Un Dieu vengeur a exaucé les voeux de cette multitude
Charles Baudelaire, Salon de 1859

In his recently published tour-de-force The Reformation of the Image, Joseph Leo Koerner discusses an early panel painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder. The painting, a crucifixion from 1503 now in Munich, is unlike any Cranach would later paint on the same subject. Cranach presents a radically oblique view of Christ that introjects a viewer into represented space, specifying one’s position “through the contingency of forms beheld as if at this specific place and time.”^[1] By manipulating point-of-view, the artist makes available the “subjective perception of an eyewitness” to the event depicted.^[2] The painting suggests a contingency involved in viewing Christ, as if one were to happen upon the scene. Under the influence of Luther’s teaching, Cranach would later eschew using such an oblique point-of-view in his depictions of the crucifixion, replacing it with head-on depictions of Christ on the cross, as in the predella of his Wittenberg Altarpiece from 1547. The individual subjectivity facilitated by the 1503 Crucifixion is exchanged for a form of depiction that corresponds to “the theological idea that all Christians share an internal image of Christ, indeed that Christ and his message are the same for all believers.”^[3] Though the scene of Christ crucified remains the same throughout, Koerner shows how — at least to Luther and Cranach — the manipulation of a formal quality like point-of-view can radically transform the viewing experience and, therefore, the theological meaning of a work.

This paper will explore an analogous situation. It takes as its subject the work of Russian priest, philosopher and all-around polymath Pavel Florensky, in particular his 1920 lecture “Reverse Perspective.” Florensky’s arguments constitute a way of interpreting formal practices in art — in this case, perspective — for their theological implications. Or, to put things somewhat differently, by elucidating formal artistic principles in a theological framework, Florensky offers insights into how painting can structure human experience. My treatment of Florensky’s essay is intended as a case study of how the formal details of artistic practice can be implicated in larger theological arguments and ambitions. By paying attention to the importance inherent in such details, I hope to make apparent a range of subtleties involved in the relationship between art and theology — ones often neglected in discussions that employ such all-or-nothing terms as “iconoclasm” and “iconophilia”. With Florensky, I want to ask: what might be the theological significance of the organization of pigment on a flat surface, when organized, for example, according to the rules of linear perspective versus those of reverse perspective? As will be shown in part one of this essay, Florensky sees the latter as a means to escape from the quotidian in a way analogous to how holidays disrupt everyday time. This answer leads him to embrace reverse perspective as a formal technique, while rejecting linear perspective. The variability of how formal details can be linked to theological ideas will become apparent in parts two and three of this essay, which bring Florensky into conversation with Erwin Panofsky and Walter Benjamin, respectively.

1.
Florensky’s essay “Reverse Perspective” consists of two main sections: the first is a series of historical observations concerning the rise of European one-point perspective, the second a theoretical account of the relationship between perspective and psycho-physiological experience, with major sections on the mathematics of two-dimensional representation. The piece was originally written as a lecture Florensky intended to give to the Commission for the Preservation of Monuments and Antiquities of the Lavra of the Trinity and St Sergius, the important Russian monastery where Florensky himself had lived from 1908 to 1919. As such, it constitutes part of Florensky’s effort following the revolution to safeguard the spiritual values and material treasures of the Orthodox faith.^[4] Reminiscent of Baudelaire’s Jeremiad against the masses’ embrace of photography over half a century earlier, Florensky comes to defend the “childish babbling” of Russian icon painting against the “naturalism” of sophisticates. Florensky uses the term “reverse perspective” to characterize the “unexpected perspectival relationships, especially in the depiction of objects with flat sides and rectilinear edges” that one finds in Russian icon paintings of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, and that “stand in glaring contradiction to the rules of linear perspective.”^[5]

