chapter four

Realism and Perspective:

From Renaissance
­Painting to Digital Media

w hat do we mean when we describe a painting, photograph, or media

text as “realistic”? In the case of photography, a technique historically
linked to mechanical objectivity, realism is sometimes tied to ethical ideas about
whether and how accurately photographs represent events as they occurred. We
may expect photojournalists to observe “realist” conventions rather than using the
camera in a highly interpretative manner. Realism has been associated with many
different styles and meanings and has been fraught with questions about authentic-
ity. In late nineteenth-century American journalism, the idea of realism was widely
embraced as the profession tried to separate itself from politics to show the social
conditions of everyday life. Growing concern about propaganda and the journal-
ist’s status as “untrained accidental witness” operating with “cultural blinders” led
some to hope that the mechanical method of photography might provide greater
“objectivity” than the written report.1
“Realism” then became more strongly associated with a particular pictorial pho-
tographic style, social realism, associated in this context with the n
­ ineteenth-century
photography of humanitarian social reformers such as the social realist photogra-
phers Jacob Riis and John Thomson. Riis was a Danish immigrant reporter who
used sketches and a camera, after the introduction of flash photography, to reveal
immigrant workers’ living conditions. In the 1890 photographs included in the
book How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, Riis
used the new technology of flash photography to reveal living conditions in an
unlit tenement room typical of those occupied by New York factory workers, who
had neither the time nor the income to clean and make repairs.

I 139
 In Chapter 3, we showed a tenement photograph by Lewis Hine (fig. 3.2) in a
discussion about the built environment of urban factory workers. Before Hine, Riis
used the visual medium of photography to raise awareness about the living con-
ditions of the poor through journalism, lectures, and books for a middle-class and
wealthy audience. His work, like that of Hine, is widely noted for its photographic
realism. Most of us probably assume that we know “photographic realism” when
we see it, but we may not necessarily associate it with scientific objectivity. Rather,
we may recognize its roots in an older style of documentation in which conven-
tions such as grainy image texture and black-and-white film, which reflected the
filmstock and technology available at the time, tug on our heartstrings and shape
our politics through our feelings.
Furthermore, definitions of realism change significantly over time. Since the
1980s, we have seen a dramatic rise in the use of computer graphics to modify dig-
ital photographs. The convergence of photography and digital imaging has resulted
in ethical as well as aesthetic questions in what are by now heavily intersected
fields. In the 1980s, designers and computer scientists working in the growing area
of computer graphics raised the question of whether or not photographic realism
was really the correct standard for the medium.2 There are no universal standards for
realism in computer graphics, though there has been much discussion and research
about the matter. Color scientist James Ferwerda classifies computer graphics real-
ism into three categories: physical realism, in which the image provides the same
visual stimulation as the scene it represents; photorealism, in which the image
produces the same visual response as the scene; and functional realism, in which
the image provides the same visual information as the scene. But we might also
consider how computer imaging references other genres and styles such as action
cinema, painting, and flight simulation training programs. Each brings a different
set of meanings, memories, and experiences.
In fine art, realism has taken a variety of forms and been associated with
a range of meanings. As in journalism, fine art realism has been strongly asso-
ciated with political movements and social reform. For instance, realism in
­nineteenth-century France was a post-revolution movement in which painters
chose everyday subject matter, including scenes of laboring workers and indus-
trial life. Rendering these without romantic heroism, they rejected the sentimen-
tal scenes of bourgeois life that were more common in French painting of the
Romantic period.
In this chapter we consider realism in a range of visual cultures, focusing on
the origins and legacies of perspective. In some cases, the same conventions have
been linked to different political agendas. In earlier chapters we noted Saussure’s
dictum that the link between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary, shifting,
and contextual. Here we demonstrate that it is important to look at the s­ ignifier’s
­production—the processes through which codes and conventions emerge in con-
text. The history of visual art and culture reveals many styles associated with realism

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 FIG. 4.1
Painted terracotta funerary fi­ gures
from the mausoleum of the first
Qin emperor, Qin dynasty,
c. 221–206 BCE

(many realisms) and many motives and

meanings linked to imaging conventions
such as perspective, which is strongly
associated with many forms of realism.
We focus on perspective because it is a
cornerstone of pictorial realism across
painting, photography, film, video, and computer graphics. By tracing the ways
different types of perspective have developed, we show how practices of looking
and image-making have been tied to conventions and practices used to know and
experience “the real.”
Artworks and artifacts have long been invested with special powers beyond
their role in basic symbolic communication. Consider the tomb of the emperor of
China’s Qin dynasty, which dates back to 200 BCE. In 1974, Chinese farmers dig-
ging a well found an army of 7,500 life-size clay warriors and horses. Each figure is
unique. Archaeologists believe the figures stood in for actual soldiers, who during
the earlier Shang dynasty would have been buried with the dead emperor. This may
be seen as a kind of realism insofar as the statues are substitutes for actual soldiers
(who must have been grateful for this change!).
A tenet in photography is that the realist image depicts something as an
observer saw it. The function of visual art and photography, however, has not
always been to reproduce objects, people, and events as the
FIG. 4.2
observer would see them; for instance, much modern and con-
Fish and loaves fresco, Chapel of
temporary art has been devoted to representing the world in the Good Shepherd, Catacombs
new ways. In the few examples of early Christian art that have of San Callisto, Rome, Italy, after
150 CE
survived (the second-century CE painted ceilings of Rome’s
underground burial catacombs, for exam-
ple, in fig. 4.2), pictorial elements appear
to have served as symbolic communication
and expression among members of marginal
and persecuted religious sects whose public
religious expression was severely restricted.
Creators of the ceiling paintings communi-
cated through symbols and icons. Fishes and
loaves, for example, probably signified a sac-
ramental rite. Variations in scale and mixing
of graphic and decorative elements with rep-
resentational ones in a single scene suggest

