Visioning Technologies

The Architectures of Sight

Graham Cairns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317001386
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Visioning Technologies brings together a collection of texts from leading theorists to examine how architecture has been, and is, reframed and restructured by the visual and theoretical frameworks introduced by different 'technologies of sight' – understood to include orthographic projection, perspective drawing, telescopic devices, photography, film and computer visualization, amongst others.

Each chapter deals with its own area and historical period of expertise, organized sequentially to mark out and analyse the historical evolution of how architecture has been transformed by technologically induced shifts in human perception from the 15th century until today. This book underlines the way in which architectural forms and design processes have developed historically in conjunction with the systems of sight we manufacture technologically and suggests this continues today. Paradoxically, it is premised on the argument that these technological systems tend, in their initial formulations, to obtain ever greater realism in our visualizations of the physical world.

Part I
Perspective

1
Envisioning geometry

Architecture in the grip of perspective^*

Nicholas Temple

Introduction

In the midst of the saturation of sophisticated imagery in our digital age, where it is often impossible to distinguish between reality and illusion, we remain ignorant of the origins of this uniquely modern phenomenon. This lack of awareness continues to lull the senses about what it means to represent something in the contemporary world and the importance that memory (history) plays in imagining and inhabiting other worlds. Such a situation is perpetuated by Hubert Damisch’s observation, “The problem of distance – distance between the point of view and the object perceived, and the distance between the eye and the picture plane, which are two different things – is to all appearances the heart of the question.”¹

Damisch addresses this question to Brunelleschi’s famous perspective experiments (of which more will be said later), but it could just as well be applied to the broader issue of the relationship between illusion and reality. To examine the historical and cultural contexts of this phenomenon is to uncover something crucial and mysterious about the advent of the modern world. Dalibor Vesely provides some historical context to this transformation:

The process of uncovering those foundations leads inevitably into the depth of time, back to the generation of Leon Battista Alberti and Nicholas of Cusa and the formulation of Renaissance perspective, the first plausible anticipation of modernity. By examining Renaissance perspective against the background of the medieval philosophy of light, we can come to understand the ontology of architectural space, which is formed by light before it is structured geometrically.²

Two issues emerge from Vesely’s statement that have a bearing on this investigation: first, perspective is “the first plausible anticipation of modernity” and second, “the ontology of architectural space” was “formed by light before it is structured geometrically”. Both assertions are related since the beginnings of modernity were char-acterised by a shift in the understanding of space as a setting revealed through ‘divine’ transcendent illumination to one construed in immanent terms as almost exclusively a problem of mathematics.

In this chapter, I return to Vesely’s arguments by examining the epistemological and ontological relationships between pictorial representation and the late medieval tradition of ‘perspectivist optics’ and the consequences of the transition (from one to the other) in our understanding of the representation of architecture. Through a study of the ideas of Leon Battista Alberti, Nicholas Cusanus and Filippo Brunelleschi in early fifteenth-century Florence, I consider how this development was expressed in humanist and theological tracts and rendered spatially. Whilst a significant body of scholarship has been written on the subject of linear perspective, in this investigation, I follow a different line of enquiry by considering how the moment when perspective was first realised signalled in historical terms a decisive shift from the earlier medieval world view and at the same time drew upon this tradition to preserve a still pervasive onto-theological outlook.³

Medieval optics and the resurgence of appearance

In Dallas Denery’s book Seeing and Being Seen in the Late Medieval World: Optics, Theology and Religious Life, the author states,

Theological debates, more often than not, began with ontological questions connected with the principle of singularity, moral problems involving human free will, and theological problems arising from the nature of beatific vision and God’s omnipotence. In addressing these sorts of issues, theologians exploited perspectivist ideas and resorted to visual analogies.⁴

In essence, “knowing something is somehow analogous to seeing something.”⁵ This claim finds expression in the ideas, for example, of Robert Grosseteste, eminent medieval theologian/scientist and bishop of Lincoln Cathedral (1235–1253). His dedication to pastoral work and to church reform drew analogies from his luminary cosmology and his theories of vision. We find evidence of this in his Hexaëmeron, a commentary on the creation narrative in Genesis, in which he examines the relationship between ‘aspectus’ and ‘affectus’, between the gaze and (divine) love:

