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Florence in Perspective

excerpt from Samuel Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective.

Unknown Italian artist, detail showing Civitas Florentiae from a fresco in the Loggia del Bigallo, Florence, c. 1350.

Unknown Italian Artist, view of Florence, c. 1480.

/ p. 7:To appreciate exactly what transpired in Florence at this time, we have only to consider two topographical views of the city. What they reveal, uniquely, is the "before" and "after" not of a town but of the artist's eye. The earlier map os a detail from a larger fresco painted about 1350 for the old Loggia del Bigallo. In the second illustration we have [a painting] from about 1480.... Very little actual change had taken place in the topography of Florence between the above dates; the only significant new feature in the [later image] is Brunelleschi's majestic dome over the Cathedral. Yet the two views of the city are strikingly different.

In the [painting of c. 1480] we can see clearly what happened to human pictorial orientation after the advent of linear perspective. This new Quattrocento mode of representation was based on the assumption that visual space is ordered a priori by an abstract, uniform system of linear coordinates. The artist need only fix himself in one position for the objective field to relate to this single vantage point. He can then represent the objects in his picture in such a way that the viewer can apprehend the scene exactly as if he were standing in the same place as the artist. Most people raised /p. 9: in this perceptual tradition since the Renaissance have come to accept linear perspective as producing greater "realism." In contrast to this, the uncentralized representation in the Loggia del Bigallo fresco seems childlike or "naive," suggesting that its fourteenth-century creator was either pitifully ignorant or deliberately distorting what he saw in order to achieve a particular aesthetic effect. Many present-day historians of science, in fact, tend to view the advent of linear perspective in the same way they do Columbus' discovery of America or Copernicus' apprehension of the heliocentric universe: as a definitive victory over medieval parochialism and superstition.

On the other hand, the attitudes of modern art have persuaded art historians today that the artist of the Loggia del Bigallo fresco was scarcely "naive." Was he not raised in the sophisticated age of Dante, Petrach, and Giotto? Nor was he any less "faithful" in rendering the city of Florence than the designer of the [later image]. The painter of the earlier picture did not conceive of his subject in terms of spatial homogeneity. Rather, he believed that he could render what he saw before his eyes convincingly by representing what it felt like to walk about, experiencing structures, almost tactilely, from many different sides, rather than from a single, overall vantage. In the [later painting] the fixed viewpoint is elevated and distant, completely out of plastic or sensory /p. 10: reach of the city. In the fresco, on the other hand, jutting building corners, balconies, and rooftops are thrust out and huddled toward the viewer from both sides of the picture. If we do not get a keen thumb's eye notion of the layout of Florence, we do get a feeling for the sculptural impact of an encompassing medieval city. Just ask any modern tourist, arriving for the first time in Florence with heavy baggage and unfamiliar pensione address in hand, which of the two views if more true!

Could it be possible that the "naturalism" of the Loggia del Bigallo fresco is just as valid a part of human --and artistic-- visual experience as the "realistic" linear perspective of the [fifteenth-century painting]?

Perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson has recently advanced a theory that lends support to such a view. According to Gibson, sight is not merely a specific, autonomous sense but its interrelated with the other senses in a highly complex sensory system (Gibson rearranges these senses into a new order of "perceptual systems"). Moreover, this visual system involves at least two kinds of perception: the "visual world" and the "visual field." The visual world, according to Gibson, is what we experience in the broadest sense of seeing, that is, as we move about, orienting ourselves to objects from all sides. In the visual world phenomena are experienced in their three dimensions and with cognizance of their complete form, as perceived by other senses (like that of touch). The visual field, on the other hand, is what we perceive when we fixate with the eyes, whether we are standing still or moving. It is in the visual field that we become aware of linear perspective, that is to say, the distortion of shape, size, and distance in the apsect ofthe seen objects according to the viewer's single eyepoint. In the absolutism of the visual world, we are conscious of the invariant size and form of things and of their substantiality in their own right, without relation to other objects. In the more relative visual field, we are aware of how things change in shape, size, and proportion with respect to position and distance from the fixed eyes ( and from each other).....

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