아나모르포시스와 바로크 시대 선 원근법 이론

Abstract

Dealing with anamorphic images had been a part of Linear perspective system since it was first developed by the Italian Renaissance humanist-painters, as is observed in the case of Piero della Francesca. Anamorphoses are perceived distorted unless they are viewed from a specific distance and angle of sight. Therefore, it is essential for the painter to embody a particular viewpoint outside the picture plane of the anamorphic diagram which is projected inside the diagram. Such a concept of a determined view-point for optical illusion of three dimensionality is the core of Renaissance geometrical perspective, especially in the 'distance point method'. However, it is the Baroque period when anamorphosis became theorized with a complete system. The perspective theories turned into a transitional period in the seventeenth century. While new analytical geometry of perspective was developed by scholars and mathematicians, artists' main concern remained on the practical aspect of three dimensional representation. Andrea Pozzo's perspective treatise and the trompe l'oeil dome in the S. Ignatius Church of the Roman College reveal the culminating stage of practical tradition of Italian Baroque perspectivists using distant point method of the previous century. On the other hand, the center of perspective study shifted from Italy to Northern Europe in the seventeenth century. The conflict between the Protestant Reformation and Counter Reformation movements of Post-Tridentine Europe provoked various challenges to the whole cultural paradigm. And the newly developed interests in the subject of anamorphosis observed in the perspective treatises and artistic devices of these French and Dutch scholars and painters can be interpreted as the conversion of a world view, questioning Renaissance's premise of cognition and representation. French Minim priest Jean François Niceron's La perspective curieurse, ou magie artificielle des effets merveilleux and Dutch painter Samuel van Hoogstraten's perspective devices are major examples of this new current. Their works show that anamorphosis reverses the projecting process of Albertian linear perspective where the picture plane is placed between the eye of the viewer and the seen object, so that the picture plane extends toward the viewer. It can be said that Baroque anamorphic perspective theories and practice resist the idealized spatial concept of Italian Renaissance perspective that is determined from the central view point. To those Baroque theoreticians and painters, anamorphosis was a proof that shows how easily the pictorial illusion is swayed by the physical condition of the viewer and how ambiguous and subjective the relation between the objects, perceiving eye, and cognized image is.