perspective and process

The President and Fellows of Harvard College

Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology

Perspective as Process in VermeerAuthor(s): Christopher HeuerReviewed work(s):Source: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 38 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 82-99Published by: The President and Fellows of Harvard College acting through the Peabody Museum ofArchaeology and EthnologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20167509 .

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82 RES 38 AUTUMN 2000

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Figure 1. Johannes Vermeer, The Art of Painting, 1667. Courtesy of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.



Perspective as process in Vermeer

CHRISTOPHER HEUER

I.

A Vermeer is a cup of honey full to the brim, the inside of an egg, a drop of molten lead. When one has looked at

Vermeer's paintings, everything that the great painters insist

upon letting us see of their technique, their know-how, their

procedure, seems to be vanity, feebleness, or vulgarity, a

kind of bluff. Vermeer. . . hides all that he knows, all that

he does.1

These words appeared in the Paris weekly L'Opinion

during May of 1921. Written by the critic Jean-Louis

Vaudoyer, they spoke to a view of Johannes Vermeer's

art that?not only through its evocations of eggs, drops of lead, and cups of honey?assumed that a virtually alchemical process was at work in his canvases. The

placid, mirrorlike surfaces, the apparent erasure of

painterly texture, and above all, the cool, seemingly unobtrusive perspective of works like The Art of Painting

(fig. 1) led Vaudoyer to assume that Vermeer's art-making was, if not magical, then virtually photographic in

nature. Traces of traditional technique, such as

brushstrokes, were nowhere to be found. The quiet,

introspective Delft pieces were then, as now, contrasted

with the theatrical, expressive, and tactical works of

painters like Titian and Rembrandt.2 For Vaudoyer, the

thick impasto of these latter artists (which was so frank

about its status as paint) remained a rather distracting effect. Today, however, such dynamic traces resonate

with discourses of gesture and the bodily in art history, and thus the apparent absence of visible marks in

Vermeer often make him an exemplar of purely

"optical" strategies of representation.3 In these accounts, it is Rembrandt (fig. 2) who generally trumps Vermeer as

the true progressive artist of the seventeenth century, his

violent handling of the brush and his bold treatment of

the quotidian providing an easy connection to modernist

conceptions of the creative process as a subject of art.

In his use of perspective, however, Vermeer may also

have something to offer. Linear perspective in Western

art is a compositional element that provides a systematic fiction of depth, variously defined as a visual cone

(Euclid), a window (Alberti), or a "seeing through"

An earlier version of this paper was presented in the "Theorizing Process" seminar at Berkeley in Spring of 1999. My thanks to the

eight members of the seminar group for suggestions during our

research in London and The Hague, in particular Dr. Elizabeth Honig, whose advice and comments on various drafts of this essay were

invaluable. For sharing their thoughts on perspective and helping me

to clarify my own ideas on Vermeer, I am also grateful to Harry Berger

Jr., Kevin Chua, David Freedberg, Elizabeth Monroe, Loren Partridge, and J?rgen Wadum.

1. "Un Vermeer, c'est une coupe de miel pleine jusqu'au bord,

l'int?rieur d'un uf, une goutte de plomb fondu. Lorsqu'on vient de

regarder des tableaux de Vermeer, tout ce que les grands peintres tiennent ? nous laisser voir de leur technique de leur savoir-faire, de

leurs proc?d?s nous semble (d'ailleurs injustement) de la vanit?, de la

faiblesse, de la vulgarit?, une sorte de <bluff>. Vermeer. . . cache tout

ce qu'il sait, tout ce qu'il fait." Jean Louis Vaudoyer, "Le Myst?rieux Vermeer" L'Opinion A May 1921. My translation is based, with

modifications, on that in Daniel Arasse, Vermeer: Faith in Painting.

(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 94-97.

2. By Vaudoyer (see note 1), for example: "Le toute-puissance du

m?tier est telle chez Vermeer qu'elle n'agit pas comme une facult?

reproductrice, mais commme une facult? cr?atrice. ... Il n'y a pas un

<effet> dans ces tableaux, au sens o? l'entendent les admirateurs du

<clair-obscur> de Rembrandt, ou du <brio> de Velazquez, de la

<patte> de Franz Hais, de Fragonard. . . ." The idea of the "sphinx of

Delft "

is famously attributed to William B?rger (Etienne Joseph

Th?ophile Thor?), "Van der Meer de Delft," Gazette des Beaux-Arts 21

(1886):297-330, 458-470, 542-575. Among the more evocative

considerations of Vermeer's "silence" in the Vienna picture are,

specifically: Hans Sedlmayr, "Der Ruhm der Malkunst: Jan Vermeer 'de

schilderkonst,'" in Festschrift f?r Hans Jantzen (Berlin: Gebr?der Mann,

1951), pp. 167-177; Charles deTolnay, "L"Atelier de Vermeer," Gazette des Beaux-Arts 41 -42 (1953):165-172; Svetlana Alpers, The

Art of Describing (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,

1983), pp. 72-118; id., "The Strangeness of Vermeer," Art in America

84, no. 5 (May 1996):64-65; and Christiane Hertel, Vermeer:

Reception and Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1996), pp. 167-186. And an important early treatment of the different

effects of paint in Rembrandt and Vermeer is Lawrence Gowing, "An

Artist in His Studio: Reflections on Representation," Art News Annual

23 (1954):85-96, 184ff., an article clearly influenced by then

contemporary criticism of Abstract Expressionism. 3. As in Norman Bryson's V7s/on and Painting (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1983), for example: ". . . the aesthetic value of the

trace resides precisely in what can be inferred about the body from the

course o? the trace." When "the work of the brush is assiduously concealed [as in Vermeer] ... the painting is not conceived of in the

model of a physical transaction . . . [rather] it is to be received as

notional, notational, as a mathematical fiction. . . . The Artist in His

Studio dissolves the bodily address of Albertian space." (pp. 116-117).

