach used Luther's portrait as his model for Christ and added Luther's friends as apostles in the Dessauer Altar. Similarly, in order to avoid allegorical or symbolic buildings in another religious painting, Cranach literally added the contemporary Wartburg in the background of his scene.20 We note that the Wartburg functions precisely as does Florence in the background in the Italian paintings considered earlier (p. ). Both are effectively visual metaphors. But, ironically, those in Northern culture, who tried to emphasize words to the exclusion of visual images, found themselves using literally when they meant metaphorically. Which may be why the North, which made such great efforts at literalism produced such unexpected volumes of allegory, emblems and other visual metaphorical expressions. The efforts of the Fruit Bearing Society come to mind.

In this context, it is not surprising that theatre, which took perspective's dimensions of metaphor and illusion to new limits, evoked two fundamentally different responses. The most extreme forms of the northern approach tried to ban theatre and indeed all art from human affairs. Hence, in England, twenty-two years after the first complete edition of Shakespeare, performances of his plays were forbidden. Visual images of the stage and painting were now held as false illusions in contrast to the truth of texts. So Shakespeare was read but not seen. Hence the dramatic visual imagery of plays intended for the stage embedded itself in the domain of words and language. A century later an extraordinary series of German readers, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Tiecke and Schlegel saw the larger implications of this process when they found in Shakespeare's writings the origins of dramatic perspectivism,21 thus starting a visual trend in criticism which has led via Lubbock22 and Ortega y Gasset23 to Guillen24 and Weimann25 in our day.

Meanwhile, the Puritan stand which suspected metaphor,26 read illusion as only negative, and sought to ban painting and theatre had enduring results. To this day expressions in English connected with the stage very often have a negative tone: e.g. He made a scene. He made a (big) Spiel. Don't make such a show. (German has an equivalent phrase: Mach kein Theater.) The very words theatrical and spectacle have something dubious about them because they are too strong, while the word play often has a suspicious ring far removed from the elevated connotations of homo ludens. Spectacular, is an interesting example of a word, which remained negative in England, later to become positive in North America, due largely to Hollywood. Even so, phrases such as Shakespeare's "all the world's a stage" reflect another tradition, which saw the positive side of illusion and was much more developed in Italy (cf. the meanings of spettacolo) and France (cf. spectacle),27 where mise en scene became a basic dimension of life. And it is this tradition which we shall examine more closely, keeping in mind that it was but one of a complex series of responses within Europe.

Renaissance commentators interpreted Vitruvius' reference to scaenographia as perspective (see above p. ), and saw their own efforts as a revival of his ancient methods. Hence it is no coincidence that there are parallels between the engravings in Cesariano's Vitruvian commentary (1521) and Renaissance stage designs (cf. fig. 80.2 - 80.1, 81.1; fig. 82.1-8). Nor is it surprising that Barbaro, author of a treatise on perspective (1568), should have written a Vitruvian commentary (1556) with the ancient theatre reconstruction on which Palladio's Teatro Olimpico was based.

Once again, however, it is necessary to stress the differences between Greco-Roman scene painting and the perspectival stage sets of the Renaissance. The ancient stage settings, as we have shown (above p. ) involved impossible images, buildings which could not exist in real architecture. By contrast, Renaissance stage sets were curious interplays between fiction and reality with the important difference that they could be real. Serlio, for instance, had a stage set which recalled St. Mark's Square in Venice (pl. 80.1), with the Tower of the Clocks in the background (pl. 80.3), and was the more interesting because it related to his later version of the comic scene in his second book on architecture (1544, 1545, etc.). Similarly, one of Peruzzi's drawings (pl. 81.1), recorded sights in Rome such as the Colisseum and the Castel San Angelo. Another of his drawings (pl. 81.2) showed the Pantheon and the Column of Trojan. Meanwhile, others such as Baldassare Lanci's scene (1569), now in the Uffizi, involved a playful combination of contemporary Florentine buildings notably the Palazzo Vecchio and the Duomo.

Closer examination of these drawings for stage set reveals another important element: play with basic motifs, which could be real. The colonnaded arcade is an excellent example. Cesariano used it in his Vitruvian commentary (1521, pl. 80.2, 82.1). Serlio used it (pl. 80.1), as did Peruzzi (81.1,82.2). Serlio then published this motif in the perspectival section of his book on architecture, a theme upon which Danti played in his treatise on perspective (1583, pl. 82.4-5). A stage design attributed to Donato Brumante (Florence, Uffizi, pl. 82.6), was closer to Serlio's version (pl. 82.3). Another stage design by Gozzoli (pl. 82.7) offered a variation on the theme. In painting practice, the Master of the Barberini Panels, in his Birth of the Virgin (New York, Metropolitan Museum, pl. 82.8) adapted the colonnaded arcade for his purpose. Meanwhile, Bellini in his Sketchbooks had explored variants of this theme for drawings of the Annunciation (pl. 83.1-2) which, bear comparison with Crivelli's later painting (London, National Gallery, pl. 83.3) and an intarsia version of the Annuncation by Fra Damiano da Bergamo (Birmingham, Museum and Art Gallery, pl. 83.4). Masolino had, of course, used such colonnaded arcades at Castiglione d'Olona.

Many more examples of this theme could be cited and a full catalogue and a chronology thereof, would one day establish whether the uses of this motif went from painting to the stage, or conversely. What interests us here is how arcades were another of those basis spatial building blocks crucial for the development of perspective (see above p. ). For the examples we have cited (pl. 80-83), suggest how these building blocks could be combined in their component parts, much in the way children play with mini-bricks, meccano, and other toy sets in creating other, new structures. In other words, once there was a commitment to verisimilitude and visual metaphor, i.e. a visual standard of truth, elements which were potentially real followed as a consequence which could then be constructed and reconstructed in an open ended system. By contrast, Greek stage settings had relied on elements which were not architecturally valid, could not be recombined at will, and led to a closed system, as well as closed space. And whereas the Greeks produced scenes with impossible architectural spaces, mainly in the context of their tragedies, Renaissance stage designs became new explorations of possible spaces in the context of play, not only on stage but everywhere. The great debate about whether or not the Baltimore, Urbino (pl. 96.7) and Berlin panels represent stage settings is an expression of this ambiguity.28

