Perspective
Points of View
I don't draw much but one of the pleasures of drawing is creating the illusion of depth by making marks of a flat surface using perspective. For most of art history nobody was interested in perspective. People were more interested in presenting symbols than reality.
This changed 500 years ago when the Italian Renaissance artists started studying how to create the illusion of space in a painting. This coincides roughly with the Protestant Reformation. It also coincides roughly with the expansion of European empires. Also the scientific world view started to blossom. I wonder whether those events are linked..
In drawing perspective involves a set of fairly mechanical rules for creating an illusion - the illusion of depth on the page. This brings to mind the reality/world distinction. Reality is the marks on the flat page while the world is the way we interpret those marks as showing depth.
An implication of perspective drawing is that there are different points of view for the same scene. Catholics and Protestants had very different perceptions of the same reality - that is, they were very aware that there were other perspectives even if they were enemies.
The point I'm trying to get at here is that the ancient world didn't really need the concept of perspective. They lived in pretty homogenous groups where everyone had the same point of view. They wanted images of gods - not literal portraits. It seems that it's a relatively recent human development to actually pay attention to reality.
Like most of life we aren't generally paying close attention to reality. We know how to respond but reality isn't in our consciousness any more than a fish is conscious of water. We might interpret the rise of science as humanity becoming aware of the reality we swim in.
I once was a photographer and photographs capture a naturalistic perspective as a matter of course. Once I became a printmaker I became more interested in the possibilities of patterns and symbols than creating an illusion of depth. For years now I've been making pictures that use photos as a seed but the resulting pattern doesn't provide an illusion of depth.
I think that the use of perspective in art was part of a whole cultural milieu that valued rational thinking. These days our culture seems to be not into rational thinking - so elitist - and lo the art world has abandoned perspective.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.