Vertical Perspective

Linear perspective, once a mainstay of art treatises and training, has had a checkered career in art history, celebrated as the beating metaphysical heart of humanist “anthropocracy”, or derided as a provincial trick for constructing spatial boxes. But a peculiar subset of perspectival views, charting recession along the vertical axis perpendicular to the direction of vision, seems to promise nothing less than a litmus test to distinguish the seer from the seen, subject from object: and that without metaphysics. Flowering in the 19th century under the revolutionary influence of photography, vertical recession died prematurely at the hands of a powerful nemesis, John Ruskin, only to revive zombie-like in the modernist aesthetics of Paul Klee and Nelson Goodman, who seized upon it as evidence that all perspective in art is arbitrary. Setting aside this fallacy, I emphasize the embodied, first-person character of most uses of vertical recession, from its unobtrusive roots in caricature to its contemporary prominence in motion pictures and electronic games.