University of Virginia Library

Introduction: The importance of
perspective and the metaphor of the
arrow in the eye

There is a frightening detail in Andrea Mantegna's Archers
Shooting at Saint Christopher (Figure I-1 and jacket illustration)
that shows a man who has just been shot through
the eye with an arrow. I see the arrow in the eye as a
metaphor for the art of perspective; I have reason to believe
that Mantegna did so too.

Why would Mantegna want to incorporate a metaphor
for the art of perspective into a fresco?

Primarily, he would want to because perspective played
a central role among the intellectual and aesthetic concerns
of Renaissance artists. Indeed, as we shall see, perspective
has been thought to have many aesthetic functions in Renaissance
painting. (In this book, I propose yet another, a
deliberate discrepancy between the viewer's actual point
of view and a virtual point of view experienced by the
viewer on the basis of cues contained in the perspectival
organization of the painting.)

The most obvious function of perspective was to rationalize
the representation of space: With the advent of
perspective, it became much easier to stage, as it were,
elaborate group scenes organized in a spatially complex
fashion. Compare the preperspectival architectural extravaganza
to which Taddeo Gaddi was forced to resort in
order to define the spatial locations of his figures (Figure
I-2), to the simplicity of means used by Piero della Francesca
(Figure I-3) to achieve a precise definition of relative
spatial locations. Then, of course, perspective gave Renaissance
artists the means to produce a compelling illusion

[ILLUSTRATION]

Figure I-3. Piero della Francesca,
Flagellation (probably 1450s).
Panel. Galleria Nazionale delle
Marche, Palazzo Ducale, Urbino.

of depth. We will come back to this illusion and the psychological
research that elucidates it in Chapter 3.

In addition to rationalizing the representation of space
and providing an illusion of depth, perspective provided
the means for drawing the spectator's eye to the key figure
or action in the painting.[1] Take, for instance, Masaccio's
The Tribute Money (Figure I-4). The slanted lines representing
the horizontal features of the building that recede
into the distance, called orthogonals because they represent
lines in the scene that are perpendicular to the picture plane,
converge at a point known as the vanishing point of this
perspective construction (a concept explained in the next
chapter). The vanishing point falls just barely to the right
of Christ's head, thus drawing attention to the central actor
in the drama Masaccio has represented. In Piero della Francesca's

[ILLUSTRATION]

Figure I-4. Masaccio, Tribute
Money (ca. 1425). Brancacci
Chapel, Church of Santa Maria del
Carmine, Florence.

Brera altarpiece (Figure I-5), the vanishing point
coincides with the Madonna's left eye. In Leonardo da
Vinci's Last Supper (see Figure 8-9), the vanishing point is
centered upon Christ's head.

In other cases, such as Domenico Veneziano's Martyrdom
of Saint Lucy (Figure I-6), the vanishing point coincides
with a central locus of the action rather than the head of
the main figure: the hand of the executioner that has just
plunged a dagger into Saint Lucy's throat. In Raphael's
Dispute Concerning the Blessed Sacrament (Figure I-7), the
vanishing point coincides with the representation of the
Host. Or, more subtly, in Piero della Francesca's Flagellation
(Figure I-3), the scourge, held by the man immediately
to the right of Christ's figure in the picture, is
related to the system of orthogonals that recede into the
distance. Even though the scourge is vertical and is not
itself an orthogonal, its extension passes through the vanishing
point.

One should not, however, expect the vanishing point
in Renaissance paintings always to coincide with an element
that is important to the narrative: Sometimes the
vanishing point interacts with the more visual elements of
the painting, such as in Domenico Veneziano's Madonna
and Child with Four Saints (Figure I-8), in which the folds
of the Madonna's cloak form a triangular pattern as it
drapes between her knees. The downward-pointing vertex

[ILLUSTRATION]

Figure I-5. Piero della Francesca,
Madonna and Child, Six Saints,
Four Angels, and Duke Federico
II da Montefeltro (Brera altarpiece)
(ca. 1472–4). Panel. Pinacoteca
di Brera.

