ABSTRACT
In the midst of the saturation of sophisticated imagery in our digital age, where it is often impossible to distinguish between reality and illusion, we remain ignorant of the origins of this uniquely modern phenomenon. This lack of awareness continues to lull the senses about what it means to represent something in the contemporary world and the importance that memory (history) plays in imagining and inhabiting other worlds. Such a situation is perpetuated by Hubert Damisch’s observation, “The problem of distance – distance between the point of view and the object perceived, and the distance between the eye and the picture plane, which are two different things – is to all appearances the heart of the question.” 1
Damisch addresses this question to Brunelleschi’s famous perspective experiments (of which more will be said later), but it could just as well be applied to the broader issue of the relationship between illusion and reality. To examine the historical and cultural contexts of this phenomenon is to uncover something crucial and mysterious about the advent of the modern world. Dalibor Vesely provides some historical context to this transformation:
The process of uncovering those foundations leads inevitably into the depth of time, back to the generation of Leon Battista Alberti and Nicholas of Cusa and the formulation of Renaissance perspective, the first plausible anticipation of modernity. By examining Renaissance perspective against the background of the medieval philosophy of light, we can come to understand the ontology of architectural space, which is formed by light before it is structured geometrically. 2
Two issues emerge from Vesely’s statement that have a bearing on this investigation: first, perspective is “the first plausible anticipation of modernity” and second, “the ontology of architectural space” was “formed by light before it is structured geometrically”. Both assertions are related since the beginnings of modernity were characterised by a shift in the understanding of space as a setting revealed through ‘divine’ transcendent illumination to one construed in immanent terms as almost exclusively a problem of mathematics.
