The Poetics of Perspective

by James Elkins
Cornell University Press.
1994.

Reviewed by Tony Green

This is the most useful publication to date on Perspective. Since it is involved with the history of representation in the West, it is a subject of central interest to art history. Elkins recognizes the importance of the way we view the rise of perspective as crucial to our complex discourses concerning art.

He shows that our perspective on Perspective has always been caught between disciplines. Hence our difficulties in reconciling the different readerly demands placed on mathematics, optics and the interpretation of art.

At the centre of his discussion is the classic and highly influential essay by Erwin Panofsky: "Die Perspektiv als 'symbolishe Form' ". For Elkins, who reads the first six paragraphs very closely indeed, this typifies the modern tendency to take Perspective primarily as metaphor (a symbol of cultural and intellectual attitude), based on its creation of "space". He shows, however, that Perspective in the Renaissance was never more than a bundle of heterogeneous practices, often combined in one picture, concentrated not on space but on the rendering of objects.

The book is evidently a compressed version of Elkins' six volume doctoral thesis. In spite of the often too evident foreshortening of the text to about 280 pages (plus an invaluable 37 page bibliography) Elkins manages to lead us through the main arguments. Even without more space for demonstrations and analyses, this book should shake up our notions of this important subject.