Perspective as Symbolic Form :: Education by Design Store

Editorial Review
Erwin Panofsky's Perspective as Symbolic Form is one of the great works of modern intellectual history, the legendary text that has dominated all art historical and philosophical discussions on the topic of perspective in this century. Finally available in English, it is an unrivaled example of Panofsky's early method that placed him within broader developments in theories of knowledge and cultural change. Here, drawing on a massive body of learning that ranges over Antique philosophy, theology, science, and optics as well as the history of art, Panofsky produces a type of "archaeology" of Western representation that far surpasses the usual scope of art historical studies.

Perspective in Panofsky's hands becomes a central component of a Western "will to form," the expression of a schema linking the social, cognitive, psychological, and especially technical practices of a given culture into harmonious and integrated wholes. Yet the perceptual schema of each historical culture or epoch is different, and each gives rise to a different but equally full vision of the world. Panofsky articulates these different spatial systems, demonstrating their particular coherence and compatibility with the modes of knowledge, belief, and exchange that characterized the cultures in which they arose. Our own modernity, Panofsky shows, is characterized by its peculiarly mathematical expression of the concept of the infinite, within a space that is necessarily both continuous and homogeneous.
Cached date: AWS Called=true

Customer Reviews

Interesting book and short

2003-05-26
Panofsky's book on perspective, Perspective as Symbolic Form, is a short book about the development of perspective from ancient perspective to the full, abstract space of an Alberti. This is interesting for a number of reasons, which are:

a) ancient perspective is the perspective of angles, not of distances. This is hard to explain without a diagram, but basically an object at a 45 degree angle is 3/4 as large as an object at a 60 degree angle. This is in contrast to modern perspective, where size is in inverse proportion to distance, not angle. The idea that the ancients did not have perspective is simply false. Modern perspective as a third antiquity.

b) the grid of perspective preceded the abstract space of the cartesian grid. The equivalence of extension and object or mass is already present in kpainting before it was ever devised by Descartes.

c) the "vanishing point" is the "actual infinite," the infinite in this world. A theological point.

d) modern perspective is actually a falsification of the "psychophysical" perception of the world, which is really curved. We live in a curved world. Comets tails, for instance, look curved even though they are straight. Buildings look curved likewise. See Vitruvius for the ancient discussion of this phenomenon.

great piece of work.. 2000-09-26
One of the most interesting problems we had in our drawing class was regarding linear perspective and I picked up this book hoping that it would go in detail about perspective in historical and cultural context and it did!

This book is written by and for educated man. The translation is great and I finished the book in one reading because it was so compelling. It is above and beyond the mere mechanics of horizon lines and vanishing points.

The end notes are great too.

A must read for all art lovers.

Visual and mathematical perspective until the renaissance. 1999-03-24
A comprehensive review of the thought behind mathematical perspective and how it differs from our empirical experience. Explains how the concept of the infinate has forever altered the way in which we represent space in pictures. Short essay with extensive end notes.