“In a sense, perspective transforms psychophysiological space into mathmatical space. It negates the differences between front and back, between right and left, between bodies and intervening space (“empty” space), so that the sum of all the parts of space and all its contents are absorbed into a single “quantum continuum”. It forgets that we see not with a single fixed eye but with two constantly moving eyes, resulting in spheroidal field of vision. It takes no account of the enormous difference between the psychologically conditioned “visual image” through which the visible world is brought to our consciousness, and the mechanically conditioned “retinal image” which paints itself upon our physical eye”.
Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form.
Panofsky in 1927 wrote powerfully and radically on the invention of Perspective by Brunelleschi, that is the linear simulation of space that was to mark the development of the Renaissance arts. Before this representational, symbolic form of space, space simply was not seen this way pictorially, and surely when it was first witnessed it was a experienced as a distortion of what space really “looked like†when painted. Nonetheless, despite its invented, historically contingent character, it is a Space that has specific rules – those derived from Euclid’s observations – and indeed may even be called a science in which if those rules are violated, that Symbolic space is subverted or collapses. In a way, the perspectivial drawing which we all regard as “realisticâ€, but a drawing of which for instance tribes’ men “uneducated†its truth (Songe, Papua New Guinea), or human beings of even a century before its “invention†cannot or could not read, is only a Symbolic form, and has no primacy of claim upon “realityâ€. Is it not the same with the conventions of logical form, codified at first by Aristotle? Are these not also constructions of linguistic space, with rules and conventions of representation that are not inherent to reality itself, or even language use in its descriptive role. Is it no coincidence that Aristotle’s rules for tragic drama, itself an aesthetic form, and those of the syllogism were the same, that where from a given set of premises the conclusion must follow.
Dunamis