The Origin of Perspective 0262041391, 9780262041393

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HUBERT

T H E

ORIGIN

tr a n slated

b y

Jo h n

0

F

DAMISCH

PERSPEC TIVE

G o o d m a n

THE MIT PRESS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSEITS

LONDON, ENGi.AND

English translation

©

1994 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Published

with the assistance of the Getty Grant Program. Originally published in French under the tide Picasso

©

L'Origine de la perspective. ©

�987 by Flammarion, Paris. Works by

by SPADEM.

Completion of this volume was made possible by assistance from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts of the National Gallery in Washington, where the author was a resident scholar in 1982-83. He would like to express his gratitude to its director, 1-Ienry Millon, as well as to the entire staff of CASVA. The schematic drawings and graphic reconstructions are the work of Jean BlCcon, architect CRI-IA.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without pennission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Garamond 3 by DEKR Corporation and was printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Damisch, Hubert. [Origine de la perspective.

English]

The origin of perspective I Hubert Da1nisch ; translated by John Goodman. p.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-04139-1 1. Perspective. NC750.D3413 70 I' .82-dc20

I. Title. 1994 93-21895 CIP

I

I

Contents

Tran slator's Note Preface

xili

Part One

2

At the Crossroads

THIS POINT ASSIGNED BY PERSPECTIVE

A threshold text. If history there be, of what is it the history? The notion of "symbolic form." Panofsky as a reader of Cassirer. Perspective and its various kinds. An index, not of value but of style. Perspective and Weltanscha1111ng. Panofsky as Hercules

22

2

Symbolism in painting.

Perspective, a

Perspective is not a code. There are paradigms and paradigms.

Thing of the Past?

The ''purpose" of so-called scientific perspective. Panofsky and the avant-garde in 1925. Merleau-Ponty and the watchword of a return to primitive thought. Wittgenstein: a new "sensauon. Perspective as myth, or how to get rid of it. Space according to reason.

42

3

Knowledg e

A period-specific phenomenon. The denigration of the signifier.

and Truth

Perspective and the moment of the cogito. The geometrical dimension of sight and the function of the lack. The question of the fixed point in the Jge dassique. Point of view and point of subject. Perspective meditation and the value of origin. Desargues and the perspectivists. The two perspectivisms. Pascal: the mad point.

Part Two T H E

58

4

The Tradition

PROTOTYPE

Brunelleschi the inve'ntor of perspective? Albeni's dedicatory preface. Filarere's treatise. Manetti's Vita. Vasari.

74

The Question o f

The invention of the rule. The origins of perspective and

the Origin

geometry. The meaning of history. Perspective in practice and theory. Knowledge and truth. The Brunelleschi demonstration. The textual tradition.

88

6

The Monstration

Was der Fall isl. The lost prototype. And as for the sky. Perspective and the built object. Perspective shows. The mirror demonstrates.

100

7

The Painting's

The square of the q11adro. Windows and doors. The schism

Reasons

between the eye and th� gaze. A matter of angle, distance, and point of view.

114

8

The View

The mirror stage of painting. Imago: the phase effect. The double designii'tion of the point. The fissure. Infinity, an idea of "what's behind one's head." What is vision? It's me, as if I were then;. A hole that's a stain. A lentil for a ducat. The two witnesses. The value of the autopsy. The "small" hraccia.

E pareva che Ji vedeJJi 'I proprio vero.

l

vii

142

9

Geometry Made Real

The second experiment. The indiscretion of he who looks. The return of the denoted. A positivist notion of truth. The destruction of"the painting. The question of infinity. An unprecedented idea.

156

I0

1'he Renaissance

The inversion. The loss. Truth of painting, truth in painting.

and the Repetition

E iJcritto non si tr11ova. Brunelleschi, "inventor of the

of the Original

Renaissance"?

Part Three

168

198

I1

I2

SUSPENDED REPRESENTATION

"Et anticho in

The

prospettiva"

Proof by context. The Mandrake. What is thinking?

Distancing

Evasive tactics. The tragic scene and the comic scene. The view

Maneuvers

Cittd ideale and

rhe "Urbino perspectives." Inventories.

(corltinued). Architectural reference. The theater and "flat" painting. Illusion and trompe l'oeil. Scenography. The case of set design. A long-established procedure.

