An open window on the wall

Picasso, Marie Th'erèse Portrait,   1939

“What is perspective?”, this is what several students asked me and I thought it might be useful to write a post about it. This is why we will take a break from our section of colors.

We were taught that perspective is a visual effect consisting in parallel lines that touch in the horizon, which is at the height of our eyes. This is true, but not wholly. There are several kinds of perspectives; “lineal perspective”, as it is called nowadays, is not always used, and it’s neither so “lineal”, since our vision is spherical and outer borders are actually seen as curvy.

Piero della Francesca, Flagellation of Christ,  1470

“Perspective” means “seeing through”. In Renaissance it was also called it “prospective”, “seeing forward”. Alberti used to say that the painting should be like an open window on the wall. It’s a tool to represent depth, three dimensions, on a plane, which is two-dimensional. In any case, in both terms there is an implicit concept of space and limits, which hasn’t been always the same in Art History.

Cave of Niaux, Salon Noir, 13000 b.C

Hiroshige, Moon on the
river, 1856

The representation of depth can be achieved through superposition or size contrasts. This is what was used by our prehistoric ancestors, Egyptians, oriental artists... 

First advances in the world of optics were done by Greek philosophers. They already knew that our vision was spherical and that lines touching in the horizon are just a simplification of the phenomenon. In any case, in the little that is left of Greek paintings, we can see how they painted depth just intuitively. For both Greeks and Romans, this is what truly important in theatre scenography. We have some examples, like the frescoes of Pompey and Herculaneum, which give an idea of how they managed to give an impression of reality.

House of Augustus, Rome, I-IV c.

Rubliov, Trinity, 1411

Cimabue, Maestá, 1272

In Middle Ages, this knowledge disappears with the barbarian invasions and artists would just do the best they could.... In icons we can find the “reversed perspective”, in which the vanishing point is where the viewer is and not on the horizon, or the “perspective of significance”, where the size of a figure would depend on the character’s importance in relation to the rest of figures’. 

Villard de Honnecourt,
Sketch, XIII c.

However, architects try to use a lineal perspective to draw their plans, for example, Villard de Honnecourt. Giotto is the first one using it in his artworks the advance is such a big one that it’s with him with whom modern Occidental art starts. It’s another Renaissance architect, Brunelleschi, who would give it a stronger impulse: he is considered the ‘inventor of perspective’.

Leonardo, Madonna of the
Carnation, 1470

Leonardo researches about the topic and offers later his ‘aerial perspective’ or ‘color perspective’: the color of the distant objects turns colder, grayer, and borders would blur. Everybody was obsessed with this theme, there are hundreds of treaties of this époque about it. Vasari tells how Uccello’s wife told him to leave his exercises and went to bed and he replied: ‘How sweet perspective is!’. Dürer travelled to Italy to learn the new techniques and thanks to his writings, all of them would spread in the rest of Europe. Netherlander Baroque artists loved tiled floors: with them they could experiment as much as they wanted… 

da Cortona, Divine
Providence, 1633

We could quote some mannerist inventions that produce the illusion of sky in vaults… Romantics refuse using it, since they consider such a geometric invention a restriction to sensibility; impressionists don’t discard it, but they prefer creating depth through superposition, imitating Japanese prints.

However, there will be no innovations until XX c. Cubists will also experiment with the ‘multiperspective’, which has several vanishing points and includes a temporal succession, a process in the painting. Surrealist artists would use traditional perspective, but illogically to express their dreams. And abstract arts refuse depth: it’s what’s flat what matters.

We aren’t interested in looking through an open window on the wall anymore.

de Hooch, Woman with a Child in a Pantry, 1658

Sources: Nerdinger, W. Elemente künstlerischer Gestaltung. München, Martin Lurz V., 1986;

Panofsky, E. La perspectiva como forma simbólica. Barcelona, Tusquets, 2010;

personal notes

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