Page 86 - The Irony Board

Into the World

Directive

Those behind were above
In the old perspective;

Then someone in front who
Perceived this defective

Ordered art to make them
Smaller as corrective.

This is a humorous explanation of the shift in Western painting in
the Renaissance away from the Persian-Chinese foreshortening of
pictorial space to the new three-dimensional representation based on
infinite vectors radiating from the focal plane of the canvas. The
people in front, of course, were the patrons paying for the work;
those behind were lesser mortals, saints, and real estate. Gluckman’s
point is that since higher placement is traditionally symbolic of
higher status, the spatially inferior position of the painted patrons
might have spurred development of a canon of perspective reducing
in size all anterior figures. Far-fetched, but not impossible.

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