Dane szczegółowe książki

1. Perspective as a Question of Images:
Paths between East and West
What Is a Symbolic Form? 13
Arab Mathematics and Western Art 26
Geometry and Decorative Art: The Arabesque 35
The Globalization of Perspective 41
Blickwechsel: Orhan Pamuk and Perspective as a “Betrayal” 48

2. The Taming of the Eye:
Criticism of Seeing in Islam
Religion and the Prohibition of Images 55
Images as a Betrayal of the Living Creation 62
The Koran as Scripture and Script 67
Under the Gaze of Allah: Pictures as Narrative 78
Blickwechsel: Pictures with a Living Gaze 84

3. Alhazen’s Measurement of Light and the Arab Invention of the Camera Obscura
Alhazen’s Book of Optics, the Perspectiva 90
Distance from Ancient Visual Culture 99
Pathways of Light and Properties of Objects 102
Mathematics and Geometry in Islamic Art 111
Blickwechsel: Kepler Rediscovers the Camera Obscura 124
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4. Perception as Knowledge:
A Theory of Vision Becomes a Theory of Pictures
Scholasticism and the Conflict over Perception and Epistemology 129
Before Perspective: The Gaze in Giotto’s Painting 135
Pelacani’s Invention of Mathematical Space 146
Ghiberti’s Commentaries and Piero’s Mathematical Art 150
Blickwechsel: Alhazen or Euclid? The Option for Vitruvius 159

5. Brunelleschi Measures the Gaze:
Mathematical Perspective and Theater
Two Inventors in Florence 164
Physical Space: The Architecture of the Gaze 173
“Prospects” on the Stage 185
Panoramas in Urbino 198
Blickwechsel: The Geometry of the Muqarnas 204

6. The Subject in the Picture:
Perspective as a Symbolic Form
Stealing an Emblem: The Eye as Representative of the Gaze 211
Nicholas of Cusa and the Sovereignty of God’s Gaze 221
The Subject as New Narcissus 227
The Horizon and the View through a Window 238
Blickwechsel: The Mashrabiyya as a Symbolic Form 252

Conclusion:
Comparing the Gaze in Different Cultures
Afterword 267
Notes 273
Index 295