Dupré, Sven (ed.): Perspective as Practice. Renaissance Cultures of Optics, (TECHNE 1), 512 p., 143 b/w ill. + 46 colour ill., 178 x 254 mm, ISBN : 978-2-503-58107-1, 90 € (Brepols, Turnhout 2019)

 
Compte rendu par Ingrid Leonie Severin, Leuphana University Lüneburg
 
Nombre de mots : 2143 mots
Publié en ligne le 2020-07-29
Citation: Histara les comptes rendus (ISSN 2100-0700).
Lien: http://histara.sorbonne.fr/cr.php?cr=3781
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          This book, whose editor is Sven Dupré¹, is the outcome of a collaboration between the Centre Alexandre Koyré (CAK) Paris and the Research Group ‘Art and Knowledge in Pre-modern Europe’ at the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), Berlin. It follows from two workshops held in October 2012 at the MPIWG and in September 2013 at the CAK. It has subsequently been developed with the support of fellowships held by several working group members at the MPIWG and a senior visiting fellowship awarded to Georges Farhat at the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of Science and the Humanities at Utrecht University. The working group has also benefited from [Perspectiva+], a collaborative digital project hosted at the Biblioteca Hertziana in Rome, conceived in collaboration with the late Andreas Thielemann, and developed by Klaus E. Werner of the Max Planck Research Group. The research was supported by an ERC Grant.

         This excellent collection of essays is about the development of optics and perspective between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, bringing together knowledgeable scholars from different fields within this area of research. As the editor states: The point of departure of this book is the recognition of the plurality of meanings of perspective. For this purpose the contributions explore the history of “perspectiva” in terms of practices through which knowledge in perspective were produced, promoted, legitimated and circulated in and through a range of sites and institutions. This brings out the variety of uses and different meanings of perspectiva—during the period between 1300 and 1700 and across different sites of artists’ appropriations of optical knowledge. By situating artists’ optical knowledge in workshop and design practices, we get the chance to deepen our knowledge about practices of perspective, use and codification of optical knowledge and geometry of perspective. It is an erudite study that contributes to the field on several different fronts. It refreshes and deepens understanding of optical theory and its development. Its contributors draw a large „picture“ with convincing arguments which will persuade readers and will fuel productive reflection, discussion and further research about the topic in a cross-over of the history of science, media and art history.

         This edition does offer a generous array of new “perspectives” and devotes a special appendix with coloured pictures at the end of the book. This well-illustrated compilation is divided into three broad sections. The first has to do with different sites in which perspective is practiced and intends to elucidate the widespread optical literature of the period under investigation, especially the site-dependent meaning of perspective. (I. Sites of Perspective)
 

         The first comprehensive examination is Marvin Trachtenberg’s extensive contribution on Perspective as Artistic Form. Optical Theory and Visual Culture from Giotto to Alberti, where the author explains how optical theories played an important role already in the Trecento visual arts in Italy. His line of argumentation is divided into a theoretical part (theoretical texts of optical theory expanded) and case studies of applied perspective, e.g. in Giotto’s paintings and frescoes and its connectivity to notations of the power of the viewers eye (p.42; 53 inflecting the work toward the viewer’s eye) paralleled in well exploited examples within architecture and sculpture.² Sources and arguments are compelling. The site examined here is the trecento urban Piazza as architectural site planning shaped by a set of Eucledian-Vitruvain optical principles. (This essay closes with a long conclusion on Brunelleschi’s perspective panels; and the exploitation of optical models/ common ground in Optics from Giotto to Brunelleschi and Alberti.³)

         The following essays examine other sites: In her compelling and highly informational article The Emerald and the Eye Marjolijn Bol presents in profundity sources about the workshop as a site of knowledge of light and colour. She examines in depth the artisan working with emeralds while knowing their optical properties and the discourses and consequences this knowledge creates. I think the massive evidence based on abundantly examined sources she here compiled surely drives the reader to that inevitable conclusion that her arguments are a valuable reflection.

         In The Perspective of the Instrument Maker Samuel Gessner investigates the sharing of knowledge and procedures that prefigure and come together in the “planispheric projection with Gemma Frisius and the Arsenius Workshop at Louvain” in the sixteenth century.
The development of Visual Theory at the Anatomy Theatre in the Sixteenth Century is the main focus of Tawrin Baker’s Dissection, Instruction, and Debate. Focusing on the anatomy theatre at the University of Padua he evidently demonstrates how it became the place where both the structure of the eye and visual theory were being developed, taught, dis/constructed, discussed and disseminated. The treatment of the eye and vision at the anatomy theatre itself (combining traditions of anatomy, natural philosophy and mathematical optics) follow a twisting path throughout the sixteenth century, the author here describes in an excellent manner. For those interested in the history of the perception of the eye, this essay is a “must read”- reference with numerous sources!

