In retrospect it is clear that non-figurative art has become a new alternative rather than replacing all the earlier goals of art. Realism has not died: it has taken on new forms: including surrealism, hyper-realism, and super-realism. As a result, although there was a significant drop in the publications on perspective from 1914 to 1945 (during and between the two great wars), since then the number of books on perspective has continued to rise. Indeed more books have been published on the subject in this century than during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries combined (fig. 82).

Fig. 82. Graph of publications on perspective in the twentieth century.

    There are a number of reasons for this rebirth of perspective particularly in the second half of the twentieth century. The enormous rise in world population has brought a hitherto unprecedented emphasis on the built environment, with a corresponding rise in publications on architectural perspective and technical drawing. Related to this has been a dramatic rise in the fields of surveying and mapping culminating in the emergence of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) (pl. 93-94) and Area/Facilities Management (AM/FM) in the context of public administration at the town, municipal and provincial levels, concerns with law and order (police departments) and security (insurance companies) (pl. 95-96).

    New technologies have played an integral role in these developments. In the course of World War I the introduction of aerial photography brought new challenges of relating terrestial maps with aerial photographs often taken at an angle and led to the new field of photogrammetry. The rise of satellite photography added an unprecedented quantity of raster images such that even today only an estimated ten percent of all satellite images are ever examined.

    Integrally connected with this quest for recording the world has been a quest for reconstructing it electronically in terms of vector images. The discovery of basic algorithms for perspective in electronic form led to computer graphics and the emergence of the so-called four C’s, namely, Computer Aided Design (CAD), Computer Aided Engineering (CAE), Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM), and Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM), each of which assumes the use of systematic spatial co-ordinates in the rendering of objects and contexts. This has expanded greatly the use of linear and other forms of perspective because once an image has been rendered in vector form it can be rotated, tilted and viewed from any direction either in its true dimensions (e.g. ground plan, elevation) or perspectivally.

    Analogue cameras are increasingly being replaced by both digital cameras and by virtual cameras: i.e. where computers reproduce the effects of a photographic image through graphics software. This is leading to ever greater links between analogue and digital methods in terms of vector and raster images. Cinema, as an application of photography, has also implicitly broadened the scope of perspective. New explicit uses for perspective have been introduced by set designers who replace actual cityscapes with illusionistic painted facades in order to save money, adapting techniques of accelerated perspective used from stage scenery in the theatre. Some of these dramatic effects have become permanent fixtures in theme parks such as Disneyworld and Universal Studios (Orlando). The emergence of virtual reality is a further stimulus for this resurgence of perspective, because it entails a combination of different viewpoints (see p. 237-239 below). For the purposes of this chapter, developments since 1950 will be referred to as modern perspective and will be compared and contrasted to Renaissance perspective where appropriate.

    It is well known that Renaissance artists made copies of paintings. They also copied individual elements and motifs of paintings such that a hand from Leonardo’s Last Supper was used in a painting of a Virgin and Child. In modern terms they introduced the equivalent of clip art long before the notion was formally introduced. Twentieth century perspective has seen the adaptation of these elements and motifs in new contexts. For instance, fifteenth century artists such as Piero della Francesca and Leonardo da Vinci revived an interest in regular and semi-regular solids. Modern artists use these shapes in holographic art. Euclid, in his Elements, described the construction of a seventy two-sided figure. Leonardo da Vinci, included this figure in his illustrations for Pacioli’s Divine Proportion (1496-1499, printed 1509). It was taken up by Fra Giovanni da Verona in his inlaid wood panels (intarsia) in Santa Maria in Organo, was a symbol for perfection in the Renaissance and became a recurrent theme in perspective treatises by Jamnitzer, Sirigatti, Dubreuil and others. In modern perspective, Salvador Dali adapts a variant of this seventy two-sided figure in a painting of a woman’s head. Other semi-regular solids found in Jamnitzer, recur as garden ornaments in a book by Nielsen (1812), and recur in variant form in Escher’s famous engraving of a Waterfall. Similarly, a cylindrical shape or toroid, known in the Renaissance as a mazzocchio, which became a leit-motif in Barbaro’s Practice of Perspective (1568), recurs in variant form in a woodcut by Escher. While the shapes are similar their function changes. During the Renaissance colour and shading were used to distinguish clearly between different sides and layers of a solid or series of nested solids. In modern perspective, artists such as Escher deliberately use colour and shading to introduce ambiguities in our reading of such shapes.

    This continuity of images extends to other objects such as stairs, which are an important theme in the treatises of Jan Vredeman De Vries, and are said to have inspired at least one of the staircases in a painting by Rembrandt. In the twentieth century this theme of stairs continues in the famous staircases of Escher. Individual elements also recur in new contexts, as with the perspectival dragon in Uccello’s Saint George and the Dragon (London, National Gallery), which recurs in one of David Hockney’s stage sets. Or individual elements are substituted, as with the protagonist in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (Florence, Uffiizi), who is replaced by Elvis Presley in Richard W. Maile’s adaptation (Siggraph, 1990). Sometimes the adaptation is merely a small part of the original as with the hands in Michelangelo’s Creation of Man (Vatican, Sistine Chapel), which recur in variant form in E.T. Hence while there is a continuity of objects and motifs a two way process transforms the Renaissance examples into modern ones. Objects which were originally isolated figures during the Renaissance become integrated into complex scenes in modern perspective. Alternatively, objects which were originally integrated in a scene during the Renaissance recur either as isolated objects or in new contexts in the twentieth century. This is one of the sources of the fragmentation of illusion considered below (p. 240) and is important because it means that the problems associated with electronic image editing packages were pre-figured by Renaissance artists.

    As we have shown the origins of perspective were closely linked with the camera obscura, the mirror and the window. The camera obscura, serving as a pinhole window, enabled one to have an image of the outside world inside a darkened room. For Brunelleschi, both the pinhole and mirror served in the process of observing the finished perspectival drawing. In the case of others, (cf. Sources, pp. 142-145*), we have shown know that instruments such as the camera obscura, mirror and window also served in the production of perspectival images. Theoretically these instruments were equally suited in the recording of both exterior and interior space. In practice they became associated in particular with interior space.

2. Contained Spaces and Artificial Reality

    Indeed, there is a striking way in which the mastery of space leads also to its enclosure. The earliest examples of proto-perspective are linked with the Greek stage at the time of Aeschylus. In early theatres such as Epidaurus the man made building was very much linked with the natural surroundings and the stage occupied but a minute proportion of the view. In later theatres the proportion of the stage increased relative to the rest of the structure, witness Delphi, the Odeon on the Parthenon, Segesta, etc. In subsequent Greco-Roman examples such as Taormina, the man made stage competed with the natural horizon. In the Roman era the stage became a frontal scene (scena frons), which blocked off everything from the eye level of the top seats downwards as in the theatre of Marcellus in Rome or the striking theatre at Aspendos on the South coast of Turkey. It was in these theatres which most blocked off the natural world that the Romans developed their striking proto-perspectival experiments in space which were then translated into the entirely closed spaces of their villas at Herculaneum, Pompeii and Oplontis.

    It is noteworthy that medieaval mystery plays at York or the later ones at Oberammergau which maintained the tradition of an open air context were largely uninteresting as far as their spatial representations were concerned. Indeed scholars such as Mesnil have argued that it was precisely this tradition of mystery plays that constituted one of the major points of resistance to linear perspective. The viewer’s attention was focussed on the players, without distractions from the scenery, a characteristic that continued into Elizabethan theatre, particularly Shakespeare, where the visual context was removed entirely, or rather interiorized, such that the words "painted" their own scenes and vistas.

    In Italy, theatre developed in different ways. Saint Francis and his followers, not content merely to read and believe the written stories of the Old and New Testaments, insisted on acting them out, such that the great frescoes at Assisi were much more than interpretations of text with an unprecedented amount of realism. They were records of text that had become live theatre, theatre now in a sense where the acting was not play acting but life itself, where all the world was literally a stage. Instead of the traditional oppositions between scenes prefiguring the life of Christ (in the Old Testament) and the life of Christ (in the New Testament), the opposition was now between the life of Christ and the life of Saint Francis. In England the stage often remained in the open. In Italy, there occured a curious enveloping process that was at once interiorizing. The little chapel that Saint Francis built, (the Portiuncula) was enclosed by an enormous church. In Italy, the mystery plays took place in churches. The new scenes were also recorded within the closed walls of a church. So too were the earliest perspectival paintings such as Massaccio’s Trinity.

    In Greece, the spatial scenery of the theatres involved a public event that was sacred and included the entire community of citizens: in ancient Rome, these scenes moved increasingly into the private context that was secular. The Renaisance witnessed a similar pattern. Initially the spatial effects of proto-perspective were used in a sacred context on the walls of churches in theory to be seen by everyone. This was the case in Assisi. But from the time of Giotto’s frescoes in the Arena Chapel (Padua) and in the Peruzzi Chapel (Florence) the sacred spaces were connected specifically with private families, usually newly rich. This was the case with Masaccio’s Life of Saint Peter, the first perspectival fresco cycle in the Brancacci chapel and remained so for most important cycles. The Life of Saint Steven and Saint Lawrence commissioned by Pope Nicholas V was for a private chapel in a section of the Vatican not open to tourists at the time. The same was true for Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie and for Raphael’s famous cycle in the Stanze which included the School of Athens. Hence the most famous examples of the new spatial experiments in perspective excluded rather than included the general public.

    Meanwhile, as the stage in Renaissance Italy became a secular event, it too increasingly excluded individuals except for an inner circle connected with the court. Plays which had been connected with the power of the gods now became instruments of the power of ruling men and women. These developments in secular theatre continued the process of interiorization such that the scenes reflected actual places, notably, Ferrara, Venice, Pisa, Florence, Rome and specifically squares that employed a systematic use of space in urban planning, the Piazza San Marco in Venice and the Piazza della Signoria in Florence which, it will be recalled was also the scene that Brunelleschi used for his second perspectival demonstration. Hence the new theatre showed perspectival views of open, public spaces in closed, private spaces. In early cases the stage was limited to one of the four walls. The courtyard of the Pitti marked an important next stage in this process. On special occasions, the open space connecting it with the Boboli gardens outside was closed in, as was the ceiling, such that the entire courtyard became a ludic space (pl. 59-60). Once entirely closed in, the space could be used more dramatically.

    Renaissance homes such as the Strozzi palace imitated the structure of Roman villas with a central atrium-like courtyard that functioned as a large window into the sky above. The tradition of ceiling painting that became known as quadratura interiorized this experience by painting views of skylights on closed ceilings. These ranged in size from Mantegna’s Oculus in the Room of the married couple (Camera degli sposi), in Mantua, to all encompassing ceilings such as that of Pozzo in the church of Saint Ignatius in Rome. Peruzzi’s experiments in the Farnesina applied the same principle to the walls of a room, such that the perspectival paintings gave one a sense of looking out of a room that was in fact fully enclosed. Here again the nexus between interiorization and privatization was apparent. For the more enclosed and controlled the visual aspects of the rooms became, the more they needed to be seen from a specific point of view, which typically entailed that of the owner. In retrospect, these illusionistic rooms can be seen as static prototypes of virtual reality, such that homes became a series of imaginary spaces through which one moved. Very gradually this exclusive process led in the reverse direction. For what began as a game of kings, spread to dukes, then the gentry and ever so slowly towards versions accessible to everyman.