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 that concern with symbols and icons overshadowed concern with reproduction
(making things look as they might to the eye perceiving them).
By the beginning of the Renaissance (the fourteenth century), many painters
labored to reproduce scenes as they would have appeared to observers. It is said that
painting and sculpture became more “scientific” during the Renaissance because
artists began to use mechanical devices to see, measure, and render. However, this
does not mean that art became less spiritual and emotional at this time. Rather, sci-
ence was associated with spiritual beliefs and meanings. When Renaissance paint-
ers organized the canvas according to optical laws, rather than to denote symbolic
value and meaning, they were in many cases working under church patronage. The
formal science of organizing pictorial space on the model of the embodied eye took
on great religious and philosophical significance during this period.
Realism is often defined in opposition to abstraction, yet such distinctions
require scrutiny. Some twentieth-century abstract styles, such as Pop art, have
incorporated some realist elements. Writing in the 1960s, art critic Lawrence
­Alloway proposed that Pop art “is neither abstract nor realistic, but has contacts in
both directions.”3 Whereas French Resistance era art critic Jean Cassou proposed
that “a realistic movement in art is always revolutionary,” art critic Donald Cuspit,
writing in the late modernist era, countered that “insofar as Pop art is realistic, it
is reactionary.”4 But Jean Cassou also wrote, regarding nineteenth-century Spanish
realism, that “the word realism is one of the most vague and ambitious of the
vocabulary of aesthetics.” In fact, he noted, “there are thousands of ways for a
painter to be a realist.”5 As these statements show, realism is a broadly applied
term, and the division between realism and abstraction is not exactly clear or stable.

Types of Realism
We noted earlier that much “realism” has been political. Twentieth-century Russian
realism is a strong case in point, demonstrating how the term realism came to des-
ignate two very different styles and two very different political views. In 1920, the
Russian brothers Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner wrote and circulated the “Realistic
Manifesto” to capture the key principles of the Soviet Constructivist art movement
that arose after the 1917 October Revolution brought down Russia’s tsarist autoc-
racy and launched the communist Soviet Union. The manifesto criticized the modern
art forms of Impressionism, Cubism, and Futurism, condemning their use of line,
color, volume, and mass as mere illusionism. It championed art practice grounded
in the material reality of a space and time undergoing technological transformation.
Gabo designed the sculpture Standing Wave, pictured here, in 1919–20, just as the
manifesto was being drafted. Industrial materials were new to the region, hard to
find, and had not been used by fine artists before. Gabo demonstrated to his stu-
dents the modern technological principles of kinetics. Drawing from the branch of

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physics studying motion and its causes, Gabo
emphasized space and time as the basis of
change in social life. This sculpture’s move-
ment, spurred when the vertical metal element
vibrates, creates a wave of physical movement
in volumetric space that is visible as blur in the
photograph. The manifesto called for artists
to actively embrace the new reality of the sci-
entific, industrial, and technological materials
and forms through which the Soviet society
was being rebuilt. It also insisted that this new
dynamic art be displayed in everyday public
spaces rather than in galleries and museums.
The Constructivist’s Realistic Manifesto
proposed that geometric abstraction and
objective form best represented the mod-
ernizing Soviet state and its forward-looking
citizenry. Emphasizing experimentation and
an avant-garde approach to art as a means
through which to advance change in public FIG. 4.3

ideology, the manifesto reflected Leninist Bol- Naum Gabo, Kinetic Construction
(Standing Wave), 1919–20, replica
shevik vanguard tenets. 1985 (metal, wood, electric motor,
Man with a Movie Camera, a film made by 616 × 241 × 190 mm)
Dziga Vertov in 1929, is another classic exam-
ple of Constructivist realist abstraction. Though the film was made five years after
Soviet Premier Vladimir Lenin’s death, it embodies many of the principles of art
made under his leadership in the early post-revolution years. Man with a Movie
Camera is a montage film of graphic patterns and abstract compositions, edited to
match the pace of change in Soviet everyday life after the 1917 October Revolution.
To experience the rhythm of the film was to experience the breathless industrial
transformation of the state. Born Denis Kaufman, Dziga Vertov chose a pseudonym
that in Russian means “spinning top,” a name that references his excitement about
the new Soviet state. Film form reflected the vanguard spirit, inspiring painters,
photographers, poster artists, architects, and sculptors to incorporate movement in
their creations. Vertov’s newsreels of the 1920s, titled Kino Pravda (or film truth),
captured Russian life on the streets as viewed through the eyes of a “spinning top”
cinematographer. These newsreels were taken across the vast country by train and
projected on walls and the sides of trains in towns where no theaters yet existed.
Man with a Movie Camera is organized around the standpoint of the title’s cam-
eraman, who moves through the dizzying spectacle of new urban structures, his
human-machine camera eye jumping from sight to sight. Although it does not

