marg

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rsen
The Discourse of Perspective in the
Twentieth Century: Panofsky,
Damisch, Lacan
Margaret Iversen
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1. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form,
trans. Christopher S. Wood (MIT Press, Zone
Books: New York, 1997), p. 477.
2. Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective,
trans. John Goodman (MIT Press: Cambridge
MA and London, 1994). English translation of
L’Origine de la perspective (Paris, 1987). All
further page references to this book are enclosed
in brackets in the text. Substantive reviews at
the time of its publication in English include:
Whitney Davis, ‘Virtually Straight,’ Art History,
vol.10, no. 3 September 1996, pp. 434–63;
Christopher Wood, ‘Review of Damisch’s The
Origin of Perspective and Le Jugement de Paris,’ Art
Bulletin, vol. LXXVII, no. 4, December 1995,
pp. 677–782; Keith Moxey, review in Artforum,
vol. 32, no. 10, 1994; Dana Pollen, review in
Camera Obscura, no. 24, 1990, pp. 88 –97;
Margaret Iversen, review article on ‘Panofsky,
Perspective as Symbolic Form and Damisch, The
Origin of Perspective,’ Oxford Art Journal, vol. 18,
no. 2, Autumn 1995, pp. 81–4. See also, Keith
Broadbent, ‘Perspective Yet Again: Damisch
with Lacan,’ Oxford Art Journal, vol. 25, no. 1,
2003, pp. 71 –94. For a brief introduction to
Damisch’s thought see Ernst van Alphen’s essay
in Chris Murray (ed.), Key Writers on Art: The
Twentieth Century (Routledge, 2003), pp. 84 –89.
# The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.
doi:10.1093/oxartj/kci020
The Discourse of Perspective in the Twentieth
Century: Panofsky, Damisch, Lacan
Margaret Iversen
When work on certain artistic problems has advanced so far that further work in the same
direction, proceeding from the same premises, appears unlikely to bear fruit, the result is
often a great recoil, or perhaps better, a reversal of direction. Such reversals. . . create the
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possibility of erecting a new edifice out of the rubble of the old; they do this precisely by
abandoning what has already been achieved, that is, by turning back to apparently more
‘primitive’ modes of representation.1
These are the opening sentences of the third section of Panofsky’s Perspective
as Symbolic Form, where he discusses the great recoil of the Middle Ages.
I would like to adopt it to serve as a thumbnail sketch of Hubert
Damisch’s strategy in The Origin of Perspective. 2 Reading it one has the sense
of jumping over the whole history of alternative approaches to Art History
and the rise of post-structuralism to re-engage with the philosophical
concerns of the early Panofsky and the linguistic and psychoanalytic theory
of High Structuralism. Out of the rubble of these two intellectually robust
moments, Damisch hopes to fashion, not just a history or theory of
perspective, but a model for the future practice of Art History. This,
needless to say, is an extremely audacious enterprise, not least because,
one would have thought that the last of the great European Humanists
would consort rather uneasily with the great anti-humanist psychoanalyst,
Jacques Lacan.
Damisch’s book is about the invention of perspective as a paradigm or
model of thought that has far-reaching implications. Or, better, it is a
defence of that idea of perspective by appeal to an analysis of its founding
moment in Quattrocento Florence and its repercussions. Although a lot of
historical evidence is marshalled, it is not exactly a history of that moment,
for, as Damisch argues, one cannot trace the evolution of a paradigm as if it
were an object of historical enquiry like any other. Because it instantiates a
model of thought, it has to be approached theoretically, in much the same
way that Saussure approached the institution, the logical construct, that is
language. Perspective, for Damisch, not only organises the field of visual
representation, it also organises the way we think about art and its history.
Damisch’s book, then, must be considered from the point of view of
its merit as a paradigm – as a model for the practice of art history.
Because of its essentially philosophical claims, the details of his account
of Brunelleschi’s experiments or the Ideal City panels could be
factually wrong without undermining the philosophical validity of his
argument.
The same is true of the essay that Damisch takes as his model, Panofsky’s
Perspective as Symbolic Form, that other audacious art historical study of the
topic. Damisch declares that it remains ‘more than a half a century after
its appearance, the inescapable horizon line and reference point for all
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 28.2 2005 191–202
Margaret Iversen

