Perspective and Spatiality in the Modern Age

• Main Author: Fausto Fraisopi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Firenze University Press 2016-05-01
• Series: Aisthesis
• Subjects: perspective; annunciation; art; science; infinity; subjectivity
• Online Access: http://www.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/18238

the domain of Art critique and becoming a philosophical argument. How can we think of Perspective as symbolic Form? Is Perspective really a symbolic form? Why is Perspective so important? Because at the beginning of the Modern Age, Perspective as spiritual figure grounds many symbolic or even many scientific constructions. We could we say that perspective open the foundation of modern science as such. The “Geometrization” of Vision, beginning with perspective, will be for us the interpretative key in order to understand the Modern Age as a whole.  This understanding will allow us to understand the anthropologic dimension arising from the Modern Age, called „Perspectivism“. Assuming that perspective was neither only an invention of painting nor of geometry nor of philosophy, taken as singular fields of human inquiry, we will try to sketch the genesis of “perspective” from an interdisciplinary point of view. By doing so, we will also try to fix its deep significance for the anthropology of the Modern Age. Living and feeling in a perspectival world is the real invention of the Modern Age, one that overcame the closed Cosmos of the Middle Ages in order to reveal to mankind its own potential. Our interdisciplinary approach will proceed from many points of view (history of art, science, theology, anthropology) and converge on the idea of a new kind of human experience. Such an interdisciplinary approach will open new questions about our present time. Are we justified in thinking of our experience today as perspectival? What does it mean today to think from perspectives in the manifold dimensions of our living and to face to the complexity of our times?