"separation between perceiver and world" Even the great Renaissance artist Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) clearly felt that he needed to compensate for the sacrilege of the distortion introduced by linear perspective, since he both reduced the size of the feet and enlarged the head, showing a 'sense of proportion' appropriate to his subject. The mathematically-based technique of linear perspective was invented in 1425 by Filippo Brunelleschi and codified as perspectiva artificialis (artificial perspective) by Leon Battista Alberti in his treatise, Della pittura (On Painting), published in 1435-6 (Alberti 1966). It now appears 'natural' to us: we are rarely conscious of it as a code at all. Herbert Read noted that 'we do not always realize that the theory of perspective developed in the fifteenth century is a scientific convention; it is merely one way of describing space and has no absolute validity' (cited in Wright 1983, 2-3). The horizon... sets the limit for the height of any object to be depicted in the painting and... it is fixed at the eye level of an observer imagined to be standing on a horizontal plane and staring straight ahead at the world... The painter (and the viewer) imagines that he or she is looking at the subject to be painted (the world to be viewed) as if through a window... The condition of the window implies a boundary between the perceiver and the perceived. It establishes as a condition for perception a formal separation between a subject who sees the world and the world that is seen; and in doing so it sets the stage, as it were, for that retreat or withdrawal of the self from the world which characterizes the dawn of the modern age. Ensconced behind the window the self becomes an observing subject, a spectator, as against a world which becomes a spectacle, an object of vision... In addition to this separation between perceiver and world, the condition of the window also initiates an eclipse of the body. Looked at from behind a window the world is primarily something to be seen. Indeed, a window between me and the world tends not only to emphasize the eye as my means of access to the world but also to de-emphasize the other senses... And with this eclipse of the body fostered by the window, the world on the other side of the window is already set to become a matter of information. As a spectacle, an object of vision, it is analyzable, and readable as a computer print-out, for example, or as a blip on a radar screen... (Romanyshyn 1989, 40-41) Class assignment (group work, done orally): Think of the text above and watch the videos illustrating the diference in 'vision' before and after Brunelleschi. Do you agree with what you have read? Can you add new ideas to the text? video 1 video 2 Home assignment : Read the picture analysis and try to comment upon the message of such "code of address". picture analysis .zip (word) picture