enquiry concern this object of study’ (p. 2). For Panofsky, Renaissance
single-point perspective also has far-reaching implications: it anticipates
Descartes’s rationalised conception of space as infinite extension and
Kant’s Copernican revolution in epistemology. The latter implies, as
Michael Podro has argued, that Panofsky regards perspective as the advent
of a reflexive self-awareness about the relation of mind to things and about
the nature of art as being essentially about that relation, rather than, say,
the imitation of some supposedly preexisting reality: ‘Perspective, like the
critical philosophy of Kant, holds both the viewer and the viewed within
its conception.’3 Artistic reflexivity about the nature of art, signals the
achievement of the sort of critical distance that enables a properly
historical study of art. So the moment of systematic perspective
construction is also the moment that art history as a discipline becomes
possible. There is a curious overlapping, then, of a particular moment in
3. Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art
(Yale University Press: New Haven and London,
1982), p. 189.
4. Joseph Leo Koerner, ‘The Shock of the
View’, review of English translation of
Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, The New
Republic, April 26, 1993, p. 34.
5. Damisch points out that this ‘denigration’ of
perspective has a long history, beginning with
Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (p. 44).
6. James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective
(Cornell University Press: Ithaca and London,
1994), p. 263.

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the history of art and the very possibility of the serious study of art’s
history. Object and viewpoint are locked together. As Joseph Koerner
nicely puts it, Panofsky’s essay ‘finally works to place itself at perspective’s
historical focal point.’4
If Panofsky’s essay proposes a paradigm for the study of art, so also does
Damisch’s book. We can get some indication of what sort of paradigm it
proposes by noting what comes in for criticism. Damisch’s critique is
aimed at art historical receptions of perspective, which, ignoring the
lesson of Panofsky’s essay, treat it as if it were nothing more than a nifty
technical device for systematically creating an illusion of space, so that
foreshortenings and the diminution of size of objects in depth all obey a
common rule and conform to a single viewpoint.5 This non-meeting of
minds can be partly explained by the fact that these scholars and Damisch
are studying different objects. As James Elkins observed, there are those
who are interested in reconstructing perspective practice and those who
are interested in its philosophical implications. This split is nothing new:
Elkins cites a late fifteenth-century source, Cristoforo Landino, who
considered perspective to be ‘part philosophy and part geometry.’6
Damisch’s pointed critique of recent treatments of perspective is part of a
broadside aimed at empiricist art historians generally, who, in a worrying
‘reversion to a pre-critical approach to cultural history,’ see their job as
‘detective work’ (p. 185). By ‘pre-critical,’ Damisch means an approach
that has not fully absorbed Kant’s critique of the empiricist view that we
can have knowledge of a stable world that exists independent of the mind’s
constitution of it.
The other target of Damisch’s critique is that band of theoretically minded
film and art theorists of the 1970s, mainly Marxists and feminists, who
attacked perspective construction as embodying a particular male,
bourgeois, individualistic ideology (pp. xiv –xv). I personally would have
liked to see Damisch undertake a more serious critique of that body of
film theory, because, like his book, it draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis
and uses the linguistic terminology of ‘dispositif’ and ‘enunciation.’
Apparatus theory, as it is called, proposed an analogy between the set up
of the cinema (spectator, projector, screen) and that of perspective,
crediting both with powerful ideological and psychic effects. The key text
is Jean-Louis Baudry’s ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic
Apparatus’ published in 1970. Baudry founded his critique of the
cinematic apparatus on its inheritance of Quattrocento perspective
construction, which, he claimed, constitutes a viewing subject as

