VANISHING POINT, A SHORT HISTORY

A few pages ago, we made clear that for the Byzantines, in the Middle Ages, the vanishing point was within the viewer.  See The Vanishing Point Is Within You.

If we look at art history with respect to the location of the vanishing point, it has a cyclical history.  As we said at the page Byzantine Spacetime, the Byzantines isolated their images on their drawings by drawing non realistically.  As long as they were faithful to the object, then the drawing was successful.  The drawing was accurate

After the Middle Ages came the Renaissance.  And of course we have chronicled the development of the linear perspective. We have looked at Alberti’s cartesian perspective experiments.  We have studied the groundbreaking work of Brunelleschi at the Florence Babtistry.  And thru the Renaissance, the vanishing point was absolutely placed on the paper.  And all lines radiated to that point.  McLuhan tells us:

“It is hard for us to realize that perspective in its first stage produced all the shock of novelty and nausea that cubism and abstract art produced in the early twentieth-century period or that perspective now give in the Arab or Hindu world today.”

But the Cartesian linear perspective got boring.  So along came the Mannerists.  They were tired of the ideal beauty signified in the Renaissance.  So they exaggerated certain parts of their drawing to the point that there was no longer symmetry or balance.  They were happy to divide the drawing so that isolated spaces were created within a single composition.  So once again, the vanishing point vanishes from the paper and moves to at least some position between the viewer and the paper.

The vanishing point returned to the paper in the Baroque period.  There was a restoration of balance and symmetry.

What came after the Baroque?  First neo-classicism.  We can surmise that the vanishing point remained on the paper.  An then there was Modernism and Postmodernism, in which the vanishing point generally went out the window once again.

So in this span of about 1500 years from Byzantium to today, we have seen the placement and displacement of the vanishing point.  The takeaway here is that the vanishing point that we are taught, with religious fervor, to place on our paper, for much of history, was not on the paper. Ching begone!

Forget the vanishing point.  If it works for your purposes, fine.  If it doesn’t, fine also.

Draw like a Byzantine.

1. McLuhan, Marshall and Harley Parker. Through the Vanishing Point. Harper and Row. New York. 1968.