The Discourse of Perspective in the Twentieth Century

Margaret Iversen

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The Discourse of Perspective in the Twentieth Century: Panofsky, Damisch, Lacan

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1. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (MIT Press, Zone Books: New York, 1997), p. 477.

Margaret Iversen

When work on certain artistic problems has advanced so far that further work in the same direction, proceeding from the same premises, appears unlikely to bear fruit, the result is often a great recoil, or perhaps better, a reversal of direction. Such reversals. . . create the possibility of erecting a new edifice out of the rubble of the old; they do this precisely by abandoning what has already been achieved, that is, by turning back to apparently more ‘primitive’ modes of representation.1

These are the opening sentences of the third section of Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form, where he discusses the great recoil of the Middle Ages.

I would like to adopt it to serve as a thumbnail sketch of Hubert Damisch’s strategy in The Origin of Perspective. 2 Reading it one has the sense of jumping over the whole history of alternative approaches to Art History and the rise of post-structuralism to re-engage with the philosophical concerns of the early Panofsky and the linguistic and psychoanalytic theory of High Structuralism. Out of the rubble of these two intellectually robust moments, Damisch hopes to fashion, not just a history or theory of perspective, but a model for the future practice of Art History. This, needless to say, is an extremely audacious enterprise, not least because, one would have thought that the last of the great European Humanists would consort rather uneasily with the great anti-humanist psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan.

Damisch’s book is about the invention of perspective as a paradigm or model of thought that has far-reaching implications. Or, better, it is a defence of that idea of perspective by appeal to an analysis of its founding moment in Quattrocento Florence and its repercussions. Although a lot of historical evidence is marshalled, it is not exactly a history of that moment, for, as Damisch argues, one cannot trace the evolution of a paradigm as if it were an object of historical enquiry like any other. Because it instantiates a model of thought, it has to be approached theoretically, in much the same way that Saussure approached the institution, the logical construct, that is language. Perspective, for Damisch, not only organises the field of visual representation, it also organises the way we think about art and its history.

Damisch’s book, then, must be considered from the point of view of its merit as a paradigm – as a model for the practice of art history.

Because of its essentially philosophical claims, the details of his account of Brunelleschi’s experiments or the Ideal City panels could be factually wrong without undermining the philosophical validity of his argument.

The same is true of the essay that Damisch takes as his model, Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form, that other audacious art historical study of the topic. Damisch declares that it remains ‘more than a half a century after its appearance, the inescapable horizon line and reference point for all

# The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. doi:10.1093/oxartj/kci020

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2. Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman (MIT Press: Cambridge MA and London, 1994). English translation of L’Origine de la perspective (Paris, 1987). All further page references to this book are enclosed in brackets in the text. Substantive reviews at the time of its publication in English include: Whitney Davis, ‘Virtually Straight,’ Art History, vol.10, no. 3 September 1996, pp. 434–63; Christopher Wood, ‘Review of Damisch’s The Origin of Perspective and Le Jugement de Paris,’ Art Bulletin, vol. LXXVII, no. 4, December 1995, pp. 677–782; Keith Moxey, review in Artforum, vol. 32, no. 10, 1994; Dana Pollen, review in Camera Obscura, no. 24, 1990, pp. 88 –97; Margaret Iversen, review article on ‘Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form and Damisch, The Origin of Perspective,’ Oxford Art Journal, vol. 18, no. 2, Autumn 1995, pp. 81–4. See also, Keith Broadbent, ‘Perspective Yet Again: Damisch with Lacan,’ Oxford Art Journal, vol. 25, no. 1, 2003, pp. 71 –94. For a brief introduction to Damisch’s thought see Ernst van Alphen’s essay in Chris Murray (ed.), Key Writers on Art: The Twentieth Century (Routledge, 2003), pp. 84 –89.

The Discourse of Perspective in the Twentieth Century: Panofsky, Damisch, Lacan

Margaret Iversen

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3. Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1982), p. 189.

4. Joseph Leo Koerner, ‘The Shock of the View’, review of English translation of Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, The New Republic, April 26, 1993, p. 34.

5. Damisch points out that this ‘denigration’ of perspective has a long history, beginning with Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (p. 44).