    From at least the time of Alberti there had been adaptations of the camera obscura principle to create miniature rooms. The seventeenth century brought new portable versions of the camera obscura, as well as developments by Dutch artists to create peep shows (the perspectifkas) into perspectival rooms and interiors. The eighteenth century extended this idea to create optical glasses (optiques or zograscopes) and show-boxes (Guckkasten) the latter sometimes with moving images (pl. 80-84).

    The rise of panoramas in the last quarter of the eighteenth century marked a next important chapter. Instead of a community surrounded by nature viewing a small stage, a small group of individuals now stood in a stage-like central area surrounded by a man-made scene which in the early panoramas typically involved the built environment: major cities such as London, Glasgow, Saint Petersburg, and Berlin. Gradually taste expanded to include smaller cities such as Ratisbon, then places outside the cities such as the Scottish peaks, and increasingly to exotic places where one would normally not go as an average person: the Isle of Gibraltar, the Escorial, even Mayan temples until the scenes involved places one preferred to see at a distance as a substitute for having to actually visit them: standing next to the lava flow of a volcano, at sea in the midst of a tumultuous storm or in the midst of a major battle. This process of aestheticization of danger went hand in hand with a German literary movement called storm and force (Sturm und Drang) which saw a new emphasis on individual experience.

    The nineteenth century developed these themes on two fronts. One continued the public context where the quest for a moving version of the panorama led eventually to the moving picture and the cinema. Another front incorporated the themes of these public panoramas with the tradition of show-boxes to produce a series of new viewfinder-like instruments with exotic names such as diorama, panoptical optic, panopticon and eudophistikon. Wheatstone’s stereoscope, consciously building on the earlier ideas of Leonardo, marked a next step. Hence by the mid-nineteenth century the process of interiorization and personalization of the external world had been adapted to individual experience: thus providing a visual equivalent of the novel which permitted a person to go on an individual journey by reading.

    The twentieth century rendered universally accessible this concept of a viewfinder and added the possibility of viewing simple motion. It also developed new equivalents in the form of portable televisions. The Sony Walkman offered to the ear a personal version of an electronic environment that accompanied one as one moved. More recently the Sony Diskman has begun to offer an equivalent for the eye. Head Mounted Displays will soon integrate the principle of stereoscopic television with stereophonic sound to create a new version of virtual reality. In all these developments the window principle remains important.

3. Correspondence and Non Correspondence

    In the early development of perspective the window played an even more central role and applied to exterior as well as interior space. Both in Italy and in the North, proto-perspectival paintings regularly employed a window which literally opened a view to the outside world. In some cases a door functioned as a window, and in some cases the window which Alberti termed an intersection became literally a section which cut away the exterior wall of a church or a room in order to open up the interior space. Leonardo also called the window a wall (i.e. a transparent wall, pariete, muro). This section or window, served simultaneously to frame the surrounding world and limit the painting to that part encompassed by the lines converging towards a vanishing point. A physical window, as a drawing instrument, became a starting point for Alberti’s perspective because its transparency enabled one literally to record images on its surface, or via a grid to record them onto an adjacent drawing board. Even so it was over a half century (c.1492) before Leonardo actually drew the window in action; almost a century (1525) before Dürer published it; a century and a half before published accounts of its military applications spread (1595, 1604); and nearly two centuries before its use as a one of the basic instruments for optical and perspectival demonstrations was fully established in the early seventeenth century by authors such as Marolois (1614), and Dubreuil (1642-1649). The work of Accolti (1625), Bosse (1648 etc) and Troili (1672) linked the window with precise quantitative measurement. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries continued this tradition establishing new interplay with other instruments such as the camera obscura, camera lucida, and show boxes.

    From the time of the earliest proto-perspectival examples in the thirteenth through to the impressionists in the nineteenth century, the window was seen as opening a view to the natural world and as an instrument that guaranteed a precise correspondence between this natural world and representations thereof. In our view, it was the perspectival window in particular and geometrical drawing instruments in general that transformed the ancient ideals of mimesis in the sense of subjective imitation, into a Renaissance ideal of matching which claimed a potential one to one correspondence between original in Nature and a record in the form of drawing or painting. As an instrument that promised mastery of the objective world, the window was seen as a key to objectivity. This ideal led Commandino and his student Guidobaldo del Monte to link perspective with mathematical principles. These links were developed in Paris. Hence the appearance of a perspectival window in the French Academy of Sciences and Fine Arts and later on the title page to Newton’s Optics. And hence the assertion by some nineteenth century thinkers that perspective was simply a branch of descriptive geometry entirely independent of optics.

    For some artists such as Abraham Bosse, the first professor of perspective in the French Academy of Arts and Science, this goal was so noble that it warranted ignoring and suppressing subjective aspects of vision. Hence his statement that one should draw what is there (the objective geometry of the window), rather than what the eye sees (the subjective angles of apparent size). Many of his colleagues disagreed to the point of expelling him as a teacher of perspective. They wanted perspective to include subjective aspects of the eye and the imagination. The rise of romanticism in the nineteenth century increased this yearning for access to subjective aspects of the imagination. Geometrical drawing instruments became seen as inimical to this aim as did perspective which had fallen increasingly into the domain of drawing academies and was often associated with these mechanical devices. A rhetoric emerged that dismissed perspective as merely or even purely academic and mechanical.

    The rise of photography brought these developments into greater focus. In a sense the photographic camera marked the logical conclusion of a fascination linking apertures in the form of a camera obscuras and images that had emerged a thousand years earlier. In the past decades there have been polemical debates as to whether photography had a great impact on new developments in painting or whether it was painting that had a great impact on the new invention of photography. Both were true. At the same time photography provided a physical demonstration that the window principle of perspective was a function of objective geometry independent of the subjective interventions of a painter and as such it helped artists to recognize that their goals could not be limited to problems of matching which involved a one to one correspondence between original and image.

    The quest to identify an artistic domain independent of the objective strictures of perspective led in various directions. The impressionists complemented the study of a space with a study of time: no longer just a townscape or a landscape, but rather a specific square in Paris seen on a rainy afternoon in autumn, the banks of a river seen at lunchtime on a summer’s day or a view of a cornfield in the country in the south of France on a specific day. Some focussed on the details of the optical experience. Artists such as Cezanne and Van Gogh, included subjective appearances such that straight lines were recorded as curves on the canvas. Artists such as Monet, Manet, and Seurat, emphasized effects of light and colour to the extent that colours competed with forms. One consequence was awareness of the surface of the painting as surface.

    With the Cubists this developed into attention to the surface of the painting as surface. Hence the rise of collage effects in Picasso, Braque and Leger. Scholars have tended to interpret this as the end of the window story in particular and of perspective in general. This is not the case. If we look at one of the classic examples of cubism, Juan Gris’, Still life with a landscape (Philadelphia, 1915), showing the Place Ravignan in Paris, the foreground appears at first sight to negate the rules of perspective. We then note that there is a window in the background that functions in the manner of a Renaissance window, opening into the space of the street beyond. As we look more carefully we see that the wall to the left of the window which would normally occlude what is beyond it also functions as a window. When we look again at the foreground we recognize a similar play with occlusion and non-occlusion. A series of different planes partially occlude, partially transform yet simultaneously reveal the words Le journal. Far from being isolated examples these new versions of the window principle offer a key to understanding many aspects of cubism and other branches of modern art which can efffectively be described as experiments with transparency-opacity laws.

Reversals of the transparency-opacity laws

    The Renaissance version of the window assumed a potential correspondence between object and image. Its claims for objectivity involved a premise that some objects are transparent and others are opaque. Transparent objects function as windows and open into spaces beyond. Opaque objects function as walls and occlude spaces beyond. Twentieth century art has challenged this premise. The attention to surface as surface by cubists such as Braque effectively explored the consequences of everything being opaque, of having no windows into spaces beyond. Artists such as Gris and Leger explored a much more daring possibility: what if one made the functions of transparency and opacity interchangeable, such that walls could be windows and windows could be walls? Surrealism can be seen as systematic reversal of traditional laws of transparency and opacity in order to explore the potentials of this assumption as a new means of recovering subjective dimensions of representation. Surrealism combined this with a deliberate play of viewpoints to spark the imagination.

    Romantic painters such as Caspar David Friedrich had drawn figures literally looking out of windows from a viewpoint just behind the figure, such that we as observers were cast into the position of looking at the person looking, able to imagine what they saw, yet distinct from their viewpoint. Dali painted a Girl standing at a window (1925) in a similar position. Magritte went one step further by painting the figure who is looking out as herself being outside the room. In addition he painted the outside of the window rather than the inside. Our first assumption that we are inside a room looking outside at a landscape is completely contradicted. So it is as if we were inside looking at a landscape seen by a woman who is outside framed by a window as if it were we who was outside looking in. This same principle without a human figure is employed in the Revolution (London, Private Collection), and in his Praise of dialectic (Eloge de la dialectique, Robert Giron Collection, 1937). In these paintings a single seemingly coherent space integrates a series of viewpoints and thus launches us directly into games of the imagination.

    The window is a leitmotif in Magritte’s paintings. It dominates his Human condition (La condition humaine, Paris, Claus Spaak Collection, 1934, pl. 119.2), in which a canvas is flush with the window. Theoretically a canvas is opaque and should occlude what is beyond it. Magritte’s canvas simultaneously suggests a transparent window and shows an opaque canvas that it makes possible. Magritte was very articulate about his purpose:

The problem of the window gave rise to The human condition. In front of a window seen from inside a room, I placed a painting representing exactly that portion of the landscape covered by the painting. Thus the tree in the picture hid the tree behind it, outside the room. For the spectator, it was both inside the room within the painting and outside in the real landscape. [This is how we see the world.] We see it outside ourselves, and at the same time we only have a representation of it in ourselves. In the same way, we sometimes situate in the past that which is happening in the present, as occurs in cases of false recognition. [Time and space thus lose the vulgar meaning that only daily experience takes into account.]

    Magritte’s Promenades of Euclid (New York, A. Iolas Gallery, 1955), takes this play of opacity and transparency one step further. Now we are looking frontally at the canvas and it would in theory occlude entirely the view beyond. This is attention to the surface as surface with a new twist. Moreover, beyond the window-canvas we see a street and a tower which can simultaneously be seen as two versions of the visual pyramid and hence as lessons in other ambiguities between two- and three- dimensional objects. Related themes can be found in other paintings where windows at once transparent and opaque dominate: e.g. his Domain of Arnheim (New York, Private collection, 1949), or his Nightfall (Private collection, 1964). Sometimes the canvas which we by now expect to be transparent depicts the scene beyond it in another scale as in his two versions of the Waterfall (La cascade, New York, Collection Harry Torczyner and Gstaad, Private collection, 1961), showing trees at a distance where we expect leaves. Sometimes the outlines of plants, which should theoretically occlude what is beyond function as windows as in Plagiarism (Le plagiat, New York, Private collection, 1960), and the Land of marvels (Le pays des miracles, Brussels, Private collection, 1960).

    Another series of paintings involve doors that function as windows. One of the earliest of these was the Unexpected answer (La réponse imprévue, Brussels, Musées royaux des beaux arts, 1936, pl. 119.3). This showed a closed door which would ordinarily occlude what was beyond it, opened by a figure-like aperture which allowed one to see the occluding darkness of the space that it opened. This concept was pursued in his Amorous perspective (La perspective amoureuse, Brussels, Private collection, 1935, pl. 119.4), where a similar opening in a closed door reveals an opening with a view that is occluded by a leaf in the form of a leafless tree. In one of his most famous paintings, Personal values (Les valeurs personelles, New York, private collection, 1952, pl. 120.1-2), this reversal of transparency-opacity is applied to a room in which the normally opaque walls function as windows into clouds, whereas the mirror reflects a non-existent window. These effects are heightened by the presence of five objects of everyday life, a glass, comb, soap, shaving brush and match positioned in a larger than life scale. The comb which we expect to be opaque is transparent. The glass which we expect to be transparent is effectively opaque.

