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Tucker, Anne Wilkes, Dana Friis-Hansen, Kaneko Ryui-
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with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2003.PERSPECTIVE
Aside from its generalized metaphorical use in our
everyday speech, the term ‘‘perspective’’ denotes a
specific—though varied and complex—application
within the history of art. Put simply, the practice
of perspective attempts to render objects in three
dimensional space on a two dimensional picture
plane. Centuries after rudimentary beginnings in
Roman wall paintings, competing approaches to a
comprehensive perspectival system developed dur-
ing the Renaissance as means to depict objects with
the greatest possible realism—a realism believed to
be rooted in geometrical truths and mathematically
determined proportions. While different perspecti-
val methods evolved in painting during and after
the fifteenth century, each claimed to reproduce the
essential faculties of sight. With the invention of
the photograph in the 1830s, the efficiency of
painted perspective in recreating vision was under-
mined. But the question of how—or whether—per-
spective inheres in the photographic image remains
the subject of great debate and diverse scholarship.
Rather than confirming the accuracy, or even exis-
tence, of a universal perspectival system, photogra-
phy has only complicated the notion of a mode of
depiction that reproduces natural vision.
As the invisible yet underlying predicate of depth,
space, and proportion in an image, perspective seems
inextricably bound up with—or even the necessary
condition of—the photographic image. That is, the
notions of realism and perspective seem perfectly
reconciled in the photograph. To be sure, perspective
and depth of field have not been championed as the
only emblems of ‘‘realism’’ in twentieth century photo-
graphy—the blurriness of Robert Capa’s documen-
tary images, for example, posit a different standard
of photographic precision. But at the time of its inven-
tion in the 1830s, the photograph appeared to attain
precisely the representation of reality that painters had
strived to capture since Leon Battista Alberti’s 1435
treatise on linear perspective, Della Pittura (often
referred to asDe Pictura, due to an early Latin transla-
tion). Alberti’s inaugurating text conceived of linear
perspective (often called ‘‘scientific’’ or ‘‘artificial’’ per-
spective) as treating the picture plane like a transparent
window, through which the viewer apprehends the
objects depicted. (And indeed, this concept possesses
an etymological basis, since the Latin wordperspectiva
derives fromperspicere, meaning ‘‘to see clearly, to
look through.’’) Despite numerous challenges and
alternative accounts, his notion has remained a popu-
lar explanation for how perspective works. In his
famous 1924–1925 essay Perspective as Symbolic
Form, the art historian Erwin Panofsky wrote,
We shall speak of a fully ‘‘perspectival’’ view of space
not when mere isolated objects, such as houses or pieces
of furniture are represented in ‘‘foreshortening,’’ but
rather only when the entire picture has been trans-
formed—to cite another Renaissance theoretician—into
a ‘‘window,’’ and when we are meant to believe we are
looking through this window into a space. The material
surface upon which the individual figures or objects are
drawn or painted or carved is thus negated, and instead
reinterpreted as a mere ‘‘picture plane.’’ Upon this plane
is projected the spatial continuum which is seen through
it and which is understood to contain all the various
individual objects.
(Panofsky 1991, 27)
Artists had attempted the transcription of three
dimensions onto the two dimensions of the picture
plane by means of drawing, mirroring, and proto-
photographic exercises. Beginning in the Renais-
sance, Italian and Dutch artists used various optical
devices, lenses, and other contrivances in enhancing
linear perspective. In particular, since the 1500s thePERSPECTIVE