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 FIG. 4.4
contain conventional point-of-view camerawork and editing,
Screen shot from film Man
with a Movie Camera, dir. Dziga the film incorporates the cameraman as the figure through
Vertov, 1929 whom the spectator sees urban life. The cameraman scouts
shots on the street and squats dangerously in the path of an
oncoming train. Like Margaret Bourke-White in her documentation of the Chrysler
Building, he even perches atop buildings to capture the modernizing city. Double
exposures render his gaze not so much surveillant and god-like as immersed in
everyday life, like the subject of de Certeau’s city streets described in Chapter 3.
The “spinning top” destabilizes the gaze. Like Bourke-White, he invites us to see
industrial progress as awesome. In a scene filmed in a movie theater, the camera-
man documents hundreds of mechanical folding seats as they open in unison, as
if the chairs, invested with machine agency, welcome Soviet citizens to sit down
and enjoy Vertov’s film.
Man with a Movie Camera embodies realism in its attention to the everyday
Soviet life, even as this content is shot and edited in a fragmented, prismatic, and
nonnarrative style. This approach reproduces the real pace and rhythm of post-
1917 Soviet life and its physical and material forms. However, in Soviet society
ideas about realism changed dramatically within a few short years. After Lenin’s
death in 1924, the Soviet leader Josef Stalin rejected the vanguard approach, claim-
ing the work was too abstract for the majority of the populace to understand or
appreciate. Over several decades, Stalin mandated a turn back to a classical picto-
rial style that had prevailed before the revolution. This revived style became known
as Soviet Socialist Realism. Thus, the materials-based, formal abstract realism out-
lined in the Realistic Manifesto was undercut by another very different, even anti-
thetical approach to realism. Socialist Realism was the official, state-sanctioned
art form from the late 1920s until the late 1960s. This shift to pictorial realism
is represented here by a 1934 painting by Serafima Ryangina, which uses bright,

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cheery colors and a pictorial style to depict
happy, healthy workers installing cables on
an electrical transmission tower high in the
Soviet mountains during the post-revolution
modernization period.
With Social Realism, however, the
Stalinist Soviet state used art to promote
feelings of nationalism and support for gov-
ernment ideologies to the exclusion of other
views and styles. At the height of European
and American modernist formalism, this style
dominated across the Soviet Union. Under
the pictorial realism mandate, it became
dangerous for artists working in communist
countries to make abstract works, as they
were viewed as a disservice to state ideology. FIG. 4.5
Serafima Ryangina, Higher and
Though some artists continued to produce
Higher, 1934 (paint on canvas)
abstract work, they were questioned, perse-
cuted, imprisoned, and exiled to Siberian work
camps, risking death for their art. This climate of political opposition continued in
the Soviet Union even after Stalin’s death in 1953. But “unofficial” art continued to
be made and shown despite these prohibitions and dangers. Exhibitions were held
covertly in artists’ own apartments, at great risk. In this photograph, we see docu-
mentation of a covert apartment exhibition of “unofficial” art.
In 1974, with censorship and surveillance of “unofficial” artists still in place, the
abstract painters Oscar Rabine and Evgeny Rukhin organized a now-famous public
display of the abstract art being made by more than thirty artists who defied the
state mandate. The exhibition was unique in
that the group had received permission from
the state to display the works. The autho-
rized location was ­outdoors—a neglected
park field on the outskirts of Moscow, far
enough away from the city center to attract
attention, but close enough for Moscow’s
international press to arrive by public

FIG. 4.6
Works by Dezider Tóth on display
in Depozit, an unofficial exhibition
space for nonconformist art in
Tóth’s apartment at 1 Moscow
Street, Bratislava, Slovakia,
ca. 1976–77

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 FIG. 4.7
Evgeny Ruhkin, Composition with
Icon, 1972 (paint on canvas,
98 × 99 cm)

