The Origin of Perspective.

Anglo-American art history barely registered the passage of Structuralism. This philosophical movement, which had such profound reverberations for other fields in the humanities, most notably linguistics and anthropology, was resolutely ignored by most art historians working in the 1960s and '70s. It now seems likely that, with the exception of a few practitioners, mainly concentrated in the fields of modern and post-Modern art, the discipline as a whole may manage to turn its back on post-Structuralism as well. Many departments and graduate programs continue to operate as if nothing had happened, as if the vast body of new theory that has been developed in relation to such concepts as representation, ideology, and authorship, not to mention race, nationality, class, gender, and sexual preference, were irrelevant to their cultural function.

In this context, the excellent translation of Hubert Damisch's book The Origin of Perspective is most welcome. Damisch wants to explore the epistemological basis of art history, to denaturalize its most cherished assumptions, in order to ask, once again, "What is the truth in painting?" To do so, he concentrates on what he regards as the most important feature of painting in the West, namely the system of one-point perspective system developed in the Renaissance. Damisch has little patience with the positivistic narratives that have been told about the history of perspective, and this attitude may well have to do with his awareness of the way in which such narratives have been called into question by the work of Jacques Derrida. This is not a work of deconstruction, however, not a narrative about the impossibility of constructing narratives possessed of truth value. On the contrary, Damisch has a very clear idea of what he conceives of as the "truth" in painting, and it is to be found in a Structuralist conception of the function of perspective as a specifically visual form of signification.

Damisch begins his story with an analysis of Erwin Panofsky's famous essay "Perspective as Symbolic Form" (translated by Christopher Wood and published in 1991 by New York's Zone Books). Like Panofsky, Damisch is impressed with the capacity of perspective--the geometrical construction used by artists to obtain the illusion of space--to correspond with "our" perceptual experience of the world. He is also sympathetic to the neo-Kantian notion of "symbolic form" used by Panofsky to characterize perspective's status as a form of knowledge. Perspective, that is, is construed as a representation or structure that exists between human beings and the world, a means by which the former can both make and obtain knowledge about the latter.

Damisch, however, is no Kantian, but rather a semiologist. His thesis is a sustained argument with the views of Emile Benveniste (see "The Semiology of Language," in Robert Innis, ed., Semiotics: An Introduction Anthology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), who insisted that language was the primary sign system of human beings because all other social forms of making meaning (such as, for example, the visual arts), had to pass through language in order to be interpreted. According to Damisch, perspective is its own kind of language, one that governs the possibility of making visual meaning the way that language (langue) governs the possibility of linguistic meaning (parole). Perspective, in other words, is the grammar of mimetic art. Instead of studying what the meaning of perspectivally determined illusionistic images is, we should examine how such paintings operate: "There is a great danger of treating perspective as just one object among others, if not as a simple product or effect, whereas it interests us here primarily as something that is productive of effects, insofar as its capacity, its power to inform, extends well beyond the limits of the era in which it was born."

Damisch's ideas are worked out in a detailed analysis of three perspective paintings found, respectively, in Urbino, Baltimore, and Berlin. Damisch argues not only that are they similar in structure and approximate date, but also that they constitute a "transformation group." He makes use of this term, borrowed from mathematics, to indicate his interest in the formal characteristics of these works rather than in their iconographic significance. In other words, Damisch wants to go beyond the sorts of interpretations put forward by previous scholars as to what the significance of these paintings might be, in order to describe how they operate: "You insist on this point: the problem is not to determine what the [paintings] represent, nor to decide, from the start, to what genre they belong. Initially it's one of trying to see them, of learning to see them, of managing to describe them."

In his efforts to find analogies to language in the operations of perspective, Damisch makes reference to Lacan's concept of the "mirror stage." Just as the subject (according to Lacan) becomes a social being on the acquisition of language, a social convention that empowers it even as it alienates it from itself, so in the mirror stage the child's identification with the mirror image is compromised and questioned by an awareness of the gaze of the other. The moment of plenitude associated with the subject's self-identification is ruptured by the recognition that the subject is only an object in the eyes of others. It is by analogy with the mirror stage that Damisch can claim a role for perspective in the construction of human subjectivity. The perspective painting appears both to empower us as subjects--everything in an illusionistic painting is, after all, related to the spectator's point of view--while at the same time insisting that the structure of what we see depends on objective principles that are quite independent of our subjectivity. One of the consequences of this analogy is that perspective, an illusionistic device, and vision, a characteristic of human anatomy, are identified with one another. In this strategy Damisch follows Panofsky, who had also exploited the ambivalence inherent in the concept of perspective for similar purposes. In both cases the identification results in promoting or exalting perspective's status as an epistemological structure.

Striking as Damisch's thesis appears to be in the context of Renaissance studies in which positivistic scholarship is still the order of the day, its value lies in its questioning and subversive spirit, one that seeks to put all art-historical givens into question, rather than in his own version of the "truth" in painting. Damisch's theory of perspective suffers from many of the same difficulties that faced Structuralist theories of language and anthropology: it is a totalizing or universalizing view that is neither inflected nor compromised by historical or geographical circumstances. Why is it only Western perspective, developed during the Renaissance, that articulates the structures of vision? One-point perspective is a characteristic of only a fraction of the world's cultures that have made use of visual art. Surely it is politically unconscionable to argue that it affords us privileged insight into the structure of visual signification as a whole? Even if we accept Damisch's theory on its own terms, i.e., that Renaissance perspective is the visual equivalent of language in the Western tradition, then what about processes of visual signification, including systems of perspective other than one-point perspective, used by Western cultures before and after the ascendancy of the Renaissance perspective paradigm?

Despite these criticisms, Damisch's achievement lies in having called into question the art-historical methodologies that still dominate work in this field. His willingness to reconsider the epistemological basis of the discipline gives this book its special relevance and value for the circumstances in which we find ourselves today.

Keith Moxey is an art historian at Barnard College and Columbia University.