For there was an extraordinary way in which play extended from the stage into everyday life, just as perspective extended from paintings and the stage into the environment. Hence triumphal arches were subjects for representation (eg. pl. 59.1-2), stage-sets, settings for triumphal entries acted as if in play, or later, even garden ornaments (pl. 99.1), as well as real objects. The rise of pageants and carnivals and a whole body of literature epitomized by Castiglione's Courtier contributed their part in making a life of acting, a metaphor for the act of life, Shakespeare's all the world's a stage, which had its Dutch equivalent with Vondel (De wereld als speel-toneel).29

By the eighteenth century, the interplay of scenography and architecture had led to remarkable imaginary stage sets, such as those in Bibiena's Architectures and perspectives (1740, pl. 79.2). To a Puritan eye these would be negative illusions in the worst sense. To French and Italian eyes, who knew how to see them as play, they were illusions in a positive sense, and it is not surprising, therefore, that the real quality of Bibiena's and Piranesi's fictive spaces inspired the fictive quality of real spaces such as Vanvitelli's Palazzo Reale at Caserta (pl. 79.1), and various palaces in Genoa, the dramatic staircases of which could be stage exits, as easily as entrances into private domains.

Such examples reveal in new ways how the perspectival window principle did much more than link interior and exterior space: it made the two interdependent. If, as we have shown earlier (p. ), it extended pictorial space of interiors into exterior environments, it also extended theatrical space of interiors into exterior environments, thus making the is-is not distinction, which we have termed visual metaphor, a part of everyday life. Perspective was not just some handy trick for painters. It was a fundamentally new approach, which transformed western man's approaches to illusion and reality.

The spatializing functions of perspective which transformed paintings, walls, stage sets and even the environment, need to be seen in direct connection with the development of trompe l'oeil,30 which became another of the major expressions of illusion in its new, positive dimensions. And here linear perspective in turn became part of a larger context involving colour perspective, aerial perspective and chiaroscuro.

Once again, Giotto's activities in the Cappella degli Scrovigni in Padua, bear witness to the early stages of these developments. In addition to his concealed chapels (see above p. ), there are fourteen allegories of virtues and vices on the side walls below the narrative series. These monochrome figures, set against the dark background of doors, which function partly as frames, were evidently experiments in creating relief. Beneath the figures of Justice and Injustice there are scenes where the frescoes are clearly representing three dimensional effects of sculpture.31 Indeed, when seen in context all the figures look as if they were dramatic trompe l'oeil sculptures rather than paintings, and Luzzatto has rightly praised the "statuesque quality" of Hope in particular.32

By the fifteenth century, the creation of relief for purposes of trompe l'oeil, had become an important goal in painting both in the North and the South. For example, Rogier van der Weyden and Van Eyck each pursued the challenge of using painting to create sculptural effects, as if the painted biblical figure were actually a statue (pl. 76.1-3), and as if a painted figure portrait were a living statue (pl. 76.4). In Italy, these ideas were taken up by Antonello da Messina, Bellini and Mantegna who, in the Camera degli Sposi painted busts of emperors on the ceiling as if they were sculptures, and in his monochrome works, simulated marble and stone as in his Samson and Delilah (London, National Gallery, 1495). His contemporary, Leonardo, made these effects of relief and chiaroscuro into the chief goals of painting.33 Positive illusions created through combinations of perspective and chiaroscuro now became fundamental to art.

There were many combinations. Sometimes perspective was used as much in the frames as in the paintings (see above p. ). Frequently perspective was used for spatial effects inside the paintings while chiaroscuro served to extend these spatial effects in the frames and ancilliary areas. In Raphael's Stanze, we can witness the process evolving. In the Stanza della Segnatura (1509-1511), the area beneath the School of Athens has two figures painted with chiaroscuro as if they were sculptured caryatids. In the Stanza dell'Eliodoro (1551-1514) each wall has four such figures and various frames which look to be real architecture thanks to chiaroscuro. The ceilings have more complex interplays of painting, architecture, sculpture and ornament. Perspective and chiaroscuro now have a systematizing function, integrating different media such that a whole room functions as one spatial context evoking various positive dimensions of illusion.

In Venice, the play of frames borrowed from contemporary architecture to produce a particular kind of scroll work known as the Sansovino type.34 In the latter half of the sixteenth century, these became the starting point for engravings of three-dimensional cartouches (pl. 94.5) and other ornaments (pl. 94.6), which functioned as visual metaphors of sculpture. The authors of these books on cartouches, notably Cock and Vredeman de Vries, were also authors of treatises on perspective, in which these elements recurred as fancy borders (pl. 94.3), or as decorative motifs on wells (pl. 94.4). This latter case had physical equivalents in wells and fountains in town squares. Hence as these grotesque representations inspired new objects in physical space, play with spatial form affected spatial content. Such play with grotesques sometimes became an end in itself and indeed inspired Montaigne's literary style as we learn from the introductory paragraph of his essay On Friendship:

As art began to explore possible worlds systematically, literature began a similar journey into possible worlds, a theme which Bolzoni has recently studied in another context.36

The trompe l'oeil illusions of perspective and chiaroscuro thus led in two different directions. In the case of Vredeman de Vries, it led to a dispersal of effects among various media, engraving, painting, architecture, sculpture, etc., with elements from one being adapted elsewhere in unexpected contexts. Ortelius, for example, adapted these cartouches for the purpose of cartography.37 On the other hand, it led to a new integration of media and created systematic, united effects as in Raphael's Stanze. The Palazzo Borghese (pl. 77.1) was a further development of these integrating effects of perspective and chiaroscuro in transforming the entire context into a positive trompe l'oeil illusion. If we look up we see a real architectural vault, to which are added painted architectural features such as cornices and architectural features, perched on which are painted three-dimensional figures, which look like living statues. In the Palazzo Pitti (pl. 77.2) the situation is at least as complex. Effects of perspective and chiaroscuro are now inseparable in creating such compelling effects of relief that architecture, painting and sculpture combine in a single integrated illusion. Are the supporting figures, the atlantes, sculptured or painted? Which balconies belong to architectural space and which belong to painted space? Which parts are physical, architectural room and which are painted room? Here the is-is not distinction of visual metaphor has been taken to such a level that the game is worth playing for its own sake. Mannerism was tempted in this direction.38 The baroque turned temptation into a challenge and made art for illusion's sake, which is a deeper reason why it tended toward form without content (see above p. , pl. 72-73), and why, inevitably, reactions such as neo-classicism and romanticism set in to bring content back into focus.