236

I3

The Reading at an

The descriptive illusion. Meaning and reference. What is

Impasse

describing? Reckoning with painting without being taken in by it. Poetry as precision. The representation's absenc;e from its place. Perspective transfixed. Perspective and architecture. Sites of writing.

Contents

viii

278

14 To S e e Them, You

Say

,

and

Describe 'fhem

The need for finesse. Structuralism, without knowing it. Learning to count to three. A rule for description. Transformations. The invariability of the point. The sun in Baltimore. Absence makes for meaning. Shuners. The blank, the enigma.

3 14

15

De prospectiva pingendi

Epistemology of the group. The painting of reference. The prototype, again. Clouds in painting. Symmetries and automorphisms. Aberrations and curious perspectives. The hole. Transgressing the limits. Piero's demonstration. The genius of perspective. Ensigns in painting. The consistent angle.

374

16 The Loci of the

Subject

The view (tertio). Diderot's telescope. Rotation/ostension. Q11aJi

per Jino in infinito. The subject holds by a thread. Serlio and the horizon of the theater. Relief, style, and idea. The theater of painting. The contradi�tor. Poetry and geometry. LaJ Meninas, once again. 'fhe geometry of the sentence.

449

Contents

Index

Tr a n slato r's No t e

l�

li !i

11 'I !:

A few remarks concerning specific translation problems. Dispositifperspectif is used frequently by Damisch; I was initially stumped by the elusive first word of this phrase (which can mean "Setup" or "apparatus, " with their concrete implications, or "disposition," with its more abstract and concep­ tual overtones), all the more so as its very slipperiness is one reason Dam­ isch uses it consistently-though it is also intended to evoke Benveniste's phrase dispositif d'!nonciation ("sentence structure, " with a marked emphasis on the performative aspect of speech as opposed to writing). I have rendered it throughout as "perspective configuration. " Age c/assique is a term of historical periodization which has no pre­ cise equivalent in English, designating roughly the period falling between the Renaissance and the modern era centered in the "classic" seventeenth century; it has been left in the original French. Representation carries all the meanings of the parallel English term and then some: in French it also means "performance, " in the sense of a theatrical presentation, and Damisch does his best to make this double entendre work for· him in part III. Its very title is a pun on the word: Representation s11spend11e can signify either "suspended representation" or "per­ formance postponed, " both of which are relevant and intended by Damisch. As a translator I had to choose between them and opted for the first, pri­ mary meaning. But the reader should bear in mind the theatrical reference of the word as it is used here. I have tried to employ standard renderings of Lacanian terminology but have not made a fetish of consistency: charniCre, for instance, is some­ times translated as "hinge, " sometimes as "pivot. " Similarly for terms drawn from the phenomenological tradition, notably the writings of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: I consulted the English language editions of these works but departed from their locution when it seemed appropriate for reasons of con-

text and/or sense. 'fhis was, in fact, 1ny procedure with all the translated works, .notably the Renaissance texts by Manetti and Filarete which exist in excellent bilingual critical editions: I have sometimes diverged from the renderings of their distinguished translators, always in the direction (I hope) of readings that are more literal, if less elegant, than theirs, in a way con­ sistent with Damisch's stated goal of "close reading . " Thanks t o James Elkins and Marvin 1"rachtenberg, who assisted me, respectively, with technical terms and bibliography; to Dana Andrus of The MI1" Press for her fine editing; and to Damisch himself, who was helpful i n clarifying several points relating to some of the book's more diffi­ cult passages. But there are bound to be. errors in any translation of a work of this intellectual breadth and density; egregious or not, all of them are mine.

I�

I

, I,

,

JG,

Translator's Note

I

xii

Preface

'fhis book was born of impatience. A double impatience, traces of which will be felt here and there, for I have not wanted to remove all of them, First, I found it regrettable that subject 1natter as highly speculative as perspective-that used by painters, the perspectiva artijil'ialis as opposed to traditional optics, both antique and medieval, the perspectiva said to be