    Magritte is often remembered for his image of a pipe with a caption, This is not a pipe (Ceci n’est pas une pipe, New York, Collection William N. Copley, 1929). That same year he wrote an essay on Words and images (Les mots et les images) in the Surrealist revolution (La révolution surréaliste), where he discussed various ways in which words and images can interact, for instance how a word can substitute an image, or use an image to represent a word other than itself. He returned to these ideas in his Notes for an illustrated lecture at the London Gallery (February 1937). He cited the familiar image of a bird in a cage and considered the possibility of replacing the bird with a fish or a shoe. He noted that while curious, such images were unfortunately arbitrary and accidental, adding:

It is however possible to obtain a new image which will provide greater resistance to the spectator’s examination. A large egg in the cage appears to be the necessary solution.

Let us now occupy ourselves with the door. The door can open up into a landscape seen in reverse. The landscape can be represented on the door.

Let us try something less arbitrary. Beside the door let us make a hole in the wall which is also another door. This encounter will be perfected if we reduce the two objects to a single one. Thus the hole places itself naturally in the door and through this hole one sees obscurity.

This image could be further enriched if one cast light on the invisible object hidden by the obscurity. Our gaze always wants to go further, wants in the end to see the object, the reason for our existence.

    This passage is of the greatest interest because it reveals that while surrealists such as Magritte were explicitly concerned with challenging the ideal of a one to one correspondence between object and image introduced by Renaissance perspective, they recognized that a completely arbitrary play with these principles would result in images that were meaningless. Playing with the assumptions of transparency and opacity, while maintaining the geometrical framework of perspectival space was Magritte’s personal solution.

    Many of Paul Delvaux’s paintings are closely related. He too has enclosing spaces such as church interiors and temples which should in theory occlude the space beyond but in fact open it, some walls which are literally windows, some walls which function as windows, others which are open spaces although we expect them to be closed. Some of his paintings use buildings and roads to create views converging towards a vanishing point in the far distance. Other paintings use buildings and roads to concentrate the space in the foreground of the picture. Other paintings are more complex. What appears at first sight to be a scene using traditional linear perspective reveals itself to have increasingly curved lines off to the side as in his Dryads (Les Dryades, Private Collection, 1966). In still other cases he deliberately combines a series of different vanishing points in a manner reminiscent of De Chirico’s method of polyvalent perspective.

    Salvador Dali is not often associated with Magritte and yet in terms of this playful method which reverses traditional transparency-opacity laws, there are remarkable parallels. Magritte used doors that both occluded and gave a view of what was beyond. Dali explored this in his Skull of Zurburan. Magritte explored ambiguities of walls that functioned as windows. So too did Dali in his Animated still life and implicitly in his Sacrament of the Last Supper where the traditional room is encompassed by an open dodecahedron that offers a panoramic view of a lake and hills beyond. He adapted this idea brilliantly in his Suburbs of the paranoiac-critical town where the image of a keyhole and its surrounding lock in the foreground on the right is repeated in the background to become a figure in an open gateway. On the left side of the picture this combination recurs in a subtler form.

    Magritte played with the idea of a human form functioning as a window in his Decalomania (Brussels, Collection Mme. Chaim Pelrelman, 1966) and a human head as a window in his Painted plaster cast from Napoleon’s death mask (Chichester, Collection Edward James, c. 1935). These became important themes for Dali, sometimes very obviously as in his Couple with their heads full of clouds, his Birth of a goddess or Old age, adolescence and infancy, sometimes less so as in his Portrait of Gala in circles, and on other occasions very subtly indeed as in his Portrait of Abraham Lincoln which, from a certain distance functions as an opaque object and from another distance resolves itself into a cross-like window from which Gala is looking out into the distance. Even more complex is a portrait of Voltaire that recurs in the background of both his Slave market with disappearing bust of Voltaire and Resurrection of the flesh. Seen from one distance it is a portrait: seen from another it dissolves into three figures framed by an open portal. His Great paranoiac and Apotheosis of the dollar contain variants on this theme. In his Illumined pleasures two of the framed images have more depth than the rest of the painting and a third canvas is actually a painted box that functions as a window.

    Seen in this context there is much more to Dali’s use of perspective than obvious examples such as his Font (1936), Sentimental colloquy (1944), Persistance of memory (1948) or Christ of Saint John of the cross (1951). Indeed like Magritte and Delvaux, Dali is playing with the transparency-opacity rules of perspective to create new landscapes of inner worlds of dreams and imagination.

Windows as walls

    During the Renaissance theorists such as Leonardo had referred to the window alternatively as a window (finestra, pariete) and a wall (muro), intending however in each case a transparent surface which allowed one to depict the world beyond it. As we have noted the Cubists viewed the traditional window as an occluding wall and as a result focussed on the surface of the painting as a surface. More recently, some would claim in direct lineage with the aims of cubism, Hockney has taken up this theme anew, arguing that the perspectival window functions as a wall separating the viewer from the objects represented. He has argued that inverted perspective offers a solution to this dilemma in that when an object is drawn in this fashion, the viewer becomes the vanishing point and in looking at the painting they are drawn into the space of the picture rather than separated from it.

    One of Hockney’s most famous paintings in this context is his Visit with Christopher and Dan, Santa Monica Canyon (1984). At a first glance we see merely a series of patches of colour. Then we realize we are in a home. On the right side of the canvas Christopher Isherwood is writing. On the left side of the canvas his friend Don Bachardy is painting. In the upper left hand corner we see a house perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. Lower down towards the centre of the painting this scene is repeated twice. In front of Don Bachardy the scene is repeated two more times. Thus we have a sensation of looking at a same scene through various windows in the house. To increase the paradox of this effect Hockney depicted a painted version of the same scene above Isherwood’s writing desk.

    There are dramatic ways in which these themes of windows as occlusions are expressed in contemporary culture. Paris, which in the seventeenth century created its squares, gardens and avenues for their vistas, has now begun to destroy systematically those vistas. In the gardens of the royal palace there are now series of truncated columns, irregularly placed, which interrupt the original view of regularity. More striking is the pyramid at the Louvre which is so placed that one can no longer stand within the walls of the palace and look out through the Tuileries towards the Arch of Triumph. Indeed several new buildings have been built which block that view. Here is a case where former windows into landscapes have been walled up.

Inner-Outer

    The early practitioners of proto-perspective and linear perspective explored the uses of these new techniques in the context of both exteriors and interiors. The development of these new genres typically went hand in hand, such that perspectival views of rooms contained windows which revealed exterior views. Only gradually did these new genres emerge as independent forms of expression such that landscapes and interiors were treated separately. Hence the window became a window in a room and then a window in an interior which gave a view of an exterior in the form of a landscape.

    Modern perspective continues these themes but is also transforming the nature of inside-outside, inner and outer. Video shows interiors and exteriors in ways that remove the distinctions between them (pl. 129). Two-dimensional virtual reality as developed by Myron Krueger increases this ambiguity. Some modern paintings based on photography continue distinctions between inner and outer. Others blur these distinctions as in the case of a painting by Robert Gonsalves (Toronto) showing book shelves from an interior outside on a lawn. A young student from Panama studying in Florida, Earl Lam, has painted a puzzle such that the man depicted in the puzzle is constructing the puzzle from the outside (pl. 121.1). Lam acknowledges the influence of Escher: "He makes you see things that aren’t there, which is what I’m trying to do". An English artist, Jim Gaines, photographed a house, which was then cut up in puzzle-form and re-photographed as a Crooked House (pl. 121.2), such that what is in and out is difficult to discern. A painting by Gonsalves pursues these themes. We are shown a painting of a puzzle in which a boy inside a house making a puzzle of a boy outside a house (pl. 122.1-2).

    Some examples of spherical perspective take even further these ambiguities of inner and outer. For instance, Dick Termes, has a painting entitled God’s Eye View (pl. 136.1), showing the interior of San Spirito (Florence) by Brunelleschi, (said to have been the first church constructed with a view to co-ordinating perspectival effects into architecture). Termes depicts this interior on the exterior of a sphere. In the case of Order in Disorder, this interplay of interior-exterior is rendered the more extreme when we recognize that the artist painted these exteriors from inside the sphere. In Termes’ Pieces of the Whole, we have a viewpoint from the outside showing boys painting the scenes in which they are painting.

    The introduction of various alternative mapping techniques has increased these paradoxical treatments of inner and outer. Cartographers have explored new ways of morphing planes such that satellite images can be "draped" over contour maps to transform two-dimensional photographs into three-dimensional spatial images. For instance, Brandenberger shows how a map of the University of Zurich (pl. 88) can be warped to fit different curved planes. It is intriguing to note that artists such as Escher have been pursuing analogous experiments in spatial transformation.

    One of his most complex examples of these impossible windows began with his three colour woodcut of a ship in the foreground with a view of the city of in the background entitled Senglea (1935, pl. 123.3). In a subsequent lithograph entitled Balcony (1945, pl. 123.1) showing a closer view of the buildings of the same town, he transformed the rectilinear plane to a spherical one. Escher pursued this theme in his Studies for a print exhibition (1956, pl. 124.2) where he began with a slightly distorted corridor containing various prints. In a second study, the size of one of the represented prints was greatly expanded, distorted and made transparent to function as a window again revealing the ship in the harbour and town in the "background", which at the same time dominates the upper half of the picture. In the foreground is a grid pattern of windows. As a result Escher achieved an effect whereby we as viewers are outside the space looking into the hall of prints and yet at the same time inside the hall looking out at the town beyond the walls (pl. 124.2).

    By consciously inverting the regular laws of transparency and occlusion, a conscious play with interior and exterior space is created. Inner and outer are fully ambiguous. More importantly for our theme, the transformations and alterations of images which we now associate with electronic tools were introduced by artists. The difference, of course, is that artists’ transformations required a great deal of effort and had built into them a personal signature, whereas their electronic equivalents require hardly any effort and lack a personal signature. For this reason it makes sense to distinguish a spectrum of possibilities ranging from direct correspondence to non-correspondence.

    Renaissance perspective assumed a one-to-one correspondence between each point on an original object and an image. Modern perspective sometimes entails a one-to-one correspondence, but the nature thereof varies greatly: sometimes it is theoretical, assumed, possible, transposed or deliberately not a direct correspondence. These new kinds of correspondence have greatly expanded the scope of perspective.

Theoretical Correspondence

    Technically speaking a one-to-one correspondence is only possible in the case of vector graphics, where entire lines are copied. In the case of raster graphics the copying of points presents problems of aliasing especially in the case of distant objects. As we have shown earlier (see above p. 142*), the underlying assumptions governing perspective apply equally to pixel projection used in ray tracing. Indeed we found that Lansdale, in a fundamental dissertation on the subject, demonstrated lucidly how the principles of linear perspective can be extended to discrete pixels in ray tracing and radiosity programs; that while in traditional Renaissance perspective one often began with a square tile parallel or at right angles to the picture plane and recorded its projected size, in Lansdale’s approach this procedure is reversed: i.e. a square pixel is treated in the manner of a projected square tile on the picture plane or screen and is then projected back onto the textured 3-D object (fig. 33-36): i.e. precisely the reverse of an anamorphic form which is projected as a regular sphere on a tilted projection plane. Hence we claimed that perspective remains a valuable tool in understanding the frontiers of aliasing problems in image processing.

