Author Description

The traditional rules of perspective involving straight lines and vanishing points have been accepted uncritically by artists for four hundred years. Flocon and Barre challenge these "laws" while accepting them for what they are-an ingenious compromise with reality. In the spherical visual world that surrounds us, the eye actually sees curves instead of long straight lines, and it sees objects whose apparent size decreases with distance to the right, left, up, and down, as well as straight ahead of the observer. Flocon and Barre, who published La perspective curviligne in 1968, were the first to define a system in which the size of objects decreases as they recede in all directions. Their spherical perspective condenses the 180° hemisphere before us in the same way a "fish-eye" lens encompasses a wideangle view within a small photograph: it enhances the degree of curvature. But the curvature itself can be found in our direct view of things. The authors patiently persuade us to understand that objectively straight edges do appear to curve around us and to recognize that every conceivable system, including traditional Renaissance perspective, can only be a convention, a symbollanguage that we learn to read -- Dust jacket.