194 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 28.2 2005


7. Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects of the
Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, in Narrative,
Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Reader, ed. Philip
Rose (Columbia University Press: New York,
1986), p. 286. First published in France in 1970
in Cahiers du cine´ma and in Great Britain in 1974.
See the volumes of translated essays from this
journal published by Routledge and the British
Film Institute.
8. Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic
Cinematographic Apparatus’, in Narrative,
Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Reader (1986), p. 292.
9. Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic
Cinematographic Apparatus’, in Narrative,
Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Reader (1986), p. 294.
10. Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic
Cinematographic Apparatus’, in Narrative,
Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Reader (1986), p. 295.
11. Panofsky’s account of that development is
indebted to Alois Riegl’s Spätromische
Kunstindustrie (1901). See my Alois Riegl: Art
History and Theory (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA,
and London, 1993). See also Michael Podro, The
Critical Historians of Art (Yale University Press:
New Haven and London, 1982) and Michael Ann
Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History
(Cornell University Press: Ithaca and London,
1984).
The Discourse of Perspective in the Twentieth Century
centre and origin of meaning.7 Cinematic camera movement only serves to
augment the viewer’s feeling of power and control.8 For Baudry, the
spectator identifies less with what is represented on the screen, than with
the apparatus that stages the spectacle.9 The crucial illusion that cinema
fosters, then, is not so much the illusory world represented, as the fantasy
it engenders of a ‘transcendental subject.’ Just as the infant in Lacan’s
mirror stage assembled the fragmented and uncoordinated body in an
imaginary unity, so also the imaginary transcendental self of cinema unites
the discontinuous fragments of film into a unified sense.10
Damisch’s implicit critique of this position is that it denigrates perspective
as a tool for interpellating subjects for the ends of Capitalism or Patriarchy,
rather than seeing it positively as an extraordinary idea – a cognitive
achievement like the invention or discovery of geometry. This is a
spectacular instance of art thinking, which, for Damisch, implies the
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impossibility of maintaining any sharp distinction between art historical
method and its objects. The ‘impatience’ registered by Damisch in his
Preface was prompted, then, by both old-fashioned empiricist art history
and what we now call visual culture. Together these created for him an
impasse that required the recoil to the rubble of apparently more
primitive approaches. What I propose to do is to examine the main
fragments of that rubble, Panofsky’s essay and structuralist psychoanalytic
theory, in order to discover what assumptions and implications are latent
in the new paradigm.
While I am sympathetic with Damisch’s general sense of impasse and
encouraged by his attention to the fundamental philosophical questions of
art history, his book poses for me a serious difficulty, for I find myself
drawn to its Lacanian moments but wary of its enthusiastic reception of
Panofsky’s essay. By combining the two, he seems simultaneously to affirm
the ideas of perspective as symbolic form and perspective as symbolic
order. I want to probe the stresses and strains this conjunction puts on
Damisch’s book and, at the same time, try to drive a wedge between its
Panofskian and Lacanian moments. It is not very difficult to discern what
kind of art historical practice is embedded in Panofsky’s essay, but what
kind is implied by importing Lacanian psychoanalysis into that paradigm?
Panofsky
Although Panofsky’s ‘Perspective as Symbolic Form’ purports to be a history
of the development of single point perspective construction and the various
conceptions of space implied by that history, it is in fact structured around
a basic binary opposition between two strikingly different sorts of
perspective. Antique and Renaissance (or Modern) perspectives stand at
the opposite poles of an evolution and all the intervening moments
are presented as hardly more than strategic moves and reversals that enable
the history to get from A to B.11 What we understand as systematic
perspective construction is the culmination of a long history and implicit in
this history is the development of the idea of space as we now understand
it. Perspective announces or anticipates the modern conception of space,
which is homogeneous, infinite extended substance. This is not something
given to perception or immediately intuited. The conception of space
implied by Renaissance perspective involved taking the raw material of
sense perception and systematically modifying it, organising it and unifying
it around a single vanishing point. The first section of Panofsky’s paper is
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 28.2 2005 195
Margaret Iversen

devoted to arguing just how far perspective departs from ‘actual’ perception,
for, paradoxically, our modern perceived reality has become so thoroughly
conditioned by perspectival forms of representation, including
photography, that we are likely to miss the point, which is that
modern perspective abstracts fundamentally from basic human psycho-
physiological perception, which is obviously not monocular or static or
strictly geometrical.
Panofsky’s account of Antiquity’s conception of space and its axial system of
perspective aims to show that both are ‘essentially unmodern.’ In Antiquity,
space exists only in so far as it is conceived as dimensions adhering to corporeal
objects inhabiting a void. This idea he borrowed from Riegl’s Late Roman Art
Industry. Yet, for Riegl, Antiquity’s Kunstwollen, its aesthetic ideal, was to
suppress space as for as possible. For him, artistic representation is not
thought of as conforming to general perception or ideas of space, but of
12. Christopher S. Wood, ‘Introduction’ to
Erwin Panofksy, Perspective as Symbolic Form,
trans. Christopher S. Wood (MIT Press, Zone
Books: New York, 1997), p. 22.
13. Panofksy, Perspective as Symbolic Form
(1997), p. 41.
14. Friedrich Schiller, Naı¨ve and Sentimental
Poetry and On the Sublime: Two Essays, trans. J.A.
Elias (Unger Press: New York, 1996), p. 116.