    Fractals pose one of the most complex examples with respect to theoretical correspondence between original and image. According to Mandelbrot (1977*), the rectilinear properties of Euclidean geometry imposed serious restrictions on attempts to analyze the curvilinear complexities of (organic and inorganic) Nature. As an example, he gave the coast of England, pointing out that if one chose smaller measuring sticks the number of sides and length of the coastline would increase greatly. Perspective had assumed that only size changed with distance or scale. In Mandelbrot’s example, shape was also a function of scale or distance. He proposed that fractals offered a way of getting beyond these restrictions. Unfortunately because fractals involve iterations, changes in scale affect only their size but not their shape. Hence, strictly speaking, discussions concerning fractals have brought into focus a important problem which fractals are not able to solve.

    Needed is a new approach to perspective which defines the scales within which the traditional laws of size as a function of distance are maintained, and identifies those changes of scale where both shape and size become a function of distance. Interestingly enough this is a case where we have been familiar with the underlying problem for centuries in a quite different context. Anyone who has used a microscope knows perfectly well that increasing the scale changes the shape as well as the size of the insect or specimen which we examining and yet within a certain range of scales shape remains effectively constant while size changes. It is this phenomenon to which fractals have drawn attention and which a future scaled approach to perspective will need to solve.

    The limitations of present day fractals have not prevented enthusiasts such as Barnsley from claiming that fractals can in fact reproduce Nature efficiently. Paradoxically as compression ratios increase fractal landscapes look increasingly plausible as illustrated by software programs such as VistaPro (pl. 141-142). When combined with ancillary programmes one can create impressive perspectival fly-bys. As a result, fractals, which seem to contradict the principles of perspective have become a new source of perspectival experiences.

Assumed Correspondence

    In Europe there has been tendency to use experience of present objects to visualize past objects. Among the most striking examples to date are IBM’s elaborate reconstruction of the former Abbey at Cluny (pl. 109) and of the Frauenkirche in Dresden which was bombed in the second World War, or the excellent work down by Iwainsky in reconstructing the great Pergamon altar. Also impressive is the reconstruction to scale by Chimenti and Menci (Arezzo) of 11,000 houses and buildings in Florence at the time of Lorenzo the Magnificent.

    In these cases there is an assumed correspondence between image and the original object, which is sometimes no longer extant. This applies equally to persons and animals. For example, in the case of Terminator II (1991), the animated robot is so impressive largely becuase it is a perfect clone of a real figure. Similarly the animated dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (1993), are assumed to correspond to how they actually looked in real life according to the latest theories.

Possible Correspondence

    In the United States, the exploration of possible correspondence is much more marked than elsewhere. Indeed it has been the subject of a new field called scientific visualization, championed by centres such as the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. This entails a whole range of applications including dynamic simulations of chemical bonding, visualizations of shock patterns and models of complex weather phenomena such as smog and violent storms. Much of this visualization is concerned with the frontiers of quantitative science and frequently requires the use of Cray computers. At the same time there are other contexts whereby such possible correspondence serves as a starting point in very different directions as in the following quote:

    Image Capture is where the image actually begins its trip into reality.

If you can call it reality. Often our ideas are conceived with reality as the basis, but they depend on our audience’s ability to suspend disbelief and play along with you as toy with their perception of what is real and what is fantastic.The fun comes when we can make a seamless transition into a world we know is not real but into which we gladly enter.

    What makes this striking is not so much the statement itself as its context, namely, the introduction to a recent booklet by Kodak. There is of course considerable interest in realism in the United States: witness the amount of attention paid to news. Yet, increasingly the approach to news as a documentary of what actually happened is being undermined by a notion of news as a combination of real and imaginary. Information is combined with entertainment to pose as info-tainment; education is combined with entertainment to pose as edu-tainment such that the event in itself is considered somehow to be suspect because it lacks the (enter-) tainment side of things. Individuals watch the CNN version of the Iraq war, conscious that they are witnessing a staged event reported from one side, and yet there is no framework for making visible other versions of the reality.

    In the United States, there has also been a deliberate strategy of using experience of real places and things to visualize unexperienced ones. For instance, members of NASA study rocky places in Nevada and California deserts in preparing for explorations on the moon, Mars and other planets. While this has obvious pragmatic advantages, it introduces a danger philosophically that persons lose their sense of difference and the other. Is the American tourist abroad who is continually saying that there is something bigger, better or very similar back home in the United States merely a stereotype or actually a direct consequence of this mentality? Klotz has recently suggested that this marks a rejection of Renaissance perspective, which deserves further analysis:

Simulation is a further step away from the vanishing point of Renaissance perspective towards a world of appearances which is virtually real for the subject. A person can get so wrapped up in this apparent world, as if they could live in it, as if they themselves as a three dimensional being existed in an artistically produced three-dimensional space. This is a new theme that one should study.

    On the positive side, there have been a number of famous applications of this principle in the case of the cinema. For instance, Steven Spielberg has explored this in films such as E.T. (1982) and Gremlins (1984, 1990). Equally, if not more famous, is George Lucas, whose special effects facility, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) has produced movies such as Star Wars (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Willow (1988), and worked with the great Japanese filmmaker, Kurosawa in producing Dreams (1990).

Transposed Correspondence

    Sometimes one may deliberately choose to have no direct correspondence between original and image and yet use an external visible experience as a metaphor for some otherwise invisible experience. For example, some investment firms have begun using images of grain fields as a metaphor for fluctuations in the stock market. Is this insistence on visualizing situations of transposed correspondence (where no direct correspondence is possible) one of the reasons why metaphors have become such a buzzword in the United States and why they are treated with such unexpected seriousness? To a European, Metaphors we live by, could readily sound more like a parody than the title of a scholarly tome.

    It should be noted that some individuals take this metaphorical treatment seriously. A Toronto based firm, Visible Decisions, has copyrighted the term "information animation" and sees in these new techniques a new methodology for understanding statistics in a space-time continuum. Interestingly enough a Singapore scholar working in the realm of knowledge navigation has reached similar conclusions independently.

No Direct Correspondence

    Sometimes there is no direct correspondence at all as in cases when the external world is used as as a point of departure for images of the internal world. In the case of films such as Fantastic Voyage (1966), this reconstruction can be remarkably realistic. In others such as Tron (1982), the spaces are much more idealized.

    Theoretically photography promised a one to one correspondence between original and image and as we have noted (above p. 118*) this principle has proven of great interest to architects such as Jantzen who have applied it to situations which combined a photographic record of an existing situation with an architect’s conception of possible modifications to this same space. As Gombrich (1975, 1976, 1980), has shown however a one to one correspondence between object and image is by no means necessary. Even when the link between object and photographic image is precise, the artist may nonetheless choose to create a non-correspondence between photographic exemplar and painted result. By way of illustration the work of three artists will be cited.

    The first is a Toronto artist, Robert Gonsalves, mentioned earlier (p. 223), who deserves to be much better known. One of his works is based on a simple photograph showing the interior of Saint Basil’s Church at Saint Michael’s College, in the University of Toronto. His "non-corresponding" painting uses the walls of the original church as a point of departure, with the difference that at a certain point the columns are transformed into trunks of trees and the intertwining arches of the vault are metamorphosed into an arboreal play of knots reminiscent of the Sala delle Asse in Milan. A second photograph, shows a nineteenth century view of Saint Michael’s cathedral along with Metropolitan United Church. The resulting painting adopts the original disposition of the buildings, reverses this with respect to the photograph and then transforms the conventional architecture into Gaudi-esque towers which have anthropomorphized praying hands. As a result both paintings while consciously using photographs as their starting points result in images which are deliberate statements of non-correspondence.

    In the case of David Hockney these transformations are more difficult to follow but the end result is analogous. Indeed, at first sight, his Portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (pl. 131.3), looks perfectly photographic, as if there were a simple correspondence between what he photographed and what he subsequently painted. In fact, as Webb (1988), has shown, the situation is considerably more complex. Having made a photograph of the whole, Hockney made individual drawings of the man as a whole (pl. 131.1-2), drew a detail of his bust (pl. 131.4) and then synthesized these elements in his final portrait. In the case of Hockney’s portrait of his friend Gregory, the situation between original figures, photographs and final painting is more subtle. The representation of Hockney himself is essentially a self-portrait. By contrast, the representation of Gregory is based on a whole series of photographs. In the final painting of a Model with unfinished self-portrait (1977), this series has been reduced to a single image as if there were a one-to-one correspondence, but is then integrated with the self-portrait using a different spatial technique, thus simultaneously contrasting the spaces of the two portraits. In the case of the portrait of his friend Peter Schlesinger, this process is even more complex. The stance of his friend is based on a photograph taken in Kew Gardens in London, England. The figure swimming in the pool is based on a series of photographs taken in a pool in California. These diverse elements from two continents were then merged to produce a Portrait of an artist (1972), that looks as if it corresponded to a single space and time but deliberately does not.

    On other occasions Hockney uses photography in ways which draw attention to the absence of a one to one correspondence between object and image as when he joins together a whole series of photographs in order to arrive at a single composite picture of an object such as the Brooklyn Bridge, a scene such as his Luncheon at the Japanese embassy, or a panoramic view such as that of the Grand canyon, his Terrace with shadows (pl. 132.1), or his Pearblossom highway (1986, pl. 132.2). In these examples his concern is to capture aspects of time as well as space. Hockney also uses photography to demonstrate his theory of inverted perspective as a means of integrating subject and object and of integrating effects of time and motion within his painting.

    In the case of Dick Termes, interests in photography have complemented and reinforced his fascination with poly-perspectival methods using a number of surfaces. His patent of 1981 (fig. 19), involved using a camera to take twelve co-ordinated views from a single centre, which images could then be mounted on the sides of a dodecahedron (pl. 133-134). Since then he has developed variants using other regular solids

4. Alternative Planes

    The perspectival window as used by Brunelleschi and Alberti was flat. Already during the Renaissance (cf. above p. 119-126*), convex mirrors and irregular shaped walls prompted artists to explore alternative windows. Nineteenth century romanticism brought with it a new emphasis on subjective sensations. Rectilinear windows were increasingly associated with the objective regularities of descriptive geometry and artists. Meanwhile, as we have noted, the optical studies of scientists such as Volkmann, Hering, and Helmholtz, claimed that visual space was not rectilinear, and might correspond instead to the space of non-Euclidean geometries being developed by Bolyai, Lobatchevsky, Riemann, and others. Hence these same scientists argued that a simple one-to-one correspondence between retinal image and visual image was impossible: i.e. that the analogy between camera obscura and eye was false, or to use modern terms, that the analogue theory had to be replaced by a digital theory of images. Ironically, artists have ignored these findings and focussed increasingly on spherical surfaces in an attempt to record what would traditionally have been termed subjective aspects of optical experience, but to which they often refer as objective aspects.

    Since we have already described (above pp. 119-126*) the major theories and practices that have resulted, a summary outline will suffice at this point. Some artists attempt to reproduce the concave surface of the retina (Stark). Others focus on reproducing the convex shape of the eyeball (Barre and Flocon), recording their results on a rectilinear plane. In so doing they are faced with problems of translating images from a spherical to a flat surface in ways similar to those of cartographers as some artists have themselves noted (Barre and Flocon). Studies of spherical map projections by Tobler (1964), have used transformations of a human face to demonstrate the anamorphic effects involved. As a result cartographic projections offer a range of new windows. Other artists use non-linear surfaces both for production and demonstration of their images. Some use large cylindrical surfaces (Day). Some use actual spherical and even polyhedral surfaces (Termes). As a result the traditional rectilinear window now competes with a whole range of alternative windows.

