A remarkable number of college students like to study useless, old-fashioned drawing. At Hofstra, for example, we easily fill three beginning drawing courses each semester.
Most of my students are non-fine arts majors who have never studied any drawing. Almost invariably, they want to learn how to make drawings that “look real” — by which they mean look like a photograph.
I tell them that the photograph is only one kind of realism, and I emphasize the precarious connection between what’s real, on the one hand, and a drawing, on the other — even one that they think “looks real.” Nature is round, I remind them, whereas drawing is flat. Nature has no lines, whereas drawing almost always contains lines. Nature is all about color, whereas drawing is primarily about dark marks drawn on light grounds. While students obligingly listen to my philosophical musings, they adamantly cling to wanting to make drawings that “look real.”
Of all the devices created for making things “look real,” none is so compelling, or so satisfying to learn, as linear perspective. Originating as a codified system in Florence sometime in the 1400s, linear perspective is a way to make an illusion of deep space on a two-dimensional picture plane and to place objects within that space in an accurate relation both to one another and to the artist’s fixed viewpoint. It rests on the artificiality of an assumed monocular vision (as opposed to our real-life, two-eyed take on the world).
Perspective confirms a lot of direct experiences we have — for example, that things get smaller as they recede into space, or that the distance between things appears to get closer as things recede into space. It also confirms our experience that such things as railroad tracks, which run parallel, appear to converge on the horizon in the distance.
But linear perspective also establishes something only a genius could ever observe by merely using his or her eyes — that the rate at which things appear to get smaller as they recede into space is geometrically determined.
When I teach linear perspective, I draw on a large board at the front of the classroom while my students draw along with me. They use a straight edge, a pencil, and an eraser. We start at the beginning — with Alberti’s famous tile floor, drawn in one-point perspective (as explained in his 1435 treatise on painting, Della Pittura). From there, we move to more and more complicated constructions, mostly in two-point perspective, until the students finally invent their own architectural wonders — skyscrapers, interiors of rooms, including furniture, and complex buildings with sloping roofs, receding windows, and tall bell towers.
Linear perspective gives to pictures a clearly defined spatial order. The system rests on Euclid’s postulates, but the invention of the camera (in 1837) reinforced the truth of the single-lens point of view that linear perspective had asserted all along.
Some art teachers argue that because linear perspective is only one of many ways to organize a picture plane — and an outdated one, at that — and because computers can do it better than human beings, it should no longer be taught.
I argue back that by learning the principles of linear perspective, and applying them to direct observations, students learn to consider what they directly observe in light of what they know in principle, and vice versa.
When you think about it, this is a rather good model for living all of life.
