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The modern mind would
do well to remember that perspective, such as that exhibited in paintings
like Albrecht Durer's
St. Jerome in His Chamber,
was an historical invention and a product of the evolution
of consciousness:
We must
not forget that [in the Middle Ages] perspective had not yet been discovered,
nor underrate the significance of this. True, it is no more than a device
for pictorially representing depth, and separateness, in space. But how
comes it that the device had never been discovered before--or, if discovered,
never adopted? There were plenty of skilled artists, and they would certainly
have hit upon it soon enough if depth in space had characterized the Collective
Representations they wished to reproduce, as it characterizes ours.
They did not need it. Before the scientific revolution the world was more
like a garment men wore about them than a stage on which they moved. In
such a world the convention of perspective was unnecessary. (SA
94-95)
Perspective is thus
instrumental to the development of The Camera
Sequence:
The eye,
seeing in perspective, is
projecting its
own point of view, its punctiliar nothingness, as I would like to call
it, into what geometricians call the plane at infinity but the ordinary
man has to imagine as something like the inside of a vast hollow shell.
By doing so, the eye converts that hollow sphere into a tableau that reduces
depth to surface and flattens three dimensions into only two. That is the
immediate experience so faithfully recorded by the camera. (RM 73)
See
in particular "The Harp and the Camera" (RM 65-78), Saving the
Appearances, Chap. XXII. |
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