By the seventeenth century perspective had come to encompass a wide range of pictorial practices and divergent aims, yet modern concepts and metaphors of perspective that have shaped both the history and practice of art in our time draw on fairly reductive models of what perspective is. The seminar considers how and why this disjunction between the practice and ideas of perspective developed, and what its implications are for our use of perspective as a category of analysis. We will be discussing key texts on perspective from the early modern and modern periods in order to understand how perspective has been theorized and become identified with such notions as the rationalization of sight, the creation of pictorial space, the ‘facts’ of vision, historical distance, the ‘Western’ scientific gaze, and modern subjectivity itself. In our assessment of these texts we will consider various pictorial practices and applications of perspective, from European perspective pictures, to anamorphic art, maps, prints, trompe l’oeil pieces, optical devices, and Japanese folding screens and handscrolls. Our aim will be to discover what aspects of pictorial practice have been illuminated, marginalized, and/or eclipsed in the discourse of perspective, and to rethink both the parameters of the category and its use in the analysis of pictures and visuality. Class discussions will focus on pictorial material from the greater seventeenth century, but participants may choose paper topics from their own areas of interest and research. Course expectations include informed participation, occasional in-class exercises, a short oral presentation, and a substantial critical research paper. The seminar will be interdisciplinary in approach and students from all disciplines are welcome.