And on Vermeer's reputation in the nineteenth century as a

"photographic" artist, see (among others) Stanley Meltzoff, "The

Rediscovery of Vermeer," Marsyas2 (1942):154-160.




Figure 2. Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, The Slaughtered Ox, 1655. Louvre, Paris. ? Photo RMN.



Heuer: Perspective as process in Vermeer 85

(D?rer).4 The perspective in Vermeer's paintings, although a longstanding subject of hard-science technical inquiry in this century, has remained largely unexamined as to its

role in narrative and meaning. In most accounts,

perspective is left strangely under-emphasized as a

component of painting-beholding dialectics. Much of this

has to do with the assumption that perspective, as a kind

of invisible scaffolding beneath pictures, must always act

as a closed, irretrievable, and above all, past ingredient of seventeenth-century art. The findings of technical

examinations conducted for Vermeer exhibitions in

Washington and The Hague in 1996, however, suggested alternatives. Here, physical evidence of carefully placed

pinholes was discovered with X-radiography (fig. 3),

causing quite a stir. Yet most of these traces had long been visible to the naked eye. The very tangible presence of these and other "by-products" of perspective

techniques?chalk lines, canvas punctures, nail marks?

unsettled not only the idea of Vermeer's process as

"hidden," but also of perspective as a hermetic, abstract, and purely uncommunicative element of painting.

In the present essay, I am interested in how the study of perspective in paintings may be used for purposes other than the reconstruction of past workshop

practices. I propose to consider how physical leftovers

from an ostensibly preliminary episode in a paintings'

making (perspective construction) condition our

understanding of Vermeer's meaning in the present. The

role that disconnected, often sloppier residues of

painting (for example, drips, splashes, traces of the

brush or the palette knife) play in the interpretation of a

work tends to be viewed as an issue of facture, o?

making. Yet such residues are equally elements of

texture, as contoured layers of pigment that intercede

between the viewer's eye and the image on canvas.5

Elements like underdrawing, submerged reworkings of a

composition, and?significantly?perspective construction, when brought to light through scientific

Figure 3. Stereomicroscopic photograph of pinhole in

Johannes Vermeer, The Art of Painting. From K. G. Hult?n, "Zu

Vermeers Atelierbild," Konsthistorish Tidskrift 18 (1949):94.

Courtesy of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

examination, can be meaningful to the observer as well,

yet for more than connoisseurship. Unearthing the

physical stuff of a painting's making, of course, brings to

light material, as much an integral part of the artwork's

subject as its putative subject matter?the mimetic

image. In certain works by Vermeer, perspective traces

not only abet this mimetic project but actually

supersede it to become the primary subject of

representation. In this, perspective can function as both

texture and facture when elements like vanishing points can be actively beheld. When they are, the overlapping

processes of both making and beholding a painting (fig. 1) come together.

4. See James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1994), which was an important source for some ideas

in this essay. 5. On facture as the subject of technical examination of paintings,

see the following works by Harry Berger, Jr.: "The System of Early Modern Painting," Representations 62 (Spring 1998):1-57; Second

World as Green World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988),

p. 43; and Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian

Renaissance (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000).




II.

Speculation about the actual techniques Vermeer and

many of his contemporaries used to create illusion has

been widespread. His supposed experimentation with

the camera obscura during the 1660s has generated debate over the applicability of proto-photographic devices to early modern painting in general.6 Although much investigation of Vermeer's work in this vein has

attempted simply to recreate the conditions under which

the canvases were made, recently it has been suggested the camera obscura may not have been used alone (if at

all). Rather, such devices may have been used in tandem

with perspective construction.7 The scientific

investigations of Vermeer and his fellow Delft painter Peter de Hooch at exhibitions in The Hague and London

that attempted to unearth material evidence of

perspective processes used infrared photography, stereo

microscopy, and radiography. In some de Hooch works, traces of chalk underdrawing were, in fact, detected, but

for the most part, such investigations proved fruitless, as

most traces of large-scale perspective construction

appear either never to have been present, to have simply

disappeared, worked into layers of pigment in the

painting process.8 Yet one mark of perspective construction that was

consistently detected had frequently been visible with

the naked eye. This was the vanishing point where

orthogonals converged. De Hooch's Woman and a Child

from 1658 (Aurora Art Fund) contains a small disruption in the paint surface where a pin was once inserted into

the white ground, while Vermeer's 1667 The Art of

Painting in Vienna (fig. 1), displayed such a point below

the lower rod of the hanging map (fig. 3).9 These small

cavities, which have also been discovered in Dutch

works by de Lorme, El inga, van Vucht, and others, mark

the spot where the artist would have inserted a pin attached to a chalked string, held this cord taut along the intended orthogonals, and then snapped it

repeatedly against white ground, moving it slightly, in

order to leave straight lines behind.10 The chalk lines

would have then been traced with graphite or paint on

the white ground of the canvas, but the nail would

sometimes remain embedded in the surface well into

the painting process. Like the theory of linear perspective itself, the origin

of this nail practice lies most probably in Quattrocento Florence. Following Brunelleschi's famous

demonstration in front of the Baptistery in 1413, painters like Veneziano, Piero della Francesca, and Uccello all

are reputed to have experimented with pin- or nail-hole

techniques.11 Small pin-depressions have been found in

Masaccio's Trinity fresco in Santa Maria Novella, and in

the so-called Citt? Ideale in Urbino,12 and like those

from the Netherlands, they appear to have been placed

according to one of three methods. Brunelleschi's single

point method (often erroneously credited to Alberti) rested upon the placement of a central "point of flight" from which projected the organizing rays of the

composition. Meanwhile the bifocal method?also

known by Brunelleschi but popularized by Vignola? eliminated the need for this central punctum, positing two convergences outside of the picture plane along a

horizon; these foci were known as distance points. Of

the methods, Vignola claimed,

the first technique is better known, easier to understand; but more time-consuming and a nuisance to use; the

second method is more difficult to comprehend, but easier to execute.13

The tiers points technique, used by de Hooch and

Vermeer, in essence combined these previous two,

negotiating something of a middle path in terms of

complexity. Outlined first in Jean Per?lin's De Artificiali

Perspectiva in 1505, and later taken up by Jean Cousin, 6. Arthur Wheelock, Jr., "Constantijn Huygens and Early Attitudes

toward the Camera Obscura," History of Photography 1:20-32.