If we interpret such reactions as proof that the baroque was somehow an hiatus, an intermission in the serious play of art, we overlook the deeper significance of the positive illusions of trompe-l'oeil introduced by perspective and chiaroscuro. For the breaking down of oppositions between form and content was part of a larger pattern of removing what had seemed key oppositions between old and new, real and imaginary, leading out from a prescriptive closed system of Antiquity to a descriptive open vision of art.

We have already noted that those who studied Roman ruins in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were also leading architects (see above p. ). It is not surprising, therefore, that techniques of visualization developed with respect to these old buildings, were applied equally to new ones, as was the case with architectural cross-sections (pl. 84.1-3). Donato Bramante developed these methods in terms of both ruins (pl. 84.4), and churches (pl. 84.5) with a result that his cut-away of a new church looked more like an ancient ruin than a modern edifice. Serlio's books on architecture codified this tradition and included hundreds of ancient and modern buildings together as ground-plans, elevations, interiors in section (pl. 84.1), as well as details of architectural elements. Although weak in theoretical principles, Serlio greatly increased the repertoire of forms. Hence, whereas Piero della Francesca had drawn only one archway in his treatise on perspective (pl. 7.3), Serlio provided six (e.g. pl. 7.4), thus illustrating the variation possible on a given theme. And while many of Serlio's drawings represented real buildings, some were architect's conceptions of possible constructions. Hence there was an interplay between old and new in two senses.

Nor was he alone in this. Almost from the outset, the study of ruins had involved imaginative interpretation, leading both to new ruins and new buildings. Mantegna's ruins, put in the context of contemporary houses, in the background of his Saint Sebastian (Paris, Louvre, pl. 86.1), were a case in point. Jacques Androuet Du Cerceau took this approach considerably further. Many of his ruins were idealized interpretations of ancient buildings. Occasionally we can trace how a motif such as two broken arches at the entrance to a barrel vault in one drawing (pl. 86.2) was developed elsewhere (pl. 86.3), or how the motif of such a vault framing a gateway recurred in another engraving (pl. 86.4). In this and other collections of his engravings a play element is evident: slight variations of elements produce a series of different structures. This process of creative archeology becomes the more fascinating when we learn from one of his titles that Androuet Du Cerceau did so consciously when he referred to: "twenty five arches partly invented by me and partly taken from monuments both in Rome and elsewhere as well as now existing as the inscription to each arch indicates."39 A generation later, Vincenzo Scamozzi, was even more articulate about this process in his Discourses on antiquity (1582):

Such statements provide a valuable context for understanding Vredeman de Vries,41 who took this principle of idealizing ruins further to create modern versions of ancient cities (pl. 87.1-2), inspiring the idealized cities of Steenwyck (pl. 87.3) and Van Delen. Hence study of ancient ruins involved creative play with basic architectural forms, which inspired new early modern buildings.

The engravings of Vredeman de Vries were integrated by his student Marolois, as part of a larger corpus which included a series by Stevens. Here we find Roman ruins such as the baths of Antonine (pl. 85.1), as well as his version of Emmaus (pl. 85.2), the place where Christ dined shortly after he rose from the dead. It does not require the world expert in middle eastern architecture for the year 33 A.D. to recognize that this restaurant has experienced certained archaeological liberties. Indeed, we can safely leave to such an expert a full analysis of anachronistic details in this Chenonceaux of the North stationed in the Holy Land. What concerns us is that even if the Israelites did not build such an Emmaus, even if it was historically infeasible, it was architecturally possible. The same principles used to represent ruins, helped to visualize structures for which no archaeological model existed. If the perspectival principle of visual metaphor introduced a standard whereby the visual truth of image could be tested, it also inspired a whole genre of images which failed the test, and yet were fully valid spatially.

Study of the past thus became a creative enterprise, as is well illustrated by the roof-top decorations in one of Vredeman de Vries' engravings (pl. 87.1). At first sight we are likely to dismiss these as imaginary while accepting them as spatially coherent. A closer look (pl. 94.1), and comparison with the facade of the Armoury at Wolfenb�ttel, built a few decades after his sorjourn there (pl. 94.2), reveals how ruins and interpretations of ancient buildings provided a vocabulary for mannerist architectural forms. Vredeman de Vries' perspectival engravings of wells (pl. 94.4) and caryatids (pl. 94.6), mentioned earlier, added to this vocabulary. This process continued into the baroque period when Scamozzi's term capriccio became indicative of a whole genre of paintings,42 including playful combinations of real buildings, as epitomized by Panizzi, and fully imaginary constructions as in the case of Desiderio di Monsu. Old and new, imaginary and real were now combined in creating new structures, and if perspective removed the opposition between old and new, it did the same in the case of real and imaginary.

Here again we find a distinction between Antiquity and the Renaissance. For as we have shown, Vitruvius' description of ancient scenography involved imaginary spaces, which had no physical counterparts, and in this sense, were opposed to reality. Plato saw the opposition of real-imaginary in other terms but the effect was the same. Renaissance perspective changed this. Brunelleschi's experiments involved the rerpesentation of an actual building, the Baptistery in Florence. But the result was hardly an opposition between real-imaginary. Indeed, Brunelleschi's decision to have the real sky mirrored in the upper portion of his picture increased the ambiguity between real and imaginary, or to return to our earlier phrase, it sharpened the is-is not distinction of visual metaphor.

The opposition between real-ideal also faded, for a fascination with idealized buildings, which had grown out of a study of ancient ruins, led to interaction among various kinds of images, including records of real ruins as they were imagined to have been, architect's conceptions of possible buildings, real contemporary buildings, reconstructions thereof in books of ancient ruins, and imaginative versions of historical and legendary buildings, as is illustrated by the case of a round temple surrounded with columns. Francesco di Giorgio Martini included at least two ancient examples of such a building in his sketchbooks: a temple near the theatre of Pompeo in Siena (pl. 96.1), and the temple of Vesta. Leonardo da Vinci used such a round temple in his design for a mausoleum (pl. 96.2). The form recurred as the central building in the famous Urbino panel (pl. 96.3). Bramante constructed such a temple: San Pietro in Montorio, the so-called Tempietto (pl. 96.4), which reappeared in modified form as an engraving among Androuet Du Cerceau's ancient ruins (pl. 96.5), in a treatise where it became a close relative of a Temple of Jupiter (pl. 97.1), a pagan edifice which had its Christian equivalent in a temple in the background of Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin (Milan, Brera, pl. 97.2). A complex interplay of architecture, drawing, engraving, and painting thus transformed art into a vocabulary of images in different media pre- and representing possible realities and possible extensions of reality. These interplays between old and new, real and imaginary, help us to understand unexpected parallels between a building which Androuet Du Cerceau associated with Troy (pl. 97.3) and Bramante's plan for the new St. Peter's (pl. 97.4); or between Androuet Du Cerceau's imaginary Roman architecture (pl. 97.6) and the Palazzo del Te in Mantua (pl. 97.5).

