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

    In Wolfenbüttel there were three individuals, unflinching in their support, whom I thank particularly: Professor Paul Raabe, then Director of the Herzog August Bibliothek; Dr. Sabine Solf, Leiterin des Forschungsprogramms and the late Dr. Hans-Heinrich Solf. There was also Dr. Marie-Luise Zarnitz, of the Volkswagen Foundation, who visited regularly from Hanover. At the library, Anne-Marie Deegen was exemplary in her helpfulness. Ulrich Kopp gave advice. Gaby (neé Jöckel) Lüddecke, heroically ordered seven meters of photocopies through interlibrary loan. Uwe Jumtow, and subsequently Miss Schultze, kindly drove me to Göttingen and helped in the search. At the Niedersächsische Staats-und Universitätsbibliothek Messieurs Grobe and Münther patiently introduced me to standard reference works (Art Index, Répertoire d'Art and R.I.L.A.); national book catalogues (Brinkmans, Estreicher, Lorenz, Pagliaini, etc.); then, via the mysteries of the 800-volume Real-Katalog, to specialized bibliographies (Draud, Lipenius, Murr, Murhard, Riccardi and thirty others, listed in Sources, Index 1.A.). Reimar Eck, head of user services, was tireless in his patient help and counsel.

    By August 1986, the bibliography was based on the lists of 125 libraries. In addition books and journals had been consulted in 34 libraries, particularly Göttingen, Leiden, London, Madrid, Paris, Rome and Wolfenbüttel. Cooperating libraries, plus many of the librarians who helped to find or answer queries concerning rare and spurious works are listed in the Sources (Index 1.C).

    As the information arrived it was transferred to handwritten file cards. In August 1986, Dr. Richard Dolen began preparing a preliminary programme which permitted the information to be entered into an IBM PCAT using a DBase III Plus system. At the Getty Center, the 15,000 titles were entered into a machine largely by Coley Grundmann and partly by Joseph Leon, with some help from Victor Bonino and Clay Stalls, two research assistants (September 1986-June 1987). Since then the computer version has continued to develop with the help of Alan Brolley (1987-1989), Paul Chvostek (1990), Jerry Szazman (1991-1992), with graphics by Eric R. Dobbs (1990-1991).

    To write the Sources (vol.1) took three years (1987-1990): to write the Literature (vol. 3) has taken another four years (1990-1994). A number of scholars have kindly read drafts or sections of the typescript: Professors B.A.R. Carter, André Corboz, M. Dalai Emiliani, Samuel Edgerton Jr., Sir Ernst Gombrich, and Rocco Sinisgalli.

    The larger vision underlying this project owes much to my friend, Dr. Rolf Gerling (Zürich), who in the spring of 1981 generously took me on a three-month tour of the Mediterranean. As he drove the range rover its 12,000 miles from the straits of Gibraltar, through the mountains and plains of Tunisia, Sicily and Greece, along the coasts to Tarsus and finally back across the vast expanses of Turkey, he played Socrates, and challenged me to articulate a new approach to knowledge. Other friends, Udo Jauernig (Wolfenbüttel), and Ian Stuart (London) listened many hours, as this approach gradually evolved into a multivalent bibliography. In the spring of 1986 a series of three lectures at Brigham Young University, generously arranged by my friend Professor Dan Blickman, helped clarify my ideas, as did a lecture with the Gesellschaft für Klassifikation in Münster arranged by Dr. Ingetraut Dahlberg. In Toronto my ideas were further developed with my colleague, Professor Ian Hacking, and friend, Sergio Sismondo, Jr. This led to the idea of collecting systematically all material in the field in the form of a knowledge package which was first presented at two world conferences (Toronto and Milan, May 1991). Eric Dobbs helped in that process.

    This volume opens with a survey of debates concerning the origins of perspective. An outline of early theories is given, followed by the contributions of various disciplines including philosophy, art history, psychology, social science, Marxism and the studies of the history of printing. New approaches are suggested by considering different stages of development and different media. In terms of art history the role of narrative is re-assessed. In terms of history of science the interplay of optics, mathematics and science is explored in conjunction with instruments. It is shown that these developments brought new links between observation and representation; that the origins of perspective are in fact linked with a re-definition of knowledge itself that began in the latter half of the thirteenth century.

    A second chapter examines literature on the history of perspective in terms of major chronological periods: pre-history; Greek and Roman, Mediaeval, Renaissance, Baroque, Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. In the interests of clarity work on individual practitioners and theorists has been relegated to alphabetical lists in appendixes one and two in order that these can be used conveniently for reference. The historical survey includes sections on pseudo-perspectival techniques in non-western cultures, particularly China, Japan and Russia, plus a brief survey of contributions made by histories of mathematics, introductions within the treatises and bibliographies.