6. James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Cornell University Press: Ithaca and London, 1994), p. 263.

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enquiry concern this object of study’ (p. 2). For Panofsky, Renaissance single-point perspective also has far-reaching implications: it anticipates Descartes’s rationalised conception of space as infinite extension and Kant’s Copernican revolution in epistemology. The latter implies, as Michael Podro has argued, that Panofsky regards perspective as the advent of a reflexive self-awareness about the relation of mind to things and about the nature of art as being essentially about that relation, rather than, say, the imitation of some supposedly preexisting reality: ‘Perspective, like the critical philosophy of Kant, holds both the viewer and the viewed within its conception.’3 Artistic reflexivity about the nature of art, signals the achievement of the sort of critical distance that enables a properly historical study of art. So the moment of systematic perspective construction is also the moment that art history as a discipline becomes possible. There is a curious overlapping, then, of a particular moment in the history of art and the very possibility of the serious study of art’s history. Object and viewpoint are locked together. As Joseph Koerner nicely puts it, Panofsky’s essay ‘finally works to place itself at perspective’s historical focal point.’4 If Panofsky’s essay proposes a paradigm for the study of art, so also does Damisch’s book. We can get some indication of what sort of paradigm it proposes by noting what comes in for criticism. Damisch’s critique is aimed at art historical receptions of perspective, which, ignoring the lesson of Panofsky’s essay, treat it as if it were nothing more than a nifty technical device for systematically creating an illusion of space, so that foreshortenings and the diminution of size of objects in depth all obey a common rule and conform to a single viewpoint.5 This non-meeting of minds can be partly explained by the fact that these scholars and Damisch are studying different objects. As James Elkins observed, there are those who are interested in reconstructing perspective practice and those who are interested in its philosophical implications. This split is nothing new: Elkins cites a late fifteenth-century source, Cristoforo Landino, who considered perspective to be ‘part philosophy and part geometry.’6 Damisch’s pointed critique of recent treatments of perspective is part of a broadside aimed at empiricist art historians generally, who, in a worrying ‘reversion to a pre-critical approach to cultural history,’ see their job as ‘detective work’ (p. 185). By ‘pre-critical,’ Damisch means an approach that has not fully absorbed Kant’s critique of the empiricist view that we can have knowledge of a stable world that exists independent of the mind’s constitution of it.

The other target of Damisch’s critique is that band of theoretically minded film and art theorists of the 1970s, mainly Marxists and feminists, who attacked perspective construction as embodying a particular male, bourgeois, individualistic ideology (pp. xiv –xv). I personally would have liked to see Damisch undertake a more serious critique of that body of film theory, because, like his book, it draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis and uses the linguistic terminology of ‘dispositif’ and ‘enunciation.’

Apparatus theory, as it is called, proposed an analogy between the set up of the cinema (spectator, projector, screen) and that of perspective, crediting both with powerful ideological and psychic effects. The key text is Jean-Louis Baudry’s ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus’ published in 1970. Baudry founded his critique of the cinematic apparatus on its inheritance of Quattrocento perspective construction, which, he claimed, constitutes a viewing subject as

The Discourse of Perspective in the Twentieth Century

7. Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Reader, ed. Philip Rose (Columbia University Press: New York, 1986), p. 286. First published in France in 1970 in Cahiers du cine´ma and in Great Britain in 1974.

See the volumes of translated essays from this journal published by Routledge and the British Film Institute.

8. Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Reader (1986), p. 292.

10. Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Reader (1986), p. 295.

11. Panofsky’s account of that development is indebted to Alois Riegl’s Spa¨tromische Kunstindustrie (1901). See my Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, and London, 1993). See also Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1982) and Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Cornell University Press: Ithaca and London, 1984).

Panofsky

Although Panofsky’s ‘Perspective as Symbolic Form’ purports to be a history of the development of single point perspective construction and the various conceptions of space implied by that history, it is in fact structured around a basic binary opposition between two strikingly different sorts of perspective. Antique and Renaissance (or Modern) perspectives stand at the opposite poles of an evolution and all the intervening moments are presented as hardly more than strategic moves and reversals that enable the history to get from A to B.11 What we understand as systematic perspective construction is the culmination of a long history and implicit in this history is the development of the idea of space as we now understand it. Perspective announces or anticipates the modern conception of space, which is homogeneous, infinite extended substance. This is not something given to perception or immediately intuited. The conception of space implied by Renaissance perspective involved taking the raw material of sense perception and systematically modifying it, organising it and unifying it around a single vanishing point. The first section of Panofsky’s paper is OXFORD ART JOURNAL 28.2 2005 195

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9. Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Reader (1986), p. 294.

