ABSTRACT
The development of geometrically projected perspective is usually hailed as a major advancement in Western ideas. But from late Antiquity through the early Christian centuries to the beginning of the Renaissance, it took artists well over a millennium to achieve this “perspectival competence.” Why? This chapter argues that the rise of perspectival competence also marked the denouement of glow. Glow is “a state of being in which an experiencing subject’s intellectual and moral sensibilities participate as-one with surrounding objects, and with divinity implicit or explicit, in a holistic way such that tick-tock time and measurable space lose count. Within the aesthetics of this encounter, Light presents itself as a physical-moral unity, and bathes the contented subject externally and internally.” This is what artists prior to perspectivalism tried to depict because they were in glow, or at least sought to be. The key to the loss of this kind of experience is the priority given to representation as the only way to “know.” This chapter tracks the stages of loss of glow in Western ideas, and also the phenomenology of thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty as attempts to recover glow, but with mixed results.