More complex interplays between real, represented and theatrical space ensued. In the case of the Uffizi (pl. 95.1), Vasari used a parallel arrangement of the galleries to create its perspectival effects, with the arcade at the end functioning as a window to reopen the space and to frame new views. His son used the same principle in his treatise on perspective (pl. 95.4), and it became almost a convention in seventeenth century stage sets (pl. 95.3). The framing device of the arcade functioned equally well when looked at from the Arno side, as is illustrated by an eighteenth century engraving, in which the galleries, with the Palazzo Vecchio and Piazza di Signoria in the background, look like a stage set (pl. 95.2), a possibility which Baldassare Lanci had put in practice in his perspectival scenery for Cini's The Widow (1569). In other words, architectural space which had been reconstructed consciously lent itself to being represented perspectivally and invited life therein to be re-enacted theatrically.

These effects were augmented by links between intervention and representation: adding automatons to create special natural effects. Such treatment of nature as artifice made it apt for both theatrical play and artistic representation. Bernardo Buontalenti and Alfonso Parigi, who completed the Uffizi, were both active in stage design, and this same Buontalenti (cf. above p. ), was active in creating the Boboli gardens behind the Pitti palace, with their amazing grottoes, a word which may well be linked etymologically with grotesques. Buontalenti's student, Salomon de Caus, developed these principles (pl. 98.1) to a point where nature and artifice became one, where grottoes became stage sets, which lent themselves to perspectival representation, where wild animals were tame stuffings, where forces of water were transformed into dramatic fountains on a stage within a stage, artifically thrown into relief by controlled, natural light.43

If nature with artifice created new stage settings (pl. 98.1), painted stage-settings (pl. 98.2), and painted representations (pl. 98.3), extended natural artifice to create plays of reality in various senses. It was this context which inspired the trompe l'oeil facade at the home of the Marquis de Dangeau in Paris44 and the trompe l'oeil arch at Rueil (pl. 99.1), where the garden was real and only the arch was painted. The same context inspired Bibiena, in his stage settings to paint both garden and architecture perspectivally (pl. 99.2). As a result real and imaginary, everyday act and theatrical re-enactment could and often did become one, which inspired as many sources of delight in Italy, France and isolated courts, as it posed serious threats in other parts of Europe, where perspective, metaphor and illusion remained a negative trinity.

It is possible to identify at least four stages in these developments from 1300-1700: imaginary extension of real, imaginary play with real, imaginary, and real extension of imaginary. If Giotto's concealed chapels in Padua were a forerunner of the first stage, some of the most important examples thereof occurred in the late fifteenth century: Mantegna's oculus, the illusionistic round opening on the ceiling of the Camera degli 'Sposi (pl. 70.2), Bramante's choir in Santa Maria presso San Satiro (pl. 5.4), Leonardo's Last Supper and Pietro Lombardo's facade in Venice (pl. 5.3). Our examples of the second stage, imaginary play with the real, have included stage sets of Serlio und Peruzzi (pl. 80.1, 81.1), paintings of Mantegna (pl. 86.1), and early ruins of Androuet Du Cerceau (pl. 86.2). This stage, where play is implicit, is distinguished from a third stage where play continues, but the distinction between imaginary and real is either explicit, as in the later ruins of Androuet Du Cerceau (pl. 86.3-4) and Scamozzi, or taken to such extremes, that it is apparent as with Stevens (pl. 85.2) and Steenwyck (pl. 85.3). The fourth stage, real extension of imaginary, involves direct intervention in nature, and includes Michelangelo's Campidoglio (pl. 88.2), Bernini's Scala Regia, Borromini's Palazzo Spada (pl. 5.5) and Le Nostre's Versailles (pl. 93.1). Examination of fig. 44, which summarizes these developments, reveals that, in the first stage, effects of trompe l'oeil, illusion and visual metaphor, involve either interiors (first four examples) or exteriors (fifth example). By the fourth stage, these examples initially involve exteriors, and later, in the Palazzo Spada and Versailles, involve such an interplay between exteriors and interiors spaces that the opposition no longer applies.

DATE	IMAGINARY EXTENSION OF REAL	IMAGINARY PLAY WITH REAL	IMAGINARY	REAL EXTENSION OF IMAGINARY
1300-1349	Giotto
1400-1450	Mantegna
	Bramante
	Leonardo
	P. Lombardo
1500-1549		Serlio	Michelangelo
		Peruzzi
1550-1599		Androuet	Androuet	Vignola
			Vredeman	Scamozzi
1600-1649			Steenwyck	Bernini
			Stevens
1650-1700				Borromini
				Le Nostre

Fig. 44. Shifts in the role of the imagination in early modern art and architecture.

On the surface, as these oppositions disappeared, distinctions between terms such as interior-exterior, subject-object, real-imaginary became blurred, which accounts for apprehensions of the North. Yet at another level, they gained new meaning, because the matching mechanism of perspective created ever subtler visual metaphors, i.e. finer distinctions between is-is not by means of a visual standard of truth. Hence the closer they come to seeming to blur, the more subtly we learn to see their differences, or as the North would say, tell them apart. Thus perspective, which literally involves seeing through (per-spicio), also teaches us to see through the illusions it creates. In Antiquity, when optical adjustments methods produced illusions to deceive the eye, Plato understandably railed against these methods of representation, which separated appearances from reality. In the Renaissance, when perspective created illusions to instruct the eye in seeing beyond deception, illusion was transformed into a positive force in cultural development.