natura!is-had given rise only, apart from a few notable exceptions, to scholarly work that was often erudite (and for this reason alone precious, indispensable) but that failed to engage the relevant philosophical issues. further observed that in different texts by different authors treating the question of perspective-if not perspective as a question--dogmatism, received ideas, prejudices, and, still worse, precipitate conclusions generally won out over the demands of knowledge and reflection. And this was all the more the case, in my judgment at least, when rhe analysis, or what passed for such, was in the service of a crirical project that was clear-cut and radical. But there is more. Such is indeed the heuristic power of the per­ spective configuration, and the value of it as a model for thought, that it continues to exercise its influence over the widest range of domains, while in the field of art any reference to so-called scientific perspective is taken to be an indication of archaism. This seems obvious enough when Michel Fou­ cault refers to the compositional arrangement of L.as Meninas, undennining and recasting its implications, reducing it to flatness, then by contrast restoring its three-dimensionality to illustrate retrospectively the workings of the system of representation that functioned as the bedrock of thought in the dge c/assique. The question becomes more complicated with Jacques Lacan, when he states that a painting (tableau) is "the relation through which the subject comes to find its bearings as such": while encouraged to do so in the service of perspective, we must take care not to confuse the

xiii

subject here, which is the desiring subject, with the cartesian subject, the one that, in the historically defined moment of the cog;to, gives itself our to be the correlative of science, in the modern sense of the word, while at the same time presupposing the unconscious-the index, from the start, of a split, a cleavage (Freud's Spalt11ng), and of the division experienced by the subject as a division between knowledge and truth. 1 I am amazed that although both of the texts in question have achieved the status of rnodern classics, these two treatments of the paradigm of perspective in contempo­ rary theoretical writing have led to results diametrically opposed to those we might have had reason to expect. Foucault's discussion of Las Men;nas and I.a.can's digression on the scopic relation, despite their preliminary character (for prelirninary is what they are), far from having cleared the way for 1nore rigorous exa1nination of an object of study which these publications pre­ sented in a new light, have remained undeveloped, at least in France, their only effect seemingly to have spawned a platitudinous discourse all the more discouraging because of its unjustifiable claims to theoretical legitimacy. It would be overly fastidious to catalog here the imprecise defini­ tions, the crude simplifications, not to mention the outright errors and misunderstandings, that are the stock in trade of those, their rnotives often suspect, who parrot formulations that no longer have even the merit of novelty. This tendency is especially pervasive in certain fields of inquiry that have only an indirect bearing on painting, for example, in studies of pho­ tography and film. A curious polemical debate took shape in these fields in Paris in the 1970s, fallout from which can still be observed today. Basing their arguments, as I myself did in 1963,2 on the fact that the photographic box, and the camera which is its technical extension, function optically in a way wholly consistent with so-called one-point perspective (to such an extent that Delacroix could envision using photography as a means of pro­ ducing the perspectival framework for his paintings), some maintained that photography and film disse1ninate spontaneously, and so to speak mechani-

I. Cf. Jacques Lacan, "La Science ct la vCritC," Ecrits, Paris, 1966, pp. 855·-77 (not included in the English-language edition of f.crirs). 2. See Hubert Damisch, "Cinq notes pour une phenomenologie de ! 'image phorographiquc," L'Arc, no. 21 (spring 1963, special photography issue), pp. 34-37; English trans . , "Five Notes for a Phenomenology o( the Photographic linage," in Classic Essays 011 Photography, ed. by Alan Trach­ tenberg, New llaven, 1980, pp. 287-90.

Preface

xiv

l

cally, bourgeois ideology (because perspective, having appeared at the dawn of the .capitalist era, must of necessity be essentially "bourgeois"), while

I

ochers (sometimes the same individuals) celebrated the pallid attempts of would-be experimental cinema to free itself from the "tyranny" of the single .Point of view and from the general constraints of perspective. Against which

I

still others protested vigorously, citing perspective's scientific status as a means of defending it against accusations of its being an ideological Cool.

I

r �

This debate is now an old story. But it has left copious traces behind it. It

'

carnera oscura, functions like ideology as understood by Marx. 3 While both of

' I

these, in the last analysis, rely on similar reasoning, the operation of per­ . spective nonetheless differs from that of the camera oJCJtra i n two fundamen­

is frequently misclaimed that perspective, through the intermediary of the

i I

tal respects: first, it is not based on the play of shadows, but rather requires bright light if it is to produce i t.s effect; second, it i n no way dictates an upside-down reversal, only the simple possibility of turning the image from

$.

I

left to right, which poses an entirely different problem.

