What do you think?
Rate this book
The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope: How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed Our Vision of the Universe
Building on the knowledge he has accumulated over his distinguished career, Edgerton has written the definitive, up-to-date work on linear perspective, showing how this simple artistic tool did indeed change our present vision of the universe. In The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope , Samuel Y. Edgerton brings fresh insight to a subject of perennial interest to the history of art and science in the the birth of linear perspective. Edgerton retells the fascinating story of how perspective emerged in early fifteenth-century Florence, growing out of an artistic and religious context in which devout Christians longed for divine presence in their daily lives. And yet, ironically, its discovery would have a profound effect not only on the history of art but on the history of science and technology, ultimately undermining the very medieval Christian cosmic view that gave rise to it in the first place. Among Edgerton's cast of characters is Filippo Brunelleschi, who first demonstrated how a familiar object could be painted in a picture exactly as it appeared in a mirror reflection. Brunelleschi communicated the principles of this new perspective to his artist friends Donatello, Masaccio, Masolino, and Fra Angelico. But it was the humanist scholar Leon Battista Alberti who codified Brunelleschi's perspective rules into a simple formula that even mathematically disadvantaged artists could understand. By looking through a window the geometric beauties of this world were revealed without the theological implications of a mirror reflection. Alberti's treatise, "On Painting," spread the new concept throughout Italy and transalpine Europe, even influencing later scientists including Galileo Galilei. In fact, it was Galileo's telescope, called at the time a "perspective tube," that revealed the earth to be not a mirror reflection of the heavens, as Brunelleschi had advocated, but just the other way around.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 17, 2019
What an absolutely great book. Okay, I am an art historian and I am already interested in this stuff. And my husband gave me a copy for Christmas 2018 or birthday 2019 and I read everything he buys me. But this slim volume written with great clarity if rather didactic tone, has changed the way I understand perspective, its origins and its import; now I wish I had a chance to teach Renaissance art again.
For years I have opened my discussions of the shift from medieval to Renaissance art by citing the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) who published a wonderful book in 1919, "The Waning of the Middle Ages." Huizinga contextualized the stirrings of the Renaissance (a moment of birth) as the end of the Middle Ages (a moment of death). Huizinga saw the contrast between medieval and Renaissance minds this way: "If the medieval mind wants to know the nature or the reason of a thing, it neither looks into it, to analyze its structure, nor behind it, to inquire into its origin, but looks up to heaven, where it shines as an idea." (p. 214). Medieval thought was a matter of spirituality and faith. It was the Renaissance mind that looked into a thing, analyzed its structure, and looked behind it to inquire into its origin.
For years I have taught about Fra Antonino, the Florentine philosopher-priest and his importance to the artists of the 15th century. I have always run through the methodology that Alberti refined and published on how to apply the method of perspective to picture-making. I've taught about Brunelleschi's architecture but I have avoided talking about his legendary painting of the Baptistery and the mirror he used to make it--probably because it seemed too complicated.
What I didn't do--and I think I really didn't understand it myself--was to examine with my students where the idea of linear perspective came from and how it had an impact on culture at large. Nor have I ever satisfactorily taken on the challenge of understanding how perspective was a matter of the spirit and theology before it was a matter of optics and realism.
The magic of Edgerton's book emerges in the careful guidance he offers in explaining the emergence of concept of geometry as a spiritual matter to its transformation into a form of realism and its later applications to science and the way we understand the world now, in the 21st century, although that last is just a tantalizing epilogue.
Wouldn't I just love to sit in Prof. Edgerton's class at Williams College. The book is arranged like a series of lectures: small topics meticulously presented, each reinforcing the previous, each leading inexorably to the next. There are no glossy, full-color plates, just some line drawings and black-and-white photographic reproductions. I did not need anything else, however. And often I found myself toggling from text to diagram to text to diagram to text, and then repeating the process to make sure I completely understood what Edgerton was telling me.
I always did understand. And that is what makes the book so wonderful. Edgerton did not write this book for scholars. "Finally," he writes in the Preface, "this book has been written with careful attention to the sensitivities of the general reader. I have tried to keep long and distracting footnotes to a minimum, and to avoid as much as possible rehearsing equally long and esoteric arguments with other scholars. My aim is to make more people, not just other specialists, more aware of just how important linear perspective was, and still is, to the uniqueness of our Western civilization."
Yes. Edgerton's own words are the best description.