centre and origin of meaning.7 Cinematic camera movement only serves to augment the viewer’s feeling of power and control.8 For Baudry, the spectator identifies less with what is represented on the screen, than with the apparatus that stages the spectacle.9 The crucial illusion that cinema fosters, then, is not so much the illusory world represented, as the fantasy it engenders of a ‘transcendental subject.’ Just as the infant in Lacan’s mirror stage assembled the fragmented and uncoordinated body in an imaginary unity, so also the imaginary transcendental self of cinema unites the discontinuous fragments of film into a unified sense.10 Damisch’s implicit critique of this position is that it denigrates perspective as a tool for interpellating subjects for the ends of Capitalism or Patriarchy, rather than seeing it positively as an extraordinary idea – a cognitive achievement like the invention or discovery of geometry. This is a spectacular instance of art thinking, which, for Damisch, implies the impossibility of maintaining any sharp distinction between art historical method and its objects. The ‘impatience’ registered by Damisch in his Preface was prompted, then, by both old-fashioned empiricist art history and what we now call visual culture. Together these created for him an impasse that required the recoil to the rubble of apparently more primitive approaches. What I propose to do is to examine the main fragments of that rubble, Panofsky’s essay and structuralist psychoanalytic theory, in order to discover what assumptions and implications are latent in the new paradigm.

While I am sympathetic with Damisch’s general sense of impasse and encouraged by his attention to the fundamental philosophical questions of art history, his book poses for me a serious difficulty, for I find myself drawn to its Lacanian moments but wary of its enthusiastic reception of Panofsky’s essay. By combining the two, he seems simultaneously to affirm the ideas of perspective as symbolic form and perspective as symbolic order. I want to probe the stresses and strains this conjunction puts on Damisch’s book and, at the same time, try to drive a wedge between its Panofskian and Lacanian moments. It is not very difficult to discern what kind of art historical practice is embedded in Panofsky’s essay, but what kind is implied by importing Lacanian psychoanalysis into that paradigm?

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12. Christopher S. Wood, ‘Introduction’ to Erwin Panofksy, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (MIT Press, Zone Books: New York, 1997), p. 22.

13. Panofksy, Perspective as Symbolic Form (1997), p. 41.

14. Friedrich Schiller, Naı¨ve and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime: Two Essays, trans. J.A. Elias (Unger Press: New York, 1996), p. 116.

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devoted to arguing just how far perspective departs from ‘actual’ perception, for, paradoxically, our modern perceived reality has become so thoroughly conditioned by perspectival forms of representation, including photography, that we are likely to miss the point, which is that modern perspective abstracts fundamentally from basic human psychophysiological perception, which is obviously not monocular or static or strictly geometrical.

Panofsky’s account of Antiquity’s conception of space and its axial system of perspective aims to show that both are ‘essentially unmodern.’ In Antiquity, space exists only in so far as it is conceived as dimensions adhering to corporeal objects inhabiting a void. This idea he borrowed from Riegl’s Late Roman Art Industry. Yet, for Riegl, Antiquity’s Kunstwollen, its aesthetic ideal, was to suppress space as for as possible. For him, artistic representation is not thought of as conforming to general perception or ideas of space, but of modelling an ideal sort of object. According to Panofsky, insofar as Antique painting does attempt to represent perspectival space, that is, foreshortenings and diminution of size in depth, it sticks closely to actual psycho-physiological effects or the subjective optical impression, such as the central bulging and curvature of verticals, particularly at the edges of the field. When Christopher Wood notes that, for Panofsky, ‘Antique perspective is more faithful to the truth of perception than Renaissance perspective because it attempts to reproduce the curvature of the retinal image,’ he is right, but his emphasis is wrong because this so-called ‘truth,’ based on ‘an immediate sensory impression,’ is unreflexive, preKantian, in short, primitive.12 Compared with the rationalisation of represented space accomplished by Renaissance perspective construction, pre-modern perspective assumes a naively mimetic, ‘pre-critical’ perceptual relation to the world.

