The Ever-Present Origin - Michael Goodnight - Editor

perspective, had become common property and were evident in theincreasing prevalence of landscape painting throughout Europe. We shallonly mention a few of the great European masters who repeatedly took upthe question of the perception and depiction of space in landscape:Altdorfer, van Goyen; Poussin, Claude Lorrain; Ruysdael, Magnasco;Watteau, Constable, Corot, Caspar David Friedrich; Millet, Courbert;Manet,Monet, Renoir, and finally, van Gogh and Rousseau.Space is the insistent concern of this era. In underscoring this assertion,we have relied only on the testimony of its most vivid manifestation, thediscovery of perspective. We did, however, mention in passing that at thevery moment when Leonardo discovers space and solves the problem ofperspective, thereby creating the possibility for spatial objectification inpainting, other events occur which parallel his discovery. Copernicus, forexample, shatters the limits of the geocentric sky and discoversheliocentric space; Columbus goes beyond the encompassing Oceanosand discovers earth's space: Vesalius, the first major anatomist, bursts theconfines of Galen's ancient doctrines of the human Body and discovers thebody's space;Harvey destroys the precepts of Hippocrates' humoralmedicine and reveals the circulatory system. And there is Kepler, who bydemonstrating the elliptical orbit of the planets, overthrows antiquity'sunperspectival world-image of circular and flat surfaces (a view still heldby Copernicus) that dated back to Ptolemy's conception of the circularmovement of the planets.It is this same shape - the ellipse - which Michelangelo introduces intoarchitecture via his dome of St. Peter’s, which is elliptical and not round orsuggestive of the cavern or vault. Here, too, we find a heightened sense ofspatiality at the expense of antiquity's feeling of oceanic space. Galileopenetrates even deeper into space by perfecting the telescope, discoveredonly shortly before in Holland, and employing it for astronomical studies —preparations for man's ultimate conquest of air and suboceanic space thatcame later and realized the designs already conceived and drawn up inadvance by Leonardo.This intense desire evident at the turn of the sixteenth century to conquerspace, and to break through the flat ancient cavern wall, is exemplified notonly by he transition from sacred fresco painting to that on canvas, buteven by the most minute and mundane endeavours. It was around thistime that lace was first introduced; and here we see that even the fabriccould no longer serve merely as a surface, but had to be broken open, asit were, to reveal the visibility of the background or substratum. Nor is itaccidental that in those years of the discovery of space via perspective,the incursions into the various spatial worlds mentioned above brought onwith finality a transformation of the world into a spatial, that is, a sectoredworld. The previous unity breaks apart; not only is the world segmentedand fragmented, but the age of colonialism and the other divisions begins:schisms and Splits in the church, conquests and power politics, unboundedtechnology, and all types of emancipations.24