transportation. Reporter Joseph Backstein

recalls arriving late to a scene of mayhem.
Thugs hired as “civil servants” by the local
authorities were tossing paintings into
trucks, crushing works with a bulldozer, and
dispersing spectators with water canons as
a torrential rain fell, causing further destruc-
tion and chaos.6 Some of the journalists
present were beaten up but managed to
document the scene. The next day the New
York Times ran a front-page story about the
exhibition. Many of the artists were questioned by the authorities and subsequently
emigrated, and organizer Evgeny Ruhkin shortly thereafter died in his apartment
under mysterious circumstances. Within weeks of the international publicity sur-
rounding this event, the state authorized another exhibition of abstract works and
the climate began to shift. Thus, we can see how the style of abstraction, one brand
of realism, was seen as a threat to Soviet ideology even as late as the 1970s, while
another brand of realism, the pictorial approach, was used as a political tool to main-
tain state power and control over ideology.
Soviet Socialist Realism coincided with French Poetic Realism, yet another form
of realism that served a different political agenda. This was an approach to filmmak-
ing during the 1930s that developed in opposition to the narrative film style that
prevailed in the mainstream French film industry. Advocates of Poetic Realism felt
that French mainstream industry films pandered to a complacent bourgeoisie. The
new style, influenced by Surrealism and associated with filmmakers sympathetic to
the French Popular Front (an alliance of left-wing political groups), was dark and
lyrical. The term realism refers to the fact that films made in this style tended to dra-
matize the social conditions of the French working class, mostly through fictional
stories featuring tragic antiheroes. This movement includes such films as Marcel
Carné’s Children of Paradise (1945) and Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1938) and
The Rules of the Game (1939).
French Poetic Realism inspired yet another form of realism: Italian Neorealism,
a film style of the late 1940s and 1950s. The Italian Neorealists included Michelan-
gelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, and Vittorio De Sica, direc-
tors who created films commenting through allegory and allusion upon Italy’s bleak
economy and dire politics after the 1943 fall of Mussolini’s Fascist regime. Using
untrained actors from the Italian working class and poor and filming on location

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 FIG. 4.8
Screen shot from film Rome,
Open City, dir. Roberto Rossellini,
1945

in the urban ghettoes of Rome and

the poverty-stricken rural south, the
Italian Neorealist directors intro-
duced new styles of narrative fic-
tion filmmaking that included ironic
and farcical political allegory (as in
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1966 Hawks
and Sparrows) and stark depictions
of poverty and political despair
(Roberto Rossellini’s 1946 Paisan).
These directors shot on grainy black-and-white stock evoking war-era documentary
newsreels and shunned the pompous styles of prewar Italian film and literature, the
industry studios in Rome, and the happy endings typical of American Hollywood
films. Poetic Realism and Italian Neorealism were associated with a camera style
championed by French film critic André Bazin, who proposed that the long take
(as opposed to Hollywood’s editing style of many cuts) and staging of scenes in
deep space, using deep-focus cinematography (as opposed to shallow sets shot in
shallow focus), allowed these films to lay bare everyday realities.7 This still from
Rossellini’s 1945 film Rome: Open City shows the staging of a scene in deep space.
The shot is carefully staged and framed so that action is visible in many parts of
the frame at once.
Each style of realism discussed thus far expressed a particular worldview spe-
cific to its era and politics. As we saw in the case of the Constructivist artists and
the Socialist Realist painters, what makes up realism in a given political time and
place can be subject to intense contestation, and engaging in one form of realism
over another can be a political choice that may incur risk and impact one’s career. In
all cases, realism has been a concept levied powerfully in the expression of political
movements through visual form.
In his book The Order of Things, Michel Foucault used the term episteme to
describe the way that an inquiry into truth and the real is organized in a given era.
An episteme is an accepted, dominant mode of acquiring and organizing knowl-
edge in a given historical period. Understanding the work of signs is one way we
can identify an era’s episteme or dominant worldview. Each historical period has
a different episteme—that is, a different way of ordering things or organizing and
representing knowledge about things. Each of these different realisms demonstrates
the different epistemes of its context. The episteme of Constructivism ordered art
according to a Soviet revolutionary theory of structure as the real basis of a society,

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 prioritizing the value of industrial materials and forms and their signifying power
in embodying the meanings of the new society. The episteme of Socialist Realism
entailed a belief that returning to the familiar codes, conventions, and materials of
traditional pictorial conventions would promote national conformity with the new
state ideology. Between these epistemes there was a shift toward dissemination of
political ideals and away from innovation of form.
Writing about photography and film in the 1960s and 1970s, Bazin pro-
posed that realism is tied to the optics of the camera’s lens. It is important to
understand how social and political meanings of truth and the real are attached
to different formulas for spatial representation. We approach this topic through
the subject of perspective in the next section in order to underscore our point
that form and method do not simply convey meaning and epistemic values; they
produce them.

Perspective
Perspective is a set of techniques for depicting spatial depth within two-dimensional
pictorial space. Suggesting physical depth is not inherently a more realist approach
to organizing an image field. Plato regarded techniques for rendering depth as a
kind of deception. We may trace the roots of perspective back to early sources such
as Euclid’s optical studies demonstrating that light travels in straight lines, or the
Opticae Thesaurus Alhazeni (1572), a Latin translation of the tenth-century writ-
ings of Abu Ali Al-hasen Ibn Alhasen (Alhazen), a mathematician and astronomer
from Basrah (Iraq) who spent most of his career in Spain. Renaissance perspective
exemplifies that era’s integration of science and art. We are interested in perspec-
tive’s emergence as both a representational method and a scientific and artistic
metaphor for a dominant episteme. The use of perspective in a work has signified
realism across different periods, from the Renaissance to the present. Our focus on
perspective allows us to consider the ways in which images can function not only
as representations of space, but also as ways of seeing that are formally integral to
worldviews.
During the scientific revolution that took place from the mid-fifteenth through
the seventeenth centuries, developments in navigation, astronomy, and biology
were linked to radical changes in the European worldview. These changes eroded
the role of the Church in cultural and political authority. Many new scientific ideas,
such as Galileo’s theories about planetary movement, were seen as a threat to the
Church and were the source of struggle. Galileo was tried for heresy because of
his scientific ideas. However, by the eighteenth century science had emerged as
a dominant social force. The Enlightenment, an eighteenth-century intellectual
movement, saw an embrace of science and ideologies of rationalism and progress.
The power of human reason, it was believed, would overcome superstition, and
scientific knowledge would overtake ignorance and bring prosperity through the