    The range of these alternatives has been further increased by the domain of psychological optics where, as we have noted (above p. 184*) the studies of Hering, Wundt, and their successors brought into focus many ambiguities of vision arising from geometrical illusions. One of these, which relates closely to the figure-ground discussions of the Gestalt school, is the Necker cube. This series of simple lines in parallel perspective can easily be read in two different ways such that when one stares at the figure the alternative readings oscillate from one reading to the other. If these simple lines are replaced by solid ones, a more complex phenomenon emerges. One of the readings involves an impossible cube which we can see as a representation but for which we cannot construct a physical object. This reading becomes the more convincing in the case of a three-dimensional version of a Necker cube where non-correspondence between image and object becomes a question of necessity rather than choice, thus implicitly bringing into play ambiguous and impossible windows, where the image looks fully realistic yet cannot correspond to actual objects. Escher drew a seated man holding such an impossible cube. This became a starting point for his lithograph of a Belvedere ( 19**), where the man and cube were positioned beside a two storey loggia, which repeated the phenomenon with columns such that these appeared to interlace in an impossible way. Escher developed a whole series of variations on this theme and indeed the deliberate juxtaposition of spaces involved has become one of the central aspects of his work.

    Closely related to the Necker cube is an impossible triangle which Reutersvaard (1934), originally designed using nine cubes. Penrose and Penrose (1958), in a now famous article, studied the implications of this shape which has subsequently become known as a Penrose triangle and which recurs in one of Termes’ spheres.

5. Anti-ocularism

    It is important to note that there is a growing school that offers a very different interpretation to the history of vision in general and perspective in particular, whereby vision is treated as something very negative, an attitude that reflects itself in a number of recent titles (fig. 70). Discussions by traditional scholars such as Stafford (1993, 265), of "antivisual rhetoric" gives some indication of the significance of this school.

    Some progress towards a global view of these problems was provided by Levin (1988), The opening of vision:nihilism and the postmodern situation and Levin (1993), Modernity and the hegemony of vision.The best synopsis thus far has been offfered by Martin Jay (1993), Downcast eyes.The denigration of vision in twentieth century French thought, the chapter themes and individuals of which give a masterful survey of the situation (fig. 71). Jay also outlined a number of concepts with which vision has been associated (fig. 72).

Author Title

Eager (1961) "The missing and mutilated eye in contemporary art"

Allen (1974) The fear of looking

Clark (1981) "Iconophobia"

De Certeau (1983) "Madness of vision"

Romanyshyn (1984) The despotic eye culturalist position

Rassial (1985) The interdiction on representation

Krauss (1986) "Antivision"

Buci-Glucksmann (1986) Folly of vision

Judovitz (1986) "Anemic vision in Duchamp"

Stich (1990) Anxious visions: Surrealist art

Sitney (1990) Modernist montage: the obscurity of vision in cinema and literature

Krauss (1993) Optical unconscious

McCumber (1993) "Derrida and the closure of vision" in Levin (1993)

Flynn (1993) "Foucault and the eclipse of vision"in Levin (1993)

Jay (1993) "The rise of hermeneutics and the crisis of ocularcentrism"

Jay (1993) The denigration of vision in twentieth century French thought

Fig. 83. A series of recent titles reflecting the anti-visual approach.

Author Trend

Impressionists to Bergson Crisis of ancient scopic regime

Sartre, Merleau-Ponty Search for new ontology of sight

Lacan, Althusser Specular subject of ideology

Foucault, Debord From the empire of the gaze to the society of the spectacle

Barthes, Metz, Cahiers du cinéma Camera as memento mori

Derrida, Irigaray Phallogocularcentrism

Levinas, Lyotard Ethics of blindness and the postmodern sublime

Fig. 84. Individuals and chapter themes reflecting an anti-visual approach in Jay (1993).

Author Associated Concepts

Gibson Privilege synchronic stasis

Descartes Active potential ...probing, penetrating, searching qualities

Said (1979) Power...in sustaining imperialist and racist domination

Freud (1962) Sexuality, mastery

Lacan (1928ff.) Aggression

Copjec (1989) Ambiguous, treacherous, full of traps

Althusser Ideology

Miller (1975) Surveillance...potent mechanism for social control

Situationists Lust

Barthes Death, thanatology

Irigaray Phallic, phallocentrism

Fig. 85. Adjectives linked with the eye, vision or gaze in contemporary French criticism according to Jay (1993).

    Jay offered a highly articulate interpretation () of the history of perspective. He claimed, for instance that the (51) "dennarativization" was helped by perspective, not mentioning the evidence that perspective also expanded the horizons of narrative (cf. above pp. 21-25,153). Citing the work of Berger and Bryson, Jay (55) claimed that, as a result of perspective, "both painter and viewer were bracketed, at least tendentially, in favor of an eternalized eye above temporal duration". He also paraphrased Alpers’ more dramatic formulation of this claim (56): "The reduction of vision to the Medusan gaze (or often the male gaze contemplating the female nude) and the loss of its potential for movement in the temporal glance was now ratified, at least according to the logic, - if not always the actual practice - of perspectival art."

    From Alpers, Jay also adopted an imaginative opposition between Italian and Northern art (fig. 73) which, as Veltman (198*), noted in a review, unfortunately had little to do with the historical evidence. It did not explain, for example, why Descartes who was French, lived in Amsterdam and died in Stockholm should be associated with a [Southern] Italian view rather than a Northern one.

Italian art Northern art

Perspectival art Nonperspectival

Geometricalized optics Natural optics

Conceptualized Art of describing

Alberti, Descartes Kepler

camera obscura

camera

Photographs

Fig. 86. Basic distinctions between Italian and Northern art according to Alpers (1983).

    Jay brought into focus a number of unconventional interpretations, citing (55), for instance, Masheck (1991), as challenging therole of the window in Renaissance perspective.He (58) cited Rotman (1987) concerning an analogy linking vanishing point and the concept of zero and referred to Goldstein’s (1988) Marxist theories see above pp. 12-15). In the case of Descartes, he quoted (76) a significant passage in the Optics: "here are no images that must resemble in every respect the objects they represent....Following the rules of perspective, circles are often better represented by ovals than by other circles and squares by diamonds rather than by other squares."

    Passages such as this led Jay (70), to claim that "By moving from resemblances to representations, it can be argued, Descartes was subtly opening the door to a non-visual, linguistically oriented epistemology of judgments." Following the view of Fried (1980), Jay (102-103), claimed that Diderot also challenged the perspectivalist scenographic tradition: "The primary function of the tableau as Diderot conceived it was not to address or exploit the visuality of the theatrical audience so much as to neutralize that visuality, to wall it off from the action taking place on stage, to put it out of mind for the dramatis personae and the audience alike."

    Jay (134), accepted Berger’s (1972), claim that the advent of the camera changed what had been the perspectival mode of seeing:"What you saw depended upon where you were when. What you saw was relative to your position in time and space. It was no longer possible to imagine everything converging on the human eye as on the vanishing point of infinity." He also accepted (159) a claim of Merleau Ponty that: "what recent psychologists have come to formulate: the lived perspective, that which we actually perceive, is not a geometric or photographic one", blithely overlooking that these debates had a much more complex history (see above pp. 87-107*). He (159), also followed Merleau Ponty’s interpretation of Cézanne, to claim that:

Cézanne wanted to overcome the very distance between viewer and viewed, thus sthattering the window’s glass separating beholder form the scene on the other side. His task, therefore, was the recapturing of the very moment when the world was new, before it was fractured into dualisms of subject and object or the modalities of the separate senses.

    To this Jay (166), added the view of Shapiro (1982): "Cézanne reduced the intensity of perspective, blunting the convergence of parallel lines in depth, setting the solid objects back from the picture plane and bringing distant objects nearer, to create an effect of contemplativeness in which desire has been suspended". And whereas as Merleau Ponty had gone on to defend Cézanne, Jay (326) followed Lyotard in insisting on the limitations even of Cézanne’s experiments with curvilinear perspective:

We have no reason to believe that the curvature of Cezannian space, its intrinsic disequilibrium, the passion that the painter experienced for the baroque organization of space ... is any more exempt [than that of other painters] from the marks of desire and better able to restore us to the phenomenality of the sensible.

    With respect to Duchamp, Jay noted (167), that the two sections of Duchamp’s Large Glass "the upper that of the ‘bride’, the lower that of the ‘bachelors’, were rendered through two incommensurable spatial projections that defy visual unity. So too does the disparity between the perspectivalist or anamorphic lines etched on the glass and the real world visible through the work’s transparent canvas." At this point, Jay’s logic became rather questionable. On the one hand he insisted that both perspective and anamorphosis were part of a narrow visual approach that was being overthrown in favour of a new verbal, literary approach. On the other hand, he went on to ask (172): " What is the role of specular, concave, or anamorphic mirroring in literary texts especially after the mise en abyme became a self-conscious staple of modernist reflexivity?" and then claimed (179) that the "word" effectively functioned as an "anamorphic glass", such that anamorphosis became a positive alternative to the negative connotations of perspective.

    In Jay’s own history of perspective Marcel Duchamp was important because of connections he assumed between art and philosophy. Jay (190), accepted Lyotard’s claim that "Duchamp’s transformations of incommensurability spatial projections with Nietzsche’s destruction of a master point of view". He believed that there were further connections with literature and hence claimed that (170): "If the history of modernist painting, broadly construed, can be understood as a laboratory of postperspectivalist optical experimentation, with a subcurrent of outright antiretinalism culminating in Duchamp, roughly parallel developments can be discerned in the literary experiments of the French avant-garde". He went further to insist (188) that there were "ironies" concerning the: "coincidence at the end of the nineteenth century of the dissolution of the perspectival grid in painting and the authorial or narrative point of view in literature, on the one hand and the emergence of aself-conscious ‘perspectivism’ in the other."

    This claim would be fascinating if it were true. As we have seen (above pp. 152-164), however, the evidence points to a rather different story, namely, that Percy Lubbock’s Craft of Fiction (1921), which codified the emerging interest in authorial viewpoints was published in the years immediately after Duchamp’s painting and marked a beginning rather than the end of serious examples and studies using this approach.

    In Jay’s mind the perspectival approaches of both Descartes and Alberti inherently precluded an individual point of view (189):

Descartes assumed that the clear and distinct ideas availbale to anyone’s mental gaze would be exactly the same because of the divinely insured congruence between such ideas and the world of extended matter. Individual perspectives did not, therefore, matter, as the deictic specificity of the subject could be bracketed out in any cognitive endeavour. The same assumption informed the Albertian concept of painterly perspective; all beholders would see the same grid of orthogonal lines converging on the same vanishing point, if they gazed through, as it were, the same camera obscura. Perspective in this sense was atemporal, decorporealized, and transcendental.