7. For the most cogent summary of these speculations, see Jean-Luc

Delsaute, "The Camera Obscura and Painting in the Sixteenth and

Seventeenth Centuries," in Vermeer Studies, ed. Ivan Gaskell and

Michiel Jonker, Studies in the History of Art 55 (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1998), pp. 111-123, and the older literature cited in

Daniel A. Fink, "Vermeer and the Camera Obscura: A Comparative

Study," Art Bulletin 53 (December 1971):493-505.

8. Peter Sutton, "

Perspective and Working Methods," in Peter de

Hooch, 1629-1684 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 40.

9. Physical evidence was first noted in K. G. Hult?n, "Zu Vermeers

Atelierbild," Konsthistorisk TidskriftlQ (1949):92.

10. As cited in Sutton (see note 8), p. 40.

11. See John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 32-51.

12. The mathematical implications of a full perspective grid with

sinopia lines under Masaccio's Trinity fresco is discussed in J. V. Field,

The Invention of Infinity: Mathematics and Art in the Renaissance

(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 43-61.

13. Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, La due reg?le del la prospettiva

(Rome, 1583) cited in Martin Kemp, The Science of Art {New Haven

and London: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 76-77.




the procedure involved drawing three different sets of

orthogonals, two of which converged at points outside

of the picture (again, distance) and one which remained

in the center. The so-called "vanishing point," thus paired with the exterior "distance points," allowed for the

construction of a believable-looking illusion without

recourse to mathematical formulas; indeed, the

procedure remained, particularly during the seventeenth

century, a system more related to carpentry than

geometry. A writer like Abraham Bosse, unsurprisingly, thus depicts lines of sight as strings, that is, as beatable

physical entities in his 1664 Algemene manier tot de

Praktyck der Perspective. These spring and uncoil atop

imaginary ladders or cluster tightly in the hands of

dandified geometers (fig. 4). Elsewhere the same author

advises would-be perspectives to avoid mathematicians

and philosophers when looking for help with

constructions, urging them instead to seek out surveyors,

bricklayers, and cabinet makers, for "they are more

versed in the tangible practice of Meet-konst

(measurement)" and thus grasp the key elements of the

art.14 At least one Dutch artist from the seventeenth

century appears to have done just that: Pieter Saenredam

consulted the Haarlem surveyor Peter Wils for advice

with his architectural paintings throughout the 1630s.15

More than eight of Vermeer's works exhibit physical traces of this method. And Pieter de Hooch, the son of a

master bricklayer, appears to have adopted the

technique as well, for evidence has been discovered in

over a dozen of his interior scenes, including Couple with a Parrot iron) 1677 (Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz

Museum) and Woman with a Child from 1661 (Los

Angeles, Getty Museum). Over time, Vermeer sunk the

lines of his horizons and reduced the span taken in by his distance points, essentially narrowing the viewing

angle of the beholder, reducing marginal distortions in

elements like floor tiles. De Hooch, meanwhile, was less

rigid in his application of preexisting perspective

methods, occasionally introducing multiple horizon

lines or other deviations from a standard grid, which

could account for different levels of depth in a scene.

Thus in some of his works, second or ?/7/rc/pinholes are

actually visible. In the Courtyard in Delft from 1658

(fig. 5), there are two depressions in the canvas along what appears as the inside wall of the brick doorway,

betraying evidence of a slightly altered perspective

r

Figure 4. Abraham Bosse and Fran?ois Desargues, Algemene manier tot de Praktyck den Perspective gelyck tot die der

meet-kunde met de kleyn voet-maat (Amsterdam 1664), no. 2.

Courtesy of the Universiteitsbibliotheek Amsterdam.

14. Abraham Bosse and Fran?ois Desargues, Algemene manier tot

de Praktyck den Perspective gelyck tot die der meet-kunde met de

kleyn voet-maat (Amsterdam, 1664) as cited in J?rgen Wadum,

"Vermeer and Spatial Illusion" in The Scholarly World of Vermeer.

(Zwolle: Waanders, 1996), p. 38. Wadum's observations there and in

the essay "Vermeer in Perspective" in Johannes Vermeer, ed. Arthur

Wheelock, exh. cat. (Washington: National Gallery of Art; The Hague:

Mauritshuis, 1995), pp. 66-79 have aided the present analysis. 15. Rob Ruurs, Saenredam: The Art of Perspective (Amsterdam:

Benjamins/Forsten, 1987), p. 117.




. "?fr'tjjr

-**fe

Figure 5. Pieter de Hooch, The Courtyard of a House in Delft, 1658. ? National Gallery, London.




system. Here, the twin points have been charted using the three-point method along slightly different horizons

to provide a structure but, curiously, a mutable one. This

more "experiential" approach to the illusion of space was a practice initially developed by architectural

painters like Pieter Saenredam and adopted by fellow

Delft painters who specialized in church interiors.