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technical mastery of nature, introducing
justice and order to human affairs. Ratio-
nalism and the elevation of science and
technology, trends associated with philos-
opher and mathematician René Descartes,
were established as strong ideologies in
this time period and would lay the founda-
tions for modernity.
The linear perspective system demon-
strated by the goldsmith and architect
FIG. 4.9
Filippo Brunelleschi in the early 1400s is widely Illustration of Brunelleschi
regarded as a major turning point in perspec- with mirror showing building,
tive’s emergence as a dominant way of organiz- c. 1410–1415

ing two-dimensional visual space. Brunelleschi

conceived of the picture as a kind of mirror or window frame through which one
sees the world. A famous story told about Brunelleschi by his biographer Antonio
Manetti concerns perspectival drawing.
Brunelleschi, the story goes, painted a precise drawing onto the surface of a
mirror: the outlines of the baptistery of the Florence cathedral, for which he would
later design a dome that would be regarded as his most important architectural
accomplishment. When he continued the lines beyond the point where the build-
ings ended, he noted that they converged at the horizon. He had viewers face the
baptistery and then peer through the back of his mirror-painting via a small peep-
hole he had drilled into in its center. Another mirror was then positioned facing the
viewer, allowing the viewer to see that the painting looked nearly identical to the
actual peephole view.8 Brunelleschi’s system differed from earlier, more intuitive
and empirical forms of perspective in its use of instruments to measure distances
with accuracy against the real structure. Not only did a drawing depict a build-
ing, the building’s plan could be derived and even reproduced from that drawing.
Brunelleschi studied classical Greek columns and architectural forms to decipher
the measurement system the Greeks used to arrive at what he regarded as perfect
designs, like those found in nature.
The earliest known publication on linear perspective as a geometric system was
written by the Renaissance scholar Alberti, who described linear perspective first
in Latin (in De Pictura, 1435) and then in an Italian version (Della Pittura, 1436)
that made the principles of perspective available to artists who were literate but not
Latin scholars. “I first draw a rectangle of right angles,” he wrote, “which I treat just
like an open window through which I might look at what will be painted there.”9
Mathematical and optical rules that he argued were derived from nature itself are
described as the source for this system, which is illustrated in this diagram. To
demonstrate this system, he used the example of a floor composed of square tiles.
The point marked “V” is the vanishing point toward which the parallel lines of the

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 FIG. 4.10
Illustration from Leon Battista
Alberti, De Pictura, 1435

tiled floor converge, giving the effect that

the floor recedes into space, much like the
road where Pina runs in the frame from
Rome, Open City discussed earlier.
Variations on this perspective system
would be devised with two and three vanishing points, but in all models a single,
fixed spectator position remained the conceptual anchor. As Anne Friedberg writes
in her book The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, the trope of the window
as the frame through which seeing is organized has a surprisingly long and relatively
uncontested life in practices of mimetic representation, from Brunelleschi to the
digital era.10 Friedberg emphasizes that Alberti’s window was both a method and a
metaphor for organizing space. The window as organizing tool for perception has
had a long life that, she suggests, has culminated in the era of the computer screen,
which may offer a view of multiple frames and different perspectives at once.
Brunelleschi drew the cathedral in part because he needed to know more about
its structure to build its dome. Architectural drawing relies on a precise representa-
tional system emphasizing the measurability of basic forms in space, so the drawing
can serve as a model for a future space, and not just a representation of an existing,
real space. Brunelleschi’s goals were at first quite different from Renaissance artists
representing religious views and stories. When Renaissance artists incorporated
perspective into their paintings of biblical scenes, they often used buildings and
distant landscapes to reference the new tool for indicating structures in deep space
that Alberti had documented.
The individual body viewed close up
was a less easy object to fit into the per-
spective formula. In Sandro Botticelli’s
Cestello Annunciation (1489), a tempera
painting, the archangel Gabriel and the
Virgin Mary are situated in the foreground.
They are standing in an interior space on
a tile floor, the lines of which emphasize
linear perspective and a single vanishing
point, which can be found in the middle of

FIG. 4.11
Sandro Botticelli, Cestello
­Annunciation, 1489 (tempera on
wood panel, 62½ × 59")

