Orthodox and Anamorphic Perspectives

Abstract

This review originated as a paper delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, November 1994, in the context of a symposium occasioned by the publication in English translation of Panofsky's famous essay first published in 1924-25 and Damisch's L'Origine de la perspective (1987). The symposium was organized by T. J. Clark and he responded to my paper. I was initially intrigued and frankly mystified by what Clark's interest in the topic might be, but I gathered that my brief was to represent a position critical of perspective informed by psychoanalytic/feminist/poststructuralist theory. I naturally anticipated a critique of my critique, yet I was totally unprepared for Clark's enthusiastic reading of Damisch's book as a vindication of perspective on the grounds that perspective contains the seeds of its own deconstruction most vividly realized by Cubism. In Clark's view the way perspectival representation attempts to measure and control every interval makes its inevitable anomalies and discrepancies all the more unsettling. Also, the reversibility of viewpoint and vanishing point, mirror images of each other across the plane of the projection, makes the viewer's position radically unstable. This instability is evoked, for example, in the figure of the reversible cube like the one lodged in the forehead of Picasso's Head of a Woman (1908-9). While I had read Damisch's detailed analysis of the so-called Ideal City in Urbino and related panels (possibly by Piero) as a masterly, if late, example of high structuralist transformational logic, Clark had discovered a modernist, post-Cubist understanding of perspective. The Urbino panel, it is argued, with its vanishing point placed very slightly off-centre, will for the patient viewer slowly release its internal tensions and torcs. For Clark and