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modelling an ideal sort of object. According to Panofsky, insofar as Antique
painting does attempt to represent perspectival space, that is,
foreshortenings and diminution of size in depth, it sticks closely to actual
psycho-physiological effects or the subjective optical impression, such as
the central bulging and curvature of verticals, particularly at the edges of
the field. When Christopher Wood notes that, for Panofsky, ‘Antique
perspective is more faithful to the truth of perception than Renaissance
perspective because it attempts to reproduce the curvature of the retinal
image,’ he is right, but his emphasis is wrong because this so-called
‘truth,’ based on ‘an immediate sensory impression,’ is unreflexive, pre-
Kantian, in short, primitive.12 Compared with the rationalisation of
represented space accomplished by Renaissance perspective construction,
pre-modern perspective assumes a naively mimetic, ‘pre-critical’
perceptual relation to the world.
For Panofsky, then, central perspective construction is the embodiment of
the crucial recognition that visual representation is not properly mimetic but
constructive. It rationalises space, which now no longer clings to substantial
things. Instead, ‘bodies and gaps between them were only differentiations or
modifications of a continuum or a higher order.’13 Instead of immediacy,
abstraction from sense experience. Instead of bodily sense impressions,
geometric systmaticity. Art is no longer regarded as a mimetic depiction
of objects seen; rather, it reflexively includes the acknowledgment that it
is a highly formalised kind of performance aimed at a spectator. Although
Panofsky claims to favour modern perspective because it occupies a middle
ground between the claims of the subject and the object, this is not the
crucial point. The point is that art since the Renaissance embodies
the essential reflexive, critical insight that representations (mental and
artistic) do not just copy objects, they produce objects structured in a
particular way. The difference between Antique and Modern perspective
is, then, somewhat like the distinction Schiller drew between Naı̈ve and
Sentimental poetry: whereas the poet of Antiquity, being closer to nature,
creates instinctively, the modern poet always ‘reflects upon the impression
that objects make upon him.’14
Because, for Panofsky, perspective is a model that relates vision to its
objects, constitutes them, in this highly reflexive way, post-Renaissance art
has the freedom to choose between types of representation that either
stick closely to the objective character of things or to the subjective,
visual conception of them. The key term here is ‘choose.’ Although this is
not spelled out, in the context of Panofsky’s other writing, it is clear that

196 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 28.2 2005


15. Cassirer and Panofsky were colleagues at
the University of Hamburg and at the Warburg
Institute where the paper on perspective was
first delivered. It was published in the Vorträge
der Bibliothek Warburg (1924–1925).
16. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Yale University
Press: New Haven and London, 1955), vol. I,
Language, pp. 202, 208. Also important for
Panofsky’s distinction is Cassirer’s book,
Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff (Verlag
Cassirer: Berlin, 1923) between a substantialist
conception of objects and a functionalist one,
that is, an object conceived as a function of the
rules that generate it. See also the importance of
the perceptual psychology of Guido Hauck in
Podro, The Critical Historians (1982), p. 186 ff.
17. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form
(1997), p. 67.
18. See Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form
(1997), footnote 73, pp. 153–4.
19. The notion that Panofsky was a relativist
because he challenged the representational
accuracy of perspective is quite widespread. See
Wood, ‘Introduction to Erwin Panofksy’
(1997), p. 22.
20. Wood, ‘Introduction to Erwin Panofksy’
(1997), p. 23.
The Discourse of Perspective in the Twentieth Century
perspective implies the possibility of human agency and free-will. It therefore
has an ethical dimension, which is amplified by the idea of a balancing
objectivity against subjectivity, and so promoting an art practice that
embodies an Aristotelian mean between extremes.
Panofsky’s conception of the crucial distinction between Antique and
Modern perspective is over determined, but one proximate influence on his
thinking was the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer.15 Cassirer wrote a history of
symbolic forms, such as myth and language, as a history of their progressive
spiritualisation. Like Panofsky, he attempted to combine the incompatible
positions of a progressive, teleological history with a relativist typology.
Yet it is not difficult to find unambiguous passages where he declares, for
example, that the languages of primitive peoples are ‘still entirely rooted in
immediate sensory impressions,’ while more advanced languages ‘display
great freedom and abstract clarity in the expression of logical relations.’16
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In my view, Panofsky naturalises Antique perspective as mimesis of the
optical impression so that it can serve as a dark cloth against which the
constructive and rational character of Renaissance linear perspective
sparkles like a gem.
Since Panofsky adopts Renaissance art as an authoritative viewpoint,
perspective, for him, encompasses both itself and its other. After the
Renaissance, there can be no non- or even anti-perspectival art – only
swings between the polarities of its two-sided significance: ‘it creates
room for bodies to expand plastically and move gesturally, and yet at the
same time it enables light to spread out in space and in a painterly way
dissolve the bodies.’17 He is probably thinking here of the difference
between Italian and Northern Baroque painting and sculpture. However,
because of the epistemological status of perspective, the question of the
right balance between these tendencies must be determined: measure and
proportion must be balanced against the distorting effects of point of view.
It would seem that in Panofsky’s view, post-Renaissance art that differs
substantially from its norm is doomed to err on one side or the other,
guilty either of being too coldly mathematical or objectivising, on the one
hand, or too warmly expressionist or too eccentrically impressionistic, on
the other. In other words, an a priori aesthetic norm is implicit in the
system and it is backed up by epistemological and ethical norms.18
Although there is some residual Rieglian relativism in the essay with
suggestions, for example, that modern perspective has only relative validity
and could be coming to an end in our post-Euclidian world, these are
mainly confined to the footnotes and overwhelmed by a sense of its
constituting a permanent and legitimate paradigm of representation that
enables fairly wide variation, the limits of which are the limits of a
humanistic art.19
The privileging of the Renaissance has certain consequences for the model
of art history implicit in Panofsky’s essay. In it and his other early writing, he
deforms Riegl’s conception of art as a history of the Kunstwollen. As
Christopher Wood says, ‘In granting Renaissance linear perspective special
status Panofsky moved away from Riegl.’20 While Riegl and Panofsky share
the same Hegelian inheritance, including the idea that a particular world
view is formulated in works of art, Panofsky was interested primarily in
discovering an absolute viewpoint. Riegl, however, appreciated Hegel’s
sense of the way the historian of art is situated in a particular moment that
determines what objects can come into view and be salient for us and
what questions can be asked of them. He could acknowledge, for example,
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 28.2 2005 197
Margaret Iversen