of this triangle (which is echoed in the decoration between
the arches) is also the vanishing point of the perspective.
It should be noticed, however, that Domenico uses the fan
of orthogonals to organize many important features of the
painting, just as Piero did with the scourge in the Flagellation.
For instance, the eyes of Saint Francis (the figure on
the left) fall upon an orthogonal; the left eye of Saint John
(the second figure from the left) and the tips of the thumb
and the index finger of his right hand fall on an orthogonal;
the right eye of Saint Zenobius (the second figure from
the right) and the tips of his index and middle fingers are

[ILLUSTRATION]

Figure I-6. Domenico Veneziano,
Martyrdom of Saint Lucy (ca.
1445). Panel. Gemäldegalerie, West
Berlin.

[ILLUSTRATION]

Figure I-7. Raphael, Dispute
Concerning the Blessed Sacrament
(1509). Fresco. Stanza della
Segnatura, Vatican, Rome.

[ILLUSTRATION]

Figure I-8. Domenico Veneziano,
Madonna and Child with Four
Saints, also known as La Sacra
Conversazione (Saint Lucy altarpiece)
(ca. 1445). Panel. Galleria
Uffizi, Florence.

also aligned on an orthogonal. In other cases, the vanishing
point falls on a point in a distant background landscape,
such as in Pietro Perugino's Virgin Appearing to Saint Bernard
(Figure I-9).

To these three uses of perspective (the illusionistic, narrative
focus, and structural focus) Warman Welliver has
recently added a fourth: “The new rules of perspective
drawing gave to the painter and relief sculptor ... a new
code for concealing allusion and meaning in his work.”
He shows how perspective enabled Domenico Veneziano
and Piero della Francesca to translate the floor plans of
complex buildings — the architectural dimensions and proportions
of which bore allegorical or symbolic significance
— into painting. Here is his analysis of certain aspects of
Domenico's Sacra Conversazione (Figure I-8).

The most obvious factor in Domenico's scheme of dimensions
and proportions, as might be expected, is three. The elemental
shape from which the pattern of floor tiles is derived is the
equilateral triangle; the viewing distance, or invisible floor, is
three times the visible floor; the Gothic facade consists of three

bays and is three G [ = the interval between columns of the
Gothic loggia] high (including the putative entablature) by three
wide; the floor is 9 feet wide at the baseline and the total depth
of the architecture beyond the baseline is 27, or 33, feet.

A second and less obvious element in the proportions is the
interplay between 2 and 3. We look across a floor which is 3/2
G deep at an elevation (without the entablature) of which the
base is 2/3 G below eye level and the proportions above eye level
are 2:3. The overall proportions of the elevation, 8:9, are equivalent
to 23:32. The proportions of the four large rectangles of
floor into which the plan forward of the exhedra naturally divides
are, beginning with the invisible floor, 3:2, 1:2, 1:3, and 2:3.

No doubt the theological allusion of this coupling of 2 and 3
is the expansion of the dual deity to the Trinity with the coming
of Christ. (Welliver, 1973, p. 8)

Now Mantegna's interest in perspective was somewhat
different from the interests of his contemporaries. He often
explored the relation between the virtual space represented
in the picture and the real space in which the spectator
stood. In the Martyrdom of Saint James (Figure 1-8), which
we will discuss in Chapter 1, the head of Saint James appears

to invade the spectator's real space. I will also show
(in Chapter 8) that in Saint James Being Led to Execution
(Figure 8-7) Mantegna creates a disturbing conflict between
the spectator's actual line of sight and the virtual line of
sight implied by the painting. These are examples — the
detailed discussion of which must be postponed — of Mantegna's
adventurous use of perspective.