Florensky argues that both linear perspective and reverse perspective, as modes of depiction, are symbolic — neither is an accurate representation of psychophysical reality. Such an accurate representation is in fact mathematically impossible, Florensky contends, making use of Georg Cantor’s method of arithmetical/analytical correspondence. He shows that, mathematically speaking, it is possible to transmit the content of three-dimensional space onto a flat surface — i.e. communicate all points from the former onto the latter — but impossible to do so while maintaining the formal organization of the thing represented. “Consequently, the final verdict is proclaimed for painting (…) to the degree that it claims to provide a likeness of reality: naturalism is once and for all an impossibility.”^[6] Recognizing this, “we immediately embark on the path of symbolism.”^[7] Because naturalism is an impossibility, it is necessary to recognize that all works of art are by nature symbolic. “Works of art differ from each other not because some are symbolic and others are ostensibly naturalistic, but because, since all are equally non-naturalistic, they are symbols of various aspects of an object, of various world perceptions, various levels of synthesis. Different methods of representation differ from each other, not as the object differs from its representation, but on the symbolic plane.”^[8] Because all depictions are symbolic, it is not relevant to judge a painting based on its being a “likeness”, on its accuracy to psycho-physiological experience. Paintings, as symbols, are concerned with something different than depicting the world as it appears. The symbol allows us to see something that is not otherwise available to our vision in the world; it is, as we shall see, concerned more with revelation than representation.

Florensky argues not only against the possibility of naturalistic depictions of the world; he also attacks the value of any such attempt. He states that “the task of painting is not to duplicate reality, but to give the most profound penetration of its architectonics, of its material, of its meaning.”^[9] Likewise, in “On Realism,” he writes: “»Just as it is in reality« — this usual praise for a naturalistic work of art surely bears witness to the fact that »like in reality« is something that, without being reality, wants to stand beside the phenomena of reality (…) Illusionistic art wants to be a match for, only a match for, sensory reality, but for all its tricks it never attains reality and at best, if it did attain it, it would become unnecessary as art.”^[10] An exact replica of an apple would give us nothing that we did not already possess in the apple itself, if it were even possible. Rather, our interest in art should reside in the fact that “works of art can unite us with realities that are inaccessible to our senses.”^[11] Art, like the icon and church ritual as a whole, is supposed to make available “that which is sensuously unavailable.”^[12] Florensky champions reverse-perspectival representation as the mode of painting that allows for the manifestation of the otherwise unseen.

In his fresco of the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo’s use of reverse perspective disrupts a viewer’s everyday experience of spatial organization. The magnitude of his figures increases as they appear further up the fresco, i.e. the further away they are from the viewer — contrary to the rules of linear perspective. Florensky glosses: “This is characteristic of that other, spiritual space: the further away something is, the bigger it is; the closer it is, the smaller. This is reverse perspective.”^[13] In viewing this painting, Florensky tells us, “we begin to experience its complete incommensurability with the space of the fresco. We are not drawn into this space; on the contrary, it repels us, as a mercury sea would repel our bodies.”^[14] Michelangelo’s fresco brings us face-to-face with an organization of space that shocks and repels. It is not a facile representation of another world, but rather presents an unusual configuration of space immediately in our world, forcing us to reckon with it. It is a world, Florensky declares, “transcendental to us, who think according to Kant and Euclid.”^[15]

Making a similar point, Florensky discusses Rubens’ Flemish Landscape, now in the Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, in Florence. The painting depicts a group of peasants returning from the fields. What makes the work interesting for our purposes is that it combines the use of both linear perspective and reverse perspective. The “central section is approximately perspectival and its space draws one in, while the sides are in reverse perspective, their spaces pushing away the perceiving eye. As a result, two powerful visual vortices are created that marvelously fill the prosaic subject.”^[16] Rubens is able to create a distinct vision of space that reveals complexities unobtainable to normal human vision. A work of such prosaic subject matter can produce an effect of shock and unease by means of the formal manipulation of perspective.

