Output details

All Depth and No Substance. A body of interconnected AHRC-funded research in the form of drawings and video installation in an exhibition that engages with site-specific installation, pictorial composition and picture-making, specifically in relation to the development and practical use of linear perspective in 15C Italy.

Extending earlier research submitted in RAE2008, which involved papers, reconstructions and tests, this new research aims to make manifest linear perspective’s inherent ambiguities and uncertainties through video and drawing. The work intentionally tackles head-on both the anomalies evident in key early renaissance paintings, and the orthodoxies and assumptions around what perspective is, and what it does. In doing so, it engages with continuing issues around pictorial representation and comments on current scholarship on the subject, thereby adding knowledge and commenting more broadly on our understanding of the use, nature, history and development of Linear Perspective.

The work proposes that implicit in the geometry of perspective there is an ambiguity, which is why it continues to defy any fixed analysis and interpretation; it proposes that it never was the fixed entity – the ‘rational’ system, or even the ‘culturally determined’ system that it is generally now taken to be, or is presented as. The research uses evidence from early renaissance paintings – in particular those paintings that form the bedrock of the orthodox historical narrative, but in which it can be demonstrated that we are not looking at what we may think we are looking at.

The video demonstrates, and embodies, the alternative interpretations possible within the most simple of perspective constructions. Its installation – filling a full wall of the gallery, references for example, the spatial anomalies apparent in Leonardo’s ‘Last Supper’. The drawings likewise, instead of dealing with ‘depth’, extend the space sideways thereby creating the possibility of a time-based narrative within the space of the drawing. This alternative solution references, for instance, Piero’s ‘Flagellation’, and Uccello’s ‘Profanation of the Host’.

The research has also formed part of peer-reviewed papers delivered at AAH, Glasgow, 2010, and the Renaissance Society of America, Venice, 2010.