reflective evaluation. In this framework, perspectivalism enables the religi-
osity once embodied in artwork to become a mere subject matter for human
consciousness.^37 Thus the rational and secular gazes join together under the
march of progress made possible by the temporal metaphor of perspective
evolving across history.
Likewise, in a 1938 lecture, Heidegger establishes the distinction
between the medieval and the modern through a perspectival paradigm:
The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture.
The word‘picture’[Bild] now means the structured image [Gebild] that is the
creature of man’s producing which represents and sets before. In such producing,
man contends for the position in which he can be that particular being who gives
the measure and draws up the guidelines for everything that is. Because this
position secures, organizes, and articulates itself as a world view, the modern
relationship to that which is, is one that becomes, in its decisive unfolding,
a confrontation of world views.^38
Although perspectival rupture is naturalized through the mythologization
of its Renaissance origins, the theorization of perspective as a rupture in
human subjectivity took place in the early twentieth century, precisely
when it lost its structuring force in painting. The moment that perspective
ceased its function as the premier structuring device of visual representa-
tion, its elision with rationalism transformed it into a structuring device
legitimating the European hegemonic world order. No longer symbolic of
good art, it became symbolic of Western dominion.
Many recent scholars have reaffirmed perspective not simply as a tool of
the Western tradition, but as a causal element in its (natural) ascendancy.
Damisch suggests that perspective functions as an origin for specifically
Western or European thought, in that“it suggests that a call for‘truth’was
present, was at work, and that art provided, for thefirst time, a place for it
to manifest itself.”^39 Similarly, even as Martin Jay critiques the prevalent
idea of perspective as a“scopic regime”with a singular expression of the
nature of the subject, dividing it into several, more nuanced, scopic
regimes, he warns against excessive critique:
In fact, if I may conclude on a somewhat perverse note, the radical dethroning of
Cartesian perspectivalism may have gone a bit too far. In our haste to denaturalize
and debunk its claims to represent vision per se, we may be tempted to forget that
the other scopic regimes I have quickly sketched are themselves no more‘natural’
or closer to a‘true’vision...However we may regret the excesses of scientism, the(^37) Panofsky, 1991 : 72. (^38) Heidegger, 1977 : 132. (^39) Damisch, 1995 : 157–159.
318 Perspectives on Perspective