Donatello's variations on a theme: Subjectivity in quattrocento perspective.

摘要

The overly technical direction of the scholarship on perspective is responsible for the negative view of several Renaissance artists, but most notably, Donatello. The technical discussions of perspective have resulted, to a large extent, from the identification of the perspective construction with vision--that is, from the general assumption that the significance of the perspective construction lies in its correspondence with the geometry of vision. Perspective is viewed as the equivalent of vision, a perceptual model, and not recognized as an endlessly flexible schema upon which any number of constructions for the representation of vision may be based.; For many Quattrocento artists, Donatello first among them, perspective's significance lay beyond the strict application of the geometrical principles of vision. The first chapter of this dissertation provides an overview of the more prominent studies on perspective and a critical reevaluation of Erwin Panofsky's Perspective as Symbolic Form. The second discusses the physical and optical aspects of perspective, specifically the Quattrocento understanding of geometry in general and things optical in particular. In addition, it includes a discussion of Donatello's application of optical corrections to his early sculpture, which permitted the introduction of subjectivity into the perspective construction. The third focuses on this subjectivity, which allowed Donatello to emphasize the narrative in his Sagrestia Vecchia and pulpit reliefs in San Lorenzo, Florence, and High Altar reliefs in St. Antonio, Padua. Suggesting that the origins of perspective lie in classical skenographia and its development during the Middle Ages, the third chapter also explores an alternative to the perceptual model. Renaissance linear perspective resulted from the application of the geometry of light, seen as a system of equal modular quantities, to the schema of the theater, which was, at base, architectural. The fourth chapter then addresses the virtually precise application of the one-point perspective construction in Donatello's Cavalcanti Annunciation, as considered within the broader context of other representations of the subject.