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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

perception as convention « Previous | |Next »
November 16, 2008

Erwin Panofsky, in Perspective as Symbolic Form, says that what we see in linear perspective pictures is not the visual imitation of the spatial structure of our visual experience, but the "expression" of a particular "view of space," and a particular "conception of the world".

His argument is that we have differing views correlating with modern and antique uses of perspective. Perspective is a structure or schematism and in linear perspective we we are meant to believe that we are looking through [a] window into space beyond. It structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time." In other words, linear perspective eliminates the multiple viewpoints that we see in medieval art, and creates an illusion of space from a single, fixed viewpoint -- and that suggests a focus on the individual viewer.

If the perceptual schema of each historical culture or epoch is different, then linear perspective by no means conclusively defined as visual reality, rather that it was only a particular constructional approach for representing pictorial space, one which happened to be peculiar to the culture of the Italian Renaissance. Linear perspective would pass away as had all earlier artistic conventions...it was destroyed by modernist art ythat aimed to explore the essential nature of its own medium.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:57 PM |