In the Bastardized Perspective

An assignment for a humanities class at The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), instructor Jill Vesci, 2013

We stand in awe before the Renaissance painting. It effervescently lines our galleries’ walls with glowing portraits of Roman tales and eloquent scenes alike. Since its conception, this redefined notion of beauty has ingrained itself within our psyches to a level so insistently intrinsic that we find little remorse in its shortness and single-mindedness. Proof of its deeply symbiotic entwinement ensues us around every corner and across innumerable walls in any Western museum of fine art.

At the mere mention of timeless beauty, Mona Lisa struts herself across our minds, Venus dances from her shell, and Adam extends his dainty finger towards God. After the centuries passed since the beginning of the Renaissance, the movement’s values have become something of a de facto to our minds. We laude in particular the refinement of the linear perspective projection which reemerged during the Renaissance. This becomes something rather problematic if we are to approach the issue of complacency in artistic method. This perspectival inclination culminates both in our subconscious rejection of alternative paradigms for the composition of art and subsequently a disposition opposed to abstractive consequences of other techniques. In short, the linear perspective defines far too much for the viewer. Its grid disposes from our minds the need to establish a myriad of personal decisions. Therefore, it traps us within its logic.

To progress our understanding of the perception of the world around us, it may perhaps emerge consequentially beneficial to reject the dictatorial ontology of the linear perspective à la Renaissance. If not complete revolution from its reign, a proper decomposition and thorough understanding could at least expose us to this tyranny.

Two of the tools employed by the linear perspective – the grid and the vanishing point – are particularly issue-bearing when critically assessed. Their shortcomings and biases manifest themselves in the meaning of the painting rather than the purely visual essence thereof, and, in that way, we ought to refrain from criticizing the ephemeral beauty of the composition. Without doubt, we find a plethora of Renaissance works worthy of the title of beauty by our contemporary eyes. The colors, the arrangements and the scenes are far less problematic than the meaning of the culmination they produce.

Consider Pietro Perugino’s fresco “Delivery of the Keys”, painted between 1481 and 1482 in the Sistine Chapel. Quite literally, we see before us engraved into the scene a constructive grid. Within it, we are encompassed by mathematical rule. That is to say that nothing can break the order. If we gaze upon the frolickers or congregated citizenry in the midground of the Perugino’s work, both depicting tales from Jesus’ life, we fail to encounter even one instance of irrationality, disorder or individuality. Each character in this dramatis personae finds himself engaged completely in the logic of his environment. His scale, his position and his depth are so clearly paraded before our eyes. In this way, only his position within the field of the grid may determine his importance or relevance to our understanding.

Because of these intrinsic traits of the linear perspective, we encounter a lack of abstraction. Inherently, we are told both our position in relation to the work and how it is that we are to understand what transpires before us. Perugino takes no remorse from determining for our comprehension that Jesus himself, alongside St. Peter, are the key figures of our reading. Naturally, the work cannot be judged pejoratively for offering a particular focus. Within the context of Perugino’s commission for the frescos, this is to be expected. Upon those regards, it then becomes the methods behind the work which are less than eloquent. We might surmise then that the pure mathematical language behind the scene purports far too much. Its quest for justification within the linear perspective ultimately leaves little room for discourse. Beyond the fact that the scenes arrange themselves by varying importance, we find an inability to discuss the meaning of their placements.

To avoid the emergence of a diatribe, a more positive proposition is put forth. We may find some inspiration in Medieval iconographic paintings. Rather than the interpretation of icons and their religious connotations, what lies important to this argument is their compositional arrangement and subsequent interpretation. In Andrei Rublev’s 1411 “Angels at Mamre”, for example, something more suggestive transpires than comparable Renaissance work. Through an inverse perspective – that being reliant on the reversal of the relationships among the picture plane, the vanishing point and the viewer – we are challenged more in our interpretation. Elements within the painting pronounce themselves as the defining elements for our comprehension of importance and value rather than a pure coordinate position within a grid. Questions about its interposition between a representation of the Holy Trinity and the more simplistic depiction of three angels may arise from a more abstractive place.

It might also then be fitting to bring forth the issue of the vanishing point. In Perugino’s work, we might a tyrannical disposition. The coincident placement of the vanishing point behind a rendering of the Temple of Solomon references far too heavily the client of the artist. Although an expected level of cross-reference is to be expected without remorse between the church and the painting, it again depletes the vital probability of abstractive discussion about the painting as a whole. Our interpretation is assigned in an amount of detail beyond reason. We find ourselves confounded by this example, only one reference from a source of so many others, because it declares before us nearly every visual element present.

By comparison, Rublev’s creation allots the power invested in the vanishing point to the audience. In essence, the viewer himself becomes the centrality of the painting, and a ubiquitous nature of its understanding overcomes the bias and property so basal in later works from the Renaissance.

If the typical Renaissance example of linear perspective engages the mind on a one-level domain in which all pure visual understanding is regulated by a gridded environment with heavy emphasis on centrality and inequality, then several counterpoints may serve well to differentiate other possible media for representation which avoid the pitfalls collected by those like Perugino.