Emanuel de Witte and Hendrick van Vliet, for example,

frequently introduced multiple viewpoints and

perspectival "errors" in their paintings of the 1660s and

1670s to create a more complex sense of space.16 Many of these works combined fragments of views taken from

different parts of a building's interior, resulting in a

finished picture hardly "correct" by any optical standard, but which indeed accounted for the activity of

the roving human eye. This "freer" method of space evocation did not discard perspective completely (as is

sometimes claimed), but rather allowed for multiple

angles to co-inhabit the canvas, assuming the presence of a mobile, projective viewer.17

Modern pictorial reconstructions of early modern

perspective do not account for these multiple spatial constructions in a single picture, however. Such

diagrams, common in technical literature, exhibition

catalogues, and thematic monographs (fig. 6)

oversimplify perspective somewhat by treating it as

nothing but a preparatory element made obsolete by the

completion of the work. Demonstrative orthogonals and

horizon lines, mapped over paintings, can create an

altogether different visual artifact than the painting itself, one where (as in scientific examination) the seemingly invisible is somehow brought to light. This schematizing

makes the picture appear as if it contains a code to be

cracked, a puzzle to be solved, and has thus wrongly influenced much thinking about perspective. The

exaggeration of straight lines gives the impression that

perspective is a dead element from the painting's past construction, something that must be drawn out and

recovered only hypothetically from deep in within the

canvas.18 Perspective itself becomes relegated to a mere

preliminary role in the story of a painting. With

explanatory diagrams, a narrative of making often seems

to end abruptly once the finished painting is on the wall

or reproduced in print.

III.

In the seventeenth century, the idea of a single, formulaic grid, one step away from a finished painting,

was unknown. The perspective available to most early modern artists was instead a diffuse, fragmented, and

pluralized affair.19 Many textual sources that individuals

like Vermeer and de Hooch may have turned to for

instruction on the subject used vastly different means to

teach their truly heterogeneous topic; writers on the

subject commonly acknowledge the complexity of

perspective to the reader, who was only in rare instances

assumed to be an artist.

Alberti's 1435 Delia Pittura had established the

metaphor of the "window" above all as an imaginary aid in explaining perspective to students. Using purely textual description, Alberti emphasized that

measurement (and even the plotting of nail-points) could

be crucial in the production of a picture.20 In the

sixteenth century, meanwhile, authors began to add

lengthy equations to their texts coupled with elaborate

instructions and diagrams (fig. 7). Barbara's Practica

della perspettiva, first published in 1568, is typical (fig. 8),

promising to reveal the "obscure and difficult" rules of

linear perspective. However, only one of Barbara's

diagrams is what today might be considered explicitly

pedagogical. Peppered with references to antiquity, the

book is aimed largely at proving why one perspective method is superior to that of previous authorities,

digressing at length into histories of Euclidean geometry 16. For example in Hendrick van Vliet's Interior of a Gothic Church

(Brunswick, Maine: Bowdoin College Museum of Art). On this

phenomenon see Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen,

Perspectiven: Saenredam en de architectuurschilders van de 17e eeuw

(exh. cat, 1991) cat. nos. 29-32, 37, 40, 43, and Hans Jantzen, Das

Niederlandische Architekturbild, 2d ed. (Braunschweig: Klinkhardt &

Biermann, 1979) pp. 93-112.

17. Technical data on de Hooch is in Peter Sutton (see note 8), p. 42. The invention of the "moving-eye" perspective, associated with the

bifocal method, is traditionally credited to Jean Per?lin (that is, by Alpers, as in note 2, pp. 56-59) but Leonardo's Trattato della Pittura, written in 1510 but unpublished until 1651, outlines something along these lines much earlier.

18. Elkins (see note 4), pp. 217-261.

19. Ibid., pp. 46-67. The idea of a single "classic" perspective is

nonetheless crucial to art-historical narratives attempting to privilege some rupturing heterogeneity in modernism. See Christopher Wood's

introduction to Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New

York: Zone Books, 1991), pp. 14-15.

20. On the window metaphor as a rhetorical trope, see Alfonso

Procaccini, "Alberti and the Framing of Perspective," Journal of

Aesthetics and Art Criticism (1978):29-39.




Figure 6. Illustration IV-4 from Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., 777e Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1975). By kind permission of Samuel Y Edgerton, Jr.

and scenography. Such rhetorical embellishment resulted

from a humanist sense of aedificatio rather than clarity? visual aids, generally woodcuts, only sporadically appear. Predominantly, textual exegesis characterizes the

treatises of Benedetti (Rome, 1585), Commandino

(Venice, 1588), and particularly Lomazzo (Milan, 1584) as well. The latter, particularly, offers long and tedious

explanations with few or no clarifying diagrams.21 Hans Vredeman de Vries's hugely successful

Perspective (1604-1605) attempted a different tact.

Geared not toward artists but to "all lovers of

perspective," the book consisted of two volumes of

plates, which demonstrated an idiosyncratic strain of

Viator's technique. Windy textual addresses to the reader

accompanying these images said almost nothing about

how the shapes should be drawn; instead, they were

concerned almost obsessively with Vredeman's own

achievement, presenting the "admirable" qualities of the

plates. Begging the reader to appreciate his inventive

ability and knowledge, Vredeman offers page upon page of eerie, geometric landscapes as products of his

method alone?unlike a writer such as Barbara, for

example, he makes no claims whatsoever as to the

superiority of his work. In rambling, complicated sentences Vredeman refers readers to earlier sections of

the book, then back to other figures, and then to

publications from south of the Alps and elsewhere. This

brand of active perusal?itself a form of travel for the

reader?is intrinsic to the study of perspective, for it

parallels the darting activity of the mobile eye. In

Vredeman's treatise, it is the viewer, the possessor of the

eye, who is thus upheld as a fundamental component of

the perspective system. Vredeman's well-known plate 30 makes plain the

importance of the embodied beholder for his schema

(fig. 9). A centrally placed viewer, ensnared in a web of

orthogonals, unifies the scene with his eyesight as

gesturing onlookers align themselves along diagonals. None of the figures look out, but the complicity of the

beholder/perspectivist in the upholding of illusion is

made quite clear. As in Vermeer's Art of Painting (fig. 1 ), the turned back of the central figure invites us both to

look over his shoulder and simultaneously to identify with his working process. Perspective illustrations

21. Cf. Kemp (see note 13), p. 84: "It is in [Lomazzo's section on

perspective effects] that the lack of illustrations is most keenly felt.