    In an earlier discussion (cf. fig. 73) Jay had accepted Alpers’ contrast between the Italian perspectival and Northern "antiperspectival" view, associating the latter with the camera obscura. Here Jay made perspective and the camera obscura synonymous in their effects. His three claims were once again misleading. If perspective was by nature atemporal, why was its development so closely linked with the development of narratives of the saints lives and history painting? If perspective was decorporealized why was it connected with the rise of realistic anatomical representation? If perspective was necessarily transcendental, why was it so closely connected with the rise of individual, personal representation? These were precisely the three characteristics which, according to Jay (187), were affected by changes in philosophy at the beginning of the nineteeenth century: "The first concerns what can be termed the detranscendentalization of perspective; the second, the recorporealization of the cognitive subject; and the third, the revalorization of time over space. In all these ways, the status of visual primacy was brought into question."

    According to Jay perspective not only involved an emphasis on space rather than time but also an imposition of space onto time (195): "The successful extension of this spatialization of time, often linked to the dissemination of the same bourgeois practices that fit so well with the triumph of Albertian perspective, reached its apogee in the nineteenth century." He discussed (208), Bergson’s distinction between spatial presence (quantitatively homogeneous) and temporal deferral (qualitatively heterogeneous); suggesting (275), that Heidegger’s two modes of vision could be defined in terms of Levin’s distinction between assertoric gaze (abstracted, monocular, inflexible, unmoving, rigid, ego-logical and exclusionary) and alethic-gaze (multiple, aware of its context, inclusionary, horizontal and caring). Jay (206), claimed that Gleizes and Metzinger, in their book, Cubism (1912), influenced by Poincaré, "helped justify the abandonment of of linear perspective in favour of a more qualitative, intuitively derived notion of spatial representation". Subsequently, he cited (585) Lyotard’s characterization in Les immatériaux of the modern as emphasizing space and vision sense whereas the postmodern as emphasized time and hearing.

    Jay’s quest to demonstrate that the twentieth century became increasingly anti-visual led to some intriguing interpretations. For instance, he (244) cited a passage from the surrealist, Breton: "it is impossible for me to consider a picture as anything but a window, in which my first interest is to know what it looks out on" and concluded that he was referring specifically to an interior model rather than ordinary vision. He referred (255), to the work of Harris Smith (1984), concerning The surrealists’ windows. In the case of Magritte, he argued (400) that: "The orders of the visible and the sayable, most explicitly at odds in the similitudinous discordance between Magritte’s images and their mysterious titles, thus demonstrates a ‘non-relation ‘.

    The thrust of Jay’s argument was that the word became more important than the image. Among many others he cited (374) Ellul’s praise of Debord for his "religious defence of the word against the image." He implied that this was much more than a simple question of fashion or choice. He referred (291), for instance, to Sartre in claiming that: "not even a God’s eye view would provide a perspective on the whole." He noted (374) that Althusser "identified ideology as a reliance on sight of any kind" and explained (419): "That visual experience would become a major battlefield in the service of revolution was inevitable, because of the strong link between any critique of fetishism, Marxist or otherwise and idolatry."

    One would expect that the consequence of anti-ocularism would be a complete rejection of visual imagery.Yet, paradoxically, he dwelt at length (360ff.) on Lacan’s discussions of anamorphosis, particularly with respect to Holbein’s Ambassadors. Moreover, he devoted no less than twenty nine pages to mirrors, referring to various studies studies on mirrors including (31), Gasché (1986), The tain of the mirror, and (458), Kristeva (19**) Ellipsis on fraying and specular seduction (Ellipse sur la frayeur et la séduction spéculaire).

    The main part of he book was an attack on authors such as Ivins (1946), and Greenberg (1965), who had insisted on the importance of vison for western civilization or, as the jargon holds, its privileging. Jay’s claims seemed so compelling because he drew on evidence from a wide range of disciplines including art history, literature, anthropology, philosophy, marxism, cultural studies, cinema, feminism and history of science.

    With respect to art history, he relied on early works in France by Francastel (1951), Painting and society, and Francastel (1963), "Destruction of a plastic space", who had traced the rejection of perspective and vision in the twentieth century; mentioning (161) the contributions of American art historians such as Steinberg (1972), Fried (1980), Absorption and theatricality, and Alpers (1982). He also mentioned (51) the English art historian, Bryson (1981), in Word and Image. French painting of the French regime, and Bryson (1983), Vision and the Painting. The logic of the gaze (1983), who attacked Sir Ernst Gombrich because he had a perceptual rather than a conceptual approach to art history. Other art historians cited were Foster (1985), Recodings: Art spectacle, cultural politics, Burgin (1986), The end of art theory, and Krauss (19**), Originality of the avante garde.With respect to literature he referred to Bakhtin (444), and Jakobson (351, 371, 447).

    In anthropology, Jay blithely overlooked the statements of Levi Strauss concerning perspective and point of view (see above p. 181) and insisted instead that (371) his "general stress on language over perception fit well with the larger trend traced in this book." In cultural studies, he mentioned the work of Argyle and Cook, (1976), Gaze and mutual gaze, and Foster, (1988), Vision and visuality who distinguished between a "natural and cultural component of vision".

    In philosophy, he cited Wartofsky (1972, 1979, 1980), who claimed that "all perception is the result of historical changes in representation". Jay interpreted Merleau-Ponty’s (1986), Visible and the invisible, as evidence that he was against vision. He noted Mitchell’s (1986), distinctions whereby image can mean "optical, graphic, perceptual, mental, verbal phenomena" and referred to De Duve (1991), Pictorial nominalism. Of Marxist philosophers, he cited Marx, the art historian T. J. Clark (1984), Jameson (1981), The political unconscious: narrative as a socially symbolic act, and Jameson (1992), Signatures of the visible who argued that (1) "The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination".

    In cinema studies, Jay referred to Debord (1967), Comolli (1985), "Machines of the visible", and Sitney (1990), Modernist montage: the obscurity of vision in cinema and literature. He cited (459) Bazin (1967), who claimed that "the tyranny of Cartesian perspectivalism, which dominated Western painting was lifted as the picture frame, separating subject and object, was replaced by the movie screen , helping to bring them once again together"; (470) Daney’s (1979), assertion "The cinema is thus bound up with the Western metaphysical tradition of seeing and vision whose photological vocation it realizes", and (473) Pleynet’s claim that: the film camera is an ideological instrument in its own right, expressing bourgeios ideology before expressing anything else... It produces a directly inherited code of perspective, built on the model of the scientific perspective of the quattrocento".

    With respect to feminism, Jay (535), cited the claims of Irigaray (1975):

Within this logic [that of western thought], the predominance of the visual, of the discrimination of form and individualization of form is particularly foreign to female eroticism. Woman takes pleasure more from touching than from looking and her entry into a dominant scopic economy signifies, again, her consignment to passivity: she is to be the beautiful object of contemplation.

    Jay also accepted (536) Irigaray’s interpretation of Plato’s allegory of the cave in book six of the republic as an escaping the womb in which: "the properties of the eye, of mirrors- and indeed of spacing , of space, time, of time- are dislocated, disarticulated, disjointed, and only later brought back to the perspective free contemplation of the truth of the Idea." On several occasions Jay referred to the work of Rose (1986), Sexuality in the field of vision . He did not however cite feminist anthropologists such as Martin (1990) who: "deplore the supposed tyranny of vision based on the optical appropriation of the thinglike data and choose to leap instead into an invisible realm by studying narrative"

    With respect to history of science, Jay (389) argued that "Scientific evidence as understood by Bachelard, Canguilhem and later Foucault, would no longer be connected innocently to its root in videre, the Latin verb ‘to see’, for what we see is mediated by the cultural construction of our apparently natural perception." He noted how Foucault had identified (390) "specific visual regimes in constituting cultural categories". Jay’s understanding of the ingredients of science were rather contradictory. On the one hand he argued that psychology and psycho-analysis was mainly Jewish and entailed a shift from visual back to verbal modes. On the other hand, he insisted (395), that "Just as psychology was born of the visually constructed notion of the Insane, so to the modern science of the individual emerged from the visual penetration of the dead body." At one point he (395) noted that "If the history of modern scientific experimentation thus showed Foucault that the privileging of vision and the suppression of the linguistic led to a problematic epistemology whose inadequacies phenomenology could not remedy, perhaps modernist literary experimentation might provide a viable alternative", without explaining precisely what literary theory could or did contribute, except in negative terms (398):

While the modern discourse of science sought to efface language in favour of the empirical gaze, thus fostering a mistaken belief in the veracity of observation, modernist literature exemplified by Roussel restored the unsublatable dialectic of saying and seeing in which neither overcame the ‘muteness of the object’

    At the same time Jay (398) cited passages such as the following from Foucault (1963): "combining the vertical point of view (which permits everything to be embraced as in a circle) and the horizontal point of view (which places the eye at ground level and gives to sight only the first dimension) so well that everything is seen in perspective and yet each thing is envisaged in its complete context". How this was proof of Foucault’s anti-ocular approach was not explained. Instead, Jay (404) noted Foucault’s claim that "The triumph of natural history was thus the triumph of a new visual order," and drew attention (406) to Foucault’s analysis of Velazquez’ famous painting:

man appears in his ambiguous position as an object of knowledge and as subject that knows; enslaved sovereign, observed spectator, he appears in the place belonging to the king which was assigned to him in advance by Las Meninas, but from which his real presence has for so long been excluded

    He (441) also recalled a definition of science by Barthes: "Science interprets the gaze in three (combinable) ways: in terms of information (the gaze informs); in terms of relation (gazes are exchanged); in terms of possession (by the gaze I touch, I attain, I seize, I am seized)".

    With respect to technology, Jay (415) cited Deleuze’s claim that Foucault feared the "disciplinary society of the panopticon was being replaced by a new society of control based more on computerized than visual surveillance, " as well as (593) Serres’ (1989), assertion that "contemporary modes of communication, based on codes and computers have put an end to the reign of panoptic theory." He referred (502) to Derrida’s Writing, claiming that: "The nineteenth century panaoramagram invented by Emile Littré to show objects on a flat surface in their true visual depth, was, Derrida insisted , the very image of the structuralist instrument", and he also believed (591), that Crary (1990), "has so persuasively shown, it was not long ago that scientific certainties about visual experience were overturned in favour of others".

    Psycho-analysis was another field cited by Jay to argue for the demise of vision in twentieth century French thought. Here Freud was considered important, for (334): "Although there were visual representations in dreams they had to be rearticulated in linguistic form before they became available for analysis." Lacan was discussed at length. Indeed, Freud and Lacan were cited as sources of Althusser (1964), in the context of structural marxism, yet another field that contributed to anti-ocularism.

    Jay noted Hebrew connections and referred to two books by Rassial (1981, 1985): Is psychoanalysis a Jewish story? and Rassial (1985), The interdiction on representation (L’interdit de la représentation). Evidence of these Hebraic connections in the United States (Blatt) and Britain (Gablik) was considered in another context (see above p.8-10*). These Hebraic connections are the more striking because Jay (22, 43) argued that anti-ocular debates were part of a larger clash betwen cultural traditions, namely, Greek vs. Hebrew: that the Greek tradition emphasized the visual whereas the Hebrew tradition emphasized the verbal; one seeing, the other hearing, and (35) that the rise of protestantism, notably through Luther and Calvin, marked a return to Hebraic concerns with the verbal and hearing.

    He claimed (269), that Heidegger had re-introduced an Hebraic emphasis and cited Jonas’ assessment that through Heidegger "the suppressed side of hearing gets a hearing after the long ascendancy of seeing and of the objectification which it cast upon thought". Jay also drew attention (499, 517) to Derrida being Jewish who, along with Lyotard, claimed that "both Kant and Hegel associated the sublime with the Jewish taboo on representation". Jay believed (546), that a study of

"Levinas will help reveal the unexpected links between the traditional iconoclastic Jewish attitude toward visual representation and a powerfully antiocular impulse in postmodernism".