For Panofsky, then, central perspective construction is the embodiment of the crucial recognition that visual representation is not properly mimetic but constructive. It rationalises space, which now no longer clings to substantial things. Instead, ‘bodies and gaps between them were only differentiations or modifications of a continuum or a higher order.’13 Instead of immediacy, abstraction from sense experience. Instead of bodily sense impressions, geometric systmaticity. Art is no longer regarded as a mimetic depiction of objects seen; rather, it reflexively includes the acknowledgment that it is a highly formalised kind of performance aimed at a spectator. Although Panofsky claims to favour modern perspective because it occupies a middle ground between the claims of the subject and the object, this is not the crucial point. The point is that art since the Renaissance embodies the essential reflexive, critical insight that representations (mental and artistic) do not just copy objects, they produce objects structured in a particular way. The difference between Antique and Modern perspective is, then, somewhat like the distinction Schiller drew between Naı¨ ve and Sentimental poetry: whereas the poet of Antiquity, being closer to nature, creates instinctively, the modern poet always ‘reflects upon the impression that objects make upon him.’14 Because, for Panofsky, perspective is a model that relates vision to its objects, constitutes them, in this highly reflexive way, post-Renaissance art has the freedom to choose between types of representation that either stick closely to the objective character of things or to the subjective, visual conception of them. The key term here is ‘choose.’ Although this is not spelled out, in the context of Panofsky’s other writing, it is clear that

The Discourse of Perspective in the Twentieth Century

15. Cassirer and Panofsky were colleagues at the University of Hamburg and at the Warburg Institute where the paper on perspective was first delivered. It was published in the Vortra¨ge der Bibliothek Warburg (1924–1925).

17. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (1997), p. 67.

18. See Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (1997), footnote 73, pp. 153–4.

19. The notion that Panofsky was a relativist because he challenged the representational accuracy of perspective is quite widespread. See Wood, ‘Introduction to Erwin Panofksy’ (1997), p. 22.

20. Wood, ‘Introduction to Erwin Panofksy’ (1997), p. 23.

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16. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1955), vol. I, Language, pp. 202, 208. Also important for Panofsky’s distinction is Cassirer’s book, Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff (Verlag Cassirer: Berlin, 1923) between a substantialist conception of objects and a functionalist one, that is, an object conceived as a function of the rules that generate it. See also the importance of the perceptual psychology of Guido Hauck in Podro, The Critical Historians (1982), p. 186 ff.

perspective implies the possibility of human agency and free-will. It therefore has an ethical dimension, which is amplified by the idea of a balancing objectivity against subjectivity, and so promoting an art practice that embodies an Aristotelian mean between extremes.

Panofsky’s conception of the crucial distinction between Antique and Modern perspective is over determined, but one proximate influence on his thinking was the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer.15 Cassirer wrote a history of symbolic forms, such as myth and language, as a history of their progressive spiritualisation. Like Panofsky, he attempted to combine the incompatible positions of a progressive, teleological history with a relativist typology.

Yet it is not difficult to find unambiguous passages where he declares, for example, that the languages of primitive peoples are ‘still entirely rooted in immediate sensory impressions,’ while more advanced languages ‘display great freedom and abstract clarity in the expression of logical relations.’16 In my view, Panofsky naturalises Antique perspective as mimesis of the optical impression so that it can serve as a dark cloth against which the constructive and rational character of Renaissance linear perspective sparkles like a gem.

Since Panofsky adopts Renaissance art as an authoritative viewpoint, perspective, for him, encompasses both itself and its other. After the Renaissance, there can be no non- or even anti-perspectival art – only swings between the polarities of its two-sided significance: ‘it creates room for bodies to expand plastically and move gesturally, and yet at the same time it enables light to spread out in space and in a painterly way dissolve the bodies.’17 He is probably thinking here of the difference between Italian and Northern Baroque painting and sculpture. However, because of the epistemological status of perspective, the question of the right balance between these tendencies must be determined: measure and proportion must be balanced against the distorting effects of point of view.

It would seem that in Panofsky’s view, post-Renaissance art that differs substantially from its norm is doomed to err on one side or the other, guilty either of being too coldly mathematical or objectivising, on the one hand, or too warmly expressionist or too eccentrically impressionistic, on the other. In other words, an a priori aesthetic norm is implicit in the system and it is backed up by epistemological and ethical norms.18 Although there is some residual Rieglian relativism in the essay with suggestions, for example, that modern perspective has only relative validity and could be coming to an end in our post-Euclidian world, these are mainly confined to the footnotes and overwhelmed by a sense of its constituting a permanent and legitimate paradigm of representation that enables fairly wide variation, the limits of which are the limits of a humanistic art.19 The privileging of the Renaissance has certain consequences for the model of art history implicit in Panofsky’s essay. In it and his other early writing, he deforms Riegl’s conception of art as a history of the Kunstwollen. As Christopher Wood says, ‘In granting Renaissance linear perspective special status Panofsky moved away from Riegl.’20 While Riegl and Panofsky share the same Hegelian inheritance, including the idea that a particular world view is formulated in works of art, Panofsky was interested primarily in discovering an absolute viewpoint. Riegl, however, appreciated Hegel’s sense of the way the historian of art is situated in a particular moment that determines what objects can come into view and be salient for us and what questions can be asked of them. He could acknowledge, for example,