II

'fhe assertion that the camera, by its very structure, exudes ideol­ ogy can lead to two disparate i nterpretations. It is one thing to regard i t,

f I :f l i

its mechanics, as an ideological contrivance. It i s quite another to claim that it is such because it is regulated by the perspectival "code" and, through this, by an acquired ideology. In its capacity as a machine that is not i ntended to enhance vision (the camera is not a telescope) but rather to

I

produce images, the apparatus must be regarded with suspicion, and we are encouraged to so regard i t by the fact that the photographic process can

I

only be carried out in darkness. If it has ·an ideological effect, this is not because at the back of the darkened chamber the image appears upside down: later steps in the process put this right, just as, according to Des­

I

cartes, the "soul" is supposed to do for the image presented to i t by the

i

retina. No, this is because photography deceptively presents itSelf to us

I

as

a

passive recording, an objective, because physical, reflection of the reality that is its ostensible material-and this with total disregard for the configu­

! !

ration by whose means it functions, which is effectively relegated co obscu-

l

,

3.

"If in al! ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera ob1c11ra, this

phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process

i

as

the inversion of objects on the

retina does from their physical life-process, " Karl Marx, The German Ideology, International Publish­ ers, New York, 1970, p. 47.

Preface

xv

' rity, controlled as it is by a mechanism now so fully autoinated that we can use it without knowing anything about it. It's all very well for some to maintain that the technical procedure in itself is neutral, and that if ideology there be, it should be sought in the message and not the code (thereby making it easier for us to grasp the interests shaping the project, itself ideological, of effecting a reduct�on of perspective to a straightforward graphic process, an enterprise that has been underway, as I will show, since the sixteenth century). This argument, sup­ posing for a moment that it holds up, doesn't apply to the said technical procedure (or the said "code") decking itself out in stolen finery. Such an application might be proposed with r�gard to perspectiva

the only

artificialis,

"scientific" thing about which would be its name. But this would create a double i1npasse, with regard to both the problems posed by reference, the resort to geometry as a rational foundation for

costruzione legittirna,

and the

mathematical support that was, historically speaking, a primary concern of painters' perspective, namely descriptive geometry and plane geometry. In other words, the debate cannot concern itself exclusively with the "basic apparatus" to the exclusion of the code in conformity with which the latter operates. The question of the semiotic status best assigned perspectiva

alis

arti/i�i­

remains entirely open, given that it lends itself to varied applications,

any one of which could serve as the basis for a rule, or set of rut.es, suffi­ cient to define a specific regime of representation. But even if it should be reduced to a "code," being nothing more than a conventional, partially arbi­ trary form of expression corresponding to a moment of representation, if not to that age which is said to be, par excellence, that of representation, osten­ sibly dominated by its structure-in other words, even if we grant that it has no existence, validity, signification, meaning, or pertinence that is not confined withiq strict chronological and historical parameters-such an assertion inerits that we stop a moinent to examine it 1norc closely. 'fo claim that perspectiva

artificialis,

as it was constituted in the

quattrocento, is a typical product of the bourgeois era is to beg the ques­ tion. It is to give short shrift to the problem of antique perspective: although the ancients never elaborated a system of one-point perspective, the (late) examples of painted architectural decoration that survive at Pom­ peii and elsewhere suffice to demonstrate that their ability to reduce spatial relations to geometric measurements was relatively advanced. The same

Preface

xvi

\

problcrn arises with the designation of costr11zione legitti111a as "hu1nanist. " In rny view it can be demonstrated that hu1nanism ('fuscan or other) is irrecon­ cilable with so-called central perspective, just as it is with the precise defi­ nition of the subject (subject, nor Man) which is its corollary. Robert Klein has shown how Pornponius Gauricus, at the beginning of the sixteenth cen­ tury, attempting ro replace the rational, geo1netric perspective of q�attro­ cento theorists with a perspective that he characterizes as "humanist," and whose primary concerns were with narratives. 4 A half-century later Vasari would complete the process of stripping perspectiva artificialis of its. theoreti­ cal "aura," relegating it to the status of a straightforward technical proce­ dure. To discuss perspective in tenns 9f ideological critique is to foreclose all possibility of understanding its historical fortune, as well as the efforts of humanism, over almost a century, to bring it into conformity with its own standards, those-precisely-of . ideology. 1'he eminently paradoxical status which is that of perspective con­ sidered as a cultural formation renders the historian's task particularly diffi­ cult, making him prone to all sorts of anachronisms. Thus, for example, it has been claimed that a new notion of space was put forward by Alberti­ the same one, mathematical and idealist, for which Descartes would fonnu­ late a conceptual basis two centuries later, designating it as extension, con­ ceived to be homogenous, continuous, and infinite. This is to fo.rget that the geometry of the Greeks, to which the author of Della pittura consis­ tently refers, was a finite geon1etry, one concerned not with space but with figures and bodies as described, or delineated, by their boundaries, whether these be circumscribing contours or the Surfaces enclosing them, to use Albcrti's own definition. 5 But it is not sufficient for the spaCe within which perspective operates, which it in fact presupposes, to be posited as infinite: it must also be centered, which rnight appear to be a contradiction in terms.