         Other sites are found in court architecture, especially the courtly theatre and the courtly garden, dealt with in the contributions by Jaime Cuenca, The Princely Point of View: Perspectival Scenery and Aristocratic Leisure in Early Modern Courts and Juliet Odgers, The Optical Construction of John Evelyn’s ‘Dyall Garden’ at Sayes Court. Jaime Cuenca shows how perspective in the courtly theatre – (through history of stage design and the discussion of view point Peruzzi, Serlio, Barbaro, Vignola, Buontalenti a.o.) had a political function whereas Juliet Odgers discusses the design of the Sayes Court Garden (near London) as a location where the garden is home to a practice in which perspective is embedded in the broader field of the optically oriented, projective mathematical arts (“including surveying, observational astronomy, dialling)

         In the second part of this volume the authors examine written sources as one of the most important practices of perspectiva. (II. Writing on Perspective)

         One of the publications most interesting in depth essay is Elaheh Kheirandish, Optics and Perspective in and beyond the Islamic Middle Ages: A Study of Transmission through Multidisciplinary Sources in Arabic and Persian. She has here viewed and compared an enormous amount of material, from Alhacen, Bīruni, Ibn al-Haytham, Munshī, Rāzī, Tūsī, e.a., focussing on components of comparable concepts and variants of perspective practices (continious and discontinuous with later developments) like angle and distance, direction and depth, outline and colour and mirror and measure. Through a close study of the transmission - either translation, omission, abbreviation- within these sources she comes to realize highly valued findings about the developments in optics and perspective. (e. g. notions of Picture plane, visual cone, visual rays a. o.) This early history of optics is well documented by in a depth study of Arabic optical and philosophical, Persian literary and surveying sources, illustrated in an Appendix (p.226-240).

         Mark Smith, The Roots and Routes of Optical Lore in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance investigates the dissemination through teaching and via popular and extra- textual conduits of core sources –three manuscripts between 1265 and 1280.

         The next three essays discuss specific texts: A highly informational essay by Dominique Raynaud on A Hitherto Unknown Treatise on Shadows Referred to by Leonardo da Vinci, suggests a reflection about and /considers the existence of a textual source for Leonardo’s theory of the penumbra, thereby focussing on the science of shadow - he highlights the role of translation in the transmission of knowledge.

         Sven Duprés How-To Optics, is divided into three parts. In the first Writing optics: recipes and secrets, Dupré examines the recognition of the materiality of perspective and shows how writing practices (materiality of texts on optics and perspective) contributed to the artist’s expertise in knowledge of the secrets of perspective. – And the role of artist’ reading, drawings and writings on optics, often this knowledge was re-packaged as recipes or secrets. E.g. he reconsiders Ghiberti’s third commentary in the light of the artist’s appropriation of optical knowledge – artist’s adoption of humanist techniques and note taking. As a second aspect of the materiality of perspective Dupré considers the instruments of perspective, camera obscura, mirror, lens. In Manipulation of optical objects, the third aspect he describes how in the books of “secrets”, in the sixteenth century, re-packaged optical knowledge travelled more easily and changed the meaning of optics, and delivered the creative basis for new concepts in the creation of visual effects via manipulation of objects and instruments.

         Jose Calvo Lopez, analysis of the Architectural Notebook of Hernan Ruiz II, introduces to us various practices of perspective at work in visualizing architecture, in Sixteenth-Century Spain.

         The focus of the third part is on the practices of drawing, constructing and painting. (III. Drawing, Constructing, Painting) and considers the variety of “non-Albertian” constructions to create the illusion of space exemplified by Masaccio’s Elements of Painting: Geometrical Practice in the Trinity Fresco, Representation of Distance and Magnitude in Leon Battista Alberti’s De pictura, The Use of Perspective in the Art of Piero della Francesca profoundly explained by Judith V. Fields; e.g. Filippo Camerota is convincingly showing that Masaccio did apply the constructive tools available in the culture of the „abaco“ tradition in the Trinity Fresco.

         Paul Hills, argues in his The Venetian Optics of Light and Geometry of Proportion, that Venetian painting around 1500 (Bellini) was the result of a practice of perspective paying special attention to light, and hereby focuses on the specific relevance and singular importance of Luca Pacioli’s understanding of proportion. Discussing in depth: Pacioli, Carpaccio and Euclidian Culture, proportion, perspective and shadows in Carpaccio, transparency, reflection and shadows, Bellini and Giorgione, the perspective of light and the optics of light in Titian.

         In his final essay, Topographic perspective as constructed Optics, Landscape Design and the Grand Canal at Versailles, Georges Farhat, takes a close look at André le Notre’s design for the Grand Canal of Versailles as a specific appropriation of optical knowledge which he names „Topographic Perspective“, a practice which includes the construction of optical devices, visual alignment and the application of anamorphic schemes. A very compelling example of how landscape designs contribute to the historiography of perspective underscoring the polysemy of perspective central to this book.

Éditeurs : Lorenz E. Baumer, Université de Genève ; Jan Blanc, Université de Genève ; Christian Heck, Université Lille III ; François Queyrel, École pratique des Hautes Études, Paris
Site conçu par Lorenz Baumer et François Queyrel et réalisé par Lorenz Baumer, 2006/7