translation of the work. Still widely read in the seventeenth century, it
informed Johannes Kepler’sAstronomiae pars optica(The Optical Part of
Astronomy, 1604) and Descartes’essay on diatropics in hisA Discourse on
the Method of rightly conducting the Reason and seeking Truth in the
Sciences: Further the Dioptric, Meteors and Geometry, Essays in this
Method(1637), written in Latin. Nonetheless, in his influential 1924 article
“Perspective as Symbolic Form,”Panofsky simultaneously recognizes and
discounts‘Eastern influences’at the close of antiquity as“less a cause than
a symptom and an instrument of the new development.”^15 Like Bergson
and Mondrian, Panofsky represents a self-sufficient West silently appro-
priating the achievements of other cultures in the construction of
a valorized‘West.’
Yet the circulation of Alhazen’s translated work in Florence had clear
repercussions. It was read by Lorenzo Ghiberti (1348–1455), who experi-
mented with perspective on the Baptistery Gates of Florence–the same
baptistery that Brunelleschi represented on his small panel.^16 Adopted
from Alhazen’s experiments, shadow casting became a common represen-
tational technique.^17 The story of perspective infifteenth-century Florence
thus suggests less a lineage of great men with ingenious discoveries than
a communicative intellectual environment open to diverse sources of
knowledge, similar in spirit to the transcultural intellectual dynamism of
the eleventh-century Islamic world that inspired them–except that while
the translators of Baghdad’s houses of wisdom were eager to acknowledge
diverse and distant sources as a means of enhancing their authority,
European historiography has often suppressed similar histories of
transculturalism.
In Islamic environments, the realism enabled by geometry was asso-
ciated with structure rather than appearance. In Europe, the perspectival
illusionism enabled by geometry became a powerful narrative device. It
could situate the viewer as experiencing a religious vision depicted within
the painted surface; portray a landowner surveying his dominion; or
construct deceptive optical effects. Perspective transformed the depiction
of space into a signifying element in painting. It enabled the creation of an
uninhabited spatialfield that could indicate relationships of hierarchy
through distance or centrality in relation to the viewer. Yet as perspectival
techniques spread across Europe, the perils of perspective became appar-
ent. The potential multiplicity of viewpoints it implied threatened the
orderly hierarchy of God as represented by the singular viewpoint of
(^15) Panofsky, 1991 : 48. (^16) Frangenberg, 1986 : 152–153. (^17) Bauer, 1987.
Perspectives on Perspective 305