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 FIG. 4.12
Simone Martini and Lippo
Memmi, The Annunciation, 1333
(tempera and gold on panel,
5 ")
72½ × 82∕8

the horizon line made visible in the

open door frame behind Gabriel. Dis-
tant buildings are strung along the
horizon. The viewer is drawn to look
deep into the composition by the
receding path of a winding river. The
open door gives the relatively shal-
low architectural interior in which
the figures are painted an opening
onto a second, much deeper space. This second space, a landscape, gives the com-
position a degree of depth that is unusual up to this point in the history of painting.
This image’s representation of depth in linear perspective contrasts with prior
depictions of the Annunciation (the moment when the angel Gabriel announces to
the Virgin Mary that she is pregnant, a popular subject among European artists at this
time). Simone Martini painted this version of the Annunciation in 1333, more than a
century and a half before Botticelli’s work. In this work, the room depicted is shallow,
and there is no orientation toward a vanishing point, though some depth is nonethe-
less indicated. The rendering of the vase and the chair, for example, suggests their
positions relative not only to a floor but also to a wall at the deepest plane. Yet cer-
tain graphic elements continue to function through other representational codes. For
example, a line of Latin text emanates from the archangel’s mouth toward Mary. This
is not, of course, meant to show what really exists in space but rather to represent
speech in a means similar to a graphic novel or comic frame. Text (in this case repre-
senting speech) introduces another logic into the frame, interrupting the visual logic
of perspective. The codes and conventions in Gothic and early Renaissance works
contribute to a range of later styles. Martini’s symbolic, narrative, and textual strat-
egies can be found in contemporary art forms such as the graphic arts and comics.
Systems such as the perspectival grid may provide realism based on the idea
of a spectator’s fixed point of view, but Botticelli’s use of perspective does little
to further the symbolic and the narrative elements so strongly present in Martini’s
version of the Annunciation. And there are forms not well captured in perspective,
such as the river in this painting. Perspective is, in the Botticelli work, a formal
exercise framing an iconic scene. The figures’ iconic meaning, which is religious,
stands apart from perspective’s iconic meaning here, which is scientific. Apart from
representing actual space, the presence of perspective in Botticelli’s annunciation
signifies scientific progress and newer, more advanced ways of seeing. The two

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 meanings, religion and science, stand in tension with one another at this historical
moment. As Friedberg observes, with the introduction of the device of the window
frame through which the observer sees the world, how the world is framed becomes
more significant than what is in the frame.
Throughout art history, the role of perspective in the formation of a modern
scientific worldview has been interpreted in different ways. Recent accounts have
stressed a paradox: paintings organized by perspective conventions take the fixed
gaze of the individual spectator as the organizing locus. But at the same time, the
perspective system displaces the seeing individual with a mechanical device that
approximates the human gaze. In 1927, German art historian Erwin Panofsky pro-
posed that perspective, as it developed from the Renaissance forward, became the
paradigmatic, spatial form of the modern worldview associated with Descartes’s
seventeenth-century rationalist philosophy.11 Rationalism is the view that true
knowledge of the world derives from reason and not from embodied, subjective
experience. In the rationalist model, space is knowable through mapping and mea-
suring with tools that aid and correct human perception.
The Cartesian grid is an important tool in cartography and in systems for
graphic and computer modeling, measuring, locating, and manipulating three-­
dimensional forms on a two-dimensional plane. Descartes developed this system in
1637 by specifying the position of a point or object on a surface, bisecting it with
two intersecting axes positioned across a grid. By organizing space around three
distinct axes, Descartes provided a model for measuring, designing, and manipulat-
ing dimensional shapes with great precision.
In 1972, John Berger, like Panofsky before him, interpreted perspective as a
system that anticipated Cartesian rationalism and objectivity’s value in modern
science: “every drawing or painting that used perspective,” he stated, “proposed
to the spectator that he was the unique centre of the world.”12 In this view, the
history of Western painting from the Renaissance forward is a march toward the
Cartesian worldview, in which instruments of scientific reason put the individual
human subject at the center of the universe, but at that same time displaced the
human with a machine. Art historian Norman Bryson further refined previous art
historical accounts of perspective’s trajectory, proposing that Alberti’s perspectival
system offered a representation of a self-knowing viewpoint paradoxically removed
from the spatial conditions of embodied subjectivity.13 Alberti’s system, Bryson
explained, situated the viewer as both the origin and the object of the look, while
at the same time positing a god’s-eye viewpoint.
The fifteenth-century development of scientific perspective is thus widely seen
as the result of Renaissance interest in the fusion of art and science, intensifying the
movement toward science into the modern period in which Cartesian mathematics
and rationalism would become dominant modes of knowledge. Although perspective
placed the human observer at the locus of the image and, as Berger argued, at the
center of the world, it also displaced the human subject with a mechanical instrument.

