Perspective As Symbolic Form

Erwin Panofsky's Perspective as Symbolic Form is one of the great works of modernintellectual history, the legendary text that has dominated all art historical and philosophicaldiscussions on the topic of perspective in this century. Finally available in English, it is anunrivaled example of Panofsky's early method that placed him within broader developments in theoriesof knowledge and cultural change. Here, drawing on a massive body of learning that ranges overAntique philosophy, theology, science, and optics as well as the history of art, Panofsky produces atype of "archaeology" of Western representation that far surpasses the usual scope of art historicalstudies.Perspective in Panofsky's hands becomes a central component of a Western "will to form," theexpression of a schema linking the social, cognitive, psychological, and especially technicalpractices of a given culture into harmonious and integrated wholes. Yet the perceptual schema ofeach historical culture or epoch is different, and each gives rise to a different but equally fullvision of the world. Panofsky articulates these different spatial systems, demonstrating theirparticular coherence and compatibility with the modes of knowledge, belief, and exchange thatcharacterized the cultures in which they arose. Our own modernity, Panofsky shows, is characterizedby its peculiarly mathematical expression of the concept of the infinite, within a space that isnecessarily both continuous and homogeneous.