In this paper I address the question of why the everyday experience of seeing verticals converge remained taboo in Western visual culture until the late nineteenth century and in painting until the 1920s. I argue that perspective theory was fused to a pre-Copernican, architectural model of space and a static model of vision based on Enlightenment optics rather than physiology. The dynamism of modernity and technologies of embodied vision such as the stereoscope exposed the covert assumptions of perspective orthodoxy. Efforts to rescue three-point perspective by invoking the station-point for viewing risked exposing perspective painting as just another peepshow art. Keywords Three-Point Perspective, Space, Converging Verticals, Cultural Capital of Exhibition Effects, Physiology of Vision, Curvilinear Perspective, Stereoscope
...More
Chapter
Dijksterhuis, Fokko Jan;
(2011)
“Will the Eye be the Sole Judge?”: “Science” and “Art” in the Optical Inquiries of Lambert ten Kate and Hendrik van Limborch around 1710
(/isis/citation/CBB001201622/)
Book
Patrick Ellis;
(2021)
Aeroscopics: Media of the Bird's-Eye View
(/isis/citation/CBB381115541/)
Book
Freund, Daniel;
(2012)
American Sunshine: Diseases of Darkness and the Quest for Natural Light
(/isis/citation/CBB001210040/)
Book
Huhtamo, Erkki;
(2013)
Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles
(/isis/citation/CBB001421230/)
Article
King, Elise Wasser;
(2012)
Harnessing Light: Illuminating Lighting in Adolf Loos' Early Commercial Designs
(/isis/citation/CBB001201128/)
Article
Cecilia Panti;
(2021)
The Commentario terzo by Lorenzo Ghiberti and his volgarizzamenti of Vitruvius, Alhazen and the Medieval Perspectivists
(/isis/citation/CBB443638931/)
Essay Review
Nieto-Galan, Agustí;
(2015)
Revisiting Colour History
(/isis/citation/CBB001566478/)
Book
Jorink, Eric;
Ramakers, Bart;
(2011)
Art and Science in the Early Modern Netherlands
(/isis/citation/CBB001201611/)
Article
Jacobs, Gerald H.;
(2014)
The Discovery of Spectral Opponency in Visual Systems and Its Impact on Understanding the Neurobiology of Color Vision
(/isis/citation/CBB001420789/)
Book
Andersen, Kirsti;
(2007)
The Geometry of an Art: The History of the Mathematical Theory of Perspective from Alberti to Monge
(/isis/citation/CBB000850432/)
Book
Kandel, Eric R;
(2012)
The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present
(/isis/citation/CBB001201847/)
Book
Hendrix, John;
Carman, Charles H.;
(2010)
Renaissance Theories of Vision
(/isis/citation/CBB001220203/)
Book
F. James;
R. Bud;
M. Shiach;
P. Greenhalgh;
(2018)
Being Modern: The Cultural Impact of Science in the Early Twentieth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB441532378/)
Article
Brauckmann, Sabine;
(2011)
Axes, Planes and Tubes, or the Geometry of Embryogenesis
(/isis/citation/CBB001221526/)
Article
Simon, Anne;
(2007)
Histoire de l'optique et recherche littéraire: Le rayon visuel chez Proust
(/isis/citation/CBB000954350/)
Book
Vega, Jesusa;
(2010)
Ciencia, Arte e Ilusión en la España Ilustrada
(/isis/citation/CBB001201788/)
Article
Pesic, Peter;
(2013)
Helmholtz, Riemann, and the Sirens: Sound, Color, and the “Problem of Space”
(/isis/citation/CBB001320409/)
Chapter
Dupré, Sven;
(2011)
The Historiography of Perspective and Reflexy-Const in Netherlandish Art
(/isis/citation/CBB001201613/)
Chapter
Dupré, Sven;
(2013)
The Return of the Species: Jesuit Responses to Kepler's New Theory of Images
(/isis/citation/CBB001201651/)
Chapter
Gausemeier, Bernd;
(2013)
Borderlands of Heredity: The Debate about the Hereditary Susceptibility to Tuberculosis, 1882--1945
(/isis/citation/CBB001500049/)
Be the first to comment!