The Poetics of Perspective

"My principal concern in this book is the way we talk about pictures...Renaissance writers and artists imagined perspective quite differently than we do... I maintain... that Renaissance authors and artists thought there were many compatible perspectives, so that their writing and painting evince a "pluralist" approach in strict contrast to the monolithic mathematical perspective we imagine today. Theirs was more a collection of rational methods than a "rationalisation of sight", more a way of drawing objects than of setting them in an abstract "pictorial space". Most important... is the gradual recession of perspective as a mute method, a practical subset of geometry, and the growth of perspective as a metaphor, a powerful concept for ordering our perception and accounting for our subjectivity." -- Preface.