Margaret Iversen

that his interest in late Roman art has something to do with the emergence of Impressionism. In other words, the art historian inevitably participates in his contemporary Kunstwollen. 21 In contrast, Panofsky’s sense of the historicity of art historical thinking ends with the attainment of a quasi-transcendental perspective. In his 1920 essay, ‘The Concept of the Kunstwollen,’ he argued that concepts proposed by Riegl, objective/subjective, haptic/optic, and so on, provide the art historian with a point of view outside the phenomena, ‘a fixed Archimedian point.’22 Panofsky later questioned the value of these concepts, but retained his quest for a method that allowed one a detached, distanced point of view.

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22. Panofsky, ‘Der Begriff des Kunstwollens’ (‘The Concept of the Kunstwollen’), in Aufsa¨tze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft (B. Hessling: Berlin, 1964), p. 33.

23. Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson, with an introduction by Martin Kemp (Penguin: London, 1991).

24. Damisch, Theory of/Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting, trans. Janet Lloyd (University of Stanford Press: Stanford, 2002), p. 124.

25. Claude Le´vi-Strauss, The Way of the Masks, trans. Sylvia Modelski (J. Cape: London, 1983).

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Damisch is clearly attracted to some of the implications of thinking perspective as a symbolic form, although certainly not all the ones I have just detailed. He does, however, particularly stress the epistemological status of perspective. That he conceives of perspective as embodying a different epistemology will soon become clear. For Damisch, perspective is a materially embodied theory or epistemological model – a way of reflecting on our relation to representation. Perspective, on his view, has many of the same properties as a sentence. It systematically organises material and positions an ‘I’ over against a correlative ‘you’. Like any system it imposes constraints, selecting what is relevant; in this case, things that have definite contours are selected. In fact, Alberti’s veil, described in his On Painting, was designed precisely to deal with irregular bodies, such as the human figure, which do not lend themselves to perspective construction (unless you are an obsessive character like Piero).23 Damisch’s earlier book A Theory of /Cloud/ is about the way those wispy phenomena nevertheless find their way into painting despite being marginalized by perspective’s ‘structure of exclusions.’24 Panofsky’s characterisation of perspective also appeals to Damisch as a modernist because perspective thus understood carries with it the recognition that no representation can be adequate to its object. The system of relations that perspective imposes is a coherent system. It has an internal logic that allows us to consider it in its own terms and not only as a model of the visible world. At the heart of Damisch’s book is a critique of art historians burdened with what he calls the ‘representational hypothesis’ or, less politely, the ‘referential prejudice’ (p. 283). His long and staggeringly detailed analysis of the three panels of architectural views or Ideal Cities in Urbino, Berlin and Baltimore proceeds by first prising them free from explanations of their style or iconography in terms of some referent, whether it be the architecture of Florence, scenography, or marquetry. For Damisch, ‘representation is not the only function of painting’ (p. 263).

Rather than relating the panels to some extra-pictorial reality, Damisch aims to show that they constitute a ‘transformational group.’ The term is borrowed from mathematics, but the practice is informed by Le´vi-Strauss’s analysis of masks or myths.25 The panels form a set of three works that respond to one another in a play of formal oppositions and relations. More than anything else they represent ‘a play of thought’ (p. 197). While for Panofsky the perspectival work of art represents a reflexive, critical relation of mind to the world, for Damisch the thought these panels demonstrate is much more self-contained: they represent a purely visual kind of thinking in which the relation of artwork to artwork is paramount. When dealing with

21. This view is most clearly stated in Riegl, ‘Naturwerk und Kunstwerk, I’ (1901), in Gesammelte Aufsa¨tze, ed. K.M. Swoboda (Dr. B. Filser: Augsburg and Vienna, 1929), p. 63.

The Discourse of Perspective in the Twentieth Century

26. Damisch, Theory of /Cloud/ (2002), p. 181.

Lacan

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abstract art we are accustomed to the idea of painting about painting, but we are apparently less able to think about self-reflexive figurative art. The tour de force of Damisch’s analysis of the ‘Urbino’ panels is enough to convince me of the critical productivity of this idea.

