Central perspective continues to interest the artist in three respects. It offers a strikingly realistic image of physical space; it supplies a rich and refined compositional pattern; and the conception of a converging world imparts its own characteristic expression.
As far as the compositional pattern is concerned, it will be sufficient to point out that the two-dimensional space of early art presented essentially a framework of verticals and horizontals located parallel to the frontal plane with a minimum of tension (Figure 22xa
)
. Isometric perspective overlays these fundamental coordinates with one or two sets of parallels, oriented obliquely toward the coordinates: This produces a wealth of new relations and angles and also introduces depth through obliqueness (Figure221b )
. Central perspective, finally, overlays the frontal verticals and horizontals with a system of converging beams, which create a focal center and provide a com plete range of angles (Figure 221c)
.The realistic effect of central perspective was foremost in the minds of the
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299
c
Figure 22r
artists who worked out its system in the fifteenth century. Note, however, that from the beginning artists were willing to deviate from the rules because they led to unsightly distortions and unwelcome coercion of subject matter and expression when applied mechanically. The various parts of an architectural setting in a painting are not always made to conform to the same vanishing point. More technically, the psychologist Zajac has suggested that convergence above eye level acts more strongly than convergence below eye level and that therefore the former should be reduced, the latter increased.
Modifications of this kind are applied intuitively in order to make the picture fit the intended expression or look more natural. In our own century, the surrealists have manipulated the spatial framework to heighten the sense of the uncanny. Giorgio de Chirico, in particular, did this by smuggling per spective contradictions into his architectural landscapes. Figure 222 is taken from a de Chirico painting,
The Lassitude of the Infinite.
The mysterious, dreamlike quality of what at first glance looks like a straight realistic compo sition is obtained essentially by deviating from perspective rules. The setting as a whole is drawn in focused perspective, whereas the statue rests on an isometric cube. Owing to this conflict between two incompatible spatial sys tems, the statue looks like an apparition, projected onto the ground rather than materially resting on it. At the same time the pedestal of the statue, with its simpler, more compelling structure, tends to make the convergences appear as actual distortions, rather than as projections of receding parallels. The setting has little strength to resist such an attack, because it is full of internal contradictions. The edges of the piazza meet far above the horizon in A. Thus
either the world comes abruptly to an end and the empty universe begins beyond the small railway train and tower in the background, or, if the horizon is accepted as the frame of reference, the piazza which ought to converge
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• E
A ,'' \
. \ I • \ I \ ' ' \ , ' \ ,' '� ..J>
J
,' \',, ' Figure 222there, appears as immensely stretched sideways-a magic expanse, created where none could be and therefore all the emptier. In consequence the two colonnades seem to have been moved apart by the flat abyss. Or, if the eye accepts the shape of the piazza, the colonnades, which converge at points on or slightly below the upper margin of the picture
(B,
C), shrink paradoxically. Viewed in isolation from the rest of the setting, these colonnades look quite normal, except for the frontal arch at the extreme left, which strangely adapts its height to the flight of the receding fa�ade. Finally, the shadow of the right colonnade produces two more vanishing points (D, E) incompatible with the others. Thus, a number of inherent inconsistencies create a world that looks tangible but unreal, and changes shape depending upon where we look and which element we accept as the basis for judging the rest.The same dreamlike unreality pervades another of de Chirico's paintings,
Melancholy and Mystery of a Street
(Figure 223). At first glance the scene looks solid enough, and yet we feel that the unconcerned girl with the hoop is endangered by a world about to crack along invisible seams or to drift apart in incoherent pieces. Again a roughly isometric solid, the wagon, denounces the convergences of the buildings as actual distortions. Furthermore, the per spectives of the two colonnades negate each other. If the one to the left, which defines the horizon as lying high up, is taken as the basis of the spatial organi zation, the one to the right pierces the ground. Under the opposite condition the horizon lies invisibly somewhere below the center of the picture, andS P A C E 301
Figure 223
Giorgio de Chirico. Melancholy and Mystery of a Street, 1914. Coll. Stanley R.
Resor.
the rising street with the bright colonnade is only a treacherous mirage guiding the child to a plunge into nothingness.
In order to make their illusions convincing, surrealists like de Chirico fitted their disparate spatial systems into a seamless, trustworthy-looking real-
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istic whole. The cubists used a different procedure for a different purpose. They attempted to portray the modern world as a precarious interplay of inde pendent units, each coherent and lawful in itself, but unrelated to the spatial coordinates governing its neighbors. I mentioned the cubists earlier, in com parison with the transitional stages between central and isometric perspectives (Figure 208), and I pointed out that the resulting visual clashes, contradic tions, and mutual interferences were deliberately sought by artists such as Braque and Picasso. What they wanted to show was not a chaotic accumula tion of objects, comparable to a mountain slope strewn with boulders, since this would be an instance of disorder in a perfectly coherent spatial setting. They were after a much more fundamental disorder, namely, the incompati bility inherent in total space itself. Each of the small units that together consti tute a cubist still life or figure obeys its own spatial framework. Often these units are simple isometric rectangles. However, their spatial interrelation is deliberately irrational. They are not to be seen as parts of a continuous whole
but as small, self-contained individualities, blindly crossing one another. In order to show that these superpositions do not occur in coherent space, the cubists used the device of making the units render one another transparent or fade out into the neutral ground of the painting. The psychological effect
becomes evident if we remember that the same means are used in motion pictures to represent discontinuity of space. If the scene shifts from the living room to the hotel lobby, the room fades out into spacelessness-that is, for a moment pictorial space gives way to the physical surface of the screen, after which the opposite process introduces the new space of the lobby. Or, in a lap dissolve, both scenes appear for a moment as overlaying each other, thereby indicating their spatial independence to the eye. But whereas in the conven tional film story, fade and dissolve represent only leaps within homogeneous and orderly space, experimental films and cubist paintings use them as part of their attempts to obtain an integration of discordant orders.
Being forced into spatial simultaneity, the individual units cannot replace one another like film scenes but must refute one another's solidity. From the point of view of any one of them, the others are unreal. Only a delicate balanc ing of the innumerable forces meeting one another at innumerable angles can provide a semblance of unity. Perhaps this is the only kind of order available to modern man in his social relations and in dealing with the contradictory powers of his mind.
VI-
LIGHT
If we had wished to begin with the first causes of visual perception, a dis cussion of light should have preceded all others, for without light the eyes can observe no shape, no color, no space or movement. But light is more than just the physical cause of what we see. Even psychologically it remains one of the most fundamental and powerful of human experiences, an apparition understandably worshiped, celebrated, and importuned in religious ceremo: nies. To man as to all diurnal animals, it is the prerequisite for most activities. It is the visual counterpart of that other animating power, heat. It interprets to the eyes the life cycle of the hours and the seasons.
Yet, since man's attention is directed mostly toward objects and their actions, the debt owed to light is not widely acknowledged. We deal visually with human beings, buildings, or trees, not with the medium generating their images. Accordingly even artists have been much more concerned with the creatures of light than with light itself. Under special cultural conditions light enters the scene of art as an active agent, and only our own time can be said to have generated artistic experiments dealing with nothing but the play of disembodied light.