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Perspective and the Body
Representation of the body in perspectival space, as we have noted, poses an inter-
esting challenge for geometric perspective. As the two Annunciation paintings
show, techniques for rendering space advanced at a different pace from techniques
for rendering the body as a dimensional entity. In early perspectival paintings, the
body is not given the same precise treatment as volumetric space, even where
multiple bodies are rendered accurately to recede in space relative to one another.
Recall that in ancient Egypt, representations of the size of an object or person rep-
resented a figure’s social importance, rather than representing relative distance. A
few years before Botticelli painted his Cestello Annunciation, Andrea Mantegna, a
court artist in Padua, Italy, painted The Lamentation over the Dead Christ (another
popular theme among Renaissance painters). This painting of Christ laid out on a
marble slab, his genitals covered but his chest and arms left bare, is a classic exam-
ple of the use of anatomical foreshortening, a set of techniques used to make the
body appear to recede in space. This work is widely referenced as an iconic example
of the use of perspective to achieve a high level of anatomical realism.
Mantegna’s painting shows that depicting the body demands a different set of
techniques. Using precise perspectival accuracy to render this human body reced-
ing in space would have resulted in the appearance of exaggeration or gross distor-
tion. Is Mantegna’s drawing a realist rendering of the body, or is it an exaggerated
or subjective view?
The limits of perspective can be seen too in a sixteenth-century engraving by
the German printmaker and painter Albrecht Dürer. It depicts an artist using linear
perspective to render the human body, but with a twist that would seem to indicate
the artist’s self-consciousness about the role of perspective in creating a powerful
“seeing through,” as Dürer himself described it.14 In this image, the draftsman looks
through a grid at a curvaceous
model, attempting to render her
nude body within the laws of per-
spective. Geoffrey Batchen writes
that this image could be a critique
of perspective as a form of look-
ing, for not only is the draftsman’s
page blank, but we as viewers are
allowed to see the technical trick
used to produce an image of the

FIG. 4.13
Andrea Mantegna, The
­Lamentation over the Dead Christ,
c. 1480 (tempera on canvas,
27 × 32")

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 FIG. 4.14
Albrecht Dürer, Draftsman “real.”15 It may be said that the scientific grid gets in the
­Drawing a Nude, illustration from way of sexually pleasurable looking at the nude. The
The Painter’s Manual, 1525
simpler point we wish to make is that the perspectival
grid works much better to depict built architectural space
than the human body. The grid’s precision, as we saw in Mantegna’s Lamentation,
can drain the living body of its mobility and fluidity.
Dürer made copies of Mantegna’s works to master his style and produced a
famous engraving and painting titled Adam and Eve (1504 and 1507, respectively)
in which he rendered nude figures not “from life” or through strict application of
perspective techniques, but through a combination of sources that Dürer believed
would come together to make a perfectly proportional body. Dürer wrote, “One
may often search through two or three hundred men without finding amongst them
more than one or two points of beauty. You therefore . . . must take the head from
some and the chest, arm, leg, hand and foot from
others.”16 Thus, for Dürer, realism was achieved
not by seeing one body from the fixed perspec-
tive of an imagined spectator but by merging
different parts of different bodies viewed and
sketched at different times and in different
places. The history of anatomical rendering thus
provides insight about another potential history
of modern visuality: that of composites, collage,
and remixes.
This raises the question of how the
potentially distorting or deceptive aspects of
viewing systems have been understood over

FIG. 4.15
Albrecht Dürer, Adam and Eve,
1507 (oil on two panels, each
209 × 81 cm)

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time. As we noted, some cultures, such as that of ancient Greek philosophy,
rejected techniques designed to reproduce what the human eye sees, regarding
this approach as trickery and not realism. The Renaissance era embraced the
idea that it is art’s social function to reproduce human vision through drawing
instruments designed to replicate vision. Indeed, Leonardo da Vinci wrote in
his diaries, “Have we not seen pictures which bear so close a resemblance to
the actual thing that they have deceived both men and beasts?”17 Da Vinci’s
point about deception is interesting in light of a 1485 drawing in which he
experimented with a technique called perspectival anamorphosis, in which an
image’s perspective can only be read at a given angle. If one holds the drawing
perpendicular to one’s face, one sees an abstract relationship of marks and
lines. But by holding the image at an acute angle leading away from one’s face,
one can see a drawing of an eye coming into view, its proper perspective made
visible by the receding plane of the drawing surface. While we might assume
that da Vinci was playing with technique, Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí used
anamorphic perspective in some of his paintings to make Surrealist plays on
meaning. For Dalí, anamorphosis invokes a kind of mental play as the spec-
tator tries to make sense of contrasting viewing positions.
Look closely at the bust of the French Enlightenment philos- FIG. 4.16
Salvador Dalí, Slave Market with
opher Voltaire that sits on the pedestal on the piano. Voltaire’s the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire,
eyes, nose, and chin are made up of two Dutch Renaissance 1940 (oil on canvas, 18¼ × 25∕ 3
8")

merchants in stereotypical collars and hats. In the dish next

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 to the bust, you may notice a plum that doubles as the buttocks of the man posi-
tioned in the distance behind the piano. The pear doubles as the base of the distant
hill. In playing with our expectations that images offer perspectival ways of seeing,
this image evokes a surreal worldview in its representation of unexpected views and
double meanings.