Reading his instructions is rather like listening to someone trying to

describe a spiral staircase without the aid of illustrations or gestures...."



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PROPOSITIONE VI.

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que contin?ate non per diritto. per laquai coi? pareno rott?^,

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A,& B A.qu?t?que fiano impediti talche n? pof ibno arriuare aU'occhio non per? i?no impediti rotti.Nell aere poi fi farebbe la ui fionc ?otto i rag gi G A.& B A. cifendo dunque qlli impediti nel l'aeren?fi pu?ucdereperquelli,

ma fatto il rom

pimento g la diuerfit? del medio,fi potr? uederc. PRO

Figure 7. Giovanni Paolo Gallucci, / tre libri d?lia perspettiva commvne (Venice, 1593), fol. G1 r. Courtesy of the Getty Research Library, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.


DAK??t BARBADO

Figure 8. Daniele B?rbaro, La practica della perspettiva (Venice, 1568-1569), title page. Courtesy of the Getty

Research Library, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

throughout the second half of the sixteenth century

increasingly included this kind of human staging in their

explanation, indebted largely to the final pages of D?rer's

Underweysung der Messung (fig. 10), which depict the

concretization of Alberti's window metaphor (and the use

of strings as drawing aids). Illustrations showing either

viewers or students hard at work on perspective become

common. Jean Dubriel's 1642 Perspective Practique, which depicts an apprentice using a drawing frame to

render a landscape, is one example. As a teaching tool, these illustrations often supplanted the line-and-letter

diagrams of earlier works like Barbara's, accounting for

the participatory presence of a maker within the

perspective act.22 The sum expression was that

perspective was a process made up of manual, human

application as well as simple results that today are too

often presented as the sole component of the craft.

For the most part, however, perspective books

remained no less mysterious in their explanations; they

simply shifted outward to acknowledge explicitly the

human viewer's involvement in the making of illusion.

22. In the introduction to his Libro de Perpsectiva (1545), Sebastiano

Serlio decries the use of textbooks to teach perspective, emphasizing

again and again that the art can only be taught face to face.




Figure 9. Hans Vredeman de Vries, Perspectiva, id est celeb?rrima ars . . . (The Hague, 1604), no. 30. Courtesy of

the Universiteitsbibliotheek Amsterdam.

One marvelous page designed by Hendrick Hondius for

Samuel Marlois's 1629 work on perspective, suggests this in an illustration of Alberti's visual pyramid (fig. 11).

Here, geometrical diagrams appear in sequentially numbered succession, gradually describing the

rendering of a cube in perspective. In figure 7, as if on

cue, a calipers-clutching human figure suddenly appears, his right eye forming the originating point for

the visual rays. By figure 8, he has disappeared, but

thanks to his presence the cube has, as it were, sprung to life in the scene. The standing geometer here

manifests the implicit role of the beholder in the process of perspective.23

Books on perspective like Marlois's inevitably contributed to the cultural milieu of de Hooch and Vermeer. Yet going through them?looking, reading, copying, thinking, correcting, erasing?was never a

simple or even a practical act, as modern perspective analyses sometimes imply. In fact, after the late sixteenth century, few of the books contained any real new ideas at all, and certainly none aimed explicitly at

the student of painting. Dutch treatises, in particular, suffered a reputation of being particularly useless?in 1628 one reader of Vredeman's Perspective quipped ". . . it is about as easy to learn something [from this

book] as to grab a bird out of the sky. ... I have never

met anyone who has learned anything from [its] prints."24 But nowhere in Vredeman's book does "learning" come

to figure; had Vredeman actually been alive to read

such a comment, the idea that perspective was simply a means would have seemed preposterous to him. For,

like the layering of paint on a canvas, the construction

of a building, or the sculpting of a marble block, an

artist's engagement with a perspective treatise remained a process like any other endeavor, one of laborious trial-and-error and potentially full of misinterpretation, confusion, false starts, and repetition?in sum, not at all dissimilar to the looping vagaries of a bird in flight. "Working through a perspective treatise is not only like

making a picture," James Elkins has noted, "it is making a picture."25 That is, it is a task often less explanatory than poetic, and thus potentially aberrant, elliptical, and abstruse, similar to the reading of many modern

writings on perspective, from Warburg to Panofsky to

23. Samuel Marolois, La perspective: contenant tant la th?orie que la practique et instruction fondamentale d'?celle (Amsterdam: Jan

Jansson, 1628).

24. ". . . waer uyt [Vredeman's Perspective] het alzoo

ghemackelijck om leeren ?s als Voghel inde locht met de handt te

grypen: Wt die oorsake en hebbe ick noyt ymant gesproken die het

selfde grondich uyt zijn printen gheleert heeft." Isaac de Ville,

T'samen-spreeckinghe, Betreffende de Architecture ende Schilder-Konst

(Gouda, 1628), p. 16. On this fascinating pamphlet, see Rob Ruurs, "Pieter Saenredam: zijn boekenbezit en zijn relatie met de landmeter

Pieter Wils," Oud Holland 97, no. 2 (1983):61-65. Further aspects of

Vredeman's posthumous reputation are discussed in my doctoral

dissertation, "The City Rehearsed: Hans Vredeman de Vries and Urban

Representation, 1555-1606" (University of California, Berkeley),

currently in preparation. 25. Elkins (see note 4), p. 115.