Damisch also makes claims about the way these panels affect the subject and for this he has recourse to Lacan’s conception of the symbolic order.

Since Lacan was, in fact, influenced by Le´vi-Strauss in his formulation of the symbolic order, this extension makes perfect sense. But can Damisch shift between understanding perspective as a model of thought and understanding it as equivalent to Lacan’s symbolic order without a terrible grinding of gears? It is clear what motivated Damisch to introduce both Le´vi-Strauss and Lacan – effectively substituting them for Panofsky’s Cassirer. Early on in the book, he claims that perspective is ‘antiHumanist’ (p. 44). He cites Lacan’s observation that perspective reduces man to an eye and the eye to a point, and links this with the later institution of the Cartesian subject – itself a sort of geometral point (p. 45). Although perspective conceived as a symbolic form abstracts radically from perceived reality and effectively denies the possibility of any unmediated knowledge of the world, it offers ample compensations. Far from the subject being decentred in relation to the structure, it offers for the first time, like Kant’s a priori categories of thought, a legitimate position – legitimate both epistemologically and ethically. Our understanding of the world, whether scientific or pictorial, can be both subjectively constituted and objectively valid. This explains why Panofsky revived the formerly obscure term for single point perspective construction, costruzione legittima. For Damisch, the subject of perspective has no such confidence: it constitutes a subject that is ‘to become that of modern science in the form of a point’ (p. 425). It marks a crisis of subjectivity and knowledge that becomes apparent in Descartes’s Discourse on Method where the subject is reduced to a point, the Cogito, and separated by an abyss from extended substance.

Damisch sometimes understands the effects of the picture in purely Lacanian terms: we are subjected, seduced, caught up in the picture (p. 46), we are programmed, informed by the model (p. 51). And yet, he also wants to preserve Panofsky’s reflexive moment: he continues, ‘Perspective provides a means of staging this capture and of playing it out in a reflexive mode’ (p. 46). On the one hand, Damisch underwrites Panofsky’s sense of perspective as a non-coercive model of thought: he describes it as a ‘regulative configuration intended not so much to inform the representation as to orient and control its regime’ (p. 233). On the other, it is a trap laid for the scopic drive (pp. 184–5). But are these models compatible? We’ve seen that the Panofskian epistemological model of perspective carries with it implications or connotations of rationality, critical distance, reflexivity, and freedom. The psychoanalytic, Lacanian model carries with it a quite different set of connotations: seduction, alienation, lack, death, and desire. Damisch beautifully summed up these latter implications in his/Cloud/book: ‘Painting has power to make man sensible of his own nothingness, his dependence, his void.’26

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27. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis’, in The Language of the Self, trans., notes and commentary by Anthony Wilden (John Hopkins Press: Baltimore, 1968).

28. According to Manetti, Brunelleschi’s first biographer, there were two panels: the one of the Baptistry and one of the Palazzo de’Signori.

For an attempt at reconstruction of these and the technicalities associated with them, see Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Theories in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1990).

29. E´mile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (University of Miami Press: Coral Gables, Fla., 1971), p. 227.

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prominence in his work with the 1953 Rome Discourse where it was understood as the most important determining order of the subject.27 In its formulation, Lacan borrowed from Le´vi-Strauss and the linguist Roman Jakobson their stress on the structural relations amongst signifiers constituting a system rather than on what is symbolised. For Lacan, our subjection to this pre-established, inexorably determining, resolutely impersonal system of signifiers is none the less salutary because it functions, like the intervention of the father in the Freudian Oedipal scenario, as a third term breaking up the dyadic stasis and narcissistic identification that characterises the imaginary register. The symbolic order, one could say, abstracts fundamentally from the here and now. For example, the physical, substantial father becomes a function – a function essentially of symbolic castration and prohibition. Since the imposition of the symbolic order breaks up the dyad of mother and child, desire for the lost unattainable object is set in motion and the ideal, narcissistic self of the imaginary is shattered. Perspective is imagined by Damisch as the visual equivalent of the discourse of the Other, yet there is very little sense of the anguish and desire that runs through Lacan’s sense of the subject’s relation to the symbolic Other.

Damisch interprets the perspective paradigm as having precisely the determining, decentering, extra-personal quality of Lacan’s symbolic order. He makes this case by arguing that the vanishing point is equivalent to the point of view – they ‘coincide on the plane of projection’ and, consequently the vanishing point has the value of a look of the Other.