that his interest in late Roman art has something to do with the emergence of
Impressionism. In other words, the art historian inevitably participates in his
contemporary Kunstwollen. 21 In contrast, Panofsky’s sense of the historicity of
art historical thinking ends with the attainment of a quasi-transcendental
perspective. In his 1920 essay, ‘The Concept of the Kunstwollen,’ he argued
that concepts proposed by Riegl, objective/subjective, haptic/optic, and so
on, provide the art historian with a point of view outside the phenomena,
‘a fixed Archimedian point.’22 Panofsky later questioned the value of these
concepts, but retained his quest for a method that allowed one a detached,
distanced point of view.
Damisch
21. This view is most clearly stated in Riegl,
‘Naturwerk und Kunstwerk, I’ (1901), in
Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. K.M. Swoboda (Dr. B.
Filser: Augsburg and Vienna, 1929), p. 63.
22. Panofsky, ‘Der Begriff des Kunstwollens’
(‘The Concept of the Kunstwollen’), in Aufsätze
zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft (B. Hessling:
Berlin, 1964), p. 33.
23. Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson,
with an introduction by Martin Kemp (Penguin:
London, 1991).

Damisch is clearly attracted to some of the implications of thinking 24. Damisch, Theory of/Cloud/: Toward a History
of Painting, trans. Janet Lloyd (University of

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perspective as a symbolic form, although certainly not all the ones I have Stanford Press: Stanford, 2002), p. 124.
just detailed. He does, however, particularly stress the epistemological
25. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Way of the Masks,
status of perspective. That he conceives of perspective as embodying a trans. Sylvia Modelski (J. Cape: London, 1983).
different epistemology will soon become clear. For Damisch, perspective
is a materially embodied theory or epistemological model – a way of
reflecting on our relation to representation. Perspective, on his view, has
many of the same properties as a sentence. It systematically organises
material and positions an ‘I’ over against a correlative ‘you’. Like any
system it imposes constraints, selecting what is relevant; in this case,
things that have definite contours are selected. In fact, Alberti’s veil,
described in his On Painting, was designed precisely to deal with irregular
bodies, such as the human figure, which do not lend themselves to
perspective construction (unless you are an obsessive character like
Piero).23 Damisch’s earlier book A Theory of /Cloud/ is about the way those
wispy phenomena nevertheless find their way into painting despite being
marginalized by perspective’s ‘structure of exclusions.’24
Panofsky’s characterisation of perspective also appeals to Damisch as a
modernist because perspective thus understood carries with it the
recognition that no representation can be adequate to its object. The system
of relations that perspective imposes is a coherent system. It has an internal
logic that allows us to consider it in its own terms and not only as a model
of the visible world. At the heart of Damisch’s book is a critique of art
historians burdened with what he calls the ‘representational hypothesis’ or,
less politely, the ‘referential prejudice’ (p. 283). His long and staggeringly
detailed analysis of the three panels of architectural views or Ideal Cities in
Urbino, Berlin and Baltimore proceeds by first prising them free from
explanations of their style or iconography in terms of some referent,
whether it be the architecture of Florence, scenography, or marquetry. For
Damisch, ‘representation is not the only function of painting’ (p. 263).
Rather than relating the panels to some extra-pictorial reality, Damisch
aims to show that they constitute a ‘transformational group.’ The term is
borrowed from mathematics, but the practice is informed by Lévi-Strauss’s
analysis of masks or myths.25 The panels form a set of three works that
respond to one another in a play of formal oppositions and relations. More
than anything else they represent ‘a play of thought’ (p. 197). While for
Panofsky the perspectival work of art represents a reflexive, critical relation
of mind to the world, for Damisch the thought these panels demonstrate is
much more self-contained: they represent a purely visual kind of thinking in
which the relation of artwork to artwork is paramount. When dealing with

