Perspective

Definition

Perspective names the representational system that constructs space as a homogeneous mathematical order seen from a fixed point. In its theorized (Cartesian) form, space is "a continuous body or a space indefinitely extended in length, breadth, and height or depth, divisible into distinct parts" — three equivalent axes "without hierarchy and, therefore, homogenous." Perspective represents the world "from a fixed monocular viewpoint at a static moment in time, and as such, drastically simplified visual experience" (La Coe). After Descartes, only "the mathematically ordered gaze of the geometer could objectively analyze natural phenomena fixed by coordinates within Cartesian space."

Two consequences organize the concept in this wiki. First, the deception problem: because reflections and illusions "affect the eye in the same ordered correspondence of light rays" as real things, perspectival illusion deceives the eye itself — Descartes treated this as an obstacle to truth and opposed art forms that confuse the senses. Second, the embodied rejoinder: Pozzo's quadrature positioned an embodied observer within the constructed illusion, using the homogenous system to "re-center man within a system of meaning, both spatial and spiritual" — Baroque illusion "sought to recreate the center of the universe within uniform space." Paradoxically (via Judovitz), Descartes's own philosophy reduced the sensual experience of Nature to "a theater of illusions, mathematically determined."

A third, solidifying treatment comes from Michael Webb: perspective treated as a architectural material rather than a picture system. His unfinished Henley regatta painting depicts the landscape as "the volume of air, land, and water enclosed by a perspectival cone of vision, whose axis is parallel to the rowing lanes of the course, and whose apex is in the Cyclopean eye of the beholder" — and then solidifies it: "I have allowed myself the notion that the air within the cone has magically solidified. It can thus be removed from the overall landscape and examined independently like an ice core. By this move, though, the contents of the cone become components of an interior space and the wall of the cone a window to the nothingness beyond." The cone of vision becomes a sectionable solid (note: "The cone has been sectioned horizontally, thus making its top surface a parabola"), an interior extracted from representation; the beholder's gaze wounds it ("negative 'shadows' radiating from the beholder's eye, voids slashing through the ice core"). Where Pozzo joined fiction to real space at a fixed point, Webb extracts the fictional volume itself as a real interior — perspective's cone as architecture. See drive-in-house and inside-outside-dialectic.

A fourth, experiential-etymological treatment comes from Ursula Emery McClure and Michael A. McClure, who relocate the looking-words from picture-making to spatial experience. Prospect (from pro-, "forward") and aspect (from ad-, "to, at") both derive — like perspective's lineage of looking — from the Latin specere, "to look"; their prospect of the aspect is "the looking forward from how one perceives and the continuation of that experiential multiplicity." Where La Coe's Pozzo positioned an embodied observer at a painted convergence point, the McClures' Pantheon stages the centering architecturally: at the oculus "an interior that is designed to focus all of its energy to the center immediately reverses, placing the human at the center of the universe, and becoming the intersection of a universal x, y, and z axis" — the Cartesian coordinate crossing inhabited experientially rather than drawn. And their three exemplar analyses are explicitly structured by the perspectival apparatus the chapter's figures name "cones of vision, major and minor axis, and spatial continuum": prospect/aspect is the cone of vision rebuilt as a tenured condition (inside and looking-beyond at once) rather than a monocular picture. See prospect-of-the-aspect, axis-mundi.

Key Thinkers

• (Named in the source, not yet paged — see log: René Descartes — geometry as indefinitely extended homogeneous space; the passive eye; the doubted vision; the opposition to anamorphosis; reason analogized as light and sight.)
• (Named in the source, not yet paged — see log: Andrea Pozzo — the practitioner who inhabited the homogenous system, re-centering the observer "within a system of meaning, both spatial and spiritual.")
• Jodi La Coe — reconstructs the perspective/truth-illusion problematic and Pozzo's intervention within it.
• Michael Webb — perspective solidified: the perspectival cone extracted as an "ice core" interior; the driver's "Cyclopean line of sight" as the fixed datum around which the Drive-in House rotates.
• Ursula Emery McClure & Michael A. McClure — perspective experientialized: prospect and aspect from specere as the twin operations of a lived looking; the oculus placing the occupant at "the intersection of a universal x, y, and z axis."
• Lois Weinthal — the sibling system's auditor: her "orthographic hinge" (parallel lines, no vanishing point) answers Pérez-Gómez & Pelletier's "perspective hinge," and she proposes that the system evolve by the same route perspective already took — the anamorphic transformation of rules into "another reading" with retained precision.
• (Related, not yet paged: Martin Kemp, The Science of Art — the historiography of optical themes cited by La Coe; Louise Pelletier, Pérez-Gómez's co-author on Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge, cited by Weinthal.)