The Camera Obscura

Today, perspective is recognized as one possible realist technique among others; it
does not characterize our era’s episteme in a totalizing way. The value of perspec-
tival realism continues to derive from its status in some imaging modalities, such
as lens-based systems, but not all. With the development and use of the camera
obscura from the tenth to the nineteenth centuries, followed by its adaptation to
the design of the photographic camera, single-point perspective has continued to
hold its own as the standard for documenting space in an objective manner. Yet,
at the same time, the photographic camera brings us back to empiricism, which is
a counterpoint to the rationalism of mechanical objectivity through which we have
interpreted perspective’s history.
The camera obscura is based on the phenomenon that light rays bouncing
off a well-lit object or scene, when passed into a darkened chamber (a box or a
room) through a tiny hole, create an inverted projection that can be seen on a sur-
face inside the chamber. This phenomenon is mentioned in the writings of Euclid,
Aristotle, and the Mohist philosopher Mozi in fifth-century China. The Chinese
scientist Shen Kuo, during the Song dynasty, described the geometrical attributes
of this phenomenon in his 1088 book the Dream Pool Essays. A key figure in the
camera obscura’s development was Alhazen. Whereas the ancient Greeks believed
that light emanated from the eye, Alhazen demonstrated that in fact light enters
the eye. He built a camera obscura modeled on this phenome-
FIG. 4.17
Camera obscura, 1646 non, and through it he shifted the study of the physics of light

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from philosophy (theorizing about the phenomenon) to empirical experimentation
(actual observation).
Camera obscuras range in scale from freestanding rooms and tents that a
human body can enter and stand in to small boxes like those that early photog-
raphers Louis Daguerre and William Fox Talbot adapted into photographic cam-
eras. In the nineteenth century, walk-in camera obscura structures were erected in
American and European parks and places of natural beauty so that people could
experience the phenomenon of seeing projected images of nature as part of their
immersive experience. As with perspective, this way of viewing was not simply
a technique but part of a larger episteme. Art historian Jonathan Crary has written that
the camera obscura is a central factor in the reorganization and reconstitution of
the subject from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The viewer stand-
ing inside a camera obscura has a different relation to images than the viewer of a
two-dimensional image, precisely because one physically stands inside the appa-
ratus to see the view it offers. This is what Crary calls an “interiorized observer to
an exterior world.”18 This orientation gives the camera obscura, according to Crary,
a distinct phenomenological difference from the perspective system. Its embod-
ied experience is quite different from that of looking at a two-dimensional image.
The camera obscura was a philosophical model for two centuries, Crary states, “in
both rationalist and empiricist thought, of how observation leads to truthful infer-
ences about the world.”19 The camera obscura affirms empiricism’s basic tenets,
including how scientific and objective truths derive from physical observation of
controlled experiments.
Although the camera obscura’s influence had a long history, in the nine-
teenth century it was transformed from a metaphor of truth to a metaphor of that
which conceals or inverts truth, as the camera obscura structure inverts light.
Karl Marx, for instance, regarded the way that the camera obscura inverts light as
a metaphor for how bourgeois ideology inverts the actual relations of labor and
capital. Capitalism, Marx argued, like the camera obscura, substitutes appearance
for reality.
Camera obscuras were also found in artists’ studios, where they were used
as a drawing instrument, much like the perspectival grid. In Secret Knowledge:
Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, the contemporary artist
David Hockney (in collaboration with physicist Charles M. Falco) put forward a
highly controversial thesis that certain painters, from the Dutch Masters (painters
of the seventeenth-century Baroque period) to French neoclassical artists such as
Ingres, used devices including camera obscuras and concave mirrors to achieve
more realist depictions.20 In the painting Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman
(fig. 4.18) by Johannes Vermeer, an artist known for his refined depiction of light
and the detailed textures of cloth, wood, and glass, there is a somewhat distorted
perspective and highlights that are suspected by Hockney and Falco to be artifacts

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 FIG. 4.18
Johannes Vermeer, Lady at the
Virginals with a Gentleman (The
Music Lesson), 1662–1666 (oil on
3 1
canvas, 28 3⁄ 4 × 25⁄5 ")

from Vermeer’s use of optical instruments such

as a camera obscura or a curved mirror. Although
some art historians contest the Hockney-Falco
thesis about the Dutch Masters’ use of such
devices, experimentation with lenses and viewing
devices was common during this era. Vermeer’s
friend and the executor of his bankrupt estate was
Antony van Leeuwenhoek, the Delft fabric mer-
chant who ground his own lenses to make simple
homemade microscopes used to magnify living
organisms. Van Leeuwenhoek, who early in his career worked with mirrors, was
one of the first microbiologists.
Putting aside the debate about the accuracy of the Hockney-Falco thesis, it is
important to note that the value of a work is affected by the instruments and tech-
niques used to make it. This may seem surprising in our present time when seeing
through visual instruments and displacing authority from the body to the instru-
ment is taken for granted. Many artists and scientists accepted these techniques
in Vermeer’s time as well. Yet the objections to the thesis are based not only on
evidence about practice but also on skepticism about the idea that a fine artist of
that era would resort to tricks. There may also be concern about the value of these
paintings in light of the possibility that their makers used visual technologies more
extensively than had been believed. The idea that an original fine art painting’s
value resides in its nonmechanical nature—the fact that it is made by hand and by
the distinct eye of the artist, and not with the help of machines—hangs on in art
history even as instruments of reproduction, such as computers, are routinely used
to make art that is collected, regarded as museum-worthy, and gains in value in the
twenty-first-century fine art market.

Challenges to Perspective
Perspective in its more traditional forms has, throughout its long history,
remained tied to the idea of technology and an objective depiction of reality.
However, some art historians have noted that human vision is infinitely more
complex than is suggested by the model of a stationary viewer before a world
organized around a system of lines giving form to space. When we look, our
eyes are in constant motion, and any sight we have is the composite of different
views and glances.

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