    In his conclusion, Jay returned to a more careful stance. Instead of claiming that perspective had disappeared entirely, he suggested (545) that postmodernism was "suspicious of single perspectives which, like grand narratives, provide totalizing accounts of a world too complex to be reduced to a unified point of view." Indeed, in the end he returned to visual metaphors in describing his aims (592):

When ‘the’ story of the eye is understood as a polyphonic- or rather, polyscopic - narrative, we are in less danger of being trapped in an evil empire of the gaze, fixated in a single mirror stage of development, or frozen by athe medusan ontologizing look of the other. Permanently ‘downcast eyes are no solution to these and other dangers in visual experience.

    One senses that if only Jay had been more aware of the complexities of twentieth century vision he would have felt less compelled to outline its theoretical demise. It is instructive to contrast Jay’s conclusions with those of Gesell (1950) concerning infant vision (3):

Babies grasp the world first with their eyes and then with their hands.Vision is therefore a prime constituent in the development of the total child....

Our civilization is becoming increasingly eye-mind. The demands of growing children are multiplying and intensifying. The conservation of vision, therefore has become a task of vast social dimensions.

 

6. New Media

    The rise of new media, notably, holograms, television, cinema, modern theatre, computer hardware and software and virtual reality, has brought a series of further transformations to the window principle.

Holograms

    Although usually produced by a combination of light sources from two different viewpoints, holograms have the curious property that their spatial effects are only visible from a given viewpoint. When viewed from other positions a hologram reveals only its surface which typically contains a completely different image. Some artists have been content to draw a fully flat two dimensional image for these views which is then transformed into a three dimensional image when viewed frontally. The shapes chosen for the three dimensional images frequently include regular solids, a hypercube, chairs or other semi-regular shapes familiar from perspective treatises (pl. 125-126).

    Some artists deliberately treat the surface of the hologram as if it were a window. In some cases these hologrammatic windows are covered with a grid in the manner of traditional perspectival windows (pl. 127-128). Some artists, including Salvador Dali, have used holograms as a means of extending the explorations of ambiguities of space introduced by the surrealists, with the result that the window reveals walls that are themselves potential windows.

Television

    Traditionally the television screen has functioned as if it were a window, allowing us to see into a room or out onto a landscape. A new technique was introduced by CNN at the time of the Gulf War (1991) whereby this window effect used to show the reporting room was complemented by a further window onto the battlefield.

Cinema

    The cinema implicitly introduced new paradoxes by using an interior screen as if it were a window onto an outside world usually very different from that surrounding the cinema. In cases of the IMAX and its more complex relatives such as the OMNI-MAX and Magic Carpet cinemas this surrounding window becomes so encompassing that what had been an opening into the exterior is transformed into an artificial exterior, which was well documented in a film aptly named, Putting you in the picture.

    In a number of cases the cinema also introduced a new level of play into the window concept by exploring the transparency principle in terms of mirrors, a phenomenon to which Roman Gubern (Barcelona) drew attention in a fascinating video (fig. 87):

Film Director Date

The Circus Charles Chaplin 1927

Los hijos de la noche Benito Perojo 1939

How to Marry a Millionaire Jean Negulesco 1953

Citizen Kane Orson Welles 1941

The Lady from Shanghai Orson Welles 1947

Le sang d’un poète Jean Cocteau 1930

Orphée Jean Cocteau 1950

La novia de la marina Benita Perojo 1948

Fig. 87. Films with an emphasis on mirrors collected in Roman Gubern’s documentary on Mirrors and virtual space in the cinema (1927-1953).

    Spielmann (1993) claimed that a shift from analogue to digital film implied a return to pictural traditions: i.e. a greater spatialisation of the moving image, variability of the frame function; as well as a shift and greater density of successive montages, with a re-animation of frozen moments of motion. She distinguished between transparent and opaque image carriers and drew attention to new effects such as the camera pinceau and the camera as paintbox. Drawing on ideas of Deleuze and Jameson (1991), she claimed that the postmodern crisis of historicism entailed a new spatialisation of the temporal and that the cartography of perception and knowledge (cognitive mapping), entailed a characterization of navigation that was predestined for electronic media. Spielmann explored the implications of the new media for concepts of the window and the mirror(56):

Scenically the video monitor functions as a window wherein, however, no actual external image is seen, but rather a secondary level of mediafication is presented.....The mirror image contains a double visual metaphor. Diegetically this framed image is beholden to the principle of the abime (mirroring of that which is outside). Nonetheless, with respect to the televisionary status it acquires the extra-diegetic function of an inference whereby the random addition of other images remains contained in the format.

    Spielmann focussed on the work of Peter Greenaway, notably the Draughtsman’s Contract (1983), and Prospero’s Books (1991), to suggest that his work entailed a return to techniques originally developed in Renaissance painting. (fig. 88) and a new emphasis on a visual cluster with (59):

a simultaneity that appears as an inner image, a layering of diaphanous image planes and electronically supported strives to absolute, punctual concentration. Inference conatins serial, successive and other continuous procedures in a new montage form, in short to a cartogaphic image space. The metaphors of a web-frame (Deleuze) and of spatialisation (Jameson) experience a concrete transaction in Greenaway through the accumulation of the frame function and its concentration to a cinematic image cluster.

Renaissance Painting and Digital Film Analogue Film

Central Perspective Multi-Perspective

Static Image Moving Image

Centrepital Centrifugal

Fig. 88. Parallels between Renaissance painting and digital film with contrast to analogue film. according to Spielmann (1993).

    In essence, Spielmann suggested (61) that once film was freed from the need of mirroring, it comes into its own and becomes conceptual. Following Steinberg (1972, 84) she claimed (64) that a shift in the picture plane from vertical to horizontal marked a shift from nature to culture.

    Spielmann (1994), returned to these themes, claiming that if film was seen as a solution to the space-time limitations of painting, electronic images raised these questions anew, particularly with respect to three problems: framing, fading and the concept of the fake. Again Greenaway’s films were used as examples. Instead of suggesting connections with Renaissance perpective, she now suggested that there were similarities with cubist painting, in that Greenaway’s technique "avoids the illusionistic spatial depth and point fine of renaissance painting" and moves towards "aperspectivity and aviatic optics". Cezanne’s move toward multiperspectivity was compared with montage techniques in film. She noted also that the camera angle in Vertical features remake, instead of distorting the perspective, gives an unlikely point of view analogous to Rodtchenko’s formalist position.

    Perhaps the most provocative claim was with respect to "fake" which Spielmann related to seeing, knowing and false knowing (erkennen). She noted that the optical device in the Draughtsman’s contract, entailed a misunderstanding of perception as apperception; that the Belly of an architect, was an exploration of relations between original, photography and photocopy to conclude that reproductions do not necessarily lead to a reality check. Hence (144), a fake was not necessarily either a reproduction nor a link with an original copy. It could readily be "an image without correspondence to an original." To illustrate this she cited how Vermeer’s Art of painting, in a Zed and two noughts, served as a starting point for a fake that was an original work in the style of Vermeer. It is significant that the article was subtitled "The art of rules", in contrast to another school which fears that rules destroy art, and will be noted that Spielmann’s concept of the "fake" is another formulation of the principle of non-correspondence discussed above.

Modern Theatre

    Traditionally the theatre has been faced with the problem of keystoning, a type of anamorphosis that occurs when an image is projected onto a wall at too sharp an angle. A typical solution was to position the projector in a position where its image was more likely to be frontal, i.e. one avoided the problem.

    Since 1990, experiments based at Cornell University have explored a new solution to this problem. When a regular image is projected at a sharp angle and/or onto an irregular surface, the resulting distortions are recorded. These distortions are then used to create a distorted original image which, when projected at an angle, appears correct. In other words rather than worry about possible distortions of an original image when projected, one deliberately takes these potential distortions into account in the original such that when this distorted original is projected it has the same effect as the undistorted image from which one began at the outset (pl. 115-116). As will be noted this represents an important trend in image manipulation.

Computer Hardware and Software

    Drawing packages for computers have developed so-called paint programs. Initially these were limited to imitating the effects of a paintbrush such that one could take an image and add colours to it as one wished. Since 1988, there has been a new trend in popular packages to create a series of special effects algorithmically. A Toronto based firm, Image Ware, which sells its products through the U. S. based, Aldus Pagemaker has, for instance, created algorithms for producing craquelure effects in a photograph of a scene or a painting automatically. In 1991, they began on a technique that would automatically transform an image in linear perspective to one in spherical perspective. Silicon Graphics machines already have this feature. Hence these new algorithms allow transformations from one kind of window to another: linear to spherical etc. By implication regular pictures can be transformed automatically into their anamorphic equivalents and conversely.

    In the early days of their development it was frequently assumed that computers were merely a further example of another media. It is important to recognize that much more is involved. Earlier media regularly came with a rhetoric assuming that the new would replace the old. Hence, the introduction of papyrus was supposed to supplant cunieform tablets, the introduction of manuscripts replaced papyrus and the invention of printing was supposed to replace manuscript culture. Each of these new media called for a "simple" translation of the message from one medium to another. Computers are different. First the translation operation, which typically involves some scanning device, is only one step in the process. A second step entails electronic recognition of the parts such that one can edit, manipulate, and transform the original text. A third step entails taking that digital text and printing it out , i.e. back into print media. That which applies to words is being increasingly applied to pictures. Early versions used only two dimensional pictures. The latest three-D laser camera of the National Research Council of Canada allows this operation to occur in three dimensions. An object such as a jar or mask can be photographed from all sides, such that its image on the screen can be viewed from all sides. This image can in turn be "printed" in three dimensional form using methods akin to stereo-lithography. Other media are being added to this process such that one can take an audio input, translate it to a digital form and thn reproduce it either as an audio or as a verbal print output. In short, the computer is introducing a potential interoperability and translation process among all th media rather than a simple exercise of replacing one form by or with another. Many persons who speak of multi-media with respect to computers are not aware of the full implications of that term.

Virtual reality

    Virtual reality is greatly expanding our conceptions of the window both as tool and as image. In what was effectively a forerunner of this new technology, Myron Krueger used a virtual window in his Videodesk program. But instead of drawing on the surface of the window, he simply used it as a plane behind which one could draw images. The separation between the drawer and the object drawn which characterized Renaissance perspective was here transcended in an experience whereby one could at once draw on the window and manipulate the space represented by the window.

    The head mounted display version of virtual reality (cf. above pp. 143-149*) involves two television screens which function as two windows into scenes. Given their extreme closeness to the eye these scenes would appear distorted if they were true to life. By way of compensation, the scenes are deliberately distorted in order to appear regular when seen by the two eyes. This it will be noted is conceptually analogous to the anti-keystoning effects that are being introduced into theatre projections. Rather than have us experience the distortions that occur with regular images, we are expected to view images distorted in such a way that they will appear correct when seen from a given place.

Method Production Instruments Viewing Instruments

Perspectival painting Window Opaque surface

Photography Lens, Dark chamber Opaque surface

Holography Laser Transparent over opaque surface

Computer Computer, Screen, Software Computer, Screen, Software

Virtual Reality Computer, Screen, Software Computer, Screen, Software

Cameras Television Screen, HMD, Glove

Fig. 89. Basic methods and the technologies required for their production and viewing.