Something much deeper than getting beyond deception was also involved. For the matching mechanisms of perspective inspired an interplay of art and science unique to the west. The artist engineers of the Renaissance, epitomized by Leonardo da Vinci, were an early manifestation. In the eighteenth century it led Lambert, who studied Leonardo closely, to write On the photometric part of the art of the painter (1768),45 in which he attempted to analyse scientifically, in quantitative terms, differences between images in paintings, mirrors, and camera obscuras -the theme of instruments once more. In the nineteenth century, this tradition led scientists such as Helmholtz46 and Br�cke47 to study painting, and convinced Fechner48 that one could quantify aesthetics, a temptation that still lingers at M.I.T. Ironically, although our universities have faculties of arts and sciences, the history of what brought art and science into their unique western relationship has not yet been studied in detail.

As for the cultural dimensions, we understand these more clearly when the development of art as visual metaphor is seen in relation to literacy and levels of aesthetic distance. In primitive societies, when connecting was the goal of art (see above p. and fig. ), and there were no texts, a statue was a god. It presented rather than represented, such that art asserted the equivalence of god and image. In Greco-Roman culture, as imitation became a goal of art, and as isolated manuscripts recorded the names, characteristics and deeds of the gods, the function of statues changed from presentation to representation, such that what had functioned as equivalents, now functioned as substitutes of the original. As the use of texts spread from descriptions of divinity to include learned interpretations thereof, the thinker Euhemerus suggested that statues and paintings represented men as if they were gods. This theory of Euhemerism, named after him, thus introduced a new level of distance between original and image.49

The rise of Christianity, with its focus on the Bible, meant that the images in this text could be cited or even be alluded to indirectly.50 A statue of a painting could now represent a but mean b: it could, for example, show a good shepherd and mean Christ. Symbolism thus introduced a further level of distance between original and image. The development of textual communities51 led to refinement of these principles in the form, as we have seen, of Dante's distinction between four levels of interpretation: literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical (see above p. ). The advent of printing expanded the range of books common to textual communities, and what had begun as parallels between Old and New Testaments, were extended to relate pagan and Christian themes, as in the Sistine Ceiling and the Stanze.

The spread of printing went hand in hand with more subtle levels of literary and visual interpretation. Mediaeval symbolism had involved representing a while meaning b (the good shepherd meaning Christ), with the assumption that one believed in the reality of both a and b. The Renaissance introduced a play element into this formula: a painting now represented a in the guise of a1 without requiring that one actually believed in a1. Honthorst's painting of the Princess of Orange as Diana (Utrecht, Centraal Museum, 1643), offers a case in point. At one level, it is a portrait of Louise Henriette of Nassau, Princess of Orange. At another level we recognize the dogs, bow and arrows as attributes of Diana, through literary culture. So we see the princess playing the part of Diana without needing to believe literally in the pagan goddess or her powers.

The increasing tendency to push topics into the backgrounds of landscapes in the seventeenth century, as in the case of Claude considered above (p. ), increased distance in two senses. When subsequent mythological figures stayed in the foreground, the play element was frequently extended to their attributes to indicate that one was not expected to believe in them, as in Boucher's Venus, Mercury and Amor (Berlin, Schloss Charlottenburg, 1742). We recognize the man as Mercury by his winged feet. But the wings have been tied on with a ribbon, to help us see through his guise, and to leave no doubt that this is a Frenchman playing the part of a god. Sir Peter Lely went further still in his Nell Gwynn and the Duke of St. Alban's as Venus and Cupid (Chiddingstone Castle), where he relied on the topos of a reclining female nude with standing child without attributes to indicate Venus and Cupid, and by making these figures portraits of two well known and notorious personalities, he transformed a purportedly classical scene into a social statement about a contemporary relationship. These developments are summarized in fig. 45.

Since then there have been many further developments: Salvador Dali's treatment of Millet's Angelus comes to mind.52 However, a detailed map of all these levels of distance is not our concern here. We are interested rather in pointing to the larger context of perspective: that there were important connections between literacy, more complex uses of space, and more subtle levels of interpretation; that perspective, which on the surface involved literal realism, played an important role in associating art with levels beyond the literal. Perspective and symbolism went hand in hand. Perspectival realism made it possible, for instance, to represent Roman soldiers in Turkish costumes in Renaissance versions of the Crucifixion, such that this scene reflected both an historical event and contemporary religious problems. Instead of pinning the image down, perspective made it polyvalent, and if it made serious matching possible, perspective also introduced playful matching. Hence instead of dooming art to a closed system of copying, perspective transformed it into a creative act, open to new themes and new goals.

Thus far we have considered four goals of art: connecting, ordering, imitating and matching, and with respect to the latter have focussed on matching the visual world illustrating implicit common verbal sources, such as the Bible, which were so well known that knowledge of their stories could be taken for granted. Perspective had its greatest impact in visualizing such texts. Nonetheless, there were no less than nine other types of matching and two other goals of art, mixing and exploring, which require brief mention, even if detailed consideration thereof is beyond the scope of this introduction.

The most obvious type of matching, involving a simple record of the visual world, was implicit in Brunelleschi's first experiment involving the Baptistery. It became more common, as use of the window principle was extended from individual objects to views of towns and landscapes (pl. 58.1-2). Perhaps because it was so obvious, this type of art remained of less interest to art than the military until the advent of the camera, which effectively mechanized the perspectival window principle, awakened new interest in its creative potential.53 Matching could also involve illustrating a text directly, an approach which was applied to the Bible, classical authors such as Ovid, mediaeval literature such as Boccacio (pl. 78.2) cited earlier, and chronicles such as Froissart (e.g. B.M. Harley 4380, fol. 23b). Thirdly, matching was used to illustrate recurring events, particularly the four seasons and topoi, which could be based on classical sources, such as the three graces, or be of a more general character: old age, the fool, the land of cockaigne etc. In some cases, matching involved an implicit verbal source, which was either so uncommon that most persons would not recognize it, (or alternatively so common that everyone at the time took its meaning for granted and we in retrospect find it mysterious). Three famous examples immediately come to mind: Botticelli's Primavera,54 Giorgione's Tempest55 and Bronzino's Allegory56 (London, National Gallery). In other cases, matching involved well known verbal sources, which remained difficult to recognize because the scene was set as a part of every day life or in the background of a landscape. In early examples, such as Carpaccio's Calling of St. Matthew (Venice, Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, 1525-1526), where Matthew was shown simply as a tax-collector, the surrounding pictures provided a context for understanding its meaning. In Caravaggio's treatment of the same theme (Rome, San Luigi dei Francesi, Contarelli Chapel, 1597-1598), only a ray of light revealed that this was a sacred rather than a secular scene. By the time of Tenier's Seven acts of mercy (Dulwich, Picture Gallery), we need to recognize that passing a loaf of bread is a visual metaphor for feeding the poor. We need even more discerning to recognize classical scenes set in the context of landscapes, as in the Claude mentioned above (pl. ).