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 The Discourse of Perspective in the Twentieth Century

abstract art we are accustomed to the idea of painting about painting, but we
are apparently less able to think about self-reflexive figurative art. The tour de
force of Damisch’s analysis of the ‘Urbino’ panels is enough to convince me of
26. Damisch, Theory of /Cloud/ (2002), p. 181.
the critical productivity of this idea.
Damisch also makes claims about the way these panels affect the subject
and for this he has recourse to Lacan’s conception of the symbolic order.
Since Lacan was, in fact, influenced by Lévi-Strauss in his formulation of
the symbolic order, this extension makes perfect sense. But can Damisch
shift between understanding perspective as a model of thought and
understanding it as equivalent to Lacan’s symbolic order without a terrible
grinding of gears? It is clear what motivated Damisch to introduce both
Lévi-Strauss and Lacan – effectively substituting them for Panofsky’s
Cassirer. Early on in the book, he claims that perspective is ‘anti-
Humanist’ (p. 44). He cites Lacan’s observation that perspective reduces

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man to an eye and the eye to a point, and links this with the later
institution of the Cartesian subject – itself a sort of geometral point
(p. 45). Although perspective conceived as a symbolic form abstracts
radically from perceived reality and effectively denies the possibility of any
unmediated knowledge of the world, it offers ample compensations. Far
from the subject being decentred in relation to the structure, it offers
for the first time, like Kant’s a priori categories of thought, a
legitimate position – legitimate both epistemologically and ethically. Our
understanding of the world, whether scientific or pictorial, can be both
subjectively constituted and objectively valid. This explains why Panofsky
revived the formerly obscure term for single point perspective
construction, costruzione legittima. For Damisch, the subject of perspective
has no such confidence: it constitutes a subject that is ‘to become that of
modern science in the form of a point’ (p. 425). It marks a crisis of
subjectivity and knowledge that becomes apparent in Descartes’s Discourse
on Method where the subject is reduced to a point, the Cogito, and
separated by an abyss from extended substance.
Damisch sometimes understands the effects of the picture in purely
Lacanian terms: we are subjected, seduced, caught up in the picture
(p. 46), we are programmed, informed by the model (p. 51). And yet, he
also wants to preserve Panofsky’s reflexive moment: he continues,
‘Perspective provides a means of staging this capture and of playing it out in
a reflexive mode’ (p. 46). On the one hand, Damisch underwrites
Panofsky’s sense of perspective as a non-coercive model of thought: he
describes it as a ‘regulative configuration intended not so much to inform
the representation as to orient and control its regime’ (p. 233). On the
other, it is a trap laid for the scopic drive (pp. 184– 5). But are these
models compatible? We’ve seen that the Panofskian epistemological model
of perspective carries with it implications or connotations of rationality,
critical distance, reflexivity, and freedom. The psychoanalytic, Lacanian
model carries with it a quite different set of connotations: seduction,
alienation, lack, death, and desire. Damisch beautifully summed up these
latter implications in his/Cloud/book: ‘Painting has power to make man
sensible of his own nothingness, his dependence, his void.’26

Lacan
The symbolic order is one of Lacan’s three terms, which, along with the
imaginary and the real, organise the psychoanalytic field. It came to

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Margaret Iversen

prominence in his work with the 1953 Rome Discourse where it was
understood as the most important determining order of the subject.27 In
its formulation, Lacan borrowed from Lévi-Strauss and the linguist Roman
Jakobson their stress on the structural relations amongst signifiers
constituting a system rather than on what is symbolised. For Lacan, our
subjection to this pre-established, inexorably determining, resolutely
impersonal system of signifiers is none the less salutary because it
functions, like the intervention of the father in the Freudian Oedipal
scenario, as a third term breaking up the dyadic stasis and narcissistic
identification that characterises the imaginary register. The symbolic
order, one could say, abstracts fundamentally from the here and now. For
example, the physical, substantial father becomes a function – a function
essentially of symbolic castration and prohibition. Since the imposition of
the symbolic order breaks up the dyad of mother and child, desire for the
27. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Function of Language
in Psychoanalysis’, in The Language of the Self,
trans., notes and commentary by Anthony
Wilden (John Hopkins Press: Baltimore, 1968).
28. According to Manetti, Brunelleschi’s first
biographer, there were two panels: the one of
the Baptistry and one of the Palazzo de’Signori.
For an attempt at reconstruction of these and the
technicalities associated with them, see Martin
Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Theories in
Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (Yale
University Press: New Haven and London,
1990).

