PLATO ON PERSPECTIVE
In The Republic, it is nice to hear that Plato was skeptical of the linear perspective. Writing in 380 BC, he states in Book X:
“Thus (through perspective) every sort of confusion is revealed within us; and this is that weakness of the human mind on which the art of conjuring and of deceiving by light and shadow and other ingenious devices imposes, having an effect upon us like magic”
We generally think that the perspective was more or less invented, or discovered, in the Renaissance, with Bruneleschi and his ilk doing their studies.
Yet there seems to be consensus that the Greeks routinely employed the principals of the cartesian geometric picture plane. And Plato’s comment supports that.
Jeremy Killian, in his That Deceptive Line: Plato, Linear Perspective, Visual Perception, and Tragedy, agrees.
And this makes sense. Given their finely tuned eye regarding inventions such as entasis, they had to have some sort of visual ordering system. It may not have been the full blown Bruneleschi linear perspective, but it most likely had great similarities.
So the questioning of the linear perspective as addressed in these pages has been with us since the beginning.
For more on our discussion of the Greeks in these pages:
Yes, but you neglect what comes after: “And the arts of measuring and numbering and weighing come to the rescue of the human understanding – there is the beauty of them – and the apparent greater or less, or more or heavier, no longer have the mastery over us, but give way before calculation and measure and weight?” That shifts the meaning of the quote you cite. Note too the elipsis: ” (through perspective)”; I wonder what the original Greek is… I wonder if Plato had something in mind on the order of Aristotle’s skenographia referred to in Poetics–the sorts of illusions used in theatrical scenery?