As Shields notes, ‘the decoupling of space from place accomplished through the use of the telephone implies that “virtual life” has been coming for a long time’, and, he continues, for longer than we thought because ‘perspective’, as used in images since the Renaissance, is a technology for producing the virtual (Shields 2003: 42). In The Psychology of Perspective and Renaissance Art, the experimental psychologist, Michael Kubovy examines the per- spectival design of a fifteenth-century fresco painting and he describes the space created within the picture as ‘virtual space’ (Kubovy 1986: 140, fig 8.8).
He explains the manner in which the artist (Mantegna) contrived to make a viewer of his picture feel as if they were positioned beneath a stage on which the scene they are viewing (the picture itself) takes place (Fig 2.9). The view we are given is much like that we would have of a theatre stage from a position in the orchestra pit (see Fig 2.10and imagine being placed, virtually, in the orchestra pit, looking up at the stage). The result is that the feet of figures
Such references can be found in Morse (1998), Mirzoeff (1998), Heim (1993), Bolter and Grusin (1999), Marchessault (1996), Nunes (1997), Hillis (1996)
Della Pittura, first published 1435–6: a key, founding text on pictorial perspective. See Alberti (1966)
depicted as further away from the viewer are cut off from view. Only the feet of the figure standing right at the front edge of the stage are visible. To emphasise the point, Mantegna paints this foot as if it protrudes slightly over the edge of the stage. The intricate details of how this was achieved need not concern us here but they depend upon managing the relation- ship between the viewer’s position in the physical space and the position of the depicted figures in a kind of virtual space.
At this time in the fifteenth century such relationships – such positions from which to view depicted ‘worlds’ – were being achieved by avant-garde artists who used one version or another of Alberti’s method. As the diagram (Fig 2.11) shows, Alberti thought of a picture as a vertical plane (AB–CD) that was inserted at a certain point within a cone of vision centred on the spectator’s eye. It is this plane that is referred to as ‘Alberti’s window’. The part of the cone between the spectator’s given position and the picture plane or ‘window’ represents the physical distance between the viewer and the painting. It also gives the spectator a fixed viewpoint and an eye-level. The part of the cone extending between the picture plane and the figure (S) represents the space that will be depicted in the image – the space ‘seen’ through the window. Traditionally this is referred to as ‘pictorial space’. It is this space that Kubovy describes as ‘virtual’.
This is sensible, as Alberti’s schema seeks to connect two kinds of space: that from which the image is viewed and that which is viewed within the image. The former is the actual space which the viewer physically inhabits while the latter seeks to be ‘as good as’ and continuous with that space. Artists of the time seemed to be acutely aware of this distinction between the actual and virtual spaces with which they worked. This is precisely what Mantegna is hinting at in making that foot protrude as if crossing from one space to another and, elsewhere, in
This formulation of perspective in the fifteenth century was partly a recovery and systematisation of a less systematic and consistent form of pictorial perspective evident in the ‘classical world’ some 1,500 years before
2.9 St James the Great on his Way to Execution (fresco) (b/w photo) (detail), Mantegna, Andrea (1431–1506). Courtesy of Ovetari Chapel, Eremitani Church, Padua, Italy, Alinari/The Bridgeman Art Library
2.10 An orchestra pit. To see what Mantegna has achieved in Fig 9, imagine the view of the stage available to a viewer in the orchestra pit. Image © Owen Franken/Corbis
depicting a head and an elbow protruding through a window as if bridging the physical and the virtual (Fig 2.12). From the early fifteenth century onwards, using versions of Alberti’s method artists working in the developing Western pictorial tradition, articulated physical space and such ‘virtual’ space in all kinds of ways. In an early but effective example, in the Brancacci Chapel, the artist Masaccio connects the virtual spaces of his frescoes to the physical space of the chapel itself. He makes the image-space appear as an extension of the ‘bricks and mortar’ chapel (Figs 2.15and 2.16).
There have been a number of moments in the history of Western art when perspectival space and representation have been challenged or subverted. Clear examples are (1) the Baroque in the seventeenth century, where images are expressively distorted and the space of a picture is shot through with inconsistencies, (2) the exploration of multiple perspectives, and a deliberate play between surface and illusion, the visual and the tactile, in Cubism during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and (3) the rigorous denial of any illusion of three- dimensional depth in favour of the material, painted surface (an exploration of the ‘plane’ rather than the ‘window’) in much mid and late twentieth- century ‘abstract’ art. However, these styles and experiments are exceptions which prove the rule in that they self-consciously attempt to depart from the dominant perspectival tradition. See Jay (1988) for a discussion of this tradition
2.11 Diagram of Alberti’s system. Beineke Library
2.12 Mantegna’s ‘window’: detail from Andrea Mantegna, ‘St Christopher’s Body Being Dragged Away after His Beheading’ (1451–5), Ovetari Chapel, Eremitani Church, Padua.
We are now in a position to think of pictorial perspective (Alberti’s system) as a technol- ogy for constructing the space within an image and for managing the relationship of a viewer in physical space to the virtual space of the image.