    Each step towards a more complex technology has introduced more instruments for both the viewing and the production of images. Hence as the window technique became more effective, a greater technical wall interposed itself between viewer and object (fig. 76). During the Renaissance, artists used linear perspective to represent a static space in a picture as determined by the position of a viewer looking at the scene from a given viewpoint. In virtual reality much more is involved. First, artists use perspective dynamically to create different spaces of the picture such that one can see how the relative sizes and positions of objects change as one travels through this space. Second, as one’s viewpoint in this space changes, one can move different persons and/or objects at will. Third, one can move through the space from the viewpoint of a person or an object such as an automobile moving through this space. Fourth, one can move through this space at a set distance from such a moving person or object. For instance, the World Editor in Dimension International’s software includes a plan view, perspective view, a North, West view and an East, South view (fig. 36). These possibilities, it will be noted, are a direct consequence of the innovations in computer graphics examined earlier (see above pp. 135-143). Hence, whereas Renaissance perspective was concerned mainly with the static space of the picture, recent developments in virtual reality integrate dynamic views of observers in their picture space. Which is one of the reasons why virtual reality has also played a major role in expanding the scope of perspective.

Canada Future scenarios building on the present

Europe Historical and projected objects with real landscapes

Japan Futuristic scenarios independent of present

United States Fictive scenarios blurring present and future.

Fig. 90. Cultural differences in approaches to virtual reality

    The possible uses of virtual reality vary with different cultures (cf. fig. 77). In Japan, the trend of cartoon films such as Akira (1987) and Sega games involve highly imaginative futuristic city-scapes with little reference to actual buildings in everyday experience. In Europe, there has been a trend to use virtual reality as a means of linking imaginary images with physical reality. A project by Renault superimposes a computer image of a prototype car, the Racoon, onto a real landscape. A project at the ETH in Zurich uses virtual reality to visualize real Roman ruins such as Aventicum, or the underlying structures of mediaeval monasteries. An Italian project by Antinucci, called the City of Giotto, uses virtual reality to re-construct the Upper Church of Saint Francis at Assisi such that one can go down (or up) its aisles, enter the space of any of the frescoes on the walls and explore their features. A virtual reality project of the Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung (GMD) at Schloss Birlinghoven reconstructs the interior of the castle, but warns: "What you see is never what you get". Another project of the GMD reconstructs a pulsating human heart and allows one to change one’s views of sections in real time.

    This European concern with visualizing hidden elements of existing physical structures is paralleled in Canada by a concern with visualizing potentially physical structures: hence more concern with design of future buildings than with the study of past buildings (often for purposes of conservation). In this respect Canada is closer to traditions of Europe than of the United States. The software of companies such as Alias and SoftImage typically serves as a tool for heightening our understanding of planned, existing, and possible objects rather than in creating visions with no (possible) basis in physical reality.

    Whereas Europeans and Canadians often focus on visualizing external objects, there is a trend in the United States towards visualizing processes that would otherwise be invisible. Some, such as Robinett, see virtual reality as an electronic expansion of human perception. More often, virtual reality is treated as an environment in which one can be immersed such that it can be seen as a direct extension of illusionistic worlds such as Back to the Future at the Universal Studios theme park and more generally of the celluloid recreations of Hollywood. Opinions differ concerning the extent to which this can imitate physical reality. For instance, Aukstakalnis and Blatner are convinced that it will not:

be possible to create realities so clear and complex that we won’t be able to perceive the difference between our everyday reality and a computer generated one....But the worlds that we use computers to create may eventually be so realistic, so enticing, and so interesting that we may intensely want to believe in them and they will become like mirages in the desert.

    Others, such as Pimentel and Teixeira, are more optimistic concerning the power of computers to simulate realistic effects:

Virtual reality is all about illusion. Its about computer graphics in the theatre of the mind. Its about the use of high technology to convince yourself that you’re in another reality, experiencing some event that doesn’t physically exist in the world in front of you....Simply, virtual reality, like writing and mathematics is a way to represent and communicate what you can imagine with your mind...and it can be shared with other people.

    In this view virtual reality is the the best means of externalizing the contents of the mind, an ultimate tool for exteriorization, for perfecting the extrovert. Ironically in a culture where the passive tendencies of television are a dominant mode, there is a danger that this tool for externalizing the interior, becomes a weapon for imposing onto the internal minds of most the carefully crafted external views of some few. This is a major problem.

    At a subconscious level there are further dangers. In the past, myth was traditionally one of the binding features of a society. This frequently occured in communal settings with a shaman or elder in a storytelling mode. Myths delved into the collective memory of a tribe or culture and used this experience to join members together. While verbalized and voiced in stories they remained largely internalized, insomuch that speaking about them in detail was reserved for a few individuals. In the latter twentieth century, myths, to the extent that they still exist, are being increasingly visualized and externalized in the form of video games, and role playing game such as Dungeons and Dragons. The imagery is increasingly personalized such that the adventures may link the individual participants but at the same time separate them from their other contemporaries. By externalizing and rendering public what was traditionally the domain of a few individuals, there is a danger that the mythic and the real worlds will be confused in new ways: that persons will attempt to live mythically in the so-called real world, that spaces of myth and spaces of the physical world will be conflated. In retrospect, we can see that the Renaissance, which used perspective to externalize religious narrative, also posed a threat to continued belief in their efficacy. Will the same prove true with myth in the late twentieth century? Or will this externalization of more elemental aspects of our semi-conscious traditions have more profound consequences? In any case, of interest for our purposes is that the European, Canadian, Japanese and American interpretations of virtual reality all entail extensions of perspective. Hence virtual reality is yet another reason for the rebirth of perspective in the latter twentieth century.

7. Objectification of the Subjective

    Erwin Panofsky, in Perspective as Symbolic Form, summarized the achievements of Renaissance perspective as resulting in: "a translation of psychophysiological space into mathematical space; in other words, an objectification of the subjective." We have suggested that this is not true: that Renaissance thinkers did not abandon their theories of psychophysiological space. They assumed that their theories of vision coincided with the principles of mathematical space that they applied to representation. In some of the stock cases that they used for demonstration the two did indeed coincide. And when thinkers such as Bosse confronted them with discrepancies between perspectival representation (in terms of projections) and Euclidean theories of vision (in terms of visual angles) members of the French Academy chose to abandon the strict principles of Renaissance perspective rather than those of Euclidean theories of vision.

    If Panofsky was wrong in his analysis of Renaissance events, his mention of "objectification of the subjective" identified a very important tendency of his own time. We have shown that this concern has continued to gain in importance since the mid-nineteenth century. In the latter twentieth century these trends have taken on a new level of significance. In a sense we have gone back to the Greek tradition which adjusted the shapes and sizes of objects in order that when viewed from a correct position they would look correct, the difference being that we now have reversible methods that allow us to move interchangeably between objective original and subjective versions.

    We now have traffic signs in a deliberately distorted anamorphic form on our streets in order that they will look correct when seen from the extreme angle of an approaching automobile driver. The preplanned distortions of a theatre image that looks correct after it has been keystoned; or the deliberately distorted images of the cameras on a head mounted display that look perfectly correct when seen from nearby, are two other manifestations of this trend. The window, which began as a tool for recording an objective world, has increasingly become an instrument whereby images of the objective world are transformed into subjectively convincing surrogates of objectivity.

    Animations were traditionally moving versions of given objects and persons. Recent developments have changed their function. Animations are increasingly becoming transformations from one person or object into another. The process is called morphing. We see it in the advertisements of a girl’s face that changes to that of boy; a black person into a white person; a youth into an old man and conversely. On the surface these transformations are as intriguing as they are clever. At the same time they pose difficult new philosophical problems. How is one able to identify which is or was the original object or image on which the transformations were based?

    In the Renaissance the window was an instrument that fixed a relation between an original object and a representation of that object. In the past century the window offered a means of transforming this representation of an object into a subjectively convincing image. In the past decade these transformative features have so much come into focus that it is well nigh impossible to trace the object that was the point of the departure for a series of images. Indeed with the rapid development of Computer Aided Design (CAD), and graphics packages that permit complete intervention, it is no longer possible to know whether there even exists an original object or whether the image sprang directly from the image-ination.

9. Re-contextualization

    During the Renaissance, perspective aimed at a representation that potentially copied an image of the physical world such that it created a coherent illusion of that physical world. Initially this quest involved mainly the medium of paint. By the Baroque period sculpture and architecture had been integrated within this framework and one could argue that the next centuries saw an extension of these principles culminating in the Viennese concept of the comprehensive work of art ("Gesamtkunstwerk").

    Not all art followed this ideal. Already in the sixteenth century there was a practice of combining elements of a series of ruins in a single composite picture. By the seventeenth century this had become the fashion in the art form known as capriccios. Even so these fanciful combinations remained within carefully defined limits. For instance, Pannini combined a series of Roman ruins in one painting and a series of modern Roman buildings in another. The capriccios shifted the physical locations of buildings. They questioned neither the principles of creating coherent illusionistic views of buildings nor of revealing the source of the original image. Even when it was hidden, the visual equivalent of a footnote or reference was always in place.

    The electronic versions of perspectival space have brought fundamental changes to this process. They entail a fragmentation in the process of creating illusion and amount to removing this implicit footnote to the original object in the physical world. In its simplest version an image of a location in the physical world may have superimposed on it an image from the world of animation as in Roger Rabbit or Terminator 2. Conversely, a computer animated space may have superimposed upon it the figure of a live person from the physical world as also happens in Roger Rabbit and more dramatically in Kurosawa’s Dreams where a modern spectator in a museum walks into two paintings of Van Gogh. In both of these cases the illusion of the context is quite separate from and provides no hint concerning the source of the isolated figures within them. Traditionally there was a challenge of making classical quotations which could and would be recognized. Notwithstanding, isolated demonstrations in the Hitchcock pavilion at Universal Studios, and occasional studies on the subject, the modern art appears to be in hiding the source (ars est celare artis in a new sense). Indeed, special effects have become the main theme of movie series such as FX (1986, 1991), and play a serious role in other movies such as Darkman (1991), Lawnmower Man (1992), and Ghost in the Machine (1994).

    Multi-media increases this process of fragmentation. For instance, in the preparation of the first full-length feature computer- animated film, an adaptation of Jules Verne’s, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1995), Channels software of SoftImage is used to copy information from sensors attached to the face of a live actor onto the face of a computer generated figure. As a result the facial expressions of this computer animated version of Captain Nemo are perfectly "realistic" but there is no way of knowing the source of this realism, namely the facial expressions of a given live actor (pl. 143-144).

Process Physical World Virtual World

Channels Software Sensors on Face Movements on Face of Model Figure

Virtual Reality Turning Head Turning Head

" " Moving Glove Moving Body

" Moving Other Parts No Effect

Fig. 91. Some examples of correspondences and non-correspondences between actions in the physical and the virtual world.

    With virtual reality this fragmentation process is even more complex. Hence turning the head in the physical world leads to a corresponding turning of the head in the virtual world. Turning the hand within a data-glove leads to a corresponding movement of the virtual body. Other systems use a hand controlled space-ball to introduce six degrees of freedom with respect to movement. In the case of other parts of the body there is no correspondence between motions in the physical and virtual worlds. As a result a beginner experiences considerable confusion because correlations are neither intuitive nor systematic.

    In the case of books and articles, scholars have developed the use of footnotes and references to document these sources and as a means of checking the reliability of any claims made. In the case of images, captions served an equivalent function. Because the medium of print brought to words and images a stability with respect to content, if changes were made they were d