“Vertical Perspective Does Not Exist”: The Scandal of Converging Verticals and the Final Crisis of Perspectiva Artificialis

In this paper I address the question of why the everyday experience of seeing verticals converge remained taboo in Western visual culture until the late nineteenth century and in painting until the 1920s. I argue that perspective theory was fused to a pre-Copernican, architectural model of space and a static model of vision based on Enlightenment optics rather than physiology. The dynamism of modernity and technologies of embodied vision such as the stereoscope exposed the covert assumptions of perspective orthodoxy. Efforts to rescue three-point perspective by invoking the station-point for viewing risked exposing perspective painting as just another peepshow art.