evidence of our own senses? If perspective models reason, and is an artifice,
then is reason an artifice as well?
Perspectival ideology gratifies the promise of modernity to replace God
with reason by granting God’s monocular gaze to our human selves.
Perspective as an imago enables the confusion of representation with
reality. This, according to Bosse, was the actual task of painting: not to
depict things as the eye sees or believes to see them, but such as the laws of
perspective impose them on our reason.^43 Perspective does not represent
reason so much as we come to view reason according to a perspectival
paradigm. Even in his celebration of perspective as the preeminent sym-
bolic form of the Western tradition, Panofsky affirms the artifice necessary
to construct the rational subject:“The perspectival view, whether it is
evaluated and interpreted more in the sense of rationality and the objective,
or more in the sense of contingency and the subjective,rests on the willto
construct pictorial space, in principle, out of the elements of, and according
to the plan of, empirical visual space”(emphasis added).^44 Much as the
Brethren of Purity understand geometry as enabling comprehension of the
divine, Panofsky considers perspectival geometry as enabling Man to take
God’s place in the order of the world:“Perspective, in transforming the
ousia(reality) intophainomenon(appearance), seems to reduce the divine
to a mere subject matter for human consciousness; but for that very reason,
conversely, it expands human consciousness into a vessel for the divine.”^45
As Iversen points out, for both Damisch and Panofsky the achievement of
perspective is not its potency as geometric form, but as symbolic order: not
mimetic, but conceptual. Perspective symbolizes the achievement of mod-
ernity because it enables Kantian objectivity to structure knowledge. This
enables art to function through a critical distance imposed by Hegel, as
a sign rather than as mimesis of the absent Real. These analyses propose
a binary structure in which perspective becomes the only paradigm for
space, and distance the only possibility for reason.^46 The appearance of
objectivity through perspective naturalizes the assertion of human omni-
potence. Thus represented through the distant subject who looks at, con-
trols, and analyzes whatever lies before him – landscape, history, or
painting– through the model of perspective, the scholarly critic also
gains authority through the propriety of distance, disinvestment, and
demonstrative rhetoric (seeChapter 6.4).(^43) Damisch,1995: 116, 150. (^44) Panofsky,1991: 71. (^45) Panofsky,1991: 72.
(^46) Iversen,2005.
320 Perspectives on Perspective