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Figure 10. Albrecht D?rer, Underweysung der Messung mit dem Zirkel und Richtscheyt (N?rnberg, 1525), fol. N3r. Courtesy of the Universiteitsbibliotheek Amsterdam.




Figure 11. Samuel Marolois, Perspective, contenant la th?orie, pratique et instruction fondamentalle d?celle (Amsterdam, 1628), no. 1. Courtesy of the Universiteitsbibliotheek Amsterdam.

Damisch.26 In all cases, the demands made on the

reader highlight his or her own complicity in the

generation of meaning and undermine the assumption that perspective and its application is always

synonymous with some kind of cool mathematical

logic. The constructions found in Barbara, Hondius, and Vredeman demonstrate the more inelegant and

eccentric aspects of perspective as a manual process of

making, highlighting the fact that the reader exists as a

separate entity. These works are not dry Cartesian

proofs or even meditative exercises, but almost

contemplations of a kind of homemade algebra,

subjective to the extreme.

IV.

Is perspective really the issue in Vermeer, however?

The fame of much seventeenth-century Delft art rests

largely upon its artists' supposed eschewing of linear

methods of composition in favor of light, color, and

surface. Today commentaries often echo Vaudoyer's

suggestion that Vermeer's images must have sprung forth

"by a kind of magic."27 Perspective's origins as a drawing

technique have traditionally located it within a graphic tradition of representation. Conversely, color and light have been more closely linked to an optical one. This art

26. The impenetrable nature of many writings about perspective is

a fascinating subject in itself. Reviews such as those of Hubert

Damisch, The Origin of Perspective (1987), trans. J. Goodman.

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994) are typical: "(One reader] finds

Damisch's account 'monumental' and 'indispensable/ to another

reader it may seem unoriginal and pointless," in Elkins (see note 4), p. 262. And further, Christopher Wood in Art Bulletin 77 (1995), p. 679,

states: "Damisch is repetitive, elliptical, pompous. . . ." Aside from

simply formal criticisms, the idea that writing about perspective itself

somehow breeds particularly vitriolic high drama is itself hardly new:

The introduction to Daniele Barbara's 1568 work, for example,

blithely claims that Piero della Francesca's book (from which B?rbaro

unabashedly plagiarizes) was written only for "idiots."

27. See, for example, the comments in Melanie Gifford, "Painting

Light: Recent Observations on Vermeer's Technique," in Vermeer

Studies, ed. ed. Ivan Gaskell and Michiel Jonker, Studies in the History of Art 55 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 185-199.




historical categorization is ultimately traceable to

W?lfflin, Riegl, and Gombrich, but their recent

reformulation by Harry Berger, Jr., provides the more

relevant grounds, it seems, for considering Vermeer:

In the graphic mode, things are painted as they are known or thought to be, that is, as people imagine they really are

and appear. ... the images produced in the graphic mode

are governed by prevailing conditions of objective appearance. It is reflexive in that the graphic image is

conspicuously displayed a product of analytical observation and knowledge.

. . .

In the optical mode, things are painted as they are seen, or, more pointedly, in such a manner that the way they are

shown modifies, obscures, or conflicts with their objective structure and appearance.

... the optical mode enjoins the

observer to peer into shadow, distinguish figures from

space where chiaroscuro overrides the individual forms, sort out the motions of figures from those of light, shade, and paint.28

The rush to posit graphic modes of representation as

somehow contrary to, or of a different nature than,

optical ones in terms of illusion is understandable, but

perhaps not entirely applicable to the seventeenth

century. First, the presence of the vanishing point on the

canvas in a sense sees a component of the graphic mode acting in an ostensibly optical fashion. It is a tiny,

physical disruption, a touchable "thing" and at the same

time one element of a spatial abstraction. The palpable nail hole remains part of the overall representation,

demanding that the viewer indeed "shuttles" back and forth before the canvas to sort out what is what.29

Second, the idea that perspective is a purely "objective" process is suspect, as even a handful of idiosyncratic

perspective treatises has demonstrated. Yet third, and most significantly, linear perspective in the seventeenth

century was often a complement of, and hardly an

alternative to, color in the construction of illusion.

Rather, it was but one more component of the Dutch

notion of houding. Variously translated as "conception," "attitude," "aspect" or even "union," houding was

defined in a 1670 book by William Goeree as

that which binds everything together in a drawing or

painting, which makes things move to the front or back, and which causes everything from the foreground to the

middleground and thence to the background to stand in its

proper place without appearing further away or closer.30

The term is a compositional one. Goeree's explanation is concerned with spatial effects in a painting, less

with how they are to be achieved than the results they will produce. The definition makes no prescriptions as

to what methods should or should not be used,

suggesting again that the boundaries between linear

and coloristic strategies for art-making may have been

somewhat indistinct. Goeree is also rather vague in his

terminology. His avoidance of concrete examples here

for the expression "everything" (alles) suggests that he

may be referring to elements other than simply the

mimetically depicted human figures or objects in the

picture. Possibly the compositional lines and

pigments?just as much as the subjects?are to

appear, as he claims "as if they were accessible with

one's feet" (als of sijn met de voeten toegangelijk ware)?as well.31 The "graphic" perspectival skeleton

beneath a composition would then be understood as a

subject just as worthy of the picture as the scene it

helped to counterfeit.

V.