Florensky’s championing of reverse-perspectival painting as revelatory is based on the argument that naturalistic, perspectival painting presents us with nothing that we do not already find in the world. This distinction between quotidian life and the role of art is the theme of another of Florensky’s essays, “On the Efimovs’ Puppet Theater.” The essay, from 1925, is an account of a performance that took place in an abandoned garden “situated on a slope and secluded, virtually cut off (…) from the general life of [Florensky’s hometown of] Sergiev Posad.”^[17] Florensky describes how “children and adults thronged the slope, and in the clusters of all age groups, from the babes in arms to old folk, one felt some sort of festiveness, expectancy, such as happens on the eve of extraordinary days in families with a settled rhythm of domestic habits.”^[18] The core of his interpretation rests in this idea of the puppet theater as a break from the everyday aspects of life, and he compares his experience that day to the experience of Sabbath time. Such time, he explains elsewhere, “is holy because it is separated from the sequence of the seven days of the week (…) [The Sabbath], though it passes in time, is not normal time.”^[19] Like the Sabbath, impenetrably divided from the other six days, the puppet theater comes into being as a result of its division from the everyday world. The fenced off space of the play area produces an isolating frame. “Only the frame, the border, and the immaculate edge can reveal the distinctive space of artistic creativity. This space is (…) saturated with joy and important meaning.”^[20] This artistic realm — as theater, both temporal and spatial — declares itself as holiday (prazdnik) in its separation from the quotidian world. A holiday, Florensky tells us, is “a qualitatively new and blessed time” that “breaks the fetters of the countless petty cares of everyday and opens the way for the unrestricted lines by which life, even in its naturalistic sluggishness, is transformed into art.”^[21] As such a holiday, the puppet theater “bring[s] to life a new reality,” uniting the choir of spectators and nurturing “profound emotions, which have no place in the everyday world.”^[22] The naturalistic sluggishness of life is transformed into art.

Whereas Florensky’s discussion of the puppet theater’s achievement of holiday focuses on the interaction between the puppets and elements outside the puppet booth, in “Reverse Perspective” his main concern is with what occurs on the picture plane. By analogy with his statements in the puppet theater essay, Florensky champions reverse perspective because it provides a break from the everyday experience of the world. It is a holiday of the visual.

2.
But if we take Florensky’s argument that all painting is symbolic seriously, we must recognize that perspectival painting also presents us with something other than what we see in the world, and hence could also be able to operate as a locus for revelation. Erwin Panofsky makes a similar claim in his essay Perspective as Symbolic Form, written just five years after Florensky’s text. Panofsky admits that “exact perspectival construction is a systematic abstraction from the structure of this psychophysiological space” and hence is not a duplication of natural vision.^[23] In fact, “it is not only the effect of perspectival construction, but indeed its intended purpose, to realize in the representation of space precisely that homogeneity and boundlessness foreign to the direct experience of that space. In a sense, perspective transforms psychophysiological space into mathematical space.”^[24] So for Panofsky, just as for Florensky, the perspectival depiction is not an exact replica of the world. Panofsky calls the space that perspectival representation makes visible “mathematical space”. For the sake of parallelism, let us call the space that reverse-perspective makes visible (according to Florensky) “holiday space”. Such space is marked by its opposition to the homogeneity of (what Florensky calls) Kantian-Euclidean. Both these spaces, Florensky admits, are symbolic; both make visible something other than what is seen in psychophysiological experience. If this is so, it remains to ask what distinguishes the vision gained from “mathematical space” from that gained from “holiday space”.

Mathematical vision is concerned with abstraction and with infinite, homogenous space. Both Panofsky and Florensky agree that perspectival representation is linked to an assertion of the infinite, homogenous space of such mathematical vision. Where they differ is in what they conclude from this fact. Panofsky writes:

perspectival achievement is nothing other than a concrete expression of a contemporary advance in epistemology or natural science (…) Actual infinity, which was for Aristotle completely inconceivable and for high Scholasticism only in the shape of divine omnipotence…has now become natura naturata (…) [S]pace (…) now becomes a “continuous quantity, consisting of three physical dimensions, existing by nature before all bodies and beyond all bodies, indifferently receiving everything.”^[25]

Such a view of space, Panofsky concludes, is the view “rationalized by Cartesianism and formalized by Kantianism.”^[26] It is also, says Panofsky, “detheologized space” — which is, of course, Florensky’s problem with it.

