CHRISTIANITY AND THE LINEAR PERSPECTIVE

Without Christianity, would the linear perspective have been invented / discovered?  The interior of the great basilicas were, when you either drew or painted them, automatically in perspective.  Did the confluence of Christianity and architecture catalyze the use of the linear perspective?

Another way to ask this is, without culturally significant religious buildings would the evolution of the linear perspective been different?  This is of course a theoretical question that does not have much practical importance.  Yet it is interesting to think about this.  Western artists and scientists pre 1500 were exposed to massive, repetitive perspectival views when they went to church.  Their view was similar to this vista in a Lisbon church.  And then after centuries of this type of daily exposure and experience, it occurred to people like Alberti to then establish a mathematical formulae to codify what they were seeing in their daily experience.  You don’t get this long perspectival throw in, say, a Buddhist temple.

When you look longitudinally down the nave of the basilica, you are looking toward the apse / altar / god.  The immense ordering of this vista toward god served as a powerful motivator to codify exactly what was being seen, and how you were seeing it.  The church vista was a marked contrast to the irregular vista of an ordinary landscape or the seemingly random geometry of looking down a medieval street.  Here we had a view toward god;  you might say a view of god, and it was all mathematically repeatable.  So, to answer the question, yes,  the church building indeed was a catalyst for the rapid acceptance of the linear perspective.

And the cultural codification of god’s view is only reinforced when the painting in the church, in this instance on the ceiling of another Lisbon church, is a representational extension of the architecture.    Cases like this are an incredible melding of actual perspectival representation  of the building extended by painted perspectival representation.  This might be considered the ultimate Representational Spacetime.

Each time the linear perspective, operating in Representational Spacetime, was employed, it was an act of supplication.  It was an act of acquiesce.  The act codified the religious worldview.  Which is why the linear perspective was only accepted in the west;  Christianity was the west.  Outside the western tradition, the single point linear perspective was a complete curiosity and anomaly.

Our cultural acceptance of the linear perspective was a synthesis of religion and architecture which resulted in a culturally dominant way of seeing that started 500 years ago.  First there was the basilica.  Then Christianity adopted the basilica form, which then catalyzed the linear perspective.  While that is great, there are simply so many other modes with which to draw, understand and document knowledge.

I selected the drawing above as it operates mostly within the linear perspective mode.  Yet it is somewhat interpretative.  It was generated as a projection of a depiction of a medieval letter “R.”