Vision and Reality

     Ismael's Ghosts (Arnaud Desplehin, 2017, above) includes a comic scene in which the filmmaker protagonist tries to connect two perspectival approaches developed north and south of the Alps in the middle of the fifteenth century. 
     Like most traditional Christological scenes, Fra Angelico's The Annunciation (1437-1445, below) has a specific scriptural source (Luke 1:26), and it depicts the announcement by Archangel Gabriel - usually positioned on the left - that the Virgin Mary will give birth. What most distinguishes Fra Angelico's painting of the scene at the Convent of San Marco in Florence is the adoption of a perspectival system based on a central vanishing-point, recessional lines, orthogonals, and partitions [1].
     Fra Angelico's painting is both exemplary and singular in two respects. The first is the perfect harmonization of the columns and arches in the painting with the physical structure of the convent space in which it was and is presented (the room with a small window in the background precisely matches the layout of the cells in San Marco). At the same time, the visual movement deep into the enframed space also draws attention to the garden fence that runs perpendicular to the central axis and parallel to the picture plane. Complementing its structural role, the fence symbolizes the hortus conclusus, the "enclosed garden" that links the Song of Songs (4:12), the original Garden of Genesis, and the Incarnation. These connections are more explicit in the Fra Angelico painting from the Prado at the top (1424).
    The alternative system developed by Bruges-based painter Jan Van Eyck appears to have been derived largely from direct observation. Van Eyck's system, epitomized by The Arnolfini Wedding Portrait (1434, below), corresponds closely with the mathematically-based Italian version, as evidenced by the lines of the floorboards at the bottom and the beams at the top. Unlike most of his Italian contemporaries, however, Van Eyck had training as a miniaturist. His painting, much smaller than Fra Angelico's, is full of precisely rendered details that suggest a deeper level of reality that can only be intuited through reflections (as if seen "through a glass darkly"). The mirror in the center, which reflects back more than the viewer can otherwise see, is emblematic.
     This emphasis on reflection, with roots in 1 Corinthians 13, was central to medieval ideas of seeing. These were strongly articulated in the 13th and 14th centuries and found their ultimate poetic expression in the final lines of Dante's Paradiso (1321).