In the presence of these two symbolic options — each of which, in its way, makes manifest something otherwise unseen — we are faced with a choice “between mediaeval night or the enlightenment day of culture.”^[27] Florensky maintains that “in the final analysis there are only two experiences of the world — a human experience in the large sense and a scientific, i.e. »Kantian« experience.”^[28] Perspective, as a style that corresponds to this scientific experience of the world, is valid for such experience, but as such “is a method that is extremely narrow, extremely limited, hampered by a host of supplementary conditions that define its potential for application and the limits to which it can be applied.”^[29] Florensky further complains about the perspectival artist:

He is an observer who brings nothing of his own to the world, who cannot even synthesize his own fragmentary impressions; who, since he does not enter into a living interaction with the world (…) is not aware of his own reality either, although in his proud seclusion from the world he imagines himself to be the last instance. Yet on the basis of his own furtive experience he constructs all of reality, all of it, on the pretext of objectivity, squeezing it into what he has observed of reality’s own differential.^[30]

We can compare this position to that of Panofsky, who writes that with the development of perspective “the subjective visual impression was indeed so rationalized that this very impression could itself become the foundation for a solidly grounded and yet, in an entirely modern sense, »infinite« experience of the world (…) The result was the transformation of psychophysiological space into mathematical space; in other words, an objectification of the subjective.”^[31] Florensky agrees with Panofsky as to perspective’s claims; however, he does not believe (as Panofsky seems to) that perspective can actually achieve the objectivity it declares. For Florensky, while perspective claims to make objectivity available, it in actuality reduces the world to the subjectivity of separate individual beholders.

Reverse-perspective, on the other hand, counteracts the tendency to solipsism through the use of polycentrism. In this way, “the composition is constructed as if the eye were looking at different parts of it, while changing its position.”^[32] Different parts of the painting are drawn each “from its own particular point of view, with its own particular perspectival center; and sometimes also with its own particular horizon.”^[33] In such paintings, the multiple points of view are contained within the painting; the shared experience of the painting is contained within the painting itself. As a result, the painting makes available to human vision an “objectivity” not restricted to individualistic subjectivity. Such paintings demonstrate a liberation from perspective “for the sake of religious objectivity and suprapersonal metaphysics.”^[34] Reality is revealed as shared and religious experience is rendered objective.

At the end of Perspective as Symbolic Form, by contrast, Panofsky admits that “perspective seals off religious art from the realm of the magical, where the work of art itself performs the miracle.”^[35] However, for Panofsky, this does not entail the absolute end to religious experience through art. He proposes that perspective “opens art to the realm of the psychological, in the highest sense, where the miraculous finds its last refuge in the soul of the human being represented in the work of art.”^[36] Panofsky treats the rise of linear perspective as intertwined with a turn to religious humanism. He concludes: “Perspective, in transforming the ousia (reality) into the phainomenon (appearance), seems to reduce the divine to a mere subject matter for human consciousness; but for that very reason, conversely, it expands human consciousness into a vessel for the divine.”^[37] The claims of both Florensky and Panofsky as to the nature of perspective are amazingly close; the differences in their theologies, on the other hand, lead them to very different conclusions — the one maintaining a traditional commitment to religious objectivity, the other locating the divine in the consciousness of the individual human subject.