In the same way as light is understood to mean the knowledge of truth, with regard to the glance of the mind, in just that way it is understood as the love of the known truth in the desire of the mind.⁶

From this relationship between aspectus and affectus, Grosseteste formulated what Richard Southern describes as a “maxim” of his understanding of the physical (and metaphysical) worlds that in many ways can be traced to the very beginnings of linear perspective:

The first manifestation of a movement toward perspectivity can be found in the new sense of space in painting, architecture, and the organization of cities. What is common to all these areas is a new coordination of space and a representation that takes into account the position of the spectator and his or her appreciation of the visible unity and beauty of the setting.⁷

For the first time, urban space was experienced as a series of ceremonially linked settings, where directional movement gave cities a new and distinct spatial orientation. This orientation, which accompanied a growing interest in the theological and cosmological perspectives of light and vision during the thirteenth century, even extended to the experience of liturgical space.⁸

Perhaps reflecting this new spatial awareness is what Denery describes as the growing importance of appearance in the Middle Ages:

People had come to think about themselves primarily in visual terms, in terms of a somewhat amorphous distinction between what appears and what exists … Confessional manuals, for example, are full of instructions to ensure that penitents and their sins will be fully revealed to their confessors. Not only does the confessor see the penitent, the penitent is taught to see himself through the confessor’s gaze.⁹

The reciprocity between seeing and being seen has significant implications in our understanding of the shift from ‘perspectivist optics’, and its relationship to the late medieval orientational movement and modes of appearance, to full blown pictorial representation in the Renaissance and beyond.

From perspectiva naturalis to perspectiva artificialis

To understand the assimilation of perspectivist optics during the early Renaissance, and its transformation into perspectiva artificialis, we have to confront the difficult question of what was lost and gained in the transformation while mindful of Vesely’s claim that perspective constituted “the first plausible anticipation of modernity.” In recent scholarship, this issue has tended to focus on the differing perspectives of Leon Battista Alberti and Nicholas Cusanus:

Alberti’s De pictura…. helped inaugurate what Heidegger came to call “The Age of the World Picture.” “Picture” is understood here as something produced by the subject, something that has its center in and receives its measure from the subject…. To confront Alberti with Cusanus is to invite our age, this “Age of the World Picture,” to recognise the poverty that shadows its power, to become learned about its ignorance. We refuse that invitation at our peril.¹⁰

Karsten Harries identifies a number of important distinctions between the ‘codification’ of perspective in Alberti’s De pictura, with its evidencing of a ‘geometrisation’ of space, and Cusanus’ ‘ontological’ treatment of perspective in which the “privileging of mathematics has its foundation not in the nature of things, but…. in relation to the nature of human understanding.”¹¹ One way of examining the intersection between optics and perspective at this time is to consider the metaphorical use of optical instruments as a means of ‘corrective’ visualisation and representation – an issue that was especially relevant to Cusanus. Such an examination requires clarification of the meaning of the term ‘instrument’. Unlike the modern definition – as a form of equipment or implement to serve largely practical ends – in medieval and early modern parlance, the utility of instrumentum was always conditional upon its symbolic/cosmological bearings.¹²

The study of optics, and optical instruments, was very much in vogue in late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century Florence, drawing upon the vast body of medieval and Arabic Aristotelian studies of light and vision known at the time.¹³ For a period, this interest co-existed with the earliest formulations of pictorial space, providing occasions for creative and intellectual exchange. This interest, however, was not just communicated through textual matter and artistic production but also involved oratory, as we see in the famous sermons of Fra Antonino Pierozzi. Towards the end of his life, Fra Antonino (who became Archbishop of Florence) wrote down his sermons in a four-volume work entitled Summa Theologia:

The most interesting aspect of this monumental work was its emphasis on the act of seeing with the eyes, and his use throughout of optical analogies and metaphors to emphasize his spiritual and moral messages. Although he never referred to optics by its common Latin name, perspectiva, there is no doubt Antonino was familiar not only with the work of Peter of Limoges [De oculo morali (‘Concerning the Moral Eye’)] but with the basic principles of the visual pyramid as applied by Bacon to his species theory.¹⁴

We have to remember that these sermons were delivered in basilicas and public places where Fra Antonino’s use of optical analogies and metaphors were conveyed in the very conc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Perspective
• PART II Photography
• PART III Film
• PART IV Digital technologies
• Index