Comment on “Theater without Actors—Immersion and Response in Installation”

"ground line") divided into 30 or 40 braccia divisions, the three braccia height of the puntus centricus means that the checkerboard pattern will only extend a small distance into the fictive space. GivenAlberti'smethod as it stands, it is not easy to continue constructing transversals into the deep distance . Again, saying otherwise is reading modern assumptions into the text. Alberti's construction is not an infinite pavement, but a specific finite depth. It is related more to the stagelike spaces offifteenth-century paintings than to the easily infinite grids produced by contemporary computer graphics. We assume infinite extension and homogeneity. Alberti did not, and so he did not provide easy means of approximating infinity. Then there are two larger problems that are symptomatic of the technical scholarship of Renaissance constructions in the late twentieth century. Salgado conflates very different constructions when he says that Alberti's method can be found in Brunelleschi's constructions, in the Trinityand in Donatello and Ghiberti. Each one of these is the subject of massive literature , and none of the authors who have written about them would agree with Salgado that they are instances of the same method. Brunelleschi may not have used a construction like Alberti's at all (he may have used surveying techniques and traced his pictures) and there is no evidence he used the areola (little space) that is the definitive moment in Alberti's construction. Masaccio's Trinityis a complicated construction , and again it shows no evidence whatsoever ofAlberti's method. Donatello and Ghiberti used a variety of correct and incorrect perspective constructions, and none of them show evidence ofAlberti's costruzione iegittima. It is wrong to call Alberti's method a "synthesis of Renaissance perspective theory," since it is the first of the more than 40 treatises that appeared before 1600. Together, these treatises contain hundreds of individual methods only a tiny percentage of which repeat Alberti's (and usually in a mistaken manner). In short: the field is huge, and the conflations proposed by Salgado do not do it justice. And last, the very idea of proposing a new "interpretation" ofAlberti's method must be considered with circumspection . The twentieth century has already produced at least 40 such interpretations, and most of them have only weak connections with the Renaissance text. Any new interpretation should meet at least these two minimum requirements: 1. It should make a serious review of the previous interpretations in order to justify its existence. How is the costruzione legittima derived from medieval optics? Is it related to Ptolemy's Planisphaerium?Is it related to bifocal construction? Is it descended from visual-ray methods? Is it derived from medieval cartography? What is right, and what is wrong, about the theories advanced by Grayson, Ackerman, Parronchi, Klein, Wolff, Doesschate, Edgerton, White, Ivins, Brion-Guerry or Steigmuller? 2. A new interpretation should place itself historiographically: that is, the author should say whether the proposed reading is meant to be of use for the twentieth century or to shed light on the fifteenth century. If it is the former, then it might be asked why Alberti's method has been chosen instead of the hundreds of others (some of which are far more interesting mathematically, textually and spatially ). If it is the latter, then the author might pause to consider the possibility that the project of adding another interpretation to the list may be a response more to the mythic origins ofWestern perspective than it does to Alberti per se: in other words, there is the possibility that the interpretations twentieth-century writers so zealously add to the achievements of Alberti, Brunelleschi and Masaccio are prompted more by a desire to find the initial moment of our culture with perfect accuracy than by an interest in the costruzione legittima itself. Why continue to write about those few constructions, when so much more material is out there? Not a single Renaissance painting can be unambiguously claimed to be an instance ofAlberti's construction and, judging by its notorious ambiguity , the fact that it was not illustrated and the small number of later perspectivists who got it right, it is reasonable to conclude that Alberti's method is more...