Having seen how important perspective was for Renaissance
art and the central role it played in Mantegna's
art, let us now return to Mantegna's Archers shooting at
Saint Christopher. Two tragedies befell this fresco painted
on the wall of the Ovetari Chapel of the Eremitani Church
in Padua. By the time it was first photographed in color,
during the Second World War, it had deteriorated to such
an extent that its bottom third and the figure of the saint
on the left were defaced beyond recognition; on March 11,
1944, soon after the fresco was photographed, the entire
east end of the church, which contained the Ovetari chapel,
was destroyed in an American air raid on the nearby railway
yards of Padua. Frederick Hartt writes:

Fortunately, there exists a copy of the fresco, shown in
Figure I-10, which can give us a reading of the parts of
the fresco for which no photograph exists. For instance,
we can see that Saint Christopher was (as Jacobus of Voragine
puts it in his Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century
compendium of legends about the lives of the saints often
consulted by Renaissance artists) “a man of prodigious size,
being twelve cubits in height, and fearful of aspect” (Jacobus
de Voragine, 1969, p. 377). Jacobus describes the
relevant episode of Saint Christopher's martyrdom as
follows:

Mantegna's interpretation agrees with Jacobus's account;
so at first blush it would seem that Mantegna's representation
of the arrow in the eye is traditional and that there
is therefore no evidence of a metaphorical role for this
aspect of the picture.

However, when one looks for pictorial antecedents for
the arrow lodged in the king's eye, one realizes the novelty
of Mantegna's interpretation — for there are none. In Italian
painting, Saint Christopher — like all the other saints —
appears both in isolated images and in cycles depicting the
saint's life.[2] Twenty-four isolated images of Saint Christopher
have been cataloged, most of which represent him
in the act of carrying the Christ-child across a river (whence

his name, which means “Christ-bearer”). Only one of them
depicts the miracle of the recalcitrant arrows: It is part of
a polyptych on various subjects painted by an anonymous
Venetian painter between 1325 and 1335.[3] It does not show
the arrow in the eye. All seven cycles (including the one
to which Mantegna's fresco belongs[4] ) contain a scene representing
the recalcitrant arrows;[5] but as far as the poor
state of preservation of these frescoes allows us to tell, only
Mantegna's shows the episode of the arrow in the eye. If
this is true, and if we may assume that Renaissance artists
did not deviate easily from traditional practice in the representation
of scenes from the lives of the saints or from
the life of Christ, it suggests that Mantegna may have had
good reason for drawing the viewer's attention to the arrow
in the eye.

Let us now see what the arrow in the eye may have
meant to Renaissance artists. Beyond the observation that
rays of light traced from points on an object into the eye
suggest arrows penetrating the eye (see Figure 1-2), perspective
and arrows were compared in several texts written
by Mantegna's contemporaries.

In 1435, about two decades before Mantegna painted the
Archers Shooting at Saint Christopher, Alberti wrote On
Painting, which contains the earliest known geometric and
optical analysis of linear perspective.[6] After his exposition
of perspective he writes:

Because Mantegna had most probably read Alberti's treatise,[8]
the arrow in the eye (which represents soldiers who
have just drawn the bow in vain) could have been a veiled
reference to Alberti's text. Indeed the architecture in the
fresco is strongly reminiscent of Alberti's style.[9] For instance,
the bridge in Saint Christopher's Body Being Dragged
Away after His Beheading (Figure I-11) is very similar to
the flank of Alberti's Church of San Francesco (the Tempio
Malatestiano,[10] Figure I-12). Furthermore, the frieze in
Mantegna's fresco that underlines the first floor in which
the King of Samos was hit in the eye reminds one of the
frieze that serves as a pedestal for the columns of the Tempio
Malatestiano's flank (see Figure I-13). In this context,
we are also led to notice the similarity between the inscription
visible on the facade of Mantegna's building and
the inscriptions on the funerary urns on the flank of the
Tempio Malatestiano (Figure I-13). Furthermore, there is
a resemblance between one of the onlookers watching Saint
Christopher's body being dragged away and a portrait of
Alberti (compare Figure I-14 to Figure I-15). Finally, the
main event taking place in the fresco on the left (the tyrant
being hit in the eye by the arrow) is seen through a window.
Given all the other evidence that indicates that this

[ILLUSTRATION]

Figure I-11. Andrea Mantegna,
Saint Christopher's Body Being
Dragged Away after His Beheading
(1451–5). Fresco. Ovetari
Chapel, Eremitani Church, Padua.

fresco is an homage to Alberti, the location of this crucial
scene in a window may be a reference to Alberti's window,
a central concept in perspective, which Alberti explains as
follows:

So if the setting in which this dramatic event is taking place
is Albertian, and the scene of the arrow in the eye is seen,
so to speak, through an Alberti window, then the conjecture
that the arrow in the eye is a reference to Alberti's
text becomes plausible.