The correlation between perspective as a model of

drawing and of seeing the world remains a contentious

subject in the art, philosophy, and psychology of this century. Erwin Panofsky's famous dismissal of

Renaissance perspective as an accurate reproduction of

vision (1927) was among the first to suggest that

cognitive processes may be conditioned by specific cultures. Since then, perspective has often been viewed as a rough abstraction, with no more claim to

28. Berger, "The System of Early Modern Painting" (see note 5), pp.

35, 39.

29. On the "shuttling" action prompted by paintings, see Claude

Gandleman, Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1991), chap. 3.

30. William Goeree, Inleyding tot de al-ghemeene Teycken-const

(Middleburg, 1670), p. 129: "De Houdinge is dat gene, welk alles dat

in een Teikening of Schilderye verbond word, doet agter en voor uyt

wijken, en alles van het voorste tot het middelste, en var daar tot het

agterste, op sijn eigen plaats doen staan, sonder nader of verder te

schijnen. . . ." See Paul Taylor's translation and useful discussion in

"The Concept of Houding in Dutch Art Theory," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 55 (1992):210-232, and also that in Lyckle de

Wies, Diamante Gedenkzuilen en Leerzaeme Voorbeelden: een

bespreking van Johann van Gools Nieuwe Schouburg (Groningen:

Egbert Forsten, 1990), pp. 55ff.

31. Ibid., p. 129.




essentialism than any other stylistic convention.32 As an oppressive and confining compositional relic in art,

perspective has become suspect, the optical burden

photography and film are cursed to bear, and which

the avant-garde is bound to renounce.33 It remains

emblematic of an ideology that shackles

representation to scientific exactitude and

quantification, and subjects human expression to the

model of a capitalist account-book. And when

deployed in scenes like Vermeer's, which often depict

burghers^at leisure, perspective further perpetuates

hazy associations with some kind of merchant

bourgeois ideology, which immobilizes and excludes

viewers before an arbitrary construct.34 As a paradigm of experience, meanwhile, Renaissance perspective is

seen?not incorrectly, in many ways?as incapable of

accounting for the vagueness, uncertainty, and

volatility of individual lives and bodies in space.

Hubert Damisch, however, has suggested something of the opposite. In his ambitious Origin of Perspective (1987) he synthesizes several older art-historical and

psychological analyses to offer the claim that

perspective in fact makes subjectivity possible. Rather than harnessing the viewer to a single, objective viewpoint, Damisch claims that perspective allows the act of seeing to become visible, making the beholder's visual options clear. By fixing the anterior viewer, and

acknowledging his presence, perspective in essence

points like a twin index not simply back to the process of a painting's creation, but also out to the subject

beholding, addressing him as through an utterance, which "assigns the subject a place that gives

meaning."35 In this process, perspective functions

dietically?it expresses spatial and temporal information about its place of origin, indicating the presence of the viewer as if by a demonstrative pronoun. With this,

perspective allows for the involvement, not the

exclusion, of the subject into a kind of discourse. The

locus of perspective's enunciation to the viewer here

becomes the vanishing point, which, like the perspective treatise explicitly oriented towards the viewer, reflexively posits the existence of a separate entity through its own

act of self-designation. The point thus maintains a dual existence as both an internal and external component of a system: within it as one element of illusion and

outside of it as a kind of meta-linguistic marker of that

system as a construct?a reminder that we are specific and particularly located, corporeal individuals looking at an image from a point of view.36

Now, there seem to be a number of problems with

Damisch's idea?most noticeably the supposition that

pictures work exactly like language and that beholding is something like the act of listening.37 And the pictures

he discusses (the two Ideal City panels in Baltimore and

Urbino) are from the fifteenth century, not the

seventeenth, and put basically, are simply more

perspectival-/oo/c/V?g than many works by Vermeer. But

32. Yet this supposed (modernist) "arbitrariness" of perspective is

actually quite debatable. See Michael Kubovy, The Psychology of

Perspective and Renaissance Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1986), pp. 104-126.

33. See, for example, El Lissitsky, "A. and Rangeometry" (1925)

translated in E. Dluhosch, ed., Russia: An Architecture of World

Revolution (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970), pp. 143-144: "Perspective limits space: it has made it finite, closed. Until our time the 'sum total'

of art has not experienced any new extensions. However a

fundamental reorientation has taken place in Science [sic]. . . . Rigid

Euclidean space has been destroyed." And further Laszlo Maholy

Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film (1925; reprint, London: Lund, 1969),

p. 9: "In the exact mechanical procedures of photography and the film

we possess an expressional means for representation which works

incomparably better then did the manual procedures of

representational painting we have known hitherto." The closeness in

time of the appearances of these treatises and Ranofsky's "Symbolic Form" essay (delivered as a lecture before its 1927 publication)

suggests a tantalizing connection. On the related question of

"objective" versus "subjective" viewpoints in painting, see J. Ortega Y

Gasset, "On Point of View in the Arts," in The Dehumanization of Art

and Other Writings on Art and Culture, trans. Raul Snodgrass and

James Frank (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 105-108.

34. Henri Pirenne, Optics, Painting, and Photography (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1970) pp. 165-183. On the origins of this

idea in a Quattrocento context, see Ranofsky (see note 19), pp. 60-66;

Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 124-128; and Henri

Lefevbre, "The Space of the Architect," (1964) in Writings on Cities

(London: Blackwell, 1985), pp. 244ff. Then for an important refutation, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth

Century French Thought (Berkeley and London: California University

Press, 1993), pp. 54-60.

35. Ibid., p. 446.

36. Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics^ 966), trans.

Lawrence Meek (Coral Gables: Florida University Press, 1971), p. 260.

One account that applies Benveniste's model to Vermeer (although not

always successfully) is Brian Rotman, Signifying Nothing: The

Semiotics of Zero (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1987), pp.

