The Domestication of vision

Abstract

This article explains how the world of mimetic representation from the Quattrocento onwards emerged through optical instruments, primarily the camera obscura. This representation was materialized and structured in architecture and the city so that the laws of perspective and the effect of depth could be effectively realized, producing the effect of perspective, which until then was impossible in the medieval city. This structuring of cities and the way of seeing the world caused a distancing between subject and object, including between the objects themselves, so that this (de)fect could be realized. The article is divided into two parts: the first, ‘The Machine of Fragments’, which addresses the use of optical instruments, mainly the camera obscura, Alberti’s veduta, and Brunelleschi’s peep show, in the construction of these representations. The second, ‘Architectures of Distancing’, addresses the issue of distancing between buildings in the structuring of cities according to the demands of the camera obscura: light and distance. This briefly highlights three city models from the Renaissance to modernity, when the concept of the medieval body-city integrity was fragmented, later also the grid-like cities, established by the basic grid of the perspective representation plan, until reaching the idea of isolation, fragmentation, and the total liberation of the object, of the building, still dictated by photography.