The twentieth century has shown a fascination for treating the matching function in a playful and/or ironic manner, as, for instance, in Magritte's Treachery of Images (New York, Private Collection, 1928-1929), which shows a meticulously painted briar pipe with the caption: This is not a pipe. Magritte's Promenades of Euclid (Minneapolis, Institute of Arts, 1955), offers a more subtle example by demonstrating how a flat road going into the distance and a three dimensional tower both project triangular shapes on a perspectival window. Some of Escher's work might also be mentioned in this context, although he is more complex in that he has different perspectival viewpoints for separate parts of a picture, which are then carefully integrated to function as a single context (e.g. pl. 73.4). There have, in fact, been a number of movements which have played with the matching principle mainly by overemphasizing certain aspects of reality, including the Precisionists, (e.g. Charles Demuth, Ralston Crawford); Pop Art (Richard Hamilton, Edward Ruscke); New Realism (Mel Ramos) and Photo Realism (Richard Ester, Ralph Goings, Chuck Close).57 In all of these movements, perspective continues to play a central role. The revival of interest in trompe l'oeil is another manifestation of this play with matching principles as, for instance, at the American embassy in Paris (pl. 100 ). Here the oblique walls are carefully painted illusions, with doors that reveal clouds beyond. The left wall, itself a trompe l'oeil, opens into a trompe l'oeil of the second degree, showing a colonnaded arcade. In front of this stands a trompe l'oeil officer representing a country which until recently had a former actor as its president.

Anamorphosis was an unlikely form of matching, which involved distorting shapes in such a way that, when seen from a specific viewpoint, their original form returned. This alternative, developed by Piero della Francesca, received particular attention in the seventeenth century (see above p. ), and was then ignored until an historical study by Baltrusaitis (1956) inspired new interest therein.58 Meanwhile, the twentieth century has introduced another kind of matching involving distortions: it abandons a rigid geometry of straight lines, involves a simplification of spatial features, yet nonetheless remains committed to representing familiar objects in every day life. Sometimes, as in Henri Matisse's painting of A Girl Reading (Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 1919), the results are close to those of parallel perspective. At other times the departure from Renaissance perspective is striking: as in Picasso's Woman Reading (Paris, Mus�es Nationaux, 1935).

The twentieth century has introduced yet another type of matching involving occlusion. Renaissance painting had concentrated on the opening function of perspective, treating the picture as a window into a world beyond. By contrast, the occluding function concentrates attention on the picture as a surface. The opening function had led painting to match architectural and sculptural effects. Yet, even when painting created effects indistinguishable from those of architecture and sculpture, it ironically upheld an underlying assumption that the three media were distinct from one another. The occluding function of perspective, which emphasized painting as surface, meant that painting was no longer a medium which could match the effects of the other two, such that painting, architecture and sculpture now emerged as equals, and what had been a focus on pictorial space, shifted to a new interplay of pictorial with physical sculptural and architectural space. One reflection of this basic change in orientation was a trend of important painters, who also practiced sculpture: including Daumier, Gauguin, Degas, Renoir, Bonnard, Picasso, Matisse, Modigliano, Braque, Derain and Leger.59

Aspects of cubism were also linked with this change in orientation, which emphasized occlusion rather than transparency, and which relied on perspective more than might be expected. Gleizes, for example, in his basic work On Cubism (1921) retained respect for perspective:

Fernand L�ger's Nudes in the Forest (Otterlo, Kr�ller-M�ller Museum, 1909-1910) comes to mind. Gleize's aim, however, was to reduce painting to two-dimensional surfaces

Ultimately, Gleizes wanted to escape matching. The result was a new goal for painting. As he wrote in his manifesto:

Hence the trend in matching, which focussed on the surface of painting, led to a new goal within cubism, which involved mixing visual and mental world. While this re-opened the way for non-perspectival paintings, it also produced complex new combinations of perspective. Three examples must suffice here. In Juan Gris', La Place Ravignan. Still Life in Front of an Open Window (Philadelphia, Museum of Art, 1915), the still life in the foreground was composed of a series of intersecting planes, partly transparent, partly roccluding. In the background, both wall and window were transparent. Hence the perspectival principles of transparency and occlusion became a matter of play, while its spatial effects continued to be important. Robert Delaunay, in his St. Severin (New York, Guggenheim Museum, 1909), went back to the Renaissance theme of Church interiors (e.g. pl. 8, 10, 16-20), introducing into the straight lines of the architecture subjective curvatures. By contrast, Jacques Villon, in Abstraction (Philadelphia, Museum of Art, 1932), used a room with very sharply defined perspectival lines as in a Renaissance interior, but then removed details and played with colour to create unexpected effects. Other movements in modern art, which shared this goal of mixing outer and inner worlds, led to further experiments with perspective: constructivism (Kasimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, Josef Alpers);64 surrealism (Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dali),65 neo-romanticism (Eugene Berman) and magic-realism (Pierre Roy, Paul Delvaux).66

Implicit verbal sources remained important. It would, for example, be difficult to understand the symbolism of Salvador Dali or Paul Delvaux without some biographical context. But a new dilemma now loomed. For the more these paintings entered into the inner life of the individuals concerned and became personal expressions, the more they required autobiographical knowledge, which could not be expected of a general public. In the Renaissance, the emergence of universally known texts such as the Bible had led to visualizations of implicit verbal sources becoming more important than direct illustrations of texts. In the twentieth century, as the concept of such universally known texts receded, a reversion occurred: direct illustrations of verbal sources once again became more important than visualizations of implicit verbal sources, whence the extraordinary rise of a whole new genre of deluxe art books (Les livres d'art, Malerb�cher) which involved most major artists of the twentieth century ranging from Braque and Eluard to Hockney.67 Picasso alone produced over 150 of such books.68 This renewed concern with a verbal filter detracted attention from perspectival visualization.

