sight. It produces desire rooted in the eye rather than in the body. Panofsky
relates an anecdote about the Florentine artist Paolo Uccello (1397–1475).
Responding to his wife’s call to come to bed, he demurs,“But how sweet
perspective is!”^22 Calling this preference for representational distance over
bodily pleasure“hackneyed,”Panofsky celebrates perspectival disembodi-
ment. Yet artists may not have responded with joy even as they adopted the
technique.
Albrecht Dürer’s illustrations of optical devices as aids in perspectival
foreshortening suggest implicit misgivings toward the capacity of perspec-
tive to divorce the eye from the body and its pleasures. In contrast to earlier
Italian deployments of perspective to emphasize powerfulfigures and
architecture, Dürer stages his illustrations in mundane interior settings
that marginalize both humans and landscapes. Like the Mughal artist
Madhu Khazanad, integrating European techniques into painting only to
depict the superiority of music, Dürer demonstrates his mastery of per-
spective while suggesting the limitations of the technique.
After four volumes that explore the geometrical construction of pattern,
space, and typeset, the concluding illustrations in theInstructions for
Measuring with Compass and Ruler(Underweysung der Messung mit dem
Zirckel un Richtscheyt, in Linien, Nuremberg, 1525) illustrate the role of the
draughtsman. Thefirst image depicts the artist peering through an optical
device and painting on a window, doubly removing him from his subject.
The subject sits similarly immobilized on a chair, both his eye and that of
the artistfixed on his transformation from body into image. To the side, in
line with the central sightline, we see signs of life: a well-upholstered bed
with a candle and, underneath it, a chamber pot. The image suggests the
utility of perspective in the construction of the gentleman, who deserts his
own bodily needs to become an object of our gaze. [Figure 29]
On the next page, a draughtsman and an assistant use a weighted plumb
line that passes through a frame to create a perspectival pouncing cartoon
for use on a painting of a lute, lying supine on the table before them.
[Figure 30] Well dressed, an indication of the newfound higher status
which the technical mastery of perspective enabled, the artists apply their
instruments of measurement to an instrument of pleasure. They thus
immobilize a sign of music and dance bodily, for both musician and
audience.
A third image, appended to the 1538 edition of theUnderweysung,
furthers this critique. A woman reclines on a table across from the artist(^22) Panofsky, 1991 : 66.
308 Perspectives on Perspective