One straightforward approach is exemplified in various works of Leonardo da Vinci. Take, for instance, “The Adoration of the Magi” from 1481. Particularly in his perspective study series related to the work, a reliance on multiple perspectives comes across. This move allows da Vinci to harness an array of vantage points onto the understanding of the painting, though we might still find slight issue with the aforementioned forceful nature still inherent in each of these perspectives.

In the same vein lies Botticelli’s 1482 “Primavera”. While a clear attempt at linear perspective pervades itself through the painting, the overall collaboration of the elements in the result slightly misses the intended mark. This is not to be lamented. In fact, the accidental abstraction remains the precise element, encapsulating the comprehension of the exact moment depicted. We retain now the unique position to argue for the misunderstanding. A detailed observation casts light on slight malfunctions in Botticelli’s perspective construction which serve in one regards a flattening of the canvas and in another a new endowment of a more heavily meaningful depth. Observe the overlap of Mercury’s scabbard (far left) above the Three Graces (second from left). Such details illuminate for the audience a more perplexing experience. As is such, the viewer must gaze across the canvas in more concentration in order to construct in his mind a clear interpretation of his perception of the portrayed image. This resultant of the abstractive qualities of “Primavera” should stand for us to be or great importance, transcending typically bland Renaissance agendas towards something more intrinsic to the human apprehension of art.

Of additional interest comes the subset of works from both before and after the Renaissance which either mistakenly break attempts at the perspective or refute its rules. We may find great benefit in a critical assessment of a 1524 drawing entitled “Destruction of Icons in Zürich” by an unknown artist. While it at first appears to us to be wrought with unfortunate lack of craft and detail, more metaphysical exanimation reveals a truly eloquent composition. The composition refutes the centrality of the Renaissance painting, instead taking on two distinct characters. While the left portion clearly relies on one-point perspective, something perhaps more intriguing graphically occurs on the right. We see before us a plaza scene in which the figures and their relationships to surrounding buildings seem slightly blurred from reality. Along this, a vaguely axonometric projection lays the framework for the work. To navigate between the two parallels forming the composition is to cross the poché of the wall which divides them. The unmarked author of the work cunningly employs the very architecture inherent in the spatial divisions of the picture to differentiate two realities. Each employs a specific projective methodology, and each thereafter defines for itself a specified trajectory for its depiction of a moment.

We find again this odd space between the anal attention to detail of the mathematical perspective and the less rule-driven precision of alternative styles in Francesco Roselli’s depiction of Florence from the 1480s. Therein, it is vital to our assessment that we withhold the Renaissance biases we so will to project onto our understanding. Where these might ruin the validity of the painting’s play on scale and pseudo axonometric projection, important points are to be gained. Naturally, Roselli understood these pictorial choices, and as is such we must not discount the appearance of massive men, miniature buildings or immense trees as some sort of foible on part of the creator. They are without doubts abstract interpretations about the relationships inherent within the scene depicted, and, in that way, we might value their propositions higher than the strictly puritanical approach of the linear perspective. In Roselli’s work, a fundamental geometric principle does not rule autocratically above the canvas. It insists that the city must resist the universal implications of the grid so inherently tied to the perspective. Through such means, Roselli presents us nearly more with a collage than a composition, but he alludes to a concept of complexity and diversity in subject. For his eyes, Florence was simply too heterogenetic to reconstruct itself visually within such narrow logics.

This same elegance we might do well to find in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s “The Effects of Good Government”, painted between 1338 to 1339. The contemporary eye eludes here a magnificent composition of Siena from whence we may gather a better understanding of the world around us. Again, the city is not confined to one logic, and the fresco as an entirety defies the pure need to grasp onto rationality. It pontificates its point a multitude of varying scales, vantages and depths throughout which are woven in the fabric of the city’s daily life the complexities inherent within its subject matter. Unlike Perugino’s commandments along his gridded logic, Lorenzetti allots the viewer the unique position by which the choice to differentiate the stratification of the scene is his. He holds the ultimate means to interpret the meaning of that which is depicted.

As we progress, it becomes evident that the reinterpretation of our world is a constant factor in the societal psyches under which we reside. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that we take into account the wealth of understandings already extant in artwork. Before we might accomplish this hefty task, our inherent bias must be overcome. It goes without blame that we have become over the time since the emergence of the Renaissance reliant on the internal logic of a movement. To the eyes of those involved in the earlier years of the new philosophy, a questioning of the values already present within the human condition would have been natural, if not unavoidable. This causes no concern, as it is a matter of the very nature of man. What does approach us as problematic is the moment in which the mind begins to accept such propositions as the linear perspective to be default. We must resist the urge to become complacent.

This very complacency is something we so easily construe within the coordinate logic of the linear perspective. It defines for us a complete set of variables, leaving little to no room for abstraction in neither depiction nor interpretation. For these reasons precisely, the aforementioned tropes to the perspective are ideal. Within their ontologies, we immerse ourselves in an infinite set of understandings. For the Medieval world, this served its own purpose. For our world, a diversification of interpolation in meaning and visuality might be of extreme pertinence. It holds for us the ability to both declare and investigate our propositions about the places we inhabit. Rather than shrouding our spaces with universally rational logic sets, these methods understand the intrinsic messiness of the world. Taking into play that very comprehension, they become incredibly eloquent proposals for one sort of world view. Perhaps it is time that we revisit it as such.