Meanwhile, another new goal involved exploring three further horizons of arts: chance, the inner world and the perceptual world. The first of these, emphasizing intuition, and relying largely on accidental actions and chance patterns, involved abstract expressionism (Hans Hofmann, Sebastian Antonio Matta Echauren, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollack).69 The second of these explored the inner world: phantasy and the irrational. In the nineteenth century, romanticism had led to the creation of dream worlds (Gustave Moreau, Rodolphe Bresden, Odilon Redon).70 These continued into the twentieth century with the naive painters (Henri Rousseau),71 and the metaphysical school (notably Giorgio di Chirico),72 which led to further explorations into the irrational through dadaism,73 surrealism74 and conceptualism.75 Striking is the extent to which these inner visions emphasize perspectival space. Even in the art of mentally disturbed persons, despite distortions, a basic spatial pattern is usually still recognizable and sometimes has a compelling coherence of its own (e.g. William Kurelek).76

A third area of exploring has involved the perceptual world. It could be argued that this was effectively an extension of the detailed attention to visual effects initiated by the impressionists. In Antonio Lopez Garcia's drawing of Antonio Lopez Torres (London, Marlborough Fine Arts Ltd., 1971-1973), for example, which Arnason77 cites simply as part of the revival of representational painting in the 1970's, we note curvilinear effects on the floor reminiscent of those found in Cezanne78 and Van Gogh.79 Inspired by nineteenth and twentieth century optical theorists (Helmholtz, Hillebrand, Ames, Luneburg),80 a number of painters (see above p. ) have claimed that spherical perspective more closely approximates the effects of vision than does linear perspective. In the nineteenth century, thinkers such as Hauck had considered spherical projections as subjective perspective.81 Panofsky followed this approach.82 However, recent thinkers such as Barre and Flocon or Hansen claim83 that spherical projections exemplify objective perspective.

In terms of strictly scientific principles of vision, the most succinct challenge to these views remains Pirenne,84 whose work also poses problems for Termes' experiments85 with one, two, three, four, five, and six point perspective (fig. ), or Blotti's explorations86 of alternative projection methods (figs. ). To enter into great polemics as to who is right, would be to assume that both sides are concerned with the same thing, which they are not. Impressionists such as Pirenne's father, and Pirenne himself, were concerned with information available to one eye, from a given station point, at a given time and place. These contemporary artists, by contrast, would argue that no single viewpoint does justice to the complexities of visual experience and that the challenge lies, therefore, in incorporating, combining, integrating different viewpoints simultaneously in achieving panoramic effects, such as we experience when we walk around in every day life. Certainly no eye from a single viewpoint could see all the images on the 360o spherical surfaces of Albert Flocon's Tableau spherique (Paris, Grand Palais) or of Dick Termes' Termespheres. Yet a painting, which does not stop with the artificial boundaries of a frame and which continues to unfold as we walk around it, comes closer, they would argue, to our experience of the visual environment of every day life.

This quest to incorporate various viewpoints simultaneously has led artists such as Lucien Day to renew interest in cylindrical projection planes, not as a rejection of linear perspective, but rather as an attempt to go beyond its limitations. In Day's own words:

As Marcia Clark has recently demonstrated in an important exhibition, Day's concerns are part of a new trend which includes Susan Crile's multiple perspectives, and Clark's own conbination paintings in which, as she explains:

In the context of our analysis three aspects of this trend are of particular interest. One is how artists such as Clark, Crile and Lima consciously speak of their work as metaphor.89 Second, is the way in which artists such as David Hockney, David McGlynn and Richard McKown use photography, with its objective perspectival-images, as a starting point for their subjective explorations of perceptual spaces.90 Whereas an earlier generation would have perceived oppositions between art and science, subjective and objective methods, this generation is exploring how they can be integrated in new ways. Related to this is a third phenomenon: for the quest to integrate different spaces has focussed attention on the challenge of relating different times. Clark referred to this in the passage cited above. Hockney has drawn attention to it:

In emphasizing such temporal-spatial problems, these painters were, in a sense, pursuing themes which Carpaccio had explored nearly five centuries earlier (see above p. ) and demonstrating in a new way the limitations of Lessing's aesthetics, which opposed painting and poetry in terms of space and time. Indeed, it could be argued that the full implications of perspective for temporal-spatial dimensions of painting are only now coming into focus.

In moving from pre-literate to literate society, imitating replaced connecting as a goal. What is striking about these recent developments, however, is that they have not replaced existing goals such that ordering, matching, mixing and exploring, with their various subcategories: all exist together. At a certain level, evolution is embracing, not replacing. The full significance of this phenomenon has yet to be assessed. It is instructive to recall, for instance, that just over a half century ago Novotny wrote an influential work entitled, Cezanne and the end of scientific perspective (1938).93 He was by no means alone. Many of his contemporaries were fully convinced that exploring chance and abstraction had become the only goal of modern art, and even today, some scholars still assume artistic progress occurred in terms of one goal at a time.94 In these minds, art history since 1500 could be reduced to a simple story of how artists gradually rejected perspectival principles, and the twentieth century became a final chapter in a move from perceptual to conceptual art.95

Our all two brief outline has shown a rather different story. For if perspective was rejected by those exploring chance and abstraction, it has proved essential in exploring both the perceptual world and the inner world (naive and metaphysical art), in new goals of mixing outer and inner world (cubism, constructivism, surrealism, neo-romanticism and magic realism) and new branches of matching (precisionism, pop art, new realism, photo realism, hyper realism). All of which helps to explain the pattern of publication revealed in fig. 47:

Perspective did not die: it did not even experience a serious decline. Since 1500 its story has been one of continuous development. What began as a mechanical means of recording the outer world objectively in quantitative terms, has become a fundamental method for exploring the inner world with its subjective dimensions. Perspective has led the west to create more images than any other culture. In the process it has given us a concept of visual metaphor, leading to ever subtler plays on is-is not, teaching us that seeing is also seeing through, revealing positive dimensions of illusion, opening our image-ination, asserting in unexpected ways our freedom as individuals.