18-26,32-39. 37. The pitfalls of such an assumption are demonstrated in Bryson

(see note 3), pp. 87-113.




if

n

S??*?

Figure 12. Johannes Vermeer, The Milkmaid, 1658. Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.




Figure 13. X-radiograph detail of Johannes Vermeer, The

Milkmaid, 1658. Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

his theory is not completely inapplicable, for it actually

suggests (if indirectly) an alternative to perspective's "rational" side. If a perspective system is functioning to

reference the viewer, it is not, Christopher Wood has

noted, doing so in grammatical terms. Rather, the system

"operates within the terms set by the fiction proposed by the picture," and thus remains, indeed, something more

haphazard, less predictable.38 The beholder of the

painting is needed to complete the perspective system, as in the Renaissance treatises' illustrations and

directives, but he does so in an unchartable way. Consider the case of Vermeer's famous Milkmaid in

the Rijksmuseum (fig. 12). In this work, there is a small,

painted nail in the upper center of the canvas, which is

made to cast a shadow on the white pitted wall. X-ray

reflectography of the canvas, which took place for a

1995 exhibition, revealed that the nail falls not far from

where there once had been a large map, later painted over.39 This piece of information about the work's

construction, of course, speaks more to the^noment of

the painting's production than to our present-day moment of its interpretation. But in both moments

perspective works as a process. As they now appear, the

represented nail and holes tell the story of previous

attempts to hang a painting or a basket like that adorning the upper left.40 But the pock-marked wall also refers to

the work's construction?pointing to the one-time

existence of a real nail in the center of the canvas.

Meanwhile, a small physical depression in the surface

four centimeters above the woman's right hand addresses

viewers as a physical evidence of this perspective (fig. 13). It serves to remind the viewer of his active

complicity in the creation of this linear system of illusion

and, correspondingly, of the role that he, like the

mimetic subject on the canvas, plays in the production of

meaning. The generation, articulation, and reworking of

potential meanings that is prompted by the painting?but

ultimately supplied by the viewer?remains in itself as

active a process as Vermeer's application of paint. And in

the end, this introspective process is paralleled almost

uncannily by the workings of perspective. Partial and

intrusive (once discovered), the texture of the piece

signifies "another state of painting" within the picture? the state of craft, of materiality.41

For viewers today the pinhole unsettles the conceptual

primacy of the mimetic narrative, making the perspectival

grid or system itself something of the main subject of the

painting instead of the pouring of milk and its

38. Wood (see note 26), p. 681.

39. Wheelock (see note 14), pp. 108-109.

40. An important study of the nail in the Amsterdam picture is

Mieke Bal, "Light in Painting: Dis-Semmating Art History," in

Deconstruction and the Visual Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1994), pp. 56-57.

41. Georges Didi-Hubermann, "The Art of Not Describing: Vermeer?The Detail and the Patch," History of the Human Sciences 2

(1989):146.




connotations of domesticity, motherhood, and

productivity. In 1669, an art collector from The Hague named Peter Teding van Berckhout got at this after he

visited Vermeer's studio in Delft. Describing the works

that he saw there to his diary, he named not pictures of

objects or people, but rather "extraordinary .. . and

curious perspectives."42 To Teding van Berckhout,

perspective effects remained an artistic endeavor and a

subject unto themselves, as in the treatises. For rather than

simply providing the stage sets for an artistic production,

perspective became the play, unseating the depicted

genre subject as the primary focus of interpretation. At the closing of the exhibition that Jean-Louis

Vaudoyer had so enthusiastically reviewed in 1921, one

of his readers was provided with a personal tour. Marcel

Proust, an avid (if cloistered) subscriber to L'Opinion, was escorted to the show by Vaudoyer in October of

that year, but apparently understood Vermeer somewhat

differently than his journalistic companion. For the

novelist, the paintings remained objects more

expressive, processural, and introspective. Vermeer's

work had first struck the delicate Proust during a visit to

the Mauritshuis in 1902, and in the intervening period, he had, of course, produced a text in which The View of

Delft figured continuously, The Remembrance of Things ftsf.43 It was hardly the muted finish of Vermeer's work

that was so intriguing in the book, but rather its very active harmonization of "patches" of color, light, and

space. This harmonization, readable in discrete visual

passages, spurred the very subjective ordering of

experience in Proust's literary characters. As Bergotte gasps in The Captive:

. . . these resemblances, concealed, involuntary, which

broke out in different times ... at remote intervals I

recaptured in my life as starting-points, foundation-stones for the construction of a true life. . . 44

Proust recognized the manner in which seemingly unconnected aspects of a painting can cohere and

evoke, and how the traces of things supposedly past can

impart meaning through their reception in the present. As I have suggested, it is possible that in certain Vermeer

paintings the remnants of perspective technique can

work this way as well. For, as the traces of making persist, so does their signification of process, and such

"remote intervals" of composition on the canvas?as

points?most certainly emerge as well as vanish.

42. "extraordinaijre . . . curieuse . . .

perspectives." as cited in J. M.

Montias, Vermeer and His Milieu: A Web of Social History (Princeton,

N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 48. On Teding van

Berckhout's visit, see also Wadum (see note 14), pp. 71-72.

43. John Meyers, "Proust and Vermeer," Art International 17, no. 5

(May 1973):69. On Proust's visit with Vaudoyer and his subsequent

experience, before the View of Delft o? a (modernist) paroxysm of self

realization, see Hans Belting, Das Unsichtbare Meisterwerk: Die

Moderne Mythe der Kunst (Munich: Beck, 1998), pp. 259-268, along with Hertel, (see note 2), pp. 116-139.

44. Marcel Proust, The Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K.

Scott-Moncrief (London: Chatto & Windus, 1971) pp. 864-865. The

emphasis is mine.



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