The Poetics of Perspective

"I have rarely read a book as illuminating as this. . . . With great tact and inventiveness, Elkins offers two basic correctives to what has been taken as the foundational procedure underlying Italian Renaissance painting and, by extension, Renaissance culture: (1) Perspective was referred to not in the singular but in the plural--not a perspective, but perspectives; and (2) it was not about drawing a unified pictorial space, but about drawing objects--not a way of unifying a picture, but an often playful fashioning of the objects in a picture."--Svetlana Alpers, The Key Reporter