Title: Perspective as practice : Renaissance cultures of optics /
Authors: Dupré, Sven, 1975-
Year: 2019
Subjects: Perspective History; Optics History; 33.01 history of physics.; Optics; Perspective; Perspective History.; Optics History.; Optics and art.; Perspective Technique.; Visual perception History.; Arts, Renaissance.
Abstract: This book is about the development of optics and perspective between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. The point of departure of this book is the recognition of the polysemy of perspective, that is, the plurality of meanings of perspective. To bring forward the polysemy of perspective, this book explores the history of 'perspectiva' in terms of practices, a conglomerate of material, social, literary and reproductive practices, through which knowledge claims in perspective were produced, promoted, legitimated and circulated in and through a variety of sites and institutions. The ways optical knowledge was used by different groups in different places (such as the university classroom, the anatomist's dissection table, the goldsmith's workshop, and the astronomer's observatory) defined the meanings of Renaissance perspective. As this period was characterized by widespread 'optical literacy', perspective was defined in different ways in different places and sites by various groups of practitioners. Most interestingly, sites such as the theatre, the instrument maker's workshop and the courtly garden were home to practices of perspective which have remained on the margin, or even completely invisible, in the historiographies of optics and perspective. The book also brings out the differences between codifications of perspectiva and practice. There were a variety of non-Albertian constructions to create the illusion of space, and other types of optical knowledge were as important to artists as the geometry of perspective."--Back cover.
Contents: Sites of perspective. Perspective as artistic form: optical theory and visual culture from Giotto To Alberti / Marvin Trachtenberg -- The emerald and the eye: on sight and light in the artisan's workshop and the scholar's study / Marjolijn Bol -- The perspective of the instrument maker: the planispheric projection with Gemma Frisius and the Arsenius workshop at Louvain / Samuel Gessner -- Dissection, instruction, and debate: visual theory at the anatomy theatre in the sixteenth century / Tawrin Baker -- The princely viewpoint: perspectival scenery and its political meaning in early modern courts / Jaime Cuenca -- The optical construction of John Evelyn's 'Dyall Garden' at Sayes Court / Juliet Odgers -- Writing on perspective. Optics and perspective in and beyond the Islamic Middle Ages: a study of transmission through multidisciiplinary sources in Arabic and Persian / Elaheh Kheirandish -- The roots and routes of optical lore in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance / A. Mark Smith -- A hitherton unknown treatise on shadows referred to by Leonardo da Vinci / Dominique Raynaud -- How-to optics / Sven Dupré -- Teaching, creating, and using perspective in sixteenth-century Spain: the architectural notebook of Hernán Ruiz II / José Calvo-López -- Drawing, constructing, painting. Masaccio's elements of painting: geometrical practice in the Trinity fresco / Filippo Camerota -- Divided into similar parts: representation of distance and magnitude in Leon Battista Alberti's 'De pictura' / Pietro Roccasecca -- The use of perspective in the art of Piero della Francesca / J.V. Field -- The Venetian optics of light and geometry of proportion / Paul Hills -- Topographic perspectives as constructed optics, landscape design and the Grand Canal at Versailles / Georges Farhat.