    Chapter three turns to the history of relations between mathematics, vision and representation. Involved is a fundamental debate about the nature of perspective. Already in Antiquity there were two basic approaches to these problems. One school, championed by Plato, assumed that our knowledge of space is innate. This tradition which continued in the seventeenth century with Descartes and Malebranche has emerged as the nativist camp in America including the Gestalt school (Koffka, Arnheim) and Gibsonian school (Gibson, Kennedy). A second approach, epitomized by Aristotle, emphasized the role of the senses, experience and learning, in the development of spatial vision and representation. This tradition continued in the Renaissance with Leonardo and found particular support among English thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke and Berkeley. This empiricist school was championed by Helmholtz in the nineteenth century and in America by Ames and the transactionalists in the twentieth century. A survey will be made of the major arguments of these schools with respect to perspective in order to consider afresh a fundamental question concerning its status: Is perspective an objective method or merely a convention?

    Chapter four reviews what has been written on various technical applications of perspective. A section is devoted to scenography, inlaid wood (intarsia), ceiling painting (quadratura), trompe l'oeil, architecture, gardens and the environment respectively. Literature on alternative methods such as inverted perspective, anamorphosis, cylindrical, conical and spherical perspective is examined, as is literature on perspectival reconstructions and about perspectival instruments, such as the camera obscura and the pantograph, cameras and more recently, computers, holography and virtual reality.

    The enormous significance of perspective is largely due to its metaphorical use in the sense of point of view, standpoint, or even plan. In literature the earliest examples of this metaphorical usage with respect to proto-perspective can be traced back to c. 1800 B.C., themes which are taken up again in mediaeval literature where there are interesting parallels between the rise of an individual viewpoint in both the literature and art of the French troubadours. Renaissance and baroque developments are considered, then later contributions including Goethe and Herder's reinterpretation of Shakespeare as a perspectival author, Percy Lubbock's claim (1921) that perspective in the sense of point of view should be the criterion for all literature, and recent developments in literary theory (e.g. Canisius, Guillen, Japp, Lintvelt, Uspensky). In philosophy, this metaphorical application of perspective emerged in the late seventeenth century through Leibniz. It was furthered by Kant and Hegel, yet it was mainly due to the neo-Kantians in the late nineteenth century that perspective became an important philosophical concept. The history of these philosophical developments leading to twentieth century concepts such as perspectivism and perspectivity is traced. Subsequent sections of this fifth chapter focus on the metaphorical role of perspective in other fields including ethnology, anthropology, psychology (perceptual, developmental,conceptual), with some attention to emerging fields such as perspective taking and cognitive psychology), linguistics, psychiatry, sociology and religion.

    While much has been written on the role of given individuals or specific problems, there have been surprisingly few attempts to assess the implications of perspective as a whole. In the sixteenth century Vasari did so largely in terms of its importance for artistic realism. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought increasing awareness of its role in mathematics. The twentieth century has seen attention to the importance of perspective for cultural history (Panofsky, Klein, Gombrich, Damish), semiotics (Saint-Martin) as well as science (Edgerton). A final chapter entitled transformations re-assesses the role of perspective in the twentieth century in an attempt to explain why perspective has become such a fundamental tool in both the production and understanding of visual and other images. Here there is emphasis on the changing role of the window in new approaches to problems of correspondence and non-correspondence.

    Notes to the various chapters follow as do one hundred pages of plates which serve both to illustrate points in the text and survey some of the key attempts at perspectival reconstruction found in the secondary literature. There are five appendixes. A first lists major practitioners of perspective and reviews basic literature concerning these. A second appendix does the same for major theorists. Even a brief perusal of these studies of individual artists brings to light patterns in scholarship: for instance, that while there have been over 120 articles on Brunelleschi and nearly a hundred on both Alberti and Piero della Francesca, there are at least 10 authors in the sixteenth century about whom almost nothing has been written (e.g. John Dee, Augustin Hirschvogel, Georg Has, or Paul Pfintzing). Appendix three surveys comments concerning foreshortening and perspective in Vasari's Lives of the artists (1558). Appendix four outlines the basic categories in Lanser's (1981) theory of perspectivity. Appendix five gives a summary of distinctive typological traits of literature found in Lintvelt (1981).

    Perspective is of fundamental importance for several reasons. As a systematic method of representation it is one of the distinguishing characteristics of advanced technological societies. In the Renaissance it was an example par excellence of western achievement. Since then it has spread to most countries of the world, and brought with it a proliferation of many alternative methods, including cylindrical, conic, and spherical perspective. These alternatives have confirmed that perspective is not a technical straightjacket, but in fact our most powerful means thus far in expanding horizons of the imagination. Its methodological and metaphorical implications are therefore no coincidence. Studies during the past decades have revealed that perspective leads back to questions about the nature of drawing and representation. What is a picture? What is art? No other animal has developed anything approaching these skills. Hence perspective confronts us ultimately with one of the most basic expressions of the human condition.

    To survey the literature of a field is a task as dangerous as it is thankless. Whoever attempts to be exhaustive risks plunging self and reader in nigh endless detail, while the person who aims to be selective sails between a Scylla of ignorance and a Charybdis of conscious omission. The motivations for silence are many: one may be aware of an article, recognize its derivative quality, find no pleasure in accusations of plagiarism, and choose instead to pass on without comment. On the other hand, no matter how informed one is, there will inevitably be some contributions that remain unknown to one and to which critics will draw attention. Hence, the goal of this work must lie in presenting a map of the field, providing readers with coordinates, such that they can place individual contributions within the context of a bigger picture. It is hoped that when they discover gaps and omissions they will inform this cartographer.