Perspective as Symbolic Form

Perspective in Panofsky's hands becomes a central component of a Western "will to form," the expression of a schema linking the social, cognitive, psychological, and especially technical practices of a given culture into harmonious and integrated wholes. Yet the perceptual schema of each historical culture or epoch is different, and each gives rise to a different but equally full vision of the world. Panofsky articulates these different spatial systems, demonstrating their particular coherence and compatibility with the modes of knowledge, belief, and exchange that characterized the cultures in which they arose. Our own modernity, Panofsky shows, is characterized by its peculiarly mathematical expression of the concept of the infinite, within a space that is necessarily both continuous and homogeneous.