Please spare us another messy foray into a marginalized zone of psuedo-aesthetics. First, it's demonstraby wrong tto say that the Renaissance had no scientific outlook. The aim was to "understand nature's habits" and to reconcile them with the religious beliefs of the day. One could say much the same of today's science, despite the fact that we pay less attention to underlying beliefs that may affect it. If the Renaissance artists lacked the scientific apparatus of today they used drawing, sculpture, and painting, and architecture-engineering to serve as their apparatus. Essentially, drawing was their way to examine nature, to discover her hidden habits. The study of human anatomy was a chief interest in that regard. One interesting fact is that in Renaissance Florence some several thousand mathematical papers, theories, etc., were published in the late 1400s. Piero Della Francesca was a highly noted mathematician. So too with Ucello. What made perspective scientific was the aim for a principle of coherence, the vanishing point of the reversed cone of vision (a notion that light was projected by the eye and not simply recorded until something interjected that cone -- a medieval notion of light). Prior to that principle, empirical perspective was practiced, even in antiquity, and it is more accurate in representing how the eye works than is orthogonal perspective.
The "scientific label" was a later prefix in the 16C and is perfectly descriptive since it refers to a principle that exists separately from any subjective, empirical, observation. And that is the fundamental fact of scientific investigation: to describe what exists independently of our knowing and believing it. There is a good reason why these marginal "scholars" you dredge up are marginalized. They don't contribute to the discourse but instead try to find, usually erroneous or trivial -- by means of relabeling -- issues that they purport will topple the whole domain. Revisionism of course is always an opportunity ad even a demand, but it must be substantial, conceptual, historically valid, born of a new world-view, as it were. Troubling over little semantic issues -- whether or not perspective is mathematical or whether early science was already a defined method -- is wasteful and frivolous. I can easily understand why you are attracted to these eclectic positions because you habitually seek information to bolster your preconceptions rather than seeking to test them. Those who test their preconceptions or intuitive beliefs, are in the world of science, just like the Renaissance artists were when they collectively tried to "understand the habits of nature". For a more lively and perplexing discussion topic, I recommend Donald Kuspit's new essay on www.artnet.com on the "perversity" in modernism. Very challenging and very critical! Kuspit is one of the few major critics, like Robert Hughes, to take on the decadence in late modernism, fully and without any hesitation. Something has truly ended and something is emerging. What? Now that's timely and far more contentious than some dusty footnote and it provides you a supple topic to argue your point of view instead of stuffing it behind the already dismissed papers on the back shelf. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Chris Miller <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tue, February 23, 2010 9:15:55 AM Subject: Norris Kelly Smith - Introduction Has anyone here ever heard of Norris Kelly Smith (1918-1998)? In 1994, at end of a distinguished career as an art historian and academic, he published "Here I Stand : Perspective from another point of view" "It has become a near-ubiquitous cliche among art historians to speak of vanishing point of perspective that was perfected early in the 15th C. as "scientific perspective"... but there was hardly anyone (perhaps no one) alive who could have been called a scientist - no practitioner of scientific method, no one concerned with systematic measurement and testing of observable relationships among natural phenomena. Equally puzzling is the designation of Renaissance perspective as mathematical, even though neither the invention nor the application of the method involved any mathematical calculation whatever other than the division of a baseline into a number of equal segments....Might it be that the modern scholar's desire to characterize the construzione in terms commonly associated with the immensely successful intellectual achievements of our own day has been ill conceived, misguided ?" "In order to find out where and why we took such a wrong turning, we need to consider developments that occurred int he academic study of the arts between the middle and the end of the nineteenth century. When John Ruskin was appointed Slade Professor of Art at Oxford in the 1860's, it was well known that he was an intensely moralistic critic of art and architecture - that his "seven lamps of of architecture, for instance, were sacrifice, truth, power, beauty, vitality, memory, and obedience, and that the title "professor" carried with it the expectation that the holder of that title would *profess* his ernest convictions...By the time of Ruskin's death in 1900, there had arisen in Germany a new and altogether different conception of scholarship to which the notion of "professing" was all but irrelevant. Instead, professors were (and still are) expected to set forth well authenticated factual data and to do their best to avoid expressions of personal opinion and conviction, under which dispensation it became increasingly difficult for them to deal with the ethical or religious convictions of the artists themselves --- professors aimed a putting the study of the arts on as intellectually respectable basis as the natural sciences, of which the one that presented the most useful model was biologoy, with its preoccupation with classification and with patterns of evolutionary development and change. Equally important was the new conception of an objectively scientific historiography (with which we associate the names of such men as Leopold Von Ranke) - a conception that carried with it a new concern for documentation, for meticulously carefull attributions, for an increasingly precise definition of styes and style periods, and above all, for the centrality of research" And so in his golden years, this retired "professor" of art history, turned around to bite the hand that fed him. As his introductory comments might suggest, he's not to be giving his topic an even-handed consideration, and moving beyond the discussion of examine specific texts and scholars, he's going to build something of a straw man as he generalizes about a "wrong turning" So if you have no taste for passionate diatribe, this book will not be for you. But, God help me, this is exactly the kind of thing that I like (especially since I tend to agree with him) -- so I'll proceed to lay out of his arguments over the next few weeks. ____________________________________________________________ Weight Loss Program Best Weight Loss Program - Click Here! http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2231/c?cp=BrZ5rJNwzCdO1m9OLFOx9QAAJz6c l_zTaptgNR5c8Mer1v9kAAYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEUgAAAAA=
