Perspective as Symbolic Form (Zone Books) by Erwin Panofsky (PDF)

Description

Erwin Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form is one of the great works of modern intellectual history, the legendary text that has dominated all art-historical and philosophical discussions on the topic of perspective in this century. Finally available in English, this unrivaled example of Panofsky’s early method places him within broader developments in theories of knowledge and cultural change.Here, drawing on a massive body of learning that ranges over ancient philosophy, theology, science, and optics as well as the history of art, Panofsky produces a type of “archaeology” of Western representation that far surpasses the usual scope of art historical studies.Perspective in Panofsky’s hands becomes a central component of a Western “will to form,” the expression of a schema linking the social, cognitive, psychological, and especially technical practices of a given culture into harmonious and integrated wholes. He demonstrates how the perceptual schema of each historical culture or epoch is unique and how each gives rise to a different but equally full vision of the world.Panofsky articulates these distinct spatial systems, explicating their particular coherence and compatibility with the modes of knowledge, belief, and exchange that characterized the cultures in which they arose. Our own modernity, Panofsky shows, is inseparable from its peculiarly mathematical expression of the concept of the infinite, within a space that is both continuous and homogenous.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Many consider this book and essential reading in our history. It is very outdated. We have known for a long time that vision is a learned process and culturally conditioned. So, the invention of perspective brought to Western civilization one specific way of seeing, but not the only one. E. H. Gombrich’s research on visual perception in better, but even that reiterates what anthropology in science already knew.

⭐There’s nothing not to like about it, when the book arrived, it looked brand new even down the how it smelled. Glad I bought it.

⭐A classic essay on the relation of perspective geometry to philosophical and art-historical issues of its day, translated from German.

⭐excellent~

⭐impeccable

⭐One of the most interesting problems we had in our drawing class was regarding linear perspective and I picked up this book hoping that it would go in detail about perspective in historical and cultural context and it did!This book is written by and for educated man. The translation is great and I finished the book in one reading because it was so compelling. It is above and beyond the mere mechanics of horizon lines and vanishing points.The end notes are great too.A must read for all art lovers.

⭐A comprehensive review of the thought behind mathematical perspective and how it differs from our empirical experience. Explains how the concept of the infinate has forever altered the way in which we represent space in pictures. Short essay with extensive end notes.

⭐Excellent.

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