This, he thinks, is demonstrated by Brunelleschi’s first experiment, as described by Antonio Manetti, in which he drilled a peep hole through a small wooden panel depicting the Florence Baptistery so that one could peer through it from behind and see an astoundingly illusionistic depiction reflected in a mirror.28 Damisch proposes that the vanishing point, which is frequently marked in painting of the period by a depicted aperture, will from thenceforth have the significance of a look back, or better, of a look that constitutes me as viewer. The subject of perspective is consequently decentred in relation to this prior point of sight or gaze implied by the depiction (p. 115 ff). As Damisch notes, ‘The perspective paradigm effectively posits the other, in the face of the “subject” as always already there’ (p. 446). E´mile Benveniste’s theorisation of the imbrication of the subject in speech is Damisch’s model for this account. For Benveniste, ‘language puts forth “empty forms” which a speaker in the exercise of discourse, appropriates to himself and which he relates to his “person”, at the same time defining himself as I and a partner as you.’29 Similarly, perspectival representation, with its visual ‘sentence structure’ (dispositif d’enunciation ) addresses me with an implicit look (p. 227). For Damisch, perspective as a paradigm operates like the imposition of language on the individual and has, in the visual register, the same effect of subjectification. This should put paid to the common view that the subject of perspective is placed in a dominant position of mastery. On the contrary, ‘this subject holds only by a thread’ (p. 388). This thread, which leads from the eye of the observer to the vanishing point, is capable of snatching the spectator, like a fish on a line, into the picture. This spectator finds him or herself looked at by the painting, lured, transfixed, summoned to take up his position. The windows and half open doors of the ‘Urbino’ panels are, according to Damisch, ‘looking at you with all their eyes’ (p. 266).

The Discourse of Perspective in the Twentieth Century

30. Joan Copjec, ‘The Strut of Vision: Seeing’s Corporeal Support’, in Imagine There’s no Woman: Ethics and Sublimation, (MIT Press: Cambridge and London, 2002), pp. 178–98.

31. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans.

Alan Sheridan (Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, 1979).

33. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (Hill and Wang: New York, 1981). I mention this because Barthes’s book relies on Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts. See my ‘What is a Photograph?’, Art History, vol. 17, no. 3, 1993, pp. 101–18.

34. Copjec, ‘The Strut of Vision’ (2002), p. 184.

35. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XIII: L’objet de la psychanalyse (unpublished seminar), May 4, 1966.

36. Hal Foster, ‘The Return of the Real’, in The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA and London, 1996), pp. 127–70.

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32. I owe this very Merleau-Pontian formulation to Alenka Zupanicic, ‘Philosophers Blind Man’s Bluff’, in Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek (eds), Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (Duke University Press: Durham and London, 1996), pp. 32– 58.

Although Damisch presses in this book the purely symbolic character of perspective, he does hint at what might be its other modalities. I would like to foreground these hints in order to develop a less univocal view of the subject’s relation to perspective. Damisch’s attention to the linguistic or structural or symbolic modality of perspective means that he tends to suppress the two other modalities of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The three registers of the symbolic, imaginary, and real intersect and overlap. I suggest that perspective can, so to speak, ‘appear’ in all three registers.

