Download or read book The Poetics of Perspective written by James Elkins and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "My principal concern in this book is the way we talk about pictures...Renaissance writers and artists imagined perspective quite differently than we do... I maintain... that Renaissance authors and artists thought there were many compatible perspectives, so that their writing and painting evince a "pluralist" approach in strict contrast to the monolithic mathematical perspective we imagine today. Theirs was more a collection of rational methods than a "rationalisation of sight", more a way of drawing objects than of setting them in an abstract "pictorial space". Most important... is the gradual recession of perspective as a mute method, a practical subset of geometry, and the growth of perspective as a metaphor, a powerful concept for ordering our perception and accounting for our subjectivity." -- Preface.