Perspective in Pompeii?

December 10, 2023 10:54 AM

My weak grasp on art history has me believing that vanishing-point perspective was "invented" in the 15th century. Yet this painting [non-paywalled] shows it pretty clearly in the bottom section. Are there lots of other counterexamples out there too?
posted by dmd to Media & Arts (5 answers total)

Oh, there are books written about this subject. I thought I might have one right here, but I don't. Anyway, the Romans made lots of paintings with "perspective" in the sense that they understood it from observation. When you look at Roman sculpture, it is obvious that they really valued realism and good observational skills.

But the geometrical, constructed perspective, based on linear projection was invented by Fillipo Brunelleschi in the early 15th century.
posted by mumimor at 11:43 AM on December 10, 2023

There have been claims, perhaps loose ones, of use of perspective in 2-D media, such as the Thera frescoes (1550BCE), especially the swallow wings, and also in some Upper Paleolithic art of 15-30 thousand years ago, for example, the Chauvet Cave horses.
posted by Rumple at 2:37 PM on December 10, 2023

Zhang Ze-duan circa. 1130 (and others) had a perspectival approach - Chinese Perspective as a Rational System, and there are hints elsewhere (but they seem to be based around multiple viewpoints*), but with the 15C Tuscans it really became a system of defining (and making) space. The spatial theorist Henri Lefebrve goes deep into perspective's Tuscan development in the The Production of Space, and probes its deeper origins viz "This representation, which had been in the making for centuries now became enshrined...[page 41]".

* which is interesting as single-point perspective has been under critique / attack by many artists for a while now, at least partly as a perspectival (world) view stops us fully absorbing or entering a scene in our mind's eye.
posted by unearthed at 2:47 PM on December 10, 2023

Someone could have stumbled upon making a camera obscura with some light coming through a crack in a door and traced to create a still life with perspective, as well as captured the nice highlights on the tray and challis. David Hockney's book Secret Knowledge includes some demos of how it and other projection techniques were used in the 16th century. For the simplest projection techniques he described, you need little more than bright light and a crack for it to pass through.
posted by chiefthe at 5:19 PM on December 10, 2023

Why do you think the Pompeii picture shows "perspective"? Because the board (or whatever that is) has slanted sides? You can get that from simple observation.

Take this 10th century painting by Gu Hongzhong. The bed and tables to the left slant like this // and the chairs on the right slant like this \\. But the lines do not meet at a single vanishing point. In fact if you look at the couch on the right, the lines are pretty far off.

Or take this 1338 painting by Ambrogio Lorenzetti. You can see a lot of good observation about how 3-dimensional objects look in space. But (even granted that not all the buildings are intended to line up) there are no vanishing points and this is not at all what the eye or a camera would see.
posted by zompist at 9:42 PM on December 10, 2023