For years I have opened my discussions of the shift from medieval to Renaissance art by citing the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) who published a wonderful book in 1919, "The Waning of the Middle Ages." Huizinga contextualized the stirrings of the Renaissance (a moment of birth) as the end of the Middle Ages (a moment of death). Huizinga saw the contrast between medieval and Renaissance minds this way: "If the medieval mind wants to know the nature or the reason of a thing, it neither looks into it, to analyze its structure, nor behind it, to inquire into its origin, but looks up to heaven, where it shines as an idea." (p. 214). Medieval thought was a matter of spirituality and faith. It was the Renaissance mind that looked into a thing, analyzed its structure, and looked behind it to inquire into its origin.
For years I have taught about Fra Antonino, the Florentine philosopher-priest and his importance to the artists of the 15th century. I have always run through the methodology that Alberti refined and published on how to apply the method of perspective to picture-making. I've taught about Brunelleschi's architecture but I have avoided talking about his legendary painting of the Baptistery and the mirror he used to make it--probably because it seemed too complicated.
What I didn't do--and I think I really didn't understand it myself--was to examine with my students where the idea of linear perspective came from and how it had an impact on culture at large. Nor have I ever satisfactorily taken on the challenge of understanding how perspective was a matter of the spirit and theology before it was a matter of optics and realism.
The magic of Edgerton's book emerges in the careful guidance he offers in explaining the emergence of concept of geometry as a spiritual matter to its transformation into a form of realism and its later applications to science and the way we understand the world now, in the 21st century, although that last is just a tantalizing epilogue.
Wouldn't I just love to sit in Prof. Edgerton's class at Williams College. The book is arranged like a series of lectures: small topics meticulously presented, each reinforcing the previous, each leading inexorably to the next. There are no glossy, full-color plates, just some line drawings and black-and-white photographic reproductions. I did not need anything else, however. And often I found myself toggling from text to diagram to text to diagram to text, and then repeating the process to make sure I completely understood what Edgerton was telling me.
I always did understand. And that is what makes the book so wonderful. Edgerton did not write this book for scholars. "Finally," he writes in the Preface, "this book has been written with careful attention to the sensitivities of the general reader. I have tried to keep long and distracting footnotes to a minimum, and to avoid as much as possible rehearsing equally long and esoteric arguments with other scholars. My aim is to make more people, not just other specialists, more aware of just how important linear perspective was, and still is, to the uniqueness of our Western civilization."
Yes. Edgerton's own words are the best description.
June 20, 2009
This is a mind-bending book that blends excellent history of science with excellent history of art. The core of the book is examination of the origins and early use in visual art of optical perspective, the technique for creating the illusion of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional plane. The book has a good account of the invention (or at least rediscovery) by the Florentine craftsman and architect Brunelleschi of perspective in 1425, when he created two works (both now lost) that were the first effective, rigorous, and theoretically sound uses of perspective since at least antiquity. The section on Brunelleschi were wonderful, not least because they placed the reader in early-Renaissance Florence. The idea - much less the historical fact - that perspective was invented defies common sense, but Edgerton shows that while everyone does see perspectivally, representing the world in perspective required a genius like Brunelleschi.
Edgerton goes on to describe - with somewhat less surety - Renaissance artists' use of perspective to make religious art seem more lifelike and therefore more powerful: a good perspectival painting could make the viewer feel that he or she was actually inside the space occupied by, say, the Madonna and Christ Child, or the crucified Christ. Edgerton goes even further than this, linking perspective in art to the development of the "perspective tube" - the device we call the telescope - and to the use of the telescope by Galileo to discover that the moon is actually lumpy, not smooth. Here, Edgerton is on firmer ground again: Galileo was an excellent artist, and was able to determine, based on his views of the moon in 1509, that the patterns of light and dark were actually sunlit and shadowed regions on the moon's surface - a realization he made because he understood perspectival effects - and because he could render objects - even lunar craters viewed through a telescope - with perspectival techniques.
Edgerton goes on to describe - with somewhat less surety - Renaissance artists' use of perspective to make religious art seem more lifelike and therefore more powerful: a good perspectival painting could make the viewer feel that he or she was actually inside the space occupied by, say, the Madonna and Christ Child, or the crucified Christ. Edgerton goes even further than this, linking perspective in art to the development of the "perspective tube" - the device we call the telescope - and to the use of the telescope by Galileo to discover that the moon is actually lumpy, not smooth. Here, Edgerton is on firmer ground again: Galileo was an excellent artist, and was able to determine, based on his views of the moon in 1509, that the patterns of light and dark were actually sunlit and shadowed regions on the moon's surface - a realization he made because he understood perspectival effects - and because he could render objects - even lunar craters viewed through a telescope - with perspectival techniques.
June 1, 2021
Samuel Y. Edgerton is the most insightful Art Historian in the history of Western Civilization.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews