printmaking technologies to create a fantasy rooted in ancient monuments
depicted as the only true Egypt, and thus depicting French civilization as its
natural inheritor.
Celebrating the Napoleonic conquest of Egypt as the natural outcome of
Enlightenment thought, Hegel may have considered theDescriptionin
developing Descartes’notion of scientific mastery as an expression of the
sovereignty of modern man in hisHeidelberger Antrittsredeof 1816.
Man, since he is spirit, may and should consider himself worthy even of the
highest; he cannot think the greatness and power of his spirit great enough; and
with this faith nothing will be so stubborn and hard as not to open itself to him. The
essence of the universe, hidden and closed atfirst, has no power which could offer
resistance to the courage of knowledge; it must open itself to him and lay its riches
and depths before his eyes and open them to his enjoyment.^29
Just as the frontispiece uses antiquities to signify the riches of Egyptian
conquest that would soon celebrate Empire in the Louvre Museum, Hegel
presents the unraveling of knowledge as a visual pleasure opening itself up
to the eyes of Man.
A century after theDescription, in 1909, Gertrude Bell critiqued this
mode of surveying the past from the perspective of the present:“We look
upon a past civilization and see it not as it was, but charged with the
significance of that through which we gaze, as down the centuries shadow
overlies shadow, some dim, some luminous, and some strongly colored
that all the age behind is tinged with a perspectival hue.”^30 Perspective
serves as a visual metaphor both for power and for history casting its gaze
onto the past. Bell’s sense of ownership over the antiquity she surveys is no
less certain than that exhibited in theDescription, yet at the same time it
suggests a self-awareness that the impression of perspective alone does not
assure a single truth enabled from the vantage point of the subject viewing
the past from the present.
The symbolism accruing to perspective coalesced in Erwin Panofsky’s
1924 – 1925 lecture“Perspective as‘Symbolic Form’”(“Die Perspektive als
‘symbolische Form’”). His argument considers perspective as one of the
a priori categories that Kant describes as prerequisite for aesthetic judg-
ment, and which Riegl adopted in his notion ofKunstwollenas the imma-
nent meaning of a sequence of artistic phenomena. His understanding of
Ernst Cassirer’s psychoanalytic concept of a“symbolic form,”when“a
symbolic meaning is attached to a concrete material sign and intrinsically(^29) Harries, 1974 : 684; Pope, 2006. (^30) Quoted in Bernhardsson, 2005 : 65.
316 Perspectives on Perspective