With Florensky’s notion of “shared reality” in mind, let us return for a moment to the puppet theater essay. The importance Florensky places on the effacement of the distinction between subject and object becomes apparent there in his discussion of childhood. In being united by the puppet, the most profound emotions arise for the spectators. The deepest and most cherished is “childhood, which lives in us, but is tightly screened off from us.”^[38] Forgotten as a result of our everyday lives, our childhood —“this primordial proximity to all existence” — resurfaces through our engagement with the work of art.^[39] Florensky tells us that though forgotten, “it continues to live in us and it declares itself unexpectedly at certain times.”^[40] The puppet theater allows us to regress to our childhood. The childhood experience, in which subject and object are obscured, is connected to a reduction of outer stimulus; its re-creation in adult life requires withdrawal into a state of holiday, separated from the world. For Florensky, this withdrawal is a return to “paradise”: “Once united in this »paradise«, now [in our everyday adult lives] we are divided from one another, because this »paradise« has become hidden from the eye.”^[41] The puppet theater brings our childhood — with all that this implies for the experience of a shared reality — back before our eye.

How might this discussion of childhood help us understand the possibilities inherent in the arrangement of space in painting? Florensky writes in “Reverse Perspective” that “it is only when they lose their spontaneous relationship to the world that children lose reverse perspective and submit to the schema [of perspectival representation] with which they have been indoctrinated.”^[42] Because this is how all children behave, reverse perspective is “a representational method that derives from a [child’s] characteristic perceptual synthesis of the world.”^[43] Children’s pictures bare witness to a perception of the world that is not suffocated by the subject-object distinction that they come to learn later. In the face of a reverse-perspectival painting, adults can return to their own childhoods; for Florensky, such works provide a sort of childhood recovered at will.^[44] A fraction of space, divided off and qualitatively different, puts adults in contact with paradise.

3.
Writing around the same time but to my knowledge in ignorance of each other, Pavel Florensky and Walter Benjamin tackle many of the same themes. By way of conclusion, I want to consider how Benjamin’s approach raises questions for Florensky’s thinking. Like Florensky, Benjamin relates art and childhood. In a fragment from around 1914, “A Child’s View of Color,” Benjamin describes color as a transitive and shifting medium of intuition. He claims that adults “abstract from color, regarding it as a deceptive cloak for individual objects existing in time and space. Where color provides the contours [as with children], objects are not reduced to things but are constituted by an order consisting of an infinite range of nuances.”^[45] For the child, the rainbow refers to a life in art. Such a life is “paradisiacal because there is no thought of the dissolution of boundaries — from excitement — in the object of experience. Instead the world is full of color in a state of identity, innocence, and harmony.”^[46] For Benjamin, like for Florensky, childhood experience is free of the distinction between subject and object. Benjamin’s thinking is more radical than Florensky’s, however, in that he understands this distinction not as the imposition of enlightenment day on mediaeval night but as symptomatic of a more fundamental metaphysical thinking. Benjamin concludes his reflections with the comment: “Children are not ashamed, since they do not reflect but only see.”^[47] To reflect is to contemplate — the subject matter of which is either theological or metaphysical, i.e. ideas, forms or God, that is to say, the eternal. Instead of contemplating, children play. Such play is a figure for immanent life. In his description of the Efimov theater, Florensky describes childhood experience as an escape from the world; Benjamin’s use of the trope suggests instead that it might in fact constitute absolute engagement with the world.

Similarly, in his “Theological-Political Fragment,” Benjamin embraces the secular gambit of modernity. As an order that lacks the means of metaphysical distinction, all time is rendered homogenous. Each day, each moment is the same — disconnected from the rest. Traditionally, holidays would mark a qualitative difference in time. The regularity of quantitatively distinguished time is made heterogeneous in such traditional calendars that leave open spaces for holidays. Immanence renders such a distinction impossible — there is no outside according to which one moment can be declared more valuable than another. The question Benjamin poses is how we are to understand this homogenous time. For Florensky, it is the enemy, from which an escape — even if only occasional and fleeting — must be maintained; Benjamin suggests that it may be the new field of the messianic. One wonders if the same holds true for space. In an immanent frame, there can be no “other, spiritual space” — as Florenksy would have it — that correlates to reverse perspective.^[48] In response to Florensky’s call for an art that opens up a realm qualitatively different from the everyday, Benjamin might retort that it is precisely the homogeneity of mathematical space as rendered in perspectival painting that can promote “the coming of the Messianic Kingdom.”^[49]