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lost unattainable object is set in motion and the ideal, narcissistic self of 29. Émile Benveniste, Problems in General
Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek
the imaginary is shattered. Perspective is imagined by Damisch as the (University of Miami Press: Coral Gables,
visual equivalent of the discourse of the Other, yet there is very Fla., 1971), p. 227.
little sense of the anguish and desire that runs through Lacan’s sense of the
subject’s relation to the symbolic Other.
Damisch interprets the perspective paradigm as having precisely the
determining, decentering, extra-personal quality of Lacan’s symbolic
order. He makes this case by arguing that the vanishing point is equivalent
to the point of view – they ‘coincide on the plane of projection’ and,
consequently the vanishing point has the value of a look of the Other.
This, he thinks, is demonstrated by Brunelleschi’s first experiment, as
described by Antonio Manetti, in which he drilled a peep hole through a
small wooden panel depicting the Florence Baptistery so that one could
peer through it from behind and see an astoundingly illusionistic depiction
reflected in a mirror.28 Damisch proposes that the vanishing point, which
is frequently marked in painting of the period by a depicted aperture, will
from thenceforth have the significance of a look back, or better, of a look
that constitutes me as viewer. The subject of perspective is consequently
decentred in relation to this prior point of sight or gaze implied by the
depiction (p. 115 ff). As Damisch notes, ‘The perspective paradigm
effectively posits the other, in the face of the “subject” as always already
there’ (p. 446). Émile Benveniste’s theorisation of the imbrication of the
subject in speech is Damisch’s model for this account. For Benveniste,
‘language puts forth “empty forms” which a speaker in the exercise of
discourse, appropriates to himself and which he relates to his “person”, at
the same time defining himself as I and a partner as you.’29 Similarly,
perspectival representation, with its visual ‘sentence structure’ (dispositif
d’enunciation ) addresses me with an implicit look (p. 227). For Damisch,
perspective as a paradigm operates like the imposition of language on the
individual and has, in the visual register, the same effect of
subjectification. This should put paid to the common view that the subject
of perspective is placed in a dominant position of mastery. On the
contrary, ‘this subject holds only by a thread’ (p. 388). This thread,
which leads from the eye of the observer to the vanishing point, is capable
of snatching the spectator, like a fish on a line, into the picture. This
spectator finds him or herself looked at by the painting, lured, transfixed,
summoned to take up his position. The windows and half open doors of
the ‘Urbino’ panels are, according to Damisch, ‘looking at you with all
their eyes’ (p. 266).

200 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 28.2 2005


30. Joan Copjec, ‘The Strut of Vision: Seeing’s
Corporeal Support’, in Imagine There’s no Woman:
Ethics and Sublimation, (MIT Press: Cambridge
and London, 2002), pp. 178–98.
31. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans.
Alan Sheridan (Penguin Books:
Harmondsworth, 1979).
32. I owe this very Merleau-Pontian
formulation to Alenka Zupanicic, ‘Philosophers
Blind Man’s Bluff’, in Renata Salecl and Slavoj
Zizek (eds), Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (Duke
University Press: Durham and London, 1996),
pp. 32– 58.
33. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on
Photography, trans. Richard Howard (Hill and
Wang: New York, 1981). I mention this because
Barthes’s book relies on Lacan’s Four
Fundamental Concepts. See my ‘What is a
Photograph?’, Art History, vol. 17, no. 3, 1993,
pp. 101–18.
34. Copjec, ‘The Strut of Vision’ (2002),
p. 184.
35. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XIII: L’objet de la
psychanalyse (unpublished seminar), May 4,
1966.
36. Hal Foster, ‘The Return of the Real’, in
The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End
of the Century, (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA and
London, 1996), pp. 127–70.
The Discourse of Perspective in the Twentieth Century
Although Damisch presses in this book the purely symbolic character of
perspective, he does hint at what might be its other modalities. I would
like to foreground these hints in order to develop a less univocal view of
the subject’s relation to perspective. Damisch’s attention to the linguistic
or structural or symbolic modality of perspective means that he tends to
suppress the two other modalities of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The three
registers of the symbolic, imaginary, and real intersect and overlap. I
suggest that perspective can, so to speak, ‘appear’ in all three registers.
Joan Copjec has argued strenuously that Lacan used the model of
perspective as a formula of the relation of the corporeal subject to the
visual field. For her, if one follows Lacan, any analogy between the subject
of perspective and the Cartesian Cogito must be misplaced, since
psychoanalysis posits an embodied subjectivity.30 But perhaps this
contradiction between Damisch’s and Copjec’s views can be resolved by
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saying that a subject alienated in the symbolic aspect of perspective would
be a disembodied one, but that perspective has other modalities. In The
Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan is concerned not so much
with the symbolic as with its limits.31 The sections on perspective set out
to theorise the subject’s relation, not to the look of the big Other (the
symbolic), but to the gaze as objet petit a (the real). In that Seminar, Lacan
argues that the ‘real’ of the subject’s body and drives looks back from the
picture and not necessarily from the vanishing point. Since death is one of
the realities alienated by the ego, Lacan figured its underside as an
anamorphic skull – the blind spot of conscious perception. The real in the
scopic field is formed when the eye splits itself off from its original
immersion in visibility and the gaze as objet petit a is expelled.32 The eye
would then be master of all it surveyed were it not for the spot or void
left behind by what had to be excluded. This spot is said to ‘look back at
me,’ because it is an intimate part of myself, a part object, projected
outside. In terms of the Brunelleschian demonstration, this implies that
while the body is elided behind the panel, there is nonetheless a real
residue, a flicker that is the reflection of my own eye at the vanishing
point. That flicker becomes the object of the scopic drive and the
encounter with it is wounding, like Barthes’s description of the effect of
the photographic punctum.33
Lacan singles out anamorphosis as an illustration of the way perspective
captures the spectator by presenting something that eludes my grasp. Yet I
think Joan Copjec is right to say that we are mistaken if we take that effect
as ‘an occasional rather than as a structurally necessary phenomenon.’34
And since the vanishing point is both structural and, in some ways elusive,
it can perhaps better serve the purpose than anamorphosis. And, in fact it
does so in Lacan’s unpublished Seminar 13 of 1966, on which Copjec
draws.35 The closest Damisch comes to conceiving of the vanishing point in
the register of the real is when he notes the physical hole in the surface of
the Urbino Ideal City panel right at the vanishing point. He writes that the
effect of this is ‘to introduce into a configuration intended to create an
illusion, the point of the real’ (p. 341). This spot is, if you like, the
equivalent of ‘pops’ and tears in the printing process, described by Hal
Foster, that disrupt the surface of Warhol’s ‘Death in America’ silk screens.36
In his reading of Velasquez’s Las Meninas, Damisch finally relents and
suggests that perspective may also have an imaginary function. Although
the technical perspectival vanishing point of this painting is on the arm of
the man at the door, the imaginary centre of the painting is the mirror at
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Margaret Iversen