4. Robert Klein, "Pomponius Gauricus on Perspective," Form and Meaning: Writings on the UenaiJJa11re and Modem Art, Princeton, 1979, pp. 102-28. 5. Cf, my Th!orif d11 1111r1ge. Pour 101e hiJtoire de la peinture, Paris, 1972, p. 162. 1 should point out here that while the idea is regularly associated with the model proposed by Alberti, the notion of costruzione legittimr1, whkh supposedly originated with Leonardo da Vinci, only beca1ne current , in these terms, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Cf. Erwin Panofsky, "Das perspektivische Verfahren Leone Battista Albertis," K11mtchro11ik, vol. 16 (1915), pp. 504-16, and Samuel Edger· ton, ''A!berti's Perspective: A New Discovery and a New Evaluation," Art B111!eti11, vol.-48 ( 1966), pp. 267-78.

Preface

xvii

Ir will be freely admitted that, like geometry, perspectivct artificia!is was preo_ccupicd frotn the start by the question of infinity. 'fhis is not to say that, from the beginning of the game, it rendered the image and the ques­ tion of the "subject," as implied by the device, mutually indissoluble. And it is to go too far too fast, it is to move with undue haste to maintain, as does the prevailing lingo, that the 1nodcrn age's conception of t·epresentation is rooted in this "umbilical knot. " One could reach such a conclusion only after prolonged intellectual work, of a kind that is not identical with the elaboration, however rigorously and deliberately carried out, of the rules governing so-called central perspective: the nature, if not the structure, of the perspective paradigm is such that. of necessity it imposed itself from the outset in its fully developed fonn, at the sa1ne ti1ne invoking an effort of conceptualization that supposedly preceded its integration into the mathe­ rnatical order, whereas the redt.;iction of perspective to a straightforward technical procedure would entail, by contrast, ideological relapses whose implications have yet co be fully grasped. It follows char one 1nust be quite naive to perceive, behind the will to subdue representation by means of the rational calculations which are at the origin of the perspectival project, the specter of Marx's "old enemy," merchandise. Quite naive or quite cynical: for such a discourse brings to mind orhers having to do with "bourgeois science" that are no longer con­ sidered respectable but that persist nonetheless, cunningly preparing the1n­ selves for an eventual return to the limelight. The attacks mounted against structuralism in the name of "history" are cotnplicit with this ideological tendency, though they are also the result of quite different determinants. Of course the debate pitting a vision of things that is static, simultaneous, and ultimately spatial against one that is temporal, and thus dynamic, vibrant, even genetic, is an old one. This debate has not been ignored .by modern science: one has only to consider the way Johannes Kepler, after having arrived at the metrical propositions governing the distribution of planets in the cosmos, proceeded to study the chronology of their movements, though he did this in hopes of confirming the existence of a universal architecton­ ics. 6 It is nonetheless true that classical physics acknowledges the existence of time and space only in their abstract, quantifiable manifestations. "Time

6.

Preface

Cf. GCrard Siinon, Kepler aJtro110111e a.1trologue, Paris, 1979, pp. 283ff.

xviii

sheJs its qualitative, variable, flowing nature. It freezes into an exacr!y

I

deli1nited, quantifiable continuu1n filled with quantifiable things

1; 1•. .

10

short, it becomes space. "7 1'he sa1ne calculating genie is at work in arr and the natural sciences, and its intervention leads to effects in those fields that

1

•• ..·

are analogous, though not synchronous. But the 1nere observation that the preli1ninary formulation of a new idearional forn1 called perspective pre­

'

ceded, by one or two centuries, what Edn1und Husserl called the "Galilean

!

i

1nathematicization of nature" scarcely justifies our ascribing responsibility

l

cally bourgeois conception of art, holding that it should adhere to the

J

for it to an infrastructural determination. lJnless we are to defer to a typi­ 1novement of "life" as closely as possible, avoiding all theory, if not all thought, as if it' were the plague.

�

•

My admitted impatie�'ce with certain uses to which history has been put is