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What is the use of perspective books ?
The magnificent Vroom Collection of books on and related to artist’s perspective, some of which
were grandly illustrated and expensive, raises the question of what were they originally for. Who read
them and why? The answer seems obvious. They were designed to train aspiring painters in linear
perspective; that is to say in the geometrical technique of plotting on a flat surface the relative sizes of
objects behind the picture plane or “window”. This was accomplished according to an optical rule that
decrees that the objects are seen from a single, fixed viewpoint at a single moment in time. Perspective
seems to allow us to become an eyewitness to what the painter sees in reality or imagination (or both).
The technique of linear perspective, either via conscious construction or via standard photographic
representations, is immensely powerful and compelling. It triggers very basic proclivities in how we
see space, without serving as a literal record of how the eye and brain actually work in the incredibly
complex and flexible mechanisms of perception and cognition. In our modern world, it has triumphed
over all other modes of representation in the popular media.
It seems obvious therefore that it provides the foundation of naturalism for any artist who want to
convince as that were are looking at the “real thing”, or at least a surrogate that stands in effectively
for the “real thing”. However, if we search for evidence of young artists spending hours mastering the
technical constructions in which the books delight or of mature artists meticulously deploying the
techniques in composing their pictures, either in preparatory studies or within the final painting, we
will find only patchy evidence. There are the causes célèbres of the perspectivist’s art: Masaccio’s Trinity,
Uccello’s idiosyncratic constructions, Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation, Raphael’s School of Athens,
illusionistic vault and dome paintings in the Baroque, some numbers of paintings in the pedantic
tradition of European academies, countless Dutch interiors (especially of churches); and topographical
veduta paintings of the Canaletto kind, not least in Britain. There are more, but the count of paintings
that openly parade precise perspectival techniques comprises but a small fraction of the total that we
see when we journey round the world’s great galleries of old masters. Most paintings in the mainstream
“Western” tradition for about five centuries exploit spatial techniques – lines of objects inclined into
the picture and subject roughly to a vanishing point or points, the relative scales of items at different
depths in space, and gradients of texture, colour and atmosphere – but few follow perspectival rules
with anything like mathematical exactitude. Before attempting to explain the apparent paradox of
instructional looks whose instructions are not generally followed, let is look at what the books typically
contain, either in whole or in part, and noting why contain these elements.
The grander of the volumes are endowed with a fine title-page or frontispiece.*
1
We may well see
classically dressed figures (usually female and representing such pursuits as painting and geometry),
often accompanied by pudgy infants. The setting is generally architectural, plotted with due care
for perspective. The protagonists, old and young, busy themselves with the accoutrements of the
perspectivist’s’ art, such as geometrical tools and linear constructions, instruments of mensuration and
perspective devices, and panels or canvases on which perspectives are being drafted. If a directional
light bursts from the skies, so much the better for the divine status of optics.
*
1
4, 9, 39, 48, 54-64, 142, 161, 184, 250, 276, 328