“Wise Pictures” and Global Projects: Histories of Perspective in Britain and its Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History of Art
First Advisor
Barringer, Tim
Abstract
This dissertation reimagines interconnecting histories of art, science, technology, and empire by investigating how visual perspective was studied, disseminated, and implemented in Britain and its empire in the long eighteenth century. It surveys how, between the Great Fire of London in 1666 and the creation of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768, perspective became a decisive force in the visual culture of modernity that shaped the representation and administration of bodies, commodities, and global landscapes, and whose effects still reverberate today. Relying on extensive archival research in the US and the UK, as well as reconstructive practices of drawing instruments, this dissertation emphasizes that the development of perspective methods proceeded from continuous, close collaborations and, sometimes, productive misunderstandings between artists, instrument-makers, craftspeople, mathematicians, and amateurs across Europe. I argue that the unprecedented attempts at disseminating knowledge on perspective throughout the eighteenth century manifest the profound inadequacy of this rigid form of representation to express the values and knowledge commonly associated with the Enlightenment. This dissertation questions the paradoxes behind the emergence of a new and widespread “discourse” on linear perspective at a moment when it represented an obsolete mode of representation in light of the new understanding of visual perception and humans’ position in the world. The histories of perspective examined in this dissertation outline a profound struggle between theory and practice, between conceptual order and sensibility, that structure visual production at large. I reveal a fundamental conflict between, on the one hand, a widespread desire to enforce the adoption of a unique point of view within and outside of images, and, on the other hand, the many forces that prevented its successful implementation. Thus, I argue that the profusion of rhetorical and practical strategies deployed to teach perspective at the time only reflect a desperate and doomed attempt to organize the visible world and subject it to the dominion of a single, centralized viewpoint.
Recommended Citation
Von-Ow, Pierre, "“Wise Pictures” and Global Projects: Histories of Perspective in Britain and its Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1427.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1427
