The outcast space of Perugino

Abstract

When I was a boy in St. Louis, Missouri, I grew up across the street from the house of Norris K. Smith, an art historian who taught at Washington University. As I have gotten older, I associate this experience with a picture in Smith’s last book–a book about Renaissance perspective and a kind of career summation he published in 1994 called Here I Stand: Perspective from Another Point of View. The picture, painted by the artist Robert Jordan, shows the vantage from the far distance of Perugino’s Sistine fresco, the Christ Giving the Keys of the Church to St Peter. Perugino shows the protagonists front and center, with smaller and inconsequential figures populating the mid ground and distance. But in Jordan’s picture we see Peter and his entourage as tiny figures in the far distance, beheld from over the shoulder of a faraway ball-player in Perugino’s original. Thinking of this image in Smith’s book, recalling the reversed perspectives of life on either side of Cornell Avenue in St. Louis, and considering my difference from Smith, I speculate on the meanings of the words world and space as they relate to Perugino’s painting and to the act of writing art history.