Two generations ago, the greatest scholar in the field, Erwin Panofsky, could plausibly claim that perspective was a symbolic form,96 that a given culture was bound to a particular method of spatial representation: that spherical perspective belonged to antiquity and linear perspective specifically to the Renaissance. This tantalizing hypothesis unfortunately raised more problems than it answered: what evidence was there that the Greeks had developed a coherent method of spherical perspective? Why did some scholars insist that the Greeks had linear perspective? If linear perspective truly belonged to the Renaissance, why was it that this period also offered the first serious evidence of spherical (Fouquet), cylindrical (Mavolois) and conical (Vaulezard, Niceron, Dubreuil) perspective? Why should spherical perspective have found new exponents in the nineteenth century (Hauck, Ware)? Indeed what happened to culture after the Renaissance?

Panofsky,97 his colleague Cassirer, and Aby Warburg, at whose institute they both worked, had been inspired by neo-Kantian theories of culture (e.g. Cohen),98 which began with a premise that there was progress, that each stage in cultural evolution brought a new world view, and that each world view determined perception and representation, in both theory and practice. This implied that any given culture was limited to a single method of representation, and progress would, therefore, be a simple linear development. Ironically Panofsky's own studies suggested, and Warburg's meticulous research showed conclusively, that the details of Renaissance art involved so many particulars and contradictions, that they could not be reduced to one goal of representation determined by a single, universal world view.

Warburg's biographer,99 who later became director of his institute, pursued these problems in three studies in the art of the Renaissance (Norm and Form, Symbolic Images, The Heritage of Apelles),100 in which he examined the climate that made different artistic expressions possible, as a direct challenge to deterministic claims. But he devoted his main energies "to study some of the fundamental functions of the visual arts in their psychological implications."101 While insisting that art has a number of different goals or functions including narrative, caricature and symbolism, Sir Ernst Gombrich focussed attention on two major functions: ornament (A Sense of Order)102 and illusion (Art and Illusion, Illusion in Nature and Art, Image and the Eye).103 He saw the problem of illusion as relatively well defined:

This suggested, however, that the Renaissance brought nothing new, that it was literally a rebirth,105 and simply involved a repetition of ancient illusionistic tricks. Underlying this approach was an important assumption: that concepts of progress and determinism were necessarily linked, and that in order to escape the totalitarian perils of the latter, it was wiser to forego entirely the very idea of the former.106

This essay points beyond these problems of either-or. The six goals of art outlined above are not deterministic in a narrow sense. We have shown that Antiquity tried at least five different versions of imitation; that the Renaissance practiced linear, conic, cylindrical, spherical and parallel perspective, and that there has been an even greater diversity in the modern period as a simple glance at Blotti's alternatives (fig. ) reveals. Therefore simplistic equations between one world-view, one theory of vision and one practice of representation can be rejected outright. Nonetheless, certain goals favoured some methods, and actually precluded others. We have shown, for instance, that connecting, ordering and even imitating precluded perspective, whereas matching, mixing, and most branches of exploring required perspective.

The climates which precluded or favoured perspectival representation were more than a question of theory. They involved architectural construction, such that building spaces with perspectival effects was an important prerequisite for perspectival representation. They were also bound up with levels of literacy: connecting and ordering requiring none, imitating needing some, matching requiring a textual community, mixing and exploring requiring complex textual communities with a heritage of both visual and verbal images.

Seen in this way both Antiquity and the Renaissance emerge as distinct phases, and a cumulative dimension of culture comes into focus. The Renaissance could never have attempted its synthesis of Christian and pagan images had there not been these two traditions, had these not been a well established culture which made this heritage accessible. Whereas Ancient imitation limited itself to representation of universals, Renaissance matching opened art to representation of individuals and took art in at least ten new directions (fig. 48). Some of these evolved simultaneously: e.g. the visual world, illustrating verbal sources directly, implicitly, recurring events and topoi. Others, such as illustrating verbal sources as every day life, with play, irony or distortion were only possible when new levels of distance had been reached, and these levels, once attained, rendered difficult return to a more naive level. Hence the process was not only cumulative: it tended at a certain point to become irreversible.

Earlier goals of art linked visible and invisible worlds: connecting, for example, linked a visible statue with an invisible god; imitating linked visible statues with invisible gods and concepts, thus leaving only one side of the equation testable, and keeping object and subject conflated. By contrast, in the Renaissance, perspectival matching established links between visible objects and visible representations, thus making both sides of the equation testable and, at least a theory, separating subject from object. Cassirer, in his Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance philosophy (1928) described the subject-object distinction as a static event, brought about by a shift from a finite to infinite world view.107 In our analysis, the subject-object distinction grew out of an interplay of perspective, new levels of literacy, and interpretation, was dynamic, and should be seen as part of a larger process involving increasing levels of distance (fig. ).

Perspective thus emerges as something much more profound than an early copying tool. It led to a systematic exploration of interiors and exteriors, of inside and outside space in the natural world, and pointed to new distinctions between inner and outer at a psychological level. If its matching function brought the natural world into closer focus for study, it was simultaneously a distancer. Hence there was a two-fold way in which perspective brought a new power over images: first, it introduced systematic combination and play in the representation of basic spatial forms. Second, it led to representation being recognized as something separate from the observer, at levels of greater aesthetic distance, such that playful treatment of images in another sense became possible also.

There remained a serious side to this playfulness, however. For the method which rendered nature visible for man, and liberated man from nature, also threatened to separate him in the negative sense, to alienate him. Connecting had assured a feeling of being at one with nature through communal rituals involving a totem.108 With matching this communal assurance was gone, and reassurance was at an individual level, using representations in galleries to reestablish relationships with nature. Seen in this way the art galleries of our cities are by no means luxuries. Even the visual metaphors and puns on billboards in major cities are more than advertising gimmicks: they are a part of a process helping us to see through illusion and gain more distance from nature and ourselves without becoming alienated: teaching us to see our relationships.

Perspective is therefore much more than an instrument of art. It is an instrument of civilization, creating representations convincing enough that we can accept them as substitutes for the most threatening dimensions of reality: such that pictures, movies and videos, become substitutes for war, violence, rape and other forces of destruction, while at the same time threatening to stimulate the very things they were aimed to prevent. At the limit, a life of action in the field risks becoming a life of reaction to a camera or a screen. But this may be the price for a method, which transformed the closed, prescriptive rules of representation to an open, descriptive approach, which encourages new images, challenges creativity and imagination, and asserts our fundamental freedom.