Measure and the unmeasurable: Perspective and the Renaissance landscape.

摘要

The reconception of painting effected by the invention of mathematical perspective in the early quattrocento was founded upon the depiction of a commensurable and unbounded pictorial space, and, at the same time, upon a centering of the viewer, with whom the space of perspectival projection was necessarily coordinated. This study treats the complex relationship between mathematical perspective and the depiction of landscape in Renaissance painting, and argues that these perspectival conditions, at once structural and phenomenological, had a decisive importance for the development of landscape painting in Europe, and ultimately for its emergence as an independent genre.;For Renaissance artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and others, working within a perspectival tradition, this relationship was both problematic and extremely fruitful, and their landscape pictures create a deep interaction between perspective's geometric commensurability, implications of infinity, and coordination with a viewpoint, on the one hand, and the complex irregularity, spatial unboundedness, and atmospheric imprecision of landscape, on the other. This interdependence between perspective and landscape is considered in four chapters, each centered on a different fundamental (structural) aspect of perspective. Chapter one focuses on commensurability, specifically in Leonardo da Vinci's exploration of mathematical structure in the forms and dynamic processes of nature. The second chapter treats Giorgione's transformation of commensurability into evocative and atmospheric terms, a mode of painting that develops the subjectivity implicit in the perspectival notion of viewpoint. Chapter three discusses the framed landscapes of villa decoration, in light of the Albertian conception of picture as window, as both a representation and a problematizing of the hierarchies constituted by perspective's own founding principles. The fourth chapter considers Pieter Bruegel the Elder's expansive approach to landscape, in which an orientation toward the horizon relates perspectival view, experience of nature, and interpretive vision in the broadest phenomenological and epistemological terms. It was in relation to issues such as these that Renaissance artists brought landscape and perspective into a highly charged dialogue that would have decisive consequences both for the development of European landscape painting and for the changing understanding and status of perspective itself.