Joan Copjec has argued strenuously that Lacan used the model of perspective as a formula of the relation of the corporeal subject to the visual field. For her, if one follows Lacan, any analogy between the subject of perspective and the Cartesian Cogito must be misplaced, since psychoanalysis posits an embodied subjectivity.30 But perhaps this contradiction between Damisch’s and Copjec’s views can be resolved by saying that a subject alienated in the symbolic aspect of perspective would be a disembodied one, but that perspective has other modalities. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan is concerned not so much with the symbolic as with its limits.31 The sections on perspective set out to theorise the subject’s relation, not to the look of the big Other (the symbolic), but to the gaze as objet petit a (the real). In that Seminar, Lacan argues that the ‘real’ of the subject’s body and drives looks back from the picture and not necessarily from the vanishing point. Since death is one of the realities alienated by the ego, Lacan figured its underside as an anamorphic skull – the blind spot of conscious perception. The real in the scopic field is formed when the eye splits itself off from its original immersion in visibility and the gaze as objet petit a is expelled.32 The eye would then be master of all it surveyed were it not for the spot or void left behind by what had to be excluded. This spot is said to ‘look back at me,’ because it is an intimate part of myself, a part object, projected outside. In terms of the Brunelleschian demonstration, this implies that while the body is elided behind the panel, there is nonetheless a real residue, a flicker that is the reflection of my own eye at the vanishing point. That flicker becomes the object of the scopic drive and the encounter with it is wounding, like Barthes’s description of the effect of the photographic punctum.33 Lacan singles out anamorphosis as an illustration of the way perspective captures the spectator by presenting something that eludes my grasp. Yet I think Joan Copjec is right to say that we are mistaken if we take that effect as ‘an occasional rather than as a structurally necessary phenomenon.’34 And since the vanishing point is both structural and, in some ways elusive, it can perhaps better serve the purpose than anamorphosis. And, in fact it does so in Lacan’s unpublished Seminar 13 of 1966, on which Copjec draws.35 The closest Damisch comes to conceiving of the vanishing point in the register of the real is when he notes the physical hole in the surface of the Urbino Ideal City panel right at the vanishing point. He writes that the effect of this is ‘to introduce into a configuration intended to create an illusion, the point of the real’ (p. 341). This spot is, if you like, the equivalent of ‘pops’ and tears in the printing process, described by Hal Foster, that disrupt the surface of Warhol’s ‘Death in America’ silk screens.36 In his reading of Velasquez’s Las Meninas, Damisch finally relents and suggests that perspective may also have an imaginary function. Although the technical perspectival vanishing point of this painting is on the arm of the man at the door, the imaginary centre of the painting is the mirror at

Margaret Iversen

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37. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts (1979), p. 81.

38. Stephen Melville, ‘The Temptation of New Perspectives’, October, 52, Spring 1990, p. 11.

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the back of the room. At the first centre, says Damsich, ‘the subject is, so to speak, produced by the system in which it has a designated place.’ In the second centre, the narcissistic ego ‘tries to find its own reflection’ (p. 443). The light shining in from the right of the picture suggests another, lateral viewpoint, called the distance point in perspective construction, from which position the depth of the room would open up.

The mirror as marker of the imaginary register in Las Meninas opens up the possibility that, for Damisch, the film theorists were not mistaken, after all. Imaginary perspective would be one in which the apparatus disappeared and we were given an image having that ‘belongs to me aspect,’ as Lacan put it.37 Damisch makes an intriguing point about the complex composition of Las Meninas that deserves further elaboration: the painting, in splitting these viewpoints and functions, and making them palpable, ‘reflects on its own operations’ (pp. 443–4). Here Damisch gestures towards a way of going beyond Panofsky’s Kantian reflexivity, which applies universally to the subject of perspective, to a more limited but credible way of thinking the subject’s agency or room for manoeuver in relation to art and the image more generally.

We saw that one of the implications for art history implicit in Panofsky’s essay was the deduction of quasi-transcendental terms that create a legitimate point of view for the field of study. The subject of knowledge, the art historian, is thus sprung out of any embeddedness in his or her own cultural/intellectual milieu. As Stephen Melville put it in his essay, ‘The Temptation of New Perspectives,’ ‘Panofsky’s valorization of perspective forges an apparently non-problematic access to the rationalized space of the past.’38 This is one implication from which Damisch, I am sure, would wish to distance himself. The Origin of Perspective is itself an eloquent testimony to the way history is constantly recast. Damisch acknowledges, for example, the productive effects of Freud and Lacan on subsequent theorisations of perspective, including his own, and brushes aside charges of ‘anachronism’ brought by scholars of Renaissance art. He writes, ‘If there is any such thing as history, it must be conceded that it too takes the same route: one that leads through this echo chamber, this field of interference in which Freud’s text resonates with those of Alberti, Manetti, and Leonardo’ (p. 123). Here ‘critical distance’ is not conceived of as empty or abstract space as it is in Panofsky. Rather, it is replete with the intervening artistic and theoretical developments that inflect the way we understand the past. The history practised in The Origin of Perspective is in this sense back to front. Brunelleschi’s perspective panel of the Baptistery has a very weak provenance, only described by his biographer some thirty years after his death, and curiously not even mentioned by Alberti. Damisch’s treatment of it reminds me of the hypothesis of the big bang in astrophysics. It must exist to explain subsequent historical phenomena. Perhaps only at the end of the book, after reading what Damisch proposes as the historical transformational group relating to the panel – Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage Portrait, the Urbino perspectives, Velasquez’s Las Meninas and Picasso’s variations on it – can one take seriously the claim that this missing panel represented the founding operation of modern painting which consisted of Brunelleschi piercing a hole in his panel and turning it around to view it in a mirror (p. 441).