Aaron Tugendhaft – (b. 1977), teaches ancient thought and the philosophy of religion at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He curated the 2008 exhibition "Idol Anxiety" at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago and is managing editor of The Crumpled Press, www.aarontugendhaft.com

Notes:
¹ Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 237.
² Reformation of the Image, p. 235.
³ Reformation of the Image, p. 246.
⁴ Nicoletta Misler, “Pavel Florensky: A Biographical Sketch,” in Pavel Florensky, Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art, ed. N. Misler (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), pp. 22-23.
⁵ Beyond Vision, p. 201. Florensky likely borrowed the term “reverse” (obratnaia) from Oskar Wullf’s “Die umgekehrte und die Niedersicht. Eine raumanschauungsform der altbyzantinischen Kunst und ihre Fortbildung in der Renaissance,” in Heinrich Weizsäcker, ed., Kunstwissenschaftliche Beiräge, August Schmarsow gewidmet zum fünfzigsten semester seiner akademischen Lehertätigkeit (Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1907), pp. 1-40, though this essay is not cited by him. It is worth noting that Erwin Panofsky, in his Perspective as Symbolic Form, rejects Wulff’s thesis that “reverse perspective” is a true inversion of normal perspective, in that the image is referred to the point of view of a beholder standing inside the picture instead of outside it (Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood [New York: Zone Books, 1997], p. 114, n. 30.)
⁶ Beyond Vision, p. 258.
⁷ Beyond Vision, p. 258.
⁸ Beyond Vision, p. 254.
⁹ Beyond Vision, p. 209.
¹⁰ Beyond Vision, p. 181.
¹¹ Beyond Vision, p. 181.
¹² Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis, trans. D. Sheehan and O. Andrejev (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2000), p. 125.
¹³ Beyond Vision, p. 239.
¹⁴ Beyond Vision, p. 242.
¹⁵ Beyond Vision, p. 242.
¹⁶ Beyond Vision, p. 239.
¹⁷ Beyond Vision, p. 132.
¹⁸ Beyond Vision, p. 132.
¹⁹ Pavel Florensky, “The Philosophy of the Cult” (1918). I would like to thank Robert Bird for drawing my attention to this passage.
²⁰ Beyond Vision, p. 132.
²¹ Beyond Vision, p. 132.
²² Beyond Vision, p. 134.
²³ Perspective as Symbolic Form, p. 30.
²⁴ Perspective as Symbolic Form, pp. 30-31.
²⁵ Perspective as Symbolic Form, pp. 65-66.
²⁶ Perspective as Symbolic Form, p. 66.
²⁷ Beyond Vision, p. 219. For a more elaborate description of this night/day metaphor, see Florensky’s comments in his essay on Aegean culture, Beyond Vision, pp. 141-43.
²⁸ Beyond Vision, p. 218.
²⁹ Beyond Vision, p. 261.
³⁰ Beyond Vision, p. 264.
³¹ Perspective as Symbolic Form, p. 66 (my emphasis).
³² Beyond Vision, p. 204.
³³ Beyond Vision, p. 204.
³⁴ Beyond Vision, p. 208.
³⁵ Perspective as Symbolic Form, p. 72.
³⁶ Perspective as Symbolic Form, p. 72.
³⁷ Perspective as Symbolic Form, p. 72.
³⁸ Beyond Vision, p. 134.
³⁹ Beyond Vision, p. 134.
⁴⁰ Beyond Vision, p. 134.
⁴¹ Beyond Vision, p. 135.
⁴² Beyond Vision, p. 219.
⁴³ Beyond Vision, p. 219.
⁴⁴ The phrase is from Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life.
⁴⁵ Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. M.W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 50.
⁴⁶ Selected Writings, vol. 1, p. 51.
⁴⁷ Selected Writings, vol. 1, p. 51.
⁴⁸ Beyond Vision, p. 239.
⁴⁹ Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vols. 3, ed. M.W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 305.