[ILLUSTRATION]

Figure I-12. Leon Battista Alberti,
Church of San Francesco, Rimini
(Tempio Malatestiano), west flank
(foundation laid 1450).

[ILLUSTRATION]

Figure I-13. Leon Battista Alberti,
Church of San Francesco, Rimini
(Tempio Malatestiano) view of the
west flank, showing frieze and inscription
on an urn in one of the
niches.

[ILLUSTRATION]

Figure I-15. Leon Battista Alberti,
Self-portrait. Samuel H. Kress
Collection, National Gallery of Art,
Washington.

Our conjecture gains further support from the existence
of a second reference to arrows, in a text by Filarete.[12] In
his Treatise on Architecture, Filarete discusses the technique
of drawing in perspective; much of what he has to say on
this topic is an improved exposition of Alberti's ideas. At
one point, while he is explaining how to draw square buildings,
Filarete writes:

Because the treatise is later than Mantegna's fresco (it was
written between 1461 and 1464), Filarete could have borrowed
it from Mantegna, from Alberti, or perhaps from
yet another source.

It becomes harder yet to believe in a coincidence when
we discover that the metaphor also occurs in Leonardo's
notebooks. In discussing the question of whether rays of
light emanate from the eye or from the bodies that are
seen, Leonardo expresses the view that “the eye [is] adapted
to receive like the ear the images of objects without transmitting
some potency in exchange for these” (Leonardo
da Vinci, 1938, p. 251). And then, to support his view, he
says:

Every technical field develops certain stock images that
are proven pedagogical tools. It would be a very unlikely
coincidence if three authors used the arrow-in-the-eye metaphor
in discussing perspective and optics unless it had
become part of the imagery involved in thinking about
perspective, a metaphor they lived by.[14]

But if a small circle of experts lived by this metaphor,
could Mantegna expect his audience to read this undeclared
rebus? I believe so. Puzzles and esoteric allusions were a
pervasive feature of Florentine art. Renaissance Florentines,
for all their interest in geometry and mathematics,
should by no means be considered to be rationalists in the
post-Cartesian sense. Indeed, shortly after Mantegna
painted the frescoes in the Ovetari Chapel, in 1460, Marsilio
Ficino (1433–99), a priest, the founder of the Platonic
Academy in Florence, and one of the quattrocento's most
influential philosophers, translated part of the Hermetic
literature, a collection of treatises concerned with astrology,
alchemy, and other occult sciences, written between
A.D. 100 and 300. The text appears to have filled a need
and gained a wide readership. As Welliver says:

It should be noted that these observations can legitimately
be generalized to include the artists of Padua as well, because
many artists of Florentine origin were active in the
North (Gentile da Fabriano and Pisanello in Venice; Andrea
del Castagno in San Zaccaria; Filippo Lippi, Paolo Uccello,
and especially Donatello in Padua).

Thus, by showing that the arrow in the eye may have
been a commonly used metaphor in Renaissance artistic
circles, and that esoteric references were common in Renaissance
art, we support our claim that Mantegna's audience
would appreciate a subtle reference to perspective in
a painting.

The thesis of this book is that there is yet another role
for perspective in Renaissance art. It is a subtle role, having
to do with the spectator's experience of his or her location
in space with respect to the physical surface of the painting
and with respect to the room in which the painting is
viewed. I will show in the following chapters that Renaissance
painters deliberately induced a discrepancy between
the spectator's actual point of view and the point of
view from which the scene is felt to be viewed. The result
is a spiritual experience that cannot be obtained by any
other means. So, whether or not Mantegna intended the
arrow in the eye to draw the spectator's attention to the
deeper significance of perspective, I hope this book will.