the back of the room. At the first centre, says Damsich, ‘the subject is, so to
speak, produced by the system in which it has a designated place.’ In the
second centre, the narcissistic ego ‘tries to find its own reflection’
37. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts
(p. 443). The light shining in from the right of the picture suggests (1979), p. 81.
another, lateral viewpoint, called the distance point in perspective
38. Stephen Melville, ‘The Temptation of New
construction, from which position the depth of the room would open up. Perspectives’, October, 52, Spring 1990, p. 11.
The mirror as marker of the imaginary register in Las Meninas opens up the
possibility that, for Damisch, the film theorists were not mistaken, after
all. Imaginary perspective would be one in which the apparatus
disappeared and we were given an image having that ‘belongs to me
aspect,’ as Lacan put it.37 Damisch makes an intriguing point about
the complex composition of Las Meninas that deserves further elaboration:
the painting, in splitting these viewpoints and functions, and making them
palpable, ‘reflects on its own operations’ (pp. 443 – 4). Here Damisch

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gestures towards a way of going beyond Panofsky’s Kantian reflexivity,
which applies universally to the subject of perspective, to a more limited
but credible way of thinking the subject’s agency or room for manoeuver
in relation to art and the image more generally.
We saw that one of the implications for art history implicit in Panofsky’s
essay was the deduction of quasi-transcendental terms that create a legitimate
point of view for the field of study. The subject of knowledge, the art
historian, is thus sprung out of any embeddedness in his or her own
cultural/intellectual milieu. As Stephen Melville put it in his essay, ‘The
Temptation of New Perspectives,’ ‘Panofsky’s valorization of perspective
forges an apparently non-problematic access to the rationalized space of the
past.’38 This is one implication from which Damisch, I am sure, would
wish to distance himself. The Origin of Perspective is itself an eloquent
testimony to the way history is constantly recast. Damisch acknowledges,
for example, the productive effects of Freud and Lacan on subsequent
theorisations of perspective, including his own, and brushes aside charges
of ‘anachronism’ brought by scholars of Renaissance art. He writes, ‘If
there is any such thing as history, it must be conceded that it too takes the
same route: one that leads through this echo chamber, this field of
interference in which Freud’s text resonates with those of Alberti,
Manetti, and Leonardo’ (p. 123). Here ‘critical distance’ is not conceived
of as empty or abstract space as it is in Panofsky. Rather, it is replete with
the intervening artistic and theoretical developments that inflect the way
we understand the past. The history practised in The Origin of Perspective is
in this sense back to front. Brunelleschi’s perspective panel of the
Baptistery has a very weak provenance, only described by his biographer
some thirty years after his death, and curiously not even mentioned by
Alberti. Damisch’s treatment of it reminds me of the hypothesis of the big
bang in astrophysics. It must exist to explain subsequent historical
phenomena. Perhaps only at the end of the book, after reading what
Damisch proposes as the historical transformational group relating to the
panel – Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage Portrait, the Urbino perspectives,
Velasquez’s Las Meninas and Picasso’s variations on it – can one take
seriously the claim that this missing panel represented the founding
operation of modern painting which consisted of Brunelleschi piercing a
hole in his panel and turning it around to view it in a mirror (p. 441).

202 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 28.2 2005