Laura JANARA Draft: please do not cite without permission
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Mirroring visions of the local world captured by a fixed, single set of eyes, this form of
perspectivism went hand in hand with the individualism that was simultaneously emerging across
Europe.
In subsequent centuries, people in this perspectival tradition have deemed it to produce greater
realism than previous traditions and have expressly associated it with scientific discovery of truth: “many
present-day historians of science, in fact, tend to view the advent of linear perspective in the same way
they do Columbus’ discovery of America or Copernicus’ apprehension of the heliocentric universe: as a
definitive victory over medieval parochialism and superstition” (Edgerton, 1975, 7-9). But this is an
inadequate account of what this perspectival tradition signifies. More accurately, its realism lends an
empirically resonant view of one particular space unified with one moment of time as visually perceived
from one location. As Antonio Manetti wrote in his Life of Brunelleschi, linear perspective “is that part
of the science of Perspective which is in practice the good and systematic diminution or enlargement, as it
appears to men’s eyes, of objects that are respectively remote or close at hand . . . to the size they seem to
be from a distance, corresponding with their greater or lesser remoteness” (quoted by Baxandall, 1972,
124, emphasis added). For good reason, linear perspectivism, though typically associated by moderns
with truth, has been alternatively characterized as a constructivist and inconclusive representation of
reality.
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While the Renaissance reclamation of linear perspective may suggest a triumph for objective reality and
science over the mysticism of the Middle Ages, “the early users of the new art-science thought of it as a
tool which might help restore the moral authority of the Church in a world becoming progressively
materialistic. In this sense, the advent of the new perspective represented not a revolt but a
recrudescence” (Edgerton, 1975, 6, 7). While European exploration of the globe fuelled the development
of a mathematical conception of space, as Francis Bacon’s work suggests, Christian thinkers also engaged
mathematics and geometry as means to develop Christian moral doctrine and an understanding of God
(Edgerton, 1975, ch. 2).
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Edgerton discussing Erwin Panofsky’s work (1975, 153). Leonardo da Vinci describes how a painter
using this method edits reality according to appearances (Baxandall, 1972, 119-21.)
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Convention