Related Concepts

• Quadrature — the architectural application of perspective: interior space extended into painted fiction at a fixed vantage point.
• Space — Cartesian homogeneous space is the wiki's account of space's negation: equivalent axes without hierarchy, against which phenomenological space (lived, existential, embodied) defines itself.
• Representation — perspective as the system that "represents the world" — and, at its architectural limit, constructs the interior it appears to depict.
• Perception — the deception of the senses: the eye as passive receptor requiring mental interpretation; illusion in the same "ordered correspondence of light rays" as the real.
• Embodiment — the alternative: the observer positioned within the illusion, the body's movement through the space revealing and destroying the effect.
• Phenomenal Transparency — the modern (Rowe & Slutzky) alternative to perspectival stasis: overlapping spatial readings perceived simultaneously rather than from one fixed point.
• Optic and Haptic Perception — Riegl's optic mode (long-range, perspectival) is the art-historical descendant of the same ocularcentric tradition Descartes philosophized.
• Interior Architecture — Webb's move makes the cone itself the discipline's product: "the contents of the cone become components of an interior space and the wall of the cone a window to the nothingness beyond."
• Orthographic Projection — the sibling system: converging rays against parallel lines; the two projection regimes share the demand for a flat picture plane and a still form, and Weinthal's chapter reads the orthographic hinge as the system where the temporal is excluded — the anamorphic precedent modeling how either system's rules could be transformed "into another reading."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Quadrature (La Coe 2018) — perspective as homogeneous Cartesian space; the passive eye and the deception of the senses; Descartes's opposition to illusion; Pozzo's embodied rejoinder.
• A history of style and the modern interior (Deyong 2018) — the modernist complaint against perspective: perspectival construction "reduces time to a static moment" and presents "a false picture of reality"; Cézanne and Cubism as the escape into duration (see space-time-continuum).
• Inside out (Webb 2018) — perspective treated as architectural material: the Henley painting's cone of vision ("apex… in the Cyclopean eye of the beholder") solidified and extracted "like an ice core" — the contents of the cone becoming "components of an interior space"; the moving beholder's gaze as "negative 'shadows'" slashing gashes in the solidified cone's wall.
• Inside Looking In: The Prospect of the Aspect (McClure & McClure 2018) — perspective experientialized: prospect and aspect both from specere ("to look"); the Pantheon's oculus "placing the human at the center of the universe, and becoming the intersection of a universal x, y, and z axis" — the coordinate crossing inhabited; the exemplar analyses structured by "cones of vision, major and minor axis, and spatial continuum." See prospect-of-the-aspect, axis-mundi.
• A pirouette on the orthographic hinge (Weinthal 2018) — perspective's sibling system audited, and perspective's own history re-read as method: Weinthal cites the "anamorphic drawing technique developed out of the conventions of perspective" during the baroque — "There is still precision in the anamorphic technique" — as the precedent for transforming a projection system's rules while retaining precision (via Pérez-Gómez & Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge, 1997, the book her title answers). Her target is the orthographic system's exclusion of the moving body ("the body becomes a blur, which the orthographic system does not like"), but the precedent is perspective's: the system whose conventions produced anamorphosis is the model for how any drawing system might evolve. See orthographic-projection, anamorphosis.
• source-notes/fuss-sanders-2006-berggasse-19-freuds-office

Open Questions

• Is Cartesian space a description of vision or its normalization — does the "mathematically ordered gaze" describe how the eye works or prescribe how the subject should see?
• Pozzo's rejoinder used the homogeneous system against itself (re-centering man within it): can architectural representation ever be non-Cartesian, or only re-centered?
• Deyong's modernist trajectory (Cézanne → De Stijl → Rowe & Slutzky) treats perspective as the stasis to be overcome; La Coe's Baroque episode treats it as the medium of a "transcendental interior experience." Are these two sides of one history of perspective's discontent?
• Webb solidifies the cone and then lets the beholder's movement gash it: does the ice core give perspective the body (a sectionable, woundable solid) that its static picture form denied it — or does extracting the cone destroy the system (the apex can no longer be a point of view once it is a sectioned parabola)?