ABSTRACT
The beginnings of a perspective view of the world, as this investigation has sought to highlight, signalled a shift in the nature and meaning of order. It heralded a new representational paradigm that, on the one hand, drew meaning from the deeply rooted onto-theological tradition of Christian-Platonic cosmology and, on the other, provided the necessary spatial parameters for articulating the emergent modern self. As Erwin Panofsky notes:
the history of perspective may be understood … as a triumph of the distancing and objectifying sense of the real, and as a triumph of the distance-denying human struggle for control; it is as much a consolidation and systematization of the external world, as an extension of the domain of the self. 1
