Space has an unimpeachable reality. But if we scan a history of how space has been drawn we see just how fluid and varied conceptions of space have been.
A brief history of how we have drawn space from, say, Neolithic cave paintings through medieval maps, byzantine paintings, Asian handscrolls to Google maps we see space itself shifting like a camera pulling focus. Space flattens then deepens, while figures and objects become more embedded then float free from the page. Our point of view lurches and flips till our own coordinates become confused and a vertiginous, sickly dizziness takes hold.
Many of these kinds of space now seem anachronistic, illegible or just plain wrong. For us perspective drawing is the thing that seems real. It depicts an idea space that seems to coincide with our conception of reality. We know where we are.
Yet, perspective is a system, not a reality. A system first described by Alberti in De pictura(1435).
“First of all, on the surface on which I am going to paint, I draw a rectangle of whatever size I want, which I regard as an open window through which the subject to be painted is to be seen.[1]
Meanwhile, Brunelleschi ‘proved’ the accuracy of linear perspective by setting up a measured perspective painting of the Florentine Baptistery in front of the baptistery itself, a hole drilled through the back of the painting, and mirror in front on whose surface the reflection of the painting merged seamlessly with the reflection of the real world.
Perspective drawing through both Alberti’s ‘open window’ and Brunelleschi’s mirror reflection not only depicts the world but becomes the world. The medium appears as an entirely transparent depiction of the world, and our belief in its accuracy means we forget the prejudices, complexities, and ideologies that representation always contains.
Erwin Panofsky, in his seminal book Perspective As Symbolic Form argues that linear perspective could only occur when a particular conception of the universe emerged. When a new religious conception of a singular, divine omnipresence meant that the infinite, and so the vanishing point, could be imagined.
To this we might add that it is no surprise that perspective emerged within the mercantile contexts of Renaissance Florence and Venice where the measurement of goods was fundamental to the accumulation of wealth and power.
In other words, perspective brought spiritual divinity and earthy pragmatism together into the same representational space. Perspective’s claim on the real was cemented because it resonated so deeply with how we imagine the world.
And its power is not only in how it depicts the world but how it remakes the world it in its own form.
The drawings displayed in the RIBA gallery span hundreds of years, drawn by very different authors, of very different subjects at varied scales. Yet we see in them the constant assertion of perspectivity: Grids converging lines and vanishing points. Hung so that the logics of perspective cross the boundaries of the frames they suggest the convention of perspective shapes far more than just the drawing itself. Perspective is the space in which the drawings – and the architecture that they propose – occur.
“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us,” John Culkin writes.[2] This is just as true of architecture. Space – far from natural – is shaped by the tools and processes use to create it. Even before perspectival space is drawn it exerts its power to determine how things are shaped, how they are placed in the world, and how we are figured within space.
Perspective is not only an internal representational mechanism. It projects its ideal geometry outwards into the world.
Soon after its invention perspective was deployed by the military for topographic surveying, for designing fortifications, and calculating projectile trajectories. Perspectives invention of the abstract horizon and its technological relationship to the devices of navigation were intertwined with colonialism.
Perspectives paradigm – a cocktail of religion, mercantilism, geometry and power has transformed not just visual space but geopolitical space too and its tyranny envelops the world.
Seen this way, the vanishing point is the location of all power: An infinitely distant and dense black hole that contains an everything that could ever be imagined, the origin point of the world (or the end of the world).
[1] Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture: The Latin texts of De Pictura and De Statua, trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon, 1972).[2] John Culkin, “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan,” TheSaturday Review (March 18, 1967), http://www.unz.org/Pub/SaturdayRev-1967mar18-00051
First published in the catalogue of the exhibition Disappear Here at the RIBA Architecture Gallery, London