David Peat

The End of Representation 101consciousness had begun to abstract itself from the world. It pictureditself as standing outside and looking in. Rather than being an activeparticipator within the cosmos it had become an observer and contemplator.Naturally this required an art that would complement thisnew attitude of mind and a means of representation adapted to anobjective gaze.Contemporary with this change of seeing came the invention, inRenaissance Florence, of geometrical perspective. There had alwaysbeen a number of ways of expressing the solidity of things and theirposition in space. For example, making objects larger or smaller, withthe closer object overlapping the ones behind. Other clues as to distancecome from the haze, the blue cast of distant mountains, thechanging sizes of tiles or patterns on a carpet and so on. Point perspectivewas dramatically different and led to a particularly vivid form ofillusion.Before perspective came on the scene the Sienese painter Ducciocould paint the Madonna Enthroned as if seen from several differentviewpoints. Part of her throne is seen from the left, another part fromthe right. Duccio was giving us more of an all-round view of the throneby integrating several glances into a coherent whole. Western paintingwould have to wait for Picasso and Braque before this device would beused again in any coherent way.By contrast, perspective employs only a single viewpoint. It is as ifthe world is being seen through a window, the edge of the canvas orpanel being the window frame. In his frescoes for the Scrovegni chapelin Padua, Giotto, one of the first painters to experiment with perspective,made explicit reference to this device. On the right and left of thealtar he painted archways through which could be “seen” the transeptof the church with a hanging lamp. To complete this illusion we “see” adifferent angle of this transept from the right- and left-hand viewpoints.It is as if Giotto had punched a hole through the wall and weare seeing a real extension to the chapel.Of course not every painter slavishly adopted the perspectival gridor preserved the illusion of the world seen through a window frame.Caravaggio knew the rules of perspective well enough to subvert thewhole illusion in particularly dramatic ways. Rather than framing his