A Matter of Perspective: Cartesian Perspectivalism and the Testing of English Studies

In The Painter's Manual (1525), a technical treatise written not only for painters but for all artists and artisans who depend on measurements in their daily lives, Albrecht Durer provides a guide for applying the precepts of geometry to problems of perspective in art. Rediscovered in the early years of the fifteenth century and codified by mathematician Leone Battista Alberti in On Painting (1435), perspective concerns the rules by which the illusion of three dimensions is created on a two dimensional surface. As Durer explains and illustrates through woodcuts designed for his manual, mathematics, geometry, and technology can be used to resolve tricky problems with perspective. For instance, one woodcut depicts an apparatus supposedly invented by Durer that enables an artist to plot an accurate outline of his subject, a lute. The artist, with his canvas attached to a frame from which it can swing to and fro like a door, uses a string, geometry, and an assistant to create a three-dimen sional image on a flat surface. Another Durer woodcut, published posthumously in the second edition of The Painter's Manual (1538), highlights even more dramatically the interplay of geometric measure ment and representation. Here an artist/draftsman views his subject, a semi-nude, reclining woman, through the screen of a grid arranged vertically in front of him and replicated in his graphed paper. Neat, orderly, and precise squares translate flesh into geometric and math ematical patterns. I begin with this brief description of perspective in art to highlight the genesis of Cartesian perspectivalism, a visual habit characterized by