Introduction

In Perspective as Symbolic Form, Erwin Panofsky elaborates on the significance of perspective as follows:

Perspective creates distance between human beings and things (“the first is the eye that sees, the second is the objects seen, the third is the distance between them,” says Dürer after Piero della Francesca); but then in turn it abolishes the distance by, in a sense, drawing this world of things, an autonomous world confronting the individual, into the eye. Thus, the history of perspective may be understood with equal justice as a triumph of the distance-denying human struggle for control; it is as much a consolidation and systematization of the external world, as an extension of the domain of the self. (67-68)